The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Davalu’s house was renowned for its day-long sessions of opium smoking and, because he was known for his influence on the Shah, became a mecca for those seeking special favors. It was reported that the special suite of rooms Davalu kept at the luxurious Georges V Hotel in Paris also became a virtual opium den when he was in town. Everyone seemed to look the other way in accommodating his addiction. However, in 1971 on his annual ski trip to Switzerland, the Shah learned that there was a Swiss warrant for Davalu’s arrest. He was being sought for allegedly having passed a large quantity of opium to another Iranian citizen. Incredibly, the Shah ordered his official plane to whisk Davalu home to Iran; he then entrusted Alam with the job of solving the resulting legal, diplomatic, and public relations nightmare. According to Alam’s journals and to documents that have since been made public, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on lawyers, doctors (who testified that Davalu needed a daily dose of 25 grams of opium for medical reasons), Swiss journalists (to ensure more friendly coverage of the episode), and even Swiss jurists (who were invited to Iran for a royal vacation as a token of gratitude). The money was spent to both contain the crisis and ensure that Davalu served no time in prison.15

  After his inquiry about corruption, the American official asked Zahedi whether the Iranian army remained reliably loyal to the Crown. “Why should they not be satisfied and reliable?” the Shah wrote tartly on the margin, adding that they were provided with all they needed. When the reliability of the bureaucracy was questioned, the Shah wrote in English, they have “misguided paternalistic information about us.” The Shah’s final reactions to more statements of concern were no less angry. He accused the American official of simply repeating the claims of the Tudeh propaganda machine and the “National Front, who are their lackeys.” He then asked, not necessarily rhetorically, whether “it is true that they [the United States and the Russians] have conspired together against us.”16

  The Shah’s last comment on the 1973 Zahedi report reflected his attitude toward critical reports, particularly at this period. He asked Zahedi to reduce to a “minimum his contacts with this person,” and then, as if in an afterthought, he wrote “in reality it is we who are concerned about their [the Americans’] future.” Rapidly rising oil revenue and sharply increasing improvements in nearly every standard economic indicator further allowed the Shah to ignore these rumblings of discontent or what he once called “these gloomy prophets of doom.” 17

  By the time of Zahedi’s remarkable September report, the Shah was increasingly self-assured and openly critical of what he disparagingly considered the many maladies of the “blue-eyed” Western world and its democracy. Early in his reign, he had regularly praised democracy, and he fondly remembered his education in the democratic society in Switzerland. By the early 1970s, his disposition had changed dramatically. He regularly chided Western democracies for their lax moral and political ethos, prophesying their imminent demise. He was certain, he often claimed, that the singular righteousness of his own ways and values would be recognized. The Shah’s new disposition, combined with the rapidly changing fabric of Iranian society and the global trend toward democracy, created a particularly incongruent and thus volatile situation in Iran.

  About a year before the Zahedi note, on November 11, 1972, Joseph Farland then U.S. ambassador to Iran, had met with Alam and “voiced some anxiety about signs of disgruntlement amongst the clergy.” Not only the 2,500-year celebration but the further enfranchisement of women had raised their ire. By then, Iran had in the person of Faroukh Ru Parsa, a much-acclaimed educator, its first woman minister. Princess Ashraf was increasingly active, not just in controversial economic activities, but in politics. She was spearheading a government-sponsored women’s movement that championed in increasingly defiant language more rights for Iranian women. A remarkably progressive new proposed family law that went a long way in affording women equal rights in the mid-seventies was arguably one of the most enduring works of this organization. Around this time, Ashraf also asked for several million dollars from the Shah to ensure that she could become the president of a UN General Assembly meeting. The Shah was opposed to this idea and rejected the request. Nevertheless, her increasing public presence was, even for the pro-Shah clergy, the cause of considerable consternation.18 Ironically, only a few weeks before this conversation with the American Ambassador, Alam had reported to the Shah that he had heard a sermon on the radio by a famous cleric who had prayed for everyone except the Shah. Anyone who seeks popularity, Alam ventured to say, seems to do so by “distancing themselves from us.” Yet when Alam heard Farland’s concern, he repeated to him what he had often recited to the Shah as a mantra: the grumbling of the clergy is nothing but petty infighting. He added in his normal grandiose manner, “when I was Prime Minister . . . mullahs united with Communists and nomadic tribes . . . rose up against the regime. They could not do a damn thing. I destroyed them; I crushed them once and for all.” Farland responded to this facile, self-deluding narrative by simply saying, “If you say so.”19 In less than seven years, Alam’s “crushed” clerics deposed the Shah and created a new regime of clerical despotism.

