by Robert Fisk
Just what life for the Shah was like emerged when the new information ministry, rejoicing in the name of the “Ministry of Islamic Guidance,” asked us to take a look at the Niavaran Palace in north Tehran. If Richard the Third really did offer his kingdom for a horse, then the Shah of Iran paid for his freedom with a clutch of palaces, a heap of priceless Persian carpets, a Marc Chagall sketch, a 22-carat gold seventeenth-century model of a Chinese slave ship, a two-storey library, a set of pianos that would send a music college into ecstasy and two solid gold telephones.
Standing beneath the silver birches on the windy lawn of the Niavaran, an Iranian government official made one of the more historic sales of the century sound like nothing but a momentary hiccup in the progress of the revolution—which was what it would turn out to be. “We will put the contents up for auction,” he announced. “Then the palaces will be turned into museums.” So we were left to watch a turbaned mullah and two men armed with G3 automatic rifles as they pulled and tugged a 30-foot-square handwoven crimson-and-gold Isfahan rug across the inlaid wooden floor of the Shah’s drawing room. Oriental princesses, plumed birds and exotic beasts of prey were tangled through the arabesque embroideries and each carpet was neatly tagged with an inventory number: proof that while the revolution might have its ups and downs, Iran’s new rulers had a head for efficiency. In the previous few weeks, the Shah’s carpets had reportedly raised $15 million.
One had to admit that the Shah had the most dreadful taste in furniture. French baroque chairs nestled against glass and steel tables while the most grotesque urns—mutated by some silversmith’s black magic into ugly peahens—sat upon desks of delicately carved and mosaic-encrusted wood. Walls of cut glass with a powdering of dust upon them suggested a British cinema of the 1930s. This was how the Shah and his wife left their palace in January 1979 when they set off for a “holiday” and eternal exile.
Fate does not usually vouchsafe to ordinary folk the right to roam around a Shah’s gilded palace, and strange things happen when mere mortals are let loose among such opulence. When the international press were invited into what Abolhassan Sadeq of the guidance ministry sarcastically called “the Shah’s slum,” there were scenes befitting the Ostrogoth descent on Rome. We tripped over piles of carpets and surged into the great library to discover what the Shah read in his spare time. There were leather-bound volumes of Voltaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, Plutarch, Shakespeare and Charles de Gaulle. The entire works of Winston Churchill rested against Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner—a work the Shah might have found suitable reading on his long journey of exile—and biographies of Mahatma Gandhi. My People by Abba Eban, the former Israeli foreign minister—in fact, his book was partly written by an editor of Commentary magazine—lay on a lowly shelf with the author’s handwritten dedication to “His Imperial Majesty, the Shah of Shahs.” On another rack were the Goebbels diaries.
In the Shah’s personal office, the guards could scarce restrain us from dialling a line on the golden telephones. On a balcony above the living room, a youth with a rifle over his shoulder watched with an expression of perceptible concern while I played an execrable two-finger version of Bach’s Air on a G String on a harpsichord presented to the Shah by King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of the Belgians. Souvenir-hunters would be able to bid for the toys that once belonged to Princess Leila, the Shah’s eight-year-old daughter. Miniature aircraft and toy bears lay near a cupboard not far from her four-poster bed. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of the American president’s family with a handwritten greeting: “With best wishes, Rosalynn and Amy Carter.” A blackboard carried Leila’s first efforts at writing in chalk the European version of Arabic numerals. In the Shah’s study, the desk calendar still registered 16 January, the day on which the monarch left his realm. In the golden ashtray I found five dusty cigarette ends, testimony to the last depressed hours of imperial rule.
We had been taken earlier to the slums of south Tehran in a heavy-handed though quite effective effort by the guidance ministry to point up the different lifestyles of the Shah and his people. Children played upon the earth floor of No. 94 Gord Najhin Place and women carried their washing over open drains. Tehran’s slums were less poverty-encrusted than Cairo’s tenements and the Shah’s palace was modest by Saudi standards. But we got the point—even if the smell of sewage did mix oddly with the expensive perfumes of the ministry girls.
