* * *
IN DECEMBER 1977, in the same week that Prime Minister Amuzegar assured Ambassador Sullivan that his government would not use force to suppress dissent, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini issued a public fatwa, or religious edict, from Najaf in which he declared the Shah an illegitimate ruler and condemned his rule as illegal. The editor of the Kayhan newspaper, Amir Taheri, recalled receiving “a strange handwritten [two-page] letter … peppered with a number of amusing spelling errors.” The letter had been dictated by Khomeini to his younger son Ahmad, a guerrilla fighter trained in Lebanon who since his brother Mostafa’s death had taken on the role of his father’s principal secretary. In his fatwa, Khomeini boldly announced that he had “deposed the Shah and abrogated the Constitution.” He referred to the King as the Taghut, or Satan, and signed the letter “Imam,” claiming for himself the title of one of the Prophet’s original disciples—an audacious and highly provocative gesture that had no precedent under Quranic law. Furthermore, Khomeini called on the people to withhold their taxes, refuse to obey the laws of the land, and stay away from school. Iranian intellectuals ignored the fatwa, regarding it as so outrageous and so fantastic that it could only have been produced by Savak to smear Khomeini as a lunatic.
The Shah learned of the fatwa after it had been in circulation for a week and only then from the Iraqi ambassador. According to Taheri, who saw the Shah in early December, the monarch was “still angry enough to mention [the fatwa] himself and turn it into a major topic of conversation. He would soon, he warned, call on all Iranians to choose sides.” Like Khomeini, he wanted the Iranian people to make a choice. “They must decide,” the Shah told him. “Do they want our great civilization, or would they rather live under the great terror our foreign enemies are plotting with that crazy fanatic as their instrument?” His remarks echoed his earlier comments to Princess Ashraf at the end of the summer: he wanted his son to inherit a throne without thorns. As December drew on, the Shah established a special committee and instructed it to come up with a list of strategies and measures to isolate and discredit the Islamists. At the same time, Khomeini wrote a letter to the leaders of the Coalition of Islamic Societies informing them to start their long-awaited insurrection. “The Shah must go,” he insisted. “This time either Islam triumphs or we disappear.” He left it to them to formulate a plan for revolt. This would be no easy task—the revolutionaries faced the unenviable feat of stirring unrest without bringing down upon their followers the full weight of the fifth-strongest army in the world.
Week by week, day by day, the provocations escalated. In the last two weeks of December 1977 the Iranian embassy in Denmark was invaded and ransacked, and in Tehran and other major cities banks and businesses associated with Americans, Jews, and the Baha’i, a minority Islamic sect, were assaulted.
There was a respite only on Christmas Day when Queen Farah and her children welcomed to Niavaran a group of American students traveling around the world to promote their message of peace.
* * *
THE SABOTAGE OPERATIONS and violent protests staged by the Khomeini movement were choreographed to coincide with the arrival in Tehran on New Year’s Eve of President Carter. The American was on the second stop of a seven-nation, nine-day presidential tour of European, Asian, and Middle East capitals. Originally scheduled for late November, Carter’s trip had been pushed back to the New Year when the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, legislation to promote energy independence, faced defeat on Capitol Hill. The significance of the trip did not become apparent until much later when it became a symbol for political collapse and the opening act in a grand historical drama, the prelude to disaster and a terrifying metaphor for future shock.
Despite his personal disdain for the Shah, Carter was anxious to mend fences with the only leader in the Middle East who enjoyed close relations with the president of Egypt and prime minister of Israel, both of whom were involved in intensive U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations. The Shah was President Sadat’s friend and as Israel’s main supplier of oil the Shah was well placed to exert leverage on Prime Minister Menachim Begin to accept painful territorial concessions. Still, Carter did not want to appear too closely associated with the Shah, whose human rights record had earned international opprobrium. The seventeen hours he planned to spend in Tehran seemed about right, just enough time to make a courtesy call and to refuel on the way to New Delhi. Carter was about to depart the Polish capital Warsaw when a time bomb exploded in the washroom of the Iran-America Society’s language school in Tehran, wrecking the ground-floor administration offices and injuring a security guard.
