At this point Kazankin broke in: “But aren’t you already preparing yourselves for the next step after that?”
“Of course not,” replied Stempel. In response to Kazankin’s next question on whether the State Department thought Farah “was strong enough to take control,” the American admitted that Farah appeared “quite capable and was obviously appearing more in public but that of course her eventual role would depend upon circumstances. In fact, the whole problem of political succession in Iran was much more uncertain than most countries.”
Stempel then asked Kazankin what Moscow thought of Iran’s future. The Soviet Union, answered Kazankin, “favors the people’s determining their own form of government.”
“With a little Cuban help?”
“No,” he added, “we have confidence that the will of the people will determine what happens.”
12
THIRSTY FOR MARTYRDOM
Something is in the air.
—THE SHAH
I wonder when we’re going to have a revolution in Iran.
—AMBASSADOR WILLIAM SULLIVAN
In the spring of 1977 Iran’s economy was destabilized by a sudden shortfall in government revenues caused by Saudi Arabia’s decision to flood crude markets with cheap oil. The Saudi move, undertaken with U.S. encouragement, prevented the Shah from raising prices yet again to finance Iran’s development projects and military buildup. The Americans had finally lost patience with their Iranian ally, whose aggressive oil policies threatened not only Iran’s economy but also the economies of Western allies in Europe and Asia. The U.S.-Saudi gambit worked and oil prices stayed in line. For the Iranian economy, however, the loss of billions of dollars in anticipated income from oil revenues precipitated a grave financial crisis. In the first nine days of the new year, Iran’s oil production fell 38 percent over the previous month, or two million barrels a day. “We’re broke,” the Shah glumly conceded. “Everything seems doomed to grind to a standstill, and meanwhile many of the programs we had planned must be postponed.”
Prime Minister Hoveyda abandoned his government’s budget forecasts, imposed a spending freeze, and sought a bridge loan from a consortium of American and European banks. Credit dried up and many large industrial and defense construction projects were postponed or canceled. The shortfall in oil revenues, combined with a drought in the south, led to a 50 percent drop in industrial production, and in the summer the national electricity grid failed, causing widespread power outages. “Government officials must walk up seven and eight stories to their offices,” reported the New York Times. “Tourists get caught in elevators. Office workers swelter in 100-degree-plus temperatures without air conditioning. Housewives complain that electrical appliances are damaged by the abrupt cuts and restorations of power.” The southern suburbs, which lacked even a basic sewage system, bore the brunt of power cuts lasting up to ten hours. Court Minister Asadollah Alam begged the Shah to replace his prime minister, warning that “we are now in dire financial peril and must tighten our belts if we are to survive.”
Government efforts to bring spending under control only made matters worse when the construction sector ground to a halt and tens of thousands of young male laborers lost their jobs and ended up on the streets. “People were flocking to town from the countryside, from the small villages all over the country, hoping to get in on the gravy train and crammed into impossible living quarters in south Tehran, by and large,” recalled William Lehfeldt who headed up the local branch of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and represented General Electric’s business interests in Iran. “And all looking for jobs. You could go down there with your truck and fill it with with people to go out working on day labor, and you didn’t have to pay them very much, because they were really paid starvation wages.… There was more disguised under- and unemployment than you could shake a stick at.” The government’s official unemployment statistics were “ludicrous. I realize they had to manufacture things, but if you went down into south Tehran in 1977 on a warm summer’s day, you wondered why the place didn’t blow up sooner.”
