The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  In the hands of the regime, the text could have been a powerful weapon to force a public discussion about Khomeini’s true intentions. Instead, its suppression only increased its currency as a forbidden tract in the seminaries. University students, who never read the thesis, remained in the dark about its central message.

  “Musa Sadr understood the influence of this sick mind and the potential for his ideas to spread,” said Ali Kani. So, too, it might be said, did the Shah.

  * * *

  THE PAHLAVIS GATHERED on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf in spring 1974 to celebrate the Nowruz holiday, which fell on March 21. In the eight weeks since his initial diagnosis for lymphoma, the Shah had not felt the need to start the anticancer treatments required to manage his condition.

  Events on Kish soon forced his hand.

  On the morning of Tuesday, April 9, the Pahlavis were about to leave their beach retreat on Kish Island and fly back to Tehran when General Ayadi startled Alam with the request that he urgently send for Professor Jean Bernard, a renowned hematologist who worked in a hospital in Paris. The swelling in the Shah’s abdomen had apparently reappeared. By strange coincidence Asadollah Alam, his closest aide and oldest confidant, was also being treated for a similar form of rare and incurable blood cancer, though without either his or the Shah’s knowledge. Alam’s Iranian physician, Dr. Abbas Safavian, had successfully persuaded Bernard and his young protégé Dr. Georges Flandrin not to tell their patient the truth about his condition; Alam knew he was ill but did not know his condition was incurable. Now General Ayadi asked Alam to send for Bernard and Flandrin at once, though he withheld the real reason for his request. Alam observed that the Shah remained his usual calm self. All that he said as they flew out was that he wanted the island’s construction projects hurried up: “I want them finished in my lifetime.”

  The French physicians left Paris amid great secrecy on May 1, 1974. When their Air France flight landed at Mehrebad Airport they were greeted on the tarmac by Dr. Safavian, Alam’s doctor, who explained that they had been summoned to examine the court minister. Out of his earshot, Bernard confided to his younger colleague that this seemed improbable because Alam’s health problems were well known to them. Only when they reached Alam’s house did the minister himself reveal the real purpose of their visit, and that they had been called to see “the boss.” From there the doctors were ferried to Niavaran, entering the compound’s modest right-side entrance, whose lower driveway led to the old Qajar palace, where the Shah maintained his office. Through this entrance it was possible to smuggle visitors into and out of the palace compound without alerting anyone in the main family residence, which sat a few hundred yards up the slope behind a bank of plane trees. From there they walked up the hill to the big house. Georges Flandrin recalled the sensation of seeing the legendary Shah in the flesh for the first time. He and Bernard were surprised and impressed when the Shah casually related his symptoms to them. The two doctors surmised they were dealing with a remarkably well-informed and well-read patient.

  Neither the Shah nor Ayadi mentioned their previous visit to Fellinger. This was in keeping with the monarch’s preferred way of doing business. He liked to consult different experts about the same problem and get a variety of opinions that would help him reach his own determination. In this case, he wanted Bernard and Flandrin to tell him what they thought was wrong. They drew blood, performed their tests, and returned to inform General Ayadi that the Shah had lymphoma. Ayadi did not register surprise but insisted they not mention the word “cancer” to the patient. The formal diagnosis they eventually settled on was “Waldenstrom’s disease,” a technical term used to describe cancer of the blood. Still, it defied belief that the Shah, when presented with their conclusions, did not grasp their meaning. Unfortunately for the doctors, at this exact same time Waldenstrom’s disease had been attributed as the cause of death of France’s president Georges Pompidou, and the Shah had followed the Pompidou case with great interest. He and Alam had both expressed admiration for the president’s decision to conceal his disease from the French people: his honorable decision to die in the saddle in the spring of 1974 showed that it was possible for a head of state to work with dignity right up to the end.

