Sullivan flew back to Washington to start his summer vacation and told his colleagues not to worry: the cycle of unrest was broken and the Shah had matters well in hand. “The fix is in,” he told Henry Precht, the Iran desk officer at the State Department. “He told us he had been assured that the mullahs had been bought off,” said Precht. “Then he went off to Mexico.”
In Sullivan’s absence the day-to-day running of the embassy was left in the hands of Deputy Chief of Mission Charlie Naas, a new arrival from Washington. Naas was settling in when he chaired a meeting of senior political officers and consular officers to get an update on where things stood. Senior political counselor George Lambrakis began by pointing out that the Shah’s policy of all-out liberalization “raised the question whether [he] is in full control or not. Has the process come so far as to be irreversible?” He reminded everyone that moderate, leftist, and nationalist groups like the National Front and Liberation Movement were once again speaking out, and students felt free to stage protests without fear of retribution. Senior military and civil service officials were puzzled by the Shah’s inaction, and there was an upsurge in anti-American sentiment on the streets of Tehran. U.S. support for the Shah meant that it was by default the “fall guy for Iran’s problems.” The presence of tens of thousands of American citizens in Iran was also causing problems because they “pushed up rents and food costs.… At the moment, US power is not respected and we are seen as a weak, indecisive nation.… There are situations in which the US could turn very swiftly into a scapegoat for Persian problems.”
Isfahan consul David McGaffey told the group that his local contacts were convinced that “the Shah does not know the breadth and depth of popular discontent,” and that in an attempt to buy social peace he was giving away too many concessions to the clergy. “While the Shah shows moderation, his opponents never will.… Hence there is pressure from the bureaucrats favoring strong action against discontent.” The same was true of younger officers in the air force who were “very uneasy about a liberalization which would give substantial concessions to those [they] opposed.” McGaffey observed that Isfahan’s senior religious leaders had their own concerns. Worried that they were losing their younger followers to Khomeini’s extremism, they feared the Marja but were powerless to challenge his appeal.
Mike Metrinko painted a depressing picture of life in Tabriz. The once-vibrant city, he told the room, was now in the grip of Islamic hard-liners. “Virtually the only entertainment that exists is through the mosque,” he explained. “The normal social structure has been reduced. Social clubs and movies have been closed. In Tabriz, Empress Farah (who is widely respected elsewhere) is despised even by members of her family, who claim the Tehran Dibas have ceased being Turkish. There is some belief that the Shah is not fully informed about what has been unleashed in Tabriz.”
Religious minorities were in a state of panic and looking for ways out of the country, chimed in Metrinko’s colleague Thomas Dowling: “The Armenian archbishop is reportedly encouraging his supporters to leave Iran.”
Those around the table agreed that if anything happened to the Shah “the military will be the final arbiter in a succession crisis. Although there is some religious influence in the military, it is expected to remain loyal to the Empress or the Crown Prince. If the entire royal family is killed, Iran will be up for grabs.”
“What do you think, Mike?” Naas asked Metrinko.
“The Shah will be gone before I leave,” he confidently answered.
Naas laughed and said, “Well, I hope your next tour is a long ways away.”
“No, it’s next summer.”
* * *
THE FIRST HEAT of summer rolled in the second week of June 1978.
In Khuzestan, 124-degree Fahrenheit temperatures and forty-mile-per-hour wind gusts sandblasted thousands of acres of farmland, scorching crops and burning freshwater melons in the fields. Television antennae, tree branches, and shop signs were blown down. In Aghajari trees were torn up by the roots and “the city was left in total silence with all residents keeping indoors.” In stricken Ahwaz, “hot winds hurling hot dust into the faces of pedestrians have caused many to pass out, while others have been hospitalized with heat stroke. The city has taken on the air of a ghost town with many shop owners not opening in the afternoons, and taxi drivers parking their vehicles, leaving the streets empty.”
Rolling power cuts that lasted up to eight hours a day pitched the port cities along the southern coast into darkness and left millions at the mercy of the cruel heat. Earlier in the year the Water Board had provided the public with an assurance that Iran’s dams were full. There was no need to measure water levels “to see if there is enough water to meet the needs of everyone” over the summer. Electricity Minister Taqi Tavakoli had been careful not to rule out future power cuts. “The national power network is linked by only one line, which can create problems in the entire networks,” he pointed out. But he explained that the grid would double its capacity in time for the hot season and said he saw no need to take the precautionary step of purchasing electricity in advance from neighboring Turkey and the Soviet Union. But four months later, with pumping stations in the south “forced to shut down due to the lack of electricity, leaving residents with no running water for most of the day,” hospitals in Abadan reported ten heat-related deaths and numerous cases of food poisoning involving children eating spoiled food. With all sea travel in the region halted, thousands of residents thronged the airport and rail and bus terminals each morning, desperate to find a way out of town.
