Denied any official role, the Shah’s brothers and sisters entered into commerce; jockeyed for proximity to the throne; and lobbied for favors, appointments, and increases in their stipends. The Shah’s view was that largesse was a small price to pay for keeping them out of trouble. If his siblings enjoyed the perks of status, then all the better. Dispensing favors and money was the Shah’s way of keeping his fractious siblings onside but also led to jealousies and resentments. No member of the Pahlavi family aroused more public animosity than Princess Ashraf. The CIA described Ashraf as one of her brother’s “most ambitious supporters and one of his major liabilities during most of his career.” After her brother consolidated power in the midsixties the Princess’s interests moved from politics to business and she entered into a series of highly lucrative business partnerships to build residential and commercial developments. The Princess “has not hesitated to use her influence to obtain government contracts for her friends or acquaintances willing to pay her a fee. In recent years … she no longer demands a pay-off from contractors but only comments that she would be happy to be able to rely on them should it ever be necessary.” Though reports of her involvement in the drug trade were based on “scanty evidence,” they too had become “a fixture in the catalogue of charges against the Pahlavis.”
The CIA report was based on the usual Tehran tittle-tattle and contained few if any proven facts and even less original analysis. Talk of the Princess’s influence was vastly exaggerated, not only in government but also in her charity work. Much of the enmity directed at female members of the Pahlavi family in particular originated with men troubled by their influence in a conservative Muslim male-dominated society. Everyone who knew Ashraf attested to her humor, passion for life, and above all her devotion to her brother. Her extensive patronage of charities and philanthropies mainly reflected her staunch support for women’s rights, a cause that stirred resentment from the ulama. The Princess built a powerful network of loyalists within the regime who kept her informed at all times. Yet there was no doubting her tenacious, opinionated personality or her business acumen. Her intrigues against the Queen, whose liberal tendencies she distrusted, caused so much havoc that in the late sixties her brother, who usually retreated from personal confrontations, sent her into exile to cool off. She returned to find her influence at court greatly diminished and Farah in the ascendant.
Princess Ashraf’s first, brief marriage, to Ali Qavam, had produced a son, Shahram, described by U.S. intelligence as “a wheeler-dealer” invested in twenty holding companies that ranged from transportation, nightclubs, and construction to advertising and distributorships. The holding companies were set up, the CIA reported, to provide cover for “quasi-legal business ventures.” Prince Shahram’s “most flagrant act of irresponsibility,” according to the agency, was a smuggling operation that involved “the sale of national art treasures and antiques, notably the gold artifacts from Marlik, a prehistoric archeological site of great significance.” According to U.S. intelligence, the loot was ferried out of Iran in his mother’s name to evade inspections by customs officials. Ashraf was stunned and humiliated when she learned of the ruse and gave orders to put an immediate end to it. The companies were wound up and her affairs were put in order, but the Princess’s reputation with the Iranian public never recovered from the scandal, and her standing with her brother and sister-in-law was further undermined.
The Shah was so angered by his nephew’s behavior that he briefly considered jailing him and then sending him into exile. He relented only in the face of emotional pleas from his sister. The Queen was not nearly so understanding or forgiving. She understood the concerns of middle-class Tehranis who worked hard, played by the rules, and were appalled by official greed and corruption, and she worried that her sister-in-law’s family threatened the Crown Prince’s chances of ever taking the throne. By now Farah was under no illusions about the life she had married into. When she accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union the Pahlavis exchanged knowing glances when their Russian escorts made them linger in the private apartments of the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death with their children by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The Shah understood that the Russians were playing a psychological game and pretended not to notice. His wife followed his cue but couldn’t help identify with the star-crossed couple. Looking around the room, she noted that they had left their possessions behind when the revolutionaries came for them. The trip made an indelible impression. “I always had in mind the Romanovs. I remember thinking, ‘If this happens in Iran, I never want them to say that we took everything away.’”
