The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Middle-class Iran’s fatal attraction to Khomeini and fundamentalist Islam revealed itself one night in late November. In recent months the country had been rattled by reports of flying saucers and monsters, and these omens of doom set the scene for the remarkable collective hysteria that gripped Iran on the evening of Monday, November 27. It began, as everything seemed to in those fraught days, with a rumor. Word spread in the mosques that an old lady who lived in Qom had found a stray hair belonging to the Prophet Mohammad in the pages of her Quran. This discovery was accompanied by an apparition who shared the revelation that on the evening of the next full moon Khomeini’s face would be visible on its surface only to believers. The rumor held special significance because of the advent of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar, whose tenth day, Ashura, commemorated the slaying of Imam Husayn at the hands of Caliph Yazid in AD 680. For years, Khomeini had compared the Shah to Yazid and criminalized him as an apostate and traitor to the Shia nation. Indeed it was with this in mind that Khomeini’s closest aides—Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti was the likely instigator—fashioned the tale of the old woman, the stray hair, and the man on the moon.

  At the appointed hour hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Iranians came out onto the streets and crowded rooftops to marvel at the sight of their Marja staring back at them from the face of the moon. The phenomenon affected rich and poor alike. At a dinner party hosted by Gholam Reza Afkhami, who worked on social issues for Queen Farah, some of the most learned men and women in the kingdom “traced Khomeini’s face in the moon with their fingers.” Even the Shah’s valet, Amir Pourshaja, bore witness. “One night we heard the rumor, we went up on the roof to see Khomeini in the moon,” he said. “People with us could see his beard.” No one wanted to be left out—not even the Tudeh Party. The official organ of Iran’s atheistic Communist Party performed the ideological feat of a triple somersault with its gushing account of the big night. “Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini, the Breaker of Idols, in the moon,” blustered Tudeh’s official organ. “A few pip-squeaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.”

  The Communists may have been taken in by the collective delusion, but Khomeini’s fellow marjas scolded him for his shameless trickery and expressed outrage that his agents were prepared to use the Quran to further his political ambitions. One senior ayatollah in Mashad spread a rumor of his own, telling his congregants that he had been visited in his sleep by Imam Reza, who told him that “true Shiites should not oppose a Shah who was named after both the Prophet and the eighth Imam.” Sure enough, statues of the Shah that had been pulled down in Mashad were restored to their plinths. Khomeini’s agents countered by spreading the lie that “the ayatollah of Mashad suffered periodic moments of hallucination prompted by an upset stomach,” and the Shah’s statues were pulled down again. The Grand Ayatollah justified the man-in-the-moon story as one of many “spontaneous initiatives of the people.”

  Khomeini’s “moon trick” convinced the Shah that he had utterly failed in his efforts to modernize Iran. Despite the billions he had invested in education, training, and industry, when the Iranian people were faced with a choice between his vision of progress and modernity and Khomeini’s face in the moon, they had succumbed to a fairy tale and corner store magic. He felt sickened and embarrassed—his children had let him down. “For me everything is at an end,” he lamented. “Even if I return to Iran one day as Shah, nothing will be the same again. It is like a beautiful crystal vase that is broken for good; repair it and it will still show the same cracks.” A palace aide remarked that Iran was “returning to the Dark Ages,” and the Shah answered him, “I wonder if we ever left them.” He mused aloud why he had even bothered. “Why?” he asked his valet. “I worked for thirty-seven years. Why?”

