The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Now well into their second decade of marriage, their relationship held few surprises. “Farah and the Shah loved each other, but the love was more companionate than passionate,” wrote the Shah’s biographer Gholam Reza Afkhami. “The Shah, being in an oriental patriarchy had more leeway; the Queen was bound by custom and tradition to make sure her actions did not violate the honor of the family and in her case the nation.” The greatest strain placed on the marriage was the Shah’s philandering. The Shah, like John Kennedy, the American president he professed to loathe, was a client of the legendary Madame Claude of Paris, who ran the world’s most exclusive gentleman’s club and whose clientele reportedly included General de Gaulle, Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and the actor Marlon Brando. Claude handpicked the young women who flew out on Air France’s regular Friday night flight to Tehran. Their encounters with the Shah were hardly romantic. “Often a conversation, a dance, or a drink sufficed,” wrote Afkhami. “But these occasions were soothing, and the Shah enjoyed them. He called them gardesh, outings.” He also felt he needed them. “If I don’t have this recreation a couple of times a week,” he told Court Minister Alam, “there is no way I could bear the burden of my office.”

  The Queen had no choice but to look the other way, though her husband’s adventures wounded her. “At times she would grumble or cry, and on rare occasions even threaten to harm herself,” wrote Afkhami. “The worst crisis of this sort occurred in the summer of 1973.” The Shah had only himself to blame when one of his lovers, a mouthy blond teenager named Gilda, flaunted their affair by spreading the lie that the Shah had promised to take her as his second wife. When the gossip reached the ears of the Diba family, the Queen’s formidable mother, Madame Farideh Diba, confronted Alam and briskly demanded that he stop the public humiliation—or else. The threat from the Diba matriarch was unmistakable—her daughter had reached the limits of endurance and would leave her husband if he did not end her humiliation. The Shah sputtered that he, too, would welcome divorce, though his idle talk fooled no one and he scrambled to make amends. Once again, Alam saved the day by seeing to it that Gilda was discreetly handed off, this time to the Shah’s brother-in-law General Khatami, the husband of his sister Princess Fatemeh.

  Though passions eventually cooled and the crisis passed, there was a subtle shift in the marriage. Farah carved out a greater public role and declared herself a feminist. In 1975 she made a point of speaking out in support of a proposal to establish a radical government-administered alimony fund that would issue married women with “divorce insurance.” It was important for wives “to have some security,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. She said she had sold the only piece of personal property she owned for about $1 million “and, like other women, I put aside some of the money.”

  The Shah might grouch about his wife’s ambitions and politics, but he ceded her more influence in public life than any Iranian female sovereign since the Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh century. He dispatched Farah to China on a highly sensitive landmark state visit that paved the way for the normalization of diplomatic relations. The trip was a success, and Farah soon became a familiar presence on the world stage as a diplomat and envoy. Her status at home was further boosted with the establishment of the Empress Farah Foundation, a multimillion-dollar charitable endeavor that supported and promoted artistic and cultural activities. Rather than settle for her usual role as honorary patron, Farah took the title of CEO and Head of the Board of Directors and ran the foundation like a business. She donated the endowment and the plot of land where the headquarters was built and made sure it became a self-financing entity with a stable revenue stream provided by the state oil company, private donations, and public fees charged by museums, exhibitions, and festivals.

  Organizations affiliated with the Empress Farah Foundation included the Negarastan Museum, headed by Farah’s cousin by marriage Layla Diba; the Carpet Museum; the stunning Museum of Contemporary Arts, whose design was inspired by New York’s Guggenheim; and a network of nationwide landmark museums and galleries that celebrated Iranian ceramics, clay, bronze, and miniatures. In addition there were four cultural centers; three national arts festivals; three research, exploration, and science institutes; and the City Theater of Tehran. The Queen’s leadership ensured that the 1970s would forever be remembered as a golden age for Iranian avant-garde and traditional artistic expression.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 1974, the Shah followed his usual custom of breaking away from the family winter ski vacation in Switzerland to fly by helicopter to neighboring Austria for his annual medical checkup. Several weeks earlier he had noticed swelling in his abdomen, and made the self-diagnosis of an enlarged spleen. Secretive as ever, he decided to keep the news to himself until he reached the consulting rooms of Viennese physician Dr. Karl Fellinger, the renowned “Doctor to the Kings” whose roster of patients included the Shah of Iran but also the Kings of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco.

