These immense sums ensured that student revolutionaries like Ali Hossein were never short of money and resources. Some of his friends volunteered to be sent to terrorist training camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to learn how to handle guns and explosives. They returned home to form paramilitary groups, which were quietly dispersed around Tehran mosques whose basements became storage places for military hardware. “The level of organization was very developed and quite complex,” said the young revolutionary. “It was not difficult to get guns. Guns were available. We produced our own hand grenades in Tehran.” There were even training grounds inside Iran, up in the mountains, where hardened fighters trained recruits to handle weapons, plant bombs, and use large crowds as cover from which to attack the security forces.
The Shah was repeatedly assured by General Nasiri that terrorist groups posed no threat to Iran’s stability or his survival. In September 1977, he boasted to Kayhan that “there are still between 100 and 200 terrorists left in Iran.” He made it clear he wasn’t worried. The captures and killings of the Mujahedin’s top leadership in the summer and autumn of 1976 had been followed by the lull in terrorist activity that led the Shah and Nasiri to believe—erroneously, as it turned out—that the security forces had finally gained the upper hand in their “dirty war” against subversion. “We totally destroyed them,” confirmed Parviz Sabeti. “Two thousand were in prison or killed. We had the best security conditions in six or seven years.” With this assurance in mind, the Shah believed he could achieve his objective of loosening controls while reining in the security forces. Back in Washington, the CIA expressed skepticism. “On the basis of fragmentary information, we estimate Iranian terrorists to number more than 1,000,” concluded a U.S. intelligence estimate compiled in late 1977. “Terrorist organizations appear to have no trouble in recruiting members from Iran’s large student population.” The terrorists “have the expertise to assemble powerful explosive devices, probably efficient enough, if properly placed on a major petroleum facility, to do substantial damage.” The Americans found evidence that “terrorists are indeed interested in disrupting the economy. Terrorists in 1975 bombed electrical power lines outside Tehran that resulted in power outages.” Iranian counterterrorist measures had so far focused on crushing the threat from inside the country. But these measures “will probably not be effective until the security services devise means to cut off the internal terrorist network from its external base of support.” Remarkably, the Americans were unaware that Mujahedin agents had infiltrated their own embassy even as they concluded the terrorist group had developed the capacity to monitor Savak’s internal communications.
Ambassador Sullivan’s embassy rejected the CIA analysis and shared Nasiri’s confidence that the insurgency was broken. “We knew firepower was coming in,” said diplomat John Stempel, deputy head of the political section. “We didn’t know how much of it there was. There was enough border fluidity in northern Iran to make it possible. But the light weapons and machine guns were not significant. A lot of the revolutionaries were trained in Lebanon, so you would expect there would be a cadre trained there. We were aware of it.”
* * *
IN JULY 1977 Court Minister Asadollah Alam flew to his rented villa in the south of France. Racked with cancer, Alam was anxious about the mess he had left behind in Tehran. He saw only one bright spot on the horizon: the Shah had finally summoned the nerve to replace Hoveyda as prime minister. For months, Alam had been patiently urging the Shah to clean house and appoint a strong, independent executive who could withstand American diplomatic pressure. Before he left Tehran, Alam thought he secured from the Shah a pledge to appoint Iran’s tough-minded finance and economy minister Hushang Ansary, an official who enjoyed good relations with the commanders of the armed forces and senior clerics. Alam felt confident that Ansary, a consummate negotiator, would not hesitate to maintain order during liberalization. The mood at Niavaran was expectant and the Ansary family began receiving congratulatory telephone calls and floral bouquets. Ansary’s wife, Maryam, was visiting Alam in Antibes, and the French government prepared to send bodyguards down in anticipation of her husband’s appointment. In the event, they weren’t needed.
On Friday, August 5, the Shah telephoned Alam and asked for his ailing minister’s resignation. Alam may have been grateful to be relieved of the burden. His mood darkened the following day, however, when the Shah called again, this time with the news that he had decided to replace Hoveyda not with Ansary but with Jamshid Amuzegar, Iran’s minister of the interior and chief oil negotiator. Known as a talented economist, and reputed to be on warm terms with senior U.S. officials, Amuzegar lacked the common touch that Iranians expected from their politicians. In public he came across as officious, haughty, and disdainful. This suited the Shah, who was still distrustful of professional politicians. Hoveyda, despite his faults, was a raconteur who could charm people in small groups or large gatherings. Alam was doubly outraged that instead of consigning Hoveyda to oblivion or exile the Shah appointed him as the new head of the Court Ministry. The Shah had apparently buckled when Hoveyda burst into tears at the news he would lose his post as prime minister and placated him by assigning him to the Court Ministry. “His Majesty is not thinking clearly,” Alam mused out loud. “This has nothing to do with his sickness. The country is lost.”
13
LAST DAYS OF POMPEII
Stop it when it gets into the streets.
—THE SHAH
This time either Islam triumphs or we disappear.
