by Abbas Milani
One of the most incendiary parts of the new programs attacking Reza Shah were allegations about his massive fortune, much of it allegedly ill-gotten and stashed away in foreign accounts. Sometimes exact and, by the standards of the time, astronomical estimates of Reza Shah’s fortune were given by the BBC. Based on these reports, it was hard not to assume that the British government and the BBC must have had detailed knowledge about Reza Shah’s wealth. Thus these stories about Reza Shah’s fantastic fortunes became accepted as gospel truth. The question of this fortune, its size and source, the tactics used to accumulate it, and finally, what should be done with it became not only the first crisis faced by the Crown Prince when he became Shah, but continued to haunt him for the rest of his political life. Documents from the British and American Embassies on the eve of the 1979 Islamic Revolution make it clear that the question of the Shah’s fortune, and the alleged corruption of his family, was, as in 1941, easily one of the most potent issues raised by the opposition. Even in exile, in his famous interview with David Frost, the Shah was repeatedly asked about the extent of his wealth, and he was more coy than angry about it.
The woman who in 1941 drafted “the material for the BBC Persian broadcasts”73 against Reza Shah went on to become a nemesis of Mohammad Reza Shah and one of the most influential scholars and advisors to the British government. Her name was Ann Lambton. During the war years, she was the cultural attaché at the British Embassy. In later years, she returned to the abstract world of British Oriental Studies and wrote seminal works on such topics as the medieval history of Iran and the history of Iranian agriculture and land reform. Nevertheless, she played a crucial role in determining the British policy toward Dr. Mossadeq in 1951. It was clear that British officials believed that “she knows as much about Persia as anyone,” and thus when Lambton talked, Whitehall listened.74 Her influence over British policy continued well into the 1960s.
In 1941, her directive to BBC, titled “Some of the Acts of Reza Shah,” included fourteen items, ranging from making the Majlis “his rubber stamp,” beating his ministers” with a kick or “the flat of his sword,” neglecting agriculture, forbidding “cultivation of rice in Isfahan . . . to protect his own rice from the Caspian from competition,” and even using water to irrigate the flowers of the palace instead of sharing it with the people.75
Incredible as these attacks were, they were still not enough to force Reza Shah to abdicate. What truly sealed Reza Shah’s fate—aside from the belief of those like Foroughi who were convinced he could no longer stay in power—was the decision of the Soviet army to move toward Tehran and occupy it. More accurately, simply the rumor of an imminent Soviet incursion morally crushed the city, and Reza Shah, who had built his reputation partially on his anti-Communism, decided that he must not only leave the city but also abdicate. Hundreds of the city’s richest families also fled upon hearing the news of the Red Army’s anticipated arrival.76
If Reza Shah’s abdication was intended to ensure the continuation of the Pahlavi dynasty, there was, in the early hours and days after the announcement, no guarantee that the gesture would have the intended consequence. Britain and the Soviet Union, as the two occupying forces, were at first reluctant to approve the ascent of the Crown Prince. When the soon-to-be-Shah went to the parliament to take the oath of office, only the Soviet and British Legations were pointedly absent from the gallery set aside for the diplomatic corps. They had earlier informed the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which had invited the entire diplomatic corps for the occasion, that they had “no instructions regarding the succession of the Crown Prince.”77
In fact, the British were seriously considering either ending the Pahlavi dynasty and restoring the Qajars to the throne or changing the nature of the regime and creating a republic. Neither alternative worked. Foroughi and Saed were the first two candidates considered for the post of president, and they both flatly refused the offer, suggesting instead that in their view Iran still needed a monarchy headed by the Crown Prince.78 While the two men had betrayed Reza Shah and had advocated his abdication instead of carrying his message of reconciliation to the British, they were also instrumental in preserving the Pahlavi dynasty itself. The search for a viable candidate for the Qajar “restoration” turned out to be even more problematic than finding a willing and capable president.
