The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The Shah stuck to his schedule and held a working lunch with Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda of Japan as though nothing were wrong. In private, however, the reports of mobs out on the streets left him “visibly shaken,” reported Newsweek. “Obviously things had gone too far.” In the afternoon he received a delegation of senior generals “who argued that the demonstrations were surely eroding his authority—and in turn the army’s—and must be stopped.” To press home their point the officers raised the specter of civil war. “We told the Shah, as Lincoln once said, a house divided cannot stand,” said one participant. One of his fellow generals bluntly told the Shah that he faced an insurrection if he refused to take action: “It is against our military honor to stand the present situation.”

  Lost in the excitement of the day was the news that Queen Farah had appointed the Islamic scholar Hossein Nasr to replace Hushang Nahavandi as the new head of her Special Bureau. The appointment of such an eminent authority on Islam was hardly a coincidence. Nasr had studied in Qom’s seminaries and was well known to the senior ayatollahs. In making the appointment, the Pahlavis wanted to send a signal to Qom that they were serious about reforming their household and Islamizing the monarchy. “Ayatollahs Shariatmadari and Khonsari favored me working with the Queen,” said Nasr. “I accepted the position on the condition that there was an expectation on all sides of reform. The reforms included a complete change in the type of personality around the King and Queen. I wanted rid of morally decadent people.” Nasr understood that if the Shah faltered then it would be Farah, in her capacity as Regent, who would wield power until Crown Prince Reza came of age. He envisioned his job as building “a bridge between the monarchy and the ulama who wanted to head off the unrest. My office became the center of action.” In his talks with the moderate ulama, Nasr drew on the Safavid era for inspiration. “Nasr could be the bridge between the clergy and the Court,” said his friend Reza Ghotbi. “He had the idea of an Islamic monarchy, something like in Safavid times. It could have been a good solution, bring back the old-fashioned Safavid-era monarchy.”

  While Tehran shook, Princess Ashraf boarded a flight from Alma-Ata, the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, where she had attended a meeting of the World Health Organization. After hearing of the latest unrest she decided to defy her brother’s admonition to stay outside the country. On arrival at Mehrebad, the Princess learned that roads to the north were blocked by demonstrations and that Saadabad Palace could be reached only by helicopter. “As I flew over the Shahyad Monument, I saw that one corner was completely dark,” she recalled. “A moment later I realized this black mass was a mass of Iranian women, women who had achieved one of the highest levels of emancipation in the Middle East. Here they were in the mournful black chador their grandmothers had worn. My God, I thought, is this how it ends? To me it was a little like seeing a child you had nurtured suddenly sicken and die.” Her private secretary noticed the stricken look on her face. “Why aren’t we doing anything about it?” she asked him. As soon as they landed she went straight to see her brother, who assured her everything was under control.

  Court conservatives were relieved to hear that the Shah’s feisty twin sister, who had played an important role in defeating Mossadeq twenty-five years earlier, was back in town. Anxious to gain her support for Operation Kach, a small group came in the evening to Ashraf’s residence and petitioned her to support their plan for a crackdown. The men in the room included the commander of the Imperial Guard, General Badrei; courtiers; and an industrialist who offered to raise funds and another who promised to turn out the crowds. Ashraf expressed shock when the plotters suggested her brother should retire to Kish Island and let them get the job done. “His Majesty is in control,” she reassured them—he had told her so himself. The men in the room vehemently disagreed. “The situation is getting out of hand,” they told her. The conspirators left the Princess without obtaining a firm commitment of support.

