On October 27, 1964, Khomeini stood outside his home in Qom and delivered a thunderous second attack on the Shah and the Pahlavi state. This time he ventured beyond religion to appeal to the people’s sense of nationalism and pride, savaging the King and his ministers as a nest of traitors. “They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” he protested. “If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.” Khomeini called on all sections of Iranian society to revolt. He also issued a dramatic pan-Islamist call to arms. “Ulama of Qom, come to the aid of Islam! Muslim peoples! Leaders of the Muslim peoples! Presidents and kings of the Muslim peoples! Come to our aid! Shah of Iran, save yourself!… O God, destroy those individuals who are traitors to this land, who are traitors to Islam, who are traitors to the Quran.”
This time the government did not wait for the popular reaction. Within a week Khomeini found himself bundled onto a Royal Iranian Air Force Hercules bound for Turkey and a life in permanent exile. For the first eleven months he lived with the family of Colonel Ali Cetiner, a Turkish intelligence officer, until the Iranian government agreed that he could move to Najaf in Iraq, where they could keep a closer eye on him. Colonel Cetiner was sorry to lose his houseguest. He thought how strange it was that the man who left his house was the same in every respect but one. “When he arrived from Iran he did not have a penny on him,” recalled the colonel. “But when he left Turkey in November 1965 he was a millionaire, even by the standards of those days. He was given money by visitors from Iran. Khomeini left Turkey with his fortune and went to Iraq.”
6
“JAVID SHAH!”
Shah is a kind of magic word with the Persian people.
—THE SHAH
Now I could do more than sympathize;
I had the means to act.
—QUEEN FARAH
Each morning the Shah and four-year-old Reza strolled hand in hand from their residence in the Ekhtessassi Palace in central Tehran across the road to the Marble Palace, the Shah’s office, from where the toddler was picked up by a governess and taken to kindergarten. But on the morning of April 10, 1965, the little prince left home earlier than usual to welcome a new playmate to class. The change in routine prompted his father to drive instead of walk to work, and the decision saved his life. As the Shah exited his car and walked toward the palace’s main entrance, a young soldier opened fire on him with a small M3 machine gun. At the first sound of shots two sentries on duty abandoned their posts and ran for cover. An attempt by a valet to close the door failed when a bullet struck his hand. With the gunman in hot pursuit the Shah dashed inside, up the stairs, and into his office, where two lightly armed bodyguards mounted a courageous last stand. Colonel Kiomars Djahinbini, the head of the Shah’s security detail, ran to the scene after hearing the attack over his walkie-talkie. “As soon as [the gunman] started shooting, my two agents shot back. They hit him but didn’t kill him. My people were armed only with revolvers.” During the final shoot-out a bullet crashed through the Shah’s office door, whistled over the desk, where he took cover, and thudded into the chair he usually sat in to do paperwork. The final spray of automatic gunfire was followed by an ominous silence. The Shah opened the door and stepped outside to find three blood-soaked corpses strewn on the floor. Incredibly, one of his mortally wounded bodyguards had managed to take down the assassin with a single shot before succumbing to his own wounds.
The telephone rang while the Queen was putting on her makeup in preparation for an early-morning meeting. “Oh, my God, Farah, darling!” Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk sobbed on the line. “Do you know what has happened?”
“No.”
“Someone has fired on the King!” On hearing this news the young mother “gasped and my heart stopped beating.” Finally, after repeating the words over and over as though in a daze, her mother-in-law had the presence of mind to tell Farah that her husband had survived the attack. “Do not worry, all is well,” she said and abruptly hung up.
Farah went into shock. “I continued putting on my makeup, like an automaton, chanting, ‘Thank you, God! Thank you, God!’” Then it dawned on her that only Reza’s change of routine had saved the lives of both her husband and her son. She ran to her husband’s blood-soaked office suite, where courtiers, family, and friends stood gathered around the bodies. They watched with astonishment as the Shah went back to work, displaying his usual sangfroid in times of crisis. “Four times in my reign I have been threatened seriously, and four times my life has been spared,” he had recently told a visitor. “I must confess that I am beginning to have a mystical sense about my job. I am reaching the conviction, anyway, that I must be here for something!”
His bodyguards could not afford the luxury of believing in a higher power or expecting a sixth miracle—they knew that luck and not divine intervention had prevented a palace massacre. “After that the system was changed,” explained Colonel Djahinbini, whose Special Protection Unit was responsible for the security of the Imperial Family. The Special Protection Unit was comprised of three hundred volunteers from the elite Eternals division of the Imperial Guard. New rules were laid down. From now on no regular army soldiers were allowed onto the palace grounds. Colonel Djahinbini’s men had their revolvers replaced with automatic weapons and were sent to the United States to receive training from the Secret Service. They also started wearing earpieces for easier communications. The security cordon around the King, Queen, and their children was tightened to the point where casual interactions with the public became rare. The most obvious result of the tragedy was the decision to move the Pahlavis away from the crowds and bustling streets of downtown Tehran. The Ekhtessassi Palace was too small anyway for the young family, and construction of a new guesthouse for foreign visitors was already under way in the fashionable neighborhood of Niavaran, to the north. Now the decision was made to transform it into a temporary residence for the Pahlavis until a new, more secure palace could be built elsewhere in the capital.
