The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

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  BEFORE THE CAMERAS and the crowds, His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Emperor of Iran, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God, and Custodian of the Shia Faith, exuded the storybook glamour of the bejeweled Peacock Throne and the majesty of twenty-five centuries of Persian monarchy. By December 1977 he had reigned as King-Emperor for so many years that most Iranians could remember no other ruler and most citizens of other nations knew no other Iranian. In the realm of international politics he had outlived or outlasted contemporaries, allies, and adversaries, including Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Kennedy, Nixon, Mao, Franco, and de Gaulle. Three brilliant marriages to three equally remarkable women had sired five children and made Iran’s Imperial Family a staple of the picture magazines and gossip columns. The Shah’s bemedaled uniforms, aquiline features, and silver hair had graced television news programs and the front pages of newspapers for so long that one visitor to Niavaran, upon meeting him, experienced “a feeling of déjà vu, as you do with some landscapes—as I did when I saw Machu Picchu or the Great Wall for the first time.”

  The life story of the Shah of Iran was worthy of the Persian Book of Kings, the literary epic by Ferdowsi that traced the rise and fall of Iran’s royal dynasties through the centuries. After succeeding to the Peacock Throne in 1941, when he was barely out of his teens, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi survived mortal threats that would have broken lesser men: the wartime invasion and occupation of his country, Communist subversion, a plane crash, assassination attempts, coup plots, dynastic intrigue, religious revolts, constitutional crises, and even a brief spell in exile. In an era when other kings and queens were forced from their thrones or reduced to a life spent cutting ribbons and shaking hands, the Shah bucked the tide of royalty in the twentieth century when he decided to rule as well as reign. Not content to merely gather power, in 1963 he embarked on his White Revolution, an ambitious program of social and economic reforms to transform Iran from a semifeudal baron state into a modern industrial powerhouse. Peasant farmers were freed from bondage to landowners. Forests and waterways were nationalized. Women were granted their civil, legal, and political rights. By the time the Shah staged his belated coronation four years later, Iran’s rate of economic growth outstripped those of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Critics who had once dismissed Iran’s King as a callow playboy now applauded his achievements and acumen. “We are delighted to salute the Shah of Iran on the day of his Coronation,” declared Britain’s Daily Mail. “During his 26-year reign he has never once involved his country in war. He has shown the way to beat hunger, want, squalor and disease by methods from which other countries could learn.”

  The Shah didn’t stop there. In the early seventies he exploited Cold War tensions to achieve regional hegemony over the Persian Gulf, then pulled off the coup of the century by engineering the December 1973 “oil shock.” The overnight doubling of the price of oil achieved the single greatest transfer of wealth between sovereign states in recorded history. Flush with his new billions, the leader of the world’s second largest oil exporter lavished resources on industry, education, health, welfare, the arts, and the armed forces. At the heart of his program of reform was an ironclad commitment to education. Between 1967 and 1977 the number of universities increased in number from 7 to 22, the number of institutions of advanced learning rose from 47 to 200, and the number of students in higher education soared from 36,742 to 100,000. Iran’s literacy programs were among the most innovative and effective anywhere in the world, so that by 1977 the number of Iranians able to read and write had climbed from just 17 percent to more than 50 percent. The Shah embarked on a military buildup, placed orders for nuclear power stations, and announced that the days when foreign powers could get their way in Iran and the region were over. “Nobody can dictate to us,” he boasted. “Nobody can wave a finger at us because we will wave back.” In 1974 Time magazine anointed him “Emperor of Oil” when it declared that the Shah “had brought his country to a threshold of grandeur that is at least analogous to what Cyrus the Great achieved for ancient Persia.” American, European, and Japanese corporations rushed to set up headquarters in Iran and enter into joint business ventures. “Boom?” asked an American investment banker. “We haven’t seen anything yet. They are now dependent on Western technology, but what happens when they produce and export steel and copper, when they reduce their agricultural problems? They’ll eat everybody else in the Middle East alive.”

