The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  By the summer of 1977 the combination of a genuine Islamic revival and leftist and intellectual support for Khomeini had led to disorienting, alarming scenes on the streets of Iran’s cities. “More and more women are seen on the streets of this Middle Eastern capital wearing the chador, a long enveloping veil, in what looks like a women’s backlash,” reported the New York Times. Popular culture reflected the new mood of sobriety. After the Quran, the second-best-selling book in Iran that year was a fundamentalist tract called The Keys to Heaven. The Shah saw with his own eyes what was happening when on May 29, 1977, during a rare public outing to southern Tehran, he was disturbed to see “thousands of women wearing the veil.” Events in the region that spring and summer suggested that the revival of Islam was not limited to Iran or the Shia. In Egypt, President Sadat called out the army to crush street protests. The country’s former minister for religious affairs was murdered in July by zealots who carried out a wave of terror attacks against cinemas, nightclubs, and other symbols of Western culture. “We don’t want your civilization!” cried one of the Egyptian defendants on trial for the minister’s murder. “We want to live in the desert under the clear blue sky, where we can pray to God!” Extremists in Syria staged attacks against government officials and assassinated Russian military advisers. In Turkey, dozens were killed and injured when gunmen opened fire on workers celebrating May Day in Taksim Square in Istanbul. But nothing prepared the Shah for the overthrow of his ally Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan in that same month. The new Pakistani leader, General Zia ul-Haq, was a devout Muslim who announced his intention to adopt a new constitution based on Sharia. Through the Muslim world, leaders who had previously shown disdain or outright contempt for religion suddenly found the need to prove their credentials as men of faith. President Hafez al-Asad of Syria was photographed at Friday prayer services, and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, ostensibly a socialist, closed nightclubs, imposed Sharia law, and declared his support for an Islamic state.

  Religious fervor was on display even at Niavaran, where a small cadre of the Shah’s own household staff emulated Grand Ayatollah Khomeini as their marja. “Afterwards, we found out that one of the young men who was working at Niavaran was in the [Khomeini] movement,” recalled Queen Farah. Her own entourage had been infiltrated. “And the funny thing was, my, one of my ladies, she traveled with me, and suddenly I realized she was wearing a scarf. I didn’t ask her why. And then with me she would put the scarf down, and when a man came she would put it up. We were hearing that in the universities some women were wearing veils and scarves, and the universities wanted to regulate them because they could catch fire in the science laboratories, or they could hide something during the exams.” It apparently never occurred to the King and Queen to purge their household of malcontents or screen employees for their beliefs, though the security implications were obvious: some of the same men and women who cooked and served the Imperial Family their meals, cleaned the floors, and stood guard duty already questioned their allegiance to the dynasty, struggling to reconcile service to the Pahlavis with their fervent devotion to the man they upheld as their marja.

  By now the Shah’s relationship with his daughter had completely broken down. Princess Shahnaz and Khosrow Djahanbani were barred from the palace grounds, much to the relief of the Shah’s bodyguards, who, unbeknownst to him, were secretly operating under orders not to leave him alone in the same room with his son-in-law. If Djahanbani made any sudden movements toward the King they were instructed to shoot him dead on the spot. The Queen’s efforts to mediate came to naught, and the last time father and daughter met before the revolution was at a house party in Tehran. Informed that Shahnaz was on the property he at first refused to acknowledge her. Farah nudged him to make the first move but their last exchange was brief and awkward. The Shah’s anxieties were revealed in an interview to mark his fifty-eighth birthday. He reminded the women of Iran how far they had come—and how much they had to lose if they returned to “medieval” ways. “How could we write off half the population—that is to say all Iranian women?” he said. “If our women continue to hide behind veils we shall not achieve our national aims. How could such women score victory at the Olympics or, when and if the need arose, fight patriotic wars? If we want a progressive Iran we ought to accept its terms also. A person’s appearance has nothing to do with his or her moral standards, and refusing to work while hiding oneself away from society does not indicate purity or chastity either.” The Shah had lost one daughter to the siren call of Islam, and now he began to worry that if he did not take action the rest of his children might soon slip from his grasp.

