PREFACE
The Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s. . . . There will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.
—secret CIA report, “Iran in the 1980s,” August 1977, five months before the start of revolution
At about 10:20 on the morning of November 15, 1977, two Sikorsky Sea King helicopters came in low across the Potomac River and made for the flat grassy expanse at the southern base of the Washington Monument. The green-and-white helicopters with their military insignia were part of the presidential fleet known as HMX-1, and on board the lead aircraft was the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, together with his wife, Farah, and a small royal entourage. The primary purpose of the trailing helicopter was to serve as a decoy.
Waiting alongside the helipad were half a dozen black limousines, along with several Secret Service vehicles and a phalanx of motorcycle police outriders. For security reasons, only a handful of officials knew which limousine would transport the shah to the White House, a mere half a mile away. It was the Iranian monarch’s twelfth visit to the United States since assuming the imperial throne thirty-six years before. Over the course of those visits, he had met at the White House with six different American presidents, beginning with Harry Truman. He was now about to meet his seventh: Jimmy Carter.
The shah had been apprehensive about this trip, and for two good reasons. In winning the presidency the previous year, Carter had campaigned on a reformist, clean-government platform. This included, the former governor of Georgia promised, a new emphasis on protecting human rights around the world and a critical reexamination of American arms sales to dictatorial regimes. Both these promises cast an uncomfortable spotlight on Iran. In recent years, a number of organizations had harshly assailed the shah’s regime over its human rights record, and Iran
x Preface was far and away the largest purchaser of American weapons systems, accounting for nearly half of all such sales in recent years. Senior Carter administration officials had quietly offered the shah reassurances that these high-minded pledges did not apply to him, but the Iranian leader was understandably anxious to hear this from the president personally.
This was joined by a more immediate concern. By 1977, some fifty thousand Iranian students were studying at colleges and universities in the United States, and in recent days a sizable portion of them—as many as four thousand, by some reports—had begun converging on Washington to protest his visit. While overwhelmingly young leftists, their numbers were augmented by a smattering of older Iranian dissidents and exiles, as well as American human rights activists, and they had vowed to give the shah a noisy and embarrassing reception. In fact, they had already put the monarch on notice the previous day, when he had stayed at the preserved colonial village of Williamsburg, Virginia; during the night, the royal couple’s sleep was interrupted by chants from several hundred anti-shah demonstrators gathered a short distance away. Lending their appearance a disquieting quality, many concealed their faces behind paper masks, necessary protection, they claimed, against identification by the shah’s secret police.
In anticipation of the unpleasantness likely to play out in Washington, the Iranian government had reportedly arranged for hundreds of pro-regime members of the Iranian American community to be flown or bused into the capital, including Iranian air force cadets under going training at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. Along with banners extolling the shah’s leadership and U.S.-Iranian friendship, the pro-shah organizers had distributed two-sided solidarity flags: the U.S. emblem on one side, the Iranian on the other. By midmorning, a forewarned D.C. police force had isolated the two factions on either side of the Ellipse, the great lawn stretching just below the White House, but it made for a tense scene; penned behind flimsy strips of snow fencing about five hundred feet apart, the two groups hurled insults at each other through megaphones, their volume and intensity growing as the time for the shah’s scheduled arrival at the White House drew nearer.
That morning found me on the Ellipse as well, strolling among the police and the handful of reporters occupying the no-man’s-land between the two sides. I was eighteen years old and employed at the Treasury Department headquarters building, immediately adjacent to
xi the White House, as a special aide to the secretary of the Treasury. The nice-sounding title notwithstanding, I was essentially an errand boy, and because the secretary at the time, W. Michael Blumenthal, required very little in the way of erranding, I spent most of my working hours strolling about the city in search of something interesting to do. On the morning of November 15, 1977, nothing looked quite so interesting as the spectacle unfolding on the Ellipse.
At about 10:30 a.m., the shah’s motorcade swung through the iron gates of the White House and came up its semicircular drive, an occasion marked by the start of a twenty-one-gun salute. In hindsight, this customary honor for a visiting head of state might have been a mistake, for the anti-shah protesters on the eastern side of the Ellipse seemed to interpret it rather like the firing of a starting gun. In an instant, hundreds broke through the snow fencing holding them back and began a charge across the great lawn for their opponents. While some of the proshah supporters started to flee in panic, a number of the younger men in their midst—the military cadets, judging by their builds and crew cuts— grabbed up whatever potential weapons lay close at hand and similarly rushed forward to battle. Suddenly no-man’s-land, rapidly shrinking as it was, didn’t seem such a great place to be.
For the next two or three minutes—it felt longer at the time—the Ellipse was the scene of a kind of massive street brawl, fists and feet flying, people sent tumbling or running or crawling, such that it was quite impossible to determine who was getting the better of whom. Nor could I be certain of the affiliation of the demonstrator who struck me across the back with a wooden stave with such force it sent me momentarily to the ground, although the power of the blow led me to suspect one of the more physically fit military cadets over some leftist graduate student. When finally the police rushed in with tear gas and billy clubs, there were already a good number of injured scattered about the lawn.
For the ceremony welcoming the shah to the White House, a rostrum had been erected on the South Lawn, before which several hundred invited guests were gathered to hear his and the president’s opening remarks. In hindsight, this tradition, too, was probably a mistake, for no sooner had the two leaders, along with their wives, mounted the stage than the first wafts of the tear gas discharged on the Ellipse began to envelop them. In a famous series of photos taken at the time, both couples try to maintain dignified poses as tears stream down their cheeks.
Concluding the embarrassing display on the South Lawn as quickly as possible—Jimmy Carter would later joke that it was one of the shortest speeches he ever gave—the two couples retreated to the healthier air inside the White House. As Rosalynn Carter led Farah and her entourage off for a coffee reception and traditional “ladies’ tour” of the White House, the two heads of state proceeded to the Cabinet Room, two doors down from the Oval Office. For this meeting, the shah was joined by only two advisors, in contrast to the array of American officials who sat opposite: President Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and several other senior State Department officials.
Also seated at the table was the chief National Security Council (NSC) officer in charge of Iranian affairs, a forty-two-year-old navy captain named Gary Sick. Although he had carried the Iran portfolio at the NSC for two years, Sick was seeing the shah for the first time. “My first thought was how delicate he seemed,” he recalled. “Very elegant, very refined, with this ramrod-straight posture, but the overall impression was of someone rather delicate. From all I’d read about him, all the newsreels I’d watched, I don’t know that I was quite prepared for that.”
