The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  In May 1979, Sir Denis Wright was sent to the Bahamas to give the Shah the bad news that he was not welcome in Britain. Wright was initially reluctant to accept the mission. He was by then on the board of Shell Oil, and he did not, in his words, want his involvement to become public knowledge, cause the wrath of the new regime, and endanger Shell Oil company interests. He did not, he said, “want the trip to jeopardize [my] position,” Moreover, he had long ago planned a fishing trip and agreed to go only if the timing could be arranged so as not to disrupt his plans.

  Eventually, on May 20, 1979, traveling under the assumed name of Edward, and “wearing dark glasses,” Wright arrived in the Bahamas and met with the Shah. After some reminiscing about the past, the Shah, according to Wright, “received the bad news with magnanimity.”32 Moreover, the Shah indicated that he “accepts but does not understand” the British government’s decision. At the same time, his pride forced him to insist that “we had not asked for asylum.”33 With Britain no longer willing to let him in, and with his visa for the Bahamas expiring, the Shah was once again in need of a country willing to give him a temporary abode. After much cajoling and pressure, particularly from the United States, Mexico finally agreed to issue him and his family a visa.

  Throughout the summer, pressure on Carter to allow the Shah into the United States continued. He grew so frustrated with the ceaseless flow of letters, messages, and implied and explicit threats—like Henry Kissinger’s threat that he would withhold his support of an agreement with the Soviet Union unless Carter caved on the Shah—that finally one day, he snapped, and told his National Security Advisor, “Fuck the Shah,”34 and asked him to go on to other issues.

  With every passing day, the Shah’s health deteriorated. He lost thirty pounds, and he looked jaundiced and emaciated. Mexican physicians were, like almost everyone else, kept in the dark about the Shah’s real illness. While the French doctors traveled from Paris and “surreptitiously administered chemotherapy,” the Mexican physicians began to treat him for malaria.35 None of the many physicians—French, Austrian, American, Mexican, Panamanian, and Egyptian amongst them—who treated the Shah “knew his entire story.” From some, his diagnosis of cancer was hidden; others were denied the information that, at the age of eighty-seven, his mother had been “found to have the same type of cancer he had.”36 Not only did his health and his chances of recovery suffer from this game of stealth and deception, but ultimately the Carter administration, and the U.S. government, paid a heavy price for it. Would the Islamic regime have been as paranoid about the Shah’s travel to the United States if, by the time of his travel to New York, the story of his cancer had been an established fact? As it was, the worse his health became, the more pressure there was on Carter to let the Shah in; the President was assured that the only place the Shah could receive adequate care for his cancer was in the United States.

  On September 28, 1979, the State Department was informed by David Rockefeller’s office that “the Shah was ill in Mexico and that Rockefeller had sent his personal physician to examine” him and that, before long, this would be followed by a request that he be admitted to the United States for health reasons and on humanitarian grounds.37 Agencies in the U.S. government, from the CIA to the State Department, began to think about the possible ramifications of such a move. The Iran Desk at the State Department decided that “the US should make no move toward admitting the Shah until we have obtained and tested a new and substantially more effective guard force for the Embassy [in Iran].”38

  It is not clear to what extent Rockefeller’s interest in the matter was based on his extensive financial dealings with the Shah and the royal family. He had been for years the Shah’s private banker and the designated executor of his will. In 1978, his Chase Manhattan Bank had decided to give Iran a loan of $500 million even though the Iranian attorneys the bank had retained to check into the legality of this transaction had advised against making the loan. After the revolution, the new Iranian regime began making substantial withdrawals from Iran’s Chase Manhattan account. The combination of these facts gave rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories.39

  According to one theory, the Rockefellers and their allies, like Kissinger, pressed for the Shah’s entry into the United States, “knowing that that act would precipitate violence in Iran and make a freeze [of Iran’s assets] inevitable. Such a freeze [would] make a repayment of the dubious loan possible.” The Chase theory became so “prevalent in the press” that in July 1981, the Senate Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs prepared a report “that directly and ineffectively attempted to deny the Chase Manhattan thesis.”40 It remains a fact that Chase Manhattan was indeed “near the top of the list” of American banks “who were able to turn a profit on the hostage crisis.”41 Regardless of the motivation, there is also no doubt that what precipitated the crisis was the reluctant decision by the Carter administration to allow the Shah into the United States.

