The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Hussein Amanat was the wunderkind of modern Iranian architecture. He was still living at his parents’ home and planning to depart for the United States and graduate work in architecture when, in June 1966, he saw an advertisement in Etela’at announcing a national competition for a new monument. The only guideline provided was that “it could not be taller than forty five meters.” The monument was to be built near the capital’s airport, and anything taller would have been dangerous. A few months earlier, the committee to celebrate the 2,500 years of monarchy had commissioned the firm of Bonyan, whose partners included some of Iran’s top architects, to come up with a design for the monument. The director of the firm, Nosrat Moghanah, was known to be a friend of the Shah and of many members of the committee, but the Shah was not happy with the 6 million tooman ($900,000) plans submitted by Bonyan and ordered a national competition for a new design.

  By the time Amanat decided to participate in the competition, there was little time left before the deadline. He solicited the help of some of his college peers, turned his bedroom into a studio, and began to work on his envisioned design. For three days, he and his friends worked incessantly to complete his plan. His concept called for a tower that would conjure Taq-e Kasra but symbolically represent the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Around the central building, in the vast surrounding space, each of the great dynasties of the past would be represented by a small yard. Only after going through the past dynasties would a visitor arrive at the monument that stood at the center of the edifice and symbolized the rule of the Shah and his father. The grand curved marble pillars of the monument made of white stone (Joshagad) from Isfahan afforded it the air of a majestic curtain flowing in the wind—and wind invariably conjures the anticipation and the anxieties of change. On one side, the curtain opened to the mystery and vistas of Iran, while from the opposite vantage point, it opened a wide window to the world waiting outside. The outer face of the monument also resembled the plumage of a peacock.25 After submitting his proposed design, Amanat continued his plans to leave for Illinois. Then, much to his surprise, he was told he had won the competition. But the jury’s choice was not in itself sufficient. The final choice would have to be made by the Shah and the Queen. On the designated day, Amanat and twenty other finalists were called to the Court, where they were each given a chance to explain their architectural ideas to the royal couple. To Amanat’s great joy, the Shah and the Queen confirmed the jury’s choice. But his joy was soon tempered by the realities of bureaucratic and professional corruption and jealousies. It took about a year before Amanat was actually given the contract.

  Amanat’s victory in the competition had a symbolic significance unrelated to architecture. His victory was an apt metaphor for a new decade in Iranian politics when Iranians of talent and merit, regardless of their faith and family, could find a job or an income commensurate with their talent. The only exceptions were those opposed to the regime. Even in their case, the regime invariably tried to “co-opt” them by affording them lucrative jobs or contracts. Previously, a “thousand families” had, according to the lore of Iranian politics, ruled Iran—or 40 national families and 150 to 200 “provincial families” according to the CIA26—and thus blood and connection had guaranteed a ticket to power and position. The power of the 40 families did not disappear, but there were now, with the expansion of the economy, more seats at the table of power and economic opportunity, and many more talented men, and slowly and gradually women, could join the table. More crucially still, in that decade, people of talent and dedication could also rise on the social, political, and economic ladder even if they were not Muslims. The fact that Amanat was a devout member of the Baha’i faith in no way hampered his victory. The Shah’s religious critics, of course, claimed that membership in the faith was, in fact, an added advantage.

  But by 1971, when the construction of Shahyad was completed, Tehran was fired by the power of petrodollars. The Shah’s new and vigorous “open-door” policy was meant to encourage The world to visit and invest in Iran. Tehran was a city enamored of the West, particularly America, and obsessed with its past. More than 50,000 Americans lived in Tehran alone. Shahyad became the perfect metaphor for the many cultural paradoxes that were the rapidly changing Tehran.

  Shahyad’s simple pre-Islamic arches, reminiscent of Taq-e Kasra, along with ornate Islamic domes, inspired by the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque,27 and decorated with sophisticated arabesque designs, were concurrently Persian and Islamic. The effect of the dualism and clash of Persian pre-Islamic grandeur and Islamic influences was redoubled when the challenge of modernity was added to the problem—creating what one critic has called the “cultural schizophrenia”28 of modern Iran—and the genius of Shahyad was that somehow it captured these complicated crosscurrents. Shahyad was a gateway to the future and a celebration of the past. As the Shah spoke of the coming “Great Civilization” and offered his own rule as the “gateway” to this utopia, Shahyad became that symbolic gate. In Shahyad, as in other artifacts of the modernist age, form was content, and the building’s form cleverly drew inspiration from its symbolic function.

  As an iconic structure, Shahyad became the object not only of adoration and emulation, but also of satire and criticism. Rumors about its allegedly exorbitant cost and about massive financial malfeasance among those involved in its construction made it one of the favorite subjects of the opposition’s campaign of whispers and gossip. The total cost of the monument, according to sources in the Islamic Republic, was about 40 million tooman ($5.5 million). The complicated concrete work of the monument was entrusted to the same company that had completed the famous Sydney Opera House.