There is often a platitudinous quality to these preliminary White House meetings with foreign heads of state, pleasantries combined with an overview of matters to be addressed in more detail later. While the November 15 meeting contained an element of this, it also proved unusually substantive. Several times President Carter stressed that he not only appreciated America’s “special relationship” with Iran but wished to find ways to strengthen it further, a tacit sign that the shah would hear few concerns from the new administration over Iran’s human rights record or profligate arms purchases. For his part, the Iranian king repeated a promise not to seek an increase in oil prices at the upcoming meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), welcome news from the man who’d long been the chief agent of such hikes.
Throughout the ninety-minute meeting, Gary Sick was struck by the shah’s commanding manner. “On our side of the table, there was a lot of informal discussion back-and-forth, but I can’t recall the shah even looking at the two guys he was with; they certainly didn’t have speaking parts. But this was his element: the planned meeting, the laid-out agenda. I found him very impressive, just thoroughly prepared on whatever topic came up.”
Despite the wariness with which the shah had approached this state visit and the chaos accompanying his arrival, it quickly became evident that he and Carter enjoyed a personal rapport, so much so that by the time he and the shahbanou left Washington the following afternoon, the king was in an ebullient mood. To an American diplomat he remarked that the visit could not possibly have gone better, while to a palace advisor he allowed that it was one of the most fruitful trips he had ever made to the American capital. Back in Iran, the state-controlled media carried banner headlines extolling the King of Kings’ triumphant foray abroad, while the consensus in Carter’s White House was that the two days of meetings had been a tremendous success, a further strengthening of the long-standing American-Iranian alliance.
Yet the occasion posed a couple of troubling questions should anyone have chosen to take notice. The violent demonstrations of November 15 had left well over a hundred injured, including twenty-nine policemen, making it the worst day of civil unrest in the nation’s capital in nearly a decade. Fistfights between the warring factions had extended even into the city’s emergency rooms, requiring hospital security guards to segregate pro- and anti-shah demonstrators awaiting medical treatment. Many of the estimated four thousand Iranian students who had come to Washington to denounce the shah were drawn from their nation’s middle and upper classes, and if this was the outlook of those who had most greatly benefited from his rule, what might it say about those inside Iran who lacked such privilege? And while most of the anti-shah demonstrators identified as leftists, they had been joined by members of several conservative Muslim religious groups, so that interspersed with the placards decrying the monarch as a right-wing fascist and American lackey were others accusing him of betraying Islam. Some of those in this latter category carried placards bearing the likeness of one of the shah’s bitterest critics, an aging cleric virtually unknown outside Iran named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. When was the last time that Washington, or any nation’s capital, saw secular leftists and religious fundamentalists march together in common cause?
But no one did take notice—at least no one in a position to do something about it. Instead, no sooner had the shah departed Washington than White House aides set to planning President Carter’s reciprocal visit to Iran, scheduled for a mere six weeks later, the better to capitalize on the progress being made. At this second meeting, Carter repeated the praise
he had showered on the king at the White House, noting that “thanks to the leadership of the shah, Iran is an island of stability in a troubled region.”
Once again, it was almost as if some psychological starting gun had been fired, for within days of Carter’s fulsome tribute there occurred inside Iran the first significant anti-shah protests in over a decade. Initially, these demonstrations were small and easily scattered, but within a few weeks they had metastasized and turned violent. Still, few took notice. By the spring of 1978, protesters had taken to the streets of almost every Iranian town of any size, their cause now imbued with a distinctly religious tilt, but it was only then, six months after his likeness had appeared on demonstrators’ posters in Washington, that The New York Times thought to identify the shah’s chief nemesis, Ruhollah Khomeini, for the first time while managing to get his first name wrong. But still it got worse, and still very few grasped the extent. By that December, with Iran paralyzed by strikes and sliding toward civil war, the death toll from its street battles now reaching into the thousands—into the tens of thousands, according to the opposition—President Carter could still profess full confidence in the shah’s ability to right the situation and persevere. And then, just weeks later, the once unimaginable: After thirty-seven years, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, was simply no more, cast into a wandering exile as his regime was engulfed by a revolution few saw coming and none knew how to stop.
Earlier in my teen years, I’d spent some six weeks traveling through Iran with my father, part of an extended father-and-son road trip through the Middle East and central Asia. That experience, joined to my gadfly presence at the Washington demonstrations in November 1977, led me to take an intense interest in the drama that unfolded in Iran over that year of revolution. I think my fascination was heightened by an element of disbelief. I shared the amazement, expressed by others far more knowledgeable about such things, that a sophisticated police state appeared utterly incapable of restoring order despite all the instruments of repression at its disposal, that as a sign of protest the women of one of the most Westernized nations in the Middle East would willingly return to the veil discarded by their grandmothers half a century before. Like so many others, I never thought the future of the Pahlavi dynasty was truly in doubt until suddenly it was, never imagined that a royal lineage purport-
ing to date back twenty-five hundred years would simply crumble until suddenly it did. And I certainly never suspected the Iranian Revolution would take on the profound significance that it has, that its legacy would mark it as one of the most important political developments of the modern age.
If at first glance this seems a tad hyperbolic, consider what that revolution has wrought.
In the forty-six years since its success, the Western and Islamic worlds have engaged in what many on both sides regard as an existential confrontation, one marked by revanchist religious fundamentalism and statesponsored terrorism on one side and by paranoia and ultranationalist bigotry on the other. It has colored almost every political and economic development in the Middle East during that time, a gamut that spans everything from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to international trade and energy policy.
While the effects of the revolution have obviously been most profoundly felt within Iran itself, they have been only slightly less so in the United States. The collapse of the Iranian monarchy brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world. Its aftershocks led to the fall of an American president and the advent of a new administration intent on re-exerting American influence abroad through massive rearmament and the sponsorship of proxy wars. The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America’s greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades— to name but two, the 1983 intervention in Beirut that left nearly three hundred American servicemen dead and the early embrace of Iraq’s despotic Saddam Hussein—and it has been a crucial contributing factor in most others: the disastrous 2003 American invasion of Iraq, its ham-fisted approach to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. Today, the specter of revolutionary Iran continues to drive American foreign policy in such disparate corners of the Middle East as Lebanon and Yemen and Israel; remains a point of division between Washington and its European allies in how best to deal with Iran’s ongoing and highly contentious nuclear energy program; and poses a chief complicating factor in Western efforts to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.