The Shah had devoted the greater part of his reign to taming Iran’s unforgiving terrain and climate, investing billions to construct dams, reservoirs, and canals and put in place ambitious reforestation and conservation projects. But the collapse of the power grid in June 1978 exposed the limitations of rapid industrialization and the White Revolution. Even the north experienced dry conditions. When Queen Farah visited Mazandaran in the same month she was told by local officials that the biggest problem they faced was “a shortage of drinking water.” In a year when nothing seemed to go right, a second disaster, of biblical proportions, threatened when the United Nations warned Iran to prepare for a plague of East African locusts. Observation posts were erected along the southern coast, forty aircraft and two thousand ground-spraying units were rushed to the region, and in the fertile southwest locust detection centers were built near fruit, cotton, and wheat fields. By unhappy coincidence, the last locust invasion had occurred in 1963 at the time of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s rebellion.
The regime made three other major missteps. Thanks to austerity, over the past year, the budget for the Customs Department had been slashed, with seventeen hundred staff laid off and another eight hundred employees retired. To reduce bottlenecks at the borders and speed the flow of merchandise to market, customs protocols were changed so that “trucks importing materials for a firm would not be stopped at the border, but rather would be inspected and charged customs levies only upon arrival at the site of the industrial unit.” What this meant in practical terms was that a truck driver could pick up his cargo in a European city and pass through Iran’s frontier without having his load inspected until he arrived at the depot in Tehran. This devastating gap in border security played into the hands of the Palestine Liberation Organization and black market smuggling networks, which were stockpiling guns and explosives inside the country. “There were no controls and everything flooded into Iran in 1978,” lamented one former senior Savak agent. “Most people in Savak did not know about this. It wasn’t seen as such a big deal at the time. But on one occasion a customs officer ordered an Austrian driver to open a single crate in the back of his truck. The driver had been paid to drive the cargo to Tehran no questions asked. When the crate was forced open the inspector and the driver discovered a cache of automatic weapons. We tried to trace the contents back to Vienna but it was too late—the trail had gone cold.”
While one government po
licy left Iran’s borders unguarded, a second, this time involving taxes, hastened the flight of capital, property, and people to safe havens abroad. In a country where tax avoidance was regarded almost as a birthright, wealthy Iranians were stunned in June by the news that their tax burden would increase. Worse, the criminal statute of limitations would no longer apply in cases of tax evasion, and specially trained agents would be hired to “hunt down” tax cheats. Wealthy individuals and businesses immediately began off-loading their property and assets. Reform of the travelers’ exit tax also backfired. Under the new rules a traveler who paid $30 to fly from Abadan to Kuwait was soaked with $300 in exit taxes. Iran’s new exit tax, the most punitive in the world, was intended to boost government coffers but had the perverse effect of punishing short-distance travelers and rewarding those who flew the farthest and stayed away the longest. “The further abroad you go,” explained one travel writer, “the smaller the exit tax becomes as a percentage of the total fare. The Iranian tourist is thus looking at more distance destinations. Similarly, the exit tax applies to a trip of one day or one lasting months. In this context, on a one-day trip the exit tax costs $300 per day. On a 30 day trip it costs $10 per day.” The new tax regime encouraged middle-class and wealthy Iranians to spend the entire summer of 1978 abroad rather than the usual month of August. This was to the benefit of the religious revolutionaries, who chose that month to make their bid for power.
The third miscalculation involved the security forces. The Shah sent several intermediaries, including his trusted financial adviser Mohammad Behbahanian and General Nasser Moghadam, the new Savak chief, down to Qom to try to broker an accord with Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari and moderate ulama who had not sided with Khomeini. Flattered that Moghadam was interested in hearing their views, the clerics issued a series of tough preconditions for talks. First, they demanded the release of the several hundred religious activists arrested in the wake of the May riots. Second, they insisted that the clergy and not the government should decide who attended pilgrimages to holy cities in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Third, the government should suppress publication of “antireligious articles” in the popular press. Fourth, justice should be meted out to Savak officials implicated in human rights abuses. Fifth, the government should pay handouts “to people who are ill or whose families are in bad shape.” Sixth, the regime should “pay more attention to the religious people.” Finally, they opposed an agreement that would allow Austria to send its nuclear waste to be buried in Iran’s deserts.
General Moghadam’s decision to meet their demands and approve the release of religious extremists from prison shocked his own rank and file. To those who protested, Moghadam explained that the plan to buy off the clergy with concessions was the brainchild of the unscrupulous double agent Hedayat Eslaminia and had won the support of Court Minister Hoveyda and General Fardust. Parviz Sabeti’s suspicions were aroused by Moghadam’s change of tone. Two and a half months earlier, Moghadam had asked him to prepare the report for Queen Farah detailing the main causes of unrest before flying to Washington, DC, for a series of briefings with U.S. intelligence officials. “When he came back he was no longer a hard-liner,” Sabeti recalled. The head of Savak’s Third Directorate was convinced that Moghadam had been “turned” by the CIA, persuaded that he would be rewarded if he stood down the security forces and entered into negotiations with regime opponents. In early June, Sabeti and Moghadam attended the wedding of a mutual friend. The younger man challenged the general to justify his decision to release the prisoners. “His Majesty said this is wrong,” protested Moghadam. “We got into a fight,” said Sabeti. “I said, ‘We should not release these men until the forty-day cycle is over.’ Moghadam believed I was sabotaging him. Our fight lasted for almost five months.” The split within Savak weakened the security forces at a critical time. On two earlier occasions, in 1953 and 1963, the Shah’s dread of bloodshed and his natural instinct to avoid conflict had been countered by the intervention of strong-willed personalities such as General Zahedi and Prime Minister Alam. Fifteen years later, Zahedi, Alam, and General Khatami, the strong-willed air force chief, were dead, and the Shah was surrounded by advisers who reinforced his own personal conviction that further concessions would defuse political and religious tensions.
