On Friday, November 3, Brzezinski thought he saw his silver lining. “Good news!” he informed President Carter. According to a CIA assessment, issued in August, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.” The intelligence agency reported,
There is dissatisfaction with the Shah’s tight control of the political process, but this does not at present threaten the government. Perhaps most important, the military, far from being a hotbed of conspiracies, supports the monarchy. Those who are in opposition, both the violent and the nonviolent, do not have the ability to be more than troublesome in any transition to a new regime.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Saturday, November 4, all hell broke loose.
Shortly before noon several thousand student protesters gathered outside the main gates of the University of Tehran. A similar disturbance the day before had led to clashes with police. “There were students in Western sports jackets, young women in traditional robes and a contingent of streetwise toughs from the bazaars,” reported one observer. This time the students faced off against five hundred troops “with fixed bayonets.” The students hurled insults, rocks, and bottles and chanted, “Down with the Shah!” and “Death to the Shah!” The senior army officer ordered them to break into smaller groups, and when they refused to comply tried to disperse them using a water cannon, tear gas, and by firing live rounds over their heads. “They are only firing in the air!” the demonstrators jeered. They set fire to vehicles and used the flaming debris to build a barricade. But when they tried to pull down a statue of the Shah the troops lost patience and sprayed the crowd with automatic weapons fire, killing at least five students.
The students stampeded back onto the grounds of the campus, then poured out onto Shahreza and Kakh Avenues waving blood-soaked shirts and rampaging through the central business district. Banks, restaurants, shops, liquor stores, and buses and trucks were set alight. At the InterContinental Hotel hundreds of tourists and businessmen took refuge in the lobby or watched from upper-floor windows as the mob “surged onto the hotel grounds, armed with fists and pockets of rocks taken from the gravel trucks. Within minutes they had broken every ground floor window, invaded the coffee shop where they overturned most of its tables and hurled decorative lamps and vases down the hallway, and demolished the shops that line the ornate arcade.” The tourists ran for the stairwells and elevators while security guards formed a chain to unravel high-pressure hoses and “washed the invaders back through the windows.” After trashing the hotel’s interior the rioters fled the scene “as if by signal. Most of them evaporated down side streets, like troops dispersing after an ambush, but a rear guard of about 50 paused and in a remarkably short time overturned and set fire to three automobiles blocking their retreat.”
Iranians in their hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand Khomeini’s return and the Shah’s departure. Two hundred thousand marched in Isfahan, two hundred thousand in Qom, two hundred thousand in Ahwaz, twenty thousand in Dezful, and ten thousand in Borazjan. There were vast turnouts in Mashad, Abadan, Bushehr, and a score of other cities and towns. Troops panicked and fired into crowds in Kohdasht in Lorestan Province, killing two people. The town of Paveh remained cut off from the outside world, surrounded by the same vigilante militia that had terrorized residents the week before, denied food and medical supplies. Staff at the Post, Telephones, and Telegraph Department staged a wildcat strike. Iran Air pilots refused to fly. Industrial action shut down the port city of Bandar Abbas. Three dozen oil tankers idled in the waters off Kharg Island, unable to load their fuel shipments. Following several bomb threats, guests at Tehran’s Hilton Hotel were served dinner and drinks in their rooms.
Late on Saturday afternoon, the Shah invited Sullivan and Parsons to Niavaran, where they “spent a long prayer session” reviewing the crisis. Sullivan told the Shah that the White House was prepared to support a military government. In response, the Shah “wondered why a military government would be successful. He cited the day’s events to demonstrate his own doubts about the military’s capability to restore law and order.” The troops had stood firm against the demonstrators in the morning, though he “did not yet know if there were any fatalities, but he did know that hit and run demonstrations had then broken out all over town beyond the capability of troops to control.” He added that while he appreciated Carter’s support “he could not see what the President would actually do in tangible terms … the situation was vastly different from 1953 when US assistance had been helpful.” His only real hope was for a civilian government that would “accept the Constitution, i.e., the monarchy, and on the other hand have the support of Shariatmadari and the moderate clergy.” The problem was that for a coalition to work “Shariatmadari and the National Front would have to break with Khomeini and come out publicly for a negotiated settlement. If the moderates surrendered to Khomeini’s dictates he would likely call for a jihad and there would be a bloodbath. Even some of the military would take their obligations to Islam ahead of their obligations to the Shah.”