On a personal level, the effect of the Iranian Revolution on my own journalistic career has been everywhere evident. In my nearly four
decades of covering conflicts around the world, one crucial feature animating much of the violence has been a spike in religious militancy. This term is not, as some would have it, synonymous with Islamic militancy. In Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s it was ultranationalist Buddhist monks who promoted a war against the nation’s Hindu minority. In the Balkans in the 1990s, it was Serbian Christians who launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims, and in Israel it was the extremism of Jewish settlers that helped spark a Palestinian uprising. As these words are written, attacks by Hindu militants on the Muslim minority threaten to carry regions of India into open conflict, while in Russia, Orthodox Christian priests stand in church pulpits to bless Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as holy war. Nor can Americans find comfort in dismissing such religiously justified violence as the province of “the other.” In the United States, white Christian nationalists are responsible for a string of mass shootings that have left scores dead, and were in the vanguard of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
None of this can be directly attributed to the Iranian Revolution, obviously, but the groundswell of Islamic protest that swept the shah from power in 1979 marked the modern world’s first successful religious counterrevolution against the forces of secularism, the beginning of an international resurgence of sectarianism that continues to reverberate today. Indeed, if one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.
Yet for all its importance, the Iranian upheaval is also marked by a curious paradox: The closer one examines it, the more mysterious and implausible it all seems.
One of the great conceits of history writing is promulgating theories of cause and effect, of suggesting that one thing happened because of something else that happened before. In this way, for example, it can be posited that the root cause of World War II was the crippling peace terms imposed on Germany at the end of World War I, or the global misery brought on by the Great Depression, or the tectonic shifts of empire and colonialism. The study of history then becomes a weighing of these different explanations, a debate over which cause produced the greatest effect. One by-product of this measuring process is that a quality of inevitability tends to take hold, the sense that however one chooses to weigh
the competing factors, the end result—in this example, World War II— was all but bound to occur.
Yet the more one delves into the mechanics of the Iranian Revolution, the less this construct appears to hold. To the contrary, one is apt to be struck by its seeming haphazardness, the notion that, far from any kind of inevitability, if events had played out just a little differently, if certain decisions had been made sooner or more forcefully, the outcome might have been completely altered.
On the eve of the shah’s 1977 state visit to Washington, which also means on the eve of the revolution that would destroy him, a highly classified CIA analysis concluded that his hold on power was so absolute that he would continue to rule Iran for many years to come. That conclusion is obviously risible in light of what came, yet at the time it would have seemed the height of foolishness to suggest otherwise.
On the international level, the King of Kings enjoyed the unwavering support of the United States, but he had also forged a close enough relationship with his superpower neighbor, the Soviet Union, to ensure there would be no Kremlin destabilization efforts against his throne. He did have his regional rivals, notably the Baathist regime in Iraq and radicals like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, but the Iranian military, the fifth largest in the world and equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry obtainable, dwarfed those of all the Arab nations in the Middle East combined. The shah also had close, if discreet, ties with the other principal military power broker in the region, Israel. If it hinged on the actions of the outside world, a safe-seeming bet in 1977 would have been that the twenty-five-hundred-year reign of the Iranian monarchy might last a thousand more.
There looked to be even less reason for concern on the domestic front. Over the span of the shah’s rule, per capita income had increased a phenomenal twenty times over, the literacy rate had quintupled, and the average lifespan of an Iranian had more than doubled from twenty-seven to fifty-six. During his reign, half a million Iranians had obtained college degrees abroad, while the network of universities within Iran ranked among the finest in the region. Socially, women enjoyed greater freedoms than almost anywhere else in the Islamic world and filled a number of important—if still mostly second-tier—government positions, while the special protections given Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities, its Jews and Armenians and Assyrians, ensured these groups were among the
shah’s greatest defenders. To be sure, there were fissures. There were gross disparities between rich and poor, between urban and rural, and corruption was an endemic problem. The majority of citizens, and especially the deluge of young men who had recently left the countryside for the cities, led grinding lives of low-wage labor with little hope of advancement. Even so, very few Iranians could honestly look to their situation in 1977 and argue they were worse off than before Mohammad Reza Pahlavi came to the throne.
Which wasn’t to say the shah didn’t have domestic opponents. He surely did, but he also appeared well on his way to muzzling or mollifying them to the point of near oblivion. The indigenous communist party had long since been crushed, with just a few dead-enders carrying on the struggle through underground guerrilla groups—of no serious threat to the regime, but useful for the shah to invoke whenever his American benefactors balked at one of his more extravagant weapons requests. Conservative clerics had always chafed against his modernization efforts, especially his empowerment of women and his open embrace of Western culture, but the monarch had adopted a policy of casting his most implacable religious opponents into exile while operating a patronage system that kept the rest of the clerical hierarchy quiescent, if not exactly happy. On a darker note, over the previous twenty years, his secret police, SAVAK, had cultivated such a pervasive informant network across the nation that it would seem all but impossible for a serious antigovernment movement to develop at any level of society without their knowledge. Even from the standpoint of personal protection, the shah appeared untouchable. Whereas an American president was guarded by a security detail of Secret Service agents numbering a few dozen at any given time, the King of Kings had a personal bodyguard of thousands of soldiers, the Javidans, or Immortals, who took an oath to die in his defense. If anything, the 1977 CIA briefing book describing his grip on power seemed almost to undersell.
And something else rather peculiar about the Iranian Revolution: This sanguine view of the shah’s future was shared by virtually everyone, including his enemies. In almost all successful revolutions, there are those true believers who are confident of victory from the outset— or at least so they claim after the fact—but such believers were in exceedingly short supply in Iran. Of the many former revolutionaries I’ve spoken with, nearly all expected their insurrection to end with some
kind of compromise measure—a coalition civilian government; a continuing monarchy but with vastly reduced powers—until very late in the contest. None professed to have foreseen the actual outcome until shortly before it occurred.
This was also the experience of Michael Metrinko, a foreign service officer who spent eight years in Iran, including fourteen months as one of the American embassy hostages. In the mid-1980s, Metrinko met with a conservative Iranian cleric who had been one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s closest confidants during the revolution. Metrinko questioned the man on the strategies the Islamists had employed to overthrow the shah, the rationale behind one course of action or another, but found his answers consistently wanting. Picking up on Metrinko’s frustration, the cleric finally asked, “Michael, do you think we actually planned to have a revolution? We were just as surprised as anyone.”
All of which lends an element of mystery to the Iranian Revolution, one that boils down to a few core questions. Just why was the shah so slow in responding to the threat to his rule? How was the United States so oblivious to the danger facing one of its most important allies that an American president could still express his full confidence in that ally’s vitality less than a month before his ruin? And what of Ayatollah Khomeini? Was he just lucky, an out-of-touch religious zealot who happened to be at the right place at the right time, or a master manipulator behind the scenes, stealthily steering the revolution away from a whole host of seemingly more plausible outcomes to instead establish a theocratic dictatorship with himself as supreme leader?
One person long haunted by these questions is the former NSC advisor Gary Sick. “I’ve studied this thing for the past forty years,” he told me. “I’ve read almost every book that’s been written on it, and it still doesn’t fully make sense to me. The thing I keep coming back to is the shah. Why didn’t he act? If he had, I think there’s no doubt he would have survived. But he never did. We waited and waited and waited, but it just never happened, and then it was too late. It’s the damnedest thing, and it’s not a very satisfying answer, but it’s all I have.”