  Not so long ago the gates at Niavaran Palace had swung open to welcome presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, Nobel laureates and Oscar-winning actors. Now the atmosphere at Niavaran resembled a “ghost ship.” “Usually there was protocol,” said Reza Ghotbi. “But it disappeared.” The Shah himself seemed isolated from events. Behind closed doors and in rare interviews he struggled to come to terms with the collapse of his life’s work. “His eyes betrayed immense sadness,” wrote Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave. “When I asked him what he had felt as rioters tossed pictures of himself and Queen Farah into bonfires, his eyes glistened, but he fought back the tears and remained silent. He wanted to say something, but the words choked his throat.” The Shah’s bleak mood reflected his physical decline. The weight loss that started over the summer was now plainly, shockingly visible. French physicians Jean Bernard and Georges Flandrin continued to fly into and out of Tehran, monitoring his reaction to the medication and drawing blood samples. Since Alam’s death they had lost access to the safe house in northern Tehran and were obliged to stay in tourist hotels that could not guarantee their security or privacy. “The worse events became, the less I wanted to put my nose outside,” said Flandrin, “for the demonstrations, the electricity failures, the street demonstrations—sometimes bordering on riots—made even the short visits I had to make to the palace quite a problem.” The Shah remained, as ever, patient and courteous, “but the visits were brief and, especially at our last meetings, one could feel that he was extremely tense and preoccupied.”

  Despite his evident distress, the Shah did not spend his days sitting alone in a corner feeling sorry for himself. He holed up in his office, calling around the country, counseling his generals, and reminding them to avoid bloodshed at all costs. “He was seeing people morning till night,” the Queen attested. Former ministers, ambassadors, generals, industrialists, and artists dropped by with suggestions, and he received and listened to them all. Few had any sound or even rational ideas for a way out of the morass. One former government minister recommended that the Shah appease the mobs by hanging a hundred of his closest aides in central Tehran. Others sent advice from afar, not all of it helpful or relevant. The Pahlavis had entertained former California governor Ronald Reagan back in April. “Shoot the first man in front,” he advised the Shah, “and the rest will fall into line.” Reagan, observed Ardeshir Zahedi, “did not understand how serious the problem was.”

  Newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft from the New York Times visited Niavaran in late November. The Shah, who received him in a second-floor salon, “looked pale, spoke in subdued tones, and seemed dwarfed by the vast expanse of the room, with its huge, ornate chandeliers and heavy Empire furniture. He wore a double-breasted suit whose blackness suggested mourning.” Kraft began by pointing out that the Shah still held several advantages over his adversaries. The army was intact, the clergy was divided, and the opposition was not united. Surely, he asked, these groups “could be played off against each other”?

  The Shah shrugged his shoulders “in an elaborate show of disbelief.” “Possibly,” he answered without enthusiasm.

  Kraft reminded him that the army was loyal.

  “You can’t crack down on one block and make the people on the next block behave.”

  Joseph Kraft was puzzled. This was not the Shah he had known for so many years. Where was the old confidence and hubris? In all their previous encounters he had never seen Iran’s king “so sombre.” He asked the Shah “when the black mood had begun.”

  “Sometime in the summer.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “Events.”

  Kraft said he had heard—most likely from Ambassador Sullivan—that “maybe he was overdoing the blues to elicit sympathy and perhaps support from the United States.”

  “What could America do?”

  The American then inquired what the Shah’s advisers “thought was going to happen.”

  “Many things,” the Shah answered with a brittle laugh. He rose from his chair to signal that their audience, like his dre
am of a new Iran, was over.

  24

  SWEPT AWAY

  They are going to kill us.

  —QUEEN FARAH

  You don’t want to be Marie Antoinette.

  —GENERAL FEREYDOUN DJAM

  The Muharram religious observances came to a head on Sunday, December 10, and Monday, the eleventh. On Sunday, seven enormous orderly columns numbering somewhere between half a million and a million people set off toward Tehran’s Shahyad Monument, modern symbol of Pahlavism. “It was an impressive performance,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “The tail end of the procession on Shah Reza Ave., which started in east Tehran at 9:00 a.m., had only reached the university by 2:30 a.m. and still had about four miles to go to the Shahyad Monument.” Marchers held aloft Khomeini’s picture and chanted, “We want Islamic government under Khomeini,” and “Khomeini, you are the leader of the free Iranian people.” Intense negotiations had preceded the march. Prime Minister Azhari had initially opposed allowing any public processions during Muharram, but he relented to avoid another round of street clashes. The Grand Bazaar’s processional organizers, the men who usually organized big religious events, cooperated with the mullahs to impose impressive discipline on the crowds. “The march showed that the feeling against the Shah cuts across Iranian society,” observed the Wall Street Journal. “Doctors and lawyers, students and raggedly dressed peasants participated in the procession. Thousands of women, hiding their faces behind chadors, or long black veils, walked along with small children in tow. There was a carnival atmosphere, with many marchers chanting joyously and spectators giving them bread and water as they passed.”

