The Shah
Page 32
When SAVAK was first created in 1957 from a blueprint provided by the United States and with the help of American intelligence officers,26 Gharani, as the chief of the army counterintelligence unit, was one of the leading candidates to become the first head of the new security organization. He had many friends and supporters, particularly in the ranks of the country’s intelligence officers. Moreover, the Shah liked and trusted him, as he had shown his dependability during the events of August 1953—for the Shah the litmus test of reliability. But, ultimately, he lost his bid for the job, reportedly because British advisors convinced the Shah that a “strongman” like Bakhtiyar would be more suitable.27 Gharani blamed his failure to get the job on Shapour Reporter, the storied representative of MI6 in Iran. And wounded pride begot a fierce desire for revenge.
Gharani began to look for any degrading information about Reporter. When he heard allegations of minor financial irregularities, he took a senior Iranian intelligence officer to the British Embassy to chronicle these alleged infractions. Reporter apparently heard about this visit and began to bide his time for a chance to return the favor.28 The events of February 1958 offered him the chance. What made his job easier was the relentless competition between Britain and the United States over turf, power, and proximity to the Shah.
Early in January 1958, the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and his assistant secretary, William Rountree, were on their way to Iran. Gharani decided that this was the time to move. On January 22, at his request, three members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran—Fraser Wilkins, minister counselor of the embassy, Colonel Baska, and Lieutenant Colonel Braun—met the General at the house of Esfandiyar Bozorgmehr. The full memorandum of that conversation is still classified as “Sensitive; special handling required; not releasable to Foreign Nations.”29 A redacted “Memorandum for the Record” of the discussion offers the following synopsis of what transpired:
[Gharani and Bozorgmehr said], a) The present government has no popular support and is despised by the mass of Iranian people and particularly by the professional and intellectual groups. The Soviets are quite openly engaging in penetrating and wooing the Iranian people. . . . Therefore Gharani stated that [it] is urgent that a change in government be brought about. . . . b) Bozorgmehr stated for Gharani that they have an intellectual group of 2000 Iranians, 1200 of whom were educated in the US and the balance attended the American university of Tehran; c) The approach to the Shah that he should reign and not rule should be made by someone outside of Iran with the inference that Secretary Dulles should make such a demand to the Shah.30
Nowhere in the report of the meeting is it made clear why the embassy officials decided to meet with such a high-ranking Iranian official under circumstances that clearly smacked of conspiracy, nor do they explain why they chose not to report the coup plans to the Shah.
Nine days after the meeting, Bozorgmehr, Gharani’s chief accomplice in the affair, flew to Athens, where he met with Assistant Secretary Rountree. During the meeting, Bozorgmehr complained about the fact that there was now “considerably less freedom in Iran than under Mossadeq; that present government was completely without power.” Bozorgmehr also talked about what he knew would be of most interest to the American officials, claiming that the “Shah and government have softened considerably toward [the] Soviet Union, with [a] constant danger Iran will accept large-scale Soviet aid.”31 Events in subsequent months showed surprisingly that the report of the Shah going “soft” on the Soviet Union was not altogether without foundation.
Back in Tehran, conscious of the internecine turf wars between different intelligence and police agencies, and of the rancor and personal jealousies amongst leaders of the regime, Gharani’s next step was to concoct a clever camouflage for safeguarding his conspiracy. He told the Shah that he planned to lay a trap for disgruntled officers, politicians, and intellectuals by inviting them to participate in a conspiracy against the government.32 But in spite of his Machiavellian guile, he had failed to take into account the continued power of British Intelligence and the personal power of his nemesis, Shapour Reporter.
