The Shah
Page 72
52. “Heyat Mota’lefe Islami,” Sharg, Special Issue devoted to the Islamic Revolution, 15 Bahman/February 4, 2006.
53. Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (London, 2000), p. 67.
54. JFK, NSF, Box 116 A, “Tehran to State Department, June 6, 1963.”
55. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 42.
56. JFK, NSF, Box 116 A, “Tehran to State Department, June 6, 1963.”
57. Ibid.
58. Denis Wright took notes of this historic meeting and shared them with me when I interviewed him.
59. JFK, NSF, Box 116 A, “Tehran to State Department, July 11, 1963.”
60. JFK, NSF, Kromer, Box 424, “Kromer to Carl, June 21, 1963.”
61. Wright, “Memoirs,” vol. 1, p. 377.
62. Ibid., p. 376.
63. Quoted in Wright’s “Memoirs,” p. 380.
64. JFK, “Tehran to Secretary of State, July 18, 1963.”
65. JFK, “Tehran to State, June 24, 1963.”
66. PRO, “The Iran Novin Party,” February 12, 1964, FO 371/17512.
67. Wright, “Memoirs,” vol. 2, p. 376.
68. Mehdi Khanbab Tehrani, in his conversations with Hamid Shokat (published in an important series of interviews with leaders of the Confederation) and in several conversations with the author, details these instances of cooperation.
69. FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. XII, p. 694.
70. Ibid., p. 670.
71. Ibid., p. 694.
72. Ibid., p. 695.
73. Ibid., p. 697.
74. PRO, Denis Wright to Foreign Office, October 12, 1962, FO 373/164186.
75. Denis Wright, interview with author, Hadenham, England, October 3, 2002.
76. Sir Denis Wright’s Valedictory Dispatch, April 20, 1977, courtesy of Denis Wright who gave me access to his personal papers.
77. Quoted in Denis Wright’s Valedictory Dispatch.
78. JFK, “Briefing for Governor Harriman, May 2, 1963.”
79. William O. Douglas, The Court Years: 1939–1975 (New York, 1980), pp. 303–304.
80. JFK, “Briefing for Governor Harriman, May 2, 1963.”
81. JFK, “Briefing for Governor Harriman, May 2, 1963.”
82. JFK, Oral Histories, R W Kromer, vol. IV, p. 11.
83. FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XVIII, p. 371.
84. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 1, p. 41.
85. JFK, “Iran, Overseas Report (Confidential), August 7, 1962,” p. 2.
86. Wright, “Memoirs,” vol. 2, p. 372.
87. JFK, “Iran, Overseas Report (Confidential), August 7, 1962,” p. 2.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., p. 5.
90. Ibid., p. 6.
91. Ibid., p. 7.
92. PRO, Tehran to Foreign Office, October 5, 1961, FO 371/157658.
93. I have covered this episode in some detail in my Persian Sphinx, Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, DC, 2000), pp. 160–163.
94. NA, Department of the Army, Confidential Report, Week 10, March 1964.
16 The Desert Bash
1. FRUS, 1969–1976, “Memorandum for Henry Kissinger, 8 May 1972, Richard Helms,” vol. E-4, Electronic copy.
2. Zahedi Papers, “Letter to the Shah, 29 Dey 1355.”
3. Ibid.
4. FRUS, 1969–1976, “Report, 28 February 1972.”
5. NA, CIA, “Nothing Succeeds Like a Successful Shah, 8 October 1971.”
6. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 495.
7. Ardeshir Zahedi, interview with author, Montreux, March 28, 2009.
8. For documents relating to this bureaucratic infighting, see Majaray-e Su’ Gasd be Shah dar Kakh Marmar [Assassination Attempt on the Shah in the Memrar Palace According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran, 1378/1999).
9. See my Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, DC, 2000). The book is a biography of Hoveyda.
10. Farokh Negahdar, interview with author, London, October 2, 2002.
11. Shah, Answer to History, p. 158.
12. JFK, “The New Men and Their Challenge to American Policy in Iran,” Senator Kennedy Papers.
13. Ibid.
14. Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, vol. 2 (Syracuse, N.Y., 2008), pp. 632–637.
15. Ahmad Mirfenderasky, Dar Hamsayegiy-e Khers [In the Neighborhood of the Bear] (London, Ketab Center, 1997, p. 268.
16. NSA, Stanley T. Escudero, “What Went Wrong in Iran,” Document No. 2629, 1980.
17. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 3, p. 100.