  In May 1974 the burden of knowledge was still limited to the Shah, General Ayadi, Jean Bernard, Georges Flandrin, and most likely Alam, though nowhere in his diaries did he reveal his knowledge. Alam arranged for the doctors to treat the Shah either in the same house he rented in northern Tehran; in a small room at Saadabad Palace; in the main residence at Niavaran, which was usually quiet when the Queen and her children were away on duty or at school; or in a safe house in northern Tehran. Bernard and Flandrin started treatment by prescribing a daily dosage of three chlorambucil tablets and monitoring the patient’s progress from Paris. There was little else they could do but manage the disease until it reached the next critical stage. They returned to Tehran in September. By now three others were privy to the secret: Dr. Abbas Safavian; his French mentor Dr. Paul Milliez; and most likely the unknown Iranian official whose residence in northern Tehran was used as the doctors’ safe house when in Tehran.

  Bernard and Flandrin saw the Shah again in January 1975 at St. Moritz during his annual ski holiday. They arrived at a particularly sensitive time for the world economy: financial markets were on edge because of the Iranian monarch’s refusal to countenance lower oil prices. Statesmen including President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Pompidou’s successor, and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger flew to Switzerland to see the Shah and lobby their national interests. The doctors’ visit to St. Moritz, an area saturated with television camera crews and journalists, entailed an extraordinary level of risk, but the Shah displayed his usual sangfroid and carried on as usual. Flandrin watched in horror as he barreled past him down the slopes when both men knew a serious fall could fatally rupture his spleen.

  Giscard d’Estaing later recalled that during their discussion he had asked the Shah why he was in such a hurry to get things done back home. The Shah told the French president that he preferred to step down sooner but knew that his son was too young and inexperienced to take over. He said he was determined to stay on and put in place the building blocks for Iran’s transformation to a modern industrialized state. More than anything, he made clear, what was needed was time.

  * * *

  FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS in a small office staffed by a single private secretary, Queen Farah’s Special Bureau by 1974 boasted a $5 million annual operating budget and employed forty office workers to manage her caseload, travel schedule, twenty-six patronages, and respond to the staggering fifty thousand letters a year that poured in addressed to her. Writing a letter to the King or Queen was a Persian tradition, and many of those Farah’s office received were appeals for help. “We will have to continue to do this until our welfare system is more spread out,” she explained. “Many problems touch me and I can be a good advocate,” she said. “My husband is interested in Iran’s GNP. I am interested in its GNH—Gross National Happiness.” Not since Catherine the Great of Russia had the world known a female sovereign entrusted with as much influence and as many resources. By now Farah had emerged as a political force in her own right. Each week she received Prime Minister Hoveyda in audience to discuss policy initiatives. She lobbied government ministers to support her causes and worked the phones to cut through red tape. She enjoyed influence at every level of the national bureaucracy. She learned the hard way that the more active she was the more people depended on her, which in turn meant more problems arrived at her door.

  The Queen was sensitive to charges that the White Revolution had disrupted traditional life. Tehran’s building boom blighted the capital with smog, construction, and traffic congestion. “The only beautiful thing we had in Tehran was the view of the mountains,” she said. “And I didn’t want people to build higher, to ruin the view.” Flying back and forth between engagements in her helicopter, she scouted the horizon for land
that could be turned into parks. “I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of other countries.” One of her triumphs was the transformation of a horse race track in Tehran’s western quarter into a grand park. The Shah was traveling in Europe when his wife heard the land was about to be turned into another concrete monolith. She wrote him a letter urging him to dedicate the grounds as the centerpiece of a campus dedicated to the arts, culture, and education. But when it came to real estate even the Queen’s influence was limited. She opposed construction of Tehran’s InterContinental Hotel, condemning it as an eyesore, but the project went ahead anyway. In Mashad her efforts to preserve the ancient bazaar were foiled when the local governor proceeded with demolition. She was horrified when she learned only after the fact that hundreds of houses and shops had been bulldozed in an egregious act of vandalism that helped turn local sentiment against the regime.