* * *
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, dawned overcast with light drizzle and temperatures predicted in the high fifties by the afternoon. There was nothing at first to suggest that Tehran’s simmering unrest would come to a boil, or that by evening residents would be standing on their rooftops watching the town burn from one end to the other. In the morning, staff at the Sheraton Hotel prepared the banquet hall for the annual St. Andrew’s Ball, and in Shemiran the Niavaran Cultural Center opened its doors for the visiting Shadow Theater of China. Despite the recent surge of anti-Semitism, the Goldis Cinema was screening Fiddler on the Roof. Ambassador William Sullivan started his morning with a visit to Iran’s beleaguered prime minister Jafar Sharif-Emami, who told him that “order was rapidly evaporating and that he felt a military government was needed.” The prime minister said he doubted that the Shah’s strategy of trying to peel away moderate clergy and politicians from the Khomeini movement would succeed because Shariatmadari and the National Front lacked “courage.” When Sullivan asked why the army was not doing more to restore lost Iranian oil production, Sharif-Emami pinned the blame on Savak, which he intimated had gone rogue. Sullivan returned to his embassy in time for a luncheon appointment with Ambassador Tony Parsons. As the Briton’s Rolls-Royce swung into Roosevelt Avenue, Parsons took note of demonstrators filling the sidewalks and “the feeling of extreme tension was palpable.”
For the third day in a row, thousands of young protesters gathered outside the main gates of Tehran University, hurling projectiles and chanting. This time when they surged forward and began attacking a bank across the road the troops “sort of shrugged their shoulders, waved goodbye and were gone.” As if by prearranged signal, similar scenes were reported elsewhere in the capital. Trucks filled with army conscripts drove back to base and left the city’s flash points exposed to the crowds. Students surged toward the center of town waving staves and hurling rocks and bottles. Mobs from the bazaar joined in and “hijacked buses and lorries and set them on fire.… Workers in the Palace of Justice and the Commerce Ministry tore up pictures of the Shah and tossed them out of the window.”
The rioting followed the pattern of earlier insurrections in Tabriz and Isfahan. Buildings associated with foreigners were targeted for destruction, and “carpet stores owned by Jews were attacked, their ornate and priceless carpets dragged into the streets and burnt,” reported the correspondent for the Times of London. For the first time the students also set their sights on diplomatic missions. Dozens of youths clambered over the gates of the British embassy, overpowered the guards, and destroyed the guardhouse. They poured onto the grounds, ordered all the staff out of the main office block, and set it alight. Only the presence of Iranian Army tanks and troops prevented a second invasion of the U.S. embassy, from where Sullivan and Parsons watched incredulously as buildings to their left and right burst into flames: “One large eleven-story building two streets away became a towe
ring inferno, burning for several hours before it collapsed in a heap of rubble with a resounding swoosh.”
Panic took hold in Tehran’s commercial district. Foreigners caught up in the riot were chased, abused, and roughed up. Americans Bruce and Eileen Vernor were lunching with friends when their driver ran into the restaurant and told them to quickly get out because “there is a mob coming toward us.” Diners grabbed their coats and bags and ran to safety just before the windows were smashed in. American advisers in the Ministry of Labor were “forcibly evicted” from their offices. Two Bell Helicopter employees barely escaped with their lives when their Iranian taxi driver was fatally shot in the head by a sniper while he was ferrying them across town. Fifty-six British stewardesses were trapped on the eleventh floor of the Imperial Hotel. “Below us on the streets rioters were burning pictures of the Shah and lighting massive bonfires,” said one woman. “They were smashing everything in sight. It was like a Guy Fawkes night gone mad.” An Iranian ran up to a Western journalist and ran his finger across his throat in a slitting motion. “The Shah is finished,” he said with a grin. “Write that.”