  The American Embassy was, of course, not entirely convinced by Alam’s words of reassurance. A couple of years later, in 1975, the new American ambassador, Richard Helms, captured the nature of the Shah’s vulnerability when he wrote that “the conflict between rapid economic growth and modernization vis-à-vis a still autocratic rule” was the greatest uncertainty about the Shah’s future. Helms went on to say that “alas, history provides discouraging precedents” for a peaceful resolution of this conflict. “I can recall no example of a ruler,” he said, “willingly loosening the reins of power.”20

  Helms was only partially right. Not long after his report, the Shah began a liberalization process. However, the timing for this liberalization could not have been worse. Stagnant oil prices were shrinking government revenues, and, at the same time, there were increasing inflationary pressures on the economy. The election of Jimmy Carter in November 1976 not only forced the Shah to expedite his liberalization plans, but also emboldened Iran’s democratic opposition; moreover, the Shah’s physical ailments and characteristic indecisiveness in times of crisis rendered him increasingly less capable of decisive action. Add to these already-momentous patterns a fact known to political theorists since Aristotle—that authoritarian societies face their biggest challenge when they seek to liberalize—and the combination had the makings of a perfect storm: as rare a phenomenon in the world of meteorology as in the realm of politics.

  Some in SAVAK tried to warn the Shah about what a Carter presidency and his human rights policy might mean for the Shah and the future stability of his regime. Parviz Sabeti, in charge of domestic security, prepared a new intelligence estimate for the Shah that addressed this issue. It warned of a potentially serious crisis facing the regime and demanded a plan of action to confront and contain the crisis. It indicated that the same coalition of opponents that had challenged the Shah in 1963—the urban middle class, students, members of the bazaar, the urban poor, Marxist groups, some nomadic tribes, and the radical clergy and their Islamist allies—were waiting for an occasion to challenge the Shah again. In 1963, the report claimed, the opposition had been buoyed by the Kennedy administration’s talk of democracy and reform, and in 1977, Carter’s human rights policies were once again awaking in them a will to fight. The SAVAK report asserted that this time the challenge would be even more serious than in 1963: there were more people living in concentrated quarters in cities, more urban poor, more Marxists, more revolutionaries (many trained by Palestinian groups in armed struggle), more college students, and more moderate democrats willing to join the opposition. If they sensed any weakness in the regime, they would engage in confrontation, and this time, the report said, it might be more difficult to roll back their challenge. In one fascinating study prepared as a master’s thesis by Parviz Nik-khah, the sudden surge in the 1960s and 1970s in the num
ber of Talabe (singular for Taliban, Arabic for “seminarian”) was found to be a serious sociological anomaly, requiring both explanation and attention. In Iran itself, from 1925 to 1941, during the reign of Reza Shah, the number of seminarians had decreased from 2,949 to 784.21

  Generally, as societies modernize, Nik-khah rightly pointed out, and as urbanism increases, the number of seminarians tends to diminish. In Iran, the reverse had happened. Moreover, in the last decade of the Shah’s rule, the increase in the number of mosques and seminaries had been even more remarkable. By 1977, there were more than 75,000 such establishments in Iran. Yet, in spite of the fact that Nik-khah was in charge of research for Iran’s National Radio and Television, and in spite of the fact that, earlier in his life, he had been a theorist of the new Iranian Left, no attention was paid to his findings.22 The conclusion of the SAVAK report was more political and indicated that any hint of weakness in the regime, of succumbing to the human rights policies of the new Carter administration, could trigger a rapid slide into a systemic crisis.23

