The human rights situation in Iran has been improving. Only government opponents advocating violent overthrow of the regime or who are suspected of terrorist activity are now being arrested, greatly reducing the number of persons being detained on security grounds.
Savak’s influence and importance had always been overstated. At its peak, the security agency employed no more than five thousand office workers and agents in the field—a far cry from the twenty thousand claimed by critics. Ten thousand additional names—not the millions alleged by Baraheni—were listed on the books as either full-time or part-time informants, though even the latter figure was inflated because it included individuals who had been approached by the secret police and refused requests to cooperate. The Shah’s “eyes and ears” had the technical ability to monitor just fifty conversations at a time. “People worried about Savak,” recalled British journalist Martin Woollacott, the Guardian correspondent who was married to an Iranian. The reporter later admitted that he had investigated and largely dismissed claims made by opposition groups of mass torture and brutality. “We were dubious. Savak worked very well in instilling passivity, some fear, and a large degree of acquiescence with a minimum of violence. But the picture of Savak as bloodthirsty did not stand up to scrutiny.”
By now Parviz Sabeti, who had succeeded General Moghadam as head of Savak’s Third Directorate, worried that the Shah’s decision to “hand over the prisons to the Red Cross” had led to a loss of control. His men were confused and demoralized—why were terrorists trying to overthrow the regime and credited with killing high officials now getting a free pass? “He got advice to allow prison inspections and put them under [Red Cross] control,” said Sabeti. “And this sent the signal [to opposition groups] that the Shah was not in charge. That he was finished.”
Queen Farah favored placing restraints on Savak and was an enthusiastic proponent of liberalization. Like her husband, she thought Sabeti was too much of a pessimist. “You warned us and nothing happened,” she said after the Red Cross inspectors left Iran.
“It will,” Sabeti answered back. “You wait. Evin Prison has become like a hotel.”
Sabeti’s view found support from an unexpected quarter. Mohammad Ali Gerami, a close associate of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, had been locked up in Evin for the past several years. He recalled the dark days before prison inspections. “No one dared talk among the prisoners,” he said. “Even if we went to prison we did not look each other in the eyes for fear of violent reprisals.” Everything changed when the Red Cross arrived. “In Evin, the facilities improved. We were allowed the Quran.”
Gerami and other revolutionaries sensed that change was coming to Iran, that there had been a subtle shift in mood. They decided that the Shah was acting on the defensive, most likely under pressure from his American allies. They watched and waited, ready to make their move.
* * *
AFTER A LENGTHY interregnum, William Sullivan finally presented his credentials to the Shah on June 18, 1977. His instructions from Washington were to restore order to arms sales, resolve the nuclear standoff, press for relief on oil prices, and encourage liberalization. Sullivan was intrigued to discover that Iran’s King was anything but the ruthless dictator he had read about. He recalled the time they both attended a joint Iranian-American air force exercise in the desert south of the capital. The Shah arrived separately, piloting his own transport plane. After landing, he ignored his officials, walked straight over to Sullivan, and asked the ambassador to accompany him for the van ride across the desert. While the crowds assembled in the reviewing stand the two men kept cool in an air-conditioned trailer. “Once inside, he unhitched his tunic, relaxed, and talked in his usual easy, gracious way about a number of things,” said Sullivan. When the time came to leave, however, the Shah let out a sigh, straightened his military tunic, and prepared to make his public entrance.
From the gracious, easy, smiling host with whom I had been talking, he transformed himself suddenly into a steely, ramrod-straight autocrat. This involved not only adjusting his uniform and donning dark glasses but also throwing out his chest, raising his chin, and fixing his lips in a grim line. When he had achieved this change to his satisfaction, he thrust open the door of the trailer and stalked out across the few remaining steps to the reviewing stand.
