The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING of August 19, National Uprising Day and the anniversary of Mossadeq’s downfall, the editors of Kayhan published a special editorial that warned the country was “in a virtual state of war. What is taking place now is nothing less than an open, concerted and tenacious aggression [from the religious right].” “The Shah is on a tight rope—trying to minimize violence while channeling political conflict into [the] electoral realm,” agreed Charlie Naas. The air was thick with tension. “Goose-stepping Iranian soldiers paraded in Tehran, and the government organized pro-Shah rallies in most major cities,” reported the Washington Post. “The parades in Tehran drew crowds of mildly curious onlookers, but public enthusiasm for the display was visibly lacking. There was virtually no applause and the generally listless spectators did not join in the troops’ shouts of ‘Javid Shah’ (Long live the Shah).”

  To the south, residents of Abadan endured another miserable day of appalling heat, water shortages, and power blackouts. “More than half the doctors in Abadan have left, because of the intense heat,” reported the press, “but a medical spokesman in the city said it had not caused any inconvenience because 150,000 other residents had left with them.” Air-conditioned cinemas remained the preferred place of refuge from the heat and on Saturday evening the six-hundred-seat Rex Cinema was filled almost to capacity for a screening of the Iranian movie The Deer. Two months earlier, religious extremists had made an abortive attempt to bomb the Rex, and it was to prevent a second incident that the proprietor had taken the precaution of bolting the exit doors from the inside to prevent saboteurs from sneaking in unobserved. Halfway through the screening, ticket holders near the rear noticed a commotion behind them and smelled smoke. Out of the darkness a cry went up, “The cinema is on fire!”

  19

  THE GREAT TERROR

  What did I do to them?

  —THE SHAH

  He will lead us straight into the abyss.

  —GENERAL MOGHADAM

  The cries from the back of the Rex Cinema auditorium set off pandemonium. “In total darkness,” said a survivor, “I with the rest of the spectators was watching the beginning of the movie when we suddenly heard noise from the back seats and felt smoke and then saw flames … all in minutes. Soon all the spectators had found out the cinema was on fire. But darkness and panic caused some to die under the feet of spectators trying to escape. People cried, jumped over each other.” Groping in the dark, the panicked crowd rushed to the emergency exits only to find them locked. Those who were not crushed to death or asphyxiated by toxic fumes were engulfed by a raging inferno. “It began at the corner near the top and soon spread everywhere,” said another survivor. “Everybody was screaming and running around. But all the doors were locked and kept in place despite our frantic efforts to force them.”

  News of the tragedy quickly spread, and the streets around the Rex filled with anguished family members, friends, and neighbors who tried to force entry but were beaten back by the smoke, heat, and flames. “The cries for help were so pathetic that I could die hearing them,” said one bystander. “There were hundreds watching a disaster take place, but there was very little they could do.” The first fire crew arrived after twenty-five minutes to discover the closest fire hydrant had a broken knob, the second nearest was underground and covered by tiles, and the third lacked enough water pressure to be of any use. “The cinema was engulfed in the conflagration,” said one firefighter injured by a falling brick. “I saw tongues of flames emerging from the air-conditioning ducts. We managed to reach the upper floor and extinguish the fire near the lavatories. All the entrance doors remained shut.” Rescuers successfully pried open one door, pulled several survivors to safety, and then ran in. “We raced to the rear of the cinema and while my colleagues directed water hoses on the fire, I used a pickaxe to unhinge the door. I gave a loud call above the din of the raging fire but no one, not a single soul moved forward. There was no movement among the doomed audience, only whining and whimpering, terribly muffled, as if from the bottom of a sepulcher.” The firemen were confronted with a hellish scene. “Several rescuers collapsed in nervous hysteria when they gained entrance to the charred building,” said a witness. “For many the greatest fear was that those unrecognizable heaps of flesh lying on the floor may have been their friends, their relatives, people they knew.”

