The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  On Tuesday, March 21, the first day of the New Year, clocks moved forward an hour and the Shah and Queen Farah hosted their traditional salaam reception for political, military, and religious figures. In his remarks to the assembly, the Shah made no reference to domestic problems but instead called for a “new international economic order” to correct imbalances between rich and poor nations. If the gap in wealth was allowed to grow “it will lead to an international conflagration.” In his traditional Nowruz address to the nation, however, he referred to the challenges of the past year. “But we all know that in rapid growth such difficulties are predictable,” he explained, and added that “the possibility that such freedom might be misused by elements whose identity is known to us was predictable.” Farah held her own reception for the wives of the ministers and ambassadors. Usually, the wife of the prime minister would respond on behalf of the group. But Mrs. Amuzegar was German-born and the Queen’s Special Bureau quietly let it be known that this year she would prefer the respondent to be of Iranian origin. Maryam Ansary stepped in at the last minute to deliver the annual felicitations.

  Their final engagements of the year complete, the Imperial couple and their children, friends, and courtiers boarded a plane at Mehrebad Airport and set out for the Persian Gulf island of Kish. The children were in high spirits with Princess Farahnaz, who had just turned sweet sixteen, set on learning to play the guitar, though against the wishes of her father, who thought the piano a more suitable instrument for his beloved daughter. But the adults in the party reported a more subdued atmosphere than usual. Everyone was braced for the end of the Tabriz mourning period and the likelihood of another round of unrest. Reza Ghotbi used his audience with the Shah to warn that his network of journalists around the country had received information that violent protests and acts of sabotage were being planned. “In Kish I presented an assessment of what had happened in Qom and Tabriz,” he said. “Our reporters and analysts thought these incidents would start happening every forty days. They predicted Yazd would be next—Yazd was preparing. Apparently my presentation was too gloomy and pessimistic. When His Majesty was not satisfied or unhappy with me, our meetings would be spaced longer and longer until the next time.” The Shah was so displeased with Ghotbi that he refused to receive him in private for several weeks. Though he personally liked his wife’s cousin, he considered National Iranian Radio and Television a bastion of liberal and leftist views.

  Minister for Women’s Affairs Mahnaz Afkhami tried to pass on her own warning. Five months earlier, she had suspected the secret police had staged the raid on the University of Tehran canteen. Now she realized the hidden hand was coming from another, more sinister direction. Around the country, her network of women’s rights activists reported they were coming under attack and that religious zealots were trying to force women to cover themselves. In several shocking cases, young toughs roaming the streets of Tehran threw vials of acid in the faces of young girls and women wearing Western dress. “Several foreign companies told employees to stay home,” reported Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “and there were at least four reports of girls being attacked with acid.” Fearing for their safety, more women—even those who did not consider themselves religious—began wearing chadors when they ventured outside. But the sight of even more black crows on city streets served only to strengthen the perception that the women of Iran were electing to submit to Islamic law.

  Defenders of women’s rights, stunned at what was happening, had almost no time to react. “People around us were shocked that things were moving so fast,” said Mahnaz Afkhami. “The government didn’t take it seriously. I remember talking to [Prime Minister] Amuzegar. I said we should set up a committee to do something, and he said, ‘I don’t know why you are so worried.’” She called Princess Ashraf and begged her to intervene with her brother. “We are hearing it is getting serious,” she said. “He needs to do something dramatic like the White Revolution and appoint a new prime minister like Amini. Someone from the outside.” But the Princess had elected to spend her Nowruz vacation on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and wasn’t there to pass on the message. “I spoke to His Majesty,” Ashraf told Mahnaz Afkhami after she returned from Saudi Arabia. “And he said, ‘Afkhami is a good minister but she seems hysterical. Ask her why she is so worked up.’”

