The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  But Robert Kennedy and Justice Douglas were not the Shah’s only critics in the Kennedy administration. Another group, particularly popular in the Department of Defense and the CIA, believed that the Shah was “weak, inefficient and confused and has needlessly raised [a] hornets nest.” They advocated that the United States force the Shah to “halt reforms and turn over power to military based traditional groups.” A third group wanted the United States to force the Shah to turn over power to “a young Western trained economist.”81

  Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, put an end to these speculations. There was a new president and a new policy. What is invariably surprising about the liberal-minded administration is the ease with which they talked of “regime change” in Iran and about deciding in Washington what the structure of power should be in Tehran.

  Kennedy’s last correspondence with the Shah was about the same issue that had preoccupied the two men from the beginning and that had become a point of contention between them. It related to the size of the Iranian military and the nature of the threat to Iran. In the letter, Kennedy used a new argument, telling the Shah that since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, it had become obvious that the United States had strategic superiority over the Soviet Union, and thus the Shah did not need to worry about the Soviet threat.82

  The Shah was sensitive to the attitude of the U.S. and British governments towards him and was affected by the tensions with the Kennedy brothers. On November 22, hours after Kennedy was assassinated, the State Department concluded that “the Shah needs fresh assurances.”83 On the other hand, on hearing the news of the Kennedy assassination, the Shah personally dictated to Foreign Minister Abbas Aram an angry diatribe against Kennedy addressed to President Lyndon Johnson. In the letter, the Shah accused Kennedy of a failure to understand the intricacies of Iranian politics and of unduly interfering in the affairs of the country. The Shah had specifically ordered Aram to send the letter without showing it to anyone. But Aram shared the letter with Alam, and both decided against sending it.

  After a few days, Alam informed the Shah of his decision not to send the letter. The Shah, visibly shaken and angry, threw the letter to the ground, leaving the room in a rage. For the next two weeks, he refused to talk to Alam or to grant him the regular audiences set aside for the Prime Minister. Even at parties and official ceremonies, the Shah pointedly shunned Alam and made no attempt to hide his dismay. Finally, of course, they reconciled,84 but the Shah’s bitter feelings toward the Kennedys lingered and, as Alam’s Daily Journals show, reared their head regularly, particularly in biting remarks the Shah made about the Kennedys in private. Even the long, meandering letter that was eventually sent to Johnson offered both condolences for the assassination and confidence and hope that U.S.–Iranian relations would thrive in the coming years, free from any misunderstanding.

  The psychological impact of those trying years on the Shah’s political persona can be seen in the two profiles of him prepared during the height of these tensions. One was written by officials of the British government, the other by an American journalist.

  On the day after the fall of the Amini government in July 1962, an American journalist named C. D. Jackson visited the Shah in Tehran in preparation of a profile he was writing for Time magazine. Editors of the magazine, on a “confidential basis,” sent a copy of the essay to Press Secretary Pierre Salinger for President Kennedy’s information. Jackson met the Shah on August 7. He described the Sa’ad Abad Palace as a “disappointment . . . some kind of European hodge-podge, a mixture of Italian, French and, as far as I was concerned, North German Lloyd.”85 About the same time, in a visit to the Court for an official ceremony, the British Ambassador noticed “the extent to which Westernization had affected the essentially Persian style . . . a string orchestra played Western music . . . nothing Persian at all except the pillaw [rice pilaf] at the end of a European dinner.”86 Jackson found the room where he met the Shah even less appealing. “The furniture was atrocious, the decorations were ghastly.”87 As to the Shah himself, he appeared to be “in good shape, lean, good condition, dark soulful eyes, tremendous busy dark eyebrows and hair beginning to go a little [gray] at the temples. His tailor is not very good and the guy from whom he gets his neckties should be subjected [to] some sort of ancient Persian punishment.”88

  The Shah began the interview by offering a thinly disguised critique of the Kennedy policy in Iran, relying on the standard cultural relativist argument that the “countries were totally different. They were different racially. They were different to their customs and mores.” He opined that “as far as Persian history was concerned, where there had been a really strong leader, Persia had almost conquered the world.”89 He also made what was by then one of his standard complaints, criticizing the administration for “continuing military aid to” his nemesis, Nasser in Egypt.