  The numbers behind Iran’s rise were impressive and few doubted that the Iranian people, reported the Chicago Tribune, were “living better than most of their country’s neighbors.” Since 1941 national income had multiplied 423-fold and since 1963 the country’s gross national product had risen 14-fold. Yet Iranian society had paid a price for prosperity. Political institutions and the judiciary were subordinate to the wishes of the Shah, his ministers, and the security forces. “The Shah’s power is virtually total,” reported one observer. “Only one political party is permitted, and debate is carefully contained.” Newspapers, radio, and television were “embarrassingly obsequious” in their coverage of the regime and subject to censorship. The state security police was “one of the most pervasive such organizations in the world” and accused by its critics of imprisoning, torturing, and killing thousands of dissidents. Tens of thousands more Iranians preferred to live outside the country than endure repression at home. The Shah’s economic reforms were also scrutinized. Much of Iran’s new wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite: 10 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth. Most of Iran’s sixty-one thousand villages still lacked “piped water, sanitation, doctors, electricity.” One physician claimed that families living in rural Karaj subsisted on four and five grams of protein a week. “People hunt for undigested oats in the droppings of horses,” he said. Iranian intellectuals sneered at the Shah’s efforts to modernize a poor, semiliterate country. “It’s all skin deep” was the common refrain among university students who dismissed the White Revolution as a giant fraud. “It’s all fake pretension.” The Shah received no credit for his achievements, though even his opponents acknowledged that conditions weren’t nearly as bad as they could be: “Given the mentality of the Iranian people, it would be ten times worse here under any other regime.”

  Despite these controversies, in the last few weeks of 1977 Imperial Iran cut its way through the international scene with the stately grandeur of a Cunard liner on its maiden voyage. While Americans and Europeans grappled with high unemployment, inflation, political scandals, and labor unrest, most Iranians were preoccupied with more mundane affairs. The Shah celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday and was cheered by news of a welcome boost to oil production. He hosted state visits from the presidents of Egypt and Somalia and attended the Aryamehr Cup tennis finals at the Imperial Country Club. He was pleased to hear that America’s prestigious Georgetown University now ranked Iran as the world’s fifth-strongest nation. His government completed trade deals with France and West Germany to build nuclear power plants, New Zealand to supply lamb, the Soviet Union to increase steel production, and the United States to supply five million telephones. In December 1977 the volume of trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange surpassed 5.9 billion rials for the first time and officials reported a record 380,000 tourists to Iran in the past year. Iran’s reputation as a haven to do business was burnished by the presence of more than 100,000 foreign residents inspired by the Shah’s vision of transforming his country into the Japan of West Asia, and lured by the prospect of comfortable lives with servants, swimming pools, and tennis courts. The 52,000 Americans living in Iran in 1977 made up the largest concentration of U.S. nationals living abroad. Other expatriate communities in Iran included 8,000 Britons, 8,000 French, 16,000 West Germans, 20,000 Italians, and tens of thousands more Filipinos and Koreans employed as guest workers. “Look at them,” crowed an Iranian businessman. “The flies have come to gather at the honeypot.”


  Foreigners living in Iran considered the country a sure and safe bet for the future. The kingdom was defended by a crack professional fighting force whose 413,000 men and women began each day reciting their pledge to defend “God, Shah, and Fatherland.” The Shah’s pride and joy were the three branches of the Imperial Armed Forces. The quarter-million-strong army was divided into armored and infantry divisions. Four separate brigades, including special forces and airborne units, “can maintain internal security and halt an invasion by any neighboring state except the Soviet Union.” Pride of place in the army went to the Immortals, the twenty-thousand-strong Imperial Guard equipped to fight as infantry and assist regular ground forces at home or overseas. Iran’s air force was “capable of defeating any regional air force except that of Israel, and possibly Turkey.” The air force dominated the skies over southwestern Asia and boasted the ability to fly hundreds of extra miles outside Iranian airspace. Iran’s navy ruled the waves in the Persian Gulf, patrolled deep into the Indian Ocean, and prowled the coast of East Africa. The regular army was complemented by two paramilitary forces. Seventy-five thousand gendarmerie guarded the borders and secured the countryside, trained to provide early warning of foreign aggression or internal subversion, and their 45 regiments and 2,240 gendarmerie posts were equipped with light machine guns, mortars, helicopters, and patrol boats. The National Resistance Force numbered 80,000 personnel and was organized into local-level company- and battalion-size units outfitted with small arms and rifles. The Iranian police was 40,000-strong.