The economic contraction coincided with the Shah’s plan to liberalize Iranian society and “let off steam” by tolerating more dissent and relaxing censorship. But with the economy in free fall, Parviz Sabeti presented the Shah with an analysis that recommended a temporary halt to liberalization. He pointed out that similar measures in the early sixties had quickly spiraled out of control and culminated in Khomeini’s attempt to overthrow the monarchy. Since then, Iran’s population had grown to 35 million and “we have more students and workers than ever before, and many farmers migrating to the cities who are vulnerable. Today we also have what we did not have then—terrorist groups. It will be more difficult than in 1963 to maintain order.” If street demonstrations erupted while the Shah was trying to introduce liberal reforms he would be faced with the painful choice of ordering another crackdown and risking bloodshed, or offering more concessions to avoid a bloodbath. Sabeti considered it vital that the authorities demonstrate strength from day one “to show we are not intimidated, and we will not cave in to pressure.” The Shah read Sabeti’s report but rejected its conclusions. He had half a million men under arms, and the army was rock solid in its support. Iran’s economy and society had been thoroughly restructured in the past fourteen years. Despite bad news on the economy, he retained full confidence that the great silent majority of the Iranian people were with him. “Sabeti sees everything as black,” the Shah told General Nasiri, who handed him the report. “Negative. He doesn’t see anything positive. We have been careful. We have grown the military. He has not mentioned any of the positives. We are going to be okay.” The Shah was apt to remind pessimists such as Sabeti that the farr had always seen him through. He never forgot the dark days of 1953, when the people came into the streets to save the country from communism. Whatever hardships they faced, he never believed his children would turn against him.
If anything, the Shah believed that more reforms and concessions were needed to satisfy the mood of unrest. Though he took a dim view of Western-style democracy, which he associated with the turmoil of the war years and early fifties and sixties, he grudgingly accepted that a return to the 1906 Constitution was inevitable and that the window of opportunity that had allowed him to reshape Iranian society on his terms was closing: his health was failing, the economy was stalled, and the ambitious experiment with one-party rule had failed to broaden support for his regime. If the monarchy was to survive, it would have to identify with the aspirations of the emerging middle class, which demanded an end to authoritarianism and a return to constitutional rule. The Shah had made abrupt course corrections before. The problem this time was that no one, not his most devoted supporters, and certainly not his foes, could imagine that the king who relished power as much as he did would ever voluntarily relinquish it.
The Shah first intimated his game plan to his sister. In March 1977 Princess Ashraf visited Niavaran to pass on the concerns of her network of admirers and contacts. They were warning her that political and religious extremists were using liberalization as a cover to organize, agitate, and mobilize. She pointed out that the recent election of Jimmy Carter to the American presidency was another complicating factor. During his election campaign Carter had criticized Iran’s human rights record and called for restrictions to be placed on U.S. arms sales. Carter’s rhetoric, said the Princess, “feeds and encourages the opposition … it tells them that you do not have the support of an ally.”
The Shah did not disagree with her assessment, though she was taken aback with his proposed remedy. “All the more reason to speed up our reforms,” he explained. “We have established the basis for economic democracy. Now, if I have the time, I want to see political democracy. I’m thinking of a first for Iran … free elections in the summer of 1979, with the participation of all parties, except perhaps the [Communist] Tudeh. I’ve discussed this with my aides.” The Princess was astonished to hear her brother talk this way
. Free elections two years from now? And what did he mean when he said “if I have the time”?
In Washington, Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, who knew nothing of the Shah’s plan to democratize Iran, was also hearing from his constituents and friends. Like Ashraf, he passed on their concerns to the monarch. “People were telling me things were bad,” he remembered. “They were giving me a very gloomy situation. I wrote a letter to the Shah.”