There was much that was odd about Tehran. The sheer normality of the great, dirty, traffic-clogged city was more astounding than the crisis in Iranian–American relations. For all the talk of fanatical mobs and economic chaos, I could still catch the Number 20 bus—a green-painted Leyland double-decker—into the centre of town, go shopping for French clothes in expensive stores or call in for a snack at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Iranians weaned on the American way of life could no longer buy Skippy peanut butter or Kraft cheese spread at the Forshagh Bozorg department store and, in keeping with Khomeini’s views on the general appearance of women, French and American cosmetics had been banned. Tehran was not an attractive city by either Western or oriental standards. Its square blocks and the architectural poverty of the shop façades built in the 1960s gave the place a sterile, curiously eastern European air. Even Tehranis, however, were still having problems with their city’s political geography, for nearly every main street in the capital had undergone an identity change in accordance with revolutionary instructions. Thus Pahlavi Street disappeared to become Dr. Hossein Fatimi Street, named after Mossadeq’s foreign minister, who was executed two months after Operation Ajax.26
The Reuters news agency bureau in Tehran became a place of spiritual repair. When I first pushed open the door, I found its bureau chief, Harvey Morris, surrounded by clouds of thick cigarette smoke with an open bottle of Scotch on his desk and a look of pained surprise on his face. With his Mark Twain moustache and unruly hair, Harvey found the revolution as outrageous as it was brave, as farcical as it was cruel. He had to protect his staff from the komitehs, keep his Iranian freelancers out of prison and soft-soap the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. And it was the ministry that was causing him his latest crisis. “They’ve told me they want to know the history of the Reuters news agency,” he announced with a frown. “So the great and the good at my London office have just sent me a tome about our esteemed founder, Paul Julius, Freiherr von Reuter, to give to the ministry. But it turns out that the good baron built half the bloody railways in this country and the Reuter Concession of 1872 granted British subjects a monopoly over the entire economic and financial resources of Iran. Christ! How can I tell the arseholes at the ministry that the founder of our news agency was worse than the fucking Shah?”
I saw his point. But Harvey was a smart guy, his laid-back, tired appearance a disguise behind which lay an able, humorous and sometimes a wicked mind. I would drop by to punch my copy on his wire machine each evening and tell him what I’d learned from my day’s street reporting or my travels outside Tehran. He would tip me off on press conferences or scandals—like the one in which television head Qotbzadeh ordered his secretary to photocopy a bunch of official papers in which she had found a letter from his French mistress. The letter was duplicated a thousand times. My hotel phone would sometimes ring in the morning with a call from Harvey. “Fisky, you might just like to know that Khalkhali’s lads have topped another bunch of folk for being ‘corrupt on earth.’ ” Or, more frequently, he’d announce that there was “a demonstration outside the American embassy—better you than me!”
It is strange that the seizure of the U.S. embassy and its aftermath should have become so tedious an assignment for journalists. After all, it was to lead to an abortive U.S. military rescue mission and, ultimately, the destruction of Carter’s presidency. It created a burning sense of humiliation within subsequent U.S. administrations that led America into a series of political and military disasters in the Middle East. Most of the U.S. diplomats and other American hostages remained captive for 444 d
ays; they were only freed after the U.S. and Iranian governments agreed on a series of complex economic and banking arrangements, at which point the captives were taken to Mehrabad airport and escorted out of Iran by Algerian commandos.