The plotters were only in the early stages of their plans when they were all arrested. On February 27, in an angry communiqué the Iranian government announced that thirty-nine Iranians, including General Gharani, had been arrested for attempting to overthrow the government and that an “unnamed foreign power was involved.”33 The reference to the “foreign” power was, according to the British Embassy in Tehran, “intended to give the Americans a fright.”34 In later versions of the communiqué, the reference to foreign powers was deleted. On that same day, the Shah asked to see Selden Chapin, the American ambassador, and “with a great show of indignation” told him that “US Embassy personnel had encouraged the Gharani plot by talking to the plotters.”35 Chapin tried his best to convince the Shah that America had no role in the affair. Fearing that the Ambassador’s words of reassurance might not work, the American government also combined them with a threat, indicating to the Shah that “there will be difficulties with aid appropriations if requests are made for the withdrawal of any Embassy personnel.”36
The efforts worked, albeit temporarily. The next day, the “government modified its statement, ostensibly to quell public speculation, by stating that only five Iranians tried to seek help from foreigners to bring about a new government pledged to safeguard foreign interests. The declaration stated that the foreigners ‘ignored the pleas’ of the plotters.”37
But the Shah’s calm was short-lived. After a couple of days, much to his consternation, he heard about the meeting between the conspirators and the U.S. Assistant Secretary in Athens. It is not clear how he found out, but British intelligence and Shapour Reporter remain the key suspects. Once again, the Shah was incensed. The American Ambassador was called to the Court. Before setting out for what he knew might be a contentious meeting, Chapin asked the State Department for instructions on how to deal with the fulminating King. This time, Dulles ordered the embassy to stand firm. “The Shah should understand [the] nature of contacts in Athens,” Dulles wrote back. “Rountree had no previous knowledge that Bozorgmehr was in Athens when [he] received telephone call asking for few minutes meeting. This lasted 20 minutes in course of which Bozorgmehr mentioned no plans for organizations, and requested nothing. He merely discussed in general terms situation in Iran. Rountree had no knowledge of Bozorgmehr’s present activities or associations and was under impression Bozorgmehr was still official of GOI [government of Iran].”38 In other words, hard as it may be to fathom, the American government again claimed that it had nothing to do with the conspiracy and that the meeting had not been previously planned but was essentially imposed on Rountree.39
The Shah tried to use the occasion and the embarrassment faced by the American government to begin pushing for an end to any contact between American intelligence or diplomatic officials and Iranian opposition figures. In fact, “on several occasions, high officials close to the Court as well as in the government . . . suggested that the American embassy should avoid any contacts with dissident or even opposition elements of the Majlis.”40 The United States vigorously rejected the idea at the time. “What would the Iranians say,” Chapin asked officials in the Foreign Ministry, “if their embassy in Washington were told to have no contacts with the Democrats?”41 The British were also pressured about this time on the same issue, and their response was even more categorical. “We are not prepared,” said British Ambassador Roger Stevens, “to shut ourselves up in a kind of ivory tower . . . it would not be in anybody’s interest that we should do so.”42 Faced with these stern rejections of his requests, the Shah eventually changed his mind, telling Chapin that all he was asking for was that the U.S. military not discuss “intelligence and political matters with his military.”43 Seven years later, when the Shah was in a stronger position, he changed his mind again, and once more pushed for an end to all American contacts with the Iranian opposition. Concerned with the war in Vietna
m, the Johnson administration succumbed to these pressures, and the result was one of the great intelligence failures in postwar American history. It is a fascinating facet of the Gharani saga that less than three years after his failed coup attempt, most of his stated goals became reality. Amini became prime minister in spite of the Shah’s opposition, and many in his cabinet were the same officials Gharani had picked for ministerial portfolios in his coup cabinet. There is, then, more than one way to skin a cat, or to convince a king.
