The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  In a meeting with the British Ambassador shortly after the crackdown on Islamists, the Shah, in a “confident and cheerful mood,” declared, with what the British official called a “lyrical note,” that spring was on its way in Iran, and “a new page in the history of Iran” was about to be turned. The most remarkable aspect of the recent suppression of Islamists, according to the Shah, “was the absence of any popular protest against the arrest of Kashani, except for a routine one from a few mullahs.” It just shows, the Shah said triumphantly, “what an exploded myth these nationalists were. Their importance in the past has been greatly overstated. He knew better now. They had nothing to offer the country. He had.”133 Maybe, unbeknownst to the Shah, the British did not share his optimism.

  “Persia is drifting” declared Ann Lambton at this time. The Shah, she said, cannot govern but “will not let anyone else do it” either. In her words, he was “a dictator who cannot dictate.” A number of Iranians, all known as Britain’s most reliable “friends”—from the Rashidian brothers to Mohammad Saed and Seyyed Zia—had complained to either Lambton or to the Foreign Office, “begging us to do something.” They complained about corrupt sycophants surrounding the Shah and leading him astray. Eventually, the British government reached the bleak conclusion that with the Shah at the helm, “good intentions coupled with weak execution has resulted in [an] intermittent and hesitant dictatorship.”134 Only the future would tell whether the Shah’s eager optimism or Britain’s critical skepticism was justified.

  * Twenty-seven years later, when Islamist students took over the American Embassy, Khomeini incredibly referred to the American Embassy as a “den of spies.

  Chapter 11

  CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  In the remembrance of a weeping Queen.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.4.106

  Nineteen fifty-eight was not a very good year for the Shah. A number of serious, sometimes contentious issues that had been quietly boiling beneath the surface began to turn tempestuous. From his constant wrangling and haggling with the American government over the size of Iran’s military to his desperate desire for a son with his infertile queen, the Shah’s private and political life became, even more than it had been, a subject of controversy.

  From early that year, those like the British ambassador, Sir Roger Stevens, who regularly saw the Shah with Queen Soraya, noticed that “the Queen was not at her ease,” and that the Shah “seemed to treat her conversation with marked impatience.”1 The once playful, even passionate relationship was beginning to look frayed. It would take no more than a few weeks before the world would learn the reasons for his impatience and her distress.

  Events on the international level were no less traumatic for the Shah. The “swift and brutal overthrow of the monarch in Iraq shocked and frightened” him, convincing him to “reappraise the future of his personal position.”2 He grew “nervous and disconcerted,” while members of his family were “obviously jumpy.” As a precaution, the Shah reinforced the protection for his residential palaces by the “transfer of tanks which [were] now in evidence in the palace grounds.”3 Soviet sources, in those days ever eager to embarrass the Shah, even reported that he “had prepared a plane to escape if an Iraqi style revolution should happen in Iran.”4

  The Iraqi coup was, for a variety of reasons, something of a personal warning for the Shah. The deposed young Iraqi monarch had been a rebuffed suitor to the Shah’s daughter, Shahnaz. Moreover, it was the second time in about five years that a friendly monarchy in a Muslim country had been forcefully supplanted by a nationalist military junta. The first was the overthrow of the Shah’s erstwhile brother-in-law, King Farouk of Egypt.* But by 1958 the Shah had succeeded in consolidating all power in his own hands. Ministers were now expected to report to him directly, often circumventing Prime Minister Manouchehr Egbal. It was around this time that the Shah told a meeting of the cabinet that “he was the fountainhead of all authority” in the country and that “he expected to be told in detail what was happening in every department of the government.”5

  A few of the Shah’s advisors, as well as the British and American Embassies, tried to convince him at the time that such a concentration of power in his hands was impractical in the short run and was likely to threaten the survival of the monarchy in the long run. The British Embassy, for example, concluded that the Shah “is not capable of discharging” all the responsibilities he had taken into his hands. Iran will be “a naked autocracy tempered only by intrigue, greed, good manners, and inefficiency.”6

  Many observers, domestic and international, believed that the Shah had to allow a clear distinction and separation between the regime, with him as its symbol, and the government, with the prime minister as its embodiment. Such a distinction was clearly stipulated in the constitution. In the absence of such a distinction, the Shah was told, any disgruntlement with the government would have no consequence other than regime change. If the Shah took responsibility and credit for everything that happened in the country, then he would also be blamed for every failure.

  The Shah, however, more than once rejected or ignored, even ridiculed, these warnings. Realizing that such a concentration of power was not only against the letter and spirit of the Iranian constitution but contrary to the historic pattern indicating the decline of actual power for nearly all other existing monarchies, particularly in Western modern societies with whom the Shah clearly liked to identify, the Shah often reassured himself (and anyone who cared to listen) that when it came to governance, there was something exceptional about Iran. What was true of other monarchies—other than their inexorable turn into mere symbols of national unity—was not, he believed, relevant in Iran. The Iranian people, he often said, loved their monarchy because it is “the natural order.” On another occasion he said, “My father’s dictatorship was necessary. My authoritarianism (egtedar) is also necessary today.”7 But he must have known, not so much by theoretical reason but by personal experience, that monarchy as an institution had become an endangered species, a quirky oddity in the age of modernity. Even in Iran, since the mid-nineteenth century, every monarch save one—Mozzafar al-Din Shah, who accepted the role of a mere symbol—had had a tragic end, either exile or assassination. Furthermore, the rise of a group of nationalist officers in Iraq, buoyed by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt’s Pan-Arabism, made the Shah wary that a group of young nationalist officers might be tempted to try something similar in Iran. As it turned out, his anxiety was not altogether baseless.