Air Force One’s slow descent over the mountains of eastern Turkey and northern Iran on the afternoon of December 31, 1977, afforded Jimmy Carter his first look at the country that over the next year would dictate his political future, decide the fate of Islam as a force for change in the world, and define the contours of the new century whose blurred lines were already taking shape. In the hour before he landed, Carter conferred one last time with his senior aides Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Assistant for National Security Affairs Zbigniew Brzezinski, and officials who handled Iranian affairs. Also aboard was Gary Sick, the desk officer for Iranian affairs serving on the National Security Council. The presidential caravan included dozens of White House advisers, support staff, bodyguards, newspaper and television reporters, celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters, and Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. But as Air Force One approached the Iranian frontier over Turkey, starting its final approach over the great desert plateau that Cyrus and Alexander had once conquered, the fifty-three-year-old president had thoughts other than politics and diplomacy on his mind.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had prepared for the trip by showing their daughter, Amy, an illustrated picture book of life in Iran. The Carters were both born-again Christians and had looked forward to seeing the lands of the Old Testament for the first time. The couple peered out the windows of their compartment over the arid moonscape, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mountain where Noah’s Ark settled during the Great Flood. Excitement quickly turned to disappointment. “Although it was a clear day,” Carter wrote in his diary, “we never were sure whether or not we saw Mount Ararat to the north.” Despite the unobstructed view, the president of the United States could not see what he was looking for in the open skies over southwest Asia.
* * *
ON THE EVE of President Carter’s arrival in Tehran, a cold front rolled down from Soviet Central Asia, coating the Alborz Mountains with a foot of silver frosting that chilled the air in the Iranian capital. The ski fields at Dizin, a short drive from the northern suburbs, were open for the season, and the northern cities of Mashad, Tabriz, and Kermanshah were already well blanketed. To the south, the Kharkeh River in Khuzestan Province burst its banks and flooded farmland, and mud seeped into the municipal water supply of Ahwaz. Iranians cheered their football team’s victory over Australia to advance to the play-offs of the soccer World Cup, due to be held the following summer in Argentina. A team of Iranian mountaineers declared their intention to become the first non-Chinese climbers to scale Mount Everest from Tibet. The death toll from the recent temblor in Kerman rose to six hundred. Iran’s broadcast authority announced that next summer state television would make the switch from black-and-white to color.
Artists and audiences flew in from around the world to enjoy what promised to be Tehran’s most brilliant winter season yet for the performing arts. Acclaimed mime artist Marcel Marceau, French pop singer Joe Dassin, and renowned Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson were all booked to perform in the New Year, with Nilsson at the Rudaki Hall reprising her signature role in Tristan und Isolde, accompanied by the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. Large crowds turned out for exhibitions celebrating the art of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in Tehran’s dazzling new Museum of Contemporary Art. The King and Queen opened an exhibition of African art and inaugurated the Tenth Festival of Arts and Culture by attending the opening night performance of Romeo an
d Juliet. Iranian film director Shahpur Gharib scooped top honors and the prized golden statue at the Twelfth International Festival for Children and Young Adults for his movie Summer Vacation. Hollywood had recently discovered Iran’s potential as a movie location. Filming was under way on Caravans, starring Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lee, Joseph Cotten, and Jennifer O’Neill. O’Neill delighted the social pages when she announced her engagement to a local businessman from Isfahan. Novelist Alex Haley, the author of Roots, was received at Niavaran by the Queen. Movie buffs flocked to the Tehran International Film Festival to see Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, and Barbra Streisand’s A Star Is Born. At the Italian Theater on Avenue France, the Crown Players, an amateur expatriate theatrical group, held final dress rehearsals for their Persian-themed pantomime version of Dick Whittington. In a nod to their surroundings, the streets of London were given Iranian names, and references to Christmas were struck in favor of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
At the central fish market, housewives waited in line to buy white fish from the Caspian, though over the winter dealers charged such exorbitant prices for a single fish—as much as 2,500 to 3,000 rials—that dark brown halva from the Persian Gulf was once again back in fashion. Shoppers in the main bazaar grumbled about high prices and shortages of basic food items such as table salt, eggs, and chickens. Eager to cash in, merchants were caught cheating customers by selling nylon bags half filled with sand instead of salt. Demand for dairy products far outstripped supply. “Get your milk and yogurt before 8 a.m. or you will go without,” Tehranis were warned. Consumption of milk had shot up 36 percent in just twelve months, far in excess of the capital’s 560-ton daily milk supply. Power outages didn’t help. The influx of new migrants from the provinces and construction of new factories and office buildings placed enormous strain on the city’s power grid. Electrical failures temporarily knocked out milk and yogurt production at the pasteurized milk plant. A nationwide shortage of eggs prompted the government to import two thousand tons of eggs to meet demand in Tehran and other cities. Even beer, a staple in a city that proudly boasted its own breweries, rose 10 percent in price so that a small bottle of beer now cost 25 rials and a big bottle went for 30 rials.
