FOR THE AMERICANS, OF COURSE, IT ALL BEGAN with the shah of Iran,
the “best friend” the United States had on the Persian Gulf in those
days.
He was referred to as “HIM” in minutes of the embassy’s staff
meetings – short for “His Imperial Majesty,” which was in turn short
for “His Imperial Majesty, Aryamehr Shahanshah, King of Kings, Light
of the Aryans, Shadow of the Almighty, and Vice Regent of God.” In
addition, the Iranian newspapers he allowed to publish described HIM
as “beloved of the nation” and “the focus of the universe,”
characterizations he both read and believed. His actual given name
was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and in the fall of 1978 he was about to
celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday. He had been shahanshah for the
last thirty-seven years and now, for the first time in a long time,
sitting in his palace looking out over the disorder of Tehran, he
had doubts about just how much longer his reign would last.
Heretofore, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had always at least looked the
shah’s part-seeming, according to one western journalist, “exactly
like the person he was: rich beyond counting, handsome, alert,
virile … self-possessed … a monarch among mortals…. That he
considered himself superior to other men [was] unstated but
obvious.” Despite being half a foot shorter than his
six-feet-four-inch father, Reza-founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, who
was said to have inspired physical terror with just a glance or a
twitch of his shoulders – Mohammad Shah made up for it by projecting
a surety about his role that was almost mystical. He thought of
himself as the soul of his people, the incarnation of a
2,500-year-old monarchy stretching all the way back to Cyrus the
Great and the very first of the world’s empires. And in western
eyes, at least, he so embodied this ancient kingship that he was
rarely even referred to by the names Mohammad or Pahlavi, but simply
as “the shah of Iran.”
HIM was perhaps the only leader from his part of the world who could
have passed for a European had he wanted. His thick silver hair was
brushed back in waves, he was trim and fit from a lifetime of
tennis, horseback riding, and skiing -invariably tan, with a face
that was all nose and black eyebrows framing gray eyes, the cheeks
set off by deep creases, his forehead twice as long as his chin.
Handsome was often used to describe him, in no small part for his
ability to exude an elegance and noblesse oblige mastered at the
best of Swiss preparatory schools. Fluent in English and French, he
was the first shah in modern memory to speak a language other than
Turkic or Farsi. His aura was always unruffled-a regal equanimity
secretly assisted by his continuous consumption of small doses of
the sedative Valium.
By the time his reign reached its last turning point in the fall of
1978, of course, the shah’s face was internationally familiar. He
appeared on the celebrity pages of the day, often seated with other
royalty, usually escorting Farah, the shahbanou, his queen and third
wife, on state visits or to the slopes at Saint Moritz in the height
of the season. Just as often, his image flashed on the evening news:
wearing one of his $6,000 suits, leading the oil producing nations’
escalation of energy prices at Geneva, or, wearing sunglasses and a
military uniform slathered with gold braid, overseeing maneuvers of
his fledgling navy on the Straits of Hormuz. His comings and goings
were tracked in the western gossip columns. His picture had been
taken with Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia and General de Gaulle of
France and every American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. He
was even mentioned in the chorus of a song by the Rolling Stones.
Inside Iran, of course, his kingship was everywhere. When streets
were widened into modern boulevards, they were regularly renamed
Pahlavi and decorated with obelisks honoring the shah or his father
or both. His picture was posted on street corners and in shop
windows. His birthday was a state occasion. His SAVAK security
police arrested and tortured people who said unfavorable things
about him. He had his father, Reza, officially renamed “Reza the
Great” and interred his remains in a massive tomb surrounded by lawn
and policed with a permanent honor guard. His Imperial Majesty’s
half-million-man army was trained to shout “Javid shah,” long live
the shah, and did so regularly in his presence. Thousands of
citizens were mustered to line his way when he made public
appearances.
Despite a somewhat phobic response to crowds, HIM appeared at these
events in full regalia and played his role to the hilt. Offstage, he
was quite often, according to one acquaintance, “shy,sulky, and
eminently fragile.” The American ambassador since 1977, William
Sullivan, witnessed the shah assuming his role: “With a sigh the
shah straightened his tunic,” Sullivan remembered, “stood up, and
… from the gracious, easy, smiling host with whom I had been
talking, he transformed himself suddenly into a steely,
ramrod-straight autocrat. This involved not only adjusting his
uniform and donning dark glasses but also throwing out his chest,
raising his chin, and fixing his lips in a grim line. When he had
achieved this change to his own satisfaction, he thrust open the
door … and stalked out across the few remaining steps to the
reviewing stand.”