  Around this time, there had in fact been alarming signs of discontent in the ranks of the Iranian military. The Communist Tudeh Party’s military network, discovered not long after the fall of Mossadeq in 1953, had been successful in recruiting more than 600 officers, many of them in key command posts. The party’s other covert military network, this time consisting of sergeants, was never uncovered. As late as 1958, the American National Security Council reported that “reliable estimates state that perhaps 20% of the Iranian army was disaffected.”8 In fact, in August of that year, “between 4 and 18 Iranian Army and Gendarmerie officers, most of them of field grade were arrested [for] anti-regime political activity.”9

  The rising power of Pan-Arabism in the Muslim world and of Arab nationalism in Iraq, combined with the success of the Soviet Union in ingratiating itself to Iraq and Egypt, brought about a profound change in the Shah’s strategic thinking. Beginning in 1958, and for at least the next fifteen years, he grew concerned—or “obsessive,” in the words of American and British diplomats at the time—about the might and machinations of Nasser, the charismatic new Egyptian strongman. Fear of Nasser and his radicalism also led to a new kind of cooperation between Iran and Israel, which in 1958 began a joint covert propaganda operation based in the city of Ahwaz, in the oil-rich Khuzestan province of Iran. The goal of the new operation was to broadcast to the Muslim world Arabic programs critical of Nasser.10

  As a result of all of these changes, the Shah came to the conclusion
that the future threat to the security of Iran would come not from the Soviet Union, but from Iraq and Egypt. Until then, Iranian military strategy had been single-mindedly focused on the fear of Soviet expansionism. As a result of the Shah’s new thinking, new air bases and radar stations were built in the southern parts of the country near the border with Iraq. In a discussion with President Eisenhower in late 1959, the Shah suggested building fifty new such fields.11

  The combination of these domestic and international challenges convinced the American and British governments that the “present political situation in Iran is unlikely to last very long.” American officials predicted that the most likely outcome of the looming crisis was an “attempt by certain military elements, possibly in collaboration with civilian elements, desiring liberal reforms, to force the Shah back into the role of a constitutional monarch.”12

  There was, according to a National Security Council analysis at the time, a “growing educated middle class” in Iran, and they formed “the basic opposition to the Shah. Increasing numbers in these groups find Iran’s antiquated feudal structures and the privileges of the ruling classes anachronistic in a modern world.” Moreover, the “business activities, general irresponsibility and in some cases outright corruption of some members of the royal family” and others in the elite were contributing to the “growing popular discontent.”13 Though written in 1958, more or less the same words could be, and were, used twenty years later to describe the root causes of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Ironically, while the 1958 analysis is remarkable for its precision, parsimony, and impressive grasp of reality in Iran, less than two decades later, on the eve of the revolution, the CIA not only missed the gathering storm of discontent, but only months before the fall of the Shah, concluded infamously that Iran was not even in a “pre-revolutionary stage.”14 Events of 1958 and the next few years can go a long way in explaining this historic intelligence failure and the surprising decline in the grasp of the Iranian reality by the American government and its intelligence agencies.

  But in 1958, so worried were the American policy makers about the consequences of discontent amongst the Iranian middle classes that they began to ponder whether the United States “should continue to support the Shah and his regime.” In fact, the September 9, 1958 meeting of the National Security Council was devoted to just this question. Ultimately, it was decided that the United States “should continue to support the Shah, but at the same time exert every effort to encourage him to undertake necessary reforms.”15 Amongst the reforms “being pushed” were “land reform and tax reform.”16 At the same time, American officials were warned not to be too “pushy” about the necessity of such reforms, lest the tone offend the Shah.

  For the Shah, the troubles of 1958 began with the publication of an embarrassing “personal and secret” letter from John Foster Dulles, then secretary of state, to Selden Chapin, the U.S. ambassador to Iran at the time. Chapin had asked for a new assignment away from Iran. In response, Dulles, using surprisingly candid terms, reassured Chapin by saying, “you know of course that we have never cherished any illusions about the Iranian sovereign’s qualifications as a statesman. The man tries to pose as the Cyrus of modern times. . . . He has no grounds whatsoever for doing so. The Shah should long ago have reconciled himself to the idea that he is there to reign, not to rule. His talk about the need for some purely national policy as well as his nebulous hints regarding the possibility of his revising his present policy show that he is about as successful as a politician as he is as a husband.”17

