The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The Crown Prince enrolled as a cadet in the Military College of Tehran, a new institution modeled after the elite French academy of St. Cyr, and for the next two years attended maneuvers and studied military strategy and tactics. After graduating as a second lieutenant he was appointed to the post of army inspector. Reza Shah also began tutoring his son in the role and responsibilities of kingship, and together they traveled to Iran’s different regions to meet with provincial officials. The Crown Prince noticed how the dignitaries they met along the way were “so much in awe that ‘discussion’ with [Reza Shah] had none of the give-and-take the word implies.” He worried about his father’s isolation. He saw that Iranian officials were too intimidated to bring problems to his father’s attention and that this left him dangerously isolated from public opinion. Gradually, courtiers who feared Reza Shah learned they could approach his son with their problems, and the prince adopted the role of emissary and mediator. Reza Shah patiently listened to his son’s suggestions and rarely opposed his recommendations. There was a practical side to this: the old king wanted to test his presumptive successor’s judgment. “I advanced my views and made hints and suggestions, but discussion in any usual sense was out of the question,” recalled the Shah. “Nevertheless, I, as a young man, of only some nineteen years of age, frequently spoke my mind to the Shah; and the amazing thing was how willing he was to listen to me, and how seldom he rejected my proposals.”

  As heir to the throne, the Crown Prince exhibited all the zeal of a youthful reformer, even daring to raise with his father the sensitive issue of the Pahlavi family’s extensive real estate holdings along the Caspian seaboard. Critics accused Reza Shah of confiscating or purchasing at artificially low prices more than three million acres of prime land. The father, his son remembered, patiently explained that “he concentrated buying along our country’s frontier primarily for national security reasons. Although he had in mind a better life for the peasants, he knew it would take time and that national security had to come first.” The Crown Prince listened to this explanation and accepted it without comment, though his subsequent behavior suggested he did not believe a word of it. He showed an interest in the cases of prominent political prisoners jailed for dissent and urged his father to release those who claimed unfair conviction. The Shah explained that emptying Iran’s prisons would not solve Iran’s problems and that showing compassion to one’s enemies was a form of weakness. How might it look if men arrested on his orders were later released by his son?

  The Shah specifically cautioned his son not to intervene on behalf of Iran’s most celebrated political prisoner, an aristocrat related by marriage to the deposed Qajars. Mohammad Mossadeq had opposed the establishment of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1925, warned Reza Shah against dictatorship, and championed the 1906 Constitution. Mossadeq’s children pleaded with the Crown Prince for mercy, explaining that their father’s age and infirm health meant he was not expected to survive the harsh prison conditions. In 1940 Reza Shah agreed to release the old man from his confinement but warned in starkly prophetic terms that it was a decision his son would live to regret.

  * * *

  IN HIS SIXTIETH year, Reza Shah turned his attention to the Imperial succession. He had entertained thoughts of abdication for some time though without spelling out an exact time line for relinquishing power. At first he considered retiring in the late forties but already by the spring of 1941 one of his most trusted advisers was holding preliminary discussions with the Crown Prince to start planning for an orderly transfer. Reza Shah was starting to lose physical strength and may have had a sense of his own impending mortality.

  As an upstart dynasty the Pahlavis were faced with a shortage of legitimate candidates to succeed to the throne. Under the Constitution only Crown Prince Mohammad Reza and his full-blood brother, Prince Ali Reza, were eligible to reign. Their half brothers, the children of Reza Shah’s other wives, had Qajar blood and were therefore deemed unsuitable. The need for the Crown Prince to produce an heir was pressing. Reza Shah was unsentimental on the subject of marriage. He had already married off his daughters Shams and Ashraf to handpicked suitors, though their joint betrothal turned into a soap opera when Shams decided she preferred her younger sister’s beau, Fereydoun Djam, the son of the prime minister and a handsome young army officer, over her own intended. Her father ordered his daughters to exchange fiancés, and Ashraf was married off to Ali Qavam, a man she loathed. “So I was married,” she wrote, “in a traditional double ceremony with Shams, complete with white Lanvin wedding dress, though black would have been more suitable for my mood.”