Sabeti managed to keep the agitators off the streets until the June 19 memorials and the state visit of the Spanish King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia passed uneventfully. The army’s show of force included Qom, where troops with bayonets standing guard at key intersections worked wonders. “I control this city,” declared Shariatmadari, who fully endorsed the regime’s decision to flood the streets with armor. “I didn’t want bloodshed and insisted there be peace.” He personally banned street protests and limited strike calls to prevent an escalation of unrest. Even so, demonstrations were reported in Isfahan, Tabriz, Ahwaz, Yazd, Zanjin, and Khorramshahr. In Mashad, saboteurs attacked Ferdowsi University, setting fire to the university generator and lobbing Molotov cocktails into the security office, causing a fire that incinerated one guard and mortally injured his colleague. Khomeini’s agents were determined to claim a new batch of martyrs to reinvigorate their dwindling protests. In Tehran on Monday, June 19, fire quickly spread from the basement of the Kasra Cinema on Shah Reza Avenue, sending plumes of smoke billowing over Bahar Street. Two moviegoers perished from smoke inhalation during a hasty but otherwise successful evacuation.
Still, palace and government officials were relieved that the security forces had avoided deadly clashes with religious demonstrators. Once again, the Shah’s determination to avoid bloodshed and confrontations looked like it had paid off. The avoidance of casualties meant “no new ‘martyrs,’” observed the Washington Post, which meant “there seems no ceremonial basis for new demonstrations 40 days from now.” Days later Khomeini’s men, who had been in detention since the May riots, were released and walked to freedom.
The Shah, as inscrutable as ever, gave little away in his meetings with ministers and courtiers. But his shrewdest advisers suspected the pressure was getting to him. In late June Lieutenant General Amir Hossein Rabii, commander of the Imperial Iranian Air Force, saw his friend and palace courtier Kambiz Atabai at the Imperial Country Club, where the two men often played tennis. “This morning I had an audience with His Majesty to discuss the F-16s,” Rabii said in reference to an order the Shah had placed for new American jet fighters. “For the first time he didn’t seem very interested. What has happened to him?”
“I don’t think you should read too much into it,” Atabai assured him.
“Kambiz, he’s lost his balls.”
“He trusts you.”
“This is not the same Shah we knew,” said Rabii. “He is no longer commanding me.”
* * *
SHORTLY BEFORE HIS departure for Nowshahr on the Caspian Sea, where he planned to spend the remainder of the summer, the Shah sat down for a lengthy interview with the American newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report. He made it clear he fully understood that his decision to loosen the reins was fueling unrest—but that he felt he had no option than to accelerate the pace of reform. If unrest flared again he said he would try to maintain order without resorting to repression. “The liberalization will continue, and I view law and order as a separate issue,” he said defiantly. “Nobody can overthrow me. I have the power. I have the support of 700,000 troops, all the workers, and most of the people. Wherever I go there are fantastic demonstrations of support. I have the power, and the opposition cannot be compared to the strength of the government in any way.”
The Queen completed her last engagements of the season, flying to Mashad to attend the Fourth Tus Festival, dedicated to the poet Ferdowsi’s literary masterpiece Shahnameh. Entering the festival grounds and “escorted to the Imperial Stand by Zaboli dancers and musicians and Quchani men carrying trays of crystalline sugar cones and burning frankincense,” the Queen received a “rapturous traditional welcome” from thousands of spectators and p
articipants. Farah sat on a dais from where she was entertained with wrestling displays followed by a garden concert performed by Azerbaijani musicians, whose “mellow music against the backdrop of Ferdowsi’s majestic marble mausoleum, and the tall silvery poplars rising into the evening sky created an enchanting atmosphere.”
* * *
ON MONDAY, JULY 3, on the eve of General Nasiri’s departure for Islamabad to take up his new post as ambassador, Pakistan’s envoy threw a farewell luncheon in his honor at his residence in Tehran. While the guests mingled, Nasiri took aside Lebanon’s Khalil al-Khalil for a quiet word. He explained that a Savak agent in Beirut had arrived bearing a secret communication from Musa Sadr that included a gift for the Shah. Fully aware that Ambassador Qadar despised the Imam, the agent had agreed to Musa Sadr’s request to bypass the envoy and deliver the letter in person to General Moghadam. Nasiri and Sabeti were both briefed on the contents. “In the letter, Musa Sadr offered to help the Shah,” said Sabeti. “He offered to talk to Khomeini on his behalf. He also offered to help change the Shah’s policies to make them more reflective of Islam—he was offering his services.”
The Fall of Heaven Page 45
