by Robert Fisk
In the event, the Shah died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was lowered into a modest tomb in the al-Rifai mosque. Six years later, in the heat of summer, I went with an Iranian friend to look at his tomb. It was midday and there was only one guardian in the mosque, an old, silver-haired man who, for a pittance, promised to take us into the last resting place of the man who thought he was the spiritual descendant of Cyrus the Great. There was a single marble slab and, resting upon it, a handwritten poem declaring eternal faith in the Shah from a member of the Javidan Guards. A spray of withered roses lay on the tomb. The old guardian wandered up to us and muttered “ Baksheesh.” He settled for 50 piastres. In the end, it cost the equivalent of 40 cents to sit at the feet of the King of Kings.
The Islamic revolutionaries who now emerged behind Ayatollah Khomeini were oddly middle-class. Men like Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the head of the television service, later foreign minister—and later still, executed for allegedly plotting against the Ayatollah—were graduates of American universities. They spoke English with American accents, which meant that they could appear surprisingly at ease on the U.S. television networks. Many, like the new deputy prime minister Amir Abbas Entezam, flaunted their un-proletarian origins. “I am proud that this has been a middle-class revolution,” Entezam announced to me one day. He leaned forward in his chair and tapped his chest. “I’m proud of that,” he repeated. By ministerial standards, his was a modest office with only two desks, a sofa, a clutter of chairs and a telephone that purred unanswered in the corner. It would have been difficult to find anyone more middle-class than Entezam, with his American education and well-travelled career as an engineer. Yet in his way, he was telling the truth. For while the physical power behind the revolution lay in those colossal street demonstrations by the urban poor and the Islamic revivalists, it was the middle class from the bazaar, the tens of thousands of merchants from the Middle East’s largest souk whom the Shah tried to tame with a system of guilds, that provided the economic backing for Khomeini’s return. It was this merchant class and its alliance with the mullahs that emerged as the critical combination of secular and religious opposition.
That is why Iran’s revolution had until now generally avoided the more traditional path of such events, the looting of the homes and property of the rich. That is why you could still take a taxi across Tehran and drive into the northern suburbs beneath the mountains to find that the luxury apartments and opulent town houses with their tree-shaded verandas and goldfish ponds had been left untouched. Accumulated wealth had not been appropriated by the state. By late March of 1979, however, this had begun to change. In the north of Iran, around the Caspian, factories were being taken over by workers—leftists had led the revolution east of Kurdistan and the mosque had never held sway there—and property was confiscated. The interim government appointed by Khomeini was receiving reports of further confiscations near Mashad and the pattern was beginning to spread to Tehran.
Just over a week earlier, Faribourz Attapour, one of the city’s most prolific and outspoken journalists, was told that his father had been arrested. It turned out that Attapour Senior, who owned a small estate on the Caspian coast, had walked into his local Tehran bank to cash a cheque and had been detained by the cashier, who thought that if his customer looked rich then he must indeed be wealthy—and that if he was indeed wealthy, then he must also be corrupt. Old Mr. Attapour, who had been a soldier in the Imperial Army but retired from military service twenty-seven years earlier, was seventy years old and deeply in debt. Nonetheless, he was collected from the bank by a heavily armed revolutionary komiteh and freighted off to the Qasr prison. At least, that is where Faribourz Attapour thought his father was being held.
No official statement had been issued by the komiteh and even the government could not gain access to the jail. There were now an estimated 8,000 prisoners inside—there had been around 2,000 at the time of the Shah—and it took the Red Cross several weeks to gain admission. So it was not surprising that Attapour was angry. “This revolution has deteriorated into petty vengeance and tyranny,” he said. “It can only be compared to the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution. The merchants in the bazaar have more money than my father but they do not care about his fate. Nor do the so-called religious leaders. I spoke on the telephone to the local ayatollah from our area of the Caspian and he said that my father must be corrupt because he was rich. He would not even let me answer his accusation on the telephone. He just hung up.”
Attapour was daily expecting his own arrest, but three days after we spoke his journalistic voice was silenced when Tehran’s two English-language newspapers announced that they were suspending publication. The Tehran Journal, for which Attapour wrote, gave economic reasons for its closure but for weeks revolutionary komitehs had been denouncing the paper as “anti-Islamic.” Most of the staff had received anonymous phone calls threatening their lives. Attapour’s parallel with the French revolution—so much at variance with Edward Mortimer’s enthusiasm—was not lost on the most dogmatic of Iran’s new regime. Dr. Salamatian, a political aide at the foreign ministry, found an agreeable comparison. There were fewer executions in Iran than in the French or Russian revolutions, he said. When I pointed out to him that there were no firing squads at all after the 1974 Portuguese revolution, he snapped back at me: “But in Portugal they were only getting rid of Caetano—we have been overthrowing more than two thousand years of monarchy.” This was a curious response, since the idea that Persia had lived under a seamless monarchy for 2,300 years was a figment of the Shah’s imagination, a myth propagated to justify his authoritarian rule.