  * * *

  ISRAELI DIPLOMATS CLOSELY monitored events in Iran, a country whose Jewish population of sixty thousand to seventy thousand dated back to the time of Esther. Jews were sensitive to the Islamic revival sweeping their homeland and anti-Semitic incidents had become more noticeable in the past several years. “Anti-Jewish books can be bought in Tehran and anti-Jewish slogans sometimes appear on the walls of buildings,” the Jerusalem Post reported in March 1978. “Anti-Semitism in Iranian Kurdistan has spurred many of the Jews in that area to move to Tehran.” Though Muslims assumed Iran’s Jews had prospered from the Shah’s reforms, half of the fifty thousand Jews living in Tehran were described as poor by Jewish relief organizations, and four thousand of those were indigent. About 20 percent of Iranian Jews were affluent, while the remaining 30 percent enjoyed middle-class status. Jewish resettlement organizations encouraged families to move to Israel to better their lives and end their isolation.

  Under the Shah, Iran and Israel enjoyed unusually close ties. The Shah saw Iranians and Jews as natural allies and strategic partners as the only two non-Arab peoples in the region. He admired Israel’s stubborn resilience, its remarkable string of military victories over the more populous Arab states, and the young country’s impressive record of economic and social development. Fifteen hundred Israeli citizens worked in Iran under the terms of a bilateral trade relationship worth $210 million, training the military; helping the security forces; and running horticulture, electronics, and construction companies. They shuttled back and forth on six weekly flights operated by Israel’s national airline, El Al. Bilateral ties provided Iranian Jews with an insurance policy of sorts. “The Jews have every confidence in the Shah,” reported the Jerusalem Post, “though there is always the lurking fear of a change in regime.”

  Israel’s unofficial ambassador Uri Lubrani enjoyed a close working relationship with the Shah and top government officials. Unlike his American counterpart, Lubrani was trusted in the palace, and the ambassador’s staff spoke Persian and were well acquainted with Iranian history, culture, and religious traditions. The Israelis had closely followed the outbreak of unrest in the autumn of 1977 and been shocked at the speed with which the security forces in Tabriz surrendered to the mob. Days after the riots, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Lubrani’s military attaché, confided to an Israeli journalist that “the Shah was finished and his days were numbered.”

  Three weeks later, on March 13, Lubrani and Reuven Merhav, the Mossad station chief, secretly visited the Shah on Kish Island armed with a proposal that Iran strengthen Musa Sadr in southern Lebanon as a counterweight to Iranian opposition groups. The Israelis were curious to see Kish, which “is rapidly taking on the symbolism of Sodom and Gomorrah to the Muslim faithful.” Far from being impressed with the louche ambience, the visitors decided conditions in Iran were comparable to Ethiopia just before the fall of Haile Selassie. On the flight back to Tehran the Israelis “concluded that the combination of a disconnected leadership that enjoyed an extremely lavish life and a growing popular frustration and civil unrest made a radical regime change highly likely.” Lubrani sent a secret communication to Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan to alert him that “the main challenge to the [Pahlavi] regime came now not from the liberal and communist opposition, but from the Islamists who had gathered strength and were expressing a strong anti-Israeli sentiment.”

  On his own initiative, the ambassador quietly stepped up purchases of Iranian crude oil to ensure that Israel would be protected if the oil supply was suddenly cut off. He also placed phone calls to Israeli businessmen living in Iran and advised them to start putting in place emergency contingency plans.

>   * * *

  AS PREDICTED, THE tempo of unrest flared again in late March. Groups of men set fire to banks and smashed windows in Tehran, Qazvin, Babol, and Kashan. Ambassador Sullivan reported that a bomb threat had been called in to Tehran’s Community Church, where many Americans worshipped. Elsewhere, flames destroyed thirty-five shops along Shohoda Street in Babol, and disturbances were reported in the towns of Abadan and Abadeh. Police in Qazvin were involved in a shoot-out that left one gunman dead and his accomplice fleeing on foot: inside the getaway car police found a handgun, thirty-one rounds of ammunition, two hand grenades, forged identity papers, and stacks of antiregime literature. Bands of rioters attacked businesses in Tehran, Isfahan, Yazd, Mashad, Qom, and Kashan in violence that lasted into the early-morning hours. The governor of Lorestan’s car was torched, gunmen opened fire on a police station in Qom, and evening strollers were set upon and assaulted on the streets of Yazd.