18. Ibid., p. 87.
19. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 4, p. 35.
20. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 3, p. 87.
21. Ibid.
22. In my essay on Alam’s Daily Journals (vol. 5), I have covered this and many other similar episodes. The essay is reprinted in King of Shadows (Los Angeles, 2006).
23. David Binder, “Northrop Cites Undercover Role,” New York Times, June 7, 1975, and Paranay Gupte, “Grumman’s ‘Fees’ to Iran Beg Question,” New York Times, February 23, 1976.
24. NA, “The Iranian Air Mafia, US Embassy in Tehran.”
25. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XII, p. 195.
26. Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the West: A Critical Bibliography (London, 1987), p. 211.
27. A book chronicling his life and edited by A. Morovati as well as a couple of officers under his command have made this claim. General Azarbarzin was amongst them.
28. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 258.
29. In a three-volume compilation of documents from SAVAK, published by the Islamic Republic, details of these surveillance modes are offered. See Sepahbod Bakhtiyar be Ravayat Asnad SAVAK [General Teymour Bakhtiyar According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran, 1378/1999).
30. General Alavi-Kia was at the time the head of SAVAK in Europe. He told me about details of the trip.
31. Margaret Laing, The Shah (London, 1977), p. 174.
32. PRO, “Ba’ath, Tudeh and the Confederation,” January 11, 1971, FCO 17/1512.
33. This information can be found in Stasi files on the Tudeh Party. See Hauptabeilung, 5, 4, Berlin Treff Mit Im “Charly” 10.51972.EGA. I am indebted to Hamid Shokat for translating the document.
34. Sepahbod Teymour Bakhtiyar Be Ravayat Asnad SAVAK [General Bakhtiyar According to SAVAK Documents], vol. 1 (Tehran, 1378/1999), p. 338.
35. NA, “Iraq’s Coup Attempt, Jan. 1970”; see also NA, “How to Buy a Revolution, October 15, 1969.”
36. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XII, p. 469.
37. Ibid., p. 473.
38. NSA, “Ali Amini, February 29, 1968.”
39. David Owen, In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years (London, 2009), p. 204.
40. Emad Baghi, one of Iran’s leading human rights activists and an opponent of the death penalty, told me about his study and the total number of those executed for political crimes.
41. For an account of this failed attempt, see Abbas Samakar, Man Yek Shoureshi Hastam [I am a Rebel] (Los Angeles, 2001).
42. PRO, “The Police and the Permissive Society in Iran,” 6 October 1970, FO 248/1649.
43. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 2, p. 98.
44. PRO, “The Police and the Permissive Society in Iran,” 6 October 1970, FO 248/1649.
45. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XII “Tehran to State, November 25, 1965,” p. 190.
46. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XII “Tehran to State, July 7, 1966,” p. 271.
47. PRO, “Coronation of His Imperial Majesty the Shahanshah,” 30 November 1967, FO 248/1637.
48. Mehdi Samii was in charge of these arrangements and in the course of several interviews, on the phone or in Los Angeles, he told me about his efforts to find the right experts to build the carriages and the difficulties of using the Crown Jewels for the construction of the Queen’s crown.
49. For details of the celebration, I have relied on interviews
with Mehdi Samii. The Queen, too, in her An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah, translated by Patricia Clancy (New York, 2004), provides a brief account of the event (pp. 151–158).
50. PRO, “Coronation Gifts for the Shah,” 30 October 1967, FO 248/1637.
51. Bazm Ahriman [Devil’s Party], vol. 1 (Tehran, 1377/1998), p. 9.
52. NA, CIA, “Nothing Succeeds Like Success, 8 October 1971.”
53. Houchang Nahavandi, Akharin Roozha [Last Days] (Los Angeles, 2004), p. 100.
54. Ibid., p. 23.
55. Abdulreza Ansari, “Interview with Keyhan,” Keyhan, no. 1089 (January 18, 2006), p. 1.
56. PRO, “The 2500 Anniversary of the Founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great,” FCO 56/323, p. 5.
57. Sir Peter Ramsbotham, Iranian Oral History Project, Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, October 18, 1985.
58. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1993), p. 564.