That search led the British authorities to the “natural” successor, Prince Hamid, the son of the last Qajar Crown Prince, Mohammad Hassan Mirza. In a strange twist of fate, in the early thirties the same Prince Hamid had caught the attention of Reza Shah. What had seemed at the time like a perfect example of Reza Shah’s pathological paranoia became in 1941 the absurd truth. In 1934, the British paper the Evening Standard printed a picture of Prince Hamid, showing him saluting the British flag. He had just joined the Royal Navy, having become a British citizen even earlier. But that was not why his picture had appeared in the paper in 1934. It was there because he was playing the role of Caliban in a local production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban was a “native” who was enslaved by Prospero, the Duke of Milan. The Duke had lost his power due to his brother’s treachery. Prospero was put on a boat, set to roam the open seas. He ended up on an island where he enslaved the natives, and one of them, Caliban, became his servant—he served the master and in return learned how to curse in the new language of Prospero. Trying to decode the dizzying parallels between Shakespeare and the Iranian reality in those years is at best a Sisyphean task, the similarities becoming more sobering the more we ponder the two stories. In 1934, upon seeing the translation of the article—and the fact that such a translation would be shown to him was itself material for fantastic conspiracy theories—Reza Shah grew angry, and saw it as a first step in a British conspiracy to return the Qajars to power. Ironically, even at the time of the paper’s publication, the King’s anger was not just paranoia.
As it happened, four months after the article appeared, the Foreign Office did indeed began to contemplate “the question of the Qajars” and their possible return to power. The British concluded that there was “no chance now . . . at the same time, the dynasty might find itself brought once more into the limelight through fortuitous circumstances.”79 The abdication of Reza Shah was clearly one such “fortuitous circumstance.”
In fact, Prince Hamid recounts witnessing “many meetings in London” between his father and the British officials, all long before Reza Shah’s abdication. Eventually, on September 13, 1941, Harold Nicolson, who had served in the Tehran Legation from 1925 to 1927, talked to Mohammad Hassan Mirza about the idea of restoring the Qajar dynasty to the throne. In the course of these discussions, Mirza was asked “whether his son spoke Persian. ‘Pas un seul mot.’ ”80 But the British, though desperate to find a replacement for the Pahlavi regime, could not fathom the idea of putting on the Peacock Throne a British citizen who spoke no Persian and who was serving in the Royal Navy.
Even Rudyard Kipling might have found the scenario too strange for reality. Nevertheless, when, a few days later, at 4:30 in the afternoon on September 17, 1941, a visibly nervous Mohammad Reza Shah took the oath of office, the Foreign Office had still not given up on the idea of a Qajar restoration. On September 19, the Foreign Office wrote to Bullard, the British ambassador, that “the Crown Prince must be ruled out on account of his well-known pro-German sympathies and we cannot regard [Reza] Shah’s abdication in his favor as anything but a ruse to prolong anti-Allied policy. Alternatives one of the younger Pahlavis, or a Qajar restoration.”81
The reasons for Britain’s ultimate failure to find an alternative to the Pahlavi family can be found in a telegram sent from their embassy in Tehran the day after the Shah took the oath of office. First there was the pragmatic consideration that, in Bullard’s words, they “could always get rid of [the new Shah] quickly if he proved unsuitable.” Accepting the Crown Prince as the new king had the advantage that it was sanctioned by the constitution and was the “solution least disturbing to the cou
ntry.” Finally, the Qajar dynasty, in the embassy’s assessment, enjoyed little support. In fact, “PM [Foroughi] is against that dynasty.” Another problem with the Qajar dynasty, according to Bullard, was the fact that there “are hundreds of (repeat hundreds of) Qajars in the country, and they are all waiting hungrily, many of them on my doorsteps for return of the days when the country was bled not by one leach but by hundreds.”82
While these deliberations were going on in London and at the British Embassy in Tehran, at the Court, Foroughi, who had authored Reza Shah’s first speech as a king, now drafted Reza Shah’s brief note of abdication “using the king’s own gold-laced and hand-carved [monnabat kari] pen.”83 The Crown Prince was busy preparing his oath of office.