  A long litany of prominent Americans had by then also argued that the Shah must be allowed in, at least on humanitarian grounds. His health had deteriorated in Mexico, and he needed another operation, which, his supporters argued, could only be safely performed in the United States. But the Carter administration continued to resist these demands. Initially, the Shah had also been against the idea of going to the United States. When the Queen suggested such a trip, the Shah shouted at her and the other aide who had suggested the idea, “I am not wanted there and I am not welcome. Forget it.” The State Department conducted its own examination of the Shah by dispatching its medical director to visit him. He found the Shah to have “enlarged neck glands, increasing abdominal distress, as well as [being] deeply jaundice[d]. There is no doubt that he has malignant lymphoma which is escaping standard chemotherapy.” He concluded that “highly technical studies are needed” to diagnose, grade, and analyze his lymphoma. These studies, he concluded, “cannot be carried out by any of the medical facilities in Mexico.”42 Years later, Dr. Benjamin Kean, a key member of the Shah’s medical team, disagreed with this assessment—an assessment, incidentally, central to the decision to allow the Shah into the United States—saying that “he [Kean] knew the sophisticated equipment needed for the Shah’s diagnosis and treatment could be found in Mexico.”43

  Whether the conclusion by the State Department’s medical director was political or purely medical, the pressure on the Carter administration to allow the Shah into the United States was incessant. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, for example, long known as an ally of the Pahlavi regime,44 wrote to Secretary of State Vance on October 2, 1979, asking why the United States “can offer haven on quick notice to members of the [Soviet Union’s] Bolshoi, taking into account all the implications of this,” but could not “work something out for the Shah.”45

  Indeed, as a result of this caution, the United States went out of its way to convince the new Islamic regime that there was no conspiracy involved in giving the Shah a visa. On October 21, the U.S. chargé d’affaires met with Mehdi Bazorgan, the prime minister of the Islamic regime, and told him of the Shah’s serious medical condition. If the Shah is sick, Bazorgan asked, why does he not go to Europe? In a later meeting, Iranian officials demanded that their own physicians examine the Shah. The United States agreed, but the Shah would not permit regime physicians to examine him. To break the impasse, the State Department tried to arrange a meeting between the Shah’s physicians and the Iranian medical team, but for reasons that are not clear, even “that arrangement never worked out.”46

  The day after the meeting with the Prime Minister, U.S. embassy staff in Tehran met again with Iranian officials—this time with Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, who repeated the regime’s demand that the Shah be visited by a group of Iranian physicians. Moreover, he wanted to make sure that the United States would abide by the agreement to not only prohibit the Shah from any political activity in the United States, but to extend the ban to the Queen as well. Yazdi said the Iranian government now rega
rded her “as currently more politically involved than the Shah, citing . . . an interview with unspecified French periodical.”47

  Not long after that meeting in Tehran, in the evening of October 22, 1979, a private Gulfstream aircraft landed at LaGuardia Airport, carrying the Shah, the Queen, and a small coterie of aides. Carter’s decision to issue the Shah a visa had been a difficult one. In his own words, “I was told the Shah was desperately ill, at the point of death,” and that New York was the only place where he could get the requisite medical attention. Moreover, Carter believed that “Iranian officials had promised to protect” American diplomats in the event that the Shah was allowed to visit the United States for medical reasons.48 The Shah arrived in New York and was taken directly to New York Hospital.