  The floodgates opened the next day on Ashura, the 1,298th anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when about a million people—a quarter of Tehran’s residents—swamped the center of town. Ashura was the deluge the regime had always dreaded, and if Ramadan had battered the pillars of the Pahlavi state, then Muharram tipped them to the point of collapse. The tone of the Ashura march was more explicitly political, aggressive, and xenophobic. “We will kill Iran’s dictator!” roared sections of the crowd. “Death to the American establishment!” “The Shah and his family must be killed!” “We will destroy Yankee power in Iran!” “Arms for the people!” “This American king should be hanged!” “Shah, if you don’t get the message, you’ll get it from the barrel of a machine gun!” The churning black and white tide of mourning garb and chadors swamped the middle-class idealists, who until now had naively assumed that they would inherit the revolution. “We would settle for the 1906 Constitution,” said one man. “But they want the end of the monarchy and, as you can see, they are more numerous.”

  Elsewhere in Iran on Ashura there was an eruption of mob violence in Isfahan, with statues of the Shah toppled, banks set alight, the city’s last cinema torched, and five people dying in an assault on the local Savak headquarters. Mujahedin gunmen tried to kill the governor of Hamadan. Rioters in Mashad stormed the Hyatt Hotel and “smashed its ground-floor windows, overturned furniture in the lobby and bar, tore down portraits of the King and Queen, and tried without success to set fire to the hotel nightclub.” The most shocking act of violence on Ashura did not occur out on the streets but behind closed doors, at one of the most secure locations in Iran. The headquarters of the Shah’s elite palace guard, the Immortals, was at Lavizan, just a short distance from Niavaran. The officers were sitting down to lunch in the mess hall when two men, Private Salamatbakhsh and Corporal Abedi, stood and sprayed the room with semiautomatics, killing twelve officers and wounding another thirty-six. Both assassins were shot on the spot. The attacks horrified the Shah and Queen, and Farah rushed to the hospital to comfort the wounded. “It was deeply distressing,” she said. “I cannot forget, in particular, how one of the men looked at me with such loyalty in his eyes as I held his cold hand. He died a few hours later.” She was shown a copy of the letter Abedi had left in his jacket pocket for his widow. “I did it on the orders of the Ayatollah Khomeini and I will go to heaven,” he wrote. “But don’t worry. I will not look at the houris [female agents, virgins]. I will wait for you there.”

  The bloodshed in the mess hall suggested that military morale and discipline were starting to collapse. After Khomeini called on soldiers in the army to leave their posts on Ashura there were reports of hundreds of troop desertions in Mashad and Qom, and in Tabriz two dozen soldiers were seen waving to the crowds and putting down their weapons. Many senior officers now regarded their own commander in chief as the real obstacle to ending the crisis. “They would be willing to see the Shah go,” a U.S. military adviser told the New York Times, “if they could take over and do what they think needs to be done: kick the hell out of the protesters.”

  After Ashura, reported Time, “Tehran was like a city that had survived a siege all but unscathed. Shops and schools were reopening, and office workers were returning to their jobs. Chieftain tanks and Russian-built armored cars, which had been in evidence everywhere, were now out of sight. Soldiers ventured into restaurants and parked their automatic weapons in corners as they ate. Locked in a monumental traffic jam, a Western diplomat sighed, ‘Things are back to normal in Tehran.’” But as always with Iran, the outward calm was deceptive. After a year of plying heavy seas the Pahlavi ship of state, that modern marvel of social engineering and technical proficiency, suddenly listed to one side and began to settle in the water. The scramble began to get off before it keeled over.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT WIND whipped through the plane trees, bearing ghostly voices that crept in through the windows and kept the children awake in their beds. “We could hear ‘Allah Akbar!’ every night,” said the Queen, who crossed the landing to calm their sobs. “The children heard the chanting at night and we tried to comfort them,” she said. Ali Reza and Leila were traumatized by the ceaseless, mechanical intonation of “Allah Akbar!” interspersed with bloodthirsty cries of “Death to the Shah!” They wondered who wanted to kill their father.