  In Vienna, Dr. Fellinger examined the Shah’s abdominal swelling and ran routine blood tests that revealed some devastating news. His Majesty, he informed General Ayadi, the monarch’s personal physician, had developed incurable lymphatic cancer. The diagnosis did not come as a complete surprise to the patient. The Shah’s family history showed a genetic predisposition to cancer. Reza Shah had died of stomach cancer and Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk was under treatment for the same exact strain of lymphoma that now afflicted her son. “They told me it was treatable,” the Shah later explained. Fellinger warned him that the disease would flare up if he did not keep stress to a minimum. For the ruler of a country with a history of rebellion and revolution, invasion and occupation, assassination and unrest, the physician’s parting admonition may have been the cruelest cut of all. From the moment of diagnosis, every decision and every plan he made would be determined by the knowledge that he had only a short window of opportunity, perhaps as few as seven and as many as fifteen years, to complete his life’s work.

  10

  EMPEROR OF OIL

  My problem is that I haven’t enough time.

  —THE SHAH

  This is the juice of a sick mind.

  —IMAM MUSA SADR

  In 1972 Abolhassan Banisadr traveled to Najaf in Iraq to mourn the death of his father, Ayatollah Nasrollah Banisadr, a prominent clerical opponent of the Pahlavi Dynasty. By now he was living in Paris in exile, teaching economics, and thinking about Iran’s future. He was not intimidated by the Shah’s popularity or the apparent strength of the Pahlavi regime. “Ten years before the revolution, a group of us concluded the Shah’s regime was headed for serious difficulties and will end up completely lost,” he recalled. “We started from that period to create an alternative in terms of programs for action in different fields and put together a group of people ready to take over.” The exiled intellectuals studied the army and concluded that its emphasis on combating foreign threats presented a major weakness in dealing with domestic discontent. Iranian soldiers were well equipped but were not trained to fight an internal insurgency or put down an uprising. In surveying the White Revolution, Banisadr and his friends noted that many peasant families had walked off the land and moved to the cities in search of a better life. Now congregated in urban slums, they comprised a lumpen proletariat, which would eventually demand a greater share of power and resources. His conclusion was that the Shah was headed for a crisis down the road because his regime’s “social basis was shrinking.… So you see on one side a phenomenon of crumbling, and on the other side the opposition pulling itself together, developing a platform, and presenting an alternative.”

  Banisadr and the other exiles recognized that the path to power lay in the streets. Equally, they understood that they lacked the leadership, charisma, and resources to mobilize vast crowds. Only a marja was capable of mounting an insurrection. Khomeini enjoyed a record of defying the Shah, but he was not considered a marja and languished in exile in Najaf
. “The way we looked at Khomeini was, ‘What role could he play in a revolution?’” said Banisadr. Though Khomeini was not a marja, Banisadr and his confederates had the idea of imbuing him with the authority of one in the same way they might sell a new brand of laundry detergent. “In Khomeini we saw a voice who could reach all of Iran. And as a marja, everything he would say would have a religious message and would be accepted. If the movement’s objectives would be articulated by Khomeini, this would be a big gain. We had some thoughts but not the means to make a public discourse. That would be Khomeini’s role. Without Khomeini, it was not clear a revolution could take place.”

  When he traveled to Najaf in Iraq in 1972 to mourn his father, Banisadr met with Khomeini to discuss how they might work together. The experience left Banisadr distinctly underwhelmed—he found Khomeini to be neither friendly nor collegial. “Khomeini was not one of those who believed a revolution would happen,” he recalled. “My first impression was that [he] was isolated. He was not in contact with the rest of the community. The other grand ayatollahs did not consider him part of the community. So I asked him, ‘Why is it this way?’”

