Over the winter Reza Ghotbi, Queen Farah’s cousin and the head of Iranian television and radio, drove down to Qom to see Shariatmadari. Ghotbi often fielded complaints from the ayatollahs about television programs such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, which depicted women in the workplace and ran story lines on abortion, homosexuality, and premarital sex. But National Iranian Radio and Television devoted far more resources to religious programming, and Ghotbi’s staff were always careful to consult with clerical experts while filming special projects such as the annual televised reenactments of Shia passion plays. During his trip to Qom, Ghotbi asked his religious hosts to explain what they thought Grand Ayatollah Khomeini meant with his call for an Islamic government. One ayatollah explained to Ghotbi that it would be like a return to the sixteenth century, when the Safavid Dynasty had shared power with the ulama. “The Shah is the son-in-law of the Ayatollah,” he said. “And the Ayatollah is the son-in-law of the Shah.” Shariatmadari added that he had talked to Khomeini about that very issue. He wanted to know if Khomeini meant to establish a dictatorship. He said he had asked Khomeini flat out, “Do you mean that you want to run the state?” Khomeini’s reply made clear that he saw himself as occupying a far more elevated position, that of “supreme leader” or intermediary between God and government. Besides, he told Shariatmadari, he already had someone in mind to run a future Islamic government. He was not interested in a political post. “No,” he said, he had no such ambition for himself. “I have Musa Sadr in mind as prime minister.”
Reza Ghotbi was familiar with Musa Sadr. “I had heard about his work in Lebanon. One of his cousins was a colleague of mine. I was aware that Musa Sadr was in conflict with our ambassador in Beirut and that he had traveled to Cairo to talk about his problem with our ambassador there. He wanted to assure His Majesty that he was not against him.”
* * *
FIVE YEARS EARLIER, Musa Sadr had enjoyed a warm rapport with the Shah and Court Minister Alam. Since then, however, relations had cooled to the point where the Shah refused to receive the Imam or listen to his requests for financial assistance.
Lebanon’s descent into anarchy in the early 1970s had made the country a magnet for extremist groups. The Shah was especially concerned because of the number of Iranian revolutionaries who traveled to the Bekaa Valley to be trained as bomb throwers, while in the capital, Beirut, zealots copied and distributed Khomeini’s speeches and propaganda tracts in a safe house. These materials were then smuggled into Iran and stored in a warehouse in the capital’s southern suburbs. In the south of Lebanon, as conditions deteriorated, Musa Sadr felt compelled to form a loyalist militia, the Amal, led by Mustafa Chamran, an anti-Shah exile who had trained in electrical engineering at the University of Berkeley California, completed a PhD, and went to work in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Chamran built the Amal militia into a formidable fighting force that drew recruits from disaffected Lebanese Shia youth but also from the hundreds of Iranian dissidents who came to Lebanon to learn how to overthrow the Pahlavi monarchy. Outraged by what he perceived to be disloyalty, the Shah ordered that Musa Sadr be stripped of his Iranian passport. As far as the Shah was concerned, the Imam could swim with the sharks. Musa Sadr appealed to the Shah to understand the delicacy of his position and explained to Iranian officials who contacted him that his primary responsibility was to the Shia of Lebanon and not to the Pahlavi state. He bitterly complained that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mansur Qadar, a Savak general and confidant of General Nasiri, was trying to frame him as an anti-Shah revolutionary.
