The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Baghi’s research was suppressed inside Iran but opened up new vistas of study for scholars elsewhere. As a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, the U.S. organization that monitors human rights around the world, I was curious to learn how the higher numbers became common currency in the first place. I interviewed Iranian revolutionaries and foreign correspondents whose reporting had helped cement the popular image of the Shah as a blood-soaked tyrant. I visited the Center for Documentation on the Revolution in Tehran, the state organization that compiles information on human rights during the Pahlavi era, and was assured by current and former staff that Baghi’s reduced numbers were indeed credible. If anything, my own research suggested that Baghi’s estimates might still be too high. For example, during the revolution the Shah was blamed for a cinema fire that killed 430 people in the southern city of Abadan; we now know that this heinous crime was carried out by a pro-Khomeini terror cell. Dozens of government officials and soldiers had been killed during the revolution, but their deaths were also attributed to the Shah and not to Khomeini. The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.

  In the seventies, a decade known for savage ideological struggles, the revised death toll in Iran’s 1971–1976 “dirty war” bears consideration. In his lifetime the Shah was often compared to Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, blamed for the deaths of 2,279 people and 30,000 torture victims, and also to the Argentine military junta, held culpable for 30,000 deaths and disappearances. Within the context of Cold War battlefronts in the Middle East and southwestern Asia, the Pahlavi state was not particularly repressive, especially when we consider that Saddam Hussein, in neighboring Iraq, was credited with the deaths of 200,000 political dissidents, while in Syria, President Hafez al-Assad crushed an Islamic uprising with 20,000 casualties. That Iran never experienced violence on such a scale suggests the Shah was a benevolent autocrat who actually enjoyed a greater degree of popular support among the Iranian people than was previously assumed. The television cameras that focused on large, angry crowds in Tehran in late 1978 told only part of the story, and foreign estimates of millions of anti-Shah protesters calling for the Shah’s overthrow turned out to be vastly inflated. Most scholars now agree that most farmers and workers stayed out of the demonstrations and many in fact supported the Shah to the end. So too did moderate religious leaders and many of their followers who defied Khomeini and engaged in frantic last-ditch efforts to find a compromise that would allow the Shah to stay in Iran and remain on the throne. Though Iran’s cities were in turmoil, large swaths of Iran never experienced the revolution, and for residents living in many rural districts life continued as before. What, then, are we to make of the Shah and the Iranian revolution?

  Historians often talk about the “uses and abuses” of history, and researching the Iranian revolution can be compared to entering a dark tunnel without a flashlight. The tunnel is filled with caverns, dead ends, and missed turns and lit only by the occasional flare of rumor, conspiracy theory, and outright lie. The Islamic Republic may be deeply invested in one version of events, but Iranian exiles remain bitterly divided among themselves about the Shah, his legacy, and the origins of the revolution. Many Iranians, even those who left Iran months before the worst unrest, still blame the Shah for abandoning the country to religious extremists. Others point the finger at Americans for betraying an ally. According to their “Green Belt” conspiracy the Shah was pushed out of power by the United States as part of a secret national security strategy to install a network of anti-Communist Islamist regimes on the southern borders of the old Soviet Union. No documents have ever surfaced to prove the conspiracy’s existence. Nonetheless, I felt duty-bound to raise the topic of betrayal during my interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Carter’s White House national security adviser. Our subsequent exchange could have been scripted by a late-night comedy writer. “Green what?” asked Brzezinski. He listened in silence as I explained his alleged “role” in Iran’s “grassy knoll” version of history. “First I’ve heard of it,” he chuckled and asked me to repeat the explanation a second time. “I have been accused of many things in my time but this one might be the best of the lot,” he said. He seemed more flattered than offended to be at the center of an epic conspiracy theory.

  Politicians and government officials with little or no training in history like to cite past events to justify their decisions and policies. This was certainly true during the Iranian revolution. U.S. officials harked back to two episodes in 1953 and 1963 when the Shah had approved the use of force to crush protests. When he failed to call out the troops a third time, in 1978, their calculations left them bereft of policy options. Iranian generals and officials used the same events as reference points, but for an entirely different reason. They knew that on both occasions the Shah had actually opposed the use of force, relenting only when stronger personalities pressed his hand. Khomeini’s totalitarian political views and violent hatred for Americans were matters of public record, yet U.S. ambassador William Sullivan compared him to Gandhi, the pacifist leader of India’s independence struggle against the British Raj. Iranians also turned to the past to help explain the catastrophe that befell their country. The Shah’s behavior was informed by other dates, most notably 1907, when Russia and Great Britain carved up Iran between them, and also 1941, when the Allies invaded Iran and ousted his father. His family members and aides feared the regicides of earlier revolutions. “I always had in mind the Romanovs,” said Queen Farah, who was outraged when a senior courtier compared her to Queen Marie Antoinette and her husband to Czar Nicholas II.