  “You do not know these people,” Khomeini glumly replied. “If you go along with these people you will have to go along with these people.” Khomeini liked to talk in circles. What he meant was that he would not be accepted by the other marjas unless he moderated his views, something he was clearly not prepared to do.

  Banisadr returned to Najaf one year later to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Since his last visit he had read Khomeini’s thirteen-part lecture series calling for a religious dictatorship. Many of Banisadr’s leftist comrades had decided the thesis was so extreme it must be part of an elaborate forgery by Savak to discredit Khomeini as a religious fanatic. But Banisadr, with his background in religion, knew better. “You are doing a great favor to the Pahlavi government,” he warned Khomeini. “You are advocating the creation of a government by people who are so incompetent they cannot even manage the affairs of a town like Najaf, which is filled with dirt and garbage.”

  If Khomeini was offended by Banisadr’s criticism, he didn’t let on. “I have written this book as an attempt to open a discussion,” he replied. “This is not the final word. It is for people like you to start thinking about forming a government.”

  “Very well,” replied Banisadr, who accepted Khomeini’s flattery and his explanation that the book merely served a tactical purpose. “Very good. Please publish this.”

  Then they got down to business. Banisadr and the nationalist left were good organizers but lacked a popular following among the people. They needed to forge alliances with Khomeini’s religious supporters in exile but especially with groups back in Iran who could open up the religious networks and mosques to their political activity. Khomeini’s pride and ambition, not to mention his hatred for the secular left, which he regarded as insufficiently Islamist, meant that he was much more comfortable dealing with Mehdi Bazargan’s rival offshoot the Liberation Movement of Iran. “There were some talks about the ambiguity of Khomeini’s relationship with the nationalist movement,” Banisadr recalled. To test Khomeini’s goodwill and to reassure his supporters on the left, Banisadr asked if Khomeini would be prepared to donate a percentage of his tithings to finance a propaganda effort to tarnish the Pahlavi name in Western capitals. The Grand Ayatollah swiftly gave his consent, and hundreds of thousands of dollars soon began flowing into bank accounts in Houston, Texas, where a supporter named Ibrahim Yazdi represented the American chapter of the revolutionary movement, and also in Paris, where Banisadr and his clique were based. Banisadr used the money to found a publishing house that churned out crudely effective propaganda that accused the Shah of committing monstrous human rights abuses.

  Banisadr was most anxious to influence foreign press coverage of Iran. Banisadr and his colleague Sadegh Ghotzbadegh made a point of cultivating American and European reporters who covered events in Iran from their regional offices in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. They studied their reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement’s facts and figures. Banisadr became particularly close to Eric Rouleaux, a reporter from Le Monde who had covered the 1963 insurrection. He was especially pleased when his French friend, a supporter of Third World nationalism and various radical causes, wrote the first article predicting the overthrow of the Shah. Another sympathetic ear was Jonathan Randal, the former foreign correspondent for the New York Times who now reported for the Washington Post from Beirut. Randal’s critical coverage of the 1971 Persepolis celebrations had presented a devastating portrait of conditions inside Iran and helped define the Shah as a corrupt, cruel dictator. Randal became friendly with Sadegh Ghotzbadegh, a raconteur and womanizer whose romances with female Western foreign correspondents were widely known. The Iranian would drop by his bureau and charm him into writing stories about human rights in Iran. On one of his trips to Tehran, Randal even agreed to Ghotzbadegh’s request that he drive to the bazaar to collect a suitcase that turned out to be full of cash and bring it out of the country.

  Back in Najaf, Khomeini made sure his thesis was republished with an innocuously worded introduction that merely explained the author’s intention “to discuss certain related matters and questions.” Copies of the book and Khomeini’s periodic statements on politics and religion were mass produced with the help of a Gestetner photostat machine set up in his compound. From there they were smuggled back into Iran, to be stashed in a warehouse in Tehran’s overcrowded and poor southern suburbs. Khomeini’s advisers also had him start recording his sermons on cassette tapes, then the latest audio technology. The tapes were flown to Beirut, West Berlin, and Paris, where they were duplicated in safe houses by sympathizers. From there the tapes were smuggled back into Iran by courier to be reproduced and distributed around the mosques and bazaars.

