The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The final spasms of unrest were felt on Monday, April 3, the day the King, Queen, and their children returned to Tehran from Kish Island. Police officers responding to an anonymous tip rushed to the Takht-e Jamshid movie theater to discover explosives planted and timed to detonate under seats. The packed hall was quickly evacuated and the devices defused just in time. In Zarand, firefighters managed to put out a fire caused by gasoline sprinkled on the roof of a local cinema. But police were too late to reach a cinema in Veramin, whose eastern wall “was suddenly engulfed in flames.” Fire consumed a large manufacturing plant on Karaj Road, a bus depot in the town of Shushtar in Khuzestan Province, and the Physical Culture Organization building in Sirjan in Kerman. The Youth Hostel in Kermanshah was firebombed. A policeman was blinded in a grenade attack in Mashad. The use of accelerants and explosives suggested the revolutionary underground was determined to cause maximum panic and casualties. “These groups have obviously taken to arson now,” reported the Pars News Agency. “Attacks with pickaxes and crowbars on bank buildings have continued as in the past. But they are increasingly using fire-bombs.” According to the authorities, the saboteurs traveled in small commando units of between two and five people. Paid for hire, and “mostly drawn from the marginal strata of the society,” they fanned out from Tehran to strike public facilities “in order to promote commotion throughout the country.”

  The Islamist underground was determined to draw the security forces into a series of confrontations that they hoped would lead to more deaths and another round of forty-day memorial services. They also hoped that bloodshed would discredit liberalization in the eyes of Iran’s middle class and the Shah’s American and European allies. The Shah refused to play their game. He believed that a sweeping security crackdown would destroy the progress he had made to clean up Iran’s human rights image and would only taint the throne. He could not afford to freeze liberalization and disrupt political activity for at least one and perhaps two years, during which time he expected his health to decline: intellectuals and moderate dissidents whose participation he needed in the elections would denounce the open space as a fraud. He also understood that his son could not inherit a blood-stained throne. It was essential that Iranians accepted Reza’s legitimacy but recognition by the foreign powers who guaranteed Iran’s security and engaged in commerce was also crucial. For these reasons he vetoed any measures that increased the likelihood of bloodshed.

  The Shah, who had always held the mullahs in low esteem, suspected they could not stage unrest without a great deal of help from foreigners. To those who dismissed talk of a conspiracy as evidence of paranoia, he reminded them of Iran’s experiences during the Second World War, when British, Soviet, and American armies had occupied his country and divided it into three sectors. The Shah remembered this bitter history and wondered whether he was starting to see old patterns of behavior reemerge. Carter reminded him of Kennedy, another liberal Democrat who held republican sympathies and interfered in Iran’s internal affairs. Then there were the big oil companies. Their contracts to take Iranian oil to market were due to expire, and they held out for better terms. The Shah saw this as a blackmail threat. Above all, he suspected that the U.S. and British intelligence services were taking revenge for the 1973 oil price hike and were determined to install in Tehran a more compliant, less nationalistic regime.

  When Reza Ghotbi’s latest request to see the Shah went unanswered, he asked Akbar Etemad, the president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, to gauge the King’s view of events. “The Americans want to eliminate me,” the Shah told Etemad. “Take me out of my place. But they are wrong. Because if they succeed Iran will become a satellite of the Soviet Union and it will be the beginning of chaos in the region. The domino effect they worried about in Vietnam will happen if Iran goes Communist.” Ghotbi reeled when Etemad relayed the contents of his conversation. “This was shocking for me,” he remembered. “It was normal to hear [the Shah] saying that ‘the Americans are plotting against me.’ He often talked about the oil companies and their influence over the religious people. That part was not new. What was shocking was that he did not say he would fight it. Instead he said, ‘If they succeed…’” The Queen’s cousin wondered what was going on. “My reaction was, ‘There are forces against him, trying to use his people, and that may help to open the political space in Iran,’ but it also means he has a very pessimistic assessment, and if so we are in trouble.”

  Other prominent officials and personalities suspected the Shah did not understand the true dimensions of the crisis. They saw inaction as the very worst choice at a time when bold gestures were required to regain the political initiative. On the evening of April 19, 1978, former Savak chief General Hassan Pakravan hosted a small dinner party at his home and took aside the American diplomat Claude Taylor for a discreet chat. Pakravan explained that unlike some of his younger friends “he no longer exercised access to the Shah,” Taylor reported back to Ambassador Sullivan. Nonetheless, said Pakravan, he was confident he knew the Shah “like a book.” The Shah, he explained, was “greatly concerned about economic and political conditions in Iran” as well as “the increasing dissidence of a political, social and religious nature.” But he was too isolated and dependent on advice from a small group of loyalists who told him what they thought he wanted to hear. Pakravan said he hoped the White House might send over a trusted emissary, someone like David Rockefeller, who could “actively pursue an advisory role with the Shah.” The Shah “might get angry and shout,” as was his nature, “but he needs to be told before the present trends are even less reversible.” Pakravan emphasized to Taylor that the Shah was committed to reform and that he had known since the early sixties “that he must set in train the democratization of Iran.” Pakravan’s unusual intercession with Taylor had undoubtedly been prompted by the death five days earlier in New York of former minister of court Asadollah Alam. The general was one of the last of the generation of older courtiers who understood that it had been Alam who had issued the decisive order to call out the army in June 1963—his cool head and firm hand had saved the kingdom. But with Alam gone, who would the Shah turn to if the unrest spiraled out of control?