Sullivan might have shown the Shah more respect if he really had been a Suharto, Pinochet, or Marcos. But his host’s shyness, soft-spoken demeanor, and European sensibilities seemed only to invite contempt. Sullivan decided the Shah was a slightly ridiculous marionette who liked to play dress-up. He gave his host virtually no credit for lasting thirty-six years on the Peacock Throne—the fifth-longest reign in the history of the Iranian monarchy—let alone his life-and-death struggle to reform a conservative Muslim society averse to change. He showed little if any sensitivity to the unique pressures the Shah faced at home by supporting U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, selling oil to Israel, and guarding the approaches to the Persian Gulf from an array of adversaries. Sullivan received a polite welcome at the palace. The Shah’s entourage were less receptive, viewing the new ambassador as they would a spider climbing up the drainpipe. His reputation for asserting himself and involving himself in his host countries’ internal affairs was already well known. “Everyone buckled up when Sullivan arrived,” remembered Maryam Ansary, wife of the Shah’s finance and economy minister. “He came in with his reputation and the devil on his back.” When she heard that Bill Sullivan was on his way to Tehran, Imelda Marcos placed a phone call to Queen Farah and passed on a stark warning: “Be careful. Sullivan is trouble. Wherever he goes he makes trouble.”
The ambassador’s jaunty irreverence dismayed and offended his hosts. It was customary for new envoys to visit the offices of the major daily newspapers. Farhad Massoudi, publisher of the evening paper Ettelaat, arranged for Sullivan to be shown around his newsroom and meet with his editors. “I was quite surprised on a number of occasions in the way he spoke about the Shah,” said Massoudi. “He did not give the necessary respect that I had been expecting from a new American ambassador.” Sullivan’s tone and attitude only encouraged the rampant speculation that he had been sent to Tehran to sow mischief. Sullivan was still settling in when he attended a dinner party hosted by Britain’s ambassador Tony Parsons. “I wonder when we’re going to have a revolution in Iran,” Sullivan cheerfully mused to his female dinner companion. “Every country I go to, after a while there is a revolution.” Unfortunately for the ambassador, the lady in question was the wife of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Queen Farah’s adviser on cultural and religious matters and a regular visitor to the palace.
* * *
IN THE SUMMER of 1977 a tall, austere, twenty-six-year-old seminarian named Ali Hossein divided his time between Qom, where he studied religion, and Tehran, where he was enrolled in Western philosophy classes at the University of Tehran. He spent Sundays through Wednesdays in the capital and on Thursday mornings drove down to Qom, ostensibly to receive instruction in religion for two days in the hawza. But his studies were a ruse—the young clergyman was a courier for the revolutionary underground whose job was to convey secret messages and materials back and forth between safe houses in both cities. After leaving the bus depot in Qom he made straight for the home of Ayatollah Rasti Kashani, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative in the holy city. Two days later, Hossein was on his way back to Tehran, holding a satchel that contained tape cassettes of his hero’s latest revolutionary pronouncements. The tapes, which had been flown in from Paris, West Berlin, and Beirut, were distributed to Hossein’s family members and friends, who in turn took them to the bazaars, where they were sold. Others passed them hand to hand. Hossein was not afraid of being caught by the security forces. “There was no fear in the followers of Imam Khomeini,” he recalled. “If they arrested me and killed me I became a martyr and martyrdom was a very great blessing. We welcomed martyrdom. We were thirsty for martyrdom. We knew that in this situation w
e could not fight the power. We could show by martyrdom that Western slogans about human rights and democracy were big lies.”