Perhaps it was the impossible equation which the embassy occupation represented. The Americans were no more going to hand the Shah back to Iranian “justice” than the Iranians were going to release their captives until Washington had been sufficiently humbled. Removing the Shah from his New York hospital bed and dumping him in Panama was not going to satisfy the revolutionaries in Tehran. And so each day we would watch the tens of thousands of demonstrators, students, armed guards and members of Muslim organisations streaming past the embassy—now officially referred to as the “U.S. Nest of Spies”—hurling to heaven their demand for the Shah’s immediate return and condemning President Jimmy Carter as a “warmonger.” They became familiar to the point of monotony. Their cry of “Down with the Carter, Down with the Shah” would be taken up for six or seven minutes, interspersed with “Yankee go home.” Hamburger stands, beetroot-juice sellers and postcard stalls cluttered the roadside.
The crowds were strategically placed to catch the television cameras, and journalists were allowed—indeed, encouraged—to approach the embassy and stare through the black wrought-iron gates. The hostages locked in the main embassy buildings—the men with their hands tied—could not be seen, although students had spray-painted slogans on the roof of the reception block. Just inside the forecourt, they now erected a painting 5 metres high, a symbolic work inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945; in this case, however, Muslim revolutionaries had replaced the marines and they were struggling to raise a green Islamic flag, one end of which had miraculously turned into a hand strangling the Stars and Stripes. The occupation had thus become theatre, complete with painted scenery. It was more than this. It was a carnival.
It was also a mistake to believe that this represented a falsehood. Individual Iranians expressed their contempt for the Shah all too eloquently—and all too often in American accents. “You wanna know why we want the damned Shah?” a student at Tehran Polytechnic University asked me. “Well, I tell you—it’s ’cos that man stole fifty billion dollars from Iran.” An Iranian air force private wandered up to join our conversation. “That bastard staged the biggest heist in history,” he said. The airman’s accent sounded like east side New York City, and it said more about Iran’s relationship with America than any amount of political rhetoric. Never before, it seemed, had so many revolutionaries lived, worked or been educated in the country which they now held responsible for so much of their past suffering.27
During the Shah’s rule, there were sometimes half a million Iranians in the United States. Many were at American universities or colleges; some were escaping from the Shah’s regime. Many thousands were undergoing military training; one of the perks available to Iranian army officers was a regular free trip to New York on an Iranian air force jet. Dr. Ibrahim Yazdi, who had just resigned as foreign minister, worked for seventeen years as a doctor in America, associating with Iranian students opposed to the Shah. Dr. Mustafa Chamran, who had been appointed assistant prime minister in July 1979 and was to die a “martyr” in the Iran–Iraq War, helped set up the Islamic Students Association in America in 1962, together with Yazdi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the acting minister of “national guidance.”
An Iranian girl who had studied journalism in New York—who had experienced, as she put it, the fruits of American democracy—demanded to know why Americans were prepared to support the Shah’s regime when it had opposed individual freedom and dissent. “In the United States, we learned all about liberty and the freedom to say what we wanted to say. Yet America went on propping up the Shah and forcing him to squander Iran’s wealth on arms. Why did it do that? Why was America a democracy at home and a dictator abroad?” There was, of course, a contradiction here. The fact that President Carter, whose campaign for human rights was well known in Iran, should have continued to honour America’s political commitment to the Shah before the revolution—in however tentative a way— was regarded as hypocrisy. Yet the Carter administration was opposed to the anti-democratic nature of the Shah’s regime and, within the limits of diplomacy, Carter had urged the Iranian monarch to liberalise his country.
Iranians argued that this was too ambiguous a position to respect, and it was difficult to read some of Carter’s statements during the last months of the Shah’s rule without sensing a certain naiveté in the American president. In November 1978, for example, Carter was describing the Shah as “a friend, a loyal ally”; he would say only that criticism of the Shah’s police state was “sometimes perhaps justified,” adding that he did not know the “details” of the criticism. Yet Iranian condemnation often seemed directed at the actions of previous American administrations: at the Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon governments. The students, when they shouted abuse about Carter, appeared to be voicing sentiments they once felt about the policies of Henry Kissinger, who had so powerful a role (as U.S. secretary of state) when they themselves worked and lived in the United States. Comparatively few had any experience of the Carter administration—except for the knowledge that Carter refused to deport the Shah to Iran. Few of the students outside the embassy gave much thought to the long-term outcome of the embassy occupation, to the possibility that it might result in the election of Ronald Reagan, who would take a much less tolerant interest in world affairs and now a much greater enthusiasm for Iran’s external enemies.