* * *
BY HIS OWN estimate, fifty-five-year-old William Sullivan was a reluctant American envoy to the Pahlavi Court. Tall, brusque, and imposing, with a shock of white hair that suited his proconsul pretensions, after serving in the early seventies as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, Sullivan was sent to Laos to oversee the Nixon administration’s secret air war against Communist insurgents. From Vientiane he was ordered to Manila to manage Washington’s fraught relations with the mercurial president Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Famously acerbic, Sullivan once had a memorable run-in with First Lady Imelda Marcos. When she mentioned that she did not know what more she could do to help the poor, Sullivan tartly advised her to “try feeding them cake.” He had no time for fools and invariably regarded himself as the smartest man in any room he entered. Sullivan expected his sunset diplomatic post to be in Mexico City, near where he planned to retire to the resort town of Cuernavaca. The incoming president and his national security team had other plans. Sullivan was dismayed to learn that the State Department was sending him to Tehran instead. “The nearest I had been to Tehran was in Calcutta nearly thirty years before,” he recalled. “I had never lived in the Islamic world and knew little about its culture or ethos. While I recognized the importance of Iran, the proposal did not make me jump for joy.” He knew he was out of his depth. “I make no pretense of understanding these people,” he once said of the Iranians. “I find the Iranians a lot more inscrutable than Asians.” He appeared not to know that Iran was in Asia.
Following Jimmy Carter’s election victory in November 1976, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had contacted William Sullivan to inform him that the incoming Democratic administration wanted to reset relations with Tehran. The White House believed that Carter’s two Republican predecessors, Nixon and Ford, had surrendered America’s strategic leverage over Tehran. Arms sales to Iran had spiraled out of control, with Iran’s armed forces struggling to absorb billions of dollars’ worth of systems they lacked the expertise to operate and maintain. U.S. military personnel were caught taking bribes and fixing defense contracts. Oil prices were a major point of contention in U.S.-Iran relations and so, too, was the Shah’s insistence on enriching uranium on Iranian soil. U.S. officials suspected their ally of harboring ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons using American and European technology.
Carter’s emphasis on human rights as a core principle of U.S. foreign policy was another sticking point in relations. The downfall of President Nixon in the Watergate scandal had revealed widespread abuses by the CIA at home and abroad. American public opinion was shocked at revelations that their government plotted coups and assassinations and supported unelected leaders in the developing world. In 1976 Amnesty International published a report that claimed the Shah ran one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The group repeated claims made by Iranian opposition groups that between twenty-five thousand and a hundred thousand people were in jail on trumped-up political charges. The International Commission of Jurists piled on when it described human rights violations in the kingdom as “unprecedented,” a statement that implied conditions inside Iran were worse than in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea and Idi Amin’s Uganda. Simultaneously, Iranian poet Reza Baraheni’s best-selling prison memoir Crowned Cannibals described his country as a charnel house of misery and murder. “Thousands of men and women have been summarily executed during the last twenty-three years,” he wrote in gripping prose. “More than 300,000 people are estimated to have been in and out of prison during the last nineteen years of the existence of Savak; an average of 1,500 people are arrested every month.… There have been occasions when 5,000 people have been kidnapped in one day. This puts the number of kidnappers in the thousands. Sometimes even tanks are used in order to get a suspect out of his lodgings.” Amid a wave of moral indignation, Time magazine lamented Washington’s inability to influence domestic policy in “largely self-sufficient and comparatively wealthy” states like Iran: “One widespread hope is that torturing dictatorships will be overthrown.”
For years the Shah, Prime Minister Hoveyda, and government officials had looked the other way, dismissing antigovernment protesters as “a bunch of Clockwork Orangers,” and allowing the security forces to get on with the job of defeating the urban guerrillas who carried out bombings and assassinations. “There has been enough of this preaching, moralizing, and telling others that they are trash or that they are third or fourth rate,” the Shah erupted in an audience with a U.S. diplomat. “It won’t work, you will see. Don’t be encouraged even if 200 dissidents write letters to you. It doesn’t mean anything.” The U.S. embassy cabled Washington that the Shah “has been stung by rash of unfavorable publicity appearing in US and western media about human rights conditions in Iran. Basically, he considers it unfair, unwarranted, and lacking in recognition of major socioeconomic advances his country has achieved during his reign.” Was it a coincidence, he demanded to know, that Saudi Arabia, America’s chief ally within OPEC, received a free pass on human rights? Iranians enjoyed far greater freedoms and a higher standard of living than the Saudis. “If you Americans are going to be so moral, you must apply a single standard to the whole world,” he lectured Newsweek in an interview in early 1977. “If I have a few thousand Communist people in prison so that others can live in a free society, it is magnified and talked about endlessly. But do you ever talk about the hundreds of thousands who were murdered in Cambodia?… I cannot believe that the US would be so shortsighted as to cut off arms sales to my country.”
