The Shah
Page 55
The KGB apparently never paid much for the intelligence they received. A few hundred dollars was the common rate. Anything over $10,000 required the approval of the chairman of the KGB.44 Mogharebi’s last wage of sin was a mere 30,000 tooman (or about $4,500). According to Soviet archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, though initially recruited on ideological grounds, Mogharebi had, by the early 1970s, become “an increasingly mercenary agent,” with a regular monthly stipend that was 200 rubles in 1972 and was increased for good service to 500 convertible rubles by 1976. He was also at that time awarded “the Order of the Red Banner.”45 With his pay in his pocket, the most effective KGB spy in postwar Iran was arrested. His KGB handler and the driver were released the morning after the arrest to the custody of the Soviet Embassy and were given forty-eight hours to leave Iran. Moments after the arrest, the Shah was informed about the case’s closure. Through the head of SAVAK, he commended the Eighth Division for their work.
At the time of his arrest, Mogharebi was in charge of strategic planning for the entire Iranian military. Every “war plan,” every new defensive formation, every projected new base and airfield passed over his desk. The last piece of intelligence he conveyed to his Soviet handlers was about Iran’s plans to build “a new secret airstrip in the desert.”46 The secret airstrip of his report might well have been the one used some five years later by American Special Forces in their ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages held in the embassy in Tehran.
Upon his arrest, owing to the unusual nature of his case, Mogharebi was not taken to a prison, but instead to a SAVAK safe house. In the first few hours of interrogation, he denied any guilt and claimed that he had been in contact with the agents on the assumption that they were Americans.47 Eventually he confessed to his crime and described the nature of his long relations with the Soviets. The mystery of his longevity turned out to be simple. From the beginning of his Soviet collaboration, he had stipulated that he would never meet any agents in the streets and that he only worked from his house. For this reason, the KGB had developed an elaborate system whereby Mogharebi sent a signal to his handlers asking for a rendezvous. They would appear on his street at the designated hour. He in his house, and the handler in his car, would turn on their transmitters and receivers—what they called the “Close Information Link System”—and in moments the transfer of intelligence was complete. The machines were so sophisticated that SAVAK’s technical department was unable to figure out how they worked. Eventually, with the help of MI6 in London and the CIA in Langley, the mystery of the machine was discovered.48
For the Soviets, the arrest of Mogharebi was a major blow. They began a desperate search for the “possible causes of the Mogharebi debacle.”49 One obvious reason, they thought, was that they had overused him in the last years. According to Kuzichkin, the Soviets had no other real agents in Iran, and as a result they overburdened Mogharebi with too many requests, thus making him vulnerable. Before his arrest in 1977, he had met with his handlers no fewer than twenty-five times.50
In spite of the common perception of the KGB as an omnipotent powerhouse of intelligence in Iran, aside from Mogharebi, their feared network of spies consisted of an Afghan diplomat, Homayoon Akram, code-named Ram, and a Persian, nicknamed Teymour, who essentially milked the Soviets and passed them insignificant bits of information.
“The man,” Mogharebi, turned out to be the only source with any real information not only about the army, but also about “The Casket”—the code name for the Shah’s Court—and “Barracks” or SAVAK.51 Even if we add to this picture the readiness of pro-Soviet Communists to turn over intelligence, the KGB emerges as much weaker than anyone imagined.† Yet the Shah considered them politically omnipotent and saw their hand not only in every major political upheaval in the country, but even in some of the most mundane details of life.
Roughly two years later, when millions of people took to the streets, the Shah reiterated his belief in the KGB’s omnipotence by telling the American Ambassador that only the British, the CIA, and the KGB could manage such a massive demonstration in Iran. By then, the KGB, bereft of its master spy, was scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to activate a spy who had been inactive for more than two decades. He was a relative of Hoveyda who was code-named Zhaman. He had been initially recruited as “an ideological agent,” but for much of the sixties, according to KGB sources, he had been too busy building a fortune. But in the mid-seventies, Zhaman took part in KGB active measures operations, passing disinformation prepared by the KGB for the Shah.52 A key part of his “disinformation” was telling the Shah that “the CIA was planning to create disturbances in Tehran and other cities.”53 As an avid advocate of conspiracy theories, the Shah was more than willing to accept this “disinformation.”