  The interview ended with another question that would, in later years, become a far more urgent issue for the Shah. Jackson asked the Shah whether “he ever got depressed” and whether he had any friends. The Shah “replied yes, that [he] got depressed, not very often” and that he had no friends, “anywhere. I have companions for jokes, but no friend to whom I can look up to as wiser than I am, who can give me the right kind of advice.”90 For Jackson, the responses indicated that he was talking to a “modern Hamlet . . . a man with all the right instincts, intelligent, capable of understanding what the game is but with a fundamental, temperamental reluctance to play the game to the fullest.”91

  Another profile, this time prepared by the British Embassy, captures the early stages of the Shah’s authoritarian power, as well as the vulnerability of such absolute power. The author of the report writes that already, “No public situation, civil or military, domestic or external, economic, political or social, no senior appointment, no promotion, transfer, reward, or punishment takes place” without the Shah’s approval. But the report points to the reality that the “complexities of the modern state are inevitably beyond the control of a single individual.” Because of “exorbitant panegyrics of sycophants” who the Shah had gathered around him, he was, according to the profile, being “increasingly convinced that only he is capable of governing this country.” Even more dangerous, according to the report, was the fact that though “he is genuinely patriotic, he is also egotistical and not incorruptible. He is inclined to lose his nerves, and some accuse him of cowardice. If he is autocratic, he can also be indecisive and irresolute, readily changing his mind according to the latest advice.” Worst of all, according to the report, as the result of recent developments, “he has become acutely unpopular.”92

  If the ambitions of Amini, the anger of teachers, and the new paradigm of politics promoted by the Kennedy administration were not enough to make the early 1960s interesting for the Shah, there was also the problem of the indomitable Khaybar Khan—onetime ally turned indefatigable foe, who used the American media and the Congress to make serious allegations of fraud against the Shah, his family, and courtiers. He fabricated checks showing large deposits in the Shah’s accounts from funds set aside by the United States for social causes in Iran. It took the Shah many years and the help of many lawyers to finally convince the U.S. government that Khaybar Khan was not a reliable source.

  In this period, another issue that occupied the Shah’s mind was the question of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States. The Shah wanted American advisors to train Iran’s military, particularly the air force. The U.S. Department of Defense, on the other hand, preconditioned the arrival of these advisors on the passage of a SOFA–something the United States has with every country where it has stationed forces. The SOFA being suggested in Iran, however, was more extensive, as it completely exempted not only the servicemen but their families from prosecution in Iranian courts. The State Department was against the idea of insisting on such a SOFA, predicting that it would give rise to nationalist sentiments and would be considered a revival of the old co
lonial habit of Capitulation Rights. Many in Iran, including some in the government, also opposed the proposed SOFA for the same reasons. The Shah shepherded through the Iranian parliament the proposed agreement and, cognizant of rising public sentiments against the bill, even encouraged some members of the Majlis to oppose it. Eventually the law was passed after Prime Minister Hassan-Ali Mansur knowingly lied to the parliament about its actual content. The most forceful opposition to the bill came from Ayatollah Khomeini who was eventually exiled for his virulent anti-Shah, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric.93 The Prime Minister soon paid with his life for his role in the affair, and Khomeini was catapulted into the center of Iranian politics.

  The events of 1963 had clearly affected the Shah’s physical and psychological condition. In February of 1964, accompanied by the Queen, he took a trip to Europe. They were supposed to be gone for only two weeks; they stayed for five. As always, rumors began to spread. People whispered: why is he gone for so long? An explanation was required. Etala’at offered the official explanation in an editorial. The trip, it said, was primarily motivated by the Shah’s “need for rest” and for “treatment for abdominal trouble, which usually stems from over-work and particularly tense intellectual activities and thought.” In other words, so worried was the Shah about the country and so hard had he been working that he had developed something of an ulcer.

  The American Embassy was not convinced. They said they were not sure that he in fact “had [an] ulcer. He has chronic liver trouble but not clear whether this flared up.” What they learned from a “fairly reliable report from Vienna medical source described his condition as ‘anxiety complex.’ ”94 This turned out to be the first hint of the Shah’s anxiety.

  Maybe his anxiety, as much psychological as political, was rooted in the fact that he knew, more by his unarticulated instinct than by reasoned insights, that the socioeconomic forces he had put into motion would sooner or later clash with his increasingly authoritarian style of rule. For the Shah, character was destiny. He was neither an efficient dictator, nor a man willing to accept the constraints on his power set in place by the constitution and made necessary by the increasingly modern characteristics of Iranian society—characteristics he himself had played a key role in creating.

  * The Shah kept his promise only in the most literal sense of the agreement. Iran in fact allowed the U.S. and British intelligence agencies to establish highly sensitive listening stations in Iran’s northern provinces that monitored Soviet nuclear activities

  Chapter 16

  THE DESERT BASH

  His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last.

  For violent fires soon burn out themselves;

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Light vanity, insatiate cormorant.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.1.33–38

  During the last week of April 1972, Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt visited Tehran on behalf of “one of his American business associates.” Given “his close personal relationship” with the Shah, he was invariably granted a private meeting with the King. And in those days, as Iran’s oil revenues increased and the number of supplicant heads of state and company executives visiting Tehran increased exponentially, getting a private audience with the Shah was no easy matter. As recorded in his Daily Journals, Assadollah Alam repeatedly urged the Shah to refrain from meeting with this head of state or that executive, saying that such meetings were no longer befitting His Majesty’s exalted international stature. Roosevelt was an exception.