Yet possible answers to these core questions might be found in another odd feature of the Iranian Revolution: the remarkably small number of principal actors involved.
At its uppermost level, this is a story that primarily revolves around the actions—or inactions—of three men: the shah, Ayatollah Khomeini,
and Jimmy Carter. What is astounding, though, is that the number of those who were close to these three leaders, who were privy to their concerns or who had the ability to sway their thinking, was also extraordinarily limited. Forming Khomeini’s inner circle at that crucial moment when he assumed leadership of the revolution and first strode the global stage were a mere three or four lieutenants. The shah’s circle of trusted advisors was possibly even smaller: his wife; a lone confidant who might have been the one person who dared speak to him candidly; and in the desperate last days the two men, the British and American ambassadors, who the shah believed held his fate in their hands. Most startling in this regard was Jimmy Carter, not only the overseer of a vast bureaucratic apparatus with any number of Iran experts to turn to for advice but a man famous for careful, even ponderous, deliberation. Yet, with uncanny consistency, at almost every key juncture of the Iranian crisis, Carter found himself distracted by seemingly even-weightier events and fell back time and again on the counsel of the same tiny handful of subordinates. What this also means, of course, is that the range of counsel these leaders received was vanishingly small—or comprised no range at all. This stands to reason in the case of Ayatollah Khomeini: As a general rule, those who view themselves as God’s earthly representative aren’t much in the market for considering alternative points of view. For his part, the King of Kings had created such a culture of sycophancy within his palace that even upsetting economic statistics, like climbing unemployment or inflation rates, were routinely doctored to more pleasing results. Within the American government, there were those at the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon who did try to alert others to the closing peril but, as outliers to the officially approved sunny narrative about Iran, had their warnings stricken or shunted to the side long before they reached the desks of the president or his closest advisors. To an astonishing degree, the two parties most dependent on both understanding and mollifying the Iranian “street” as the revolution got under way—the shah and his American ally—had maneuvered themselves into a position where neither had any comprehension of it.
Ultimately, what all the questions surrounding the Iranian Revolution come down to is a revisiting of a story that has been told in various guises since time immemorial. It is the tale of a group of people caught in extremis, the account of what they did, or failed to do, in a moment of profound crisis and change. Some acted with courage and either lived or
died as a result. Some acted cowardly, and also lived or died as a result. Some had the foresight to see doom closing in, while others stood frozen and disbelieving until the very end. And, as always, there were those who glimpsed opportunity and moved boldly to seize it. In this book, it is my hope that by focusing on the actions and experiences of that small cast of people who resided in or were eyewitness to the inner circles of the revolution, I might both tell a new version of an old tale and begin to answer some of the riddles of why the Iranian Revolution played out as it did.
This still leaves the question of precisely where and with whom to start the tale. Perhaps not with the figure who stands at its center, not the King of Kings himself, nor at a moment of weighty deliberations over some great geopolitical drama. Instead, maybe with the story of the American adventurer who turned up in Tehran in early 1968 and who, through a peculiar set of circumstances, was to gain a unique insight into the dark undercurrents roiling Iranian society at that time. His name was George Braswell, and the oddities of his story begin with what brought him to Iran in the first place: In a nation somewhere between 96 and 99 percent Muslim, he came to spread the good news about Jesus.
THE COURTIER
“I think I was always looking for a kind of personal test, both of myself and of my faith,” George Braswell said in explaining the unusual turn his life took in 1968. “Iran gave me that.”
Originally from a tiny town in the southern reaches of Virginia, Braswell was raised in the progressive wing of the Southern Baptist church, his commitment to civil rights and social justice further honed by graduate studies at the famed Yale Divinity School. By the mid-1960s, however, his youthful restlessness and ambitions had been tempered by practicality, leaving him the pastor of a small North Carolina church while raising a young family. It was there in 1967 that he heard a bit of stirring news: The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, the church agency that selected and dispatched evangelical missionaries to the far corners of the globe, was looking for a volunteer to go to Iran.
There had once been a strong tradition of American Protestant missionaries venturing to Iran to start up schools and medical clinics and discreetly convert locals to the Christian faith. By the 1960s, however, that tradition had ended a good half century earlier, and between a rise in Islamic conservatism and lingering Iranian resentment over
past Western chauvinism it seemed unlikely to revive anytime soon. Nevertheless, the Southern Baptist leadership had decided it was time to retest the waters. On a lark, the thirty-one-year-old Braswell signed up for the mission, and in early 1968 he and his wife, Joan, and their three young children set off for Iran on a ninety-day visa. “We didn’t know if we’d be able to stay or not,” he recounted, “but the plan was to try to find something to do that the Iranian government would approve of.”
No small order. In light of perpetual tensions between the shah’s modernist regime and Iran’s conservative Muslim clergy, proselytizing was clearly out of the question. When it came to pastoring, both the expatriate population in Tehran and the existing Iranian-Christian communities scattered about the country were well tended. Braswell’s prospects appeared exceedingly dim, but then he was introduced to the dean of Islamic theology at the University of Tehran. Taking a quick liking to the affable Virginian, the dean offered him a position teaching English and comparative religion—Islam excepted—to the school’s graduate students. Braswell immediately accepted, becoming the newest faculty member, and certainly the only American Christian, in one of the leading bastions of Shia Islam higher learning. “There were about thirty-five other members of the faculty,” he recalled, “all of them Muslim clergy and some of them very senior in the religious hierarchy. They all wore turbans and robes. I wore a coat and tie.”
From this improbable vantage point, George Braswell was to become one of the very few outsiders to gain a glimpse of the religious schisms that had developed in Iran by the late 1960s—although gaining that glimpse was a feat in itself. To overcome the legendary Iranian standoffishness with foreigners, Braswell took intensive Farsilanguage classes and read whatever he could find on Iranian and Islamic culture. He was also aided by an outgoing personality and an intense curiosity about all aspects of Iranian life. Quite quickly, the Christian evangelist won over even the wariest of his Muslim colleagues. “My whole approach was to be as transparent as I could be,” Braswell explained. “I’d strike up a conversation with anybody and then just let them take it wherever they wanted it to go, and how far they wanted it to go. Once they decided I wasn’t CIA—because to Iranians every American is CIA—they began inviting me into their
homes. I sat on the floor, I ate rice with my fingers, I asked questions, and I listened, so I built this trust.”
With that trust, and in response to his unceasing questions about the Islamic faith, Braswell’s Iranian colleagues took to escorting him to various mosques in Tehran during prayer services, something generally discouraged for nonbelievers, so that he could observe the proceedings for himself. At first, these excursions were to the grand old mosques in the city center, but they gradually extended to far more modest structures, often little more than bare cinder-block huts, in the working-class neighborhoods of south and east Tehran.
