The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The Shah tried to be philosophical. “It is human nature to be in opposition to society and its values for a certain time,” he admitted in an interview. “That certain time often coincides with the years of youth—exactly at the time some of our children are about to go abroad to pursue their studies, thus virtually suspending their time with their families and their country.” Privately, he struggled to understand why so many educated students from Iran’s best families not only rejected him but also wanted to burn down their inheritance. Their willingness to die for their cause appalled but also impressed him.

  * * *

  HE HAD NEVER enjoyed a strong constitution, and the barrage of daily stress now began to aggravate his lymphoma.

  During their first few visits to Iran, French physicians Jean Bernard, Georges Flandrin, and Paul Milliez had agreed with Dr. Abbas Safavian, the specialist treating Court Minister Alam for his own terminal blood disease, that the monarch’s personal doctor, General Ayadi, was incapable of providing the right palliative care. Ayadi’s valise was crammed with so many potions, pills, and creams that they lent him the air of the village quack rather than physician to a king. The French team expressed concern that the Shah was not receiving the correct dosage of medication. They observed that Ayadi appeared anxious not to be assigned blame if anything went wrong. The Shah agreed with Bernard’s recommendation that his junior colleague Flandrin should take over supervision of his treatment and progress. Flandrin flew out to Tehran on February 19, 1975, and in total made forty-seven secret trips to Tehran until his final visit at the height of the revolution in December 1978.

  Flandrin’s schedule rarely varied. He left Paris on the third Saturday of each month and was back at his office each Monday morning to make sure no one noticed his absence. He usually traveled alone but from time to time was accompanied by Jean Bernard or Paul Milliez. On occasion, he might make two trips to the palace over a two- or three-day period. When he departed Paris, Flandrin drove away from Saint-Louis Hospital at midday for Charles de Gaulle Airport, boarded the afternoon Air France flight to Manila via Tehran, and disembarked at Mehrebad Airport after dark. Flandrin traveled as discreetly as possible, always sitting in the front row of first class so he was the first passenger to exit the aircraft. At the bottom of the gangway he was met by a car with flashing lights sent by Colonel Djahinbini. Their nighttime drives from the airport to the safe house sometimes involved a change of vehicles to shake off tailgaters. After a short and difficult night’s sleep, Flandrin was up at dawn for his early morning appointment. Depending on the Shah’s routine he was taken either to Niavaran; to Saadabad, where a small bedroom was set aside for his use; or to another safe house.

  Flandrin’s movements into and out of the palace grounds were carefully choreographed. Shortly after dawn two cars would approach Niavaran’s lower right-side entrance. Either Colonel Djahinbini or one of his deputies watched from the shadows as General Ayadi, in the first car, stopped at the gate to present his papers for inspection. But the second car, with Flandrin, never stopped and was briskly waved through by the guards. The Shah’s chief bodyguard preferred not to know what was going on. “I knew they were doctors,” recalled Djahinbini. “I saw them at least once a month. Sometimes they came in with lots of equipment like microscopes to check blood but I never asked why they were there. I could have given their names to my friends in the Imperial Guard who were studying in Paris, and they could have found out immediately who they were. But I didn’t. I didn’t know they specialized in cancer. I didn’t want to ask.”

  The Shah’s blood samples were sent to Paris from a medical laboratory in Tehran under the name of his valet, Amir Pourshaja. Every five days Pourshaja sent a driver to a local pharmacy to pick up the phoned-in refills of chlorambucil. General Ayadi was supposed to oversee the tests and refills. “Each bottle lasted five days,” said Pourshaja. “I called the pharmacy and sent the driver to get the pills. Dr. Ayadi chose the medicine.” But when Flandrin visited the Shah at the Dizin ski field he noticed that his spleen had once again become swollen. Worse, new blood tests revealed elevated levels of abnormal cells. The Shah’s medication was not working—but why? Flandrin deduced that the Shah’s second valet had accidentally refilled the bottles with the wrong pills. This was an easy enough thing to do. To avoid discovery, the doctors had agreed to substitute chlorambucil for Quinercyl, another medication whose white pills resembled the original anticancer drug. In their medical reports they substituted the word “Quinercyl” for “chlorambucil” and also placed the real medication in bottles labeled Quinercyl. One day, as a precautionary measure, and in advance of a state visit abroad, the valet decided to stock up on an extra supply of Quinercyl, and these were the pills that he used to refill the Shah’s medicine bottles for the next two months.