  The Shah was incensed by the SAVAK report. He accused Sabeti of treasonously overlooking the fruits of the Shah and People Revolution. Do they mean to say, he reportedly asked, that we have accomplished nothing in the last two decades? Are workers not with us after we made them stockholders in the factories they worked in? Will women who have been enfranchised during our reign join the opposition? The underlying premises of the report and the retort captured the Shah’s illusion and SAVAK’s delusion. Economic progress, the Shah believed, would mollify people’s demand for democracy; his secret police continued to seek the solution with an iron fist.24

  Parts of SAVAK’s early warning were in fact strikingly similar to the analysis offered by Anthony Parsons, the British ambassador during the heat of the crisis. The Shah, Parsons said, “had kept the country under severe discipline for 15 years,” while he had pursued his policy of rapid modernization. It was inevitable that when this discipline was relaxed, there would be a violent release of popular emotion.25 Parsons noted that the “massive influx into the cities from the rural areas” had created a “rootless urban proletariat of dimensions hitherto unknown in Iran” who had nothing to look forward to, and “in this state of mind, it was natural for them to turn back to their traditional guides and leaders, the religious hierarchy.”26

  However, since the traumas of 1953, the Shah had insisted on the indispensability of his authoritarian rule. As he did deliver rapid economic progress, and as it is hard to argue with success, the paradigm of authoritarian modernization had remained unchallenged. A CIA profile of the Shah prepared in the mid-1970s concluded that he now believed that democracy “would impede economic development.”27 Sometimes he criticized the endemic frailties of democracy; other times, he merely asserted that Iranians were not yet ready for democracy. He believed that only he could and should determine when and whether the time for such a democratic transition had arrived. By the time the Shah was willing—or was pressured by Carter—to make some of these changes, he was already deemed too vulnerable and weak by his opponents. Before long, they wanted his throne, not just an offer of a democratic opening.

  The rapidity of economic development in the 1960s and early 1970s had fueled the Shah’s grandiosity. According to the CIA, the Shah had a concept of “himself as a leader with a divinely blessed mission to lead his country from years of stagnation . . . [into] a major power, supported by a large military establishment.”28 In 1977, Iran spent 10.6 percent of its GNP on the military, France spent only 3.9 percent, Turkey 5.5 percent, and Iran’s local rival, Iraq, only 8.75 percent of their corresponding GNP.29

  As Iran was undergoing rapid economic change, the Shah followed a scorched-earth policy against the country’s moderate and leftist forces. He also believed that the clergy—with the exception of the Khomeini supporters, who were suppressed—were his reliable allies in the fight against Communists and secular nationalists. His policy left the clergy and their nimble network of organizations an opportunity to grow and to monopolize the public domain. When in October 1969, “moderate religious leaders” sent a message to the Shah and to the U.S. Embassy that they were worried “about the situation” in the country and “angry at Khomeini” for putting them in the difficult position of either choosing his radicalism or being branded as a “reactionary mullah of the court,” the Shah chose to ignore their warnings. More than once, similar warnings from the moderate clergy—about everything from the Shah’s sudden decision to date the calendar from the birth of Cyrus the Great rather than from Mohammad’s hegira (1355 suddenly became 2535) to new progressive laws about women and family protection—were dismissed. Open letters and declarations from moderate secular politicians—leaders of the National Front, independent moderate opposition figures like Khalil Maleki and Mozzafar Baghai—were ignored or, more often, punished. Instead, the Shah basked in the self-congratulating complacency of courtiers like Assadollah Alam, who was constantly “reminding” the Shah that radical clergy like Khomeini had been neutralized in 1963.30 The more the Shah ignored the moderate clergy, the easier it became for Khomeini and his radical allies to gain and consolidate hegemony over religious forces in Iran.31