In his forays into the countryside, Braswell had been instantly struck by the chasm of experience that existed between Iran’s urban and rural, a land where women wore the latest Parisian fashions in central Tehran while, perhaps twenty miles away, farmworkers spent their days harnessed to medieval human-plow contraptions for lack of draft animals. In his trips into the capital’s slums, Braswell saw that this same gulf existed among Tehran’s haves and have-nots, that for every heir of the aristocracy flaunting his wealth in the nightclubs and casinos of downtown were dozens—perhaps hundreds—of itinerant workers crowded into makeshift shacks, young men lured in from the jobless countryside and now scrabbling for whatever subsistence wage was to be found. As Braswell soon discovered, this schism was also reflected in religion, the divide between the so-called government mosques and their traditional counterparts.
In the government mosques, presided over by clerics who were approved and subsidized by the state, Koranic sermons were interlaced with paeans to the shah. In the traditional mosques, by contrast, there was little talk of the king. Instead, the clerics there preached a conservative message of modesty, moral rectitude and a rejection of modern values to congregations largely drawn from the city’s poor or working class. In these mosques, it was not so much what was said that was subversive—all assumed that SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, was everywhere and taking notes—as what was left out: any praise of the regime, any suggestion that the nation was on the correct and righteous path. “So that’s when I realized there was this very large segment of Iranians out there who didn’t like the shah,” Braswell explained, “who thought he was a fraud.”
But the American evangelist’s education was just getting started.
So thoroughly did Braswell win the trust of his faculty colleagues and students that one day one of his graduate students approached to ask cryptically if he’d be interested in hearing a special kind of sermon. Braswell readily accepted, even if puzzled by the outing’s arrangements: He was to meet his student at a specific intersection in south Tehran at four in the morning.
He attributed this to the finely honed Iranian streak of paranoia over the shah’s thugs. When he and his family first settled into Tehran, Braswell had been quietly advised that SAVAK had surely tapped his home telephone and that there would be at least one SAVAK plant in all his university classes. He’d also noted a tendency of Iranians to talk in whispers in public settings, a habit he first attributed to a social characteristic until it dawned on him that it was protection against being overheard. Since most Iranians whom Braswell knew displayed such caginess as a matter of course, he didn’t think too much about the precautions his graduate student took that night.
At their rendezvous, the student led Braswell to a nondescript home behind a high mud wall and into a room where about two dozen young seminary students and lower-level clerics, or mullahs, were gathered. Within a few minutes, all fell silent to huddle around a portable tape cassette player as a taped sermon was played. Despite the tinny sound of the machine, the impassioned words of the speaker, delivered in a harsh baritone, came through very clearly. “He was saying, ‘Down with the shah,’ ” Braswell recounted, “ ‘mobilize your forces, get ready to change things.’ ”
All at once, the American professor understood his student’s precautions: He had been led into an underground cell working to overthrow the state, its members subject to imprisonment or worse should they be uncovered by SAVAK. As for the identity of the speaker on the cassette, it was a name Braswell had previously heard only in quick passing: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Five years earlier, Khomeini, a religious teacher in the city of Qom, had emerged as the chief spokesman of a protest movement against a series of economic and social reforms that the shah was enacting as part of his so-called White Revolution. The most controversial of these was a measure granting Iranian women the right to vote and an agrarian reform program designed to break up the vast landholdings of the kingdom’s oligarch families—and of its many religious
foundations—for redistribution to landless peasants. Khomeini had so stridently denounced these initiatives that in June 1963 the shah had him arrested, an action that sparked the bloodiest riots in Iran in a decade. In the face of such popular fury, the shah soon released Khomeini, only to have the conservative cleric quickly launch a new line of attack. This time, the shah bundled his nemesis aboard an airplane and cast him from the country. When George Braswell first heard his sermons in the south Tehran slums, the exiled Khomeini had spent the previous several years in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in neighboring Iraq.
The nighttime excursion with his graduate student convinced Braswell that he was seeing a revolutionary force in the making. “With these cassette tapes he was sending over,” he said, “Khomeini was trying to bring on board the local preachers at mosques all across the country. I got the impression that the local preachers and some of my preacher boys—I called them my preacher boys, the most conservative guys on my faculty—they had a tremendous amount of influence, and Khomeini was developing a coterie of leadership across the country, a network, so that when the auspicious time for revolution came, he would have them prepared.”
Yet Braswell didn’t find any of this particularly alarming. Every society has its malcontents, after all, and so firmly did the shah appear in control of Iran it was hard to imagine a gaggle of Old Guard clerics posed a bona fide threat. Besides, Iran was so important an ally of the United States, and the official American presence there so ubiquitous, that such a movement could hardly have gone unnoticed. “I just assumed I was slow to the game,” Braswell said, “that everyone already knew about this—surely, the CIA and all the guys down at the American embassy knew all about it.”
In this, the evangelist from Virginia could not have been more mistaken. When Braswell first heard Ruhollah Khomeini’s clandestine call to arms in late 1968, the cleric’s name had scarcely garnered a mention anywhere in the voluminous correspondence flowing out of the American embassy or the CIA station in Tehran in the four years since his exile. What’s more, this void would extend for at least eight more years, even as the number of Khomeini cassettes smuggled into Iran multiplied, and both the extent and the intensity of religious opposition to the shah grew. Well into the mid-1970s, in the eyes
of American officialdom Ayatollah Khomeini might as well not have existed at all.
It would be unfair, however, to attribute this silence to simple base ignorance. Rather, it was an ignorance born of willfulness, a testament to the culture created by the man around whom all others in Iran tiptoed: the King of Kings.
EARLy On ThE MORninG of April 6, 1970, a slender fifty-year-old man in a well-tailored suit climbed to the second-floor landing of the Jahan Nama Palace in Tehran. His name was Asadollah Alam, and his official title was minister of the imperial court of Iran.
At the top of the landing, he was met by two liveried footmen who ceremoniously swung open an ivory-inlaid door. The room Alam stepped into was spacious and, if the morning curtains had already been drawn back from its exterior windows, almost dazzlingly bright: all stained glass and chandeliers and mosaics of mirrored silver. At the center of this glittery place was a long desk, behind which sat another fifty-year-old man, also slender and also clad in a business suit. This was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shahanshah.