Queen Farah’s decision to sound out Court Minister Alam during her trip to Mashad in May 1970 marked an important step in her political maturity. Her dissatisfaction with Alam’s response to her concerns about corruption meant that when she returned to Tehran she decided to follow the advice of trusted friends and place a telephone call to Parviz Sabeti, whose appearances on television explaining the role of Savak had also drawn her husband’s close attention. Sabeti agreed to meet with her but only on the condition that she first obtain the Shah’s approval—he wanted the monarch to know exactly what was going on.
* * *
PARVIZ SABETI FLEW to Nowshahr on the Caspian Sea, where the Pahlavis spent the later part of each summer on vacation. He found the Queen in a state of great anxiety. “She was obsessed with corruption,” he recalled. They met alone. The Nowshahr residence was small but somehow Sabeti never caught a glimpse of her husband.
For five hours Sabeti briefed Farah on his findings, providing her with damning evidence of corruption within the Imperial Family and at the highest levels of Pahlavi society. “I spoke against corrupt courtiers and family members,” said Sabeti. He rattled off the list of names in his usual cool, perfunctory manner and spared no one. By the end of their exhausting session Farah grasped the magnitude of the problem and the powerful forces arrayed against her. The scales had finally fallen from her eyes. The Queen was stunned. “She cried hard,” remembered Sabeti. “She asked, ‘How can my son become king if this is going on?’”
After their first encounter the Queen kept in close touch with Sabeti, phoning him to arrange for the delivery of reports and seeking his advice. She also used their back channel to intercede on behalf of citizens who contacted her office claiming they had been falsely accused of dissident political activities. Sabeti was generally amenable to her requests, though they bickered over specific cases. More meetings followed. Over the next several years they held at least two lengthy sessions specifically devoted to corruption, and on both occasions the Queen again wept in despair. But Farah was also galvanized into action. She started asking questions and pursued her own lines of inquiry. She showed a closer interest in the workings of the Imperial Court and government. Another time, Farah asked Sabeti to prepare a report on the corrupt business practices of a prominent leader of the Tehran trade guild who happened to be a protégé of both Hoveyda and General Nasiri. She said she intended to raise the matter with her husband in the hope that he would take action. “It took three days to write,” said Sabeti. “I gave it to her. It was a very long report.” The Queen handed the report to her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, gave it first to Hossein Fardust, who then presented it to General Nasiri. The next thing Sabeti knew, Nasiri summoned him to his office and in the presence of one of Fardust’s aides informed him point-blank that the contents of the report he had compiled were categorically false. “It’s all wrong,” said Nasiri, and sent him smarting back to his office.
Two days later, Farah telephoned Sabeti. She said her husband had embarrassed her by discounting the corruption allegations in their entirety. “Mr. Sabeti, the report you gave me was all wrong,” she said. He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was distressed. They met the next day, and Sabeti explained to her what had happened. The confidential report he had prepared for her eyes only had been handed over to his supe
riors—the same men he had accused of malfeasance. “Now, I have to say it is all wrong,” he patiently explained. Realizing what had happened, the Queen wept with frustration and offered to help Sabeti secure a meeting with her husband so he could present the evidence in person. She telephoned him from a small resort area beside a lake outside the capital. “His Majesty has offered to see you,” she said, sounding optimistic. “We will be together.” Sabeti insisted that he see the Shah alone because “He won’t let me talk frankly about his sisters and brothers with you in the same room as me.”
The Queen helped Sabeti prepare for the meeting, which they both hoped would focus the Shah on the need to confront his brothers and sisters and purge his inner circle of corrupt elements. But in the end the Shah backed out of the meeting. Shy, averse to bad news, and surrounded by loyalists who had their own reasons for encouraging his distrust, the monarch declined his wife’s request to meet alone with Sabeti. In so doing he missed a golden opportunity to learn more about the corruption that was already starting to gnaw away at public confidence in the regime.
