The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The real radicalization of Iranian youth took place outside Iran’s borders. Each year the Shah spent $50 million to send his country’s best and brightest to the United States and Western Europe to learn the skills needed to modernize Iranian society. The students’ time in America coincided with the explosive events of the late sixties, when the United States was rocked by urban riots, social movements, street protests, and political assassinations. Caught up in the spirit of people power, the students returned home to a still deeply conservative Muslim society where strict censorship was enforced, drug traffickers went to the firing squad, and secret police informants sat in their classrooms. In 1970 the U.S. embassy was concerned enough about the emergence of a leftist fifth column to conduct a study of Iranian youth opinion. “The liberal states of Western Europe and North America are measures by which young Iranians judge themselves and their society,” it concluded. “Thus, as elsewhere in the world, most of the educated youth in Iran dislike living in what they see as a totalitarian society. They deeply desire the civil liberties which are standard in the United States and other Western nations; they are annoyed that their newspapers are censored and controlled, their activities subject to secret police scrutiny, their movements (particularly in and out of the country) under heavy control, and the free public expression of their personal freedoms forbidden. They regard these aspects of Iranian society and government as a direct creation of the Shah.”

  Young, politically astute Iranians admired Ruhollah Khomeini as the only public figure who had stood up to the Shah and paid the price for his principles. Though they knew very little about him, the young idolized Khomeini as an Iranian Che Guevara, imbuing him with a leftist revolutionary aura based on their own naive hopes for a better tomorrow. The Iraqi authorities who kept the Grand Ayatollah under observation were more apprised of his true nature. Iraqi intelligence chief Sadoun Shakir informed his French counterpart, Count Alexandre de Marenche, that Khomeini was “a terrible character” with the personality traits of a “medieval tyrant.” Shakir passed along a report of a disturbing incident that had recently involved the Grand Ayatollah and a neighbor’s child.

  One day, a child of his family had a fight with a neighborhood youngster. [Khomeini] wanted the boy who had dared raise a hand to his offspring to be put to death.

  * * *

  BEFORE HE BECAME the public face of Savak, Parviz Sabeti earned his law degree at the University of Tehran. Bright and exceptionally well-read, with ambitions to enter political life, at twenty-two he went to work for the security organization as an intelligence analyst in the hope it would serve as a springboard to enter government. His intelligence and acumen so impressed his employers that within five years he was appointed to head the agency’s political reporting unit. “Our task was not only to fight the opposition but to fight injustices and corruption within the system,” he said. “The cycle of popular grievance led to actions [by the security forces] and then counter-actions [by the opposition]. We had to break the cycle.”

  In the aftermath of June 1963 Iran’s senior security officials reorganized Savak with the goal of anticipating and preventing another bout of revolutionary unrest. The Iranians accepted an Israeli recommendation that they merge the separate offices responsible for collecting and processing intelligence. The next year Sabeti was put in charge of the new Office of Anti-Subversion, which fell within the jurisdiction of Savak’s powerful Third Directorate, headed by General Nasser Moghadam. Moghadam was the same officer who had tried and failed to persuade Khomeini not to deliver his Ashura speech. He reported directly to General Nasiri, who had replaced General Pakravan as Savak’s new chief, and both men enjoyed reputations as hard-liners within the security forces. Moghadam’s Third Directorate was responsible for domestic security and for monitoring the activities of subversive groups as well as farmers and workers. Separate directorates were devoted to the National Front and its Islamic offshoot, Mehdi Bazargan’s Liberation Movement of Iran; the Kurdish minority; other minority separatist groups, including Arabs, Baluchis, and Turks; Iranian students abroad; domestic religious radicals; and the Fedayeen and Mujahedin terrorist groups. Khomeini lived in exile, but Sabeti regarded him as a domestic threat and kept tabs on him, too, infiltrating his household with informers who garnered information on who he saw and what he said and wrote.