Musa Sadr’s estrangement from his patron in Tehran left him dangerously isolated and vulnerable to men such as Abolhassan Banisadr and Ahmad Khomeini, who suspected he did not share their extremist agenda. They were deeply angered when he blamed their ally Yasser Arafat for provoking Israeli military action in and around his stronghold of Tyre. His next heresy was to ally himself with Syria and support President Hafez Assad’s decision to send troops into Lebanon to try to dampen the civil war and prevent the Palestinian leader from setting up his own puppet state inside Lebanon. Musa Sadr received death threats and after evacuating his wife and children to Paris spent his days on the run, shuttling between safe houses in the Lebanese capital. Despite Musa Sadr’s open breach with Arafat, Khomeini retained a soft spot for him. He entertained the notion of appointing his former pupil to serve as the first prime minister of an Islamic republic. Talk like this disturbed his son Ahmad, a fanatic who nurtured his own political ambitions. “Ahmad was someone thinking in terms of power,” recalled Abolhassan Banisadr. “He had no scruples in terms of religion, clerics or whatever. His wife was Musa Sadr’s niece but he was not someone who necessarily liked Musa Sadr.”
* * *
OUTWARDLY AT LEAST, the streets of Tehran appeared calm in late January, though the mood of complacency tended to rise with the elevation. “Many Iranians appear to have ceased to believe newspaper reports of religious incidents and regard counter-demonstrations as government inspired,” observed the U.S. embassy. But others, acting on tip-offs from friends and family members in high places, suspected there was something wrong in the palace. Since the summer they had purchased residences in Europe and North America. Now they began quietly moving family members out of the country to safety.
Then, at six thirty on the morning of Thursday, January 19, an explosion tore through Tehran’s Bowling Recreation Club, a popular hangout spot for American teenagers that housed a cinema, indoor pool, skating rink, and bowling alley. The fire on Old Shemiran Road “raged for hours,” reported Kayhan, “and brought frightened householders in the neighborhood to the scene.” Eight days later a second explosion and fire tore through the three-story Sabouri furniture store on Pahlavi Avenue. The inferno on Friday, January 27, broke out at six forty-one in the morning, raged for four hours, and almost detonated a nearby gasoline station. Both fires were reported in the local press without comment. The authorities worried that if the public learned the truth—Islamic sabotage squads were at work targeting businesses owned by Jews and members of the Baha’i faith, regarded by the Shia as apostates—there would be panic. Knowledgeable Tehranis read between the lines anyway. There had already been a run on Iran’s largest private commercial bank, Bank Saderat, whose three thousand branches also made it the most accessible for depositors. They didn’t need the government to tell them that Bank Saderat was owned by a Baha’i, or that Khomeini had ordered his followers to suddenly withdraw their savings in an attempt to collapse the banking system.
On that same Friday evening, at the end of another long week of suspicion and rumor, strollers leaving Tehran mosques after evening prayers claimed they saw an unidentified flying object approach northeast Tehran and the hills around Niavaran from the direction of “the southern end of the city.” In the words of one eyewitness, the object was “shining brightly, regularly changed its colors and flew for about fifteen minutes over the area in a revolving manner before it suddenly gained speed and disappeared.”
For the past two years, UFO sightings and paranormal disturbances had escalated in direct proportion to the intensity of Iran’s Islamic revival. Two weeks earlier, on the same day that Ettelaat published the article attacking Khomeini, police officers were called to a house on Vanak Square in Tehran to investigate alarming reports of a mysterious intruder. Twelve-year-old housemaid Zari, who spoke as if in a trance, described her friendship with an “extraterrestrial being” named “Honar” who stood over two meters tall and whose arms and legs were “longer than an ordinary human being [with a] body [that] was covered with something like a black fur coat.… Some strange light reflects off the eyes of this creature and this light causes the attention of the onlooker to be drawn on it rather than to any other part of its body.” Her employers said they too had experienced “strange and unexpected things connected to an ‘outer space creature’” and felt the intruder’s presence. Furniture was moved around rooms, the radio turned itself on and off, the re
frigerator was unplugged, and trays of food were missing. Police officers confirmed that fingerprints found in the house were “not those of any human being.”