In spite of all the planning and thinking about what to do in Iran after occupation, the British were surprised not so much by Reza Shah’s abdication itself, but by its timing. They grew concerned that once he left Tehran, he might reach “some area not in Allied occupation” and that he might there be tempted to create trouble. The War Cabinet sent an urgent message to the embassy and to military commanders in Tehran saying, “military authorities have been informed that it is important to prevent [Reza Shah], if possible, from leaving Tehran,” and that if necessary they should “use force to detain him.”84
The British were not the only ones surprised by Reza Shah’s sudden decision to abdicate. As he was leaving the Court in an unmarked car, the Crown Prince was inclined to leave with his father. He too, according to ministers present at the Court, was worried about what the Russian army might do to him. In fact, when Foroughi first broached the topic of abdication, Reza Shah is reported to have said, “who will replace me; this Crown Prince is sure not up to the job.” But now, at the gates of the palace, ministers and the abdicated King finally prevailed over the reluctant Mohammad Reza, convincing him to stay and take over the reins of the state. The Shah alluded to this episode, albeit cryptically, when he wrote that his father “could not stand the infamy of remaining in his capital city when it was occupied by foreign troops. I had of course to obey my father who commanded me to take over the job.”85
In 1925 Reza Shah had begun his oath of office by declaring, “now that with God’s help, I am ascending the throne entrusted to me by the people of Iran, I must declare my plans so that everyone knows that I will, like the past, focus all my efforts towards putting our beloved nation on the path of excellence and progress.” Clearly, for Reza Shah, at least at the abstract intellectual level, his legitimacy as the king lay with the support of the people, and the throne was a trust placed in his care by the people. In reality, he had grabbed the throne, but even then, his first instinct had been to create a republic, where ballots, not blood, determined the line of succession. In his oath of office, God played only an auxiliary, enabling role. Reza Shah went on to say, “I hope the Lord will make us victorious in this endeavor.”
Mohammad Reza Shah’s oath of office, on the other hand, was longer and suffused with the language of faith and of the divine right of anointed kings. Of its ninety-three words, forty-nine were directly related to some religious idea or concept. In the case of Reza Shah, only ten of the total seventy-two words had any relationship to divine rights. Even more revealing are the fundamental philosophical differences between the two oaths. While Reza Shah’s oath was that of a modern monarch, his son’s trafficked in medieval ideas about the divine right of kings.
Mohammad Reza Shah began his oath by saying in a trembling voice, “I hereby take the Good Omnipotent Lord as witness, and I swear to the Sacred words of Allah, and to whatever is sacred in the eyes of God that I will focus all of my efforts towards safeguarding the borders of the nation, and the rights of the people.” He further promised to rule in strict accordance to the constitution, but immediately added that he would “make every effort to promote the Twelver Shiism,” and “in everything I do I will take the Good Lord as my witness.” He ended the oath by beseeching the good grace of God and of the lofty saints of Islam. Contrary to his father’s oath, the Shah never acknowledged the proposition that monarchy is a gift given by the people. Moreover, in his oath, Reza Shah did not accept the promotion of Islam as one of the main responsibilities of the king. For the Shah, on the other hand, such promotion was not only one of his key responsibilities, but Allah and the Islamic saints—not the people—were the judges and witnesses, and the source of anointment for all he did.
As the young, reluctant new Shah watched all of this and saw how easily British and Russian power had forced the abdication of his once-omnipotent father, he seemed to have internalized the idea that big powers, particularly Britain, Russia, and America, could do anything in Iran, and that in fact nothing would happen in the country without their overt approval or their covert intrigue. His own thirty-seven-year reign was haunted, even deformed, by this conviction. As Iran’s oil revenues increased, and as there was enough money for the Shah to buy all the arms he wished, one of the recurring arguments he made to legitimize the expenditure of such vast sums on the military budget was that he would never again allow another surprise defeat like the one that had befallen his father in August 1941.86 He could, of course, have learned an entirely different lesson from that experience, concluding that armies, regardless of their majesty and power, cannot save a regime in the face of sustained popular resentment, or that, faced with big powers, little nations can survive not by the sheer power of their military but by the sustained support of their people.