In the thirty-sixth year of the Shah’s reign his capital resembled a glass, steel, and concrete behemoth that flooded an eighty-five-mile-square radius stretching from the foothills of the Alborz Mountains to the edge of the great salt desert. Tehran’s population now exceeded 4.5 million, with 200,000 new arrivals expected each year and the number of city residents doubling on average every eleven years. The runaway growth of recent decades had outpaced the ability of local government to maintain services, and the combination of weather and traffic served only to aggravate popular discontent. In the autumn of 1977 unseasonably heavy rains caused the water table beneath southern Tehran to suddenly rise, backing up sewers, overflowing drains, and flooding poorer neighborhoods in the southern suburbs as well as the central business district. Surface water brought traffic to a halt in a metropolis where every morning another five hundred vehicles were added to rush-hour traffic, which peaked as early as seven in the morning. “Private cars, taxis, minibuses, single- and double-decker city buses, heavy trucks, and trailers can be seen as early as four in the morning to late at night,” remembered one resident.
With only 1,200 traffic police to monitor 12,000 roads, and 109 filling stations to service almost 1.5 million cars, daily travel around the capital was a real challenge. The traditional Persian disdain for regulations and laws of any sort didn’t help. In Tehran there was a sort of freewheeling anarchy on the streets, with motorists slicing across divider lanes, driving up on sidewalks, barreling through traffic intersections and red lights, and heading in the opposite direction down one-way streets. Collisions led to raised tempers, fistfights, and broken bones. Iran had one of the world’s highest rates of fatalities involving children because ambulances were often stuck in traffic. Traffic was so bad that Crown Prince Reza made front-page news when he placed an anonymous phone call to Mayor Javad Shahrestani’s live radio and television program Direct Contact, pointing out that too many traffic lights did not work and that uneven hatches covering sewage ducts made the roads even more hazardous.
The capital’s poor southern suburbs were plagued by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and shortages of clean drinking water. An estimated 700,000 residents who lived there were either unemployed or underemployed. The heavy autumn rains that flooded “sewage wells and filth-choked jubes” caused a cholera outbreak made worse by “the piles of garbage left on street corners and the presence of packs of wild dogs, both threats to health.” City councillors representing southern wards complained that the municipal budget was weighted in favor of the wealthier north. Whereas northerners were allotted one street cleaner per sixty residents, said Councillor Hossein Sharbiani, in Mesgarabad in the south there was only one cleaner for 720 residents. In the southern districts of Naziabad and Javadieh there was one worker for every 540 residents, but in Takhte Tavous in the north there was one municipal worker for every 190 people. Disparities like this fed the grievances of poorer Tehranis who every day took buses to Shemiran to clean, sweep, and cook for the wealthy.