  Determined to inoculate the throne from charges of apostasy, the Shah decided to highlight his role as Custodian of the Faith and offer the clergy small, tactical concessions until the religious fever broke. As a fifty-eighth-birthday gift to the nation he announced his intention to build a new Islamic university in the city of Mashad. The Shah hoped that Mashad, a more moderate seat of Islamic learning, would displace Qom as Shiism’s most important center for religious scholarship. He assigned management of the project to Hossein Nasr, the Islamic scholar who advised his wife on cultural issues. The Shah also invited Nasr to enter politics when he offered him the post of secretary-general of the Rastakhiz Party. If he agreed to serve in that position for one year, the Shah said he hoped Nasr would consider taking the job of prime minister to lead Iran into free elections in the summer of 1979. Though Nasr preferred to stay out of politics and turned down the appointment, the Shah had revealed his thinking. As he surveyed the horizon in the summer of 1977 he recognized that storm clouds of a different, unwelcome sort were forming, and that interim measures were needed to batten down the hatches and clear the decks. If that meant Islamizing the Pahlavi monarchy in the short term, then so be it.

  At the end of the summer Princess Ashraf returned to Niavaran to warn her brother for a second time that her contacts had told her that opposition groups were exploiting liberalization to organize and agitate. The annual ritual of Ramadan, one of the central pillars of the Muslim faith, was under way. During the monthlong observance—the date each year varied slightly according to the lunar calendar—the devout sought to purify their hearts, minds, and bodies through fasting. During Ramadan no food or beverages were consumed in daylight hours, though the rules were not as strict as they appeared: travelers, diabetics, and women pregnant, breastfeeding, or menstruating were exempted from fasting. Nonetheless, Ramadan was a time when individuals, families, and communities renewed their commitment to the Prophet and their faith in Islam. Long hours were spent in the mosques listening to prayer leaders deliver sermons and speeches. After dusk, at the end of fasting, families and their friends gathered for celebratory meals to socialize and exchange news. The combination of fasting, prayer, and celebration produced feelings of elevated spiritual unity. In the late summer of 1977, at the height of Ramadan, Tehran’s mosques took advantage of liberalization to host large political gatherings at which the Shah and his reforms were denounced as un-Islamic. “We have not been allowed to form political parties,” said a dissident lawyer. “We have no newspapers of our own. But the religious leaders have a built-in communications system. They easily reach the masses through their weekly sermons in the mosques and their network of mullahs throughout the nation. That is why so many nonreligious elements cloak their opposition in the mantle of religion.” Mosque orators spoke in code to avoid provoking a reaction from Savak but their meaning was understood by all. At the same time, everyone was talking about the marked drop-off in terrorist activity by the Mujahedin.

  The Shah told Ashraf that he couldn’t quite put his finger on it but he too sensed an undercurrent of unrest. “Something is in the air,” he agreed. “What concerns me most is this renewal of the alliance between the Red and the Black.” He explained that Savak had recently uncovered evidence that the Mujahedin and Fedayeen had agreed to form a united front and share resources. His next remar
k suggested that he understood the implication: “It is clear they will settle for nothing less than the overthrow of our regime.” He resolved to stay on track. Nothing, he assured his sister, would deter him from democratizing Iran—there could be no going back.

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  QUEEN FARAH SPENT the first half of July 1977 on a speaking tour of the United States. She was puzzled to see young Iranian student protesters holding aloft portraits of an elderly clergyman whose face she did not recognize. “And so I asked the name of this mullah who was idolized by our young demonstrators and whose defiant look meant nothing to me,” she recalled. Mention of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s name brought back unpleasant memories of the summer of 1963, when his mobs had threatened to storm the palace. To see the old man hailed now as an icon, like some Iranian Che Guevara, made no sense to her.

