The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Bakhtiyar and General Badrei, the commander of the Iranian Ground Forces followed the Queen and the Shah onto the plane. Neither man would survive the eventual terror of the impending revolution. Inside the plane, both men displayed due deference to the King, bade him a formal farewell, and left. The Shah, teary-eyed, went to the cockpit and piloted the plane during takeoff and for the first hour of the flight. According to the chief of his security detail, the Shah’s decision to pilot the plane that day was not based solely on his passion for flying: “He was worried they might conspire to take him somewhere other than the planned destination.”17 As it turned out, this time the Shah’s fears were well founded: within weeks, the flight’s chief pilot, Captain Moezzi, revealed that he had joined the opposition before this last trip.

  Initial plans had called for the Shah to go to the United States, but a few days before departure, he received a call from President Carter, asking him to stop over in Egypt to consult with President Sadat and President Ford on the Camp David Accords and then head for the United States. Visas for him and his entourage, he was told, would be awaiting them in Egypt. In the meantime, in the United States, the State Department had asked Walter Annenberg, the former ambassador to Great Britain, to “receive the Shah and a party of up to 15 and put them up through the first week of February” at his estate in Palm Springs. The contingency plan called for the Shah to move later to another safe location, “possibly with Rockefellers.”18

  After his decision to leave the country had been made, the Shah told Aslan Afshar to call President Sadat’s office and find out what the best time would be for the royal plane to arrive in Egypt. He was informed, much to his dismay, that phone connections to Egypt had also been cut by striking employees. The American Embassy in Tehran allowed the use of its special lines to contact Sadat’s office. It was agreed that the Shah would leave Tehran on the afternoon of January 16.

  Unbeknownst to the Shah, a number of other countries had also been contacted about offering him a visa or asylum, and virtually all had said no. Sometimes the countries offered political reasons for their refusal, and other times their answers had the crass reality of mercantilist truth. Germany, for example, replied that they could not offer the Shah asylum or support “by reason of the large German investments in Iran and the 13,000 Germans” who were working there on the eve of the revolution.19 At that point, Egypt and America were the only two countries willing to offer the royal family a place to stay.

  No sooner had the Shah’s plane left Tehran than Keyhan, Tehran’s most popular daily at the time, issued a special edition with the entire top fold of the paper covered with two words: “Shah Left.” Ironically, it was the Shah’s “seed money” that had launched Keyhan thirty-six years earlier. He had wanted a pro-monarchy publication, but by 1979, the paper’s de facto editor was Rahman Hatefi, one of the top leaders of the underground Tudeh Party in Iran. Under his leadership, the paper had on its staff a whole array of writers and journalists opposed to the regime who used every opportunity to promote their ideas and ideology.

  The news of the Shah’s departure rapidly spread throughout the capital. There was an air of gaiety and celebration in the air. Not just in Tehran, but in many provincial capitals, there were “mass demonstrators”20 celebrating the Shah’s departure. In a surprisingly well-managed “spontaneous outpouring” of exuberance, throngs of people took to the streets, and there were celebrations well into the night. The air of revelry began to taper off early the next morning in overcast Tehran. While the city was brimming with anxious excitement, doors to the expansive U.S. Embassy compound were locked, with no sign of the American flag anywhere. The embassy reported “a few threats to foreigners,” but everywhere American citizens were spared any threat or actual attack.

  Revolutions invariably have an element of the carnival about them. They are a country’s moment of cathartic celebration. In their early hours of jubilant celebration, fears, constraints, and the Apollonian logic of the quotidian give place to the spirit of Dionysian excess, of make-believe egalitarianism, of shared community and suspension of rancorous rifts. That day, Tehran experienced its revolutionary carnival. As people danced in the streets, cars drove around aimlessly with many of their inhabitants braving the cold and hanging out of the cars like human flags. The police and the military seemed to have suddenly melted into the air. Self-declared lords of misrule distributed free candy to passing cars and demanded that drivers turn on their lights and blow their horns. The normal sounds of the city’s hustle and bustle were drowned in the collective blaring of car horns.

