The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Ali Amini, another credible candidate for the job of prime minister was, in the Shah’s words, “on a different tack.” His proposal was that the Shah should withdraw “to Bandar Abbas [in the South] and that a monarchical council should be set up which would carry out all the functions of the monarchy, except the command of the armed forces, which would remain with the Shah.”89

  In those days, Tehran had become a virtual circus, full of political lightweights with delusions of grandeur or political figures well past their prime offering themselves to the Shah or to the British and American Embassies as the sole savior, the country’s messiah. Mohsen Pezeshkpour, the leader of the Pan-Iranist Party whose only hour of glory had been in the late sixties, was amongst those who met secretly with the Shah and offered himself as a candidate for prime minister.90 A few weeks earlier, when the Shah had let it be known that Majlis deputies were free to speak their minds, Pezeshkpour made what the British Embassy called “an inflammatory speech” establishing himself as a critic of the government. Clearly, however, he did not have the gravitas to tackle the crisis facing the country. Sadighi remained the most credible candidate.

  National Front leaders of different hues all tried to convince Sadighi not to accept the position. But he was altogether indifferent to the petty machinations of his National Front comrades, each of whom was eager to deter Sadighi for their own often personal reasons. To those who appealed to his lifelong reputation as a foe of the Shah and a friend of Mossadeq, he responded that the reputation he had achieved was not a private asset to be taken to the grave, but something “I must use in the service of my country.”

  The third meeting between the Shah and Sadighi took place on December 25, when Sadighi laid out some of his plans—a final resolution of the question of the Shah’s properties in Iran and a radical change in SAVAK, though not its dissolution. He proposed an end to martial law, a reduction of the military budget, the appointment of General Fereydoon Jam as minister of war, the dismissal of Zahedi as ambassador to the United States, an independent judiciary, and an end to military tribunals. The Shah agreed to nearly all of these demands, offering some resistance on the military budget. “What are you going to do with Iraq?” he asked. Sadighi insisted that his goal was not to weaken the military, but to make a temporary reduction to allow the government to survive the current economic crisis. Sadighi reiterated his insistence that the Shah must stay in the country. He could go to the destination of his choice—for example, the Caspian coast or Kish Island—and appoint a committee that would act as liaison between the cabinet and himself. Sadighi knew that his survival depended on the support of the military and that such support was dependent on the Shah’s favorable disposition and his continued presence in the country.

  While the Shah waited to see whether Sadighi could succeed in forming a cabinet, he told the American and British ambassadors that he had been thinking about what would happen if Sadighi could not calm the situation. Then, he said, there would have to be a “crackdown by the armed forces. There would be at that stage no choice between that course and surrender.” The Shah further added that if it came to a crackdown, he “could not personally associate himself with it . . . and would withdraw to Bandar Abbas to ‘visit his navy’ while the army did its stuff.” Ambassadors Parsons and Sullivan were both reluctant to support this contingency plan. Parsons said that he was not sure that the army would in fact carry out orders for such a crackdown: in “certain areas they [would] refuse,” and this would be disastrous. Clearly, the policy of Britain and the State Department was at that point to encourage the Shah’s liberalization policy, eschew the use of the military against the people, and hope that in the end “wiser counsels among the opposition will prevail” and bring some semblance of order to the domestic scene.91

  Three days later, Sadighi met again with the Shah and reported that he had prepared a list of potential members of his cabinet. The only thing that was now required for his appointment was a vote of confidence by the Majlis and the Shah’s final word. “As far I am concerned,” Sadighi said on December 28, “I can begin work today.”92 By then, in his legendary meticulous manner, Sadighi had prepared a plan of action, “down to every hour,” for his first weeks as prime minister. Khomeini proved unwilling to attack Sadighi in public, and all that was needed was the Shah’s final word.