* * *
PRINCESS SHAHNAZ MARRIED Khosrow Djahanbani in the winter of 1971 at Iran’s embassy in Geneva, an out-of-the-way location dictated by the bride’s embarrassed father. The Shah instructed Alam to prevent the transfer of his daughter’s financial assets out of the country and to bar the groom from ever showing his face at court. Iranian law stipulated that drug offenders face the firing squad, and the couple’s hedonistic lifestyle made him appear a hypocrite. “As her father I may be able to forgive my daughter her mistakes, but as Shahanshah of Iran I can never accept a good-for-nothing as my son-in-law,” he said. “It would imply that I am willing to condone his morals.” Princess Fatemeh represented the Pahlavi family at the wedding ceremony. The couple, wearing elegantly tailored caftans, their long hair falling loose over their shoulders, wept, smiled, and held each other during their vows. Shahnaz had never looked more lovely or more happy.
In the months leading up to his marriage, Khosrow Djahanbani had moved into the house of his fiancée’s cousin Prince Patrick Ali, the Shah’s nephew by his late brother Prince Ali Reza, who had died in a plane crash in 1954. The young prince dabbled in religion and was under the influence of a fundamentalist Islamic preacher who saw an opportunity to make a spectacular conversion. Patrick Ali was not alone in turning to religion. In 1971 U.S. diplomats reported “an unexpected growth of interest in religion among a small segment of youth in Iran, especially those studying and teaching in the universities.” The Islamist Union was strong on all campuses “and attendance at the Tehran University Mosque is continually increasing.” The embassy concluded that youth interest in religion was “basically conservative in nature” and a backlash against the White Revolution, which emphasized the use of American and European ideas, technology, and personnel. “A small number of students have also embraced religious orthodoxy as a means of criticizing the Shah and his method of rule in Iran,” read the report. “Criticism of the Shah which might be unacceptable in a secular context, can often be voiced under cover of an interest in strengthening the role of religion in Iranian life.”
Savak generally left the mosques alone. With Khomeini in exile and his lieutenants underground or in prison, and Iran’s mainstream ulama solidly anti-Communist and in receipt of generous state subsidies to reward their quiescence, there seemed little reason for the secret police to harass the clergy. That made the mosques even more attractive to leftists, who saw them as sanctuaries for political activity. Through their contacts with the mullahs some students did rediscover and embrace religion. Mostly they were allies of convenience who could offer shelter and support while they fomented plans to overthrow the Shah and replace the monarchy with a republic. Both sides set aside religious and philosophical differences for the greater good of the struggle against what they saw as injustice and repression. “The banning of political parties, the turning of the Parliament into a club for sycophants, the muzzling of the press, and the continued underdevelopment of trade unions and other associations, deprived society of its natural means of self-expression and political activity,” wrote an Iranian political commentator. “This led to a gradual return to the mosque as a multipurpose institution that could counter the inordinate expansion of the state as a super institution.”
The U.S. embassy decided that Islam did not pose a threat to the Shah or to Iran’s essentially pro-Western orientation. If anything, the “conservative, inward looking, and antiforeign basis for the revival of interest in religion among the young educated classes” actually precluded it from becoming a “force for change in the country” because the country was moving inexorably toward a future that was modern, liberal, and secular. “It is necessary to re-emphasize that this growth in interest is on a small scale and affects an extremely limited percentage of the student body. It is interesting, however, as an indication of one of the possible paths reaction against Westernization and modernization can take in Iranian society.”
8
THE CAMP OF GOLD CLOTH
We stand on our own feet.
—THE SHAH
Ah yes, Khomeini. One does what one can.
—IMAM MUSA SADR
“Let’s go and visit the halls. We’re going to pay a visit to the students.”