Lest the new Shah had missed the message implicit in his father’s abdication, in September 1941, the British Ambassador to Egypt called on the Egyptian Prime Minister. The Ambassador wanted the Egyptians to take a message to the new Shah. They wanted him to pay close attention to his father’s fate—to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest what happened to his father.”87 A copy of the memorandum of this conversation was sent to the British Embassy in Iran, and Egypt was chosen as the conduit for the important message because the King of Egypt was then the Shah’s brother-in-law. The Egyptian Prime Minister immediately began to look for “some genuine Anglophile of sufficient caliber to lead a mission”88 to Iran. The Shah, it seems, learned the lesson only too well.
His reluctance to take the throne and his belief that his rise to power was part of a divine design for his life and for his country, mixed with the grandiosity that characterized his pronouncements in the petro-crazed seventies, led him to tell a journalist in 1976, “Yes, Karanjia, uneasy is the head that wears the crown and I in particular had inherited a crown of thorns.”89 Mixed metaphors and Shakespearean paraphrase notwithstanding,90 the words, seen in the context of his early behavior, capture his transformation from a reluctant monarch to a messianic monarch.
* In deference to the privacy of the lady, I have chosen not to divulge her last name. As it happened, I saw her once when she was a septuagenarian. Even the ravages of time could not hide all hints of her beauty
Chapter 7
HURLEY’S DREAMS
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and mystery I do forswear.
Shakespeare, King Richard II, 4.1.201–205
In politics, the Shah had a baptism by fire. He was a reluctant young king on a shaky throne in the turbulent years of the Second World War amid a hotbed of fierce competition between the war’s competing forces. Before the first decade of his tenure ended, he would witness the creation of breakaway republics in two of Iran’s biggest provinces, the dawn of the Cold War, an assassination attempt on his life, and open challenges to his power from some of the prime ministers he had reluctantly appointed. During this first decade, the Shah also convened the Constituent Assembly to increase his own constitutional powers. Contrary to the common perception that during his first years in power the Shah happily resigned himself t
o his limited constitutional role, he was in fact trying to regain as much of his father’s power as possible. In the meantime, many in the Western media, enamored with the romance of royalty, were busy turning the new young Shah into an exotic Oriental monarch.
On September 21, 1942, the cover of Life magazine was dedicated to a Cecil Beaton portrait of a woman of exotic beauty—she had sad and mournful eyes, pitch-black hair, a perfectly sculpted face, and soft, graceful hands, bereft of the wrinkles of labor, holding a small sprig of blue bells, and she wore an elegantly cut dark dress, strewn with designs of light pansies. A diamond-studded necklace and a cloisonné fish pendant hung from her neck. The caption read: “The Queen of Iran.”
The Beaton portrait was a metaphor for an important change in the cultural sensibilities of the Pahlavi Court. Reza Shah had been unmistakably local in his desires and dispositions. The glitterati, the international “jet set,” celebrity photography, and haute couture were altogether alien to his tastes. But his oldest son, the new Shah, had been educated in Europe. His wife, Fawzia, was steeped in the modes and manners of European royalty and high fashion. In portraits of her while she was still in Egypt, she wore the hats and the bags, the dresses and the gloves of a Hollywood glamour girl.
Also included in the same issue of Life was a picture of a dapper Shah. By the time Beaton came to Tehran, the Shah, too, had already started having his shirts made by the exclusive House of Sulka, in Paris. He was a true creature of habits—the same shirt maker for almost three decades, the same Italian tailor, even the same dentist in Switzerland (where he traveled for regular checkups). Every morning his valet set out for him what he was to wear that morning. Late each night, the valet received a copy of the Shah’s engagements for the next day and, based on the exigencies of these meetings, the valet would choose and lay out that day’s clothes. Still, the valet’s choice was limited to the wardrobe accumulated by the Shah himself. By the mid-seventies, the Shah’s strangely large, dark-rimmed glasses, his big-lapelled suits, and his “daring” ties were a radical departure from the staid, somber, trim, and fit contoured suits he was wearing when Life magazine published a photo gallery of him and his family in 1942.