  The prescription mix-up had still not been discovered by the time the Pahlavis flew to Kish Island for the 1976 Nowruz holidays. Farah noticed that her husband’s lip was swollen but was reassured by General Ayadi that nothing was amiss. By June, however, the Shah complained to Alam of stomach pains, skin rashes, and a headache, and it wasn’t until the end of summer when proper medication was restored that his condition stabilized.

  Try as he might, the Shah could not escape the reality of his terminal illness. More than ever, he thought about the succession. Two weeks before flying down to Kish he granted an extensive interview to Newsweek magazine and explained his plans for Crown Prince Reza’s education and his own desire to eventually step down. “Secondary school, then certainly a military training,” the Shah explained. “Even in the European royal families, where the monarchs are doing what they do, the Prince still has military training. But in this country, if the King is not the real commander in chief of the armed forces, anything can happen.… Also he must understand that the people of our country expect the King to be the father, the teacher, the leader, the confidante. These are the characteristics of our people and monarchy. That’s why it has lasted so long.” He was “not pressing at all” for his son to learn the ropes. “But every day I can feel that he’s more and more interested … maybe knowing a little less, but always terribly interested—in the dams, in atomic energy, in everything.”

  The Shah answered in the affirmative when his interviewer asked if the Crown Prince “would play an active role earlier than he would normally.”

  “Yes,” the Shah replied. “I intend to retire, really, in about twelve and a half years’ time—if I live until that time—and let him take over. Before then, he will be gradually introduced to all the problems. This is my normal position and if everything goes in a normal way, there is nothing to change that decision.”

  Though his publicly expressed intention was to hand over the reins in 1988, the qualifier to the statement was significant: if I live until that time.

  * * *

  ON KISH ISLAND, Queen Farah struggled to contain her own anxieties about the future.

  Several days earlier, on March 21, 1976, she had noticed the cool way the public had responded to the lavish fiftieth-anniversary celebrations to mark Reza Shah’s coronation. She compared the indifference of the crowds to “a sudden icy wind.” Farah startled the Shah and Alam when she said she wondered if the Iranian people had lost interest in the monarchy. The two men waved away her fears, blaming them on an overactive imagination. They decided it was she who was out of touch with public attitudes. “The internal situation is sound,” Alam assured her. The regime’s generous social programs kept the middle class, workers, and farmers onside, and the complaints of a few intellectuals were of no concern. “I saw the problems while His Majesty saw the achievements,” said Queen Farah. “In bed we would compare notes. I would report about what was going wrong in the regions I had just toured. His Majesty would try to dismiss my report as exaggerated or one-sided. At times he would tell me that such minor problems were des accidents de parcours or the heritage of the past, and that all would be well in a few years’ time. Sometimes, however, h
e would get impatient and edgy. ‘No more bad news!’ His Majesty would command. And I would, naturally, change the subject.”

  In June 1976 Farah returned from a trip to the countryside to sound the alarm. This time, rather than write a letter to her husband or have a private chat over lunch, she decided to take her concerns public. Speaking to journalists, she warned that “the rate of migration from villages to towns is dangerous.” Tehran could no longer absorb the newcomers, and she feared a social explosion if they did not receive adequate housing and jobs. “What had happened was when land reform was done, of course the agriculturalists were very happy, but there were people on the lands who were just the workers,” she later explained. “They suddenly didn’t have anywhere else to go and that created some social problems. We tried to see what we could do to help them. I remember that the government gave money for instance to those whose villages had been destroyed when a dam was built. But you know, they did not know how to properly use the money, they spent it, and then they were left with nothing. In the villages, except for agriculture they made handicrafts but they wouldn’t make enough money [to survive]. They would come to town, to Tehran, hoping to find work and a better salary.” Farah supported initiatives to tackle the problem of rural migration by promoting village handicrafts and small businesses. At her urging, wealthy businessmen agreed to open showrooms to display village wares. Still, the scale of the problems dwarfed the solutions.