  Khomeini’s classes in Najaf began to steadily increase in size and number. By the latter stages of his exile, the Grand Ayatollah had trained as many as five hundred mutjahid and lectured to twelve thousand religious students who made the trek over the border from Iran. Each wave of acolytes returned home filled with Khomeini’s message of hatred toward the Shah.

  * * *

  WHILE KHOMEINI LINGERED in exile, the Shah exploited the international scene to emerge on the world stage as a confident, seasoned statesman. In 1971 President Richard Nixon welcomed his Iranian ally’s offer to shoulder the burden of defense in the Persian Gulf at a time when the White House was focused on ending the Vietnam War and avoiding new foreign entanglements. “The Persian Gulf delivers about 70 percent of Europe’s energy needs and about 90 percent of Japan’s,” explained the Shah. “If these lines of communication are not secure, then Japan and Europe will crack. So while we are doing this for ourselves, at the same time I think we are rendering a great service to the whole of Europe and Japan.” At a time when anti-American sentiment was running high throughout Asia and the Middle East, the Shah’s staunch pro-Western credentials made him stand out as a loyal ally. In return, Nixon agreed to end restrictions on U.S. arms sales to Iran and tacitly approved the Shah’s demand that he charge higher oil prices to Western consumers to finance his country’s military buildup, nuclear program, and industrialization. “But I like him, I like him, and I like the country,” Nixon enthused. “And some of those other bastards out there I don’t like, right? I just wish there were a few more leaders around the world with his foresight.… And his ability, his ability to run, let’s face it, a virtual dictatorship in a benign way.”

  The Shah’s foreign policy triumphs masked a growing malaise at home. Ten years had passed since he decided to rule and reign, and the White Revolution had achieved many of its immediate objectives. Wealthier peasant farmers tilled their own land and sent their produce to market. Women enjoyed the right to vote, divorce, work, receive an education, and secure abortions. The rising tide of prosperity enrich
ed and enlarged the urban middle class. Even many of the Shah’s most severe critics on the left, including opposition leaders such as the Liberation Movement’s Mehdi Bazargan, worked in the private sector and put their connections and skills to good use to enjoy a high standard of living. Yet materialism brought with it a host of new problems and challenges. Many Iranians were disoriented by the pace of change and increasingly questioned the logic behind rapid modernization. They worried that it diminished and threatened family life, culture, and traditional values. The old ways still exerted a strong pull. “Our economic progress is a wonderful thing, but we are being swamped by you,” former Savak chief Hassan Pakravan told the American journalist Frances Fitzgerald. “No one cares for anything but money nowadays. We are overwhelmed by material goods, and we are losing our own values. Children don’t respect their parents. Of course, there’s nothing we can do about it. The modern world must come, and we are powerless. But what you have, is that really a way of life?”

  The Shah was beginning to understand that total political power and full coffers could not solve every problem. He could impose laws but not enforce them. Despite the money he lavished on his country’s best and brightest, the elite universities remained in a constant state of upheaval and rebellion. After spending a fortune to build up the Iranian Imperial Navy, he had recently attended maneuvers during which every cannon fired had missed its target. “These are the people that I rely on in planning my foreign policy, in risking confrontation with foreign powers; and yet you can see for yourself what a bunch of cretins they’ve turned out to be,” he told Alam. He pumped billions in oil revenues into the domestic economy only to learn of food shortages and inflation. Despite thousands of new schools, rapid population growth meant the government was falling behind in its campaign to improve literacy. Many poorer peasants had been freed at great cost only to walk off the land in search of better lives in the big cities. Women emancipated a decade earlier were now covering their heads and in some cases even returning to full hijab. Recently a popular preacher had delivered a radio address without bestowing the usual blessing on the head of state. “What a farce,” he groused. “Anyone courting popularity does his damnedest to steer clear of the court.”