By the time American high school student Jonathan Kirkendall got home from school in the afternoon “smoke [was] rising over the town” and “we could hear guns going off.” “The mob spread garbage in the street right in front of our building and lit it on fire so that black columns of smoke were soon going up all around our building,” expatriate lawyer John Westberg wrote in his diary. “The rioters then picked up a minibus that was parked directly in front of our building, carried it a short distance around the corner, and laid it on its side squarely in the middle of the street to serve as a barricade to keep the martial law forces from coming through that way.” There were fraught scenes at the Tehran American School, where teachers and administrators struggled to safely evacuate thirty-six hundred children from two campuses in different parts of town. Elementary school principal Donna Colquitt, who had children as young as four-year-old kindergarteners to think about, rallied her teachers and administrators and reminded them of the job they had to do. “There will be no hysteria,” she instructed. “We will have no tears in front of the children.” The staff loaded the children into their minibuses and before each set off Donna climbed aboard and cheerfully told them that “they were playing a new game on the way home, and that they should get down on the floor until each one arrived home.” But the ride home was a terrifying ordeal for students whose buses strayed into the riot zone. The children heard rocks glancing off the window grilles and crouched low, saying not a word and hiding their faces in the hope that no one would see they were American.
Out on the streets, paper rained down from office windows like confetti, and buses and cars exploded in flames. The Radio City Cinema burst into flames. Buildings that housed Pan American World Airways, the German automobile manufacturer BMW, and the Irano-British Bank burned out of control. Mobs sacked the ground floor of the luxury Waldorf Hotel and used accelerants to light a fire that quickly spread through the lobby. In scenes straight out of The Towering Inferno, seventy-five terrified guests fled to the hotel roof while dozens of others were seen hanging out of upper windows, screaming for help. Two young men working on an adjacent construction site swung into action and pulled off a remarkably daring rescue operation. They attached a building pallet onto the boom of a crane and then lowered it onto the roof. The trapped guests scrambled aboard five at a time, lay down, and were carefully winched to the street below. Shortly after the last guest was lowered to safety the Waldorf went up like a blowtorch. Thick clouds of black smoke from four cinemas and an estimated 400 banks billowed over the Shah’s stricken capital. Army troops, police, and the emergency services were conspicuous by their absence. “As slogan-chanting demonstrators surged from neighborhood to neighborhood, breaking banks and igniting buildings—the Information Ministry among them—police, army and firefighting units often were nowhere to be seen,” reported the Los Angeles Times correspondent at the scene. “Only after a particular area had been hit, sometimes as much as a half-hour, did the troops appear, seemingly indifferent to renewed destruction raging only a block or two away.”
Ambassador Parsons decided to make a dash for it. He left his Rolls-Royce at Roosevelt Avenue and accepted Sullivan’s offer to drive back in an Iranian-made Peykan. Parsons’s plainclothes security detail followed behind in an unmarked police car. “When we emerged into the main street, I found myself faced by a scene such as I had not experienced since the end of the Second World War,” Parsons later wrote. “Fires were burning everywhere, furniture and office equipment had been piled in the middle of the street and set alight, burning cars and buses littered the roadway. Young men were dancing around in a frenzy, feeding the flames and plastering the few passing cars with stickers reading ‘Death to the Shah.’”
The two cars were edging past flaming debris in Ferdowsi Square when rioters spotted the radio in the police car. Parsons watched as a group of young men “wrenched open the doors and were trying to drag the occupants out. The last I saw of my escort, who eventually found their way back to the American embassy, was the car careering down a side street with three of its doors open and a mob of young men clinging to the sides.” Men clung to the roof of his own car and to save himself the British ambassador joined in the chants of “Death to the Shah!” Parsons retreated to the safety of the French embassy and didn’t make it back to his own smoldering compound until late afternoon.