The most notorious incident involving UFOs had occurred fifteen months earlier, and had drawn the Shah’s close attention. At 11 o’clock on the evening of September 18, 1976, the control tower at Mehrebad Airport received four telephone calls from residents of Tehran’s Shemiran district who reported seeing bright lights and a fast moving object in the sky overhead. The unidentified aircraft was picked up on radar and two F-4 fighter jets were scrambled from Hamadan air base to investigate. Air force generals suspected a Russian intruder, possibly to test the readiness of Iran’s aerial defenses. The pilots radioed ground control with detailed descriptions of a large cylindrical object with flashing lights that released a smaller orb, which flew toward and around them—no mean feat considering the pilots were flying at almost the speed of sound—and started circling them. One of the pilots turned back to base. Fearing an attack, his colleague, Lieutenant Parviz Jafari, made an attempt to fire a sidewinder missile at the intruder when he reported the electronics in his cockpit suddenly failed, shutting down all radar and navigation equipment. After regaining power he returned to Hamadan for a debriefing that drew the attention of CIA investigators. He told them he had seen a second small orbit plummet into the earth north of Shemiran. The American briefing on the incident was sent to President Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The Shah’s reaction to the mystery intruder in the night sky over Tehran was telling. He knew the intruder hadn’t been a Russian aircraft testing Iran’s aerial defenses. “The Russians weren’t coming over Iran anymore,” said Lieutenant General Mohammad Hossein Mehrmand, the Hamadan base commander. “Our new F-14 jets flew with Phoenix missiles that could reach Russian aircraft even if they were flying at a higher altitude. The Shah knew this. And Jafari was a good pilot.” Five days later, the Shah flew down to Hamadan to learn more. “He listened carefully to the pilots for thirty to thirty-five minutes,” said General Mehrmand. “He didn’t ask any questions.” At the end of the presentation the Shah made one of his typically oblique observations. “Yes,” he said, “for sure there was something out there. But it did not come from the human hand.” He paused before adding, “Maybe it came from the other side.” Though the events of September 18, 1976, were never fully explained, astronomers did observe that on the same evening a meteor shower rained debris over a broad arc of territory that stretched from Iran as far west as Morocco.
There was no easy explanation for the monster of Vanak Square and the sightings of bright lights circling over Tehran. Throughout human history, however, such events have often been interpreted as precursors to the fall of kings and the collapse of empires. The faithful saw the flying lights over Niavaran as an omen that Allah was on their side and that Islam would triumph.
15
THE CARAVAN PASSES
Death to the Shah!
—GRAND AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI
Khomeini has to be assassinated.
—GRAND AYATOLLAH SHARIATMADARI
On February 1, 1978, the Shah took part in the first “satellite summit” or televised video conference between heads of state from different countries. He joined France’s president Giscard d’Estaing and West Germany’s president Walter Scheel on the three-way call to inaugurate two satellite relay stations built in Tehran and Shiraz by the Franco-German telecommunications company Symphonie. Nineteen seventy-eight was the “Year of the Microchip,” which ushered in the era of personal computing, and the Shah was eager for Iranians to be seen as at the forefront of technological innovation. In his remarks to d’Estaing and Scheel, the King quoted Hugo and Goethe on the importance of brotherhood and expressed his hope that their satellite linkup “was solid proof of the fact that geographical distance had lost its meaning. The time was now ripe for technology to be used to remove non-geographical gaps—remnants of the past—and replace them with understanding and cooperation.”
Here was proof, if proof was still needed, that a modern, secular Iran was within reach. New satellite and computer technology proved that the Persian fable “about a prince who had a glass ball in which he could see all he wanted” would come to pass. The next day, the Shah and Queen Farah flew to India to begin a four-day state visit. On arrival in New Delhi, he again spoke out forcefully in support of his friend Anwar Sadat’s peace plan with Israel and lobbied for two of his most visionary foreign policy initiatives: a “common market” binding Asian economies and a “zone of peace” in the Indian Ocean. As usual, the Imperial couple were dogged by boisterous protests organized by Iranian student groups. Responding to Western criticism of Iran’s record on human rights, the Shah told reporters that the first world leader to address the issue had been Cyrus the Great, more than six hundred years before the birth of Christ. At that time, he tartly reminded his audience, “we [Iranians] were civilized … and those people [Westerners] were climbing trees. I don’t think that we can really take lessons from anybody. They should first put their own house in order.”