That this rule was authoritarian was one of the few common denominators among those who supported the revolution, for the Left in Iran already realised that the clerics were installing themselves in power. “Why condemn us for hunting down the Shah’s murderers?” Salamatian asked. “In the West, you kept the Nazi Rudolf Hess in prison in Germany. We regard the agents of Savak as Nazi-type criminals. You in the West put Nazis on trial. Why shouldn’t we put our Nazis on trial?”
And how could one argue with this when reporters like Derek Ive of the Associated Press had managed, very briefly, to look inside a Savak agent’s house just before the revolution was successful? He entered the building when a crowd stormed through the front door. “There was a fish-pond outside,” he told me. “There were vases of flowers in the front hall. But downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bed frames so that the people strapped to them could be brought down onto the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer. They had been shaving off people’s hands.” Ive found a pile of human arms in a corner and in a further cell he discovered pieces of a corpse floating in several inches of what appeared to be acid. Just before the Shah’s soldiers burst back into the rear of the building, he snatched some quick photographs of the torture apparatus.
After the revolution, we were able to meet some of the Shah’s top Savak agents. Sitting in Evin prison in their open-neck shirts, winter cardigans and corduroys, drawing nervously on American cigarettes, the eighteen prisoners looked nothing like the popular image of secret policemen. From the moment they were brought into the room—a dingy, rectangular office that doubled on occasions as a revolutionary court—these middle-aged, over-friendly men either smiled or just stared at us as government officials described them as criminals.
But they had disturbing and sometimes frightening stories to tell. Hassan Sana, the economic and security adviser to the deputy head of Savak, talked of British intelligence cooperation with the Shah, a friendly liaison which, he claimed, prompted British agents to pass to their Iranian counterparts information about Iranian students in Britain. Sana, a chainsmoker with dark glasses and an apparent passion for brightly coloured sh
irts, said that British assistance enabled Savak to watch or arrest students on their return to Tehran from London.
He spoke, too, of how Savak agents were flown from New York by the CIA for lessons in interrogation techniques at a secret American military base, a mysterious journey that took four hours flying across the United States in an aircraft with darkened windows. We had earlier toured the Savak interrogation centre in central Tehran, where former inmates described how they had been tortured. A black-tiled room with a concrete floor was all that remained of the chamber—almost identical to the one Ive had discovered—where prisoners were roasted on beds over gas burners. In Evin, for one terrible moment, Mohamed Sadafi—a Savak agent who had been a weightlifter—was confronted by a man whose daughter died in Sadafi’s personal custody.
“You killed my daughter,” the man shouted. “She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted.” Sadafi glanced briefly at the man. “Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody,” he replied quietly. The father said there was not even a sheet in the prison from which an inmate could hang herself. Yes there was, Sadafi said. He had himself seen the laundry bills at Evin.
Upon such horror the Shah’s regime was maintained, and upon such fearful scenes the revolution was fuelled. If there was a cause for surprise in Iran at this early stage of the new regime, it was not that the revolution had claimed so many victims among the Shah’s retinue but that it had claimed so few. But the revolution was unfinished. It was not going to end at that friendly bourgeois stage at which the Portuguese grew tired, nor was there any common ground between the new Islamic Republic and the people’s democracy that Iranian left-wing groups had been propagating. The Left was now more active—there were fire-fights in the streets every night—and the situation would only be exacerbated by Iran’s constantly worsening social conditions. Even Khomeini described the country as “a slum.”25
The security authorities of the new Islamic state remained convinced, however, that some in the new government regarded the United States as a potential partner rather than the “Great Satan” of the street demonstrations.
And they were right. After the U.S. embassy was seized in November 1979 by the “Muslim Students following the Line of the Imam,” Iranian security men found tons of shredded U.S. diplomatic correspondence which they spent months reconstructing by laboriously pasting documents back together. The papers included an embarrassing quantity of material about Abbas Amir Entezam, the deputy prime minister, and his contacts with the U.S. government. At first this was on a formal basis—the American embassy remained open after the revolution and U.S. officials routinely met Iranian foreign ministry staff to arrange the repatriation of American military staff and civilians—and the embassy told Entezam in March 1979 that “the United States desires to normalize its relations with Iran at a steady pace.” Entezam replied, according to the documents, that “his government also wanted a good relationship with the United States . . . the prime minister, Bazargan . . . had recently expressed this sentiment publicly.”
Within a few days, however, Entezam was expressing his government’s desire to “share intelligence information with USG [U.S. Government].” The Americans had, incredibly, already given Entezam a “paper on Afghanistan”—the Iranians were increasingly fearful that the Soviet Union might invade their eastern neighbour—but now Entezam explained that his government was more concerned about “internal security threats.” According to the U.S. embassy report of a further meeting in May, Entezam said that “PGOI [Provisional Government of Iran] was concerned about possible meddling by Iraqis in Khuzestan province as well as activities of PLO and Libyans.” Entezam said that “PGOI had information that George Habash [the leader of the Syrian-supported Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] had recently visited several Gulf countries . . . presumably with a view to causing trouble for Iran.” The PLO’s office in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz was also causing concern but “shaking his head, he [Entezam] said his government could do nothing about it . . . because it was Khomeini’s desire that it be opened.”