* * *
COLUMNS OF SMOKE were clearly visible from Niavaran, where courtiers rushed to the windows to watch the city burn. In the late afternoon a large mob was seen advancing up the hill and the Imperial Guard took up defensive positions and moved Chieftain tanks and an antiaircraft battery into place. Barbed wire was strung around the perimeter of the palace grounds, and machine-gun-toting troops stood watch. General Khosrodad and several senior military officials flew over the city in a helicopter to survey the destruction. They were appalled by the scale of the carnage. “This has got to stop,” said Khosrodad. “We have to act severely or things will really get out of control.”
The generals returned to Niavaran and appealed to Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar to talk to the Shah, but the older man was quick to put them in their place. “I am the protocol chief,” he reminded them. “You are the generals. Why don’t you speak with him? You command all the military in Tehran. Why don’t you stop this nonsense?” They walked over to the Jahan Nama Palace, and when Afshar saw the Shah at the foot of the stairs he prostrated himself in the traditional manner, kneeling and gripping the monarch’s shoes. The generals fell to their knees, too. The Shah, who was embarrassed by their display, tried and failed to pull Afshar to his feet. “What is it?” he asked.
“Your Majesty, the city is on fire,” said Afshar. “The banks have been burned. The citizens’ possessions have been destroyed. Civil documents have been cast away. No one is safe. It is no longer clear what remains to the people or of the authority they can turn to. Please, Sire, something must be done.”
“But the army is attending to the matter,” the Shah told them. He was apparently unaware that the decision by the army to pull back earlier in the day had allowed the tide of vandalism to wash unchecked through the streets.
General Khosrodad stood and saluted. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Your Majesty,” he begged, “your army has become an object of scorn, contempt, disrespect. They spit on your soldiers. No honor remains to the Imperial forces. Your Majesty must order us to defend you, the country, and ourselves.”
The Shah, “visibly shaken” by this display of emotion, offered his assurance that “Of course, we shall take measures.” He returned to his office and asked Afshar to send for General Oveissi, which the generals interpreted as a sign that he meant to replace Sharif-Emami with his martial law administrator. The Shah also asked for the American and British ambassadors to join him at Niavaran so he could explain his decision to suspend civilian governm
ent.
Sullivan was the first to arrive. Usually when guests arrived at Niavaran they passed through security and were welcomed and announced by an aide-de-camp. This evening, however, the usual guards and courtiers were nowhere to be seen, their absence a sign that the Imperial Court was in a state of complete disarray. “While I was puzzling what to do next, a door from one of the small rooms off the drawing room opened and the Shahbanou came in,” said Sullivan. “She was obviously surprised to see me, and I had clearly not expected that she would be the first person I would encounter there.” Queen Farah arranged for Sullivan to be escorted to her husband’s study, where the Shah explained that he had run out of time and choices—a military government was inevitable. The ambassador responded that rumors were spreading that Savak agents had deliberately lit the fires to justify an army takeover. The Shah sighed and answered, “Who knows? These days I am prepared to believe anything.”
At one point the Shah answered a call on his private line. By now Sullivan knew enough Persian to “make out that he was telling [the Queen] of his intention to install a military government and answering some of the reservations she was expressing about such a decision. It was a gentle, patient sort of conversation with nothing peremptory in its tone.” Court liberals associated Oveissi with the debacle at Jaleh Square and feared that his appointment would doom any chance of a settlement with moderate clergy. Farah preferred General Gholam Reza Azhari, chief of the supreme commander’s staff, “a thinking, cultured man … considered a moderate who was open to dialogue.” When the call ended the Shah placed one of his own to General Azhari, asking him to come at once to the palace. He told Sullivan he had decided to appoint Azhari and not Oveissi to lead the new military government. The American expressed relief at the Shah’s decision to appoint a moderate and graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. They were eventually joined by Ambassador Parsons, who arrived at the palace in an armored personnel carrier and in a state of high dudgeon, still furious about the attack earlier in the day on his embassy compound. Unlike Sullivan, who believed the street gossip that Savak was behind the arson attacks, Parsons and his staff had concluded that Mujahedin guerrilla fighters were responsible: the scale and organization behind the violence fit the pattern of unrest seen elsewhere around the country.
The Fall of Heaven Page 57