  One of the few survivors was Hossein Takbalizadeh, an unemployed welder, heroin addict, and recent convert to fundamentalist Islam. The day before the fire he had left a drug treatment facility and met up with three friends affiliated with the local chapter of the Khomeini underground. They were under orders to carry out a sabotage operation to mar the formal ceremonies marking August 19, 1953, and National Uprising Day. Though Takbalizadeh had been out on the streets for only a few hours, he agreed to help the others set fire to the nearby Soheila Cinema. Fortunately for the patrons inside, the solvents used in the attack failed to explode. The next day, the four men went to a field on the outskirts of town to test and strengthen the fuel. They drove back into town in the evening only to find the Soheila’s box office closed, and it was by chance they noticed that the Rex Cinema was still selling tickets to the eight o’clock screening of The Deer. The young men paid the entry fee, took their seats at the rear of the hall, and shortly after intermission slipped out into the lobby, where they sprinkled four small bottles of solvent around the concession stand and along the corridor leading to the main stairwell and only exit. Takbalizadeh proudly lit the first match and fled the scene. Passersby told police they saw a man running from the cinema as the fire took hold.

  Iranians awoke to the appalling news that a single act of arson had caused the deaths of 377 men, women, and children; the final death toll reached at least 430. The inferno, the worst anywhere since the Second World War, was at the time modern history’s deadliest recorded act of terrorism. “The holocaust stunned Iranians from all walks of life,” reported one newspaper. “Radio Iran stopped its music programs and declared, ‘The slaughter of innocents in Abadan has plunged all Iran into mourning.’” Around the country, cinemas closed their doors in sympathy. The streets of Abadan, said one visitor, “echo with scores of muezzins reciting the Quran, and many people on the streets are wearing black, weeping for relatives or friends lost in the holocaust. Thousands of people have attended memorial services and mosques are booked for the next 15 days for ceremonies for the dead.” Businesses and homes were draped in black. Physicians treated hundreds of people for shock, and local pharmacies ran out of tranquilizers. Throughout Khuzestan Province, crowds gathered in town squares to demand that the authorities investigate the shoddy rescue effort and find and punish the culprits.

  * * *

  FEW DOUBTED THAT the arson was connected to the Ramadan riots. The date of the fire, National Uprising Day, was significant, and so too was the location—the Rex had been targeted once before by religious fanatics. Over the past nine months, Khomeini’s revolutionary cadres had burned twenty-nine cinemas and hundreds of private businesses. The Marja’s incendiary rhetoric criminalizing the Pahlavis, and the Islamic underground’s use of solvents and explosives in crowded spaces, made the Rex Cinema a massacre waiting to happen. “The Khomeini people selected August 19 to show their power even though it was the day the regime had to show its strength,” said Minister of the Interior Assdollah Nasr. The Rex Cinema was not the isolated act of a bunch of misfits but the centerpiece of a concerted terrorist campaign to destabilize and panic Iranian society and shake the foundations of the Pahlavi state. During Ramadan the authorities reported 123 bombs planted in public places and 184 acts of arson. There were 158 assaults and 3 armed attacks against police officers. At least 336 public and commercial buildings were attacked. In the same twenty-four-hour period that coincided with the Rex Cinema tragedy, religious fanatics set fire to a cinema in Mashad, killing three people, while in Shiraz another two were hurt in a cinema fire. Tehran’s famous Hatam Restaurant, on Pahlavi Ave
nue, was badly damaged by arson, and the Baccara, the capital’s biggest nightclub, was gutted.

  Khomeini’s agents were not deterred and may even have been encouraged by the slaughter in Abadan and subsequent chaos. Five days after the outrage an attempt by two men to plant explosives on the roofs of two cinemas in Shiraz was foiled by alert pedestrians who spotted them on the street below. Properties owned by Jews and Baha’i were assaulted. Southern Tehran’s vegetable market was destroyed by arson, and three children were injured when their family’s furniture workshop was firebombed. Elsewhere in the capital, arsonists destroyed a brewery, a mob threw rocks at a school for intellectually handicapped children, and the Darvish nightclub was firebombed. In Khorramshahr, a large blaze gutted the harbor authority’s warehouse, a restaurant was bombed in Yazd, in Qouchan a private construction company was burned down, and near Elam a restaurant was set alight in forested parkland. “There is no question now that a stupendously savage and sinister hand is behind this spreading bloodbath,” declared one newspaper in a front-page editorial. “There has been no dearth of violence since the political liberalization program started. Thousands of people have been hurt and hundreds killed. Now, the situation seems to be getting out of hand. Extremists on the Left and the Right seem to have gone berserk. The madness must be stopped in the most urgent manner possible.”