  In his fervent nationalism and authoritarian leadership the King of Iran echoed the rulers of centuries past but in particular his idol President Charles de Gaulle of France, the very model of the twentieth-century nationalist strongman. “His is a formidable personality, which he employs skillfully to advance Iran’s interests in such matters as increasing oil revenue and acquiring sophisticated military equipment from hesitant sellers,” noted an American intelligence assessment. “In short, the Shah has developed into a confident ruler, who knows what he wants and how to get it. He is sure that his way is best for Iran and that monarchical power, wisely used, is essential to the country’s well-being. He is, all in all, a popular and respected king. We might ask: Are there no flies in the ointment of Iranian success? Do not some wish him ill and work against him? Can he continue to go onward and upward forever?”

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  AFTER BREAKFAST, THE Shah returned to his bathroom to shave and brush his teeth. Dressing with the help of his valet, he selected a cravat and slipped a miniature copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, inside his front breast jacket pocket. Courtiers recalled the time he walked into his office, patted his jacket, and with a stricken look on his face exclaimed, “My Quran, I forgot it! I have to go back!” Ready for the day and already fully briefed on the domestic and international situation, at nine o’clock he exited his suite accompanied by Colonel Kiomars Djahinbini, his personal bodyguard and the head of palace security. The colonel walked a pace behind and for the remainder of the day never let the Shah out of his sight. Together they crossed a landing, headed down a flight of stairs past smartly saluting military guards, and strolled out onto the sunlit palace grounds. “I remember him coming down the stairs,” recalled Crown Prince Reza, who was seventeen years old in December 1977 and in his last year of high school before moving to Texas to train as a pilot at Fort Reese Air Force Base. “He would ask me to walk to his office with him. The first question of the day was always the weather report.”

  His office was a short walk away from the Niavaran residence along a pathway shaded by plane trees, down a flight of stone steps, and through a small wooded grove that led to a second palace, the Jahan Nama, the low-slung residence of the former ruling Qajar Dynasty. Now refurbished as an office complex, the Jahan Nama boasted exquisite Persian carpets, intricate tile work, and luminous stained-glass windows. Greeted at the entrance by Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar, he climbed the stairwell to the second floor along a corridor that passed several anterooms, including one for gift wrapping and another for the palace dentist, before entering his office, a vast, cavernous space whose spectacular mirrored ceiling and inlaid walls resembled a jewel box radiating diamond light. Regardless of the temperature and season, he worked without air-conditioning. Sensitive to chills and drafts, he could not abide modern artificial air to the point where he drove with the windows down and forbade the installation of cooling devices in his various residences—he hated the expense as much as the air. But by late May, with the heat from the plains climbing up the hillsides, Niavaran became so oppressive that the entire household was forced to decamp farther up the slopes of the Alborz Mountains to Saadabad, a second royal compound of lush, forested acreage whose White Palace served as the Pahlavis’ summer residence. When temperatures cooled again in the autumn the family and their servants returned to Niavaran, and the White Palace was converted into a guesthouse for visiting foreign heads of state.

  Palace officials were already at their desks when His Imperial Majesty walked in the room. The Shah was a stickler for punctuality who rarely ever ran late for appointments. The bulk of each day was spent behind his desk, though days at a time were spent away on regional inspection tours to open and inspect new factories, dams, schools, hospitals, power plants, and oil refineries, and also abroad, on state visits to capitals in every corner of the globe. After consulting with Afshar, who managed his daily program, the Shah met with Minister of the Imperial Court Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s former long-serving prime minister who four months earlier had assumed the post responsible for the overall running of the Imperial Court and household. “We start getting work from [the Shah’s] office at eight in the morning,” one aide explained. “We work through meals and until the middle of the night. We go to sleep exhausted, and then we get more work to do.” The Shah did not hesitate to bypass the chain of command. “Often I order minor officials to tell their superiors what I want done,” he explained. He delighted dropping in to make unannounced inspections. One year earlier, air force commanders at a base near the city of Isfahan learned they had just eight minutes to prepare for his arrival. “I barely had time to get there before he landed,” recalled the base’s deputy commander. “The plane was a Boeing 727, and he was flying it himself with just a copilot, an engineer, and one other man with him. We were in quite a state here, I can tell you.”