  Savak agents gathered intelligence on subversives but also on officials whose behavior and activities they believed posed a threat to public confidence. Sabeti and Moghadam were particularly concerned about the corrosive effects of corruption. Years earlier, Prime Minister Fazlollah Zahedi had warned the Shah that in the absence of a strong parliamentary executive the monarch would be held personally responsible for scandals and failures. To prevent that from happening Savak monitored the business activities, financial dealings, friendships, and sex lives of members of the Imperial Family in addition to government ministers, senior military officers, business executives, the ayatollahs, and poets, writers, playwrights, and entertainers. Government ministries were infiltrated with informants and subjected to investigations. The head of state was not immune from Savak’s prying eyes. When Sabeti discovered that the Shah was seeing women in a safe house near the palace, he took action. “I often used to see the Shah driving to this house [near Niavaran] at three in the afternoon,” he said. “I started asking around and soon found out what was going on. My concern was security. I thought the house was too exposed, so I made sure security in the area was tightened.”

  The Shah made certain that the intelligence service remained in loyal hands. Nematollah Nasiri, born in 1910, had first made the acquaintance of Crown Prince Mohammad Reza at the prestigious Officers’ Academy. Later, he served as a lieutenant with Hossein Fardust, the Shah’s confidant since childhood, and it was Fardust who selected him to help guard the royal palaces when political unrest boiled over in the early fifties. Nasiri played a key role during Operation Ajax, when he was arrested on August 15, 1953, while trying to serve Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq with his letter of dismissal. The Shah rewarded Nasiri’s loyalty by promoting him to the rank of three-star general and appointing him to lead the national police. In June 1963 it was Nasiri who enforced Alam’s shoot-to-kill order that earned him the title “Butcher of Tehran.” Two years later, when the Shah swept aside his father’s advisers, Nasiri received the Imperial warrant to replace General Hassan Pakravan as head of Savak. Nasiri was loyal to a fault, though not regarded as especially creative or original in his thinking. That suited the purposes of the Shah, who had no intention of hiring a Mark Antony to run his secret service.

  Nasiri had a taste for the finer things in life. “He parlayed his power into wealth and illicit gains not only for himself and his allies, but for his family,” wrote one critic. He earned a fortune in real estate and invested in industrial farms with Hossein Fardust, once his patron and now his deputy at Savak. While Sabeti and Moghadam rooted out corruption, their superiors enriched themselves at the public trough. It was hardly a surprise that Nasiri went to great lengths to protect the names of his business associates and others cashing in on Iran’s economic boom. “Any time I wrote reports on the Shah’s family and friends,” complained Parviz Sabeti, “Nasiri wouldn’t take them to him.” The general transformed Savak into a personal empire whose grip extended deep into every sector of society as well as into government ministries, embassies, and universities. In the early seventies he personified the agency’s Orwellian reputation as all-knowing, all-seeing. But no spy agency could see or know everything, particularly when the men at the top were censoring themselves.

  * * *

  AS A BOY, Hossein Fardust had been selected by Reza Shah as a companion for his son, and he had accompanied the young Crown Prince of Iran to boarding school in Switzerland.

  When the Shah reshuffled Savak’s top leadership in 1965, he appointed his oldest friend, Fardust, to the highly sensitive post of deputy director to make sure he had his own “eyes and ears” in t
he agency. Fardust’s job was to report to the monarch each day with summaries from the different directorates. One biographer described him as “the ultimate ‘clearinghouse’ for all reports [and he] had his hands on the pulse of the country.” Fardust struck most observers, including Queen Farah, as a rather strange and mysterious fellow, the sort of courtier who lurked in the shadows and prowled the palace corridors, scuttling into and out of anterooms, and entering and leaving meetings without feeling the need to say a word to anyone. His influence was such that everyone at court, from the Queen and the commanders of the armed forces on down to the lowliest palace courtier, believed that Fardust’s opinions and instructions carried the full weight of the Shah and were to be carried out accordingly. Like his friend General Nasiri, Hossein Fardust was not especially smart, bright, or cultured. He shambled when he walked and was “notorious for wearing the same shirt and shoes for long stretches of time.” Despite his attempts at modesty, however, Fardust’s business dealings with Nasiri made him a very wealthy man.