Hossein’s personal journey from pious student to revolutionary zealot mirrored the experiences of a generation of young, educated Iranians who rejected the Shah’s vision of a secular state and dedicated their lives to establishing an Islamic republic. “Before the revolution I liked to study Western culture,” he said. At the age of twenty-three he had sold a parcel of land to pay for a trip to Europe. But instead of returning home feeling inspired and uplifted, Hossein found that his encounter with modernity left him deeply disillusioned. “When I traveled in Western countries I used to ask people the same question: ‘What is the acceptable philosophy for the creation of the human being?’ Each time the answer was the same: ‘comfort and pleasure.’ They claimed to believe in individualism. They believed in multiculturalism. In nationalism. In rationalism.” Western societies, he decided, were “animalistic and not human.” Appalled by their loose morals, their individualism, and their obsession with material goods, Hossein returned to Iran with a sharper awareness of what the White Revolution meant for Islam. “After that trip I became ready to tolerate every type of torture in prison and made a firm determination to fight with [the Pahlavi] regime. I found that Iranian governments wanted to make Iran in [the Western] image.”
An opportunity came up to work for the government, and Ali Hossein accepted an offer to accompany an official from the Ministry of Education to Shiraz. On the trip from Tehran his bus pulled over at the side of the road to pick up an American traveler. None of the Iranians on board wanted to sit beside the foreigner but the seminarian, who spoke English, told them, “I am ready to sit with this American.” Over the next twelve hours he and the traveler talked about many things. The American admitted he was overcompensated for the work he did and that Iran offered him a much higher standard of living than he could ever have back home. He was so pleased with his new status that he had decided to bring his daughter over from America to study at Pahlavi University in Shiraz. “The Americans could do whatever they wanted in Iran without observing the customs of the people,” concluded the Iranian. When he reached Shiraz his hosts at the Ministry of Education “showed me some Westernized youth and said, ‘We are going to establish an organization to change the culture of youth to make them look like this.’” This was the last straw: at the age of twenty-six he joined “the movement” and went underground.
Ali Hossein was the quintessential true believer. “Since we were active and new to the circle of Ayatollah Khomeini, we used to follow everything exactly.” He repeated verbatim Khomeini’s solemn pronouncements that the Shah’s plan to liberalize Iranian public life was “a plot by America to deceive the people and nothing more,” and that President Carter’s support for human rights was little more than a trick to prolong the enslavement of the Iranian people. The Shah “gave” women the right to vote, but who was he to “give” anyone anything? Who was he to decide such matters? If Iranian men were not free to vote as they wished, then “how does he claim he is giving women their freedom?” The real enemy was not the Shah (“the Shah was nothing”) but America. “[The Imam] was fighting the international power of the United States. The Shah was the first step. He had attacked the United States and Israel in 1963. They were the real targets. He felt a prophetic responsibility on his shoulders to save humanity.” The revolutionaries understood that the Shah’s decision to liberalize provided them with an opportunity to organize and mobilize. “We saw [liberalization] as weakness!” said Hossein. “Yes, of course!”
For more than a decade the Coalition of Islamic Societies had represented Khomeini’s interests inside Iran while he remained in exile. In the midseventies their revolutionary cells began to sense a shift in momentum. Opposition to the White Revolution was growing, and interest in Islam among younger Iranians led to a surge in seminary enrollments. In 1977 some 60,000 “undergraduates” studied at 300 religious schools around the country, while 180,000 mullahs were active in 80,000 mosques, holy shrines, schools, and other Islamic sites. In the aftermath of the June 1975 uprising in Qom, more seminarians and younger clergy concluded that the Pahlavi regime could not be peacefully reformed and that their entire way of life was at stake. They agreed with Khomeini on the need to reject the 1906 constitutional settlement, revolt against the regime, and replace the monarchy with an Islamic state. These converts studied and employed tactics used by other successful revolutionary movements throughout Africa, South America, and Asia. To escape Savak’s prying eyes, sympathetic teachers in the hawza devised “hidden classes” that never appeared in the official academic curriculum. “In my hidden classes we learned revolutionary activism, which we could not learn in an official course,” said Ali Hossein. “We participated in classes on the characteristics of Islamic government. First, they used to teach us the necessity of revolution, Islamic government, corruption and the oppression of the Shah and his superpower supporters. We studied how to make the people ready to participate in demonstrations and make them aware.”