  With his usual brusque efficiency, Reza Shah took matters into his own hands and betrothed his son and heir to the lovely Princess Fawzia, sister of King Farouk of Egypt. “With his characteristic forthrightness—perhaps better adapted to engineering projects than to affairs of heart—he staged an investigation,” Mohammad Reza Shah later recalled with dry understatement. His father was eager to strike a pact with Egypt, the greatest of the Arab states, and legitimize the Pahlavi Dynasty as an established royal house. The engaged couple met for the first time just two weeks before their wedding on March 15, 1939, and discovered they had virtually nothing in common. They were marched down the aisle anyway. Spoiled and adored at home, beautiful Fawzia made no effort to hide her resentment at leaving behind cosmopolitan Cairo for the stuffy provincialism of court life in Tehran. She was bored and lonely and found the intrigues of the Pahlavi women tiresome. The Iranian public regarded her as disinterested in their lot, and they were probably right. Fawzia provided a daughter, Shahnaz, in 1940, but her marriage to the Crown Prince was otherwise not a success. “For reasons still obscure to medical science, there were to be no more children,” was his cryptic explanation for the breakdown in marital relations. Rumors flew around town that husband and wife both found solace elsewhere.

  Reza Shah’s plan for a well-crafted transfer of power to his son was upended during the Second World War when on August 25, 1941, the combined armies of Great Britain and Soviet Russia invaded Iran on the flimsy pretext of preventing the kingdom’s road and rail links and oil depots from falling into German hands. The real problem was Reza Shah’s policy of neutrality and his refusal to be seen bending to the same foreign powers who earlier in the century had divided the country among them. On the day of the invasion the Imperial Family gathered for lunch. The mood at the table was “so tense and so grim that none of us dared speak,” recalled Princess Ashraf. “What I knew was inevitable has happened,” her father told them. “The Allies have invaded. I think this will be the end for me—the English will see to it.” In a moment of great drama, the Crown Prince handed his sister a gun. “Ashraf, keep this gun with you, and if troops enter Tehran and try to take us, fire a few shots and then take your own life,” he told his sister. “I’ll do the same.” The next day bombers reached the outskirts of Tehran and dropped explosives. The Queen and the princesses sheltered in the palace basement and as soon as the all-clear was sounded packed and fled south to Isfahan.

  The Shah and his eldest son stayed behind to rally the generals, but Iran’s army disintegrated under the Allied onslaught. On September 16, 1941, Reza Shah signed the formal instrument of abdication, changed into civilian clothes, and drove to Isfahan to join his wife and daughters. He was told by his British captors that he must leave Iran to spend his days in exile—a fitting end for the former Cossack who came to the throne idolizing Napoleon Bonaparte. Princess Ashraf begged to join her father but he said no. “I would love to have you with me, but your brother needs you more,” her father explained. “I want you to stay with him. I wish you had been a boy, so you could be a brother to him now.” Stripped of his titles, rank, and wealth, Reza Shah boarded a British cruiser bound for his preferred destination of Argentina. Only when the vessel was at sea did the captain inform the deposed monarch that he was actually headed to permanent exile in South Africa. His son later noted the irony—unbeknownst to the British, at the ti
me of their invasion his father had already set his mind on abdication and spending the rest of his life abroad. Mohammad Reza Shah later wrote, “You might say that Reza Shah was exiled by mutual desire and consent.”

