The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

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  ISRAELI DIPLOMATS, BY contrast, saw the Rex Cinema as the decisive turning point in the Shah’s fortunes. After deciding that the Shah’s reluctance to use force meant he was finished, Ambassador Uri Lubrani, who was about to return home to accept a new diplomatic assignment, requested the Foreign Ministry to start drawing up emergency plans for a wholesale evacuation of Israeli nationals. The Israelis were also acutely sensitive to the panic sweeping Iran’s Jewish community. Ayatollah Nouri’s campaign of anti-Semitism had awakened the beast. “Some of the slogans say ‘Jews out of Iran,’ while others blame the Shah for being a ‘Zionist stooge’ and not supporting the Arab Muslim cause,” reported the Jerusalem Post. Propaganda leaflets were distributed in the oil fields “calling on Iranian oil workers to stop working on oil production to Israel.” Iranian Jews followed the example of the Armenian Christian population by drawing up evacuation plans, selling property, and sending wives and children to safety abroad. “Many of those who have already left are well-to-do families who have settled in either North America or Western Europe,” reported the Post on August 25. “Some of them have been operating various businesses abroad for some time in preparation for such an eventuality.”

  Confounded by the pace of events, Sullivan visited Lubrani, who “expressed concern that Jews will be the next target of Muslim fanatics.” When the American asked him to describe what he thought was happening, Lubrani’s deputy interjected. “It’s a revolution,” he said, a remark that prompted his boss to look at him as if to say, “Shut up.”

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  THE TUMULTUOUS EVENTS of August 1978—the Ramadan rising, the Isfahan insurrection, and the fire at the Rex Cinema—ended any hope the Shah had for a peaceful transition to Western-style democracy. For the first time in twenty-five years he began to have doubts about his mission. Visitors to the palace noticed he was more subdued and reflective than usual. The old confidence and buoyancy were gone. “When the King came back from Nowshahr he wouldn’t talk much,” said Reza Ghotbi. “He was not active in conversations. He would listen much more than he talked. I went to the residence and you could feel some sort of isolation.” He could no longer dismiss the unrest on the streets as the work of a few terrorists and malcontents—the sight of crowds massing in late August suggested broader opposition to the regime and a more personal rejection. The question he asked friends and family members changed from, “What do you think is going on?” to “What did I do to them?” He succumbed to feelings of guilt, self-pity, and bitterness, and on his worst days he lashed out at family members, advisers, and ministers, wondering who among them he could trust. At other times he blamed the Iranian people for behaving like spoiled children—if they no longer wanted him then they could run the country on their own and see what happened. In late August, Prime Minister Amuzegar offered a disturbing insight into his agitated state of mind. “If the people are so ungrateful, His Majesty may leave,” Amuzegar warned General Moghadam. He repeated the remark to shocked cabinet ministers. No one needed to be reminded that the Shah had left Iran under similar circumstances once before.

  Disoriented by events, the Shah miscalculated when he lurched from one extreme to another. He abandoned his plan for a gradual transition to democracy, deciding instead to give the people what they wanted now by simply lifting the lid off. “In the past few days that I have been back in Tehran,” Ambassador Sullivan informed Washington, “it has become clear to me that the Shah has made a fundamental political decision, as announced in his Constitution Day speech, to transform his authoritarian regime into a genuine democracy. He has reached this decision as a result of his own intellectual convictions, because he feels Iran has become too complex and too volatile to govern through the current processes of benevolent authoritarianism. He therefore feels that the only way to preserve the integrity of the country is to change the political system, even if that change puts the monarchy at risk. Indeed, he realizes that, unless the system changes, the monarchy is predictably doomed.”