  But as Sadighi knew, the Shah had been meeting with other candidates during these same weeks. On January 6, 1979, in what turned out to be the last meeting between a beleaguered Shah and a defiantly nationalist Sadighi, the Shah talked of his meeting with Shapour Bakhtiyar, another National Front leader, praising the latter as “a brave nationalist man.” Unlike Sadighi, Bakhtiyar had made it clear that he would accept the challenge of forming a cabinet only if the Shah agreed to leave the country. Clearly, for a distraught, angst-ridden Shah, who was by then taking six milligrams of chlorambucil as chemotherapy for his lymphoma, and at least ten milligrams of Valium a day to calm his jittery nerves, the idea of leaving Iran might have been music to his ears. Nevertheless, why the Shah decided to reject Sadighi’s plans and opt instead for Bakhtiyar remains a mystery. Carter’s White House Diary provides some clues when he reports that Sullivan insisted that the Shah should be forced to leave Iran, because only with such a departure would Bakhtiyar have a chance to survive.93

  The Shah might have also changed his mind after the conversation he had with the British ambassador, Anthony Parsons. When the Shah described for Parsons the different potential candidates, the Ambassador was clearly not in favor of Sadighi. Parsons urged that Sadighi “would be well advised to consult the religious leaders in Qom,” added that “unfortunately he is generally regarded as an atheist,” and finally ventured that Khomeini was “bound to do his utmost to destroy a government led by Sadighi.”94

  On December 7, 1978, the White House announced that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France, had invited President Jimmy Carter, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and British Prime Minister James Callaghan to “personal and informal conversations on political matters and international developments of special interest to their mutual relations.” The meetings were to be held on January 5 and 6, 1979, in the French West Indies island of Guadeloupe, one of the last vestiges of France’s lapsed colonial grandeur. Each head of state would be accompanied by only one assistant.95

  For the Shah and many of his supporters, this meeting has taken on mythic proportions. It was, they claim, the “watershed” moment when the decision to “get rid of the Shah” was finalized. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the assistant accompanying Carter; for the Shah, this should have been excellent news. He knew that Brzezinski was one of his most stalwart supporters. Just before departing for the meeting, Brzezinski told reporters that “the worsening situation in Iran was likely to figure prominently in the four leaders’ discussions.”96 He added that “Carter will reiterate his support for the embattled Shah of Iran” and that he anticipated the other leaders to agree “with Carter’s backing for the Shah.”97 Two days before the summit, Brzezinski suggested to Carter that he send an “emissary to Tehran after Guadeloupe, as a sign of US interest, and as the reflection of a common Western interest.”98

  There are apparently no minutes of the four leaders’ meetings at the Hamak Hotel, on the southern coast of the Guadeloupe island of Grand Terre. They met “under [a] thatched roof, open-air cabana affair known locally as ajoupa—[the] Caribbean perhaps thirty yards away.” More than 120 journalists traveled with the President, and somehow they knew that during the first three-hour meeting, Carter and Callaghan “did most of the talking.”99

  At the end of the summit, the four heads of state offered some remarks about the meeting. In none of the four brief comments was Iran even mentioned. More than once it was suggested that there were no decisions made during the meetings, but simply amicable discussion covering such topics as SALT, Cambodia, China, Russia, and Japan. The only leader who made what appears to be an allusion to Iran was Carter
, who declared: “We discussed the potential trouble spots of the world, and we tried to capitalize upon the unique opportunity that one or several of us have to alleviate tension, to let the people of these regions find for themselves, with our assistance on occasion . . . a better quality of life and enhanced human rights.”100

  There are fascinating differences between “official” accounts of the meeting and what the leaders later remembered or wrote in their memoirs. Carter recalls “little support for the Shah” in the meeting with the leaders “unanimous in saying that the Shah ought to leave as soon as possible.”101 Other leaders’ recollections of the meeting—particularly those of the French and German leaders—essentially repeated the same idea: the Shah was bereft of support and Khomeini was the sole, albeit less than desirable, alternative. In their recollections, however, it was in fact Carter who first suggested the idea of the Shah’s departure.