  The violence ramped up over the long holiday weekend of Friday, March 31, to Saturday, April 1, with daylight attacks reported for the first time against banks, cinemas, and other public buildings in more than a dozen cities and towns, including Tabriz, Bandar Shah, Arak, and Chalus. Machete-wielding assailants smashed in the windows of a restaurant at Saqi-Kalayeh on the Caspian, terrorizing patrons but causing no casualties. In Khomein, birthplace of the Marja, the governor’s residence and many private dwellings and vehicles were set upon by organized mobs. In Zarand, saboteurs “sprinkled petrol on the roof of the Kuroush Cinema Hall and set it ablaze. Firefighters got there in time and put the blaze out before it could spread to the structure and neighboring buildings.” Each wave of provocations, unrest, and violence was more intense than the last. But nothing prepared the police in Isfahan for the gruesome crime scene that awaited them in a field on the outskirts of town. Iranians prided themselves on the hospitality they showed foreigners. That made the discovery of a bloodied foreign worker whose tongue had been cut out, presumably to prevent him from identifying his attackers, all the more shocking. The battered victim died of his injuries in the hospital.

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  TWICE A YEAR, and always at Nowruz, Parviz Sabeti made the drive down to Qom to pay his respects to Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari. Sabeti always took great care to travel incognito and arrived in town after dark to protect the Grand Ayatollah’s reputation. “I drove down at night with a security car in the rear,” he recalled. “I always drove myself—I never trusted my guard. That way I could keep an eye on the rearview mirror.”

  Sabeti had a vivid memory of his final meeting with Shariatmadari. The Marja handed him a gold coin, as was custom, and the two men began a lengthy discussion about the unrest sweeping the country. The Marja was alarmed by the latest unrest, fearful of where the kingdom was headed, and puzzled by the Shah’s inaction. More than anything, Shariatmadari was “scared of Khomeini” and “furious” that Savak was not doing more to remove the source of the problem. The Shah, he said, did not seem to understand what and who he was up against. The most respected and popular of the Shia marjas living in Iran got straight to the point. “Khomeini has to be assassinated,” he declared. “I, as a marja, can give you a fatwa to send someone to kill him.”

  Sabeti was impressed and astonished with this most unusual request. He explained to the Grand Ayatollah that his hands were tied. “Your Holiness,” he answered, “we are not in the business of killing people. If you want this taken care of you can give the fatwa to one of your followers.”

  16

  FIVE DAYS IN MAY

  My headstrong lord, consider now and say

  Whether you want to fight or run away!

  —THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS

  The Americans want to eliminate me.

  —THE SHAH

  The thirteenth day of Nowruz, the final day of the spring break, was traditionally an occasion for family outings to public parks, gardens, and picnic spots. This year, Sizdeh-Bedar fell on Sunday, April 2, and many Tehranis took day trips to the countryside, while others stayed closer to home, motoring the short distance to Karaj to the west, to the Abbasabad hills in the east, or to the Latian Dam, a beauty spot popular with the Imperial Family. Downtown, tens of thousands of picnickers filled the broad lawns that marched outward from the grand archway of the Shahyad Monument. “There were only a few cases of quarrels among picnickers,” reported Kayhan, “and police and Gendarmes said most people, in a jovial mood, enjoyed their Sizdeh, which was made even more enjoyable by the beautiful sunshine.” The arrival of warm spring weather saw fresh snowfall in northeastern Iran, Gilan on the Caspian was drenched by heavy rains, and there followed several days of high winds in Tehran, which “raised the dust and scattered garbage, causing inconvenience to many pedestrians. In the mornings after the winds, the city has suffered a typical heat wave that is apt to suffocate many.”