  Thousands of angry Abadan residents besieged police headquarters to demand expulsion from the city of preachers “who have urged people to go to mosques instead of to movies. The demonstrators put the brunt of the blame on the preachers.” Observers noted that Khomeini was the only marja who did not immediately condemn the arson, and Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari all but accused his rival Khomeini of culpability when he condemned “hot-headed people with whom we have no link whatsoever.” He added, “Such a crime must be the work of Nazi-type people. We are still not sure who is responsible, but you can be certain that no true Muslim was in any way involved.”

  The Shah issued a ritual statement of condolence and urged the authorities to find and punish those responsible, but he blundered badly when he allowed his mother’s annual garden party to mark National Uprising Day to proceed. Each year Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk marked the anniversary of her son’s return from exile with a lavish soiree in the gardens of Saadabad Palace. Court Minister Asadollah Alam would never have allowed the festivities to take place, but his successor, Hoveyda, feared crossing the eighty-two-year-old grande dame even in the midst of national mourning. Iranian public opinion was scandalized that the Pahlavi elite drank champagne while Abadan mourned its dead. “As always, the reception was sumptuous, the buffets beautifully laid out and the quality of food and drink was exceptional,” recalled Hushang Nahavandi. “Two orchestras, one Iranian and one Western, played alternately. Gentlemen wore evening dress and ladies wore gowns and jewels which would have been the envy of the finest receptions in Paris and Rome.” Inside the palace, however, the smiles were as tight as the gowns. The Shah “mingled with the guests, as was his wont. He seemed relaxed; but he was wearing his habitual mask, through which no hint of his real, inner misgivings could penetrate.” The Queen struggled with her own emotions. Earlier in the day the government had rejected her offer to fly to Abadan to console families of the victims. Farah was told that her safety could not be guaranteed and that her presence in the stricken town might actually trigger riots. “Usually when there was a tragedy I would go down,” she recalled. “I asked if I could go to Abadan and was told, ‘No.’”

  For three days Khomeini, with his usual flair for the dramatic, maintained a stony silence. When he did finally speak out it was to sensationally turn the tables and accuse the Shah of orchestrating a massacre. “This heart-rending tragedy is intended by the Shah to be his masterpiece, to provide material to be exploited to the utmost by his extensive domestic and foreign propaganda apparatus,” Khomeini declared. “Who benefits from these crimes other than the Shah and his accomplices? Who is there—other than the Shah—that has ever enacted savage slaughter of the people every now and then, and presented us with barbaric scenes such as this?” Khomeini warned that “the regime may commit similar savage acts in other cities of Iran in the hope of defiling the pure demonstrations of our courageous people, who have watered the roots of Islam with their blood.” The crime was the Shah’s devilish attempt “to show the world—and in particular the Americans—that the Iranian people are not ready for his program of ‘liberalizing’ the political atmosphere.” Khomeini’s protégé Ayatollah Yahya Nouri, architect of a campaign of virulent anti-Semitism, was also quick to claim the moral high ground when he denounced “the burning of human life” that “could only be regarded as inhuman in Islam.” In mosques in the capital, sympathetic preachers read out an open letter repeating the smear of Pahlavi complicity, while to the east, in Mashad, a crowd of thirty thousand gathered at the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza to listen as the Shah’s “crimes” were broadcast in lurid detail over loudspeakers.