  * * *

  THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS AFTER his exile and on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his accession, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi has been reduced to a bloodless enigma. Puzzled by his decision to leave and not stay on and fight Khomeini, biographers over the years have resorted to dream interpretation and psychosexual analysis to describe his behavior. Others attributed his behavior to personal insecurities stemming from his relationship with a domineering father and the women in his life. “Everyone is a psychologist, you know?” Farah Pahlavi warily observes.

  I wondered how the Shah, so often derided as “weak,” held on to the Peacock Throne for thirty-seven years, making his the fifth-longest reign in the twenty-five-hundred-year history of the Persian monarchy. If the Shah really was as “stupid” as his detractors said, how did he successfully outmaneuver ruthless and wily American presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon? If the Shah was a “coward,” how to explain his remarkably cool behavior when he survived a plane crash and assassination attempts? If the Shah was “indecisive,” how did he engineer the 1973 “oil shock,” the greatest transfer of sovereign wealth in recorded history? Somehow the Shah achieved these feats while steering Iran through the treacherous currents of World War II and the Cold War and implementing one of the twentieth century’s great experiments in liberal social and economic reform. The Cold War was a brutal, bloody business during which leaders of frontline states like Iran were regularly overthrown and assassinated. Trapped between that cauldron and the rise of Islam, the Pahlavi Dynasty was swept away in a deluge that few kings or presidents, perhaps not even a de Gaulle, could have held back.

  What was true for the Shah was also true for his wife. Throughout history the royal consorts of reigning kings and emperors have usually been portrayed as appendages or spectators, as meddling shrews or naive dilettantes. Farah Pahlavi defied these stereotypes. Early in my research I came across an American diplomatic dispatch from January 1979 that referenced the Queen’s role in a final attempt to save the throne. This book provides new details about Farah Pahlavi’s life and the remarkable role she played during the critical last days of Imperial Iran. I
n these pages the Queen finally emerges from her husband’s shadow as a truly consequential figure in her own right, not only as one of the great women of Iranian history but also as the most accomplished female sovereign of the twentieth century. It is hardly any wonder that the Islamic Republic regards her as an existential threat or that so many Iranians still address her as madar, which translates literally as “mother.”

  I set out to write a book that would describe the interior life of the Iranian Imperial Family and the Pahlavi Court, while re-creating the fin de siècle atmosphere in Iran in 1978, the momentous year of revolution. Our understanding of Pahlavi-era Iran and the 1978–1979 revolution is moving into a new era of research and discovery. Although many of the principal figures have left the scene, many others were willing to share their experiences. They included Queen Farah; former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr; retired White House officials, including former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; and dozens of former senior Iranian government officials and members of the late Shah’s entourage, many of whom agreed to speak out for the first time. Memories change over time and most of my interviewees forgot dates and details of conversations or conflated one event with another. Fortunately, I could fact-check and cross-check their accounts with other interviewees as well as original primary-source documents, including diaries, letters, memoranda, and newspaper clippings. Hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library provided a unique insight into back-channel communications between the U.S. embassy and the National Security Council at the height of the revolution. As my research progressed it became clear that I was dealing with two different revolutionary narratives, one American and the other Iranian. As understood by the Americans, Iran’s revolution began on September 8, 1978, when army troops opened fire on protesters gathered in Jaleh Square in Tehran. But many Iranian interviewees assured me that the Pahlavi regime was almost certainly finished by the end of August 1978 and that the Shah accepted defeat four days before Jaleh Square.

  If the Iranians were indeed correct, if the struggle for Iran really was over before the revolution proper began, I had to make an intensive study of events as they unfolded in the months leading to unrest. To do that I painstakingly constructed a 242-page color-coordinated time line that spanned the crucial twenty-month period from January 1, 1977, through August 31, 1978, that decided the Shah’s fate. The time line expanded to include everything from weather reports and traffic conditions to movie and theater listings—anything to help me re-create daily life on the eve of revolution. The time line meant that I could follow the Shah, Queen Farah, President Carter, Ambassador Sullivan, and other personalities on a daily and even hourly basis during a critical two-year stretch. The time line yielded unexpected patterns, trends, and turning points forgotten, neglected, or otherwise overlooked by other scholars.

  This book is not intended as the final word on the Shah or the 1979 revolution—far from it. As our knowledge of events from the period expands, so too will our understanding of them change. This book will, I hope, shake up a historical narrative that for too long has felt too settled. No doubt it will upset some and delight others. “Blunt histories do not always meet with warm approval,” writes historian Margaret MacMillan. “Historians, of course, do not own the past. We all do. But because historians spend their time studying history, they are in a better position than most amateurs to make reasoned judgments. Historians, after all, are trained to ask questions, make connections, and collect and examine evidence. Ideally, they possess a considerable body of knowledge and an understanding of the context of particular times or events. Yet when they produce work that challenges deeply held beliefs and myths about the past, they are often accused of being elitist, nihilistic, or simply out of touch with that imaginary place ‘the real world.’ In the case of recent history, they are also told … that they cannot have an opinion if they were not there.”

