The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  The second problem had to do with the fact that the Shah had already been twice married and divorced, and as a Catholic girl, Gabriella could only marry him after a special papal dispensation. That might well explain the unusual circumstances of the Shah’s trip to the Vatican in late 1958. The Shah was scheduled to visit Italy that year, but then when Pope Pius XII died, he postponed his journey, waiting for the time when he could meet the new pontiff. In Rome, the Shah stayed at the Hotel Excelsior, where he had stayed during the anxious days of August 1953. He met Pope John XXIII on December 1, exchanged gifts, and discussed matters of “mutual interest.” Vatican documents are kept confidential for seventy-five years, and thus accessing the minutes of the meeting is still impossible.65 All we know about the meeting is the gifts the two leaders exchanged. The Pope gave the Shah “a photograph of himself, a gold medal commemorating his coronation, a book on the Raphael apartments of the Vatican and a catalogue, in three volumes of various Islamic and Turkish manuscripts in the possession of the Vatican Library.” The Shah, in return, gave the Pope “a carpet of silk and wool, woven in the workshops of Nain.”66

  The Pope, however, was not the only obstacle on the way of a marriage between the Shah and Gabriella. Shiite clerics at home were no less unhappy with such a union. Hussein Ala, the minister of Court at the time, offered a refreshingly honest assessment of the political costs and benefits of such a marriage. Mixed in is a caustic and critical account of Court life in the latter part of the fifties. Ala writes of “different responses” in the diplomatic community to the news of the Shah’s possible marriage to Gabriella. According to Ala, some diplomats are surprised and ask how a Muslim king can marry a Catholic Princess. They worry that no sooner has the Shah married the Italian Princess than “a horde of Italians will converge on Iran” seeking work and contracts. Moreover, many believe that neither the Pope nor Shiite clerics will tolerate such a union. Ala goes on to report that some diplomatic circles in Tehran believe such a marriage will bring about “the overthrow of monarchy” while others will welcome it as an occasion to reform the Court and “improve its image.”

  Ala then offers a bleak view of the influence that the Shah’s family and friends have had on the reality and image of Court life. He warns against Princess Ashraf’s “meddling and mischief” and her attempt to “dominate the future queen.” According to Ala, even Iranian intellectuals who are in favor of the Shah’s marriage to Gabriella, and see it as a sign of progress, worry about Ashraf and the Queen Mother’s interference “in the private life of the Shah.” Ala ends his epistle by asking the Shah to cleanse “his private parties of unsavory characters,” and to replace “parties of gambling and silly games and striptease” with “intellectual endeavors” like lectures, bridge games, films, and musical concerts.67

  The note combines political candor with a kind of paternal concern. Its bitter tone might have had also a personal reason. Every time the Shah was looking for a bride, a number of prominent Iranian families had begun to jockey for a chance to have their own daughter become the future queen. At least according to Soraya, these self-serving calculations and machinations might well have influenced the decision of the “Council of Wise Men.” One of the most storied efforts came from the Ala family itself. Not only had Ala himself been at the center of Iranian politics for half a century, but his wife, too, came from an aristocratic family of great wealth and erudition. She was known for her unabashed pride in her blood and lineage. Her daughter, Iran, was, she thought, the natural next queen. When it turned out that the Shah did not share her view, she grew so angry and embittered that, henceforth, she refused to meet the Shah or to attend the parties at the Court.

  Of the families hoping to have their daughters chosen as the next queen, the Diba family of mid-level officials was an unlikely candidate for success. Farah Diba was at the time a student of architecture in Paris. Once when the Shah had visited France, she had been in the line of students received by the King. Her father had died when she was young, and she and her mother lived with her uncle and his son, Reza Qotbi, who became her surrogate brother when she was young and her closest confidante when she was queen. It was, in her telling, an idyllic childhood, save for the death of her father. Though Iran was in those years in the throes of a most vibrant political atmosphere, Farah and her family were decidedly non-political, and she was a royalist because, in her own words, “[she] was immersed in Ferdowsi’s ideas: Only the kings were legitimate rulers in our country.”68 In reality, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the grand epic of Iranian history is filled with stories of kings killing their sons—at least eighteen cases of filicide by Dick Davis’s count in his masterful Epic and Sedition.69 It is also the story of royal hubris, of arrogance of power, and it ends with a lament on how the weakness of a king allowed the country to fall into the dangerous hands of Arab Muslims who were overrunning the once-great empire.