  Though Iran had a prime minister, cabinet, and parliament, the Shah projected an image of absolute control and made it clear that in the realm of decision making all roads led to Niavaran. “I not only make the decisions, I do the thinking,” he famously boasted. He approved and often handled treaty negotiations and defense contracts, negotiated contractual terms and conditions with foreign oil companies, and even agreed to salary increases for oil workers and the timing of oil refinery overhauls. As the son of a general who had seized power in a coup, and in a part of the world where armed revolts were a common occurrence, he kept a close eye on his army, navy, and air force. No military plane took off or landed without his permission. No member of the armed forces was promoted above the rank of lieutenant colonel without his explicit approval. When foreign journalists visited Iran their itineraries were sent to the Shah for inspection. “Copies of every story written about Iran go to his desk, according to aides,” recalled a team of American journalists who visited Iran in December 1977. “Once, while visiting a hospital, he ordered a swimming pool dug for the doctors. Plans for building design require his approval. In factories he asks intricate questions on electronics, production rates, and manpower problems. He reads arms catalogues to relax.”

  The Shah was impatient for results and hated to hear excuses. “He only wanted to get things done,” remembered one of his advisers. “He was always asking questions. Questions! Questions! Questions! And he would look at you with those eyes!” Exceptionally well-read and a quick study, the Shah enjoyed policy discussions with his ministers but drew the line at debate.
“He would let you explain yourself,” said one former cabinet minister. “He was very open in private. I experienced it myself many times and on many issues. And in meetings he would let ministers talk. But he did not appreciate it if they tried to debate him.” He prided himself on his breadth of knowledge. “He asks very, very sharp questions,” said the manager of an electronics factory in Shiraz who received the Shah. “If you try to b.s. him, he’ll know it right away.” “He was familiar with everything that was going on in the world,” marveled Armin Meyer, President Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to Tehran in the late 1960s. “In military affairs he was smarter than most of our Pentagon people. Very intelligent, very impressive person, and one who had very strong feelings.” Ambassadors knew better than to cross him. “Once you lost his goodwill you were finished,” recalled Sir Denis Wright, who served as Britain’s envoy under Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

  Mornings were spent issuing directives, receiving dignitaries, signing legislation into law, and reading the intelligence reports that streamed in from the provinces. The much-feared secret police, Savak, maintained internal security and kept a close watch on events beyond Iran’s borders. Once a week the Shah received Savak chief General Nematollah Nasiri to review major intelligence findings, and one morning each week was set aside for separate interviews with the three commanders of the army, air force, and navy. If the foreign minister was traveling, he and the monarch exchanged notes in a case padlocked to the wrist of a close aide. The system was fail-safe—they were the only possessors of the two keys that could open the case—though one time it was fastened so securely in Vladivostok that by the time the go-between reached Tehran his wrist had started to blacken. With these systems in place the Shah felt confident that he enjoyed absolute control and would not be blindsided by events. He dismissed a courtier’s advice that he hold regular meetings with ordinary people from different walks of life. “But I already know what the people think,” he replied. “I’m fed report after report from goodness knows how many sources.” The advent of modern technology meant that he no longer worried about being seen in the flesh: “My voice is heard everywhere, my face is seen everywhere; heard through the radio, seen through the TV. The contact is there.” At his desk, while he worked his way through the stacks of paperwork with the help of the head of his Special Bureau, Nosratollah Moinian, he gave instructions on how to respond to individual requests. All this was done verbally and without the use of a stenographer or a Dictaphone.