  Bands of bearded vigilantes, which had gradually become a constant staple of every large gathering in Tehran, watched in quiet disapproval. Within a year, their mores would become the law of the land, and they would exact a heavy price on the population for their moments of “heathenish” joy. It took only days to realize that beneath the veneer of the “spontaneous” but orderly popular demonstrations, there was an embryonic force that soon came to be called the “Committee”—local militia-cum-gangs-cum-revolutionaries—based in local mosques, led by the clergy of those mosques, increasingly armed, and increasingly ideological. As the royal army and police melted away, these committees took over their functions.

  There was, in contrast, little joy aboard Shahbaz, the Boeing that had been designed as the royal plane. After piloting the plane for over an hour, the Shah quickly moved past the dozen seats for guards and guests and headed for the royal compartment. It consisted of a sitting area, a conference table, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Dr. Lucy Pirnia, a friend of the Queen; Kiumars Jahanbini and Yazdan Navisi, respectively the Shah’s and the Queen’s bodyguards; Aslan Afshar, the de facto chief of protocol for the Shah; Mahmoud Eliasi, special valet for the Shah; Ali Kabiri, for many years the chef of the Court; and finally, the man responsible for minding the royal dogs—Beno, the Shah’s big German Shepherd, and Catsu, the Queen’s puppy—were, aside from the crew, the only people on the plane. Egypt was their destination.

  By then the Shah was hungry and asked for something to eat. But the airport’s catering department had refused to supply the royal plane with food. “Let them make their own sandwiches,” the catering director had derisively declared. Moreover, the crystal glasses and the chinaware usually used on the plane had all been pilfered. As it happened, Kabiri, perhaps in anticipation of problems at the airport, had prepared some food. Some passengers remember a pot full of rice and geyme, one of the Shah’s favorite dishes, while others remember bagali polow—rice and fawa beans.21 Using makeshift plates and utensils, the Shah and the rest of the passengers were finally fed. A somber silence was in the air, and there was little appetite among the entourage.

  After about an hour, Jahanbini was called to the back of the plane, where the Shah and the Queen had settled. As he walked through the door, he saw the Shah, his right hand cushioning his reclining head, lying down on the couch. He had taken off his jacket and tie; his red, slightly inflamed eyes betrayed the long anguished hours he had spent awake. Without moving his head, the Shah raised his eyes and asked, “What do you people think of our decision to leave?” By then Jahanbini had been serving the Shah for almost a quarter of a century and, by his own admission, this “was the first time His Majesty was asking my views on something.”22 At the same time, Jahanbini had noticed the Shah’s gradual decline into a state where he distrusted everyone. He had been surprised to learn, for example, that the Shah had ordered the generals in charge of the air force base in Tehran to henceforth heed only orders coming through Eliasi, the Shah’s valet, about who could leave Iran. In other words, the Shah distrusted not only the civilians serving him in the Court, but many in the military hierarchy. In the past, he had been obsessive about maintaining ranks in the military, and keeping them strictly walled off from any civilian contact. Now he was asking generals to take orders from a valet.23 With every passing day, long-established hierarchies and habits had begun to collapse, and in the chaos that ensued, fo
rces of change found more and more room to maneuver.

  With this context in mind, Jahanbini assumed that the Shah’s question was part of an attempt to see whether the members of the royal entourage were dependable. He responded, quickly and categorically, “Your Majesty, I and your other servants have total belief in the wisdom of Your Majesty’s every decision. Everyone is completely convinced of the wisdom of your decision to leave.” Remembering the conversation a quarter of a century later, Jahanbini added wistfully, “and I was not lying. We all thought the Shah had something up his sleeve.” Here again, the August 1953 events would haunt the Shah and his supporters: as the Americans had helped bring the Shah back to power then, they must have a similar plan this time, too. The royalists assumed the Americans were not going to leave the fate of Iran in the untested hands of mullahs, or worst yet, in the hands of Communists. What they did not know was that by then, Ambassador Sullivan had concluded that doing another August 1953 was not in the interests of the United States. Some of the generals who remained loyal to the Shah were obviously worried about the future of a country run by Khomeini, while others might well have been banking on another August 1953, when those who remained loyal to the Shah had been amply rewarded when he was restored to power. One of the generals who paid a heavy price for such loyalty to the Shah in 1979 was Ali Neshat.