The Shah was genuinely mystified by the lurid reports that appeared in the American and European press of mass arrests, cases of torture, and executions. His weekly meetings with General Nasiri had always focused on broader questions of intelligence, not what he described as “petty” matters such as prison conditions or interrogations. He might have followed the example of most every other Middle East leader and either ignored the critics and rebuffed the Americans or introduced superficial reforms that could later be withdrawn. But he knew that the Iranian middle class, whom he regarded as his most important supporters, wanted to see an improvement in the political atmosphere. The Shah was paying the price of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on prisoner detention adopted five years earlier by the regime’s Anti-Terrorist Joint Committee. Worried that General Nasiri had not been straight with him, he took the unprecedented step of inviting the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate Iranian political prisons. He ordered his own parallel internal inquiry to make sure the Red Cross inspectors received full cooperation. In addition to meeting Red Cross envoys, the Shah met with Martin Ennals, head of Amnesty International, and also with William Butler, president of the International Commission of Jurists, and listened to their complaints. Parviz Sabeti gave a rare interview to the Washington Post correspondent in Tehran and dismissed Amnesty International’s report as “pure fabrication and not at all true. In all Iran there are only 3,200 political prisoners. We don’t have enough jails to house 100,000 prisoners.” The Shah had already banned the use of torture during interrogations and anybody caught “will get six years in prison.” The number of “active terrorists at large in Iran may not exceed 100.” Before 1970, he admitted, “Iran had not felt it necessary to execute people for anti-state activities.” However, following the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in 1971 the “new wave of terrorism had ‘caused us to get a bit rougher.’” Sabeti’s counterclaims raised the question: Who was telling the truth?
The Red Cross inspectors report
ed their findings in June 1977. They counted 3,087 political prisoners, down from a peak of 3,700 inmates two years earlier. Approximately one third of the inmates, or 900, reported having been subjected to some form of torture or abuse while in detention. The inspectors found no evidence of torture “over the past few months.” The striking discrepancy between the Red Cross and Amnesty International investigations was explained by the fact that Amnesty relied solely on statistics provided by opposition groups and foreign press reports. Western journalists like Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post had also been manipulated by Abolhassan Banisadr and anti-Shah propagandists in Paris and Beirut. The truth was that from 1971-1978 at most 386 and as few as 312 Iranian dissidents were killed by the security forces or died in detention.
The findings of the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that hundreds of Iranians had been tortured by the security forces but exonerated the regime of the worst charges leveled by Reza Baraheni and others. Yet his Iranian critics and their Western sympathizers simply ignored the report or accused the Shah of a cover-up. The same American and European newspapers that had fulminated against the Shah lost interest in the story and never made the necessary corrections. This was a shame. In an internal intelligence memorandum published in November 1977, Jimmy Carter’s State Department reported that the Shah’s intervention had been decisive and that there had been not a single case of torture in Iran in the past twelve months. “During the past year the Shah has moved further and more rapidly on human rights than most leaders with a similar image. Because he does not wish to be labeled as a US puppet, he particularly resents inferences that his efforts are in response to US pressure, but the fact remains that they only began after Iran received considerable bad publicity in the US and candidate Carter looked like a winner in the US elections.” The Shah had followed through with reforms to the judicial system and released almost half of all political prisoners. He had even gone so far as to instruct his security forces to “assist needy families of ‘anti-security’ prisoners.” Indeed, the Red Cross inspection team had “praised the ‘indispensable’ interest and backing of the Shah” for its work. In a separate report, the CIA concurred with State’s assessment.
The Fall of Heaven Page 31