  The Shah refused to hear a word said against his old school chum. He dismissed as slander the rumors and reports that Fardust was in the pay of either the Russian or the British intelligence services. “They can’t even let me have one friend,” he grumbled. He trusted Fardust to the point that he told his wife to consult him if she ever needed to corroborate information or could not obtain satisfaction elsewhere in government. The Queen was aware of the stories that Reza Shah had selected Fardust to accompany her husband to Le Rosey and then decided he didn’t like him. Reza Shah had discouraged his son from making friendships, with the predictable result that he grew up to be a generally terrible judge of character. The Shah had a tendency to push away smart, capable people who genuinely had his best interests in mind and surrounded himself instead with men such as Fardust and Nasiri, feckless mediocrities who exploited and manipulated their proximity to the throne for self-interest. In the case of Fardust, the viper at the breast nursed a bitter, vengeful grievance. He had never forgotten his origins as the son of a poor soldier taken away from his parents at a tender age to serve the most powerful family in the land. One interpretation is that he associated his royal service with a form of psychological imprisonment. “He grew to despise all those whose birthrights granted them advantages in life,” wrote Abbas Milani. “Envy became a permanent part of his emotional vocabulary. Yet he spent nearly all his life serving someone whose very right to rule—and to lord it over him—was an accident of birth.” From an early age he had learned to tell the Pahlavis what he thought they wanted to hear. The first lies he told were as a boy on the tennis court—he fibbed when he assured Reza Shah that his son the Crown Prince was his superior in tennis. His habit of covering up, dissembling, and deceiving escalated from the tennis court to the palace. This, then, was the twisted personality of the dark soul who presented the Shah with his daily portrait of conditions inside the country. In his personality and motives, Hossein Fardust had all the makings of a traitor.

  Perhaps it was not surprising that when the Shah read the Third Directorate’s periodic reports on corruption and policy failures he was often too quick to blame the messenger. Since childhood he had avoided dealing with unpleasantness and bad news to the point where he tore references to the Arab invasion of Persia in the seventh century out of a school textbook. In the palace he dismissed as spoilers the few brave officials who tried to bring evidence of mismanagement and corruption to his attention. “Why is Savak pushing so much negativity?” he complained to Fardust. “Go and see what is wrong with Sabeti and Moghadam. What are their family backgrounds like? Why are they the only ones complaining?” He was so used to receiving optimistic assessments of Iran’s progress from Nasiri and Fardust that he wondered if their two underlings suffered from psychological problems. “I didn’t blame His Majesty but Fardust [for not telling him the truth],” said Sabeti. “I told Fardust that he needed to explain to His Majesty that it was not our job to tell him good news.” Fardust’s solution was typical: he advised Sabeti that in the future he should edit his intelligence reports so that any bad news was balanced alongside the good. But even then the Shah complained that his reports were too negative, sniping to Court Minister Alam that Savak’s most senior and talented intelligence analyst was most likely a CIA plant. Alam did nothing to allay his paranoia. He, too, feared and resented Sabeti—agents from the Third Directorate compiled damaging material on his own extralegal commercial investments and properties.

  Yet by age thirty-five Parviz Sabeti had become Iran’s untouchable man. No one could match his breadth and depth of knowledge on conditions inside Iran, the regime’s strengths, and its vulnerabilities. His intelligence on opposition groups, terrorist networks, and dissidents was unmatched. His files contained the most intimate secrets of anyone of any consequence at court, in government, the mosques, and in the bazaars. The Shah knew this and warily kept Sabeti, the regime’s “Mr. Security,” at arm’s length—the two men met each other on only one occasion—but he knew how much Nasiri depended on Sabeti’s skills as an analyst to succeed. Sabeti emerged from the shadows on three separate occasions in 1969 and 1970, when he appeared on national television to explain the activities of the Third Directorate to the Iranian public. Television viewers were struck by Sabeti’s telegenic looks, sharp intellect, and soft-spoken demeanor—he was no one’s idea of a ruthless secret police operative. The decision to raise Sabeti’s public profile had another quite remarkable and unintended consequence.