Since circumstances had not allowed a coronation when he took the
throne in 1941, the shah staged one in 1967. The ceremony featured
the legendary Peacock Throne, encrusted with gold and jewels. The
shah wore a pearl-embroidered silk cape, a gold girdle with an
emerald the size of a chicken egg for a buckle, and the
“all-conquering” sword of the dynasty, its sheath covered with
diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. He carried a solid-gold scepter, and
his crown, originally designed for his father’s coronation in 1926,
included 3,380 diamonds, 368 pearls, 5 emeralds, and 2 sapphires.
The shah kept a bust of his late father in the anteroom of his
office at his palace on the slopes of the Alborz Mountains in north
Tehran. The palace was actually several buildings spread about in a
leafy park, where the temperature was often five or ten degrees
cooler than the baking south side of Tehran on the slopes below.
Most of the palace had been built 160 years earlier, then renovated
by Reza. The shah’s work was largely done in the three-story
Sahebgharanieh Palace, and his living quarters were in the newer
Niavaran Palace. By the standards of European monarchs -with whom he
compared himself – the palace was visibly small-time, the size of the
gatehouse at a place like Versailles. The shah had commissioned
drawings for a new palace of dimensions suitable to a monarch such
as himself, to be located even farther up the slope, but in the fall
of 1978 it remained in the planning stage.
His current office in the Sahebgharanieh was a large salon with pink
velvet walls and tall windows overlooking the leafy park in both
directions. The plaster on the walls and ceilings was embedded with
tiny fragments of mirror so the room sparkled. It was also decorated
with gold plate at every turn: gold phones, gold cigarette boxes
studded with jewels, gilt chandeliers, gold ashtrays, thread made of
gold in the “Versailles-kitsch” furniture, gold-plated fixtures in
his private lavatory. The office had the modern accoutrements of
political power as well, with charts displayed, radios deployed, and
an illuminated map board for quick reference. His desk was the final
seat of authority for a nation of some 34 million, the
second-largest petroleum exporter in the world. And, for the last
decade, his personal power there had been closer to absolute than
that of any other head of state on the planet. The shah truly ruled.
His Imperial Majesty had always lived like a man on the come:
endless energy, everything going his way, engaged in what seemed to
be an American men’s magazine fantasy. Seeking to escape the cold
winters in Tehran yet stay at home, he used state funds to develop
Kish Island from what had been a sand spit in the Persian Gulf into
a resort complex that included a palace, an airstrip, and all the
infrastructure to allow the shah to rule while on vacation. Since
the shah loved to ride but Kish Island was too warm to keep horses
for much more than several weeks at a time, his horses were flown in
and out by military transport. Besides water skiing, the shah’s
family liked to go out in the helicopter, piloted by HIM, hover over
the water, and jump out one by one -a kind of portable diving board.
Then the shah would give up the controls to his copilot and join
them in the drink.
When the shah flew to Saint Moritz in his executive jet, he often
piloted the plane himself. Sometimes a second jet came along to haul
the baggage. In either case, his dogs -as many as six of them, in
various sizes-flew with the shah. In Iran, he entertained himself by
flying single-engine planes at treetop level in the Alborz and
around the ten-thousand-foot-tall dome of Mount Damavand looming
over Tehran. In addition to his Iranian palaces, he kept a home in
England and another in Switzerland, where he often skied in
restricted areas and along the lips of precipices. Whenever he
visited any where, it was always behind a shield of dark-suited
SAVAK state security police. He often had a gaggle of courtiers from
his homeland in tow as well.
Upon arrival in Saint Moritz each year, the shah’s caravan from the
airport customarily split -the shahbanou, the dogs, and most of the
rest of the crowd driving on to the royal villa while he proceeded
into town to the Suvretta House hotel. There, with SAVAK occupying
the lobby and the hallway outside a luxury suite, he was presented
with a blond, wide-mouthed European woman for sex play. During the
sixties, most of these playmates were either Lufthansa stewardesses
or very expensive prostitutes, scouted and procured by members of
his court with titles like “Adjutant to His Imperial Majesty” or
“the Shah’s Special Butler.” Those looking to rise in the court
often did so by finding HIM women. Back in Iran, a small palace was
reportedly reserved for these trysts. The prostitutes he used were
contracted through the legendary Madame Claude’s whorehouse in Paris
and flown in for several-week shifts. A member of the court acted as
advance man and patiently taught the women how to curtsy in order to
appropriately greet the shah when he arrived. Aside from sex, HIM
reportedly liked to spend his time with these women talking about
himself.
