The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  By early 1978 massive demonstrations had begun across the country’s urban centers. The Shah’s initial defiance turned into disbelief and then disdain for his subjects; finally, it collapsed into paralyzing despair. More than once during the days of revolution, and later in exile, he asked, with unmistakable hints of contempt in his tone, “What kind of people are these Persians? After all We have done for them, they still chose to opt for this disastrous revolution.”9

  Some of the Shah’s supporters today praise his demeanor in the heady days of revolutionary upheaval as consistent with his stoic devotion to nonviolence and his respect for human life; he could have easily retained his power, they argue, had he been willing to shed blood and use the full force of his mighty military. The Shah championed this argument himself when, in his last book, Answer to History, he wrote, “A sovereign may not save his throne by shedding his countryman’s blood.”10 But this was, at best, only one of the many reasons for his stoic behavior. With the onset of the crisis, the Shah lost his resolve. The man who only months earlier had taunted the West as lazy and dismissed democracy as only befitting the blue-eyed world; the King who had previously stood up to pressures from U.S. presidents—including Richard Nixon, with whom he had a particularly close relationship—to reduce the price of oil was suddenly unable to make any decisions without prior consultation with the British and American ambassadors. Adding to the Shah’s distress was the fact that these ambassadors had made it clear that their governments would not support a military crackdown against the opposition.

  Some of the Shah’s supporters conceded that, in his last months of rule, he suffered from inaction, even vacillation, but they attribute it all to the debilitating side effects of the drugs he had been taking for his lymphoma. They conveniently overlook a long history that underscored, long before the beginning of the new wave of protests, the Shah’s inability to withstand pressure and his storied indecisiveness in times of crisis. For the Shah, character was destiny, and many of his weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being. In 1978 the cancer that ate away at his body and the side effects of the drugs he took to battle it only reinforced behavior patterns that were in fact rooted more in his personality than in any of his physician’s prescriptions.

  Now, overlooking the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, it seemed to the Shah that God had forsaken him. He arrived in Morocco on January 22, 1979, with his entourage. Though King Hassan II greeted him at the airport, the pomp and ceremony that Anwar al-Sadat, the president of Egypt, had organized when the disheartened Shah arrived in Cairo a few days earlier was glaringly absent. As the plane had landed in Egypt, a disheveled Shah was languishing in his chair. The moment he saw the honor guards and realized he was being afforded a welcome worthy of a king, he perked up, dressed up, and with an upright gait walked off the plane. But in Morocco there was no similar welcome. The Shah can’t have been but deeply disappointed by the lack of a royal reception. Of all the countries in the world, if there was one where the Shah could have reasonably expected that his past favors would now beget him a warm welcome, it was Morocco. But this would be the first of his many surprises.

  All his adult life, the Shah had demonstrated a solid sense of loyalty to the royalty of the world. With the sudden surge of petrodollars in the early seventies, he became the veritable patron saint of deposed kings, widowed queens, and unemployed princes and princesses, past and present. Tehran was in those days a virtual mecca for the likes of the deposed King of Greece, the ever-needy King of Jordan, the daughter of the last Italian King, or members of Holland’s royal family. In one notable instance, for example, Jordan’s King Hussein left Tehran with the “gift” of twenty-five free F-5 fighter jets.11 Even the long-deposed King of Albania came to Tehran for his share of Persian hospitality.

  Among the kings who had benefited from the Shah’s generous financial and military aid, King Hassan II of Morocco occupied a unique place. Iran, in apparent collusion with the United States, had begun helping King Hassan militarily as early as 1967. Iranian army officers trained Moroccan soldiers then fighting separatist militants, and Iran sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Morocco over the next decade.12 In one case alone, Iran gave Morocco an almost interest-free loan of a $110 million for the construction of a dam.13 But, as the Shah soon learned, there was no guarantee that those who had benefited from his past patronage and extravagance—a royal largesse, the final costs of which were shouldered by the people of Iran—would, in his hour of need, return the favor. Some, like King Hussein of Jordan, never allowed him to visit their country during his exile. Others, like King Hassan, were willing to help but only so long as the help did not threaten their own power.