Another example of disinformation, this time intended not for the Shah but for the purpose of affording the KGB an air of omnipotence, was their claim that they had “influenced the Shah’s choice of his third (and last) wife,” Farah Diba. The future queen was “unaware of the KGB interest” in her, but she was part of “a circle of Communist student friends.” The KGB even claimed that one of her relatives was an agent of the Soviets.54
Even in exile, weeks before his death, the Shah reiterated the idea that the Iranian revolution was in fact the work of “international Communism” and the omnipotent KGB.55 In reality, however, beneath this image of omnipotence was, at least in Iran, the reality of a weak, often incompetent organization. And with the loss of General Mogharebi, they had lost their only ace in Iran.
The loss of Mogharebi had another consequence that once again directly involved the Shah. There was a shakeup in the KGB residency in Tehran, and the man who was blamed for the debacle was forced into retirement. The new Station Chief had a sordid past in Iran. In 1959, eccentric Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, exhibiting his colorful impetuosity, had ordered the KGB to assassinate the Shah.
The KGB had at the time sent an agent named Fadeikin to Iran to assassinate the Shah. He bought a Volkswagen for the job, filled it with explosives, and hired an “illegal” (the KGB term referring to anyone who had been smuggled into a country and could come and go without any official trace) to detonate the car when the Shah was on his way to open a new session of the Majlis. But a mechanical malfunction saved the Shah. The “illegal” hired for the job pushed the button, but the detonator failed to operate. The Soviets of course blamed their hapless minion for not pushing the button hard enough. The same man who had made a mess of the assassination attempt was appointed the head of KGB offices in Iran on what turned out to be the eve of the Islamic Revolution.
* One of the main precipitating causes of tension between Iran and Iraq was the sudden claim by the new Ba’ath regime that Shatt al Arab, the river that has long been part of the border between the two countries, was an Iraqi waterway. Iran refused to accept the claim, and the Shah ordered Iranian ships to travel up the river, flying Iranian flags. Fighter planes from the Iranian air force provided cover for these ships. The thalweg line is the standard internationally accepted way to demarcate the middle of the navigable channel in waterways that are shared by states
† The KGB’s capacity must not be confused with the Soviet Union’s cultural influence in Iran at the time. For example, during much of the 1970s, the de facto day-to-day editor of Keyhan, the country’s most popular daily, was Rahman Hatefi. He turned out to have been all along a leading member of the Tudeh Party. A cursory look at the headlines for the paper during his tenure indicates a clear but subtle tilt toward the Soviets—in spite of strict censorship by SAVAK. Some have suggested that the Shah knowingly allowed the tilt in order to keep the West on the edge about the clear and present danger of the Soviet Union in Iran
Chapter 19
THE PERFECT STORM
O God, O God, that e’er this tongue of mine,
That laid the sentence of dread banishment
On yon proud man, should take it off again.
