The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Tumult and chaos were the last things on anyone’s mind on the bright morning of April 28, 1971, when the Shah made his impromptu stroll over to Pahlavi University’s student halls. Usually unsmiling and taciturn, today the monarch was “obviously happy, almost radiant,” remembered his escort Chancellor Hushang Nahavandi. He was all the more cheerful knowing that his officials dreaded exactly this sort of spontaneous gesture. They usually preceded his arrival to ensure that the facilities he inspected were orderly and the people he met were loyal. He waved aside his officials’ security fears and walked on. His face lit up as he ventured onto the grounds. The architecture, he told Chancellor Nahavandi, was ideal because it was “modern, but so suited to the climate and the surroundings—so Iranian!” He expressed his hope that one day the university would be “the Persepolis of our times.”

  The Shah and the chancellor entered a dormitory and started up the stairs. In the Iranian tradition the Shah was “in his own home, wherever he may be,” observed Nahavandi, and the two men knocked on the first door they encountered. Two students were in the room, surrounded by books and cups of tea, one sitting on the floor while his friend leaned against a wall. The Shah’s appearance stunned them into silence. “We’ve come to ask for your news and how you are,” he politely inquired. “It’s about time for your exams. You’re getting ready for them, aren’t you?”

  The student who had been seated on the floor stood up, started weeping, and in the tribal custom knelt at the Shah’s feet and gripped his legs. His friend took the monarch’s hand and touched his shoulder. Everyone was overcome with emotion.

  The Shah asked them about their studies. He applauded them for studying science, a profession he saw as essential to Iran’s development, and asked them about their families, where they were from.

  By now news had spread throughout the dormitory of the Shah’s arrival. Excited students thronged the hallway and soon the chant went up, “Javid Shah! Javid Shah!”

  After a few more words the Shah bade the students farewell and ventured into the corridor, where he shook hands and exchanged greetings. Students converged on the dormitory from around the campus, some still in their pajamas. They cheered and called out their support. The Shah smiled, waved, and urged them to go back to class.

  “We want to come with you!” they cried. “Thank you for coming to see us.”

  Downstairs, the Shah greeted the dignitaries with a sardonic aside. “You see,” he said, “we’re still alive.”

  Cynics might dismiss the Shah’s public receptions as staged, but no cameras were present to record his encounter with the students at Pahlavi University: at the first sight of their king they had melted in his presence—won over by his modesty, self-effacement, and politesse, they had dropped to their knees. The royal magic still worked.

  * * *

  THE PERSEPOLIS CELEBRATIONS were the inspiration of Shojaeddin Shafa, an Iranian scholar who eleven years earlier had first proposed the idea of celebrating two and a half thousand years of Persian monarchy. The Shah approved the concept and established a planning committee with a budget. But the unrest and financial constraints of the early sixties, followed by the great national crusade to implement the reforms of the White Revolution, led to a nearly ten-year delay, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1970 that the Shah announced his intention to host “the most wonderful thing the world has ever seen.” It was from Persepolis that Darius had ruled the ancient world, and a pageant there would “rewaken the people of Iran to their past and reawaken the world to Iran.”

  The Shah liked the idea of building a tent city in the desert to house his foreign guests. He blanched at the cost but eventually assented in the face of Court Minister Alam’s persistence and flattery. Envisioned as a contemporary take on the royal encampment built by Francis I, who hosted England’s Henry VIII in 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Persepolis appealed to the Shah’s sense of history, romance, and grandeur. But it was only after Queen Farah accepted patronage of the Celebrations Council that she learned that the design and construction of the Tent City had already been outsourced to French companies. To speed up the planning process, on his own initiative Alam had contracted Jansen of Paris to design and build the tents, Maxim’s to provide catering, and Lanvin to dress officials and guests. Sensitive as ever to public relations concerns, Farah reminded the council that the whole point of the celebration was “to prove that the times we are living in now, the Pahlavi era, is a period of renaissance for Iranian civilization.” The idea that Iranians would pay foreigners to plan their own national event “went against my Iranian sensibility,” and she anticipated a backlash from foreign media. Though she made an impassioned plea to scrap the contracts, the majority of the council stayed loyal to Alam and accepted his argument that it was too late to change course. Farah doubted Alam’s excuse that Iran lacked the expertise to stage the event in one year. His older generation of Iranians, she believed, had an inferiority complex when it came to their own culture, having been raised to assume that “whatever was European was good, noble, beautiful and praiseworthy. They thought that Iranian things were ugly, mean and open to condemnation.” Privately, she seethed. “Of all the tasks that fell to me in preparation for the festivities,” she wrote, “coping with that mishap was the most difficult and the most depressing, for just as I had predicted, a wave of acerbic criticism about expenditure on luxuries slowly arose from the West.”