  Shortly before seven o’clock, Iranian guests attending the Japanese prime minister’s cocktail reception froze when Hushang Nahavandi, the only government minister in attendance, was handed a note and abruptly excused himself without explanation. Clutching the piece of paper, he rushed to his car and drove to an emergency meeting of national security advisers who included the prime minister, the cabinet, and generals. Nahavandi arrived to find the group learning details of a plot by Khomeini’s agents to seize power in a coup. Apparently emboldened by their show of force on the streets, the Coalition of Islamic Societies had decided to mass their followers in Jaleh Square on Friday morning and stage a march to the Majles. Once there they planned to force their way in, seize the prime minister and members of parliament, and declare an Islamic republic. In the debate that followed, Sharif-Emami sided with conservatives who supported an immediate declaration of martial law in twelve cities. The Shah was dining with Queen Farah and Ardeshir Zahedi when he received a call from the prime minister to ask his opinion. He expressed ambivalence about putting inexperienced army conscripts on the streets—the sight of young soldiers accepting flowers from the crowds on Eid-e Fetr had raised questions in his mind about their preparedness to open fire on civilians. He asked his dinner companions what they thought. Ardeshir Zahedi made clear that he had no confidence in Sharif-Emami regardless of the decision. The Queen worried that there was not enough time to issue alerts over radio and television to ensure that people did not venture out before the curfew was lifted. The Shah was loath to challenge his prime minister and generals and reluctantly approved the martial law decree.

  Reza Ghotbi was finishing up his last day at work as director of National Iranian Radio and Television when he received a telephone call at about 11:00 p.m. Two weeks earlier, Ghotbi had handed in his resignation during the change of government but agreed to stay on an extra two weeks to help with the transition. His deputy and successor, Mahmud Jaafarian, had attended the National Security Council meeting and phoned Ghotbi to brief him about the martial law decision. He said he was worried that with only an hour left before television went off the air they had run out of time to issue news bulletins. “What shall we do?” he asked.

  “I will be out of the office in a few minutes,” Ghotbi answered. “You will have to decide.” He suggested Jaafarian call Minister of State for Executive Affairs Manuchehr Azmun for guidance, and Azmun agreed that to avoid possible confusion and bloodshed it would be better to start the broadcasts as early as possible on Friday morning, starting at six o’clock. Throughout the night, army trucks with loudspeakers moved through the deserted streets urging people to stay off the streets and comply with curfew regulations.

  * * *

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, September 8, Reza Ghotbi was at home when he received another harried call from Mahmud Jaafarian, who begged him to come back into the office. “The streets are filling up with people and crowds are heading for Jaleh Square,” he said. “You’ve been at this organization for twelve years. Come in please.” Ghotbi drove in and helped marshal the staff, dispatching reporters and camera crews onto the streets and asking them to radio in eyewitness accounts. He also instructed that a helicopter be readied so his reporters could survey the scene from the air.

  Jaleh Square was a misleading name for the modest traffic circle that joined Farahabad Road with Jaleh Road, a narrow carriageway that passed the American Community School in a westerly direction toward the Majles. Overlooking the roundabout, which could be entered from several sides, were low-slung, flat-roofed buildings containing apartments and small businesses. On Friday morning several thousand people converged on a space too congested to accommodate everyone. They ignored warnings from police and army officers to disperse and listened to a fiery speech by Ayatollah Nouri, who led them in chants for Khomeini and an Islamic republic and against the Pahlavi Dynasty and the monarchy. “Death to the Shah!” they cried. The mostly male crowd was comprised of Khomeini supporters, students, and leftists, but also a contingent of PLO-trained Mujahedin guerrillas, who regularly used
big crowds as a cover to stage provocations and take control of the streets. A second, less visible armed group was at the scene. They were battle-hardened veterans of seven clandestine militias that reported directly to Khomeini’s agents in Najaf and Qom. Their presence exposed the fallacy of Khomeini’s public claim that he supported a nonviolent approach to street protests. “Khomeini did not believe in armed struggle but there were armed groups under his observation” was how the young religious revolutionary Ali Hossein cautiously put it. “In some cases there was a need for such groups. For example, if the regime was going to attack demonstrators these groups would support the demonstrators. And in some cases, since the army of the Shah was on the streets there should be power to protect the people [and stage] attacks against the army of the Shah.” The Khomeini movement followed its usual practice of placing women, children, and young people at the head of the demonstration to intimidate the security forces and provide cover for their gunmen.