  This book was researched and written by someone who was not there. Moreover, during the dozens of interviews I conducted for this book I was struck by how many of my Iranian interviewees confided that they felt more comfortable talking to a New Zealand–born historian than an ethnic Iranian scholar, whom they feared would cast judgment on them or misinterpret or even manipulate their words. For my purposes, at least, having an outsider’s perspective was a decisive factor in helping me to recover memories, re-create events, and revisit some of the lingering mysteries of the Iranian revolution, perhaps the most important yet misunderstood historical epic of our time.

  * * *

  SHE FLEW INTO Cairo on a Saturday evening.

  From the airport, Farah Pahlavi was driven by motorcade to the government guesthouse where she would stay for the next three days. At dinner she joined in the conversation and banter with the same small group of friends and loyalists who have been at her side since she came out in 1979. The table fell silent when she recalled that on her flight from Paris she had sat next to a young man who had been eager to talk about Iran, the Middle East, and politics.

  “When did you reveal yourself?” someone asked.

  “When he mentioned the Shah,” she said, trying to stifle her laughter.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I said, ‘I was his wife.’”

  “What was the look on his face?”

  Farah mimicked the poor man’s look of bug-eyed, openmouthed shock, and the table roared with laughter. She was in good spirits and happy to be back among friends.

  The next morning, after paying her respects at President Sadat’s bier, Queen Farah drove to the Al-Rifa’i Mosque, which stands on a hill overlooking Cairo. If the view overlooking the city is breathtaking, the mosque itself is one of the jewels of Islamic architecture, with soaring cathedral-like proportions. The Shah’s chamber is intimate and elegant. Farah, a trained architect, oversaw the design, and with a team of helpers she managed to purchase a block of Iranian marble, which first had to be shipped through Italy and then conveyed to Egypt without alerting the Iranian authorities. Her husband’s strong-willed sisters Ashraf and Shams had insisted that their brother should be buried and entombed with full pomp in the style of Napoleon, and they all but accused their sister-in-law of skimping on the Shah’s burial. She knew her husband preferred simplicity and took the dispute to his five children to ask them what they thought. “It’s beautiful and perfect,” they assured her, and the chamber was consecrated. Al-Rifa’i is known as the King’s Mosque and for a reason: the room adjacent to where the Shah lies holds the tombs of the last two kings of Egypt, Farouk and Faud.

  The public ceremonies ended and Jehan Sadat and the Egyptians quietly withdrew from the chamber. The doors closed behind Farah Pahlavi and she stood in silence. After a moment passed she knelt and kissed her husband’s catafalque, then stood with her eyes closed in quiet communion. She was talking to the Shah.

  1

  THE SHAH

  A country’s king can never be at peace,

  The fears and trials he faces never cease.

  —THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS

  I want my son to inherit not dreams but

  the realization of a dream.

  —THE SHAH

  His day began at seven o’clock with a soft knock on the bedroom door at Niavaran, the palace compound where he lived and worked in northern Tehran. “Good morning, Your Majesty,” said Amir Pourshaja, and by the time he returned from the bathroom the valet had set out a tray with toast, a little butter and honey, five or six pieces of prune, and a glass of orange juice. On occasion, the cook might liven the plate with two or three pieces of grapefruit, but in general he preferred plain, modest fare—he had a sensitive stomach and was allergic to onions, strawberries, and Iran’s famous caviar. A military aide brought in official correspondence and the morning papers, both foreign and domestic, to be read while he ate and his wife slept on. He received his first intelligence briefing of the day before he started reading.

  The King
dom of Iran, which Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had ruled over as Shahanshah or King of Kings for the past thirty-six years, occupied a vast southwest Asian desert plateau larger in size than Great Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany combined. An hour earlier, Amir had telephoned officials in each of Iran’s twenty-two provinces to collect their individual weather reports. What they told him was important because it usually determined the mood of the Shah—and thus the mood of his thirty-five million subjects—for the remainder of the day. News of rain brought cheer and satisfaction. No rain meant a furrowed brow and gloom. “His Majesty always worried about the weather,” said Amir. “He worried all the time. Because he knew weather affected the crops, and crops affected the people.” One morning, Amir told the Shah that it had rained during the night: “He was very happy.” So happy indeed that he walked over to the window in search of a tree branch moist with precipitation. When he couldn’t find one he turned to Amir with disappointment writ on his face: “It’s not wet! You told me it rained!” He knew exactly how many millimeters had fallen in each city in each province. He knew the amount of water in each of the dams. He knew because he had built them all, twenty-one to date, and often during the rainy season or after a big snowfall he liked to fly across the country in his executive jet to check the water levels from the air. One day at the Caspian, where he spent a part of each summer, the Shah peered off into the distance, staring up at the cloudless blue sky as if willing something to happen. One perplexed visitor, seeing his head craned for so long in the same position, worried that His Majesty had developed arthritis. “What is he doing?” he implored the household physician. “Looking for rain,” sighed his companion.