  The Court Ministry stumbled again when it announced that the price tag for Persepolis came to a staggering $100 million. Alam failed to point out that the sum included the cost of new construction projects such as rural schools, tourist facilities, roads, and other infrastructure projects. The actual cost of the weeklong festivities came to $22 million, of which one-third was covered by generous donations from the Iranian business community, one-third was paid for by the Court Ministry, and one-third was rolled over from the budget of the Celebrations Council, which had a ten-year reserve to draw on. The Court Ministry’s inept handling of public relations presented opposition groups with a priceless opportunity to tarnish the Shah as a cruel dictator who preferred to dine on foie gras while his poorest subjects went hungry. In a society that thrived on conspiracy theories and was prepared to believe the very worst about its rulers, wild rumors soon spread that the true cost of the event had soared as high as $300 million. The Shah bridled at the criticism. “Why are we reproached for serving dinner to fifty heads of state?” he snapped. “What am I supposed to do—serve them bread and radishes?” He had a point—Jacqueline Kennedy had hired Jansen to redecorate the White House, and she had not faced this sort of personal criticism. But his defensive attitude showed how out of step he was with the toned-down modesty of the early seventies. Four years earlier, on the eve of his lavish coronation, he had been lauded abroad as a benevolent and progressive king. Now he was criticized for indulging in a Bourbon-style extravaganza while international aid agencies still supplied eighty thousand Iranian mothers and children with powdered milk. Tehran lacked a proper sewer system, one-third of children admitted to hospitals in the capital suffered from malnutrition, and cholera remained a persistent threat.

  The celebrations drew the attention of young socialists who had fled over the border and made their way to Palestinian terrorist camps in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and South Yemen to receive weapons training and learn how to plant explosives and stage bank robberies and hijackings. An attempt had already been made to kidnap U.S. ambassador Douglas MacArthur II outside the grounds of the American embassy in November 1970. The incident at Siakal three months later raised the dreaded prospect of a terrorist attack on the Shah’s golden city in the desert. Hamid Ashraf, the sole survivor of the original guerrilla cell, evaded capture to mastermind a series of bank robberies that raised funds to buy weapons and earned him the cult status of a modern-day Robin Hood. The regime responded in kind by harassing, arresting, and detaining hundreds of suspected radicals, extremists, and dissidents but also many mode
rate critics of autocratic rule. In late September, on the eve of the celebrations, four armed men staged a clumsy bid to kidnap Princess Ashraf’s errant son Shahram Pahlavi on the streets of downtown Tehran. Though the prince escaped with minor abrasions, a parking attendant who ran to his aid was shot and killed. “Theoretically the guerrillas must have hoped to impose top-level negotiations—humiliating for even a less autocratic regime—in which the prince’s release would have been contingent on that of the rumored 600 to 1,000 political prisoners detained in recent months,” reported the Washington Post.

  Determined to prevent more attacks, the Shah’s security advisers established the Anti-Terrorist Joint Committee, a special extralegal body specifically set up to combat terrorism and antistate subversion. The joint committee’s leadership included the heads of Savak, the gendarmerie, military intelligence or G-2, and the national police. Working in complete secrecy, these officials made the momentous decision to determine the fate of individual detainees and captured terrorists outside the court system. In some cases that meant approving the use of force during interrogations. The joint committee was structured to ensure a measure of collective responsibility among the regime’s top security officials. Detainees were not taken to Evin Prison, where political prisoners were normally held, but instead to a special holding facility at the national police headquarters for their initial interrogation, from where they were transferred to Evin. Members of the joint committee took care to shield the head of state from the methods used to extract information. The Shah was informed of their deliberations on a need-to-know basis and apparently believed Nasiri’s explanation that only psychological pressure was applied to inmates. His fear of bloodshed and his record of pardoning assassins and plotters were well known to Nasiri and the others, who regarded him as far too softhearted to understand the sort of unpleasant measures required to crush an insurgency.

  Torture was not new to the Iranian experience. Dark tales had always swirled about the rumored bloodlust of Iran’s kings. According to legend, Shah Abbas reportedly “kept a retinue of cannibals … and when someone angered him he would turn to the cannibals and say, ‘Eat him,’ which they would promptly do.” In 1794 Shah Agha Mohammad Khan’s troops pillaged the city of Kerman and reputedly had the male population blinded and their wives and daughters raped and enslaved. Torture was a violation of the teachings of the Prophet and the holy book. “God shall torture in the next world those who have tortured in this world,” decreed Mohammad. Yet his admonition had not stopped Persian religious courts at the turn of the twentieth century from approving the use of “an array of corporal punishments.… They gouged out eyes. They amputated fingers, feet, and ears. They hanged, decapitated, strangled, impaled, disemboweled, crucified, hurled from cliffs, buried alive, and drew-and-quartered. Most common of all, they flogged the soles of the feet in a process known as falak.” Yet systematic torture had not been employed in the prisons of Reza Shah in the 1930s, and his regime had still enjoyed internal stability. At that time the police administered beatings to common criminals, though political prisoners and disgraced government officials were generally treated with leniency. It took the feverish, paranoid onset of the Cold War in the late forties for political extremists on the far left and right to resort to torture. Abuses were reported in Iranian Azerbaijan during the Communist rebellion at the end of World War II, and also during the unrest of the early fifties political detainees had been routinely abused. Pro-Mossadeq loyalists had thrown young Ardeshir Zahedi in prison, strapped him down, and beaten him so savagely that he suffered crippling spinal injuries and a lifetime of chronic pain.