Shakespear
e, King Richard II, 3.3.134–136
On September 22, 1973, Ardeshir Zahedi, then Iran’s ambassador to the United States, sent one of his many “strictly confidential” reports for the Shah’s eyes only. The content of these reports was so sensitive that Zahedi would not even trust his staff with the task of typing them, writing instead in his own almost illegible handwriting. They were then placed in a special briefcase with only two keys—one in Tehran with the Shah and the other with Zahedi in Washington. He had seen this system used for the transfer of highly sensitive materials when he was Iran’s ambassador to Britain. The same firm that made the safe courier briefcase for the office of the British Prime Minister made one on order for the Shah–Zahedi correspondence.1 Couriers would carry the briefcase to Tehran with the case handcuffed to their wrists and then bring back the response—sometimes in the margins of the notes in the Shah’s polished and neat handwriting, and sometimes by letters from the Shah’s chief of staff, Nosratollah Moinian, or his private physician, Dr. Ayadi. Judging by the number of reports he read and commented on from Zahedi alone, it appears that, as his confidantes claim, he did indeed sometimes work well into the night.2 Zahedi’s reports were not, of course, the only ones the Shah read carefully. Other top officials of the regime say that while the Prime Minister and other cabinet members generally ignored their reports, the Shah read them carefully and “returned them with his decisions.”3
Early in his second turn as Iran’s ambassador to the United States, Zahedi learned through the wine-induced confession of a “reliable American source” who worked at the White House that coded confidential telegrams from the Iranian Embassy to the Shah were regularly intercepted by agencies of the U.S. government.4 As he wrote to the Shah, even before receiving this news, Zahedi had suspected as much. A few weeks earlier, Henry Kissinger had prematurely mentioned a matter that Zahedi had confidentially reported to the Shah only in an encrypted message.5
In the September 22 note—written on pages of a legal pad, with the Shah’s marginal notes appearing in red pencil—Zahedi reported meeting with a high-ranking U.S. official. The name of the official does not appear on the document and today, more than thirty-five years later, Zahedi has no recollection of his identity. The report is remarkable for the nature of the official’s inquiries and the Shah’s responses.
The first question related to the Shah’s “physical and mental” health. “Is the Shah well?” the American official asked Zahedi. The question is surprising for, at the time, there had been no public discussion of the Shah’s health in Iran or in the West. Were some agencies in the United States already privy to some news about the Shah’s health problems? Toward the end of 1973, or about the time the American official asked his surprising question, the Shah, while vacationing on the isle of Kish, noticed “a curve on his left hypochondrium [abdominal area].”6 He had consulted first his own physician, Dr. Ayadi, whose medical acumen the Shah did not always trust, and then Dr. Abbas Safavian, Alam’s friend and physician. They decided to consult with European physicians, and thus it was that on May 1, 1974, Dr. Georges Flandrin flew to Tehran and, under a great veil of secrecy, diagnosed the Shah as suffering from a “lymphocytic blood disease.” Neither dispatches from the U.S. and British Embassies in Tehran in those years nor declassified National Intelligence Estimates give any indication that either of the governments had any knowledge of this diagnosis or of the Shah’s health problem. It became the policy of the Shah and his three male confidantes—Alam, Ayadi, and Safavian—as well as his French physicians, to keep the story of the Shah’s illness strictly confidential, not even telling the Queen, who was by law the regent in the event of the Shah’s death. She learned about the sickness more than three years later. Ironically, in those days, Tehran was so rife with rumors of the Shah’s illness, even of his death at the hand of an angry nephew, that at one time Zahedi arranged for Barbara Walters to visit Tehran and interview the Shah, thus confirming his continued good health.