In all likelihood, that morning’s meeting of the two men followed the same general pattern as the hundreds that had preceded it. The shah had probably been reading from one of the stacks of papers on his desk with his oversized, black-rimmed bifocals when Alam entered. It’s just as probable that he neither spoke nor looked up as his minister approached, but instead absently raised his right hand from the desk to let it hover in the air. Drawing up at the shah’s side, Alam would have executed a deep bow, then taken the proffered hand and, while kissing it, whispered a prayer for the continued health and safety of the man known as the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth. This incantation complete, Alam would have then rounded the desk, careful not to show his back to the monarch while doing so, to stand on its opposite side. Because their meeting that April morning was scheduled to be brief, perhaps a mere twenty minutes, the court minister probably remained standing for the duration.
In itself, this bit of royal theater would not have seemed at all odd to anyone familiar with the rhythms of the Iranian imperial court in the spring of 1970; with only slight variation, it was the same ritual
performed by every Iranian commoner who gained admission to the shah’s inner sanctum. It might seem a bit more peculiar if one considered that, by then, the king had long since regarded Asadollah Alam as the closest friend and confidant he had ever known.
The two men had first crossed paths in Tehran in the late 1930s. It was an inevitable encounter since Alam, from an aristocratic family of eastern Iran, and Crown Prince Mohammad Reza traveled in the capital city’s small circle of ruling elite, but it wasn’t until the late 1940s, after the shah had ascended the throne and set out to amass greater power, that the two firmly joined forces. For Alam, the attraction seemed born less of self-aggrandizement than a shared vision for their nation’s future. By then, the callow young king already dreamed of wresting Iran into the modern era, and to do so required breaking the iron grip of a clergy and landed aristocracy that had kept Iran in a feudalistic state for centuries. Despite his own highly privileged background—the Alam family literally “owned” scores of villages in Birjand province—Asadollah shared in this goal, as well as in the shah’s contempt for the nation’s calcified political class. As the shah’s stock steadily rose, so did Alam’s, especially after he stayed loyal to the monarch during a 1953 constitutional crisis when many others jumped ship. That crisis had ended with a coup restoring the shah to absolute power. With Alam’s most favored status thus secured, over the next decade the king rotated him through a series of ministerial positions, culminating in his assuming the prime ministership in 1962. That appointment notwithstanding, there was no clearer measure of where true power lay in Iran—as well as of how greatly the shah had come to rely on the aristocrat from Birjand—than the fact that Alam became minister of the imperial court after serving as prime minister. Many of those who had dealings with the Iranian royal court in its last years would comment on a pronounced physical similarity between the shah and Asadollah Alam. Both had slender frames and stayed physically fit, and both were self-conscious about their relatively slight height, which they compensated for with elevator shoes and ramrod-straight posture. More than physical appearance, though, this impression of sameness was reinforced by a matching of mannerisms, of body language and gesture—only to be expected, perhaps, of two people so constantly in each other’s company. In addition to their almost-daily meetings, which could last anywhere from fifteen min-
utes to five or six hours, the minister of court accompanied the shah on almost all his trips away from the palace, whether one-day excursions to the Iranian countryside or extended state visits to foreign capitals. His presence was even demanded on royal vacations; as Alam once noted in his diary as the shah prepared to leave for a skiing holiday to Switzerland, “HIM [His Imperial Majesty] stressed that he will be unescorted for much of his coming trip to Europe and expects me to keep him company as often as possible.” Over the span of his nearly four decades on the Peacock Throne, the shah surely spent more of his waking hours in the company of Asadollah Alam than anyone else.
On the morning of April 6, 1970, the main item on their agenda was to go over preparations for a grand party, scheduled to take place in eighteen months, at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. It was a celebration very long in the works. The shah had always felt aggrieved by the manner in which he had assumed the throne in 1941, a slapdash affair utterly devoid of pageantry, and for just as long had nursed the hope of holding some kind of do-over event. Outsiders might be forgiven for thinking he’d achieved that with a second coronation ceremony in 1967, but despite a glittering show of horse-drawn carriages and bejeweled crowns and thirty-foot silken trains, the notable lack of high-ranking foreign dignitaries in attendance at that event—there seemed to be a collective mystification in foreign capitals as to why a coronation was occurring twenty-six years after the fact—continued to rankle. For the upcoming spectacle at Persepolis, the shah was promoting a far more memorable milestone, twenty-five hundred years of imperial Persian rule, and planning a multiday extravaganza of parades and fireworks and feasts the likes of which the world had rarely seen. This, to the shah’s mind, was just as it should be, since the world had rarely seen a success story like modern Iran, a land risen from the shackles of foreign domination and now poised to restore its ancient splendor and reclaim its place among the first rank of nations. There was a snag, though. Persepolis lay at the very edge of the barren, waterless deserts of central Iran, thirty miles from the nearest sizable town and three hundred miles from the nearest decent hotel. Just where to put all the foreign dignitaries the shah hoped would attend? In addition, by some nasty quirk of nature, the Persepolis environs were home to a staggering array of venomous snakes, scorpions and poisonous reptiles. How to ensure the festivities wouldn’t be
marred by the unhappy spectacle of a visiting head of state or ladyin-waiting collapsing into convulsive death throes? As with so many other problems that came Iran’s way, the shah had assigned the task of finding solutions to the minister of the imperial court.
On that April morning, Alam had a bit of dispiriting news to impart about the party preparations, but after thirty years’ association with the king, he knew it best to start on a more upbeat note. He could now report that the extension to the airport runway in Shiraz, necessary to accommodate the Boeing 707s that would bring dignitaries to the festival site, was about to get under way. Once arrived at the gleaming new terminal, VIPs would be whisked across the desert in one of the 250 Mercedes sedans on special order for the occasion. By far the most ambitious aspect of the enterprise was the tent city to be built beside the Persepolis ruins once its plague of deadly reptiles had been eradicated. Serving as temporary homes to the most important invitees, some sixty prefabricated buildings were to be arrayed over the desert in a sunburst pattern and adjacent to a massive banquet hall where the international elite would gorge upon caviar-stuffed quail eggs and roasted peacock. That was the original plan anyway, but it was now Alam’s sad duty to inform the shah that even eighteen months out the cost overruns for the party were soaring. In particular, the estimate for the main banquet hall, contracted to the finest tentmakers in Europe, was staggering. At that day’s meeting, Alam persuaded the shah to reduce the banquet pavilion to a quarter of its originally proposed size, producing a savings of millions, but not, as he noted in his diary that evening, “without a considerable struggle.”
From there, their conversation moved on to other things, the plethora of issues, large and small, that forever framed the days of the two most powerful men in Iran.
Because the shah personally oversaw so much of the workings of the nation, because he allowed—in fact, insisted—that the demands on his time and attention range from the gravest issues of state to the almost absurdly trivial, the same relentless cascade of matters befell his closest aide. As a consequence, at the same time that Alam was seeing to the trimming of the Persepolis banquet hall tent, he was also working to expand Iran’s sphere of military influence in the Persian Gulf, serving as the point man in a series of extremely complex oilfor-arms deals with the United States and Great Britain and, in his
spare time, trying to come up with a workable scheme to assassinate the rogue former head of the shah’s secret police.