  The British and Russian ambassadors considered turning out the Pahlavis and replacing them with the more pliable Qajars. Fearful of arousing nationalist opinion, they abandoned the scheme but nonetheless snubbed the Shah’s investiture. In his maiden speech from the throne the new king assured parliament and the people that he would abide by the Constitution and return his father’s estates back to the nation. His speech went down well, but his ministers and the Allied ambassadors were determined to see to it that the second Pahlavi king’s wings were firmly clipped and surrounded him with forceful older personalities determined to reestablish constitutional rule and prevent the emergence of a second autocracy. The proud young monarch felt the sting of humiliation every time he drove in and out of the capital, where he was obliged to present his identification papers to the Russian troops manning the gates. Two years later, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill flew to Tehran to discuss their war aims, only Stalin made an effort to treat the twenty-four-year-old King with the respect he felt he deserved as Iran’s head of state. Roosevelt said he would be happy to receive the Shah—at his lodgings in the Russian embassy. The Shah bitterly recalled that “it seemed a curious situation that I had to go to the Russian embassy to see him, while Stalin came to see me.” Slights like this left their mark.

  The Shah found himself “plunged into a sea of trouble,” and perhaps his greatest achievement in those fraught early years was simply to survive. The U.S. embassy in Tehran informed the State Department that the young king had “no solid power base and no political machine” but nonetheless thought they saw promise in his idealism and character.

  Mohammad Shah is a man of much stronger purpose than is generally realized. He stands almost alone, distrusts most advisers, is honest in his efforts to secure a democratic form of government in Iran. He is not easily influenced and cannot be shaken. Installed as a figurehead during the 1941 crisis, he may yet surprise the factions in his country and the outside powers. He thinks along Western lines, and is inalienably attached to his Iranian army. The military budget is half the national expenditure now. Yet, of course, the army is almost his only backing within Iran.

  The young monarch could barely hide his frustration with his lot. “I inherited a crown,” he protested. “Before I put it on, I want to earn it.” He had been on the throne a year when he met with a group of senior politicians to plead his case for far-reaching social and economic reforms. “I told them that we must establish social justice in this country,” he said, drawing on his tutelage in Switzerland and bearing in mind Madame Arfa’s talk of revolutionary kings. “It is not fair that a number of people should be at a loss what to do with their wealth,” he said, “while a number die from hunger.” His ministers dismissed his “revolutionary ideas” as empty talk and the naive ramblings of a young man with too much time on his hands.

  The Shah’s brimming youthful idealism was never more fully expressed than during a reception he hosted for the country’s religious leaders in the late forties. In words that would come back to haunt him later in life, he lectured the ulama on their responsibilities as moral guardians of the nation. No ruler of Iran was above the law, he reminded them. “People must not remain silent, or neutral, about the actions of their rulers,” he said in reference to the farr, which sanctioned rebellion in case of injustice. “They must rise up if governments trample their rights or break the laws. It is indeed one of the major responsibilities of the clergy to awaken people and make them aware of their legal rights, and thus not allow rulers and governments to engage in reckless and lawless behavior.”

  3

  THE OLD LION

  I will never start anything against [him].

  —MOHAMMAD MOSSADEQ

  Has there ever been a monarch who has

  plotted against his own government?

  —THE SHAH

  On the pale winter afternoon of February 4, 1949, gunshots rang out in front of the University of Tehran, where crowds were gathered to witness the Shah’s arrival. He was walking in plain sight of dozens of onlookers when a man pulled a revolver from a camera box, took aim at his head, and opened fire at point-blank range. With no time for the Shah to take cover, the first three bullets “passed through my military cap without touching my head. But the gunman’s fourth shot penetrated my right cheekbone and came out beneath my nose. He was now aiming at my heart.… So I suddenly started shadow-dancing or feinting. He fired again, wounding me in the shoulder. His last shot stuck in the gun. I had the queer and not unpleasant sensation of knowing that I was alive.” The young King’s bodyguards returned fire, killing the assassin on the spot, while the Shah was rushed to the hospital “bleeding like a young bull whose throat had been slit.” Later in the evening, bandaged and propped up in bed, he delivered a radio address to the nation to assure the people he was not seriously harmed.