  General Nasser Moghadam, now the head of G-2 military intelligence, avoided talking to the Shah and instead tried another tack by taking his concerns directly to Queen Farah. He telephoned Hushang Nahavandi, the head of the Shahbanou’s Special Bureau, to request a private meeting. During his long tenure at Savak, Moghadam had enjoyed a reputation as a hard-liner but also as someone who was incorruptible. Over the Nowruz holiday he had stopped off at the home of Parviz Sabeti, his old deputy, to let him know that he had accepted an invitation to fly to Washington, DC, to meet with top CIA officials. Moghadam told Sabeti that the Queen had asked him to provide her with a report on the problems facing the regime and the causes of unrest. Sabeti agreed to write the report, which Moghadam then presented to Nahavandi at their assignation at the Reza Abbasi Museum. The general wore a civilian suit so as to avoid stares from the crowds.

  Nahavandi read the “brutally frank” document at the table, apparently unaware it had actually been written by Sabeti. The report named corrupt individuals within the Imperial Family, at the Imperial Court, and in private business. It revealed that former prime minister Hoveyda had not only tolerated but also encouraged corrupt business dealings with government officials and that General Nasiri had carried out extortion. It described in detail the breakdown in crown-clergy relations and how problems with the economy were exacerbating unrest in the streets. The report urged that “dramatic measures must be taken ‘at once if not sooner.’” Nahavandi later claimed that the Queen was furious that he had read the report without her permission. She dismissed his version of events as “nonsense.” “There was nothing so secret,” she said. “I knew about the problems, everybody was coming and telling me their problems.”

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  THE LOWER SLOPES of the Alborz Mountains were near enough to Te
hran for day trips but far enough from the capital that dissidents could meet away from the prying eyes of the security forces. Young student admirers of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini often spent their Fridays hiking around the small hamlets debating politics and Iran’s future.

  On Friday, April 21, even as the King and Queen extended a warm welcome to West Germany’s President and Mrs. Scheel at Mehrebad Airport, several hundred students assembled near the village of Darakeh to distribute subversive literature and listen to new cassette tape recordings of Khomeini’s latest diatribe against the Pahlavis. They had no sooner gathered when they were surprised by gendarmes dressed in full riot gear who began corralling them to higher ground, while from the air ten Chinook helicopters swooped down and landed on a nearby field. Those who resisted arrest were beaten and clubbed. “Eyewitness said he saw more than 50 individuals with serious injuries such as severe head cuts, cheeks cut open, and bones broken,” Ambassador William Sullivan reported back to Washington. “Several other dissident sources point to roughness of events and police preparation as evidence that [the government of Iran] is determined to crack down on dissenters, in violent manner if necessary.”

  U.S. officials were furious. They believed that the Shah and Prime Minister Amuzegar had reneged on the promises they had made to restrain the security forces and allow peaceful demonstrations. They were aware that in recent weeks the homes of several prominent Iranian dissidents had been firebombed, reportedly by vigilante groups acting at the behest of Savak. Sullivan condemned “brownshirt tactics” that he feared would cause opposition leaders to break off their contacts with the embassy and blame Washington for repression. The ambassador received support from Secretary of State Vance and his deputy Warren Christopher. Their concerns continued to be focused on the Shah’s handling of the unrest rather than the unrest itself. Senior administration officials scoffed at reports that opposition groups were part of a conspiracy by the Soviet Union and its proxies in the Middle East to overthrow the Shah. Parviz Sabeti recalled a contentious meeting he had with CIA officials in Washington in 1977. They got into a “big fight” on the subject of foreign subversion in Iran. “I told them the Mujahedin was getting help from the Czechs, the PLO and others,” he said. “And they said, ‘You’re telling us that everyone who is against the Shah is Communist?’ And I said, ‘No, you are missing the point.’” The meeting ended in acrimony, with the Americans convinced the Shah was hyping the threat from radicals and extremists to justify the use of force to suppress legitimate dissent.

  The Americans came down hard on the Shah because they assumed he could end the unrest when he thought the time was right. They not only misinterpreted his intentions but also overestimated the durability of his regime to withstand pressure from within and without. U.S. policy rested on the latest CIA review of the Shah’s prospects. Based on four key assumptions, the agency provided officials in Washington with a glowing picture of Iran as it prepared to enter the 1980s. The report’s first assumption was that the Shah enjoyed “good health” and was likely to be “an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s.” Reports circulating in Tehran that the Shah was “suffering from a dread but usually unspecified disease” were “unfounded and are probably the result more of wishful thinking than of medical fact.” Second, there would be “no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” Now in his final decade in power, the Shah was “not likely to change voluntarily the style of rule which he has found so successful.” He would continue to rely on a “small inner circle of confidantes, whom he uses as hatchet men, enforcers, advisers, and go-betweens with other elements of the Iranian power structure.” Third, “Iran will not become involved in a war that would absorb all of its energies and resources.” Iran was the bulwark of stability in southwestern Asia and at peace with its neighbors—the Shah kept a close eye on developments in the region. Fourth, oil production and exports “will continue to dominate the Iranian economy.”