The Shah accepted these strictures without complaint, though he insisted he still drive himself everywhere. But there were to be no more incidents of the sort that used to give Colonel Djahinbini and his agents heartburn. “Once we were driving back to Saadabad from downtown,” he recalled. “We entered a narrow street and had to slow down. We saw a big man running after a little girl. I saw His Majesty push the brake.” He braked so suddenly indeed that they were almost rear-ended by the tail car following behind. The Shah leaped out of the driver’s seat and started after the man. Colonel Djahinbini and his agents, who did not understand what was going on, also sprang into action. “I jumped out and said, ‘Is there something wrong?’”
“Stop that man!” cried the Shah.
His bodyguards ran off, grabbed the culprit, and brought him back to where the Shah was standing. The young girl he had been chasing was in floods of tears.
“Why are you running after this girl?” the Shah demanded.
“She is very naughty!” replied the man, who claimed to be her father.
“But you are big!” protested the Shah, who had personal experience of childhood bullying. He began to lecture the man on the need to show kindness to his daughter.
Suddenly the father recognized who was talking to him. He became very emotional, begged the Shah’s forgiveness, and promised not to punish his daughter once they returned home. The Shah accepted his assurance and left the scene. But once they reached Saadabad he asked Colonel Djahinbini to send one of his agents back to the girl’s house to make sure the father kept his word. This sort of behavior unnerved the Shah’s bodyguards and courtiers: the same King who had stopped to help a single child was now responsible for making life-and-death decisions that affected a kingdom.
* * *
HE WAS R
EADY to show what he could do with his untrammeled powers. “I want to build a government that is based on democratic practice at the bottom,” said the Shah, “although perhaps a better term is ‘cooperatively based.’ I know that my people are very individualistic and find it difficult to work with each other, but I am certain this can be overcome. It can be conquered, particularly now that the whole nation is behind it.” In the spirit of making a fresh start, he installed in government a team of young technocrats and businessmen who he believed reflected his modern interests and outlooks. Because they were his appointees and owed him their careers, he felt more confident in the saddle. They shared his builder’s instincts, his impatience with party politics, and his admiration for the great cultures of Western Europe. Like him, they wanted to get on with the job and see how far they could go with the resources of the state at their disposal. Ever alert to the rise of a new demagogue and potential rival, the Shah made sure none was able to develop an independent following among the people.
The new era got off to a bloody start, however, when in January 1965 Hassan Ali Mansur, the Shah’s pick to succeed Asadollah Alam as prime minister, and the brightest of the young liberal reformers, was shot to death by Mohammad Bokharai, a teenager found carrying “a copy of the Quran and a picture of Ruhollah Khomeini.” The police investigation revealed that Bokharai had been sent on a mission to kill the prime minister by the Coalition of Islamic Societies, the militant group that represented Khomeini’s interests inside Iran. In his absence the coalition had absorbed the terrorist group Fedayeen-e Islam. The story behind Mansur’s murder was typically Persian in its level of intrigue. His death had been ordered by a secret religious “court” composed of Khomeini loyalists. One of the judges was Seyyed Mohammad Hussein Beheshti, a special adviser on religious affairs to Prime Minister Mansur’s very own Ministry of Education. When he learned that a death sentence had been passed, Khomeini approved the fatwa or religious edict that rendered it legal under Sharia law. With permission in hand, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a young clergyman loyal to the Ayatollah, and a future president of the Islamic Republic, handed the gunman his weapon.
The shooting of Hassan Ali Mansur was an act of revenge for the humiliation of Khomeini’s exile, the prime minister’s association with the White Revolution, and his role in pushing through the controversial legislation that granted legal immunity to U.S. military advisers. At the top of the coalition’s list of thirteen targets for assassination was the Shah himself, followed by other senior regime officials. The objective of Khomeini’s men was to decapitate the entire national leadership and provoke another religious uprising. The soldier who shot up the Marble Palace three months after Mansur’s death was publicly accused of Communist affiliations, but he, too, was later revealed to be part of Beheshti’s underground terror network.
Khomeini did not yet have a million martyrs willing to die for him, but exile imbued him with the irresistible aura of outlaw and man of God, two attributes highly prized by the Shia faithful, who saw themselves as victims of historic injustices dating back to the Battle of Karbala. The narrative of the “tyrant king” and “pious man of God” resonated with religious radicals. Ironically, in the months before he was shot Mansur had tried to persuade the Shah to end Khomeini’s exile and bring him home in the spirit of national reconciliation. The Grand Ayatollah was not looking for favors, let alone a charitable compromise from a man he despised as a traitor: Mansur’s liberal moderation suggested weakness that in Khomeini’s view invited only contempt and a bullet.
* * *
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER the assault on the Marble Palace, Farah collapsed from nervous exhaustion. One night, hearing voices outside her bedroom, she crept onto the landing and stood in the shadows as a young man was brought into the downstairs lobby and forced to stand against the wall with his hands tied behind his back. He was a confederate of the gunman who had tried to shoot her husband. “I was filled with sadness and felt deeply sorry for him,” she said. She watched as her husband came down, talked to him, and then escorted him into his office, where they conversed for an hour. The culprit was pardoned and let go.