  Farah’s party was scheduled to fly on the Concorde to France on July 14 with a brief stopover before returning to Tehran the next day. After landing in Paris the Queen was handed a cryptic note from Dr. Abbas Safavian, someone she knew well from her work in academia. “I have to stay on an extra day,” she told her party and they left without her. The next morning Farah was in her suite when Safavian entered with her husband’s medical team. For the past few months Bernard, Flandrin, and Milliez had debated the ethics of staging a medical intervention. They worried that the Shah was not receiving the correct dosage of medication and that his health was already starting to deteriorate. Yet whenever they raised the topic of informing the Queen he would change the subject. By the summer of 1977 the physicians agreed that regardless of the patient’s wishes they were obliged to break confidence. It was Jean Bernard who broke the devastating news of her husband’s cancer. He explained that the Shah’s condition was “chronic but serious … he knew it and had not wanted to say anything about it. All this had to be understood, if not accepted in such a short time, and then kept to herself. More difficult still: how was [the Queen] going to tell her husband that she knew about it?”

  For Farah, the shock of diagnosis was compounded by the knowledge of her husband’s years of deception. She couldn’t help but feel betrayed. There was a harrowing parallel too with her father’s cancer diagnosis thirty years earlier. As a child she had been lied to by her mother about her beloved father’s illness. Now, as mother, wife, and Queen, she had to cope with the bitter reality of history repeating itself. “I thought that was the end,” she remembered. “I cried all night long. I could not bear the thought of returning to Tehran and facing him. What would I tell him?” She flew back to Tehran on July 16, anguished but composed. She smiled through the arrival ceremony and concealed her distress from the battery of photographers and government officials on hand to greet her at the airport. The Shah, meanwhile, knew nothing about the medical intervention. All that he had agreed to do was allow Bernard and Flandrin to meet his wife when they were next in Tehran.

  * * *

  THE SUMMER OF 1977 was a heady time for Ali Hossein and his band of young revolutionaries. Their handlers made the crucial decision to start testing the reflexes of the security forces. They wanted to gauge the extent to which the Shah’s pledge to loosen controls and tolerate more dissent was purely symbolic or a genuine concession. Younger men in the movement were ready to put their training to good use and stage provocations. They hoped a bloody crackdown would discredit liberalization by exposing the Shah as a hypocrite in the eyes of the Iranian middle class and isolating him still farther from his allies. “We would move in groups, through alleyways,” said Hossein, “and we would meet in different homes.”

  For the past year terrorist operations against the Pahlavi regime had halted in response to appeals from the leaders of the two best-known mainstream opposition groups. The secular National Front and the Islamist Liberation Movement of Iran urged the Mujahedin and Fedayeen to give President Carter time to show he was serious in pressuring the Shah to improve human rights and return to constitutional rule. U.S. intelligence experts described the Mujahedin as “fanatic religious conservatives” who opposed the Shah because his reforms threatened to weaken the power of religious leaders. They described themselves as “Islamic Marxists” because of their commitment to the Prophet but also to social justice and equality. Khomeini had forged a tactical alliance with the Mujahedin in 1972, boosting their fortunes when he declared it “the duty of all good Muslims to support [the group] and overthrow the Shah.”

  Khomeini’s blessing legitimized the Mujahedin in the eyes of Shia fundamentalists. Mujahedin recruits trained in terrorist camps run by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and George Habash’s even more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. After completing training in Lebanon, Libya, and Syria they slipped back into Iran, some posing “as clergymen … [they] took code names, formed cells and provoked incidents of terrorism.” “The quantity and sophistication of weapons available to the terrorists is impressive,” concluded a secret U.S. intelligence assessment produced in September 1977. “Their arsenal includes assault rifles, armor-piercing rifle grenades and possibly mortars, which allows them considerable flexibility in their tactics.” Mujahedin guerrillas also enjoyed ready access to radios, handheld walkie-talkies, and “electronic devices such as oscilloscopes, transformers, condensers, relays and grated circuits.” Some of the Mujahedin’s funding came from followers of Khomeini who traveled to Najaf to make their financial donations in person. The Marja “siphoned off a portion and gave the rest to the [Mujahedin].” The group’s other lucrative source of income came from Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, who “provided financial assistance to both Khomeini and [the Mujahedin]. The Libyan embassy in Beirut allegedly forwarded $100,000 to the Mujahedin every 3 months.” The financing and training paid off; by 1977 Mujahedin operatives had infiltrated Ambassador Sullivan’s embassy and secured jobs working in the motor pool used by U.S. army advisers.