Though the aristocracy had been abolished by his father, Reza, the
shah had reintroduced a court largely without titles. And those who
joined it did very well by themselves. “The [shah’s] court,” a CIA
report in the 1970s observed, was “a center of licentiousness and
depravity, of corruption and i-fluence peddling.” His half sister
alone amassed a $500 million fortune. All of the royal family drew
benefits from the more than $1 billion in assets of the Pahlavi
Foundation. The shah’s personal physician became one of the largest
landholders in Iran. The shah’s special butler ended up with a
monopoly on the export of Iranian caviar as well as a real estate
fortune. “There was an atmosphere of overwhelming nouveau-riche,
meretricious chi-chi and sycophancy,” a European visitor to the
court remembered. “There was an overheated, overstuffed atmosphere
in those super-deluxe mini palaces in the imperial compound which
left one gasping for air.”
When worried or perplexed, Mohammad Pahlavi often sat silently at
his desk in his office, endlessly twisting a lock of his hair. He
thought often of his father. Their last contact had been thirty-four
years ago, through a scratchy gramophone voice recording Reza made
shortly before his death in South Africa, where the British had
exiled him. On the vinyl disk he shipped to his son, the ferocious
Reza’s only parting advice to HIM had been to “fear nothing.”
By now, the shah had lost the recording and was having a very hard
time following his father’s dictum. “You’re always afraid,” he
admitted to a British television interviewer early in 1978.
“Something might go wrong. So you’re constantly afraid. It’s not
physical fright. Or moral fright. It’s a reasoned fright.” And that
fall, all of the Shah’s worst “reasoned” fears seemed to be coming
true. On any given day, he could see wisps of smoke from a burning
barricade down below in Tehran or hear far-off rifle shots as his
army attempted to control the crowd that invariably came flooding
down some major avenue, wearing black, tens of thousands strong,
women and children at the front, exhorted by mullahs shouting
“Allah-u akbar,” God is great, or “Marg bar shah,” death to the shah.
Though considered an abomination by much of Iran’s Islamic faithful,
the shah was actually devout after his own fashion, largely
abstaining from alcohol and rarely missing his prayers. HIM was a
Shiite Muslim, like most Iranians, a follower of the Koran and the
prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the First Imam.
When still the crown prince, the shah had even studied a little with
a mullah, a fact he had to conceal from his zealously secular
father. The shah’s religious devotion was rooted in a series of
three mystical experiences he had as a child.
The first came in May 1926, several weeks after his father Reza’s
coronation, when Mohammad, not yet seven years old, officially
became heir to the throne, and the Pahlavi name -taken from the
Farsi word for heroic-was first attached to the family. The new
prince was infected with typhoid fever and delirious for weeks. The
western doctor Reza summoned offered only faint hope that the boy
would survive, and at that point Reza broke down in tears. It was
the only time anyone had ever seen him cry. As he did so, the
seemingly incoherent crown prince had a vision of Ali, the First
Imam.
“Ali had with him his famous two-pronged sword,” he remembered,
“which is often seen in paintings of him. He was sitting on his
heels on the floor, and in his hands he held a bowl containing
liquid. He told me to drink, which I did.” The next day, the crown
prince’s fever broke.
The future shah’s second vision came later that summer, after the
typhoid was behind him. His family, including his mother and
sisters, was making their customary excursion to a favorite spot in
the Alborz above Tehran. The trail was steep, and the young Mohammad
was sharing a horse with a military officer when the horse slipped
and Mohammad was thrown headfirst into a jagged rock and knocked out
cold. When he came to, the crowd around him expressed amazement that
he hadn’t even a bruise on his head. The prince explained that “as I
fell I had clearly seen one of our saints, named Abbas, and that I
had felt him holding me and preventing me from crashing my head
against the rock.” Eventually Reza learned of the claim and gave his
son a severe tongue-lashing for engaging in such mumbo jumbo.
Mohammad didn’t argue, but he didn’t change his mind about having
seen Abbas either.
Continues…
Excerpted from The Crisis
by David Harris
Copyright © 2004 by David Harris.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2004
David Harris
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-32394-2