59. Ibid., p. 5.
60. Zahedi Papers, Zahedi to Shah, n.d.
61. PRO, “The 2500 Anniversary of the Founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great,” FCO 56/323, p. 7.
62. PRO, Secretary of State to Prime Minister, March 2, 1965, FO 371/180802.
63. Wright, “Memoirs,” vol. 2, p. 399.
64. Ibid., p. 390.
65. PRO, Tehran to Foreign Office, 30 May 1968, FCO 8/28.
66. Ebrahim Teymouri was the diplomat entrusted with the job. He spent four years in London, collecting a four-volume collection of documents on the subject. He has referred to his assignment in an article he wrote about Abbas Aram, onetime Foreign Minister of Iran. See “Gousheyee az Khaterat Abbas Aram” [Some Moments from Aram’s Memoirs]. I was provided a copy of the manuscript courtesy of Mr. Mortezai, head of Iran’s mission to Israel.
67. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXII, p. 563.
68. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston, 1979), p. 1264.
69. The first from account number 2/85678 in Union De Banques Swiss and the other from an account in Arabiya Bank.
70. A copy of the check and copies of letter exchanged between the two sides were provided to me, courtesy of Ardeshir Zahedi.
71. PRO, “Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s Visit to Iran,” FC08/2270.
72. NA, “Iranian Cooperation with Oman and Sudan, March 1974.”
73. Crucial segments of the memorandum of the conversation in which the Shah offers details of what he planned to do in Afghanistan have been “sanitized” and thus made unavailable. NA, “Memorandum of Conversation, White House, July 23, 1973.”
74. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 3, p. 180.
75. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXII, p. 457.
76. For the text of letters, see Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 2, p. 385.
77. Fereydoon Hoveyda, “My Secret Mission to End the Vietnam War,” American Foreign Policy Interests 23, no. 4 (2001): 243–252.
78. Ibid.
79. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXII, p. 387.
80. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXII, p. 401.
81. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXII, p. 392.
82. FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. E–4, electronic copy.
83. Several letters from Zahedi to the Shah containing messages from Nixon offer details of these dealings. Zahedi Papers.
84. Barbara Zanchetta, “The United States and the Loss of Iran,” Working Papers on International History and Politics, no. 4, June 2009.
85. Zahedi Papers, Letter to the Shah, October 21, 1975.
86. I initially heard about the episode from General Azarbarzin. I checked with Anthony Cordesman, the respected scholar on Iran’s military, and he confirmed the story.
87. Owen, In Sickness and in Power, p. 204.
88. Akbar Etemad provided some of this information in interviews I did with him in Paris and on the phone. Moreover, a summary can be seen in NSA, “Department of State, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, April 16, 1976,” Nuclear Vault.
89. Ibid., p. 4.
90. Ibid., p. 10.
91. NSA, “Department of Defense, Interview with the Shah”; some of the most important documents about nuclear negotiations are clustered in a file called the Nuclear Vault; see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb268/index.htm.
92. Ibid., p. 2.
93. Ibid.
94. NSA, “Memorandum for Secretary of Defense, June 22, 1974,” Nuclear Vault.
95. NSA, “Cooperation with Iran, Alfred L. Atherton Jr., June 20, 1974,” Nuclear Vault.
96. Ibid., p. 4.
97. NSA, “Action Memorandum, December 6, 1974,” Nuclear Vault.
98. NSA, “Report of the NSSM 219 Working Group,” Nuclear Vault.
99. NSA, “Memorandum for the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, April 18, 1976,” Nuclear Vault.
100. NSA, “Briefing Notes: Iran and Nuclear Weapons, 29 July 1975,” Nuclear Vault.
101. NSA, “Department of Defense, Iran Nuclear Agreement,” Nuclear Vault.
102. NSA, “Department of Defense, Iranian Nuclear Policy,” Nuclear Vault.
103. NSA, “Brent Scowcroft, Next Steps in Our Negotiation of a Nuclear Agreement with Iran, February 4, 1976,” Nuclear Vault.
104. David Menasheri,” The Jews of Iran: Between the Shah and Khomeini,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and T. Katz (New York, 2002), p. 356.
105. On her wish to have Mr. Rahnama in the post, and the Shah’s dismissal of the idea and denigration of the candidacy as a “joke,” see PRO, “Iranian Foreign Ministers,” October 28, 1966, FO 371/18665.