  During the oil boom the Shah approved the creation of an American-style think tank, the Group for the Study of Iranian Problems, which he hoped would provide the government with fresh ideas on how to manage policy challenges arising from the oil boom. Scores of scholars, industrialists, and lawyers joined the new association under the aegis of Hushang Nahavandi, head of his wife’s Special Bureau, who took charge as its chief executive. The group served to reassure Tehran’s liberal community that the Shah understood their concerns and took them seriously. Nahavandi’s leadership and the Queen’s patronage, however informal, gave the assembly the imprimatur of legitimacy. The Shah was also aware that Nahavandi had ambitions for the premiership, though he never regarded him as suitable for the task. In classic divide-and-rule fashion, Nahavandi’s appointment as head of the think tank became a device to keep Hoveyda from becoming too comfortable in his job. The prime minister retaliated by encouraging the secret police to harass Nahavandi and obstruct his work.

  The group’s report on public attitudes came as a rude shock at court. Although living standards had improved considerably, the interviewees spoke more about their frustration and disillusion with modernization. The authors of the report were especially critical of the security forces, which they blamed for alienating young Iranians and the middle class from the monarchy. Rounding up and detaining students for weeks at a time created a lawless atmosphere that angered their families and friends, who pointed the finger of blame up the hill, at Niavaran. They warned that Savak’s harsh tactics were driving even moderates into the arms of the opposition. Unless steps were taken to reform the political system and address underlying grievances, there would be trouble. The middle class had to be engaged and a measure of democracy injected into Iranian political life. The Shah was deeply upset with the report’s conclusions. He rejected the implication that the regime was off-track or that he was out of touch with public sentiment. But his decision to hand the report off to Hoveyda for action suggested it had made an impression. Hoveyda, however, had no intention of lending credence to anything Nahavandi did, nor was he about to boost his rival’s credibility. The report was quietly shelved, its recommendations never debated. Had the prime minister bothered to read it, the Queen lamented, its findings “would have alerted the government to the dissatisfaction.”

  More than ever, the Queen worried about the corrosive effects of corruption. Her sharp eye led to the exposure of one of the last great scandals of the Pahlavi era, an episode that some saw as an Iranian version of the doomed French Bourbon Dynasty’s celebrated “affair of the diamonds.” At the center of the scandal was an exquisite set of jewels that included a necklace, earrings, and a bracelet valued at $1 million. Farah had admired the collection and made discreet inquiries to the jeweler. “I am very sorry,” the jeweler told her representative, “the set was brought yesterday by the wife of Admiral Atai.” Admiral Atai, commander of the Imperial Navy, lived on a modest salary and could not possibly afford such extravagance. Farah told her husband, who ordered an immediate investigation. By the time the probe was finished the admiral was under arrest, and graft had been uncovered at the highest levels of the armed forces.

  Corruption in the senior ranks of the armed forces was a dangerous development for a royal dynasty whose survival rested on the competence and integrity of the military. An official investigation revealed a culture of corruption with vast fortunes that had been acquired by Iranian officials who demanded kickbacks from foreign defense companies anxious to secure lucrative contracts to furnish Iran with their weapons systems. The Shah was also dealing with a scandal closer to home, this one involving the family of his sister. Princess Fatemeh, only daughter of Reza Shah and Esmat ol-Moluk Dowlatshahi, had first married an American, Vincent Hillyer, a union her brother had opposed to the point of stripping his sister of her royal prerogatives. Following their divorce in 1959 the Princess had returned to Iran, resumed her titles and responsibilities, and married General Mohammad Khatami, chief of the air force, and one of only two attendants who had accompanied the Shah and Queen Soraya on their desperate flight out of the country in August 1953. Khatami was a strong personality and talented leader, who enjoyed the Shah’s complete confidence, and who was also widely rumored to be the U.S. embassy’s preferred successor in the event the Shah was assassinated or removed in a coup. But in the last few years of his life Khatami had piled up a fortune estimated at more than $100 million, and at the time of his death in a hang-gliding accident in 1975 investigators in Washington were exposing his complicity in a brazen kickback scheme involving the sale of American Grumman fighter jets to the Imperial Iranian Air Force.