  Barricaded in the palace behind Chieftain tanks, sandbags, barbed wire, and machine-gun nests, the Pahlavis were hostages to fortune and rulers of a kingdom whose dominion had shrunk to the size of a small municipal park. Many old friends and acquaintances had already fled the country to safety, while others, with an eye to the future, now preferred to keep a discreet distance from Niavaran. The King and Queen had never spent so much time together or in the residence. Though the main house had its own power generator for emergencies, the couple turned out the lights at night to share in the hardships of the people. Their ever-loyal bodyguard Colonel Djahinbini described the atmosphere in Niavaran as “very tense,” with everyone waiting for the next crisis. The massacre at Lavizan base meant that no one could be sure when an agitated servant or guard might snap and start shooting. He was also worried about assassins and spies infiltrating the household. “The staff were conflicted by their loyalty to His Majesty,” said the valet Amir Pourshaja. “Their Majesties noticed what was going on. They were a little alarmed but they recognized it as private. But they noticed.” One of the Shah’s attendants, a man named Hassasi, had been wounded when he tried to close the door on the gunman who forced his way into the Marble Palace in 1965 and almost succeeded in wiping out the Imperial Family. During the revolution Hassasi’s son, a soldier in the Imperial Guard, “went berserk during lunch” and tried to pull the Shah’s picture off the wall. Kambiz Atabai offered his sympathy to Hassasi “and wondered aloud how anyone could think that a man like Khomeini would be able to rule a country like Iran.” To Atabai’s shock, Hassasi revealed that he, too, emulated Khomeini. “I am devoted to His Majesty,” he said, “but I am also a follower of the Imam. I will not have anyone disparage the Imam in my presence.” For Hassasi, his son, and millions like him, the Shah might be head of state but the word of their Marja was law.

  Long winter evenings were spent in the screening room watching old movies and a French television series “with the intriguing title of Les rois maudits (The C
ursed Kings).” Eager to escape Niavaran’s claustrophobic atmosphere, on December 20 the Shah, Queen Farah, and their two youngest children went skiing for a day in the Alborz Mountains “and stood in line like ordinary folks for the lifts at the fashionable resort of Dizin.” Another outing, to Lake Latian for fresh air and a walk in the hills, was not as enjoyable. “Someone wrote ‘Death to the Shah’ on a wall and the children saw it,” said the Queen. This apparently minor incident was the final straw for both parents. “After that we decided the children should leave,” she said. “They were suffering too much.” The children were at least spared the indignities of the slanders spread by Khomeini’s men in the mosques and bazaars. “Farah, where are your gloves?” they jeered. “And where is your pimp of a husband?” “When we have killed the Shah, Farah will rush into the arms of Carter.” The Queen had already accepted that she was unlikely to get out alive. “One day I was looking out the window and I thought, ‘They are going to kill us.’ After that I was calm. I accepted what would happen.”

  Resigned to death yet refusing to accept defeat, Farah was prepared to consider every idea and any avenue in a last, desperate attempt to hold back the revolutionary tide and save the throne for her son. Hossein Nasr pursued his concept of an Islamized monarchy based on the Safavid period, and he played to clerical fears of Khomeini’s fanaticism and his support from the far left and terrorist groups. “The ulama were negotiating with us right to the end,” he said. The tragedy was that the Queen’s delicate negotiations with the moderates were undermined by Ambassador William Sullivan’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Mehdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Beheshti, who represented Khomeini and the extremists. Nasr was appalled that Sullivan placed so much faith in empty suits such as Bazargan, Tavakoli, and Sanjabi. The Americans, he said, were “fumbling around, not knowing what they were doing.” “It is very pleasant to talk politics with them after dinner,” he told the ambassador about Bazargan and his ilk, “but they can’t tie their own shoelaces.”