  The United States was monitoring Soviet reaction to the Guadeloupe Summit rather carefully; official Soviet commentary saw it as a reflection of “growing differences” within the capitalist world, and as yet another attempt by the big four to “coordinate a response to Japan and its rising might.” A day before the conference, on January 5, the Soviet regime accused the United States of “political skullduggery” and of attempting “to change the course of events in Iran.” From the tone of the Soviet reports, the skullduggery they expected was intended to keep the Shah in power, not undermine him.102 Afterwards, the Soviets claimed that, from what they knew of the meeting, there had been no discussion of Iran.103

  As noted, while Carter was in Guadeloupe, negotiations were going on in Iran for the formation of a government of national reconciliation. After his last meeting with the Shah, Sadighi declared his readiness to commence work immediately and said that he would wait for the Shah’s decision. But the Shah decided he did not want Sadighi. He chose to appoint Bakhtiyar.

  Carter received information about the new Bakhtiyar cabinet while still in Guadeloupe. It was clear to everyone that “the appointment of General Jam to War Ministry may be the key to gaining army support [for] the new government.” Sadighi had made a Jam appointment one of his conditions for accepting the job of prime minister. The American report affirmed that Bakhtiyar and the Shah had both urged Jam—who had a “reputation for outstanding ability and integrity”104—to return from Europe, where he had been living since 1971.

  Jam was known to have retained “significant contacts within the armed forces” and for having had several confrontations with the Shah—particularly during his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had complained that “no officer, in any capacity had independent authority.” Jam had also lamented that all good officers had been purged. His own dismissal had come when, in response to some Iraqi provocation, he had ordered a few units of the Iranian army to the Iraqi border. Who gave you permission to stick your nose in this? the Shah had demanded, adding menacingly, “in Iran no one is allowed to take this kind of liberty.” After this humiliating encounter, Jam was relieved of his duties, forced to retire from the military, and sent to Spain as Iran’s ambassador.105

  The return of Jam proved a disaster. In his meeting with the Shah on January 3, he insisted that if he was to be effective as Minister of War, he needed to have all the constitutional powers afforded the ministry in its control of the military. The Shah “stubbornly insisted [on] not only retaining his role . . . of commander-in-chief . . . but also on controlling the military budget.”106 Disgusted, Jam left Iran; with him went the chance for the Bakhtiyar government to maintain some control of the military in the absence of the Shah. It took the military thirty-six days before it turned against the new Bakhtiyar government and tried to make its peace with the mullahs. The U.S. Embassy helped General Moghadam, the head of SAVAK, and General Abbas Garabaghi, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to actively pursue the goal of making peace with the mullahs. In a “commanders meeting” that brought together the country’s top military brass, one general, in a moment of candor, declared that the military was “melting like snow.” As the Shah made last-minute plans to leave the country, he could exclaim with Shakespeare’s Richard II: “O, that I were a mockery king of snow.”107

  * In those days, I was a political prisoner in Evin. Some of the future leaders of the Islamic Republic—from Rafsanjani to Montazari—were my block-mates. They refused, as a matter of prin-ciple, to watch television. The only time they broke their self-imposed taboo was the night Hoveyda’s resignation was announced

  † Today, Bani-Sadr lives in exile after being impeached as the first president; Gotbzadeh was executed on the charge of plotting a coup; and Yazdi, the leader of the Freedom Movement, is in jail for his role in the 2009 post-election demonstrations

  Chapter 20

  THE SHAH’S LAST RIDE

  And my large kingdom for a little grave,

  A little, little grave, an obscure grave . . .

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.3.154–155

  On the cold, slushy morning of January 16, 1979, Tehran awoke to a day of anxious anticipation. The city was once again awash with rumors. For years, rumor had become the tool of subversion. Censorship is not just the mother of metaphors, as Jorge Louis Borges suggests, but also begets rumors, a veritable tool in any opposition’s arsenal in authoritarian regimes.