  Central Intelligence admitted that any one of its four assumptions might be proven wrong. “The Shah could die suddenly or be assassinated; a combination of political personalities and forces might reduce the Shah to a figurehead; Iran could become involved in a war with one of its neighbors or in a more general outbreak of hostilities.” Though none of the scenarios could be predicted, there was no doubt that the Shah’s “forced-draft approach” to modernization had placed enormous strains on Iranian society. His programs were so interrelated that the failure of one could affect the others, and all were dependent on “a continuing flow of income from oil revenues: declining oil sales have recently forced a cutback in some programs, and a sharp decline could affect everything else.” The CIA failed to point out that the decline in oil sales and program cutbacks was the direct result of the U.S.-Saudi oil coup that had shaken the foundations of the Iranian economy and weakened the regime’s pillars of support.

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  EVEN AS THE White House was assured by the CIA and Sullivan’s embassy that all was well in Iran and with the Shah, on Saturday, May 6, U.S. consul David McGaffey reported from Isfahan that thousands of American defense contractors and their families were “on the verge of panic” and that the city itself was a tinderbox of tightly coiled anger and resentment. McGaffey expressed alarm at the “strength and growing violence” of religious groups whose mullahs “have begun inserting inflammatory anti-foreign and anti-American rhetoric into already anti-Shah sermons, and that they and their students are forming ‘self-defense squads.’” The city was filled with wild rumors: “I was called from several sources about the kidnapping of an American child, an acid attack on two American women, student bodies on the street near American residences, attacks on American school buses, and numerous break-ins, assaults, and rapes. The Elementary School saw a sharp drop in attendance after rumors of an attack and serious vandalism at the school.” Though none of the rumors was true, American parents had decided to keep their children at home, others had fled the city for safety, and contract workers were requesting transfers out of the area.

  McGaffey believed the rumors were part of a concerted effort to stampede the American civilian community into leaving Isfahan. “The general population,” he reported, “while unhappy with the situation, is largely sympathetic to the conservative [religious] reaction. As it grows in strength, there is an increased danger that additional targets will be added to the anti-government actions: Isfahan’s Jewish, Armenian and Baha’i communities are increasingly fearful, and Americans are on the verge of panic.… Security officials are now beginning to issue warnings to Americans, after weeks of assurances that there was nothing to fear.”

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  ON SATURDAY, WHILE McGaffey warned of a brewing insurrection in Isfahan, the Shah returned to Tehran from a highly successful visit to the southern seaports. He had toured naval installations, attended maneuvers in the Persian Gulf, and been feted by large and enthusiastic crowds. The trip reinforced his own view that Tehran was a bubble and that the Imperial Court in particular was filled with elitists, nervous Nellies, and naysayers who failed to understand his rapport with the great, silent majority of the Iranian people.

  Usually reticent before the cameras, today the Shah was practically bursting with good cheer. Everything was going so well, he told reporters assembled at Mehrebad Airport. “I talked with people from all walks of life and could see how happy and hopeful they were,” he said. “You hear about the naval maneuvers but beyond that visible aspect there is the sense of national pride, that intangible achievement which some nations may never succeed in attaining while Iran has fortunately attained it.” He said he had met with local leaders, including senior clergy, who praised him for “generating a new sense of awareness among Iranians in their cultural and religious values.” Iran’s southern provinces would be “turned into an industrial powerhouse competitive with any in this part of the world.… The income of the people, according to the local elders, is high and signs of progress are everywher
e.” Before returning to Niavaran, the Shah ended his remarks on a positive note: “This preparedness, vigilance, sense of pride and faith in the future could be seen everywhere in our visit to Tabriz and Kermanshah last year and in our numerous visits to Mashad.”

  Not for the last time, the Shah appeared curiously detached from the pall of anxiety that hung over the country. Courtiers worried about his capacity for denial, his aversion to unpleasant news, and his decision to cut out anyone who suggested the situation in the country was anything but agreeable. Even Kayhan, a pillar of the establishment, expressed concern at the official policy of leniency toward rioters and provocateurs. “Over the last three months, the country has witnessed various instances of individuals or small groups of people taking the law into their own hands and choosing to express their ‘views’ by acts of violence and hooliganism,” the editors warned toward the end of the latest forty-day mourning period. The universities were in turmoil, banks had been attacked, shop windows smashed, and private and public property destroyed. “Iranians should stand together in the firm determination that, during this time of liberalization, the rule of law shall prevail.” As if to prove their point, over the next several days students stabbed the head of the faculty of literature of the University of Tehran and threatened another senior administrator; University of Melli students torched two cars, attacked a cinema and a bank, and assaulted another student in his bed; University of Kerman students clashed with police; and Pahlavi University’s central administration building was bombed.