  But regardless of the sources of Farah’s royalist sentiments, no sooner was she the queen than a stream of rumors about her politics began to spread. She was accused of being everything from a Communist to a Pan-Iranist, a member of an extremist nationalist group in Iran. Even the KGB claimed that it had some influence on the Shah’s selection! In reality, it was Ardeshir Zahedi and his wife, Shahnaz, who introduced Farah to the Shah. At the time, Zahedi was married to the Shah’s daughter; though every female member of the royal family was apparently busy trying to find a suitable match for the King, Zahedi and Shahnaz participated in the process rather reluctantly.

  At Zahedi’s house, the Shah met Farah for the first time, and after a couple more meetings in the same place, where they danced and listened to music and played parlor games, the young lady was, at the behest of the Shah, taken to meet the Queen Mother. Without her approval, everyone knew, no marriage would be possible. Farah passed that test as well. Before long, the Shah asked her to take a ride with him in a new plane he had just bought. As they were flying over Tehran, on October 14, 1959, the Shah proposed, and she “said yes to his love and to the special destiny that love entailed.”70 In what, in retrospect, seems like a potent metaphor, at the end of the flight, the plane had technical difficulties. The wheels would not open, and the plane had to fly over Tehran for some time to consume as much of the gasoline as possible. Eventually they had a choppy but safe landing.

  Hers was indeed something of a Cinderella story. Overnight Farah went from the simple solemnities of middle-class life to the starchy rituals of a Court where her wedding dress was designed by Yves Saint Laurent and the tiara by the American jeweler Harry Winston.71 In spite of all the planning, on the night of the wedding, somehow everyone forgot to bring the ring. As the cleric was about to recite the Qu’ranic verses that would sanctify the bond and declare them husband and wife, the royal couple was desperately searching for a ring. Ardeshir Zahedi came to the rescue and offered, albeit temporarily, his ring as a surrogate wedding band.72

  The Shah, Farah tells us, chose her because she was “so natural.” She was, in her own words, seen as “an unaffected girl who knew nothing of the world of courtiers and diplomats.”73 In fact, diplomats then and for many years afterwards talked about her as bringing a touch of “humanity and humility” to an otherwise distant and diffident Shah. In her memoir of exile, there is beneath the jovial façade a constant touch of melancholy. In her eyes, too, there is always a hint of sadness, of resignation to the Cinderella story fate had hurled her into. Words, particularly in memoirs, invariably tell us more than their authors intended, or at least more than they consciously wanted to convey. While still in power and in Iran, she called her life story My Thousand and One Days74 and conjured both the ostentatious affluence of a Thousand and One Nights court as well as the sad tale of Scheherazade, the ultimate master of yarns, who concocted stories only to keep alive. In exile, long after the many travails and tribulations of her marriage to the Shah had become public knowledge, after Alam’s Daily Journals had chronicled in painful detail the Shah’s excessive phila
ndering and the litany of “guests” flown in from Europe for the Shah’s “entertainment,” she called her memoir An Enduring Love and chose to remain stoically silent about all of those stories. But as she explains in both memoirs, not long after she accepted his marriage proposal, the wedding ceremonies took place at the Court, and then the waiting game began. Her husband, his family, her mother, and much of the nation waited to see whether she would bear a son and produce an heir to what was in those years a shaky throne.