  That day, the winds of change lurked in the air. For too long, the country had been suspended in the paralysis of a political stalemate. Neither the regime nor the opposition had the power to end the crisis. For a variety of reasons, a compromise was unreachable; something had to give. Historians tell us that a prolonged period of paralysis between conflicting forces usually gives rise to a Caesar, to a kind of Bonapartism. But in Iran, everyone expected the Shah to blink. A week earlier, right after the Guadeloupe meetings, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had announced that “the Shah has said that he plans to leave Iran on vacation.”1 The announcement reflected the conclusion the British and American governments had reached about the Shah by early November 1978. The Guadeloupe conference of the top four Western powers in early January had only confirmed this decision. With both governments insisting that they would not support a military crackdown, with the opposition becoming more radical with every passing day, the Shah was politically dead.

  In the past, too, the Shah had often blinked in times of crisis yet had somehow survived; but this time, his adversary, Ayatollah Khomeini, was a man of steely determination. He had emerged as the de facto leader of the amorphous democratic movement only by virtue of his unbending resolve and untarnished reputation, and he was keen to use any weakness in the Shah to overthrow the monarchy. Two days after the announcement of the Shah’s intention to go “on vacation,” Khomeini announced the formation of an Islamic Revolutionary Council. And as a harbinger of things to come, the composition of the council was—and remained—a secret. Eleven days after the beginning of the royal family’s vacation, Ayatollah Khomeini “sent a personal message to US,” that cleverly combined threats with promises of peaceful transition. He recommended “that in order to avert disaster, [the U.S.] advise the army and Bakhtiyar to stop intervening in Iranian political affairs.” He concluded his message by “asserting his preference for solving the problem peacefully.”2 For several weeks before this message, he and his entourage in Paris and his allies in Tehran had been in touch with the American Embassy.

  The Iranian people not only knew nothing about Khomeini’s letter or about other extensive contacts between him and American officials in Paris or Tehran; they were also generally ignorant of Ayatollah Khomeini’s real intentions. His fourteen years of exile had afforded him the unique luxury of having no track record of compromising with the regime. A sinecure tarnished one potential nationalist leader; a few lucrative contracts compromised the integrity of another; yet a third lost his gravitas when he was shown in a photograph prostrating himself before the King and Queen. Khomeini had lived in the relative safety of Najaf during t
he years when the Iraqi government, particularly under Saddam Hussein, was a fierce foe of Iran. There, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued one proclamation after another, attacking the Shah in increasingly virulent language. In the 1960s and 1970s, these radical pronouncements were often seen as the quixotic rants of an embittered, exiled foe of the regime. In 1978, however, he modulated his words about his intentions but remained steadfast in his uncompromising opposition to the Shah.

  Of those who knew what those plans were, who knew the true mettle of Ayatollah Khomeini, some, like Ayatollah Shariat-Madari, were unwilling to fight him publicly. They saw him as a modern-day Savonarola whose piety was but a veneer for power-lust and who was dedicated to the idea of forcing the establishment of a new puritan Shiite society, with Khomeini as the absolute arbiter of truth. In the days before the revolution, these forces mostly chose silence. In the handful of cases in which they dared to speak, as Shapour Bakhtiyar did during his brief tenure as prime minister, their warnings were altogether lost in the cacophony of hysterical adulation for the coming revolution. Others, like Mehdi Bazorgan, kept silent in return for a place at the table of power. Like everyone else in the opposition, Bazorgan believed he could temper Ayatollah Khomeini’s radicalism. Even the fact that in 1963 Khomeini had railed against women’s right to vote and against land reform was conveniently forgotten. Selective public amnesia, prodded by a masterful public-relations campaign—including the audacious claim that his profile had appeared on the moon—made of him an ambiguous symbol, a tabula rasa, allowing each element of the radically disparate coalition against the Shah to see him not for what he was, but for what they dreamt he would be—for some, a pious reincarnation of Mossadeq; for others, a Kerensky who would pave the way for their planned Bolshevik revolution.