The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Iranian society and the American Embassy in Iran were not alone in this dangerous game of wishful self-delusion. Prominent Western intellectuals such as Michel Foucault saw Khomeini as a breath of fresh air after a century of intellectual regurgitation of the Enlightenment’s “sterile” ideas. Not only was this an instance of Foucault’s remarkable arrogance in making historic judgments about a society and religion he knew virtually nothing about, it also reflected the “progressive” Western intellectual’s romantic weakness for any radical force that was anti-American or anti-Western.

  In the absence of reasoned debate about Khomeini and his ideas, his Paris proclamations, all carefully crafted to fit the moment, became most people’s only introduction to the man. Exercising remarkable discipline in Paris, he held the pose of a liberal. On that January 16, this political discipline was about to bear fruit.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon in Iran, all ears turned to the radio. For that generation of Iranians, the two o’clock news had the regularity of the seasons; it was the anointed time for the news. In the Shah’s days of power, the lead every day was invariably his deeds and words. After that came an account of the Queen’s daily activities. Only then came the real news of the day. When Reza Qotbi, the Queen’s closest confidante and relative, was appointed as the head of Iran National Radio and Television, one of his early innovations was to change the line-up of the news, allowing each day’s real story to lead. Before long, he was forced to “reconsider,” and the old anointed line-up was revived. One of the first signs that the Shah’s power had genuinely declined came late in 1978 when he was no longer the lead on every day’s news. But on that January day, the Shah was, not by fiat but by desert, the lead of the day.

  At the Court, all that day, indeed all that week, life had taken on a frantic pace and a transient look. Furniture was covered with sheets; paintings were taken off the walls; boxes lay about. By January 14, five crates, enough to fill the second jet that was to accompany the Shah’s official plane, had been packed with valuables and the personal belongings of the Shah and his family. Earlier, a small charter jet had taken Eliasi, one of the Shah’s most trusted valets, to Geneva, where he reportedly deposited in banks the “most valuable papers” of the Shah. The charter flight was kept a strict secret.3 What the valet took is not known. Every day, rumors of these and other transactions—like the alleged transfer of almost $2 billion by leading officials of the ancien régime, whose names, along with the amounts of their individual transfers, were published by a group claiming to be employees of the Central Bank of Iran—swept the city, disheartening the Shah’s supporters and cementing the resolve of the opposition.

  The Shah had been growing increasingly short-tempered and overtly anxious to leave Iran. What went through his mind, we may never fully learn. What we do know is that he felt “betrayed” not just by his people, but by his allies in the West. He felt he had been “misled by sycophants for years and that the people seemed to have rejected everything he had done for them.” 4 In reality, twenty-five years of sycophancy in courtiers, his decided aversion to hearing the bitter truth, and his oft-repeated claim that he received reports from multiple sources had resulted in his near paralysis when faced with the reality of massive opposition to his rule. The unbreakable bond the Shah had always believed connected him to the people was torn asunder in his mind, and the sobering reality of the people’s anger could no longer be ignored.

  For at least sixteen years the Shah had moved closer to becoming the ultimate source for nearly all key decisions in the country. In 1965, the State Department had put together a list of the decisions that could only be made by him. The Shah, the report said,

  is not only king, he is de facto Prime Minister and is in operational command of the armed forces. He determines or approves all important governmental actions. No appointment to an important position in the bureaucracy is made without his approval. He personally directs the work of the internal security apparatus and controls the conduct of foreign affairs, including diplomatic assignments. No promotion in the armed forces from the rank of lieutenant up can be made without his explicit approval. Economic development proposals—whether to accept foreign credit or where to locate a particular factory—are referred to the Shah for decision. He determines how the universities are administered, who is to be prosecuted for corruption, the selection of parliamentary deputies, the degree to which opposition will be permitted, and what bill will pass the parliament.5

  This incredible concentration of power was in place even before the 1970s, when the Shah’s personal authoritarianism, and its accompanying cult of personality, reached a new height.