  The experience must have created in the Shah a “riot of emotions.” He was taken to the same room he had used in 1955 when, in his salad days, he had visited the hospital with Soraya. He had been worried about fertility then; now mortality was on his mind. Both times the hospital had to keep the visit “private.” This time, the White House had tried to keep the Shah’s arrival secret and prevent it from becoming a media circus. Robert Armao, who had been assigned by David Rockefeller to be the Shah’s special assistant in exile, “decided for security reasons, not to register the Shah in the Shah’s own name,” but then, for reasons hard to fathom, he decided to use the name of David Newsome, undersecretary of state for political affairs. Newsome was understandably not amused, particularly after the New York Times broke the story.49 The ramifications of this eventually forced the resignation of the hospital’s vice president for public affairs, who believed “the public had a right to know the entire medical story to justify the Shah’s admission to the US.”50

  As the Shah was settling into his hospital room in New York, a group of young students held a meeting in a small house in one of Tehran’s sprawling suburbs. They represented all the major universities in Tehran. Two delegates from each institution had come to represent their universities’ most zealous Islamic students. They were meeting to plan a response to the U.S. decision to allow the Shah into the United States, and they agreed to take over the American Embassy in Tehran. Amongst those present in the first plenary meeting was a young man from a third-tier technical university called Elm-o Sanat (Science and Technology); his name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He participated only in the first plenary meeting and stopped attending after he realized they were not also going to take over the Soviet Embassy. The rest of the students completed their plans and, to the shock of the Carter administration and the world, on November 4, 1979, they climbed the walls of the American Embassy and took diplomats and other staff hostage. Six American diplomats who happened to be outside the embassy compound at the time took refuge in the Canadian Embassy and were eventually whisked out of the country under assumed names in an operation masterminded by the CIA. Before long, Ayatollah Khomeini expressed his support for the occupation of the embassy, and so began the 444-day ordeal of the hostage crisis. The students’ main demand was the return of the Shah.

  Aside from his own medical problems and his concern about the hostage crisis, the Shah’s stay at the hospital was uncomfortable for a variety of other reasons. His therapy, for example, required that on more than one occasion, he be taken from his room in New York Hospital to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer center across the street. For security reasons, the Shah, always in the dark of the early morning hours, was wheeled through the tunnel that connects the two buildings. He sat under a blanket, surrounded by a handful of hospital staff and security men, and was then carried through the chilly caverns beneath the New York streets—a scene reminiscent of Homer’s Hades. Moreover, although he was given an exclusive suite of rooms on the seventh floor, he could still hear the shouts of demonstrators congregating in front of the hospital, some demanding his extradition, others his execution. He often watched the news, and there too he was more than once forced to hear criticism of his rule, of SAVAK’s brutality, and of his family’s corruption. He listened to Anthony Parsons—for the last years of his rule the British ambassador to Iran and now Britain’s ambassador to the UN—lambaste him at a meeting of the UN. “Listen to that son of a bitch,” the Shah said in a halting voice to Ardeshir Zahedi, who was in the room at the time.51 Furthermore, he was sure his room was bugged. The most sensitive messages he would jot down on a yellow writing pad he kept by his bed. We cannot be sure if his fear was entirely justified, but we do know that, on the orders of President Carter, his phone was indeed bugged.52

  On November 30, it was decided that the Shah could leave the hospital. He had already declared that his preferred destination would be Mexico, where he had lived before, and where the President had invited him back. But on the morning of November 30, much to his consternation, he was informed that he was no longer welcome in Mexico. The ostensible reason given was that “his presence is becoming a threat to [their] national interest.” The Mexicans were worried about their diplomats being taken hostage, they said.53 Queen Farah offers a different reason, suggesting that Fidel Castro had told the Mexican President that “Cuba would vote for his country’s entry into the Security Council of the United Nations on condition that he refused to give” the Shah a refuge.54 Either way, the Shah was cornered. Robert Armao contacted the State Department and said, “His Imperial Majesty was officially throwing himself at the administration’s mercy.” Until then, the Shah had tried to avoid making any official requests of the United States. He felt betrayed by them, but now he was out of options.55

  As the Shah lay sick in bed, the Carter administration was of two minds about what to do with him. With every passing day, the hostage crisis took on more significance in Carter’s re-election bid. Some in the administration favored pushing the Shah out of the United States as expeditiously as possible. Others, like Brzezinski, opposed the move, saying it would “compromise America’s national honor” and amount to “giving into a student mob.”

