* * *
WITH HIS KINGDOM in flames, his people in open revolt or headed for the doors, and his generals agitating for a putsch, the Shah saw only a series of trapdoors that led to the basement. On Thursday, October 19, he declared before an audience of senior parliamentarians that he had decided to pave the way for “a natural transfer of power” back to the legislative branch—Iran would continue with or without his hand at the helm. His remarks read like a valedictory and the end of an era. “God willing, our history will never have a finish,” he declared in somber tones. “Iran will be everlasting, as long as there is a world.”
At Niavaran, the Shah’s intimates watched the Shah walk the length of his office, playing with his hair, lost in thought. “I would walk one step behind him, always on his left,” recalled Reza Ghotbi. “I remember he turned back, his eyebrows down, and said, ‘I’m not a Suharto. A king cannot kill his nation.’” He accepted his fate and hinted at his future intentions during a small private dinner in late October. “The mood was somber,” said Maryam Ansary. “It was not the joking, teasing, fun times we used to have.” Her brother had recently been injured in a car accident in Milan and she told the Shah she planned to spend three weeks in Italy to help him recover. She was taken aback by his reaction to this news. “Good,” he responded. “It is better that you leave now.” The dinner table conversation turned to the grim subject of unrest. “Everyone was giving advice,” she said. Their bickering drew an unusually sharp response from the top of the table. “Stop it,” the Shah interrupted them. “You know something? It’s like when you go to the casino. Your number comes up and you’re a winner. For fifteen years everything I picked up turned to gold. And now every time I pick up gold it turns to shit. It’s the way life is. There is nothing I or anyone else can do about it.” His companions were stunned into silence.
Since the end of the summer the Shah had sent his extended family out of the country. Only he remained behind with the Queen, their three youngest children, and Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk. Prince Gholam Reza’s wife, Princess Manigeh, received permission to return for a few days to collect some personal items and check on the family home. “I went back alone in October just to make sure the house was in order and to bring out winter clothes,” she said. “In that period I felt that things were not normal. There was a lot of tension and you could feel that. I went to the court and had the chance to visit His Majesty. You could read on his face that he was worried for the country. His Majesty told me that we have to stay outside Iran for the time being.” The Princess instructed her husband’s staff to temporarily close his office. “I just let them know that we do not know when we will back.” She packed suitcases of clothes for the children but left her jewels behind in a safe. Only her husband knew the safe combination and it still hadn’t occurred to them that their exile might be permanent. The Princess was so sure they would return she even brought back their summer clothes. “We could never ever believe that events would take this direction and that we could never go back,” she said. “I did not bring our photo albums. We left everything behind, even our memories.”
The Shah’s refusal to save himself meant that ministers, generals, and courtiers directed their petitions to Queen Farah. They bombarded her with ideas to pass on to her husband—he should order a crackdown, hold a rally, make a televised appeal to the nation admitting his mistakes and beg for forgiveness. The dutiful intermediary usually came back with the same answer. “The prime minister was coming to me, and the generals, and others,” she recalled. “It was confusing. They wanted us to act stronger because we still had the people with us.” Despite their past disagreements on policy matters, husband and wife were united in their belief that violence was not the answer. Unlike the Shah, though, Farah refused to accept that they were finished. She wanted to keep fighting—for Reza, for the dynasty, for the White Revolution, and for the millions of people counting on them, not least the women of Iran who faced subjugation at the hands of the mullahs. She could not stand by and watch the destruction of a half-century legacy of progressive social policy.
The Queen refused to be a prisoner in the palace and held her head high during public appearances. She made a highly publicized trip to open the new training center for nursing and health workers housed at the Society for the Protection of Children, where she was cheered and embraced by the excited students. Farah returned to the palace, pulled the doors closed behind her, and collapsed. “I have the feeling there is no hope anymore,” she wrote in a notebook. The Pahlavis threw a small bash to celebrate Farah’s fortieth birthday, but their attempt to lift everyone’s spirits failed. Elli Antoniades described the atmosphere as “very sad. And after that the social life ended.”
In the downstairs dining room where the King and Queen took their evening meals, a piece of paper was found on the table. The handwritten scrawl read, “Death to the Shah.”
* * *
THE SHAH HAD lost all faith in the technocrats who had been at his side since 1963. He blamed them for covering up mistakes and excesses and lying to protect their prerogatives and privileges—the Persian court mentality had always been to tell the king what he wanted to hear. Ambassador William Sullivan cabled Washington that “the Shah feels himself without any clear plan for the immediate future and without any reliable Iranian advisers from whom he can get objective reactions.” For that reason, the Shah began holding regular consultations with the American and British envoys. He held Sullivan and Anthony Parsons in only marginally higher esteem but assumed—naively, as it turned out—that they at least understood the threats he faced from the far right and the far left. He recalled the diplomatic intrigues that had surrounded his accession to the throne in 1941 and recognized that Allied support would be crucial if and when his son took the throne.