During the days and months when the Shah was preoccupied with the Gharani Affair, another long-simmering crisis, this time in his personal life, began to surface. The “impatience” the British Ambassador had detected in the Shah’s usually playful relations with Queen Soraya was rooted in the fact that by early 1958, the couple had, after repeated efforts and examinations, accepted the fact that they were incapable of having any children together. The decision had come at the end of a long saga that had begun only seven months after their marriage in early 1951. When at that time the Court announced that she would be traveling to Europe “for medical treatment,” rumors about her infertility began to circulate. But as Soraya clearly admits, at that time and for the first couple of years of their marriage, “so long as the Shah had to fight [with Mossadeq] for his throne, the absence of an heir scarcely counted as a problem of state.”44
But then in October 1954, when the Shah was well ensconced in power, as the royal couple began to plan for their upcoming trip to the United States, the Shah surprised his wife by telling her “of his serious concern about the succession to the throne” and suggesting that in their upcoming trip to the United States, she should have herself examined by fertility specialists.45 Pressure on the Shah to produce an heir had begun long before. Early in 1954, when it was rumored that the Shah was considering “nominating his only daughter as heir presumptive,” newspapers in Tehran pointed out that such an appointment “could not be done without a constitutional amendment.” Moreover, there were indications that one of the Shah’s “aspiring” brothers had “inspired” these press reports. Ali Reza and Abdul Reza were the main suspects.46
With Ali Reza’s death, the issue of succession found new urgency. Tensions were particularly intensified after the Shah’s daughter, Shahnaz, married to Ardeshir Zahedi, announced that she was pregnant and, much to the consternation of the Court, claimed that should she have a son, her “baby would be heir to the throne.”47 The Shah was particularly upset by his daughter’s claim, saying in private, that “a Zahedi could not continue the dynasty of the Pahlavis.”48
Sensing that her days as queen might now be numbered, in July 1957 Soraya complained to the Shah that “we can’t go on like this” and suggested that the Shah should change the constitution and make it possible for him to appoint one of his half-brothers as heir to the throne. Such a change, the Shah told her, “requires the approval of the Council of Wise Men.” But in the articles of the constitution dealing with legal ways of amending it, there was no provision for such a council, and the Shah must have known that. He had already changed the constitution once. The Shah’s concocted allusion to such a provision in the constitution, and her gullible acceptance of it, says as much about his mode of operation and his unwillingness to face up to difficult questions as it does about her limited grasp of the realities of the country of which she was queen.
Initially, according to Soraya, the Shah was opposed to her proposal. Eventually he “grew used to the alternative.” He agreed to convene the “Council of Wise Men” for that purpose. It was also decided that she should leave the country and await the vote of the council and the eventual change of the constitution. There is no evidence that the Shah ever seriously considered the idea of such a change. Moreover, such a move would have been sure to raise the ire of his family, particularly his dominating mother, whose open rift with Soraya was by then a matter of public knowledge. Some have even suggested that for the last three years of her tenure as the queen, Soraya never visited the Queen Mother’s home.49
On February 13, 1958, “almost to the day, the seventh anniversary” of her royal wedding, Soraya left Iran for Europe. Ostensibly, it was for a vacation; in reality, she had known for some time that she might never return. In the months before her departure, she “systematically put her house in order,” collecting in a “suitable place those things which belonged” to her.50
After her departure, the Shah did convene a council of elder statesmen—past and current prime ministers and ministers as well as some generals—and entrusted them with the task not of changing the constitution, but of finding a solution to the problem of the Queen’s failure to produce an heir. According to Soraya, after a few days, the council sent three emissaries to Europe to win her support for the idea that she should remain the queen but that the Shah would take a second wife, whose purpose would be to produce a male heir. She rejected the offer, even after she was reminded that the Shah’s own mother had accepted the idea. She blames the Shah for the unacceptable offer, calling him, “fundamentally an Oriental.” It was, she believed, because of this Oriental blood that the Shah did not model his conduct after that of the Duke of Windsor, “who sacrificed his throne to love.”51