  With public emotions running high, Khomeini and Nouri succeeded in convincing many devout Iranians that the Shah had ordered the fire lit and then tried to shift blame onto the ulama. Public grief boiled over in Abadan, where ten thousand mourners packed the town cemetery. “Men, women and children poured earth on their heads and writhed around in the dust in scenes that even shocked and sickened hardened detectives and veteran crime reporters,” reported one eyewitness. “Scores of ambulances, on standby to rush those overcome by grief to hospital, were very busy throughout the sorrowful ceremony.” Fearing riots, the City Council barred police and firemen from the site and turned over crowd control to young Boy Scouts, who sobbed as relatives of the dead tore their hair, clothing, and leaped into grave pits, begging to be buried with friends and family. Newspaper reporters and photographers ran for their lives when the mob turned on them, leaving several beaten and bloodied. Mourners rioted in the streets of downtown Abadan, smashing up banks and storefronts and lighting fires. Faced with a second major urban insurrection in as many weeks, the Shah made it clear to his security chiefs that he wanted no civilian casualties, and the police were instructed to fire live rounds over the heads of the crowd. When he was informed that order had been restored without loss of life, the Shah telephoned Khuzestan governor Baquer Nemazie to express his gratitude.

  Iranians braced for more attacks to coincide with the birthday of Imam Ali, and the security forces instituted bag checks in government ministries, hotels, restaurants and public venues. Worried officials noticed that with each passing day the crowds of unruly demonstrators and rioters were swelling in size. Protests that one month earlier might have drawn dozens or even hundreds of people now attracted thousands. With Savak emasculated, the army confined to barracks, and the police holding fire, the crowds lost their fear and took over the streets. On the evening of Friday, August 25, demonstrators in Qom waving black flags clashed with police and lit fires around the town, prompting firemen to turn their hoses on the crowds. The next day, when several thousand demonstrators chanted slogans and hurled bricks, stones, and explosives, police were ambushed by men tossing Molotov cocktails out of house windows. The unrest quickly spread to the streets of the capital, where a crowd rioted outside a mosque in southern Tehran, while in Shemiran a group of thirty men set fire to a branch of Bank Saderat. In nearby Karaj, rioters assaulted a cinema and broke bank windows. To the south, zealots in Abadan burned the grand bazaar to the ground and destroyed several hundred stores. Police in Hamadan fired live rounds into the air to clear the streets, and a terrorist was killed when his bomb prematurely exploded. Violent unrest was reported in another half dozen cities and towns.

  * * *

  REZA GHOTBI WAS in Vienna when Cinema Rex burned down. “I cut my stay short and went back because of the government’s reaction,” he remembered. He was alarmed when Information Minister Dariush Homayoun all but dared the public to challenge the government’s version of events.

  Back in Tehran, the Queen’s cousin a
ttended meetings where government officials and courtiers discussed the worsening security situation. Everyone was waiting for a signal from the Shah to do something. “At many different meetings people would say, ‘We hope he knows what he’s doing,’” said Ghotbi. “If he is not reacting it is because either (1) Carter and the Americans have told him to democratize or (2) people thought he was intriguing and would come back even harder. People wouldn’t even believe there wouldn’t be a reaction.” Ghotbi agreed with the others that “something has to be done.” Still, he recalled that “no one at that time except some in the military said we need a military solution.” He joined Hushang Nahavandi and Savak’s General Hossein Fardust at a meeting in Court Minister Hoveyda’s office. They wanted to know what was going on. “Things are going awry,” said Fardust, “and I hope His Majesty knows what he is doing because it is not possible he has no plan. I hope you, Mr. Hoveyda, will ask him and tell us so that we have nothing to fear. Otherwise things are going to end badly.”

  * * *

  AMERICAN DIPLOMATS IN Tehran remained curiously detached from the crisis. “We were not panicking in August,” explained Deputy Chief of Mission Charlie Naas. “With Rex, all we could do was report it and the different explanations for it. We thought the Savak story [of culpability] was weak. It was a terrible tragedy—it boggled my mind that anyone could say the Shah did it. We did not recognize it as such a severe blow.” Still, Ambassador Sullivan’s first day back at the embassy after his summer on the Mexican riviera coincided with the mass burial in the Abadan cemetery. Sitting on his desk at the top of a stack of papers was a memorandum written by John Stempel describing the dreadful events of recent weeks. The headline he wrote reflected the somber mood: “While You Were Away … the place really didn’t turn to crap, but it might have looked like it.”