  As the Shah’s annus horribilis had begun with a nasty, albeit forged letter, it ended with an even nastier, more threatening letter, this one from President Eisenhower. And this time, the letter was no forgery. Not long after the Gharani Affair, the Shah, maybe in partial retaliation for America’s role in the incident, threatened the American Embassy that “if he is not given satisfaction by US on such matters as budgetary assistance,” he would “reconsider Iran’s position vis- à-vis USSR.” He wanted not only more budgetary assistance, but also a bilateral treaty that would commit the United States “to come to the aid of Iran if there is indirect aggression against Iran from any source whatsoever, communist or non-communist.”75 Making such broad commitments, Dulles informed the Shah, was “beyond the commitments authorized by the US Congress.”76 In response to this rejection, the Shah took the extraordinary step of engaging in secret negotiations with the Soviet Union for a long-term non-aggression and economic cooperation pact. The United States and Britain were angered by the move and considered it at best an act of “blackmail,”77 if not betrayal. The way the British and American government learned of the arrival of the secret Soviet delegation, and the tactics they used to dissuade the Shah from going ahead with the proposed agreement, precipitated the first major crisis of 1959.

  * It is an interesting fact of history that although both were coups by young officers against monarchies in Muslim countries, that was where the similarities ended. Iraq’s coup was bloody and brutal and was, in subsequent years, followed by other equally bloody coups. In Egypt, the royal family was allowed safe passage out of the country. Even the Shah’s first wife, Fawzia, who was the King’s sister, was allowed to live, with her second husband and her son, in one of the royal family’s homes in Alexandria. There has been no other coup in Egypt since that time

  * The order of the Garter was the oldest order of chivalry in Europe, going back to the time of Edward II, around 1348 to 1351. According to at least one myth, the Garter first came into vogue during the Crusades. Richard I, then fighting the Muslim infidels, tied garters around the legs of his knights. Membership in the Order has always been limited, often to no more than twenty-five, consisting of the sovereign and a few more blue bloods. On rare occasions, foreign monarchs, called “Supernumerary Knights” were also invited to join. Worried for much of his life about the approbation of the British, this was, one can surmise, the Shah’s way of ensuring, in his own mind, that he had finally been accepted by the British

  Chapter 12

  RUSSIAN HOUSE

  Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples.

  Shakespeare, King Henry V, 3.7.103–104

  In 1956, a week before the Persian No-Ruz—the Persian New Year, the first day of spring, celebrated at the moment of the vernal equinox—the British Embassy in Tehran received an offer it could not refuse. General Teymour Bakhtiyar asked Mr. Sajjadi, an Iranian member of the embassy staff, to lunch. The General was named the military governor of Tehran in the aftermath of events of August 19, 1953, and by the time of his lunch invitation had already developed an infamous reputation.

  That day the General had torture on his mind. He “wished to inform the Embassy . . . about the question of treatment of political prisoners.” He began by suggesting that he knew the embassy had by then “heard the stories widely current in Tehran about the tortures practiced by the Military Government.”1 Tehran was in fact abuzz with stories of torture and beatings, mock executions and nail pulling, solitary confinement and forced confessions. There was even talk of rape. The brunt of these brutalities was said to be reserved for arrested members of the Tudeh Party, particularly their clandestine military network.

  By the time the Military Governor considered the party defeated and its military network abolished, 4,121 party members had been arrested.2 It was a measure of the party’s long tentacles that amongst the officers in charge of Richard Nixon’s security detail when he traveled to Iran as vice president in 1953 was a member of the party. The head of the security detail for General Fazlollah Zahedi when he was the prime minister was also a party member.3 The hub of the torture rumors was an infamous bathhouse—hammam—in one of the prisons where many of the arrested officers were first incarcerated. Whisper had it that the hammam was in fact changed into a torture chamber. One of the most popular heroically tragic songs of modern Iran—“Mara Bebous” (“Kiss Me”), inviting his beloved to kiss him “for the last time”—was, perhaps apocryphally, said to have been composed by one of these Communist officers on the night before his execution. Of all the Tudeh Party military network members arrested, thirty-six were sent to the firing squad, including its mastermind, Khosrow Roozbeh.4 It has been reported that the arrest of the entire military network was the result of a fluke arrest of an officer named Abbasi in whose possession were the encrypted names of all members of the military network. Roozbeh was something of a math and chess prodigy and had used a sophisticated equation to encrypt the names. After much effort, it was ultimately the encryption officers of the CIA who broke the code. Whisper at the time, however, had it that the code was broken only after Abbasi was tortured.