  The tension exploded at 9:20 a.m. Reza Ghotbi was at his desk when two eyewitness accounts were radioed in from journalists at Jaleh Square. The first reported seeing and hearing shots fired from apartments overlooking Jaleh Square and people collapsed on the ground. The second journalist stated that shots were being fired from within the square, though apparently over the heads of the crowd. The scene was one of pandemonium and panic.

  Exactly who fired first was never conclusively determined, though Reza Ghotbi’s correspondent and other eyewitnesses insisted that at least one gunman had opened fire from a high window overlooking the square. If his intention was to shoot into the crowd to cause maximum bedlam and provoke a gun battle, it worked. When the army troop commander saw his men coming under fire he ordered them to lower their weapons, assume combat positions, and fire machine-gun blasts into the crowd. “According to witnesses, the troops ordered the demonstrators to abandon the demonstration several times, then fired overhead and shot tear gas canisters into the crowd,” reported the Washington Post’s William Branigan, who wrote one of the most succinct accounts of what happened during those first chaotic moments. “The demonstrators replied by throwing rocks at troops and breaking nearby bank and government office windows, the witnesses said, whereupon the troops opened fire, literally mowing down scores of people.” Confirmation of an attack on the soldiers came from the Islamists themselves. “At Jaleh Square there were people among the crowd who used guns,” admitted Ali Hossein. “One probability is that both sides shot into each other.” An investigation later conducted by the U.S. embassy, which sent a ballistics expert to the scene, concluded that “troops were attacked by a stone-throwing, club-wielding crowd at Jaleh Square, they had had no weapons with which to retaliate other than their rifles. They wore helmets but carried no shields. When their rifle bursts into the air failed to stop the advancing crowd, the resulting slaughter was inevitable.”

  The crackle of gunfire set off a panicked stampede to safety. Blood-splattered survivors stumbled down side streets. “Shortly after the shooting, demonstrators left the scene with clothes blood-soaked from helping carry away victims,” reported the the Post’s Branigan. Riots broke out almost immediately as the crowds vented their anger. Bonfires and barricades were set alight, women wept in the streets, and men angrily shouted anti-Shah slogans. One young man tossed a piece of wood and shouted to no one in particular, “We only need guns.” Nearby, a woman wearing a chador cursed the Shah’s “fascist” government. She cried, “We only want an Islamic government with a religious leader like Khomeini.”

  * * *

  CHARLIE NAAS WAS leaving his residence in the American embassy compound when he heard gunfire. “I was outside the bedroom window and my wife was standing on a ledge trying to see over the perimeter wall.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Jean.

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “There’s a lot of shooting.”

  Naas ran back to the chancellery, where Ambassador Sullivan was rounding up his staff. “You manage the place,” Sullivan told his deputy, “and I’ll be the chief political officer.” They started phoning their contacts around town to find out what was going on. John Stempel reached one of his sources, Associated Press correspondent Parviz Raein, who said he had been in Jaleh Square standing next to the army’s communications gear when the shooting erupted. Raein told Stempel that he “heard the radio announce there had been no more than ninety dead,” though he estimated another twenty to thirty killed in the surrounding streets.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE few souls brave enough to head down to Jaleh Square after everyone else had fled was Dr. Fereydoun Ala, director of the national blood bank. He set out in an ambulance with colleagues bound for the city hospital that fell within the army’s security cordon and that was also treating most incoming casualties. They drove carefully through Jaleh Square dodging bits of debris that lay scattered on the ground. To their astonishment they were forced to stop and present their papers at street barricades that were manned not by army troops but by swaggering Mujahedin guerrillas sporting Palestinian head scarves. The hospital was a desperate scene. Local residents dragged in mattresses, donated medical supplies, and lined up in their hundreds to donate blood. “The hospital’s ramp was spotted with blood and inside frantic nurses tried to cope with the new arrivals,” reported the Guardian. Relatives of the dead and wounded besieged the hospital gates looking for their loved ones. “Just before 11 a.m., the troops, roaring ‘Shah, Shah!’ moved in to disperse the increasingly angry crowd. ‘We will kill you!’ one soldier yelled at foreign journalists who assembled outside. ‘Go and hide!’ The crowd chanted back, ‘Shame on you!’ and ‘Who pays for you?!’ Minutes later the troops fired. They were followed by 14 trucks and there was a heavy silence except for the sporadic bursts of gunfire in the direction of Iran’s lower house of Parliament on Baharestan.”