  As the Shah’s stay in Morocco grew longer, King Hassan’s hospitality became increasingly cold. According to Richard Parker, the American ambassador to Morocco at the time, “Moroccans believed that the Shah was worth about two billion dollars, and they wanted to take their share of the loot.”14 Ardeshir Zahedi, who was one of the lead negotiators in the attempt to find the royal family a place to stay, rejects this claim, adding emphatically that “King Hassan and the entire royal family acted with absolute nobility with the Shah. Not an extra penny, other than the expenses was taken from the Shah while they were in Morocco.”15 Regardless of what happened in Morocco, wherever else the Shah and his family landed in their exilic ordeal, gouging the royal family became a favorite sport of the local elites, with Egypt being the only exception.

  Despite all this, in his first days in Morocco, there was a bit of gaiety in the air. On his arrival, the Shah and the Moroccan King, both airplane aficionados, bragged about the skills of their special pilots, and there was even a “soft landing” contest between the two.16 The Shah’s pilot, a young man named Captain Moezzi, won the contest.

  But a few days after arriving in Morocco, the Shah gathered his entourage for a meeting, with an air of foreboding and resignation hanging in the air. He informed them that he had decided to trim the number of guards and aides that had hitherto served him and the royal family. He was teary-eyed, and others in the room wept silently. The Shah’s decision was as much political as financial. On leaving Iran, he had declared that he was going on a vacation and would return to the country when he felt rested. By the second week after his arrival in Morocco, the vacation myth was no longer tenable.

  The decision was also yet another sign of the royal family’s storied fiscal restraint, or miserliness, according to some. The news from Ja’far Behbahaniyan, the man who had managed nearly all of the Shah’s foreign assets for more than two decades, had been less than satisfying. A day after arriving in Egypt, the Shah had summoned his moneyman and asked him for a full accounting of his assets. The meeting had ended in acrimony. What Behbahaniyan claimed the Shah possessed was less than the figure the Shah had expected. The two men met again in Morocco—and the acrimony soon turned into open animosity. Not long after this meeting, Behbahaniyan disappeared into a world his detractors claim is one of incognito living and assumed aliases. He has maintained silence about these matters and has, in the process, become the subject of endless gossip and innuendo. Many of the Shah’s friends and family still claim that Behbahaniyan walked away with a substantial portion of the Shah’s assets. The truth may never be known. But one definite result was that the Shah told his assembled entourage that since the journey was turning out to be longer than he had anticipated, he could no longer afford to pay all their wages. Those who had family and obligations at home, the Shah said, should feel free to leave or to go back to Iran.

  He had come to Egypt in two jets—one filled with four crates carrying the royal belongings, as well as some of the people who were leaving Iran with the Shah. Dozens of courtiers and high-ranking officials of the regime were desperately trying to get on those jets, but only a handful succeeded. It was a measure of the Shah’s state of mind that he had relegated the authority to decide who could travel in the royal entourage to one of his valets.17 The second jet
was set aside for the Shah, the Queen, their guards, the chef, a physician, the dogs, and their groomer. In Morocco, around the time of his meeting with his entourage, the Shah ordered that both planes be sent back to Iran. One of his aides suggested that at least one of the planes be kept and sold—for around $20 million—to defray some of the immediate expenses; the Shah demurred.18

  A few days after his unceremonious arrival in Morocco—local media and even international television crews were barred from the airport—the American ambassador, Richard Parker, paid a courtesy call on the Shah. He wanted to reassure him—after receiving inquiries from the Iranian Embassy—that the royal family would be welcome in the United States, if they decided to settle there. William Sullivan, the American ambassador in Tehran, had also told the Shah before he left the country that he would be welcome to settle in America. While the Shah was in Egypt, President Carter had declared in a press conference, “The Shah is now in Egypt, and will come to our country.”19 As it turned out, Sullivan’s promises might well have been part of an effort to “sweeten” the deal to convince the Shah to leave Iran as soon as possible. The Shah should have remembered the fact that his father too was “persuaded” to leave Iran in 1941 with the promise of asylum somewhere in the Americas. As soon as his father, Reza Shah, was out of the country, he was told, rather unceremoniously, that his planned visit to the Americas was no longer possible.