  In the course of the meeting, the Shah talked solely about the international situation. He complained about King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt. Nasser was no longer on the Shah’s list of worries, but Soviet gains in the region—particularly in places like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan—were of constant concern. He ended his meeting with Roosevelt by declaring that “in spite of the difficulties involved, he felt he must play a more active role as a regional leader in organizing anticommunist forces.”1

  Domestic matters were not mentioned that day. By them, the Shah increasingly viewed himself as a regional and global leader, not just a head of state. His leadership in OPEC, Iran’s emergence as the most powerful nation in the Persian Gulf, the prominent place he occupied in the Nixon administration’s strategic vision for the Middle East, as well as the endless procession of Iranian and foreign sycophants, affirmed his growing sense of grandeur. When someone suggested that Iran launch a campaign to give the Shah the Nobel Peace Prize, the Shah wrote in the margin of the report, “If they beg us, we might accept. They give the Nobel to anybody these days [kaka siah*]. Why should we belittle ourselves with this?”2

  Though the Shah was not interested in discussing domestic matters with Roosevelt, the old CIA hand met with a number of “well-informed senior Iranians” and from them he heard that the country faced “pressing domestic problems.” The Shah’s global preoccupations were causing him to pay these problems not “enough attention.” Roosevelt was told of a “growing gap between ‘the government’ and ‘the people,’ ” of serious inflationary pressures on the economy, and, most important of all, of the serious erosion of “the credibility of the government.”3

  In the same period, both the American Embassy in Tehran and the CIA began to notice hints of trouble. The embassy, for example, found that “over the past several months, a number of more or less chronic causes of popular dissatisfaction” had “taken on consistently sharper edge.” It even reported that Amir Abbas Hoveyda, by then in his seventh year as prime minister, might be replaced, “if only as a sop [to] the public discontent,” and suggested that “it would be a good bet” to assume that Jamshid Amuzegar would be the successor.4 Corruption in high places, the disproportionate size of the military budget, and the mistreatment of the clergy—most specifically the arrest of a famous cleric (apparently Falsifi) and the publication of his picture in highly compromising congress with a young girl—were declared to be the direct causes of the discontent. Concurrently, in one of its intelligence estimates, the CIA first praised the Shah’s work ethic and the improvements he had successfully brought about in the people’s livelihood. It noted that “most people have been too busy doing well in other spheres to fuss about politics.” Nevertheless, the report called the Shah “an isolated figure, living in a formal court atmosphere” with a “regrettable lack of communication upward to him.” It reported that not only would no Iranian official dare tell the Shah “he is wrong about something,” but even foreign ambassadors “cringe before the Shah’s responses to official presentations which displease him.”5 The Queen, by then amongst the handful of people who still dared confront the Shah with unpleasant truths, captured this atmosphere when, much to the King’s consternation, she disciplined the Shah’s dog, adding, “everyone is obsequious, even to your dog. I won’t do it.”6

  The Shah’s blithe disposition toward matters domestic, and his obliviousness of the credibility gap between the government and the people, is particularly remarkable in light of what had been happening to him, and to his family, in the few years before the 1972 meeting with Roosevelt. On the morning of April 10, 1965, he had decided to drive himself the short distance between his residential palace and his office in the Marble Palace. As he neared the steps of his office, a conscript named Reza Shamsabadi who was on guard duty that day shot at the Shah with his service machine gun. With remarkable agility and some luck, the Shah managed to climb the stairs and make it into his office, closing the door and taking cover behind his desk. Shamsabadi was able to enter the building before the other guards shot him dead. Bullet holes in the door to the Shah’s office indicated how close the assailant had come.

  To avoid panic and maintain an air of normalcy, the Shah decided to keep his full day’s schedule. In fact, in the early afternoon, he drove alone and without any escort or guard to the house of his son-in-law, Ardeshir Zahedi. When the Shah was asked why he had ventured out only a f
ew hours after a failed assassination attempt, he repeated an old Persian adage, “the same house won’t be hit by thieves twice in the same night.”7

  That day, the Court issued a brief statement about the failed assassination attempt. Behind the scenes, SAVAK and the Imperial Guard each tried to blame the other for what had clearly been a gross lapse of security.8 Someone should have identified the assailant long before he had the opportunity to assassinate the Shah. The assailant in fact had a record of both assaulting a prime minister (Ali Amini) and consorting with radical Islamist circles. Nevertheless, he had been picked to be part of the elite unit carrying loaded machine guns and entrusted with protecting the royal palaces.