  Before leaving Iran, the Shah had entrusted General Neshat with a sensitive mission. By then, all the documents in the Shah’s office at the Court (Daftar-e Maksous, or the Special Office) had been removed to a basement in the Sa’ad Abad Palace. The most sensitive documents had either been sent out separately with Eliasi on the chartered plane or went with the Shah when he left Iran.24 More than once, in his daily journals, Assadollah Alam cryptically refers to “documents so sensitive” that he dared not even mention their topic. They were kept in a safe in the Shah’s office. What happened to those documents, and what they contained, remains unknown. They could have been part of what Eliasi took to Switzerland. But there were also thousands of pages of documents dealing with the affairs of the state or of the royal family. They were all placed in the basement of the palace before the Shah left. General Neshat, commander of the Imperial Guard, was entrusted with the task of burning them the moment the Shah left the country. For the last decade of the Shah’s rule, under the legendary management of Nosratollah Moinian, the office had been known for its exemplary efficiency. By the mid-1970s, much of its work was computerized. Every letter was stamped when it was received. Another stamp indicated the day and the hour the Shah read or was informed of its content. A separate box registered what the Shah had ordered. In more sensitive cases, the Shah read the reports himself, making comments or issuing orders in the margin, always brisk and brief, sometimes in a purple pencil, sometimes in red. Sometimes he even marked the file in which the document should be placed. In the days after the royal family’s departure, General Neshat made a bonfire in the gardens of the palace and burnt all of the documents. Rumors continue to persist that copies of all of these documents exist somewhere outside Iran. The Islamic Republic has published so far some 600 volumes of documents from SAVAK and other governmental offices, but much of what they have published has been devoid of serious substance. Nearly nothing has been published, for example, about the Shah’s fortune. Moreover, the published documents have clearly been handpicked to serve the ideological purpose of demonizing the Shah and his regime. General Neshat was executed by the Islamic Republic a few weeks after the Shah’s departure and the burning of the documents.

  Before the Shah left Iran, the constitutionally mandated Regency Council was created ostensibly to manage the affairs of the state during his temporary absence. The first choice for the job had been Sadighi but he refused the offer, saying that since he had been opposed to the idea of the Shah leaving the country, he couldn’t head a regency that would rule in his absence. The man eventually chosen to head that council, Seyyed Jalal Tehrani, seemed ill-fitted to the sensitive task. Tehrani was famously ill-tempered and self-centered, more of a scholar than a statesman. Shortly after arriving in Paris to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini, he announced that he was resigning from the council. His letter of resignation—or, more accurately, his statement of recantation—was surprisingly redolent of Islamic jargon and Shiite piety. He wrote that, in light of “public opinion and the view of His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, May God extend his bounty, that the said Council is illegal,”25 he was resigning from his post. Tehrani was known as a man of much, albeit esoteric, erudition, a man fascinated by astrolabes and medieval astrologers. His support for the Shah had always been somewhat doubtful, and the fact that he was chosen for the critical job of heading the Regency Council is yet another example of the strangely inexplicable decisions made by the Shah during his last months in Iran. In his memoirs, Bakhtiyar intimates that it was the Shah who suggested making Tehrani the head of the council. The reason was apparently his known close ties to the clergy, particularly to Ayatollah Khomeini.26 It has been rumored that Tehrani was blackmailed into tendering his resignation after Khomeini supporters showed him photos they had of him in a compromising situation.27

  The Shah and his family stayed in Egypt briefly. The meeting with President Ford to discuss Camp David—promised by President Carter before the Shah left Iran—never took place.28 Sadat went out of his way to make the Shah feel not just safe but royal.