—GRAND AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI
On September 23, 1977, the King and Queen attended the University of Tehran’s forty-fourth annual graduation ceremony, a routine event on an otherwise quiet day in the Iranian capital. Liberalization was moving ahead. Hundreds of political prisoners had already been released, censorship laws relaxed, and newspapers were permitted to publish articles on corruption, government incompetence, and the economy. Senior civil servants were ordered to make their assets and salaries public, and reforms were announced to make the judiciary more accountable and independent. The Iranian people were encouraged to attend assemblies organized by the Rastakhiz Party, where they could debate politics and air grievances. Most striking was the Shah’s announcement of an “open space,” allowing respectable regime opponents to meet and organize on condition that they refrained from criticizing the Shah or calling for a republic. Longtime activists such as Mehdi Bazargan suspected a ruse. They recalled the open atmosphere of the early 1960s, when reforms had been followed by repression. Younger activists, however, looked forward to testing the limits of the open space.
For Queen Farah, the ceremony at Tehran University came at the end of a difficult few weeks. For the past several years conservatives at court had argued that the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, one of her signature patronages, was too avant-garde for Iranian tastes and caused needless offense to the clergy. Scorn turned to anger in August 1977 when the eleventh Shiraz-Persepolis Festival almost descended into street riots. The Squat Theater, an experimental Hungarian troupe based in New York, staged a production of its show Pig, Child, Fire! in an empty storefront window in the main Shiraz bazaar. In the play’s climactic scene a young mother was raped by a soldier in front of her child. The atmosphere in the bazaar was already a combustible scene, with American tourists buying trinkets from stall owners, who broadcast cassette tapes of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini calling for revolution and railing against American influence. By way of coincidence, the Shah’s granddaughter Princess Mahnaz was in the bazaar that day and overheard Khomeini’s voice. She stumbled across Pig, Child, Fire! as the show was already under way and noticed the crowd start to boil as a rumor spread that the actors had actually performed a live public sex act. Police officers rushed to the bazaar to prevent an outbreak of rioting, but public revulsion could not be contained. From Najaf, Khomeini issued a statement condemning what he described as the “indecent acts” perpetrated on the people of Shiraz and demanded
local religious leaders “speak out and protest.”
The scandal provided ammunition for Farah’s conservative critics in government and at court. At a time when religious passions were running high they argued that the Queen needed to lower her public profile. Shiraz, they argued, had been an accident waiting to happen. These critics reserved special enmity for her cousin Reza Ghotbi, whose state radio and television monopoly sanctioned programming that took sly digs at the Shah’s authoritarian regime. But Farah’s public works were more nuanced than they appeared to conservatives. She used the proceeds from her foundation to preserve and restore old mosques that had fallen into disrepair. Iran’s most ardent feminist defended the right of women to stay home and raise children in the conventional manner. One of her new initiatives was the Festival of Popular Traditions, which championed traditional village culture. In the rush to find a scapegoat for Shiraz, however, these achievements were overlooked.
One month later, Farah sat mute beside her husband while university graduates filed past to collect their diplomas. She had attended hundreds of similar events over the years, each one following the same unerring script. This time, however, something unusual happened when several students stood up before the assembly to warn that extremists had infiltrated the university with the intention of instigating “plots to create campus unrest.” One student referenced the involvement of religious radicals in the 1949 assassination attempt on the Shah’s life and the 1963 uprising against the White Revolution. A second student rejected international criticism of Iran’s record on human rights, while a third appealed to Iranians living abroad to return home “to become acquainted with the new realities of modern Iran, and to enjoy the fruits of our success and prosperity.” This clumsy piece of staged theater caused outrage among faculty, administrators, and students who regarded it as an effort by Savak to hijack and politicize the signature event of the academic calendar. Tensions were already running high on campus, and the demonstration of loyalty before the Imperial couple was all that was needed to strike the match of conflagration.
* * *
AT THE START of the new school year, student revolutionary Ali Hossein was on the run.
The young man’s identity as a courier for the Khomeini movement was discovered by Parviz Sabeti’s agents, who ordered his arrest. He fled his dormitory room at the University of Tehran for a safe house where “we could become more and more active.” Hossein’s underground cell received orders to start testing the boundaries of the “open space” and bait the security forces with staged provocations that they hoped would draw blood, create martyrs, and generate public sympathy. Violent disorders would embarrass the Shah before the eyes of the world and expose liberalization as a sham. In the absence of a crackdown, however, revolutionary cells would take advantage of the resulting security vacuum to cause further instability. Either way, the revolutionaries would win. “Our goal was to confront the regime in some way, show our opposition in some way,” said Hossein. The debacle at the university graduation ceremony created new opportunities to stoke unrest. “We made demonstrations and created problems for the regime under the banner of some excuse, pretending that our activities were not political.” The provocateurs decided to stage their biggest attack yet inside the university’s student cafeteria, acting under the guise of protesting the mingling between male and female students at mealtimes. Hossein was already personally offended by the behavior of young women on campus. “In the mosques the genders were segregated. The girls [on campus] wore makeup and Western clothes. In the cafeteria at that time when we were taking tea there was no separate facility for the girls.”