The Shah clearly worried that if Western powers learned about his sickness, they would use it against him. He was in those days engaged in increasingly acrimonious negotiations with Europe and the United States regarding the price of oil. So worried was he about the Western response to his demands for higher prices that he ordered the government to substantially increase Iran’s supply of stored sugar, tea, wheat, and a few other necessities—“lest they try to pressure us by imposing an embargo,” he told Fereydoon Mahdavi, the minister in charge of trade. The haste of these purchases eventually led to allegations of kickbacks received by officials in charge of the $250 million sugar transaction. Even Shapour Reporter, the storied MI6 man in Iran, was implicated in the embarrassing case. In court papers in Iran, he confirmed that he had accepted £300,000 for acting as a representative of the British company.7
The Shah’s fears of an embargo turned out to be baseless, but his belief that Western powers might use his sickness against him were neither hyperbolic nor paranoid. As David Owen, then the British foreign secretary, made clear, “Had the US and UK governments known about the Shah’s cancer, they would have acted decisively to force the Shah to admit his illness publicly, and to leave Tehran and appoint a regency.”8
Zahedi’s American interlocutor on that September 22 meeting went on to say that he had heard that all was not well in Iran, that there was mounting dissent and dissatisfaction among larger and larger swaths of the population. “Is the Shah increasingly isolated from reality,” the official asked, “and surrounded by those who do not tell him the truth?” “This is all nonsense,” the Shah wrote. “This kind of information is given to them by a bunch of American puppets.” A few weeks after receiving this report, the Shah told the combative Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he not only “receive[d] messages” from God, but that he received reports from a dozen different sources about all that went on in the country.9 When in 1971, Alam suggested to the Shah that he should occasionally invite simple people from different strata to the Court and hear from them “the people’s complaints.” The Shah dismissed that idea as well, repeating the mantra, “I receive reports from multiple sources.”10
The American official also claimed that sometimes even the economic statistics given to the Shah were not accurate. Here on the margin the Shah wrote, “this stuff is probably fed to them by Mehdi Samii and [Khodadad] Farmanfarmaian.” These men were two of Iran’s most respected and experienced bankers and economists, known for their probity and professionalism. By the time of this discussion between Zahedi and his American source, both men were out of government jobs, working in the private sector.11
The American interlocutor continued his remarkable line of queries by saying that, according to his information, the numbers of militant dissidents were swelling from the ranks of the intellectuals and that signs of student discontent at the universities were hard to ignore. Why is the Shah not apprised of this dire situation? the American official asked. The Shah wrote in the margin, “these are all propaganda and old cliché [using the English words for “propaganda” and “old cliché”]; in Iran there are no true intellectuals; these are all Marxists; recently we have even found Islamic-Marxists.” More than once in those days, the Shah made such dismissive public pronouncements about the opposition. More than once he accused them all of being at best inadvertent tools of foreign powers.
The 2,500 years of monarchy celebration in 1971, what Newsweek had called “the Bash of Bashes,” was a propaganda bonanza for the opposition, particularly the Confederation of Iranian Students, which had spared no effort in tarnishing the image of the Shah and his regime. They went so far as to forge documents that showed that SAVAK was illegally active in Europe and the United States and was tracking not just Iranian students but Western opponents of the regime, even members of Western governments.12 The documents created a public relations nightmare for the Shah and were followed by investigations by Western governments into SAVAK’s alleged illegal activities in Europe and the United States.
More than once the Shah and SAVAK accused not only the Soviet Union and China but the United States and Western European nations of supporting, indeed underwriting, the Confederation. The Shah’s comments, written in the margins of this confidential note, strongly suggest that he did not make those pronouncements simply to score easy political points, but that he in fact firmly believed them.
When the American official asked Zahedi about increasing public resentment about corruption, again the Shah dismissed the charge, writing in the margin, “it is [the] Western sickness with money that causes some problems.” He also asked Zahedi—more in a tone of sarcasm than concern—to demand specific names from his American interlocutor.
In those days, even when SAVAK’s Third Division, which was in charge of internal security, submitted reports about corruption in high places and described them as an issue of national security, the Shah brushed them off. For example, one such report was prepared on Hushang Davalu Qajar; he was called the “sultan of caviar,” and one of the Shah’s more sympathetic biographies calls him “the most notorious of the Shah’s friends.”13 He was the closest thing to the Shah’s court jester, making jokes at everyone’s expense, preparing culinary delicacies the Shah favored, and acting efficiently as his designated Master of Royal Mirth. Davalu was also known for his heavy addiction to opium. Alam refers to a couple of occasions when Davalu tried to interest the Shah in exploring the soothing powers of what Coleridge called the “milk of paradise.” Alam claims that he strongly objected to the idea, reminding the Shah that people were executed for dealing opium. Davalu was said to be a “born courtier, a sycophant par excellence . . . and a superior pimp.” Though the Queen generally despised these royal procurers of pleasure, Davalu was such a pleasant conversationalist that even she “enjoyed his company and invited [him] to the Court.”14