  Amir Abbas Hoveyda has been rightly criticized for facilitating, indeed encouraging, this royal power grab. Now the Shah, the nerve center for all decisions, was beset with depression, indecision, and paralysis, and his indecision led to the immobilization of the entire system. Paralyzed by a potent combination of qualities in his character, the medications he had been taking, and the unexpected turns in his fortune, his mood grew increasingly volatile and unpredictable. One day he was full of verve and optimism, and the next day or hour he fell into a catatonic stupor.

  Because of his regular meetings with the American and British ambassadors, we can map out his mood swings. One day, he was reluctant to meet with anyone, and if he gave an audience, he made it clear that he had little time or interest. The next day, he spent hours in meetings where he paid close attention to the advice offered by those he met. Hardly a day passed without some new suggestion by one of his loyal generals or one of the newly minted self-appointed royal advisors. Some saw terror and brute force as the remedy, while others saw concessions to the opposition as the solution. One group of generals offered a plan to use the air force and bomb the throngs of demonstrators in the cities of Qom and Tehran. There was the idea that the Shah should usurp the leadership of the revolution by hanging a few of his own supporters from the poles of electricity lines in city squares. As ludicrous as it might seem, the Shah, by arresting some of his most dedicated allies and generals, made a half-hearted attempt at this very idea. Finally, there were those who saw pity as a panacea, suggesting that the Shah should talk openly about his sickness and appeal to the Iranian people’s sense of decency. “They would never throw out of the country a man dying of cancer,” Zahedi said.

  The Queen had several solutions of her own. Her plans were rooted in her desire to save the dynasty and protect her son’s chance at the throne. As the Shah’s mood and health deteriorated, not only did he become increasingly dependent on her presence and support, but more and more she and her coterie of advisors and friends took an active, if not determining, role in running the affairs of state. Eventually, she told the Shah that he should leave—as he seemed to be the focus of people’s wrath—and allow her to stay “as a symbol of your presence.” The Shah did not accept the offer, saying sardonically, “You don’t have to be a Joan of Arc.”6 Hers was, of course, not the only idea the Shah did not accept. He rejected virtually all other suggestions as either infantile or incongruent with the real complexities of the world.

  The Shah tended to take false comfort in conspiracy theories featuring an impotent, enfeebled “We” and an omnipotent “Other.” Conspiracy theories had become the bane of Iranian politics in the nineteenth century, just at the time when opium also became the new rage. Both helped soothe souls humiliated by a sense of historic defeat—at the hands of the Russians, the West, Fate, and all the conspirators. The sort of power that conspirators are purported to have is nothing less than a secularized version of the omnipotence of a messiah or Mahdi. A people who have lost faith in their messiahs but have yet to reach genuine social mastery of their fate need conspiracy theories to assuage their anxieties and satisfy their existential human urge to have a narrative explanation—a history—of their lives and of what has befallen them. The Shah suffered from all the social sources of this malady; but his own experience, what he had witnessed during
the humiliation of his father at the hands of the British in 1941, and finally, his own private demons, exacerbated the effects of this national proclivity.

  During his last months in power, every major decision he made was arguably the worst possible choice. A partial explanation of his devastatingly wrong decisions was his flawed, conspiracy-laden analysis of the situation. In his attempts to “address” the purported international sources of the revolution, he consistently failed to address the real domestic sources of discontent. Often, the world made sense to him only in terms of a conspiracy. That was why his mood was in no small measure dependent on what he perceived to be the current level of support from the United States and Britain.