  After a week, the royal family set out for Morocco, but it was only a few weeks before the Shah—much to his dismay and disbelief—was told he must leave the country. King Hassan was under pressure from Moroccan religious circles to get rid of him. Some in the Moroccan royal family had been opposed to the idea of allowing the Shah to visit from the beginning. Moreover, aside from the French intelligence agency’s warning that the Moroccan monarch would face serious opposition from his domestic foes and critics, and the concern that the Shah’s presence would overshadow the proceedings of an upcoming Islamic conference in Morocco, there was, in early February, the effort of the new Iranian regime to file extradition papers “with the Moroccan government for the return of the Shah.”29 This was the first legal step by Ayatollah Khomeini to demand the return of the Shah to Iran. Even if there was no realistic chance or legal ground for ever convincing Morocco or other countries to send the Shah back to Iran, these pressures, along with regular threats by Islamic regime radicals to send terrorist teams to kill him, made life more and more difficult for the royal couple. Khomeini obviously believed that the more the Shah was isolated and his pariah status underscored, the more royalists in Iran would be disheartened. He used the same argument when he ordered speedy the trials and executions of members of the ancien régime. Ayatollah Khomeini was known for holding grudges and for exacting revenge on those who had crossed him. He therefore spared no effort to pressure, embarrass, frighten, threaten, and isolate the Shah in exile. These efforts, some legal, some obviously illegal, continued until the Shah’s last days.

  Few things underscored Khomeini’s success and the Shah’s pariah status as much as the fact that, until a few hours before the time he was ordered to leave Morocco, his next destination was not clear. No country was willing to provide the Shah even a visiting visa, let alone asylum.

  And then, shortly before his departure from Morocco at the end of March, the government of the Bahamas agreed to give the Shah and his family a temporary tourist visa. While in the Bahamas, on May 6, the Shah met with the U.S. Ambassador, who was carrying a message from President Carter. Earlier, the Shah had offered to delay his U.S. arrival to a time when it would not “create inconveniences for the US.” Moreover, he wanted to make sure that his children would be able to go to school in America. Carter wanted the Shah to know that “his understanding of the very difficult situation” that his journey to the United States would create both for the United States and for the Shah was much appreciated, and that when “conditions are more settled,” they could return to the question of his journey to the United States. In
Morocco the Shah had been told that, should he settle in America, both his life and his fortune would be consumed by lawsuits. As for the children, Carter wanted the Shah to know that they would of course be welcome to “pursue their education,” provided that in such a case “specific security arrangements for them could be made with private security services.”30

  In the Bahamas, the Shah received another piece of disappointing news. Since mid-February, he had been using Alan Hart, a British journalist, to sound out the British government about the possibility of settling in England, where he already owned a large estate. Hart had also been chosen to write a book about the Pahlavi dynasty. Through Hart, the Shah let it be known that settling in Britain would be “his first choice.” He promised not to bring a large security detail and to lead “for a year or two a completely secluded life.” He stipulated that there were “no loyal military officers in Iran with whom he could communicate.” He guaranteed to “abstain from all political activity.” He indicated that he did not want to go to the United States; not only did he not like the American way of life, but he thought the United States “bore an especially heavy responsibility” for “the downfall of the Pahlavi regime.”31

  Although the ruling Labour Party had rejected the Shah’s request on grounds that giving him safe harbor might jeopardize “UK’s future relationship with Iran,” Margaret Thatcher had promised that, if she were elected prime minister, she would certainly give the Shah asylum. When she did win the election in May, British Intelligence, the Foreign Ministry, and other government offices immediately warned her against the wisdom of allowing the Shah into Great Britain. Not only would British interests be jeopardized, she was told, but British diplomats might be taken hostage if the Shah was given asylum in England. Commercial calculations or political caution cannot fully explain why big powers like the United States and Britain were so unwilling to cross the new regime, and why they were even willing to allow clerics in Tehran a de facto veto power over who received a visa to enter the United States or Britain.