  But even those who did not subscribe to sundry financial allegations used Shahyad to poke fun at the Shah and his regime. In Ebrahim Golestan’s subversive Mysteries of the Ghost Valley, the nouveau riche man with an unmistakable resemblance to the Shah builds a phallic monument to his own grandeur after inadvertently finding “underground” riches. The monument built in the film mischievously but unmistakably conjured Shahyad.29 The Islamic Republic’s attempt to erect a new tower—an incongruent mix of the Seattle Space Needle and the minaret of a mosque—and make it the symbol of the new Islamic Tehran has failed so far.

  When Amanat, along with other finalists for the Shahyad competition, met with the Shah and the Queen, it was not the first time the young architect had met the King. Architecture students were required to submit as their final thesis a project of their choice. Amanat had submitted a design for a resort on the coast of the Persian Gulf. In preparation, he had traveled widely in the area, and his design integrated the natural contours of the territory with its potential political economy. The project stipulated that the Persian Gulf area, until then seen only as a rich reservoir of oil, offered great untapped possibilities for tourism and trade. The Plan for the United Development of the Natural Resources of Khuzestan region, developed during Ebtehaj’s tenure as the director of the Plan Organization and modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority, called for the agricultural development of the region after the construction of a major new dam.30 But the new proposal called for a new attitude toward the region. A jury of faculty chose Amanat’s design as the best for that academic year. The Shah, too, on his visit to give prizes to the top graduating students, was keenly interested in both the idea and the design of the resort. The Kish project, nearly finished before the fall of the Shah, was akin to the Amanat proposal. The Kish idea called for creating on that beautiful but sparsely populated island a “free city” that would be the Paris and Hong Kong of the Persian Gulf—a place of epicurean license and commercial delight, an open city of pleasure and profit. When the revolution aborted the project, the rulers of the United Arab Emirates realized the need for such a city and created in their kingdom the unfulfilled dream of the Shah. Today’s Dubai is the child of yesterday’s aborted Kish project.

  Ironically, the year Amanat won the prize for the best project, the runner-up design was for a new
seminary in the city of Qom. Once again the Janus face of Iranian culture was evident in the two disparate designs and the two conflicting paradigms of identity—one that sought to integrate Iran into the global march of modernity, and the other opting instead for a return to the comfort of an “authentic self” molded by tradition and laced with Islam. Before Iran’s plans for turning the Persian Gulf into a tourist haven could become reality, seminarians, led by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, helped foment the revolution of 1979. Amanat had won not just the competition for Shahyad, but the competition for the best graduating project of the year. At the same time, his competitor’s plan for a seminary had, maybe unwittingly, tapped into alternate forces of Iranian history.

  * Pedar soukhteh is a common phrase in the vernacular. “Father-burned” is its literal meaning; its actual meaning is determined contextually. Here “bastard” seems like the right translation

  † In recent months, some of the masterpieces of these artists have been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A couple have sold for more than $1 million

  Chapter 18

  THE PERFECT SPY

  . . . little joy have I

  To breathe this news, yet what I say is true.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.4.85–86

  The Cold War began in Iran, and the fall of the Shah was the beginning of its end. The Shah was, amongst other things, both a victim of the Cold War and one of its most fervent advocates. When historians try to tally the costs and benefits, the victors and the vanquished of the Cold War, they might well conclude that the fall of the Shah and the rise of radical Islam—and with it, the tectonic shifts in the political landscape of the Middle East—were some of the most profound unintended consequences of the Cold War. Long before the CIA tried to use Islam and Islamists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Shah and SAVAK had been trying to use religion to contain and combat Communism. The CIA and the Shah both seemed initially to have succeeded in their efforts, but the price for the miscalculation in Iran was the throne itself, while in Afghanistan the result was the tragic domino effect of terror and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

  Compounding this strategic miscalculation was the false sense of security the Shah felt after the violent suppression of the pro-Khomeini riots in June 1963. Assadollah Alam had been the prime minister in those turbulent times, and in later years, when he was the Court minister, with more daily access to the Shah than anybody else had, he often whispered in the Shah’s ear that the clergy were no longer a relevant political force in Iran. The mullahs, Alam declaimed with self-serving bravura, were politically destroyed, ideologically disarmed, and socially marginalized and no longer constituted a viable threat.1 Even in exile, a few months after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Shah still believed that it was in fact the Communists who had masterminded his fall.

  All through his political life, the Shah was preoccupied with fear of the Soviet menace. Even the coup of 1921, the first step in his father’s meteoric rise in politics, was, according to the Shah, more than anything else an attempt to abort an imminent Bolshevik revolution in Iran.2 Twenty-five hundred kilometers of common border with the Soviet Union and the relentless history of Russian expansionist mischief in Iran—rooted in the alleged “Peter the Great’s Last Will,” exhorting his progeny to capture Iran and thus find access to the “warm waters of the Persian Gulf and beyond”—were the historical backdrop of the Shah’s fear of the Soviet Union. This apprehension was exacerbated by the Manichaean view of the world promulgated by theorists of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