  A few days after Black Friday, September 7, 1978, when the army had opened fire on demonstrators defying a curfew, he was in a meeting with a group of visitors from Europe. In the middle of the meeting, an aide informed him that President Carter wanted to talk with him on the phone. He left the group and went upstairs to a room where he could talk in private. The conversation lasted ten minutes, said his chief of protocol, Aslan Afshar, and “the Shah was brimming with laughter when he came out of the room. He spryly jumped down the stairs two at a time, and told me to immediately send a telegram to Carter. ‘Write it in a warm tone and thank him for the call.’ ”7 The sheer fact that Carter had called was for the Shah a sign of support and enough to improve his sagging morale. In retrospect, it is a remarkable fact that while Tehran was burning and Iran moved ever closer to the precipice of chaos, Carter was preoccupied with Camp David, and with convincing his guests, Begin and Sadat, to sign a peace agreement. To his credit, Sadat knew the importance of the situation in Iran and while at Camp David at least once convinced Carter to call the Shah and offer words of support.

  While the Shah sought advice from both British and American governments, in reality he trusted neither. In late September 1978, during a meeting with Anthony Parsons, the British ambassador, he let it be known that he was “obviously worried that the Americans are plotting with the opposition.”8 More than once he articulated the same sentiment about the British to American and Iranian officials. Distrust of the Soviets was, of course, a constant pillar of his vision. Ultimately, when he felt that his attempts at “reconciliation” with his omnipotent foreign foes or allies had failed, he became despondent and anxious and unable to rule.

  Documents from the British and American archives show that the main reason these countries began to search for an alternative to the Shah, and the reason they were so keen on getting him expeditiously out of the country, was their conclusion that he was no longer able, or willing, to lead. Until October 1978, it had been the policy of both governments to try to preserve the monarchy. At the same time, in this period, the two governments also repeatedly talked of the need to limit the Shah’s power. All too often, the Shah showed signs of “complacency,” “brooding,” “depression.” When in December of 1978 the Comte de Marenches, the head of the French secret police and an old friend of the Shah, arrived in Tehran to discuss with him whether the French government should renew Ayatollah Khomeini’s visa, he came away convinced that the Shah’s days were numbered. The Shah met the Comte in a dark room, wearing a pair of “dark large glasses.” The Shah told the Comte that he preferred that the French government keep Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris. Otherwise, the Shah said, he would end up somewhere like Syria, closer to Iran. When the Comte de Marenches went back to Paris, he told French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, “C’est Louis XVI.” The President responded, “alors, c’est la fin.”9 Less than four years earlier, a New York Times journalist had compared the Shah to the Sun King, Louis XIV. Now, he was being compared to the Louis who helped bring about the French Revolution.

  Of those entrusted with the task of assessing the Shah’s chances of survival, none was more important than George Ball, head of Carter’s Iran task force. In early December 1978, he suggested that the United States should discreetly “open a disawoable [sic] channel of communication” with Khomeini and concluded in no uncertain terms that the days of the Shah as a potentate had ended, and that he could at best retain the throne as a figurehead. Iranians want, Ball concluded, “a government responsive to the people.”10

  Somehow, though the Shah never met with Ball, he knew through his contacts with Ambassador William Sullivan that the American government had for some time wanted him to leave the country. More than once while in exile the Shah complained about Sullivan’s impolitic “hurry” to force him out of Iran. When Sullivan restlessly looked at his watch, the Shah understood it to mean that the hour for him to leave the country had arrived. Carter’s White House Diary confirms Sullivan’s insistence that any solution to the problem in Iran would depend on the Shah’s speedy departure from the country. On the morning of January 16, the Shah met with only a handful of servants and valets. Of all who had been given a chance to accompany him on the new trip, few accepted the offer. In spite of the official pretense that he was leaving on a holiday for recuperation, everyone at the Court, and arguably most people in the country, knew that this was a one-way trip. In the past, accompanying the Shah on a royal jaunt was a privilege coveted by all in the Court. This time, those who went knew they courted the danger of permanent exile.

  The Shah took a helicopter from the palace to the airport. Another helicopter took members of the entourage. As he sank into his seat, he pushed his “grief-stricken face against the window, and gazed at the city below, as if he wanted to capture for his mind every image.”11 At the airport, the Shah, ever attentive to protocol, paid careful attention to all who had taken the trouble to come for the official farewell ceremonies. At the same time, he was impatient, anxious to leave. He was agitated when he saw the gathered reporters. “Who asked them to come?” he asked his aides impatiently. As with much else that happened at the Court those days, nobody knew.