This was incendiary material. Here was Entezam—who only a few weeks earlier was boasting to me about the “middle-class” nature of the revolution— discussing Iran’s security fears with the CIA; not only revealing his own intelligence information but expressing his exasperation with the most revered Islamic figure in the country for endangering that security. In June, Entezam was asking for U.S. information on “Iraqi intentions towards Iran.” By this time, there had been frequent artillery exchanges across the Iran–Iraq border, and the U.S. embassy chargé, “after remarking that he was not sure who cast the first stone . . . speculated on the possibility of the Iraqis attempting to create a ‘prickly hedge’ along Iraq’s border with Iran à la one-time British policy on the Durand Line.”
Bruce Laingen, the American chargé, held further meetings with Entezam and within weeks Entezam—known in the U.S. cable traffic by the rather unromantic code-name “SD/PLOD/1”—was receiving direct visits from senior CIA officials. When he became an Iranian ambassador based in Sweden, Entezam was given an intelligence briefing by CIA agent George Cave, who was later to be a leading figure in the 1985–86 Contra scandal. In Tehran there had been further meetings between the CIA and Bazargan, Entezam and Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister. Cave himself later visited Tehran and agreed with Entezam that there should be briefings—again, I quote the reconstructed documents—“every three to six months, with spot information being passed if particularly important. Entezam asked if there could be a contact in Tehran to exchange information on a regular basis. (Note: Cave was introduced as senior briefing officer from intelligence community. Term CIA was never used.)”
When the American embassy in Tehran was invaded after the Shah had been admitted to the United States, the explosive nature of Entezam’s CIA contacts was revealed in the shredded files that the young Iranian men and women were painstakingly pasting back together. Bazargan and Yazdi were discredited and Entezam arrested and put on trial for treason, barely escaping execution when he was given a life sentence in 1981. Entezam always maintained that he was a true revolutionary merely seeking to maintain relations with the Americans in the interests of Iran.
Massoumeh Ebtekar, among the principal “invaders” of the embassy, saw it quite differently. “The CIA apparently believed that it could manipulate any revolution or political establishment if it could successfully infiltrate its top ranks early on,” she was to write. “In Iran, the agency was particularly intent on doing so. After all, it had plenty of past experience.” According to Ebtekar, the “students of the Imam” also found counterfeit identity cards and passports for CIA agents in the embassy, including stamps and seals for airport entry and exit visas in Europe and Asia, as well as 1,000 false Ghanaian passports. Other documents dealt with pro-monarchists “who were involved in terror killings.” But if another Operation Ajax was ever considered in Washington, it surely died in November 1979.
Our own life in those early weeks of the Islamic Republic was not without its humour. As long as Iran kept to the system of free visas operating under the Shah, we could enter and leave Iran as often as we wished—I even flew to Dublin for a weekend break, leaving Tehran on a Friday morning, returning by Monday night—and only slowly did the regime’s new laws affect us. For months, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran—later renamed Laleh, “Rose,” after the symbol of revolution—we could still drink vodka with blinis. But the ban on alcohol was quickly imposed. I still possess a memorable note from the Tehran hotel management pushed under my door on 21 March 1979. “Due to the limited supply of alcoholic beverages in the country and the unexpected [sic] in the mark-ups in the price of these itesm [sic],” it said, “the management has no alternative but to a 20% increase. Thank you.” Not long afterwards, a revolutionary komiteh invited journalists to watch the destruction of the remaining stocks of Satanic alcohol in the hotel’s cellars. As fi
lm cameras whirred, gunmen hurled Pol Roger champagne bottles into the bottom of the empty swimming pool, along with the finest French wines and upended boxes of Gordon’s gin. From the two-foot-deep field of glass at the bottom of the pool, the stench of alcohol permeated the hotel for days afterwards. A South Korean restaurant continued to elude the authorities, its staff burying cases of German beer in their garden. Clients had to wait for ten minutes until each beer can arrived at their table covered in earth.
And the middle classes so beloved of Entezam continued to entertain. One evening I was invited to dinner at a villa of marble stone floors and tasteless pseudo-baroque paintings in north Tehran where a young couple entertained several Iranian writers and myself with poetry-reading and a meal of pre-revolutionary abundance, along with obligatory glasses of home-made vodka. I was intrigued by the attractive hostess because she was rumoured to have been one of the Shah’s last mistresses. Whenever the Shah wished to make love to a woman, it was said, she would be invited to a side door of his palace, would spend two hours with him in a discreet salon and—before leaving—would be presented with a Labrador puppy dog as a token of the King of Kings’ affection. Given the grotesque reputation of the man, I often wondered why Tehran was not populated with hundreds of stray Labradors. I had dismissed all such thoughts when the dinner ended and I was saying goodbye to my hosts. It was at this moment that the kitchen door burst open and something vast and furry catapulted into me, to the consternation of the couple. I looked up to see the friendly face of a yellow Labrador, looking at me as if it had spent all evening waiting to make my acquaintance.