  Still, the creation of the Anti-Terrorist Joint Committee signaled the start of something new and disturbing in Iran—the introduction of state-sanctioned torture. Though the Shah was not aware of the most extreme forms of interrogation, and though the regime considered itself at war with fanatics, bomb throwers, and revolutionaries, as head of state he bore ultimate responsibility for any suffering caused and any deaths that resulted.

  * * *

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on the morning of Tuesday, October 12, 1971, the boom of a 101-gun salute echoed across the vast windswept plain at Pasargade, outside Shiraz. The Shah had brought his family, government officials, generals, and tribal leaders to this remote desert place to honor the founder of empire, Cyrus the Great, before traveling to the Camp of Gold Cloth, some twenty-five miles away at Persepolis, where Cyrus’s grandson Darius had ruled. For the Shah, who as a boy had savored tales of Cyrus’s epic rise to the pantheon of greatness and resolved to revive the splendors of the Persian Empire, this moment marked the symbolic high point of his thirty years on the throne. He believed that he had succeeded where his father and dozens of other kings had failed by erasing past humiliations and consigning several hundred years of reversals and defeats to the dustbin of history. Television viewers thought his voice shook with emotion when he stood before the tomb of Cyrus wearing the uniform of commander in chief, his gold braid and ribbons of medals and decorations ablaze under the desert sun, to deliver a heartfelt eulogy to the architect of the world’s first great empire.

  “O Cyrus,” the Shah intoned, “great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself and from my nation … the Iranian flag is flying today as triumphantly as it flew in thy glorious age; the name of Iran today evokes as much respect throughout the world as it did in thy days; today, as in thy age, Iran bears the message of liberty and the love of mankind in a troubled world and is the guardian of the most sublime human aspirations. The torch thou lit has never died in stormy times.” His concluding words burst forth like an agitated thunderclap: “Cyrus! Great King, King of Kings, Noblest of the Noble, Hero of the history of Iran, and the world! Rest in Peace, for we are awake, and we will always stay awake!” “With that,” wrote the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, “a huge sand storm, a good omen in Persia, arose in an abrupt funnel and hovered for a few minutes, then blew away.”

  Standing behind him, with Crown Prince Reza at her side, the Queen looked on with pride and trepidation. Wearing a traditional white and green silk gown handsewn by seamstresses in Baluchistan, elbow length white gloves, and her diamond and emerald tiara, Farah had turned to cigarettes and tranquilizers to conceal the strain of months of planning and relentless criticism. Her rail-thin figure attested to severe weight loss. Several days earlier she had spoken to the Washington Post’s Quinn, who described the Queen as looking “quite thin, drawn and tired. Her fresh makeup did not hide the circles under her eyes.” Farah was alternately defensive and defiant. “People are quite right in their criticism,” she conceded. “The problem was that the plans for the festival were starting to be made 10 years ago. And I was not involved in the beginning. I came in only because they said they needed me and then it was too late.… We would have done the interior decorations of the tents in Persia and the design could have been done in Persia but it was all so rushed. Everything happened at the last moment and I just didn’t have a chance to see to it. There were so many more important things. And also it was a committee point of view. I tried to get them to see it my way.” She lit up one of her favorite Winston cigarettes and looked down at her hands. “You have to accept your destiny. It’s no good to dream of a life you might have had. You have to be happy the way you are. The strain and the mental and moral fatigue are overcome by the satisfaction of knowing you have achieved something. I guess you just have to develop inside you a kind of philosophy.”

  Her husband, by contrast, was in an ebullient mood. On the flight back from Pasargade, the Shah saw crowds gathered outside the gates of the Bagh-e Eram Palace in Shiraz and ordered his pilot to set the helicopter down. After alighting he stalked off into the streets of Shiraz, to be greeted by thousands of cheering locals. The Pahlavis and their aides strolled as far as the grounds of Pahlavi University, where the Shah had enjoyed himself so much back in the spring. After a ha
lf-hour inspection of the press center, where a thousand journalists from around the world were already filing their first stories, the couple returned to Bagh-e Eram in time for a cocktail reception at sunset to honor the world’s leading scholars in Persian history and culture. But the Shah found the crush of admirers an ordeal and was disconcerted at the absence of security. “This is a fine place for a murder,” he grimly confided to one guest. “Little by little, the guests backed the rulers against the palace wall and they slipped inside where they had a tea while their guests peered in at them,” reported the New York Times. “Then they were off again in their helicopters—back to their tent in Persepolis and then on to the sound-and-light spectacle in the mountains above the ruins.”