  It was a tragic exercise in futility, a game where both sides knew the truth behind the public façade. Nonetheless, he told the gathered reporters that he was tired, that he was going away for a vacation and would return as soon as he had recovered. But the grimace on his pained face, the tears in his eyes, the vacuity of his gaze, ever wandering in the empty yonder, and his inability to look any of his well-wishers in the eye, all belied the official pretense of a healing holiday. One of the officers fell at the Shah’s feet and asked for permission to save the throne with his life. The Shah, still looking beyond the man’s anguished face, raised him to his feet, allowed him to kiss the proffered hand, and then moved past him. The Queen looked on, a fur hat on her head, anguish and compassion for her husband in her eyes. The picture capturing her look and his countenance became iconic of the moment.

  General Garabaghi, by then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, by law and custom normally entrusted with running the army in the Shah’s absence, had been nervously trying to get the Shah to sign the normal constitutional decree that temporarily transferred to the general the powers of the commander in chief. In the past, such decrees had routinely been signed the night before the Shah’s departure and sent to the general in charge. This time, no decree had come the night before, and even at the airport, the Shah seemed reluctant to sign the document. Eventually, after several beseeching looks and requests, the Shah finally beckoned to the nervous General, motioned to him to turn around and bend over, and on his half-bowed shoulders, haltingly went through the motions of signing the decree. When the General asked whether the Shah had any last-minute orders, he dismissed the question with a shrug of his shoulders and, in a barely audible voice said, “Do what you think is right. I have nothing to say.”

  Perhaps the Shah knew that the day before, on the afternoon of January 15, 1979, Garabaghi had agreed to meet with opposition leaders Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti and Mehdi Bazorgan.12 He must have known that, since late December General Gast (the MAAG chief in Tehran) and Huyser had been working behind the scenes to facilitate meetings between military commanders and Khomeini allies.13 He mu
st have heard that General Nasser Moghadam, the last head of SAVAK—traditionally the most reliable pillar of support for the monarchy—“had taken out of the American hands” the business of bringing the armed forces and Khomeini supporters to an amicable truce. Moghadam was one of the many generals and allies of the Shah who were trying to arrive at a “private pact” with the Khomeini forces. And finally the Shah knew that Garabaghi had been a protégé of General Fardust, the childhood friend who now stood accused of complicity with the Shah’s enemies. In the Shah’s famous interview with David Frost in January 1980, when he was asked about the allegation that Garabaghi and Hussein Fardust had betrayed him and had been secretly working with the clerics long before his fall, he responded that their fate was a “tragedy only [a] Homer and Shakespeare could describe.” He added that in his “inner heart” he hoped that the stories of conspiracies hatched by the two generals were untrue. They would be “so vile, so disquieting” if they were true.14 Of the two, only Garabaghi was at the airport. By then, Fardust spent his afternoons in a private club, playing cards with the dwindling number of patrons who still frequented the once-bustling place of power and status.

  The Shah arrived at the Royal Pavilion at the airport before Bakhtiyar, the prime minister–designate, who was at the Majlis, waiting for a vote of confidence. For Bakhtiyar, these constitutional formalities were the foundation for his fragile claim to legitimacy. To everyone else, they seemed like rearranging deck chairs on the sinking Titanic. The Shah, anxious to leave, asked his aides to call Bakhtiyar and find out what had delayed his arrival. But striking employees had disconnected the phones at the Royal Pavilion. Eventually, the army’s wireless connection was used, and to the Shah’s relief, it was learned that the newly confirmed Prime Minister was on his way.15 Although Bakhtiyar had fought against the Shah for more than three decades, when he finally arrived, the sad solemnity of the moment, or perhaps the bereft countenance of the Shah, brought tears to Bakhtiyar’s eyes. The Shah shook his head, and said, “I hope you will succeed. I give Iran into your care, yours and God’s.”16