  “Farah knew me from television,” said Sabeti. “The people around her asked her to call me. I told her, ‘I want to see you. But not without His Majesty’s permission.’ She asked, he approved, and we met for the first time in 1970 at Nowshahr on the Caspian. Our meeting lasted five hours.”

  * * *

  THE DIARY OF Court Minister Alam revealed that on May 9, 1970, he accompanied Queen Farah on a day trip to Mashad. She had a complex relationship with Alam, her husband’s oldest, devoted, and most indispensable adviser. Farah was painfully aware that it was Alam who arranged the Shah’s afternoon trysts with young women in a safe house near the palace. She bridled at his sycophantic behavior and worried that her husband, shy, isolated, and surrounded with flatterers, risked losing touch with the realities of daily life in what was still a poor country with serious social and economic challenges to overcome. Alam was loyal to the point of servility. “He is very, very independent,” he once said of the Shah. “You know, a man who is missioned by the gods, how can he choose a model for himself?”

  On the flight back to Tehran the Queen asked Alam if she could talk to him alone. Though she blamed him for pandering to her husband she still appreciated his loyalty, discretion, and political acumen. She also knew he shared her concerns about the behavior of the Shah’s relatives. “In general I get the impression that Her Majesty fears for the future, and not without cause.” Farah was sensitive to the widespread perception that her husband’s brothers and sisters used their titles and connections to advance their own interests. “In general,” the U.S. embassy observed in a devastating 1970 assessment, “young people in Iran, like other Iranians, find the numerous members of the Royal Family, other than the immediate family of the Shah, a shadowy and vaguely distasteful group. Innumerable rumors and occasional substantiated accounts, which are in circulation in Iran, produce, particularly among Iranian youth, a general image of parasitism, constant corruption, and personal laxness.”

  The wives of Reza Shah had between them produced seven sons and four surviving daughters. “The Shah had too many brothers and sisters,” said Fatemeh Pakravan. “That’s not good for a king. Not good at all.” He kept them firmly in their place, restricting their ability to play any role in public life. “We never spoke politics in family gatherings,” confirmed Prince Gholam Reza, the Shah’s half brother, who was respected for his involvement in the army and sporting life. “I was His Majesty’s Special Inspector for the Army. This position was important at the begi
nning as I could report directly to His Majesty, but in the last few years this was changed. I kept the title but had no real impact.” His wife, Princess Manigeh, a Qajar princess, was not allowed to hold official patronages, which were reserved solely for Queen Farah and the Shah’s sisters. The prince recalled that as children the Pahlavi siblings were raised in separate households so that relations between them “were never shown in a warm way. We had no casual gatherings together. It was always a bit official between us. We avoided talking Iranian politics as it could be considered interfering in government decisions or influencing this or that. I’m not exaggerating by saying not a word.” The prince recalled that Princess Shams maintained her own social circle and kept to herself, while Princess Ashraf “had the best parties and was a very interesting lady. There was always very good conversation and she had very bright mind. We always had a very good time in her place.” He was personally closest to Prince Ali Reza who was “as a twin to me. We loved each other and made lots of things together. His loss [in a plane crash in 1954] for me remains very painful. Prince Abdul Reza was very sportive and a very good hunter, very elegant and refined. Princess Fatemeh was very sociable, down to earth and sportive. She was also a helicopter pilot. Prince Hamid Reza was fun and smart. When he was younger he would hide under the car from his own guards. He liked to go out and have fun—he had a good sense of humor.”