  The second major terrorist group, the Fedayeen, were secular Communists, dedicated Maoists bitterly opposed to any form of organized religion. They did not target Americans in Iran and focused their attacks exclusively on Iranian buildings and military and government personnel. The Fedayeen underwent training in guerrilla warfare operations in terrorist camps in Oman, South Yemen, and at bases in Libya run by George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Fedayeen were well stocked with explosives, machine pistols, revolvers, submachine guns, high-powered hunting rifles, and Tungsten armor-piercing ammunition supplied by Communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Financing for group operations came predominantly from Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, who kept the group on a retainer to the tune of $400,000 each year. Fedayeen leaders also enjoyed close ties to an assortment of international terrorist groups, including Swiss anarchists, West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Fedayeen agents earned notoriety by disguising themselves as Iranian student protesters and storming Iranian consulates in European capitals. Though they claimed the attacks were staged to draw attention to human rights abuses in Iran, their real motive in assaulting diplomatic missions was to seize as many Iranian passports as possible, which were then used to create fake identities for sleeper agents sent back into Iran.

  Libya’s Gadhafi boosted Khomeini’s fortunes at a crucial moment. In 1977 Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari and the other moderate marjas and grand ayatollahs noticed a marked drop-off in the religious taxes they garnered from their supporters. They watched with dismay as many of their youngest and brightest emulants drifted to Khomeini’s side. Hassan Shariatmadari served as his father’s closest adviser and aide during this time and recalled his father’s shock when Khomeini attracted enough adherents to emerge as a marja in his own right. “Most people had still not heard his name,” he said. At this time, Iranian newspapers and television were still expressly forbidden from mentioning Khomeini’s name or even publishing his portrait. Later, Shariatmadari and the o
thers found out what had happened. “Two years before the revolution, Khomeini got $16 million from Libya through the son of Ayatollah Montazeri. He used this money to pay the talebs [religious students], and this allowed Khomeini to become a marja.” Seminarians were reliant on the stipends they received from their marja, and in Khomeini’s case he simply purchased their allegiance by outbidding his peers. “We knew a mullah in a far village who was getting 20,000 tomans from Khomeini, whereas my father had been giving him 5,000 tomans,” said Shariatmadari. “We were astonished. We did not know the sources of the money.”

  Libyan cash supplemented even vaster sums raised inside Iran to support revolutionary activities. In 1977 Khomeini’s field commander at home was Seyyed Mohammad Hussein Beheshti, now Ayatollah Beheshti, who twelve years earlier had condemned to death Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansur. In the late sixties Beheshti, described by CIA analysts as “rabidly anti-Shah and an unwavering and unquestioning supporter of Khomeini,” moved to Hamburg in West Germany to found the city’s Islamic Center. Beheshti was a brilliant organizer and tactician who played the lead in forging alliances between religious hard-liners and secular left-wing Iranian student groups based in Europe, two groups united solely by their hatred for the Shah and the monarchy. From Hamburg, Beheshti returned to Iran to serve as Khomeini’s liaison to the National Front and Liberation Movement. His biggest contribution, however, was as the revolutionary movement’s fund-raiser in chief. “The funds Beheshti has been able to raise in the bazaar are considerable,” reported CIA agents who estimated that “on a normal day” friendly merchants donated $285,000 or 2 million tomans to Khomeini’s underground cells. The U.S. intelligence agency made one other notable observation: “Beheshti also functions as Khomeini’s conduit for distributing funds to the terrorist group Mujahedin which targeted Americans for assassination in the early 1970s.”