  Day-to-day operations within the Queen’s Special Bureau were managed by a secretary appointed at her husband’s discretion. In the early seventies the job was filled by Karim Pasha Bahadori. He was later replaced by Hushang Nahavandi, the scholar and chancellor who had welcomed the Shah onto the grounds of Pahlau University in April 1971. “He was very hardworking and the head of my office,” Farah remembered, though she was also aware of Nahavandi’s abrasive personal style. “People said that he was using my office as a stepping-stone to becoming prime minister. He had friends but he was not popular.” Farah’s cousin Reza Ghotbi, her closest confidant, was appointed Managing Director of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) in 1969. From his sinecure he influenced the media and cultural affairs with his liberal views. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of Shia Islam’s preeminent scholars, was another prominent adviser. Nasr made Farah’s acquaintance when he returned to Iran in the early sixties after studying at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I met her and she became very interested in my devotion to Persian culture,” Nasr remembered. “For many years in the 1960s and seventies I used to cooperate with her very closely on projects such as saving old crafts and urban planning.”

  The Queen’s party, though never formally declared, stood for more political freedom, restraints placed on Savak, and an end to censorship. Liberals argued that these reforms were essential if the monarchy was to stay relevant in the affections of a population becoming steadily younger, more educated, and more worldly. Many intellectuals and even some leftists who could not abide the Shah were prepared to set aside their qualms to work for his wife. Consciously or not, Farah replicated the role of intermediary and mediator her husband had carved out during Reza Shah’s reign forty years earlier. “The Queen,” said Reza Ghotbi, “was always the person to whom intellectuals would go for support, to get her protection against the government, Savak, the police, so she was involved and concerned and in contact with these people.”

  Farah used her influence at court and her back channel to Parviz Sabeti to quietly help artists, writers, playwrights, and poets arrested or harassed by the security forces. “They once arrested a man and gave him three years in jail for reading Chekhov!” she said, her voice rising in incredulity. “Can you believe it? I intervened on his behalf and he was released.” The acclaimed artist Zenderoudi turned to her when he was arrested on the streets of Tehran for having shoulder-length hair, taken to a police station, and forcibly shorn. “Furious, I spoke to my husband about it,” said Farah. The Shah agreed to sack the national chief of police. But not even his wife was immune from Savak’s heavy-handed tactics. Before the Queen attended public events, her staff forwarded the names of attendees so they could be prescreened. But her attendance at the opening of a new art gallery was marred when security agents prevented some guests from entering the building and subjected others to humiliating interrogations. One of her oldest friends, Fereydoun Djavadi, now lecturing at the University of Tehran, was approached by a Savak agent who pressed him to become an informant. Djavadi refused and demanded the man leave his office. This sort of intimidation, directed at someone who regularly socialized with the King and Queen, sent the chilling message that no one was beyond reach or surveillance.

  The Queen drew the lightning for her husband whom establishment conservatives were loath to criticize. The ulama were disturbed that a woman should occupy such a prominent role in national affairs and speak out on family issues, which they regarded as their prerogative. Within the regime, conservatives such as Ardeshir Zahedi blamed Farah for giving false hope to the same subversives they had helped crush twenty years earlier. “Why do you hire so many leftists?” he once challenged her. But Zahedi’s criticism could also have been directed at Court Minister Alam, another rival, whose deputy, the former minister of justice, had previously been a high-ranking member of the Communist Tudeh Party. The Shah’s preference was to co-opt as many leftists as possible. He viewed their placement at all levels of government not as evidence of a conspiracy but as a sign of progress—finally, the intellectuals were coming around. If the Queen hired former Marxists and Maoists it was with her husband’s express permission. Foreign diplomats to the Pahlavi Court welcomed her moderating influence. “I saw the Empress as the perfect complement to the Shah,” wrote Britain’s ambassador Tony Parsons. “Where he inspired awe and fear, she inspired love and affection. Beautiful, intelligent, artistic, compassionate, she seemed to have a remarkably free and open relationship with her husband. The general view was that she was one of the very few people who could speak their minds to him and that her influence was beneficial.”

  11

  THE TURNING

  Right across Islam, the mullahs are doomed.

  —THE SHAH

  People are turning to Islam.