  The letter took on more significance when its content was echoed by the Turkish Prime Minister’s published declaration that the Iranian regime was “in a shaky position.” The Shah was “reliably reported to be ‘furious’ over the wire service” account of this impolitic declaration.18 As it turned out, the Shah’s fury and anxiety were, at least partially, based on a forgery. While the vote of no confidence by the Turkish Prime Minister was true, the more serious Dulles letter turned out to be a forgery. In the Shah’s own mind, the KGB topped the list of “usual suspects.”19 In fact, the mastermind of the forgery has yet to be definitively identified. But what makes the enigma of the forged letter still fascinating is the fact that not long after its publication, the Shah faced a coup whose stated goal was almost verbatim the same as what Dulles purportedly demanded of the Shah—namely that he must reconcile himself to the “idea that he should reign not rule.” Even the letter’s reference to the Shah’s marital failure was eerily prescient. The attempted coup has come to be called the “Gharani Affair” after its mastermind, Valiollah Gharani.

  Gharani’s career is a symptom of the cancer that was gnawing away at the core of the Shah’s pillars of power. It also offers a clue to the riddle of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Even in the late fifties, it turned out, Islamists had powerful “sleeper cells,” some in the belly of the regime. There is a scholarly and diplomatic consensus that throughout the Shah’s reign, the army and the intelligence agencies were the two key pillars of his power. Of the seven top military intelligence officers who served under the Shah (Bakhtiyar, Pakravan, Nasiri, and Nasser Moghadam, all four of whom were heads of SAVAK; Fardust and Alavi-Kia, who were deputy directors of SAVAK; and Gharani, head of army intelligence), at least five (Bakhtiyar, Alavi-Kia, Moghadam, Fardust, and Gharani) have been, at one time or another, accused of conspiring against the Shah. Pakravan, who was easily the most intelligent and erudite of the group and who also proved to be unfailingly reliable, served only for four years as the head of SAVAK. But Nasiri, an officer whose only apparent qualification was his fealty to the Shah, and who was never accused of brilliance, had the longest tenure (1965–1978). He was renowned for his reluctance to tell the Shah “unpleasant” truths or to take him bad news. Of the seven top intelligence officers, only one, General Alavi-Kia, went on to live a normal life. The others met violent ends: three were executed by the “revolutionary courts,” one was assassinated by the Shah’s secret police, and one was assassinated by a terrorist group shortly after the revolution; the fate of the seventh, Fardust, is still mired in mystery.

  Of the seven officers, at least two tried to organize coups against the Shah. In 1958, it was Gharani’s turn, and it was a measure of the entangled web of intrigue in his case that, in spite of the seriousness of the charge against him, he served less than three years in prison.

  After his release, Gharani was put under constant surveillance, his phone bugged, his house and his every move monitored and reported. From these sources, we learn the extent of public support for him. For example, we know from police reports that in the first few days after his release, no fewer than 300 bouquets of flowers were sent to his house.20 The number is particularly striking in light of the fact that, in those days, everyone who sent the flowers would have assumed that Gharani’s house was under surveillance. From the same sources, we learn that before long, Gharani was in open collaboration with anti-Shah clerics who played a key role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

  In fact, there is evidence that even at the time of his attempted coup, he was working with religious clerics. The British Embassy in Tehran, for example, reported that “Imam Jomeh, although appointed by the Shah is the leader of a group with which General Gharani is known to have contacts.”21 When the Shah tried to force into exile one of the clerics who had allegedly cooperated with Gharani, Ayatollah Boroujerdi, Shiism’s top cleric was reported to be “furious about this development” and in protest threatened “to leave the country.”22 The Gharani accomplice was not exiled, and the Ayatollah did not go on his journey of protest.

  Valiollah Gharani was born in 1913 in Tehran. His family was solidly middle class and religious. He was seventeen when he joined the military, and he was one of the top three students of his class in the Officer’s Academy. Special courses he took on intelligence shaped the contours of his career. Though Islamic panegyrists have tried to make of “Martyr Gharani” a devout and pious man of religion who ne
ver veered off the path of piety,23 his peers remember him as a jolly young man, given to all the normal, sometimes-bawdy frivolities of a young officer.24

  His early career is remarkable only for his steady but altogether routine rise through the ranks. As for many in the military, events of August 1953 were pivotal in determining the future of his career. He had by then become the commander of the Rasht brigade, one of the more important command posts of the time. During the fateful days between August 15 and 19, he remained loyal to the Shah, and his reward was his subsequent rapid rise to the position of vice chairman of Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was a measure of the Shah’s trust in Gharani that he was also named the head of the Joint Chiefs’ Second Division—Rokne do—in those days the most important intelligence post in the country. It was in that capacity that he often traveled to the United States, and it was during one of these trips that he began to plan a coup in Iran. On that trip he apparently met with Ali Amini, Iran’s ambassador to the United States who was to be named prime minister after Gharani’s planned coup. A list of other designated ministers for the coup cabinet was also discovered, with Gharani himself picked to be the interior minister. Ultimately the coup might have had as much to do with Gharani’s wounded ego as with intrigues of politics. Like Iago, he believed that he had suffered “the curse of service,” where preferment goes “by letter and affection / And not by old gradation.”25