  This, then, was the unhappy state of affairs that confronted the Shah in early 1976 and that convinced him of the need to take action. He set up a committee of experts “to recommend changes that would improve Iran’s image and loosen controls without affecting anything basic.” Committee members included senior ministers, security chiefs, and newspaper editors. The report they produced became the basis for the Shah’s subsequent policy shift, which was dubbed “liberalization.” They urged him to open a dialogue with Amnesty International and other international groups critical of Iran’s record on human rights. They recommended lifting the ban on twelve hundred books and easing censorship of newspapers and magazines. “There was a realization,” said one participant, “that Iran cannot develop technologically without a more open political environment.” A case in point was Aryamehr University, supposed to be the MIT of Iran, where classes were seriously disrupted by student protests. At the same time, “an effort was being made to pump some life into the flaccid body of Rastakhiz” when the Shah allowed Nahavandi’s Group for the Study of Iranian Problems to become a quasi third wing of Rastakhiz. He hoped this would stimulate the political establishment and encourage the exchange of ideas and a degree of informed debate. Yet he remained adamantly opposed to working with the National Front and the Liberation Movement of Iran, the two leftist groups that had tormented him in the 1950s and early ’60s. He hoped that Nahavandi’s liberal think tank would supplant them as a moderate centrist force that could reinvigorate Iran’s moribund political system.

  * * *

  SENSING A SUBTLE shift in atmosphere, Tehran-based diplomats began quietly comparing notes. Though the Shah projected an air of confidence and power, Iran’s economic and political malaise coincided with almost daily confrontations between the security forces and Mujahedin guerrilla fighters, who melted away into the warrens and slums of the southern suburbs. In 1976 almost one hundred pe
ople, including police, terrorists, and innocent civilians, were killed in shoot-outs that sometimes spilled over into the downtown commercial district. Iranian society was coming to a boil. In 1976 U.S. senator Charles Percy visited Tehran and asked Israel’s ambassador, Uri Lubrani, for his assessment. “Everything is okay with the Shah, except he has a big problem with the clerics,” said Lubrani. “He can’t control them in the way he can control the politicians and the others.”

  Every few weeks American diplomat John Stempel, deputy political counselor at the U.S. embassy, held regular meetings with Guennady Kazankin, the second secretary at the Soviet embassy, at restaurants and coffee bars around Tehran. On April 14, 1976, the pair met in a booth at the Pizza Roma restaurant. The Russian asked Stempel “whether we had any recent difficulties with terrorists.” Stempel answered that “things had been mercifully quiet for the past couple of months, but that we remain concerned.” He asked Kazankin if he agreed with the Shah’s assertion that Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arming, training, and sheltering the Mujahedin in camps in Lebanon: “[Kazankin] said he thought this was not true, although perhaps a few Iranians were being trained in ‘centers abroad.’”

  Two weeks later, on April 28, Stempel and Kazankin met again, this time for lunch at the Tehran Steak House, a popular watering hole for the sixty Russian families stationed in Tehran, and then on to Tiffany’s Restaurant for coffee. Kazankin wanted to hear Stempel’s view “about the future of U.S.-Iran relations and gradually pushed the discussion toward what happens in Iran when the Shah goes.”

  The American admitted “there was a great deal of uncertainty as to what would happen when the Shah eventually left the scene.”

  “No, no,” Kazankin pressed him. “I mean if he were to be taken away by accident, what do you think?”

  If there were no suspicions of foul play, said Stempel, “the Regency Council and the Empress would take over. The US would support the legitimate succession to the Throne.”