  * * *

  BY MIDDAY SMOKE from more than a hundred fires floated above rooftops in eastern and southern Tehran, and the sound of automatic weapons fire resounded through the streets. Flames engulfed the Armstrong Hotel on Amir Kabur Avenue. Twelve banks, two supermarkets, and the Ramsar Now restaurant were put to the torch, and major boulevards were littered with the burning hulks of tankers, refuse collection trucks, and double-decker buses. In some areas fires raged out of control when emergency crews were caught up in traffic as thousands of residents fled to safer neighborhoods. “South-east Tehran was a scene of destruction tonight,” reported the correspondent for the Times of London. “I was caught in a taxi on one main square as troops fired to disperse groups of people.” The scale of unrest overwhelmed the army, which lacked trained personnel, armor, and rubber bullets. “Unless the government makes a bigger show of force,” remarked a European ambassador, “these demonstrations and riots are likely to continue and the Shah may be forced to step aside.”

  In the early afternoon a devastating rumor took hold that the Shah had been seen in a helicopter hovering over Jaleh Square and that he had not only ordered the massacre but also picked off demonstrators with a rifle, like a big-game hunter on the African veld. Khomeini’s men were quick to distribute leaflets alleging that the bloodletting had actually been carried out by Israeli paratroopers disguised as Iranian soldiers. “It’s the Israelis!” hysterical mobs bayed in the streets. “Tell the world that the Israelis are killing us!” The revolutionaries also spread the false rumor that Khomeini’s close aide Ayatollah Nouri had been murdered by Savak agents. Most effective was their claim that the official death toll of eighty-six was a cover-up. The real number, they insisted, was at least two thousand and most likely three thousand killed. Blared a headline in Britain’s Guardian, “3,000 DEATHS IN IRAN SAY SHAH’S OPPONENTS.” The newspaper’s correspondent dismissed the government death toll as “a gross underestimate” and repeated unproven allegations that the registry at Tehran’s Beheshtzahra Cemetery showed three thousand bodies buried in a “mass grave.” In fact, a drive to the cemetery would have revealed there was n
o burial site and that the registry showed just forty new bodies. Many years later, the Islamic Republic’s Martyrs’ Foundation confirmed a death toll of eighty-eight—sixty-four in the square and twenty-four in surrounding streets—or two higher than the original estimate provided by the Shah’s government. By then, of course, the damage had already been done, and the Shah was given the moniker “Butcher of Jaleh Square.”

  The Shah was devastated when he heard that dozens of civilians had been killed on the streets of his capital. Much like Russia’s Czar Nicholas II after the 1905 massacre outside the Winter Palace, the King of Iran now occupied a throne stained with the blood of his people. Black Friday was the final confirmation that he had indeed lost the farr. The proud Shah of old was gone and in his place was “an immensely saddened man,” reported two Americans who saw him shortly after the tragedy. “It showed in his face, which was grim and gaunt, and in his eyes, which were tired and melancholy. Even his dress, so often elegant, was somber.” Ambassador Sullivan cabled Washington that “the Shah looked awful” and described him as “a shattered man who looked to be on the brink of a nervous collapse.” He made no attempt to deny rumors that he planned to abdicate the throne in his son’s favor. “I would like to wave goodbye but that would be a catastrophe,” he admitted. “It is certain that the main program, which is the liberalization and democratization of the country and then real, free elections, will continue. Martial law is for six months, and it will end before the elections start. In the meantime, all aspects of freedom, free speech and everything, will be absolutely carried out. But democracy will take place in the parliament, as in any civilized country. We have not stopped the clock. We will not go back.”