The Shah’s casual suggestion to his startled entourage was made on the grounds of Pahlavi University in Shiraz. Having decreed 1971 the “Year of Iran” to mark the 2,500-year anniversary of the Iranian monarchy, he traveled to Shiraz to open a sparkling new sports facility on the grounds of the university. The White Revolution was under way, income from oil revenues was surging, and dozens of world leaders were expected to arrive in October to attend the anniversary festivities outside Shiraz at Persepolis. More than two thousand schools, three dams, highways, mosques, a vast irrigation system, and one of the world’s largest pumping stations were on target for completion. Resources including a municipal library were lavished on Tehran. The Shah opened a new housing complex to serve hundreds of poor families in the southern suburbs and whose amenities included arts and sports facilities. During a stroll through the University of Tehran’s new central library, which housed more than six hundred thousand volumes, and a collection of priceless Persian manuscripts, he asked a university official, “What status does this library, as one of the world’s institutions of this kind, give us?” His escort replied that the university was now one of the best equipped of its kind. “We’ve given them a good hiding, haven’t we?” the Shah said, beaming. As ever, he was determined to show them—the Europeans and the Americans who had once dominated Iran—that his people were catching up.
In the countryside, where land reform was in full swing, millions of farming families now lived on their own plots. “Of course my life is better,” said a peasant living in a village near Shiraz. “Ten years ago, I could neither read nor write, nor could my wife. Our children were not in school and they worked here on the land with us—another man’s land. I got one-fifth of the fruit of it each year, if I was lucky. Sometimes there wasn’t much fruit. Now our farm belongs to us. We have machines for work. All my children have gone to school. My eldest daughter has married an engineer in the city. My wife and I vote for our village council. We can read and write because a young man from the Education Corps [the national service group of young men drafted for military duty who are assigned to adult education] taught us to.” Women were eligible to vote and stand for election. They could divorce their husbands and veto them taking a second wife. Idealistic young volunteers from the universities joined the literacy and medical corps and ventured into the countryside to teach reading, writing, and health care.
The Shah was at the peak of his powers and popularity. Despite the bitter criticism leveled at him by left-wing intellectuals and religious radicals, in 1971 he enjoyed broader public support than at any time in the previous three decades. Sixty thousand had recently turned out to cheer his visit to the Holy Shrine of Imam R
eza at Mashad, the same spot where his father’s troops had once fired on crowds to enforce the ban on hijab, or Islamic dress. In 1971 the CIA described him as “a worthy successor to earlier monarchs, of whom some have been notable—Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, Abbas to name a few. 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.” The Shah was “a confident ruler, who knows what he wants and how to get it” and “all in all, a popular and respected king.” The agency did express concern about “soft spots, actual and potential” in the overall picture. He was isolated from the realities of daily life in Iran and from different viewpoints: “Few of his ministers or officials are ready to express to him an opinion differing from his own; virtually none are able to tell him he is wrong about something. Even foreign ambassadors cringe before the Shah’s responses in official presentations which displease him.” Most Iranians were too preoccupied with making money “to fuss much about politics,” though that was likely to change and “there are a few signs of ferment—after a decade of political torpor.” The Shah’s isolation would not lessen as he grew older: “The chances he will fail to comprehend the intensity of, say, a political protest movement, are likely to grow. Hence, so will the miscalculation for dealing with it.”
Despite the general image of peace and prosperity, among middle-class Iranians there was rising impatience with authoritarian rule and criticism of the secret police “and the monarchy itself, particularly since extensive corruption is associated with the royal family.” The Shah’s suppression of legitimate political activity had pushed the opposition underground and caused younger activists to abandon hope of peaceful reform and take up arms. On February 8, 1971, a group of poorly trained, lightly armed insurgents attacked a gendarmerie post at Siakal on the Caspian. The arrest and execution of the thirteen culprits was followed by the revenge killing of the army’s special prosecutor and a series of tit-for-tat assassinations and shoot-outs in southern Tehran neighborhoods between the security forces and armed militants. The CIA’s view was that the Shah was likely to remain in power for “the foreseeable future” though it cautioned that “Iran’s fundamental vulnerability lies in the unique concentration of power in the hands of the Shah. He has over the years deliberately cut down any leaders who have shown signs of acquiring an independent political base. He talks of giving the responsibility to elected representatives but shows no sign of actual movement along these lines. He hopes to hand the throne to his son; he may be able to do so.” But he couldn’t rule forever and his departure from the scene “will usher in change, perhaps involving tumult and chaos.”
The Fall of Heaven Page 21