And these were just the higher end of Alam’s responsibilities and concerns. The minister was also constantly enlisted to play peacemaker among the extended Pahlavi royal family—and a most quarrelsome family it was.
In the spring of 1970, the shah was feuding with his eldest daughter from his first marriage, Shahnaz. Building from a series of recent scandals involving her circle of dissolute jet-set friends, the twentynine-year-old divorcée now wished to marry the wastrel hippie son of an Iranian general; adopting the role of trusted uncle, Alam mediated between father and daughter while also taking the would-be groom aside to demand he give up his “hippiefied nonsense.” The previous summer, the shah’s twin sister, Ashraf, had accused her brother of neglect and left Iran in a huff, and it had been Alam, masquerading as the shah, who penned the letter begging for her forgiveness and return. By that April, Ashraf, the woman dubbed the Black Panther for her palace intrigues and propensity for siphoning funds from government development projects, was trading on the rapprochement with her brother to pursue her most audacious goal yet: to be elected the next United Nations secretary-general. “She’s getting crazier and crazier,” the shah vented to Alam about Ashraf’s UN campaign. “It’s the menopause that’s doing it.” Then there were the king’s frequent spats with the queen mother. Mother and son had an odd relationship, one simultaneously close and reproachful, and the shah seemed to take quiet delight in teasing the seventy-four-year-old lady until she lost her temper, only to then dispatch his minister of court to calm her down.
Where all these family tensions tended to reach full boil were at the regular dinners of the extended royal family. These occurred two or three times a week, usually at the queen mother’s home in the old Saadabad palace complex, about two miles from the shah’s own new royal residence at Niavaran. These were uniformly dreary affairs, attended by whichever of the shah’s relations—siblings, cousins, nieces or nephews—happened to be in town or could be bothered to make their way over from their own residences in the Saadabad compound, and try as he might to escape, Alam was frequently strongarmed into attending by the shah himself.
And there was at least one more frequent demand the monarch placed on Alam’s time, one rooted in a proclivity they shared. Both men were inveterate lotharios, with the same fondness for tall and statuesque women, especially Europeans and especially blondes. With Alam obviously able to operate with more stealth than the king, it was he who frequently saw to the recruitment of willing women for both of them—highly coveted were airline stewardesses, along with European starlets and high-end prostitutes—and their transport to discreet love nests around Tehran. So frequent were these trysts, or “outings” as the shah euphemistically called them, that the risk of detection by their respective wives was nearly constant. Certainly the shah’s third wife, Farah Diba, was well aware of her husband’s rapacious appetites, and her suspicions of Alam’s role in satisfying them were a source of periodic friction between them. As Alam noted in his diary during one extended stretch of coolness on the queen’s part, “HMQ [Her Majesty the Queen] believes that her husband and I go philandering together, and in that she’s not far wide of the truth.”
Yet, for all the time and intimacies the two men shared, theirs was certainly not a friendship in the generally recognized sense of the word, not a relationship of mutual respect and concern. Instead, and as evidenced by their morning hand-kissing ritual, it more closely resembled the interplay between faithful servant and eighteenthcentury master. On one occasion, when Alam returned to the palace after a lengthy illness, he was initially moved when the shah rose and came around his desk “to offer me his hand which I kissed with real sincerity.” The minister initially interpreted this break with formality as a sign of genuine friendship—the shah had truly missed him—only to have the king then berate him for having convalesced for longer than expected. Particularly wounding had been an episode in May 1969 when Alam rashly urged a bit of advice on the shah too forcefully. It prompted an angry king to acidly remind Alam that he was “only” the court minister and therefore hardly qualified to comment on the matter. “I am ready to sacrifice anything on his behalf,” Alam lamented in his diary that night, “yet he feels obliged to offer all of us these cutting reminders of who is boss.”
On one level, such put-downs simply came with the territory, part of the governing style of a ruler ever fearful that his subordinates might outshine or conspire against him. Naturally, those closest to
the apex of power came in for special monitoring and mistreatment. As a result, if Alam became too closely associated with some popular government initiative, he was apt to see it abruptly transferred to someone else. If at an airport welcoming ceremony a visiting head of state seemed overly pleased to renew Alam’s acquaintance, the court minister might suddenly find himself disinvited from all subsequent meetings. The king’s attention to such matters could descend to the remarkably petty. One of Alam’s few respites from the burdens of office was to go horseback riding in the foothills above Tehran, a hobby that in the late 1960s he shared with the British ambassador, Denis Wright. The two had a standing arrangement to ride together every Friday morning, but so consistently did the shah summon Alam back to the palace as soon as they arrived at the royal stables that Wright finally concluded the disruptions were deliberate. For those given the honor of serving the King of Kings at close quarters, the price was unceasing demands and routine humiliations.
Yet in comparison to others in the imperial inner circle, there seemed a special strain of tension in the shah’s treatment of Asadollah Alam, the clear respect for his counsel accompanied by a heightened need to denigrate. What made this more curious was that in contrast to some of the king’s other advisors over the years, the court minister had never displayed the slightest sign of playing usurper to the throne, nor cultivated the sort of independent power base that might enable him to do so. To the contrary, even in the presumed anonymity of private letters, Alam was in the habit of referring to the shah as “my mighty leader.”
Instead, it seems likely this strain had root in a history-altering secret the two men shared.
Over the course of his reign, Shah Pahlavi had twice been pushed to the edge of ruin, buffeted by threats so grave they threatened to sweep him from power. The first was the 1953 constitutional crisis that culminated in a military coup, and the second was the shah’s showdown with the religious firebrand Ayatollah Khomeini in 1963. Both times Asadollah Alam had stood resolutely beside the shah, but he had played a far more significant role in the second crisis than all but a tiny handful of palace insiders were aware.
When the shah announced the first tranche of his White Revolution reforms in early 1963, Alam was serving as his prime minister;
indeed, while both men made scant mention of it in subsequent years, it’s probable that the more liberal-minded Alam was a prime mover behind the initiative. Almost instantly, the shah’s more modernist proposals came under attack by Iran’s clerical archconservatives, and none more vituperative than Ruhollah Khomeini. Through the spring of 1963, Khomeini steadily escalated his attacks on the regime, with matters threatening to reach a violent climax on Ashura, or the day of atonement, the most emotionally charged high point of the Shia religious calendar. On the eve of Ashura, with Khomeini rumored to be preparing a particularly strident sermon for the following day, an anxious shah put a call through to Prime Minister Alam. “What shall we do?” he asked.
“If you want to get tough, get tough,” Alam replied. “But if you take half measures, you will lose everything.”