  Initially, Carter sided with those opposed to pushing the Shah out. But on November 14, he changed his mind again, this time appointing Vice President Walter Mondale as the “point-man on the effort to get the Shah out of the US as soon as possible.”56

  When Lloyd Cutler, Carter’s emissary, went to see the Shah in the hospital to talk about his departure, he told him that there were only three countries willing to take him—South Africa, Paraguay, and Egypt. The United States was against the idea of the Shah’s going to Egypt, as it might threaten Sadat’s position. The Shah was adamantly against going to either of the other two countries. He was also told that while he was in the United States, he couldn’t go to his twin sister’s home on Beekman Place in Manhattan. A new stalemate had developed. The Shah was told he was leaving the hospital without knowing where he might seek asylum—or even where he might stay while his visa problems were resolved.

  Even something as simple as taking the Shah out of the hospital was a security nightmare—anti-Shah demonstrators and the paparazzi were on a twenty-four- hour vigil outside. On the night of the transfer, they moved the Shah “through an underground tunnel to the Sloan-Kettering Institute” to “an unwatched exit onto First Avenue.”57 From there the Shah’s entourage went to LaGuardia and boarded a U.S. Air Force DC jet, which flew them to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

  From the plane, the royal couple was taken to the base hospital and given two rooms in the psychiatric ward. The Shah was “put in a room with a walled-up window,” and the Queen was “taken to an adjoining room where there was no door handle on the inside but a microphone on the ceiling.”58 Both rooms had all the trappings of a prison. Without saying a word, the Shah moved to the bed, pulled a sheet over his head, and lay down.59 He was exhausted, too tired even to object. But his wife was not. Are we prisoners, are they trying to hand us over to the mullahs? she asked angrily. She even wondered whether “the whole incredible setup was put in place just to drive us mad.”60 Camp commanders reminded her that these were t
he safest rooms they could find, and they talked about the safety concerns of a place like Lackland, where students could freely come and go, and promised to move them to better facilities as soon as possible. Three hours later, the Shah and his wife were moved to a small three-room bungalow that was usually set aside for visiting officers.61

  The Shah spent two weeks at the base. Once they put their unpleasant arrival behind them, the Shah cheered up, particularly when he could swap “aviation experiences with some of the officers.” But from the beginning, it was clear that Lackland was a temporary point of transit. The Shah still needed an asylum, and only three countries were willing to give it to him. While on the base, the Shah heard the news that his nephew, Prince Shahriar, had been assassinated in Paris on December 7. He had been an officer in the Iranian navy and was the only member of the royal family who had dedicated himself to continuing the fight against the clerical regime. The death put the Shah into “a mood of silent despair.” Princess Ashraf, Shahriar’s mother, joined him at the base, only adding to his grief. Further increasing his anguish was the fact that, while at Lackland, the Shah was informed that South Africa had withdrawn its offer of asylum.62

  In retrospect, although a 2008 survey by The Times63 identified the Shah as one of the world’s ten “most decadent dictators”—along with such exiled figures as Mobutu, Idi Amin, and Ferdinand Marcos—and in spite of the fact that, even in the harshest assessment of his critics, his decadence and crimes paled in comparison to a Mobutu or an Idi Amin, no other member of this cohort of infamy was treated with as much contempt and derision as the Shah. These others were all given safe asylums, where they lived and enjoyed the “fruits” of their decadent rule. The Shah, however, was subjected to every form of indignity and embarrassment imaginable at the time. Ayatollah Khomeini’s role in this sad saga is explained by his penchant for revenge, and his enmity toward the Shah. What is more difficult to fathom is the international chorus that accompanied this bloodlust. A dying man, “un-kinged” and hounded by terrorists, was denied even the dignity of a quiet corner to die.