  General Bakhtiyar began by insisting that stories in the rumor mill were “greatly exaggerated, thanks at least in part to the Tudeh Party.” The first story Bakhtiyar wanted to confirm but correct was what had been until his confession arguably one of the most serious charges made by the opposition. It was said that a bear had been used to rape recalcitrant political dissidents. The General indicated that a bear had been used, but only “once. . . . Even then the bear had not been allowed to molest the person concerned. This had been a man who in the time of the Murdad [August] troubles of 1953, had sent a telegram to Mussadeq . . . attacking the Shah, and suggesting that the grounds of the royal palaces should be turned into a zoological garden.” The General and his interrogators had assumed that using the bear “would be an appropriate punishment for such sentiments and the man had been put in the cage much to his terror, but taken out after he expressed rapid repentance before the bear actually got its claws on him.”5

  The General went on to say that “a number of other methods of torture” ascribed to them were highly exaggerated. Their main “weapon had been flogging with a whip,” and he went on to say that as their reputation worsened, as more and more people heard these whispers, often the only thing that was needed to get prisoners to confess and or give information “was to tell them that they would be transferred” to the hammam.6

  As to the Shah’s role in the decision to use these brutal methods, Bakhtiyar went “to some pains to explain that the Shah had only given general orders on this matter.” He had told the Military Governor that he and his staff should use any method necessary “to gain information, depending on the importance and the recalcitrance” of the prisoners.”7 It is difficult to know precisely what motivated Bakhtiyar to make these revelations. Was he trying to implicate the Shah or exonerate himself? It was hard not to assume that he was campaigning for the job of the head of the new organization (SAVAK) he knew was in the planning stages. The British Embassy in fact surmised that he was trying to counter the “dirt” that his rival, the chief of the police, “had been spreading” about him.8 While we might never know his real motive, we know what the British government decided to do with this potentially volatile information.

  The first person who received a report of what Bakhtiyar had revealed was rather astounded and believed that the Br
itish government, at least on humanitarian grounds, should ask the Shah to order an end to such practices. But as the report made its way up the diplomatic and bureaucratic ladder, prudent silence was the chosen path. Someone suggested that he “does not believe that the Shah is unaware of these tortures. . . . [He] is determined to wipe out the Tudeh . . . [and he has been] just as ruthless . . . in allowing full military operations against the [nomadic] tribes.”9 Some surmised that the Shah had a “personal score to settle with the Tudeh party for the attack on his life.”10 Another official claimed that “torture of one kind or another has been common in Iran for a long time,” though he immediately went on to add that “the majority of Iranians do not like this sort of thing,” and that “nothing of this sort went on under Dr. Mussadeq’s government.” Finally it was resolved that “rooting out communism in Iran is a major interest and objective for [Britain] as well as Iran,” and thus the British government must certainly “not appear to be undermining” the Shah’s efforts in achieving this common goal. Moreover, it was decided that if the Shah should ever give the British Ambassador an opening, the Ambassador should register his government’s displeasure about the torture of Communists. Before long, Britain and the United States both found themselves showing strong displeasure to the Shah not about the torture of Communists, but about his big gamble on establishing new ties with the Soviet Union.

  In a character study of the Shah prepared in 1957, U.S. officials pointed to some important changes in his behavior. One of the key indications of “his growing maturity” had been his symbolic “break with his old tutor and personal secretary, Ernest Perron. Probably not even his own brothers had been more closely and continuously associated with the Shah.” By all indications, Perron was sacrificed when, a few months after the fall of Mossadeq in 1953, the Shah’s attempt to bypass the cabinet and the Prime Minister and establish direct ties with Britain backfired. Though they had met daily for almost two decades, the Shah would never see Perron again. His older sister, Shams, who shared Perron’s deep devotion to Catholicism, took him in and allowed him to stay in her palace until the end of his life.