Neither envoy was suited to the role of Imperial confidant. Parsons was an inveterate gossip, “the favorite source of all the American correspondents in Tehran,” recalled Chicago Tribune reporter Ray Moseley, and the ubiquitous “senior Western diplomat” whose patronizing assessments of the Shah convinced officials in Washington and London that Iran’s king needed a night nurse and a glass of hot milk to calm his nerves. Indeed, Parsons’s self-appointed role as resident sage of the revolution would have been laughable if it weren’t so tragic—with the exception of Sullivan, the Briton was one of the most misinformed diplomats in Iran. Foreign correspondents who made the trek to the British chancellery and spotted the “elderly man in rumpled clothing, hair uncombed, tending rose bushes,” and usually took him for the gardener, couldn’t have found a more highly placed source—or one less knowledgeable about the country where he served.
Sullivan was more problematic. The Shah knew that U.S. embassy officials were holding talks with his opponents inside Iran. But he was unaware that the CIA had successfully intercepted the telephone lines at Neauphle-le-Château, where Khomeini and his supporters were ensconced. The Americans recorded and read incoming and outgoing calls placed from the house, then sent transcripts of the conversations to officials who managed Iranian affairs in the White House, the State Department, and the embassy in Tehran. “We were able to intercept some messages,” confirmed Henry Precht, who read them. “They were not intercepted from his residence but from his phone calls,” confirmed Charlie Naas. “We had the means to do it. We would discuss them with Sullivan.” The ambassador did not share what U.S. intelligence knew about Khomeini with the Shah, and he felt free to offer advice to the Shah even though he knew the CIA had also intercepted Queen Farah’s private phone line, sending the transcripts back to the White House, where they were closely studied. They didn’t learn much—like Khomeini, Farah knew better than to reveal her true intentions over the phone.
Sullivan and Parsons encouraged the Shah to oppose the generals who pressed him to replace Sharif-Emami with military rule. The ambassadors suspected the officers were unduly pessimistic, “feeding the Shah the darkest possible view of the current situation,” and t
hat military rule would only “create worst [sic] pressures which might lead to a real explosion.” Sullivan was so opposed to the idea of a military government that he even lobbied Washington against sending over a team of U.S. specialists to train the Iranian Army in riot control and the peaceful dispersal of large crowds of protesters: “He did not want to give the Iranian military the idea that we wanted to help them have the capability of maintaining themselves in power bloodlessly if they took over.” Sullivan’s policy meant that young Iranian Army recruits were forced to confront large groups of rioters, some infiltrated by professional agitators, with only rifles and live rounds at their disposal, making bloodshed more, not less, likely.
* * *
MARTIAL LAW DISINTEGRATED at the end of the month. On October 26 the Shah’s formal birthday salaam went ahead in Golestan Palace’s Hall of Mirrors, with thousands of spectators lining the streets to watch the Pahlavi motorcade with motorcycle outriders pull up. “There was not the least demonstration—no cheers, no jeers, no whistles—only a heavy silence, both going and coming back,” observed Hushang Nahavandi. “This reflected the view mainly taken by the public—amazement and expectancy. People were waiting for an end to events and the winner of the confrontation.” The Shah “arrived ashen-faced.… He was expecting, perhaps, signs of hostility but not this silence—these questioning looks turned towards him.” Before entering the hall he drank a cup of sweet tea. Chief of Protocol Afshar whispered in his ear, “Sire, no one must notice your sadness, especially today—you must inspire confidence.” “You’re right,” he answered. Forcing a smile, he entered the room on his wife’s arm.
Away from the capital, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Khorramabad waving black banners and chanting, “Allah Akbar!” (“God is Great!”). They gave chase to two men they suspected were undercover police agents and stoned one to death. In Isfahan a terrorist died when his bomb prematurely exploded. Mobs launched an assault on the governor’s office in Kermanshah. Five people were shot and killed in a small town outside Hamadan. In Mashad an estimated one hundred thousand demonstrators marched through the streets and in Gorgan a crowd of thirty thousand chanted, “Victory to Khomeini!” and “Victory to Sharia!” Government buildings in Soussangerd were stormed. Rioters burned the center of town in Rasht. In Kermanshah an unveiled woman was pulled from her car, which was then set alight. In the southern city of Jahrom a rooftop sniper took aim at a jeep traveling through town and assassinated the local police chief. The authorities were shocked when the arrested gunman revealed himself to be one of their own soldiers.
Unrest flared in Tehran on Sunday, October 29, when gangs of youths took over city streets, overturning vehicles and building flaming barricades. “The entire capital was plagued by demonstrations and sporadic clashes between students and troops and police in east and west Tehran,” reported Kayhan. Barricades were thrown up on Shahreza and Shah Avenues to block the progress of army convoys. Thousands of student protesters charged up Sabah Avenue until troops dispersed them with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Army helicopters hovered overhead to direct tanks and armored cars to the scene, and troops fired live rounds in the air to drive the crowds back. Traffic came to a halt and motorists were teargassed where they sat in their cars. Sullivan and Parsons were returning to Shemiran after meeting with the prime minister when the Briton’s Rolls-Royce came to a halt on a side street. Fifty yards up the road men with clubs and pipes began overturning and setting fire to automobiles. Parsons’s driver spun the big car around—no easy maneuver on a crowded side street—and “we shot off down a small alley pursued by some of the club wielders.” The ambassadors and their plainclothes police escorts took shelter in a bank, where the manager offered them tea and sympathy.