106. Qassem Lajevardi, phone interview with author, October 14, 2003.
107. Ibid.
108. Qassem Lajevardi, Speech to the Senate, Official Transcript of Senate Proceedings, 2535/1976, p. 195.
109. Firouz Tofigh, “Development of Iran: A Statistical Note,” in Iran, Past, Present and Future, edited by Jane W. Jacqz (Aspen, 1976), pp. 57–69.
110. F. Najmabadi, “Strategies of Industrial Development in Iran,” in Iran, Past, Present and Future, edited by Jane W. Jacqz (Aspen, 1976), p. 105.
111. Hamideh Sedighi and Ahmad Ashraf, “The Role of Women in Iranian Development,” in Iran, Past, Present and Future, edited by Jane W. Jacqz (Aspen, 1976), pp. 201–210.
17 Architecture and Power
1. Abbas Milani, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (Washington, DC, 2004), p. 84.
2. Aziz Farmanfarmaian, interview with author, Paris, October 12, 2002.
3. Abbas Milani, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, DC, 2001). I have discussed these reports and rumors in the book at some length.
4. Princess Soraya, Palace of Solitude, p. 68.
5. Kamran Diba has recently published a memoir in the form of an interview with Reza Daneshvar. See Baghi Miyan Do Khiyaban [A Garden Between Two Streets: In Conversation with Reza Daneshvar] (Paris, 2010).
6. Keyvan Khosravani, personal correspondence with author, Paris, n.d.
7. Ibid.
8. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 207.
9. John B. Oakes, “The Persian Mind,” New York Times, September 30, 1975.
10. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 273.
11. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 399.
12. PRO, “Bribery and Corruption,” 27 June 1968, FCO 7/400. In the same report, it is claimed that one of the Shah’s brothers received $200,000 as a bribe. The embassy finds that allegation hard to believe “if only because no business firm in their right minds should rate his influence as worth that much.”
13. For example, Kamran Diba made just such an argument. See his A Garden Between Two Streets, pp. 229–231.
14. Philipe Jullian, “Architectural Digest Visits the Empress of Iran,” Architectural Digest, December 1977, pp. 68–72.
15. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 5, p. 30.
16. Ebrahim Golestan, interview with author. He has also referred to t
his episode in some of his interviews.
17. Khosravani, personal correspondence with author, n.d.
18. Alam, Daily Journals, vol. 3, p. 315.
19. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 300.
20. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 220.
21. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 164.
22. PRO, British Embassy, Tehran, to Foreign Ministry, 5 October, 1978, BT 241/3045.
23. Mehdi Samii, interview with author, Los Angeles, March 18, 2004.
24. Both the New York Times and the London Telegraph reported about this exhibit and about some of the cars in the collection. See Nazila Fathi, “Cars Seized After Iran’s Revolt Find Home and Showroom,” New York Times, September 8, 2003; “Shah’s Car Collection Is Still Waiting for the Green Light,” Telegraph, October 7, 2004.
25. Faryar Javaherian, “Shahyad: A Multi-Faceted Symbol,” Irannameh, 24 year, no 4. The article is an architect and art historian’s account of the building process. For the online version of the article, see http://www.fis-iran.org/fa/irannameh/volxxiv/iss4-mixed/faryar-javaherian.
26. NSA, CIA, “Iran in the 1980s,” document no. 1210.
27. Javaherian, Shahyad.
28. Darius Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (Syracuse, N.Y., 1992).
29. For a discussion of the film and how it was made, see the section on Golestan in my book, Persian Sphinx, pp. 241–263.
30. For an account of the plan and its implementation, see Abdul Reza Ansari et al., Khuzestan’s Development, edited by Gholam Reza Afkhami (Washington, DC, 1994).
18 The Perfect Spy
1. Any of the five volumes, hitherto published, are replete with such references.
2. Shah, Collected Works, p. 2055.
3. Some sources have argued that he was more than just friendly and was in fact an agent of the Soviet Union. For an account of his life, and the different narratives about his character, see for example, Sheikhol-Eslam, Javad, So’ud va Sogute Teymourtash [Rise and Fall of Teymourtash] (Tehran, 1379/1990).
4. In his Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University, Nasser Moghadam offers fascinating data on Iran’s foreign trade and the surprising significance of the Soviets during the Teymourtash period. See Nasser Moghadam, “Iran’s Foreign Trade Policy and Economic Development in the Interwar Period,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1956.