  Aside from using all of these grievances against the Shah in traditional mosques, religious forces had by the 1970s also developed the idea of the hosseiniye—a lecture hall that used modern trappings to cultivate a Shiite theology that was more rational in approach and shorn of superstition. The halls usually allowed people to sit on chairs, by then a habit of the middle classes, and forgo the more traditional mosque practice of sitting on the floor. The most famous of these halls, called Hosseiniye Ershad, was built in one of Tehran’s upper-class neighborhoods. The financial support came from members of the bazaar who were close to the religious members of the National Front (the Freedom Movement), and the ideological management of the center was in the hands of Khomeini supporters. Every move they made, we now know, was made after consultation with Khomeini, who was in exile in Najaf.32 At this hosseiniye, more-moderate clergy like Ayatollah Mottaheri and eloquent Islamist orators like Ali Shariati, himself an active member of the National Front when he was a student in Europe,33 offered a version of Shiism that was more amenable to modernity and democracy. Amongst those influenced by Shariati’s rhetoric was Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who now leads the Green Movement, and his influential wife, Zahra Rahnavard.34 Though Shariati was known partially for his fierce critique of the Shiite clergy—calling them symbols of a despotic and stale Islam—he usually praised Khomeini as an exception, calling him a “progressive” cleric fighting relentlessly against despotism and colonialism.

  By the early seventies Khomeini had found supporters amongst secular intellectuals as well. The most important such support was initially offered by Jalal Al-Ahmad, an influential writer and essayist of the 1960s who had called the clergy leaders in the important fight against colonialism. Al-Ahmad had even argued that the clergy were an essential part of the country’s intellectual class. More than any other ideology, the writings of the likes of Al-Ahmad and Shariati prepared the context for Khomeini’s leadership of the democratic movement. By promoting economic changes that created a new, wealthy, more educated middle class and then denying them the political rights they sought, and by allowing only the clergy to organize and mobilize the population, the Shah inadvertently pushed these moderate forces into Khomeini’s camp. As early as 1962, Khomeini advisors had written that the political future of Iran was in the hands of those who could mobilize the rising middle class. Using a modern iteration of Shiism, the clergy were virtually the only group given a chance to mobilize and organize this critical social class.

  Ironically, by the early 1970s, even the Shah realized that his regime faced a serious political challenge. In October 1972 he grew disgruntled with Amir Abbas Hoveyda’s Iran Novin Party.35 The party had originally been created to organize the middle class, but by the early 1970s it was staging party congresses that smacked of Communi
st Party rituals. Searching for a remedy, the Shah summoned Mehdi Samii to Court. Samii was one of Iran’s most respected technocrats and had extensive connections amongst middle-class moderate intellectuals and the leaders of the National Front. He had gone to England in the mid-1930s on a government scholarship and had taken courses with Harold Laski. The Shah told Samii of his worries about the future and about the “problem of transition”—particularly after his death—and asked him to launch a new political party that would successfully solicit the support of the Iranian educated middle classes for a peaceful transition.

  After some initial resistance, Samii agreed to take up the challenge. His reticence was particularly understandable in light of Alinaghi Kani’s fate. In 1971 Kani had been named secretary-general of the Mardom Party, supposedly the loyal opposition to the Iran Novin Party. According to the U.S. Embassy, during his brief tenure, Kani invigorated the party and made it appear a more legitimate loyal opposition.36 In a party demonstration in Isfahan, Kani had called the Hoveyda cabinet “reactionary” and declared that if free elections were held, he and his party would easily defeat Hoveyda. The Shah was livid when he heard reports of the meeting. “How dare he say that elections are not free during my reign,” he fumed to Alam, with no apparent irony. Within twenty-four hours, Kani was dismissed from all his positions.37