  From overseas, dignitaries and celebrities lined up to see the Shah like so many airliners circling over Mehrebad Airport. “Foreign trade delegations poured into Iran,” recalled Britain’s ambassador Tony Parsons, “and it was hard to imagine that we were living on the edge of a volcano.” Formal state visits were paid by the presidents of West Germany and Senegal. The Shah received the commander of the Indian Navy, and the Queen welcomed to Niavaran a delegation of prominent American feminist leaders. Two American politicians, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, both presidential aspirants, flew to Tehran to burnish their foreign policy credentials. Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi had taken special care to arrange the Shah’s audience with Reagan. The Iranian was friendly with the glamorous Ron and Nancy Reagan, who fondly regarded him as an honorary member of their “kitchen cabinet” of advisers. Convinced that Reagan had a good chance of defeating Jimmy Carter in 1980, Zahedi wanted the Shah to be his preferred partner on the world stage and hoped that a Reagan victory would get U.S.-Iran relations back on track. “Ron and Nancy stayed in my house,” he said. “I sent them by plane from the south of Iran to the north and from the east to the west. I wanted to show the geopolitics of Iran’s position in the region. Reagan and the Shah spoke about geopolitics. The Shah was terribly impressed.” The Shah’s interview with Reagan took place the same day another prominent conservative politician, Margaret Thatcher, the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, flew in to Mehrebad. Princess Ashraf and Prime Minister Amuzegar feted the Iron Lady at separate luncheons, and Ambassador Parsons took her to Isfahan and Shiraz for a spot of sightseeing. “Isfahan was full of European and American tourists, as was customary in the spring,” Parsons wrote in his memoir. “The only evidence that everything was not entirely satisfactory was that Mrs. Thatcher’s visit to the Isfahan bazaar was quietly dropped, her escort explaining to me that there was ‘the possibility of a little trouble there.’” The Shah’s session with Thatcher had no sooner ended than George Bush, the former CIA director and future forty-first president, was escorted into his office.

  In downtown Tehran, and despite the return to piety, grind houses, strip bars, and nudie cinemas that lined Avenue Lalezar, formerly known as the “Street of Ambassadors,” attracted a steady trade. Elsewhere, office workers looking for a shady lunch spot strolled over to Avenue Kakh, the old royal quarter built by Reza Shah with its rambling lawns, trees, and fountains, while to the north Shemiran and the surrounding hills were as charming as ever. “The parks are immaculate, studded with sculpture and fountains,” wrote one visitor. “Along tree-lined Pahlavi Avenue, apartment buildings, 30 stories high, shade splendid mansions only partly hidden by brick walls and iron-latticed gates. There are restaurants and nightclubs with names like Miami and Chattanooga. Department stores and supermarkets offer almost anything that can be found in an American suburban shopping mall. The Yves St. Laurent and Charles Jourdan boutiques cater to stylish customers.” But the languid spring atmosphere was deceptive. Iranians counted the cost of the Nowruz holiday disturbances that left at least five dead and ninety-eight injured. Violence had been reported in fifty-five towns an
d cities, with hundreds of commercial properties put to the torch.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST time since the outbreak of unrest in January, longtime observers of the Iranian scene studied the Shah’s prospects. “Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is beset by grave economic, social and political problems he set in motion when he spearheaded the successful oil producers’ fight to quadruple oil prices in 1973,” reported the Washington Post. “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.” The Shah faced a tough economic climate at a time of rising popular expectations. “A year ago you wouldn’t have found all these people to go rioting,” stated an Iranian economist. “They would have been working in the construction sector.” But with the economy slowed down and the construction sector in the doldrums, unskilled laborers saw their daily wage packet fall from $10 to $7. An Iranian-based ambassador said, “The only way out for him now is to deliver the goods—and fast. But can he?”