  —GRAND AYATOLLAH KAZEM SHARIATMADARI

  In centuries past the Persian Gulf island of Kish had prospered as a trading port and pirate anchorage. When the Shah first saw Kish in the late sixties the island had fallen on hard times, reduced to a few settlements that survived on fishing and smuggling. He was entranced, however, and decided that Kish’s long beaches, temperate winter climate, and strategic location sixteen miles off Iran’s southern coast made it the ideal venue for a holiday home and a convenient base from which to visit nearby ports and military and oil installations. He also hoped to revitalize the island by establishing it as a mecca for European and regional tourism. The Pahlavis flew down to Kish in March 1976 to spend the Persian New Year Nowruz holidays in their seaside palace on the western shore, a large whitewashed bungalow nestled amid sand dunes. The palace’s strikingly modern design was “simple, sharply angled, steeply gabled, and with a retreating, pyramidal formation of balconies, those at the top being set back far from those at the base.” Kish Palace had the ambience of a big beach house with children and animals running around and toys littering the public rooms. The Queen rode her bicycle through the corridors. “Kish was fantastic,” she said. “Architecturally it was very nice. We swam but we were very careful because there were sharks.” Her husband was not deterred and swam out as far as he could, his head spotted at a center of a bobbing circle of Colonel Djahinbini’s bodyguards.

  While his guests enjoyed themselves on the beach, the Shah reached a fateful decision about his future. Thirteen years after the army crackdown that paved the way for personal rule, and more than two years since Court Minister Alam first advised him to start sharing power, the Shah decided to embark on the immensely difficult task of reforming the political system to allow for a greater measure of democracy. His health problems and the succession were his foremost concerns, but he was also disturbed by the economic convulsions set in motion by the oil boom, realizing that “an informed and urbanized society could not be run in the old way.” The Shah followed his usual pattern of establishing a committee of experts to consider the problem and make a series of recommendations. Their report made for sober reading. They pointed out that the Shah faced a daunting series of challenges: economic problems, institutional corruption, political stagnation, youth rebellion, popular rese
ntment of foreign and especially American influence, and the emergence of an urban proletariat with all the makings of a revolutionary underclass. Pressure for reform was coming from different directions. Since the Shah had so far failed to build independent political institutions that could outlast him, the survival of the Pahlavi state still relied to a large extent on the quiescence of three traditional groups: the ulama; the merchants, or bazaaris; and intellectuals. The Shah believed that the 1963 crackdown, the White Revolution, and the oil boom had eliminated the potential for a repeat of the coalition that led the 1905–1906 revolution. By 1976, however, each of these three groups was disillusioned enough with the Shah’s rule to set aside their differences and start a mobilization against the state. The complaints of the clergy and intellectuals were well known. Less understood were the fears and insecurities of the guardians of the old economy, the merchants whose way of life was threatened by the emergence of Pahlavi state power, big corporations, and foreign investment.

  If the mosque was Iran’s beating heart, the bazaar was the lung that drew in commerce and exhaled prosperity to everyone’s benefit. “The bazaar is not just a collection of shops, as it might appear at first sight,” wrote an Iranian journalist. “In it there are merchants worth hundreds of millions of dollars as well as small businessmen, artisans, craftsmen and a whole army of middlemen. The bazaar also invests in agriculture, the building sector and, in recent years, the nation’s expanding industries.” The bazaars were built beside the mosques and for good reason: the ulama relied on the merchant class to handle their business transactions and provide them with banking and investment advice. As late as 1976 fully 80 percent of clergy income was reinvested in charities, religious schools, publishers, and theological colleges. Merchant-clergy relations extended beyond commerce. The bazaaris played an important role in helping the ulama mobilize large crowds for religious processions. In Tehran, for example, the mullahs could expect to call on five thousand agents from the bazaar to help them organize annual big religious processions that typically drew tens of thousands of participants during the holy months of Muharram and Ramadan. The Tehran bazaar’s network of operatives extended deep into the southern and eastern suburbs, where Khomeini supporters predominated. In the absence of democracy, the bazaaris found it convenient to use “the religious processions and leaders for political purposes” and formed tactical political alliances with the mullahs. The mosques were run by their relatives, clients, and customers and served as a convenient means to an end, not least because religious devotees were a captive audience that could be readily mobilized in support of a good cause. “Politically, it is the bazaar that influences the Shiite clergy and not vice versa,” noted an Iranian observer. “This is because the bazaar, in addition to holding the purse-strings, has all the networks … and is also capable of doing something concrete and valuable by closing down. Without the active backing of the bazaar virtually no section of the clergy could wield political influence for any length of time.”