Since the birth of her two children Farah had steadily increased her workload. “When I was first married, well, marriage is a big change in anyone’s life so I was content with that for a year or so.” But she was soon dissatisfied. “I had nothing to do. At times I just drove my car around Shemiran to kill time.” Wearing a pair of jeans, she rummaged through palace basements “sticking my nose” into dusty hideaways that few had ventured into over the years. She rescued valuable artifacts, started restoration work, and figuratively and literally let in the light after years of darkness and neglect. The palaces were in a terrible state. “I remember in the Golestan Palace, the Court had to borrow candelabras from the outside. The officer on duty at Saadabad was sleeping on the job.”
After successfully tackling the family’s living quarters, Farah decided to carve out a public role for herself. She became patron of the national organization that helped orphans and children abandoned by their parents and supported national groups representing underprivileged youngsters, the handicapped, the deaf, and the blind. Farah became a strong and early proponent of mainstreaming the disabled into society by helping them gain an education, skills training, and enter the workforce. At her behest, sports facilities for deaf students were built in every major town. One of her earliest causes had a transformative impact on how she saw her role and how she in turn was seen by the people. She accepted the presidency of the Lepers’ Aid Association at a time when the Muslim clergy refused to administer to lepers or even set foot in Iran’s two isolated leper colonies, a fact that did not escape Farah’s attention. But even she admitted to feelings of apprehension on the eve of her first visit to the leper center near Tabriz. “For the first time I saw those ashen, disfigured, ragged faces, and the deep distress in their eyes,” she remembered. She brought cakes and candy for them and was appalled when her guide, instead of presenting them to the lepers as gifts, tossed them on the ground so that they were trampled in the dust. She broke away from her entourage and walked into the crowd, touching the lepers, talking to them, listening to their stories, and allowing herself to be touched in return.
In dispensing with protocol Farah broke the biggest taboo associated with the disease. She convened doctors and specialists from around the world and embraced the role of advocate for medical advancements in the treatment and early detection of leprosy. Her husband consented to her request to donate a large parcel of crown land on which was built the world’s first economically viable and self-sufficient leper community. With the help of a board of trustees, and support from wealthy donors, the new village acquired “all the facilities, schools, shops, even a theater, to the point that the village was more advanced than some of the villages around it. And the people from the other villages started coming to work with the lepers. It was a fantastic place.” Doctors traveled to Iran from around the world to do facial reconstructive surgery and repair hands that had never opened. The Queen made periodic inspection visits and insisted on regular progress reports on improvements undertaken since her last trip.
Farah’s encounter with the lepers taught her an invaluable lesson: “Now I could do more than sympathize; I had the means to act.” She threw herself into her public duties with the gusto and optimism that epitomized the go-go atmosphere of Iran in the late sixties. Where her husband identified with the military, foreign affairs, and business interests, the Queen challenged old taboos through symbolic gestures. To erase the stigma associated with blood transfusions in a Muslim society, she allowed herself to be photographed donating blood. Deeply affected by the plight of burn victims in hospitals, Farah lent her name and prestige to Queen’s University Hospital’s special burns unit and signed on as the organization’s patron and chair of the board. Together with her friend Lili Amir-Arjomand, she launched the Organization for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which
raised funds to build a network of children’s libraries across the country. “We built libraries in public places like parks,” Farah recalled. “I wanted libraries built that reflected the style of each city, and also to have writers write storybooks for children and designers illustrate them. To start production, I symbolically translated The Little Mermaid into Persian and drew some pictures like Disney cartoons.” The libraries and books were free. By 1977 Tehran boasted 28 children’s libraries, many located in the poorest neighborhoods in the city. A second initiative included sending 118 mobile libraries out into the provinces to educate children living in 2,400 villages. The children’s libraries led to other free initiatives, such as children’s concerts, poetry recitals, movies, and eventually the world-renowned Children’s Film Festival. By the late seventies, Iran’s success in reducing illiteracy attracted the attention of educators from around the world.
Farah had one major advantage over her husband in that she could move more freely around the country with a small entourage and minimal security. On occasion her old friend from childhood Elli Antoniades filled in as lady-in-waiting. She remembered these excursions as exhausting but exhilarating. One day Elli, by now the principal of Tehran’s French school, received a phone call from the Queen asking if she could replace her regular lady-in-waiting, who had fallen ill. “When?” she asked. “Now,” came the reply. “But I have to pack. I have no clothes.” “Elli, there is no time. The car will pick you up in a few minutes. We will get you clothes when we arrive.” But when the women arrived in the south their days were so jammed with engagements they had no time to shop for Elli’s new wardrobe. “So at the start of each day I wore the clothes Her Majesty had worn the day before. But she is taller than me and … nothing fitted!” The two women tried to suppress their mirth during official engagements but at the end of each day once the door was closed they roared with laughter.
The Fall of Heaven Page 17