Ten days later, the Pahlavis opened Tehran’s new Museum of Persian Carpets on Aryamehr Avenue. They were joined for the gala celebrations by Prince Gholam Reza, Princess Pari Sima, Prime Minister Amuzegar, Court Minister Hoveyda, and a phalanx of high-ranking court and government dignitaries. The carpet museum and its neighbor the Museum of Contemporary Art firmly anchored the Farah Park fine arts district in the downtown commercial district. Built to resemble “a giant-size nomadic tent, stretched and pinned to the ground at all sides,” the new museum’s inaugural exhibit boasted two hundred of the finest Persian rugs in the world. The facility’s upper story was painted turquoise blue, a color “used a great deal in mosques, from which many of the carpet designs … are copied.” Inside, the dignitaries strolled through a large, well-lit hall with “a pond and bubbling fountain in the center and singing canaries all around.” The outside garden included an Islamic prayer room.
In his opening remarks, the Shah said he hoped this latest dazzling addition to the capital’s skyline would “turn Tehran into an international cultural center within a few years.” He noted the importance of carpet weaving to Iranian society and reminded the guests that he had outlawed child labor in the carpet-weaving industry and introduced salaries to end exploitation of young and poor workers. He pledged state aid to support local weavers in the face of “tough foreign competition.” But there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind as to whose day it really was. In the late sixties the Queen had envisioned a network of museums that would revive and preserve art but also make the country’s cultural treasures more accessible to the people. By the spring of 1978 the fruits of her years of labor could finally be seen not only around Farah Park but also in northern Tehran, where the Negarastan and Reza Abbasi museums were located, and out in the provinces—in Lorestan, which boasted a new museum to house bronze, and in Kerman, where there was now a modern art museum.
The Queen’s pride was tempered by the private agony of her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Six months earlier, the Shah’s doctors had staged their dramatic intervention in Paris and informed his wife that he was stricken with terminal lymphoma. She felt constrained from raising the subject with him because he had not been informed that she knew. To further complicate matters, his shyness prevented him from sharing personal matters. She tried to draw him out, but to no avail. Farah and the medical team were also still unaware of the Shah’s initial diagnosis at the hands of Dr. Fellinger in Vienna four years earlier. All she could do was monitor his weight and make sure he took his medicine. The Shah hinted that he was aware that she knew the extent of his illness, though the word “cancer” never passed his lips. If he felt discomfort he would lift up his shirt and ask Farah to touch his abdomen and check his spleen. “What do you think?” he would plaintively ask. “Does it look swollen to you?” “We talked a great deal about His Majesty’s il
lness,” she recalled. “I was sure that he knew that I knew the truth. He might have even known that I knew that he knew. But he played the game as if I didn’t know while I pretended not to know what was wrong. It was a strange game: sweet and sour, tender and painful at the same time. I loved him desperately. I wanted to rush into his arms, put my head on his chest and cry. But I kept my cool: raison d’état oblige.” The knowledge that they shared the secret “brought me closer to His Majesty than ever before.”
Finally, Farah summoned the French doctors and told them that enough was enough. It was no longer tolerable for them to simply refer to her husband’s lymphoma as “Waldenstrom’s disease.” She asked them to be straight—it was time for the word games to end. The doctors met with the Shah in the first few weeks of 1978, intending to break the news. To their great surprise, he preempted them and made a poignant request that left no doubt in their minds that he already knew he was marking time. “I am only asking you to help me maintain my health for two years,” he said, “enough time for the Crown Prince to finish the year in the US [where he planned to train as an air force pilot] and spend another in Tehran.”
The Fall of Heaven Page 39