  In Mohammad Reza Shah’s case, the decision to delay his arrival in America would have far-reaching implications not just for him, but also for the United States and for Iran. The hostage crisis was only the first of the many cataclysmic dominos that ultimately fell as the result of this delay.

  In his exile, the Shah still followed events in Iran closely.20 In his own words, “even in the first months in exile, I was convinced that the Western governments had some plan in mind, some grand conception or overview to stop Communist expansion and xenophobic frenzy in places like Iran.”21

  Many of the Shah’s friends and supporters had the same illusion. They reassured themselves that “America must have a plan. They can’t let a place like Iran fall into the wrong hands.” This assumption accounts for the fact that so many of the Shah’s generals and ministers stayed in Iran and did not flee in the face of the rising tide of revolution. The Shah’s enemies were no less concerned about this fact. Only weeks before the fall of the Shah, Ayatollah Mottaheri, the closest confidante of Ayatollah Khomeini, said, “America will not allow the revolution to win. Iranian oil is for America like water is for human life. America will not give up Iranian oil. Imam [Khomeini] should behave in a way that America does not see its interests jeopardized in Iran.”22

  But soon after arriving in Morocco, the bleak reality gradually dawned on the Shah that there was little hope of return. All such hope was irrevocably dashed when, on February 11, he heard the media announce that the armed forces—hitherto the most reliable pillar of his power—had declared their neutrality and would be returning to their barracks. “The revolution has won,” Radio Tehran announced, “the bastion of dictatorship has collapsed.”23 The Shah’s already somber mood darkened drastically after hearing of these developments. Afterwards, Iranian radio, calling itself the “Voice of Revolution”—and soon enough, the “Voice of the Islamic Revolution”—was regularly filled with harangues against the Shah and his family. To the consternation of the Queen and his entourage, the Shah sometimes listened to the diatribes, and with every passing day, he grew more despondent.

  In Morocco the Shah gradually grew resigned to the fact that, for the rest of his life, he would eat the “bitter bread of banishment.” The bond between the Shah and the people, a bond he often praised as “eternal” and unbreakable, was broken, and “ruinous disorder” was spreading everywhere.24 In a rare interview, he confided to a British journalist that “he would die in exile.”25

  Now, on that mid-March morning in the Moroccan palace, the Shah asked Farhad Sepahbodi, Iran’s ambassador to Morocco, to help move his table and chair away from the breeze. It was nine in the morning and the Shah was having breakfast and the breeze was making him uncomfortable. The sun was bright and the heavy chandelier hanging above his head was turned off.

  All his life, the Shah ate a very light breakfast, usually nothing more than a couple of pieces of toast, some feta cheese, a small glass of orange juice, and some coffee. He had an affinity for exotic homemade jams, and in Tehran, courtiers used to compete in finding ever more exotic fruits or flowers for the royal palate to savor.26

  Meager as his daily breakfast was, he still never finished it himself. Invariably, he shared a piece of his buttered toast with Beno, his great black German shepherd. Even during regular meals, the Shah, to the Queen’s consternation, fed Beno from his own dish. Many Persians, still under the emotional, if not doctrinal, sway of Islam, are phobic about dogs and consider them, as their religion mandates, the epitome of najes, or “unclean.” All the waters in the oceans, Shiites believe, cannot wash off the filth of a dog’s saliva.