The young revolutionaries scrutinized the Pahlavi regime’s strengths and weaknesses but also those of his more mainstream opponents. Just as leftists such as Abolhassan Banisadr accepted that they could not overthrow the monarchy without the help of the ulama, Khomeini’s supporters accepted that they would have to adopt a moderate posture and work closely alongside liberal and leftist opposition groups that enjoyed the support of the middle class. Both sides agreed that if the middle class deserted the Shah, his regime would collapse. The two main opposition groups favored by middle-class liberals and leftists were the National Front, the party of former prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and the Liberation Movement of Iran, the spin-off from the National Front led by moderate Islamist Mehdi Bazargan. Khomeini’s agents studied these men and their beliefs like insects under a microscope. “We knew that these groups did not believe in Khomeini,” said Ali Hossein. “But the requirements of revolution sometimes make use of people who are not in complete agreement with the leaders. We were aware of Bazargan’s objections to Khomeini even before the revolution began. He did not believe in revolutionary activities and we knew what he and his people said in private.” The Khomeini movement had already infiltrated Bazargan’s circle and spied on him: “There were people who were with Khomeini who pretended to be close to Bazargan.” In their “hidden classes,” the religious students read and critiqued works by Bazargan and Banisadr. “We did not believe in them even then. The Imam recognized that [these] Westernized people could not run Iran for Muslims. Their preoccupation was with the West and not Islam.”
The dangerous game began. Banisadr and Bazargan believed they were the ones who would inherit power by manipulating Khomeini. Khomeini had the same idea, but in reverse. His plan was always to outmaneuver liberals and the left, and the “democracy” he envisioned was purely Islamic in form and content. “Khomeini did not believe in parties or in parliamentary struggles, even though he recognized a parliament was essential,” said Ali Hossein. The challenge was to cultivate the support of Iran’s urbane middle class, which in turn would earn him sympathy from the Western powers and international public opinion. Then once the Shah was deposed Khomeini’s men planned to follow the example the Bolsheviks had set in Russia when in 1917 they seized total power for themselves.
Perhaps more than even he knew, Khomeini had already won the hearts and minds of the children of the Pahlavi elite and many in the middle and upper-middle classes. They decided that poor religious students like Ali Hossein represented the true voice of a nation corrupted by sterile Western materialism. Karim Pakravan, the son of General Pakravan, told an American visitor to Iran that in his youth he too had once supported Mossadeq. “The young had absolutely no interest in religion,” he said. “Khomeini became important only after he was driven into exile by the Shah. The Shah’s father, Reza Shah, had been very successful in fighting the mullahs. He made a direct assault on the clerg
y—forcing women to take off veils, riding into the shrines and beating the mullahs. He had public sympathy, because then the clergy were corrupt and wealthy. They were hated by everybody. Now they have lost their lands and the religious foundations. The mullahs have been purified. They have the power of poverty.” Intellectuals like Pakravan believed that Khomeini and his followers were to be pitied and helped. “Khomeini is merely a symbol of opposition. He is a respected Muslim, but he has no power. Ten years ago, no prayers were said in universities. Religious students were mocked. Now there is a genuine student problem. Many of the students come from poor families in the provinces. They have to rent homes, and the financial burdens are unbearable.”
Young Iranians educated at the Sorbonne returned to Iran as committed Marxists willing to subjugate themselves to Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah opposition. “[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran,” parroted one student, a leftist who donned a chador not because she understood or believed in Islam but because she wanted to make a political statement against the Shah’s regime. Though Marx had condemned religion as the “opiate of the masses … in developing countries it is different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the Shah. We are in an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious coloring. We do not believe there will ever be Communism here as there is Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.” Remarks like hers pointed to a curious phenomenon last seen in Imperial Russia sixty years before: Iran’s best-educated minds helping their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name.
The Fall of Heaven Page 32