  The attempted assassination was the Shah’s second remarkable escape from death in less than a year. Some months earlier he had been piloting a light aircraft when it inexplicably lost power and dropped from the sky. “We had to make a forced landing in a mountainous region in a ravine full of rocks and boulders,” he said, describing the moment when he braced for impact. With no engine to throttle, and unable to maneuver the body of the plane, he managed to pull the nose up just in time to clear a barrier of rocks. The propeller slammed into a boulder, tore off the undercarriage, and the plane landed in a somersault. “There we were, hanging by our seat belts in the open cockpit,” he said. “Neither of us suffered so much as a scratch. I remember that the scene amused me so much that I burst out laughing, but my upside-down companion didn’t think it was funny.” The plane crash and the shooting outside the University of Tehran reaffirmed his fatalistic belief that he enjoyed God’s protection.

  Faith and luck were in short supply in Iran in the late 1940s and early fifties. The end of the Second World War did not usher in peace or stability but instead hurled Iran into the treacherous currents of the Cold War. Iran’s oil wealth and its proximity to the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf made the country a prize worth fighting for. Though the wartime allies had signed a pact to evacuate their forces from Iranian territory within six months of Germany’s defeat, Stalin decided to test British and American resolve by keeping Russian troops on the ground supporting a puppet Communist state in the northern province of Azerbaijan. It was only in the face of tough diplomatic pressure from the Truman administration that Moscow backed down and Azerbaijan was liberated from Communist rule. This first major international crisis of the Cold War convinced the Shah and the army generals that they should cultivate close ties with the United States if Iran was to avoid falling behind the Iron Curtain.

  Political disturbances also roiled Iran’s southern provinces, where the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, founded in 1908, still dominated oil production, ruling over a vast swath of territory with all the hubris of a colonial overseer. Iranians angrily protested when the company refused to adopt a more generous compensation agreement in line with favorable taxation deals struck with other oil producers in the Middle East. They clamored for oil nationalization, which would strip Great Britain of its control over Iranian oil assets and end half a century of British interference in their internal affairs. Extremist political and religious groups emerged from the shadows to exploit the unrest and agitate against the royalist establishment. Though police were quick to blame Communists for the attack on the Shah outside the University of Tehran, investigators were well aware that the gunman was in league with the “Warriors of Islam” or “Fedayeen-e Islam,” a Shiite group dedicated to the implementation of religious law and ridding Iran of all secular and Western influence. In the same year the Shah escaped assassination, religious fanatics succeeded in murdering his minister of court, and two years later Prime Minis
ter Haj-Ali Razmara was assassinated inside the Sepah Salar Mosque in Tehran.

  Poverty and illiteracy were a breeding ground for extremism and violence. “Iran’s chief city, like the country as a whole, is still only in the shadow of the machine age,” wrote a visitor to Iran. “Though the city boasts broad streets, traffic lights, dial phones, and pretentious buildings, it still lacks sanitary water and sewage systems.… Tehran is a city of rags to riches. Expensive American automobiles are legion. Palaces and pretentious walled villas dot the city and its northern suburbs. On the sidewalks well-dressed men brush elbows with barefooted porters, well diggers, and other laborers in rags, while flanking the main road south to the shrine city of Rey families live like animals in caves.” The Shah, his ministers, and Western legations worried that Iran’s backward economy and weak government made the kingdom susceptible to Communist subversion. The future of the Pahlavi Dynasty hung in the balance at a time when other monarchies were toppled in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Queen Fawzia’s decision to abandon Tehran for Cairo in 1948 and sue for divorce was yet another reminder that the Pahlavi line was only a bullet away from extinction. Anxious to provide his people and mother with a male heir, the Shah began the search for a new wife.

  * * *

  SORAYA ESFANDIARY WAS descended from the chiefs of the Bakhtiary tribe. Her father, Khalil Esfandiary, had left Reza Shah’s Iran for Germany in the late twenties to escape political persecution, and it was while pursuing his university studies in Berlin that he met and fell in love with Eva Karl, the daughter of a wealthy German chemicals industrialist. Following a lengthy courtship, the couple married and moved to Iran, where a daughter, Soraya, was born in 1932. Eva struggled to adjust to Iranian life, and the Esfandiarys soon returned to Berlin. Fearing the outbreak of war, the family moved back to Iran before decamping, this time for good, to Switzerland as soon as peace was declared.