The Shah’s strategy of appeasement had ended in a rout. “The more you feed an alligator, the bigger and hungrier it becomes,” observed a senior Iranian military officer. The unrest continued even after the security forces and civil service were purged of hard-liners, an action that effectively decapitated the regime’s security and intelligence apparatus. Dozens of high-ranking regime officials, including Parviz Sabeti, were tipped off in advance and fled Iran before they could be jailed. The prison gates were flung open and 1,451 political prisoners, including Communists, convicted terrorists, and religious fanatics, were pardoned and set free. Twenty-five years earlier, Deputy Court Minister Abolfath Atabai had accompanied the Shah and Queen Soraya into exile. He recalled those dark days as he watched the Shah struggle with the decision to use force against his people. He took aside the generals and begged them to proceed with their coup. “My boss cannot make up his mind,” he told them. “Go ahead and take action. Put tanks around the palace, cut the phone lines so you won’t have anyone in the palace telling you not to act, and do what you need to do to save the country.”
On the evening of the last long day of October, the Shah reviewed the deteriorating situation with the two ambassadors. He told Sullivan and Parsons that his generals were losing patience. Earlier in the day the army had marched into Abadan and seized control of the oil refinery and other oil installations along the southern coast. The Shah, said Sullivan, was “sober but controlled and occasionally displaying a rather macabre touch of humor.” He repeated his opposition to a military government, which “would at best be a quick fix and in the long run no solution at all.” He said he was considering which opposition leaders would make suitable ministers in a coalition government. Almost as an aside, he explained that he expected former prime minister Hoveyda and former Savak chief Nasiri “to go to jail” to satisfy the mobs. It was now that his bleak humor came to the fore. “Finally, the Shah said life was cruel,” Sullivan jotted down in his notebook. “His loyal prime minister was at that very moment courageously pleading his heart out in the Majles to obtain a vote of confidence, while he sat plotting with the British and American ambassadors to replace him.”
On November 1, the day all domestic air travel was grounded by strike action at the airports, and with tens of thousands protesting in the streets of the capital, the Shah intimated to Sullivan and Parsons for the first time that he might leave the country. His efforts to cajole the leaders of the National Front to join a coalition government had come to naught. He refused their condition to hold a referendum on the future of the monarchy, telling the ambassadors that he would rather “leave the country than submit to that.” He knew the Imperial regime “was melting away daily and time was running out; therefore, he had to look at alternatives.” The generals were starting to take measures into their own hands. In recent days the palace had been presented with a petition signed by three hundred senior officers urging the monarch to call out the army. The Shah told the ambassadors that he was aware that “many people, including his military probably considered him cowardly or indecisive for failing to take the military course of action. He wondered how history would judge him.” Sullivan and Parsons assured him that his stand “was viewed as very prudent and courageous” in Washington and London (Sullivan wrote “Hip Hip Hooray” in the margin of his meeting notes).
The Shah and the ambassadors were still in conference when a call came through from his ambassador to Washington. Ardeshir Zahedi was rumored to be behind a series of recent pro-royalist vigilante-style attacks in Kerman and other provincial towns. In the most dramatic episode, several hundred Baluchi horsemen had stormed the center of Paveh during an opposition rally and killed eleven people. Zahedi was telling friends in Washington that “his advice to the Shah is to bring out progovernment groups to demonstrate and if necessary to do battle even if that means civil war.” The Shah would have none of it. Speaking in front of the ambassadors, he “cut [Zahedi] off short with a statement that this was not 1953 and was not even the same situation that existed two weeks ago when [you were] here.” He hung up the phone and Sullivan said that he agreed with the Shah’s view that “in 1953 the bazaaris and mullahs led mobs in support of the monarchy. In 1978 t
hey are leading mobs against the monarchy. Zahedi cannot switch the bazaaris and mullahs off today. Recourse to mob violence under present conditions would only assist the polarization between the Shah and Khomeini supporters.”
Sullivan returned to Roosevelt Avenue and cabled Washington for instructions. He said he needed to know what he should tell the Shah if, as expected, the monarch “reported that none of his efforts or a political situation will work and that he needs to decide whether to abdicate and turn the government over to the military or to impose military government under his continuing rule.” He expected that the Shah would inform him that he would stay on as ruler “only if the US and UK say that they will continue to support him.”
The ambassador’s telegram caused consternation in the White House, which had consistently underestimated the scale of unrest in Iran. On the evening of November 2, President Carter’s national security team met to consider their options. They expressed astonishment at the scale and speed of disturbances and decided that Moscow must be involved in trying to upset the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. “The fact is there was some external support for the unrest,” said National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yet U.S. officials were surprised only because they had not been closely following events in Iran over the past year. They lacked any real understanding of Islam and the Shah’s preference to avoid bloodshed.
The Fall of Heaven Page 56