The authorities were finally responding to mounting public anger. In December, Mayor Shahrestani unveiled a five-year roadworks plan to tackle congestion and get the city moving again. Construction started on the first section of Tehran’s new French-designed subway, whose 2.8-mile tunnel connecting Mirdamad to Abassabad Avenue was set to open in January 1981. The proposed new metro stations were specially designed to double as bomb shelters in the event of aerial bombardment during a war. Work also began on a new international airport nineteen miles south of the capital. Final approval was granted for what would be remembered as one of the Shah’s finest urban legacies, a twelve-mile-long, half-mile-wide forested green belt designed to improve air quality, preserve agricultural farmland, and protect the city from desert sandstorms. The National Iranian Oil Company announced the installation of new equipment at its Tehran refinery to reduce the content of lead in gasoline. The Ministry of Energy announced plans to build a 20-billion-rial sewage treatment plant to service southern Tehran. The city’s fourth water filter plant was on the brink of completion.
One group of young entrepreneurs decided not to wait for official action and imported forty-two battery-run cars capable of driving distances of up to sixty kilometers. Demand was not exactly overwhelming in Tehran for automobiles that sat only two passengers, had limited mileage, and cost 225,000 rials. Nevertheless, by the end of the year four battery-powered CitiCars had appeared on Tehran city streets. They were taken as yet another sign that Iranians had embraced science and technology and were ready for the challenges of the eighties. Help was on the way. The question was whether they had the patience to wait that long.
PART TWO
FAREWELL THE SHAH
1978–1979
And Seyavash said, “As the heavens roll
They cast my spirit down and sear my soul.
The wealth with which my treasury is filled,
The goods I’ve sought, the palaces I build,
Will pass into my enemy’s fell hand.
Before long, death will take me from this land.”
—THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS
14
LIGHTS OVER NIAVARAN
Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the thing that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid things seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets,
And graves have yawned, and yielded up their dead.
—JULIUS CAESAR, ACT 2, SCENE 2
All the elements of trouble are on the loose and unleashed.
—THE SHAH
From the heights, the winter city unfolded like a crush of black velvet and white light, spilling down the slopes
of the Alborz Mountains as though every diamond in the Queen’s jewel box had been flung onto the desert floor. Tonight, the lights of northern Tehran shimmered and glowed with a special brilliance. With the New Year only a few hours away, a round of house parties was about to get under way. Hostesses and servants put the final touches to dinner tables; checked place settings; and strung lights, streamers, and decorations. One of the biggest house parties was a fancy dress bash at the home of John Hoyer, general manager of Scandinavian Airlines, and his wife, Hanne. Their guests included Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife, Pat, and diplomats and business executives from a dozen countries. The hilltop home of Iran’s ambassador to Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi, back in town for one of his infrequent visits, was a “busy hive of activity,” with baskets of flowers arriving “almost every other minute” from admirers.
Tehran’s hotels anticipated a busy night. The InterContinental boasted Polynesian and French-themed restaurants, a “snazzy disco” on the ground floor, and assured guests a celebratory midnight glass of champagne “on the house.” The Sheraton promised “an exciting and unforgettable New Year’s Eve special” with a fixed-price menu in the Supper Club, accompanied by live entertainment featuring Persian singers and belly dancers. The Hilton’s French restaurant, Chez Maurice, offered romantic dinners by candlelight. In the hotel discotheque, DJ John Coulson was on hand to spin the latest pop hits flown in on audiocassette tapes from New York and London. Abba’s “Name of the Game,” “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees, and “We Are the Champions” by Queen were the hot tracks of the winter, and “Mull of Kintyre” by Wings finally toppled Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” after eight straight weeks at the top of the charts. Iranian playlists included disco tracks by popular local stars Darioush, Manouchehr, Giti, Ramesh, and Googoosh. The fun would continue well into the night. After-dinner entertainment ran the gamut in Tehran, where every taste, fancy, and quirk was catered to. In a city where an exotic dancer had recently been paid a staggering $50,000 to disrobe at a private party, nightclub patrons at Club Vanak looked forward to a smorgasbord of “belly dancers, strip teasers, sexy dancers, go-go girls, jugglers and musicians.”
The Fall of Heaven Page 36