  Sullivan explained that the Shah believed that events were forcing his hand and that he was moving faster than he ever intended or indeed wished to open up the political system. “The Shah had not made his dramatic decision in a burst of exhilaration,” wrote the ambassador. “He is remorseful, morose, nervous and suspicious. His game plan, which he nurtured in such confidence for two decades, has had to be scrapped. He has little confidence in the wisdom or the responsibility of the Iranian people even though he has decided to put his faith and that of his country in their hands. He fears that everyone will perceive him as slipping and then in the best Middle East tradition join in kicking him as he goes down. He especially fears the United States will do this.” Sullivan warned that the Shah’s enemies “will try to frustrate political liberalization and prove that the Shah’s ‘democracy’ is a farce by taking to the streets and forcing the Shah to institute a martial law regime.… The fabric of this society, under the stress of a genuine democratic opportunity, may disintegrate and the Shah may feel he has to reimpose strict political controls. That sort of thing has happened before and the US assisted in the reestablishment of internal security.” Senior Iranian officials were themselves unsure what to do or how to react. Even those who have encouraged the Shah in that direction “are nervous, because they have never played the democratic game before and they are not sure how things will turn out.… They are nervous and afraid of ‘that great beast,’ the people of Iran.”

  The Shah announced a new raft of concessions that signaled weakness to supporters and opponents. He canceled the controversial deal to allow the burial of nuclear waste in the Kavir Desert, sent his brothers and sisters and their families out of the country, and agreed to sack Jamshid Amuzegar as prime minister and replace him with Jafar Sharif-Emami, the Senate president who he was told enjoyed good relations with Shariatmadari and other senior ulama. He had chosen poorly. Sharif-Emami was a lackluster politician widely suspected of skimming profits from the assets of the Pahlavi Foundation, which managed the Imperial Family’s wealth. The foundation’s portfolio of investments, which he oversaw, included many of the same casinos and hotels that were now under attack from Muslim fundamentalists. Even the Shah’s most devoted followers reacted with shock and amazement when they heard that he was on the verge of demanding Amuzegar’s resignation in favor of Sharif-Emami’s appointment.

  On the morning of Thursday, August 24, Hushang Nahavandi, who aspired to the prime ministership himself, drove to Saadabad Palace to find out if the rumors were true. He arrived just as a clearly distressed General Moghadam left the Shah’s suite. When the two men saw each other, Moghadam approached and asked Nahavandi if he could secure an immediate audience with the Queen. Farah listened as the general begged her to help him stop Sharif-Emami’s appointment. “I permit myself to intercede with you about this appointment, because it is the worst which could possibly have been made, at this critical juncture in the nation’s affairs,” begged Moghadam. “Sharif-Emami is not the man for this situation. Not only does he have no following, popular or otherwise, but he has an abominable reputation. His appointment as prime minister—it is my duty to tell you—is nothing less than catastrophic. He will lead us straight into the abyss; but there is still time to stop it. Please, Your Majesty, persuade the Shahanshah to reconsider.”

  Farah picked up the phone and dialed her husband’s office. “Sire, your chief of Savak is here, begging me to throw myself at your feet and implore you by no means to make Mr. Sharif-Emami your head of government,” she explained. “His reputation is execrable and he’s the most dangerous choice you could have made at this time.” Listening in silence to what the Shah had to say, she put down the phone after a few minutes and looked at her two visitors. “Unfortunately,” she said, “there’s nothing to be done about it as far as I can see.”

  Outside the Queen’s office, Moghadam vented his frustration. “I just can’t believe it. How can the Shah be so ill informed? Sharif-Emami! There wil
l be a general insurrection within two months! I’ve done all I can to stop the worst from happening—you are my witness to that—and even now I beg you to keep trying.”

  The Queen tried again, too. She favored Nahavandi for the job of prime minister. Though his arrogance alienated many of his colleagues, Farah recognized his credentials as a liberal reformer loyal to the throne. “I thought Nahavandi should be prime minister but His Majesty wouldn’t have him,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Is Nahavandi again trying to become prime minister?’ He didn’t like him.”

  Reza Ghotbi made a similar appeal. “I proposed Nahavandi as prime minister,” he recalled. The Shah rebuffed him. “Nahavandi?” he queried. “He has no weight.” To emphasize his point the Shah held out his hands, palms facing upward, and raised and lowered them in quick succession: “The Shah took [Nahavandi] as a loyal, good intellectual who could be of interest as a contact between the palace and scholars and intellectuals.”