  But by 1975, Iran’s relations with its giant Communist neighbor to the north were the best they had ever been. The only years that were in this sense comparable to the seventies were the first few years of Reza Shah’s rule when, thanks to Court Minister Teymourtash’s “friendly”3 attitude toward the Russians, the Soviet Union accounted for close to 40 percent of Iran’s foreign trade.4 By 1972, the USSR had emerged “as Iran’s third largest arms supplier.”5 The rise of trade with Russia began in 1966, when, in spite of some pressure from the United States, Iran signed a major economic agreement with the Soviet Union. In a July 7, 1966, meeting with the Shah, when Armin Meyer, the American ambassador, pointed out the dangers of flirting with the Soviet Union, the Shah said he did not need the United States to “lecture him re inequities of dealing with the Soviets.” He assured Meyer that he had no illusions about Soviet intentions but that his aim was improving relations with Russia while not falling prey to their temptations.6 In the same meeting, the Shah “warned that when he turns to Soviets, USG should not set in motion political movement in Iran.” The Ambassador answered that the “very thought . . . is ridiculous.”7 A few days later, in another meeting on the same topic, the Shah railed against those who were “puppets” of the United States and against “taking orders” from the Americans, declaring that “he did not care to emulate” them.8 Some of the Shah’s brothers told Vice President Hubert Humphrey that the Shah would go through with the Russian deal unless President Johnson invited him to Washington and told the Shah “how much you love him.”9 None of these pressures or inducements worked. The Shah went ahead with the deal and by the mid-seventies more than 8,000 Soviet technicians were working in Iran. Their areas of expertise ranged from metallurgy and mining to agriculture and steel production. So heavy was the traffic of these experts in and out of Iran that the Moscow–Tehran train was usually booked several months in advance.10 Iranian industrialists had also begun exporting huge quantities of Iranian products to the Soviet Union. Everything from soap and shoes to cars and air conditioners was being exported to the vast Soviet empire.11

  But deep tensions, rooted in ideological differences and bred from fifty years of distrust, lurked beneath the surface solemnities of “peaceful coexistence.” As an “Intelligence Estimate” by the U.S. government at the time made clear, “While pursuing their policy of reconciliation with the Shah during the 1960s and 1970’s, the Soviets retained all of the various tools available for use against him. These include critical public and private statements, support for a clandestine radio station broadcasting into Iran, continuing ties to the Tudeh Communist party which has its own history of subversion in Iran; a continuing espionage network within Iran, implicit approval for the training of Iranian dissidents by other forces hostile to the Shah; the capacity to conduct cross-border infiltration and arms deliveries; support of anti-Shah movement; and of course a military capability on the Iranian border.”12

  Of these “tools of subversion,” the KGB was for the Shah the most feared nemesis. Much to his consternation, in the early 1970s, he realized that some of the activities of Soviet spies had reached inside the royal household. There was, for example, the discovery that a member of the staff at the Court had ties to Soviet agents; she was, according to Alam, quietly dismissed. More important was the case of the Saberi family.

  Around 1972, SAVAK’s counterespionage units put Roshanak Saberi, an employee of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, under surveillance. After she went to a meeting with a Romanian “diplomat” who in fact worked for the KGB she was arrested. Before long, she confessed to passing information to the Soviets and indicated that her brother, Abbas Saberi, had recruited her for the work. Ostensibly a rich and generous rug merchant in Paris, Saberi turned out to be a key KGB operative.

  Abbas Saberi himself had been, early in his espionage career, part of what the KGB called the “ideological recruits”—believers in the cause of socialism who, like Kim Philby and his gang of Cambridge spies, offered their services to the “Bastion of Revolution” gratis and out of a sense of ideological camaraderie. Gradually, most of these ideological recruits became simple spies for hire. Saberi and his wife owned a famous store in Paris where they specialized in expensive Persian rugs. The KGB had successfully diverted attention from the true nature of Saberi’s activities by spreading the rumor that he was in fact an apostate who had stolen funds from the Tude
h Communist Party in Iran and escaped to France.

  Saberi and his wife lived a life of bourgeois affluence and comfort in France—a large apartment in Paris and an expensive vacation home in one of the most exclusive suburbs of the city. From the early 1940s, the couple had been the patron saints of distressed Iranian exiles in Paris. Their apartment was also a veritable salon for émigré intellectuals and political activists. Even high-ranking officials of the Shah’s regime, including Abdollah Entezam, Iran’s ambassador to France for several years, and General Hassanali Alavi-Kia, one of the founders of SAVAK and from 1961 to 1967 the head of SAVAK operations in Europe, frequented the Saberi house.13

  Two of the people closest to the Shah had also been one-time visitors to the Saberi residence and had borrowed money from Saberi. Both had been exiled to Paris during the Mossadeq era. The first was Princess Ashraf, who was staying at the Hôtel de Crillon, the most expensive hotel in Paris, at the time. Though she was about to purchase a late-model Cadillac, she nevertheless felt poor and strapped. She wrote letters to her family and to trusted officials at the Court, asking for financial help.14 She also, according to general Alavi-Kia, borrowed some money from Saberi in return for a handwritten promissory note. The note was never cashed in or publicly used against the princess. Saberi kept it, apparently as a badge of honor.