Iranian reaction to the smaller “Satanic” powers was almost quixotic. At the British embassy, still daubed with paint from earlier demonstrations, a crowd arrived to express its satisfaction that Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, had not been given asylum in the United Kingdom. When the same demonstrators reached the French embassy—the country in which Bakhtiar had been given temporary residence—they expressed their appreciation at the sanctuary France had given Ayatollah Khomeini before the revolution.
But no political démarche could unscramble the U.S. embassy siege. The Europeans, the Papal Nuncio, Sean MacBride—a founder of Amnesty International—seventy-five ambassadors representing the entire diplomatic corps in Tehran: all found their appeals ignored. The ambassadors could not even visit Bruce Laingen, who was in the Iranian Foreign Ministry when the embassy was taken and remained there until his release in 1981. Ayatollah Khomeini sternly informed the Pope that “Jesus Christ would have punished the Shah.” Iranian television broke into a showing of The Third Man to announce that Iran was halting its daily supply of 600,000 barrels of oil to the United States—a rather hurried response to the decision already taken by the Carter administration to suspend oil imports from Iran. On 14 November, Iran announced the withdrawal of $12 billion of government reserves from American banks and Carter promptly froze Iranian funds in the United States. Each new step reinforced the power of the theocracy governing Iran and reduced the influence of the leftists.
Half a million students gathered near Tehran University on 15 November in support of the Fedayeen, the left-wing guerrilla movement which was now illegal in Iran and which had not supported the embassy takeover. But inside the campus of Tehran University I found Mehdi Bazargan at Friday prayers, sitting in a grey sweater, cross-legged on the ground, and listening to Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the head of the committee of experts who had just written the new Islamic constitution for Iran. He was telling his audience that “the will of the Iranian people was behind the occupation” of the embassy. Yazdi sat next to Bazargan, who had just resigned because the embassy siege had undermined his government. Article 5 of Montazeri’s new constitution stated that a religious leader with majority support—“a just, pious, enlightened, courageous and sagacious person”— would become guardian of the nation. It was obvious that this arduous, not to say spiritually wearying role, would be given to none other than Ayatollah Kho
meini.
In this new theocracy, there was going to be no place for the communist Tudeh party. After the overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953, the Shah had executed some of its leaders; others fled the country. Soon it would be the party’s fate to be crushed all over again, this time by Khomeini. But in the winter of 1979, it was still officially supporting the Ayatollah—even if Nouredin Kianouri’s office walls were the only ones in Tehran without a picture of the Imam. There was a copper-plate portrait of Lenin above the stairs and the secretary-general of Tudeh frowned when I asked him why the Ayatollah was not staring stiffly down upon his desk.
“The cult of personality does not exist here in Iran,” I was told. “We are not like the English, who have a picture of the Queen hanging in every room.” Kianouri laughed rather too much at this joke, aware that the parallel was somewhat inexact. He was a precise, faintly humorous man whose balding head, large eyes and bushy grey moustache made him look like a character from a great French novel, but the political language of this former professor—Tehran University and the East Berlin Academy of Architecture—had more in common with Pravda than with Zola. Tudeh was involved in “the radical struggle against imperialism” and “the struggle for the reorganisation of social life, especially for the oppressed strata of society.” The party wanted a “popular democracy,” not the bourgeois variety so popular in the West. And in so far as it was possible, Tudeh, Iran’s oldest political party, wanted the same things as Ayatollah Khomeini. This was the theory and Kianouri held to it bravely. The truth was that Tudeh’s views on the new Iran were almost exactly the same as those of the Soviet Union—which, for the moment, was in favour of the Ayatollah.