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  ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, the palace confirmed that Jafar Sharif-Emami would replace Jamshid Amuzegar as Iran’s new prime minister. “I thought it was a joke,” recalled Iran’s ambassador to Washington Ardeshir Zahedi. “I didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t possible. His name was ‘Mr. Five Percent’—he was totally corrupt.” Princess Ashraf also was “astonished at the choice. I felt the situation called for a stronger leader.” She told Parviz Radji, Iran’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, that “for us—and by us I mean the Pahlavis—it is virtually over, it being only a matter of time before a republic based on Islamic principles is proclaimed. His Majesty will never agree to be King in a country where Khomeini or Shariatmadari exercise the ultimate power. He will never have anything to do with the mullahs.” The Princess criticized “the Iranian people who are incapable of gratitude after all that my father and brother did for them.”

  On Sunday, the day of Sharif-Emami’s appointment, the new prime minister’s televised speech to the nation included the admission that the reforms of the White Revolution “had been too rapid and uncoordinated, resulting in an unprecedented spread of corruption and unsuitable bureaucracy.” His remarks signaled that the Pahlavi state was in full retreat before the Islamist onslaught. The new government replaced the Imperial calendar with the Muslim lunar year—Iranians found themselves plunged back into the year 1357—and Mahnaz Afkhami’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the first in the Muslim world and one of the only ministries of its kind anywhere, was abolished. Bars, clubs, and liquor stores were shut down, copies of Playboy and Penthouse were hurriedly pulled from store shelves, and for the first time since 1963 Iranian newspapers were permitted to display Khomeini’s portrait and mention his name on their front pages. “The Club Discotheque, normally a place of frenzied activity for Iran’s newly rich upper middle class, was shuttered,” reported Time. “Television stations broadcast readings from the Quran and Islamic sermons in place of Cannon and Police Story. It seemed that Iran’s uncertain advance into the 20th century had stumbled again, and that the nation had been thrust back into the dark Islamic puritanism of the 18th century.” Khomeini’s campaign of intimidation combined with Sharif-Emami’s concessions brought a sudden, ignominious end to the Pahlavi Dynasty’s half-century effort to balance Iranian religious traditions with secular government and Western-style modernization.

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  TWO DAYS EARLIER, Imam Musa Sadr had arrived in Tripoli on the first stop of a three-week trip scheduled to take him to Rome and then on to West Germany, where he planned a secret meeting with the Shah’s envoy. Musa Sadr was accompanied by two close associates, his aide Sheikh Mohammad Yaqub and Abbas Badreddin, a Lebanese journalist assigned to cover the trip for the Beirut press. Shortly before his departure he had written an essay in France’s Le Monde that described his view of events back in Iran. In “The Call of the Prophets” the Imam drew an idealistic portrait of different classes and social groups joining together to fight injustice. The language and spirit of the article reflected mainstream Shia thinking and were in keeping with French Enlightenment traditions. They provided a real contrast to Khomeini’s message of fundamentalism and violence. Where he used the word “revolution” to describe the troubles, Musa Sadr was referring to a revolution of ideas and not politics. Though careful to acknowledge the guiding role of “the great Imam Khomeini” in leading the opposition to the Pahlavi state, nowhere did Musa Sadr personally condemn the Shah or advocate the replacement of the monarchy with religious rule. Senior clerics often cloaked their opinions in carefully phrased sentences, and Musa Sadr’s essay, written to assuage the doubts and suspicions of men such as Ahmad Khomeini and Abolhassan Banisadr, actually left open the door to rapprochement with Niavaran.

  Musa Sadr and his companions were picked up at the airport in Tripoli and whisked to the al Shate’ Hotel. Ayatollah Beheshti was expected to arrive shortly. Curiously, the Libyan press failed to mention the presence in their country of one of Islam’s most revered leaders. Musa Sadr usually phoned his office and family when he was away, but on this trip they never heard from him. Journalist Badreddin’s employers noted that he did not file a single news dispatch during his stay in the hotel. Gadhafi finally consented to receive Musa Sadr on the evening of August 29–30, then begged off, pleading a busy schedule. Beheshti’s party never arrived. Musa Sadr became impatient to leave—perhaps he realized he had walked into a trap after all—and at one o’clock on the afternoon of August 31, 1978, the trio was spotted by a group of Lebanese visitors in the lobby of their hotel. An aide to Yasser Arafat later confided to his contact in American intelligence, CIA Beirut station chief Robert Ames, what he was told happened next:

  Arriving at the Tripoli airport, Musa Sadr was escorted to the VIP departure lounge. In the meantime, Beheshti told Qaddafi over the phone to detain Musa Sadr by all means necessary. Beheshti assured Qaddafi that Imam Sadr was a Western agent. Qaddafi ordered his security force to delay Musa Sadr’s departure. Qaddafi instructed that the imam should just be persuaded to go back to his hotel. But Qaddafi’s security officers accosted Imam Sadr in the VIP lounge and addressed him disrespectfully. An argument ensued, and the imam was roughed up and thrown into a car. Things had gotten so out of hand that the imam was taken to a prison.

  In Beirut, one of the Imam’s friends passed in the street Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, the founder of the Farsi Brigade, which trained Iranian guerrilla fighters in Lebanon. Hosseini knew Musa Sadr and enjoyed good relations with Colonel Gadhafi. When Hosseini mentioned his intention to fly to Tripoli to attend Gadhafi’s festivities, the Imam’s friend asked him to pass on his greetings to Musa Sadr. Hosseini fixed him with a hard stare and without explanation said, “Musa Sadr is gone.”

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  ON AUGUST 29, while Musa Sadr cooled his heels in a hotel room in Tripoli, the Shah and Queen Farah received Chinese Communist Party leader Hua Guofeng at Saadabad. The first ever trip by a Chinese Communist leader to Iran couldn’t have come at a worse time. Security was so tight that the usual ride from the airport in a gold coach was scrapped and the two leaders drove to the Shahyad Monument by car, and from there flew by helicopter the short distance to Golestan Palace. “Security around Hua’s Golestan Palace guest residence in teeming South Tehran, a short distance from the teeming Bazaar area, was drumtight to prevent the approach of any demonstrators,” reported the Washington Post. They came anyway. An evening rally drew thousands of protesters to downtown Tehran. They attacked a bank and a cinema, lit fires in backstreets, evaded police lines to block traffic, and hurled burning garbage cans.

  At Niavaran the Shah, Queen Farah, and their Chinese guests were halfway through their banquet dinner when the King was approached by an aide who whispered in his ear. The Shah thought for a few moments and then rose from the table and excused himself, unheard of behavior for someone so concerned with protocol. The Iranians in the room exchanged furtive glances—what could be so important that His Majesty would leave his own table during a state dinner? S
everal minutes later the Shah returned but instead of entering the dining room signaled to Prime Minister Sharif-Emami and General Moghadam to join him outside. Moghadam went to pick up his hat but the Shah made it clear it was not necessary. The two men listened in stunned silence as the Shah told them he had just taken a phone call from Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, where Khomeini lived in exile: “Saddam Hussein was telling me, ‘This mullah, Khomeini, is causing problems for you, and for me, and for all of us. It would be wise to get rid of him. But I need your agreement to take care of it.’” The Shah said that he responded, “I personally cannot make this decision. I have to speak to my responsible officials.” He looked at Sharif-Emami and Moghadam and added, “Saddam Hussein is waiting on the phone for my answer. I wanted to know your thoughts about this.”

  Sharif-Emami and Moghadam then conferred between themselves for several more minutes. Moghadam had nothing to say and preferred to hear the prime minister’s opinion. Neither man wanted to take responsibility for the assassination of a marja. “Your Majesty,” said Sharif-Emami, “you know better than anyone else what should be done.”

  The Shah looked at them and gravely said, “In my opinion, this is not the right action.” He turned and walked back up the stairs to give his reply to Saddam. For the second time in fifteen years, the Shah saved the life of the man he knew wanted to destroy him. Then the Shah walked back down the stairs, returned to the dining hall, and resumed his seat as if nothing untoward had happened.

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  THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, August 30, the Israeli ambassador Uri Lubrani recommended that his government establish an emergency committee to monitor the worsening unrest in Iran. Prime Minister Menachem Begin was at Camp David in the United States, negotiating a peace treaty with Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, and President Carter, when his deputy back home authorized the Israeli security forces to start planning for the evacuation of Israeli citizens from Iran.