  Now, to alleviate the problem of the breeze, Farhad Sepahbodi moved the table and chairs to a sheltered corner. By then, most Iranian embassies around the world had been taken over by “diplomats,” sometimes students who claimed to represent the unfolding Islamic Revolution. By the time of this March breakfast, Sepahbodi had received a threatening letter from the Foreign Ministry, recalling him to Tehran. But at great risk to himself and his family, he chose to remain loyal to the Shah. His loyalty was particularly interesting in light of the fact that, a few years before his appointment to Morocco, he had been banished by the Shah.27 But on that breezy March morning, his mind was occupied with the situation in Iran. Only seconds after Sepahbodi moved the tables and chairs, the large wrought-iron chandelier, with its handcrafted glass tulips, came crashing down. The heavy impact cracked the marble floor and sent shards of glass flying everywhere. The Shah was jolted first by the sound, and then by the recognition that the chill he had felt had saved him. Had he not moved, he might have been killed under the weight of the wrought-iron chandelier. His first instinct, honed after almost four decades on a throne coveted by others, was to think of a conspiracy. In the world according to conspiracy theory adherents, there are no accidents or serendipity, and natural deaths are unnaturally rare.

  “Do you think they are trying to get rid of us?” the Shah asked in a shaken voice. Sepahbodi tried to calm the Shah’s jittery nerves, facilely assuring him that he was most welcome in Morocco. While the Shah might have still been in denial about the reality of his status in King Hassan’s court, Sepahbodi by then knew all too well that the Shah’s days in the Garden of Eden Palace were numbered.

  Soon, the Shah too was forced to acknowledge the fact that a tortured odyssey in search of a safe haven was about to begin. His wanderings would earn him the nickname “The Flying Dutchman.” Ultimately, after almost a year-long desperate search for safety, he would find his final sanctuary back in Egypt, where the journey had begun. President Sadat, who, on the gloomy January day when the royal family first left Iran, greeted the Shah with the full pomp and ceremony accorded a head of state, was at that time the only leader willing to offer the Shah a place to die in peace.

  But perhaps the most fitting name for the benighted Shah was the one used by the Israelis even before the wanderings began; in their confidential documents they called him Saul—the first anointed ancient king of the Jews. But eventually God abandoned this moody king. And the Philistines, according to the Bible, defeated Saul.

  Chapter 2

  A COMPROMISED CONSTITUTION

  Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be ruled by me

  . . . Deep malice makes too deep incision

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 1.1.152, 155

  The Shah was born in Tehran, a city that lives in the shadow of mountains and myth. More than any other city in Iran, its real and mythopoeic history captures the tormented soul of Iran.

  To the north stands the towering, sometimes snowcapped, oft
en eulogized Mount Damavand, haloed by clouds that emanate from the coast of the Caspian Sea. According to Shahnameh, the grand epic poem of pre-Islamic Persian history, Zahak, the dreaded demon of Iranian mythology, lurks in some dark recess of the 18,600-foot mountain. The story goes that Jamshid, a reformist king who “rendered iron pliable,” made from the mountain helmets, breastplates, and other arms and “laid up stores of weapons.” He built houses and baths, castles and palaces, and his service to his people was commemorated on a day they called No-Ruz, which is still, many millennia later, celebrated as the Persian New Year. But Jamshid, legend has it, fell prey to hubris. He told “the elders and army commanders and priests . . . that there is no leader or king in all the world” greater than him. The gods punished him by taking away his charisma—farrah-e izadi—and before long, the people rose up against him. After a long period of chaos and confusion, people sought “Zahhak the Arab”1 to come and rule over them. His thousand-year reign then became, in the collective memory of Iranian history, the epitome of oppression and cruelty.*

  From the south come the desert winds, howling from the flatlands that cover the geographic heart of the country. Less than a hundred miles south of Tehran, in the midst of that desolate landscape, there is Jamkaran—a mosque built atop a well that has long been dry of water but is effervescent of messianic hope. Shiites, the majority in Iran, believe that their twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, went into hiding some thousand years ago, and some of these millenarian Shiites believe that once he decides to reappear, as he certainly will, he will ascend from the pit of that well.