On Sunday, October 9, 1977, twenty religious extremists wearing balaclavas rushed into Tehran University’s parking lot and set fire to student buses. The attack on the buses proved a diversionary tactic. While security guards doused the flames, the young men stormed into the student cafeteria, smashing and kicking in windows and forcibly pulling apart the boys from the girls. The scene inside was one of panic and pandemonium. Screaming students ran for cover, and those who offered resistance were set upon and beaten to the ground. Before the assailants ran off they dropped a pamphlet titled, “Warning to the Elements of Corruption.” In it they threatened the life of any female student caught socializing with male friends.
Don’t ever come to the self-service restaurant in the boys’ section [of the dormitory]. Don’t ever, under any pretext, even for getting food, come to the boys’ area. In no way may you ride the boys’ bus. Put pressure on the officials of the dormitory and demand a separate self-service restaurant, as well as a bus. If you violate the guideline, your lives will have no guarantee of safety.
The assault on Iran’s oldest and most prestigious university made front-page news across the country. One professor described the episode as a “revolting attempt to revive medieval horrors,” an allusion to Sharia law, which forbade casual mixing of the sexes. The chancellor said it was the worst display of violence he could remember in his eleven years on the job. The head of the student union appealed to the anonymous assailants to come forward to talk about their concerns rather than resort to violence. University coeds staged a four-hour sit-in, promising they would “not allow shameful ideas to be propagated on the campus, which is a center of progress and the home of the nation’s enlightened youth.” They were supported by the Women’s Organization of Iran, a women’s rights organization headed by Princess Ashraf, which held a press conference on campus to denounce religious extremism.
Ultimately, however, the efforts of student leaders to rouse their peers was met with a sullen wall of silence. Leftist students suspected the secret police had staged the attack to smear their hero Khomeini as a fanatic. Religious students fully supported segregation anyway. Most students, not wanting trouble, warily submitted to intimidation. The result was that Tehran University’s self-service cafeteria was segregated, and bus drivers refused to drive onto campus grounds. Ali Hossein’s revolutionary cell had succeeded in its mission to paralyze the administration of the nation’s top university and terrorize the student body into submission.
Students and intellectuals weren’t alone in assuming that Savak was behind the cafeteria invasion. In the shadowy world of counterintelligence and subversion, the secret police had a long history of staging provocations to discredit opponents of the regime. Even government officials such as Minister of Women’s Affairs Mahnaz Afkhami suspected Parviz Sabeti’s Third Directorate was to blame. His agents targeted her for harassment because they believed her ministry employed too many leftists and dissidents. “The only negative article written about me was planted by Savak,” she claimed. “They said I wore a see-through blouse with boots and drank whiskey.” Galvanized by the attack on Tehran University, a pro-Khomeini mob took to the streets of Rey three days later demanding the release of Seyyed Mehdi Hashemi, a hard-line mullah sentenced to death for his role in a series of assassinations in Isfahan.
Both incidents drew the Shah’s condemnation. On Saturday, October 14, he received a delegation of parliamentary leaders at the palace. While they stood in respectful silence he read out a tough statement deploring those who would try to take advantage of liberalization. “All these developments smell highly of counterrevolution, black reaction, and outright treason,” he lectured his audience. “They want to set the country back, not only to pre-Shah-people revolution times, but also to circumstances prevalent fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago.” Without naming Khomeini, the Shah made it clear who he believed was behind the violence. “How coordinated these internal and external developments are! One should not be surprised because they originate from the same center. Their orders come from the same source.” He insisted that he would not be deterred from opening up the political system. Liberalization was irreversible: “And those who think otherwise or act in response to orders from foreigners or their agents should realize that their actions will not delay our progress as much as one ten thousandth of a second.” As though
to prove his point, the Shah allowed a series of open poetry readings hosted by West Germany’s Goethe Institute to proceed. European and American diplomats were shocked when as many as fifteen thousand Iranians showed up to attend the receptions, using the venues to debate the country’s political future without fear of censorship or arrest. The security forces watched warily outside the institute but otherwise made no effort to break up the gathering. “It was absolutely unbelievable,” said one lawyer. “I thought I wasn’t in Iran. I kept expecting the goons to come in and take us all away, but nothing happened.”
Opposition leader Mehdi Bazargan also decided to test the new open space by announcing his first public speech in almost fifteen years. His choice of venue, a large mosque in the heart of downtown Tehran, was highly provocative, and his remarks warning against false idolatry were clearly aimed at the Shah, whose portrait was displayed in every public and many private buildings. But Bazargan’s event passed off peacefully, too. “His people were well organized with loudspeakers so they could reach a crowd which at times numbered twenty thousand,” reported one observer. “Going among them [were the] young and fairly well to do.”
* * *
QUEEN FARAH’S THIRTY-NINTH birthday fell on October 14. Around the country, hundreds of local development initiatives were inaugurated in her name. She spent the day handing out awards to a group of eight hundred science and medical researchers at Tehran University. Prime Minister Amuzegar and Minister of Education and Science Manuchehr Ganji arrived to help her blow out the candles on a huge birthday cake.
The Fall of Heaven Page 34