The Shah telephoned his estranged queen on several occasions and gave her an often-hopeful progress report of the council’s deliberation. He even told her that he had suggested the change in the constitution and that they had rejected it. On March 5, the Shah called again, this time “in a cool and factual tone” and asked her to reconsider the two-wives option. She rejected the idea once again. On March 14, 1958, the Court issued a statement indicating that after three meetings of the Royal Council, and in light of the fact that the Crown Prince must be of Pahlavi descent, the Shah, “taking into consideration the interests of the nation,” has decided to divorce his wife, and that she had been informed of the decision and had, in the interest of the nation, decided to accept the decision.52
Soraya offers a starkly different narrative. She claims that after their “cool and factual” conversation of March 5, the Shah never called back, and then on “March 14, he announced our divorce without having spoken to me again.”53
Financial settlements, including “sums of money, as well as lands and security” that the Shah had given her during their days of marriage left her a comfortably rich woman. Though she makes no mention of alimony, it is reported that for years, she was paid a monthly allowance of about $7,000.54 The estate auction, conducted in June 2002, shortly after her death, showed the range of valuables she had taken with her to Europe. While her Paris apartment was sold for almost $3 million, the auction netted more than $6 million. The sale included a Harry Winston platinum ring, featuring a 22.37 carat diamond, sold for $838,350; a Bulgari ruby; a Van Cleef & Arpels brooch; a 1958 Rolls-Royce; and a Gullwing Mercedes-Benz.55 By the time of her death, she had come to be called the “sad queen,” and it was a poignant sign of this sadness that her only heir was her brother and that, a week after the auction, he too died, leaving the fortune to the legal vagaries of a “next of kin.” But as it turned out, the 1958 divorce did not end her romantic, or even financial, entanglements with the Shah.
Reports of the Shah’s response to the divorce range from those claiming he was crassly indifferent to those who claim that “Soraya was the Shah’s only true love” and that the divorce left him despondent. The British Ambassador, for example, described the Shah at the time as a “man at an emotional cross-roads,” in some ways relieved by the prospects of divorce, and at the same time unable to easily “bring himself to face it.”56 Others close to the Court told the American Embassy that “the Shah is relieved to be rid of the Queen and that his first despondency was more feigned than real.”57 In one of the Shah’s biographies it is even claimed that on the night the announcement of the divorce was made public, the Shah went to Hotel Darband, a fashionable Tehran nightspot at the time, “and invited a ravishing European blonde to dance.”58 At the same time, the Shah wanted
to know what the British government thought about such a divorce, and he “was relieved to feel that the divorce” would not be “a stumbling block” to his upcoming trip to England and to his relationship with the British government.59 As it soon turned out, his concern for the British view of his divorce was more than just political.
Not long after the public announcement of the divorce, the Shah began looking for a new queen, while rumors of his philandering also spread. There was talk of his affair with an Iranian girl as well as with international celebrities.60 But he was also thinking about marriage, and “he put out feelers for the hand of Princess Alexandra,”61 a granddaughter of King George V. Three years earlier, on a visit to England, the Shah had made it known, through various means, that he coveted the Order of the Garter,62 or “The Most Noble Order of the Garter.”* But the feelers he sent out for the Garter and for Alexandra were both met with a cold shoulder. In fact his “feeler” about Princess Alexandra was, according to Sir Denis Wright, “dead on arrival.”63
The Shah’s search for a fertile European queen next took him to Italy, where he tried to marry Maria Gabriella, the daughter of Umberto II, the last king of the country and of the House of Savoy. He had met her in Europe and on more than one occasion, spent time with her, including a week in Switzerland, where he stayed at the lakeside villa of his son-in-law, Ardeshir Zahedi. The problem in this case was more theological than political—Shiite clerics in Iran and the Pope in Italy posed serious problems for such a marriage.
Gabriella was a Catholic, and her father was particularly devoted to the demands of the faith. A marriage with the Shah would pose at least two problems. On the one hand, there was the question of religion for the couple’s future children: would they be baptized and raised Catholic, as her faith demanded, or would they be raised Muslims, as required by Islamic law? Some courtiers suggested a compromise alternative: the question of the children’s religion would be deferred to the time when they reached maturity.64