“But what shall we do?” the shah plaintively asked again.
Alam certainly knew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi well enough by then to grasp the meaning of this passive tone: As had happened at other key junctures in his reign, the king was stepping back, leaving it to others to act. “Don’t worry,” Alam said before hanging up, “I’ll manage it.”
In his public address on Ashura, Khomeini not only denounced the shah’s regime as illegitimate but heaped abuse on him as a tool of his Western and Israeli allies with a vitriol never previously uttered aloud in Iran. “You miserable wretch,” he thundered from his lectern in Qom, “forty-five years of your life have passed; isn’t it time for you to think and reflect a little, to ponder about where all this is leading you?”
A line had been crossed. Alam ordered Khomeini’s arrest, and very early on the morning of June 5 a squadron of policemen closed on the ayatollah’s home to haul him off to jail. The backlash was immediate. In cities throughout Iran, enraged crowds of the faithful took to the streets to denounce the shah and demand Khomeini’s release, while in Tehran seemingly organized bands of protesters made for specific government buildings in the capital—ministry headquarters, police stations—to ransack and set them on fire. With the shah cloistered in his palace, it was Asadollah Alam who acted, calling the heads of the nation’s security services into his office to announce he was declaring martial law.
According to a participant at that meeting, an awkward silence followed Alam’s announcement, finally broken by one of the security chiefs suggesting that only the King of Kings had the authority to issue such an order. At this, Alam grabbed up his office telephone and called the monarch, holding out the receiver so that the others in the room could hear their exchange. Informing the shah that the situation was spiraling out of control, Alam said, “I have the commanders of the security forces here, and believe you should command them to stop the riots by whatever means necessary.”
The shah sounded taken aback. “You mean open fire?”
“That is the only way,” Alam replied.
According to the eyewitness, the shah continued to balk even as Alam insisted there was no other option. At last, he relented: “Mr. Prime Minister, if that is your judgment, and you are prepared to take the consequences of your judgment, you may proceed.”
With that, Alam hung up the telephone, turned to the security commanders and ordered them to “clear the streets.” They did so with alacrity. Beginning that evening, detachments of soldiers and police threw up barricades across the paths of protesters in half a dozen cities and fired into their midst when they failed to disperse. By the time order was restored, at least a hundred Iranians had been killed, according to government sources—in the years ahead, Khomeini and his supporters would claim as many as fifteen thousand dead—but the violent crackdown had its desired effect: Across the nation, the fever of insurrection seemed to dissipate as quickly as it had begun. By the following year, when a still-recalcitrant Khomeini was hustled off to a foreign exile, protests by his supporters were sporadic and halfhearted, paling in comparison to those of June 1963. It was a formative moment in the history of modern Iran. The King of Kings had faced down his most virulent opponent and won, and only a handful of palace insiders knew the true story: that until the last moment the shah had quailed, that it had actually been Asadollah Alam who carried the day. By the spring of 1970, the two men had carried their “guilty secret” for seven years, and while surely never spoken of, it just as surely injected a certain frisson of tension into their relationship.
Judging by the diary he scrupulously kept, it’s also clear that by April 1970 the court minister was frequently recalling the past crises
he and the shah had faced. That is because Alam was increasingly convinced that the nation—and more specifically the shah’s grip on the nation—was tumbling toward another time of trial. Nothing so dramatic as the showdown with Khomeini, perhaps; instead, the perils Alam saw in 1970 were more diffuse, a kind of slow unspooling. Distilled to a single word: “malaise.”
In truth, this wasn’t an altogether new concern, but for a long time the minister of court had attributed it to the same set of ills that had always plagued his homeland: an entrenched ruling class that controlled the kingdom’s economic lifeblood, an archconservative religious hierarchy resistant to all change. Joined to this, a culture of corruption, an elaborate system of payoffs and sinecures and favor trading that went back centuries and extended from the local traffic policeman all the way up to the top reaches of government ministries. Of course, it was to end all this that the shah had launched his White Revolution in 1963, but as that decade drew to a close, Asadollah Alam had begun to grasp how little had truly changed in Iran.
In the summer of 1969, he attended a parliamentary reception to celebrate the anniversary of Constitution Day, but as he confided in his diary, the event felt “more like a wake than a birthday party. It brought home to me that I belong to a corrupt and money-grubbing elite. Iran stands little chance under the thumb of such a motley crew.”
A short time later, a traffic accident had stranded his chauffeur-driven limousine in one of the new slums sprouting up on the outskirts of Tehran, giving Alam “a glimpse of the life that goes on in that squalid district.” That glimpse was of a policeman lording his power over the others, “puffed up like the monarch of all he surveyed,” of “pariah dogs and a few unwashed babies pawing over a heap of rubbish at the streetcorner,” of “shaven-headed servicemen wearing badly-cut trousers, ill-fitting boots.” It was, he wrote in his diary, “both droll and desperately depressing, a scene from a top-heavy society.” The heretical thought occurred to him that at least in the Soviet Union there was an element of social equality, that almost everyone was poor together, rather than the chasm between rich and poor that one saw in Iran. “The shah struggles day and night, confident that within a decade we shall have surpassed much of the developed world,” he wrote after his morning in the slums. “Yet no manner of wishful thinking can alter life in those streets.”
But how to change that, to foster true transformation? The only way, to Alam’s thinking, was to give the people a tangible stake in the political system. His growing conviction on this point had led him to first raise the issue with the shah during one of their palace meetings in late 1969, in the same month he’d been stranded in his Chrysler Imperial in the Tehran slums.
At that meeting, Alam had urged the king to hold elections, “real and meaningful elections,” at every level of the government, from village councils to parliament to provincial governorships, arguing that it was only with such direct involvement that people would feel they were being heard. Needless to say, such elections wouldn’t impinge on the monarchy—the shah’s position would remain inviolate—but democratic reforms along these lines, Alam contended, would lead to both a more contented population and a more efficient government. “We must seize this opportunity,” he implored, “allow the people a role.”
The shah was intrigued by the idea, so much so that he had repeated Alam’s proposal almost verbatim in a meeting with parliamentary officials the following day. But then, nothing. As with so many other matters that arose at the royal palace, the idea of a democratic opening was a source of discussion for a few days, with ministers mumbling about the need for further study, perhaps the writing of some reports, and then allowed to wither away.
In the months since that talk, though, the court minister had begun to see things a bit differently. He still believed the shah was the only person who could fix Iran’s ills, but by that April morning when he walked into the shah’s inner sanctum to discuss the Persepolis banquet hall, he was also now coming to see him as part of the problem. He didn’t mean this in any treasonous way—Alam certainly wasn’t advocating the overthrow of his “mighty leader”—but rather that part of the reason issues were allowed to fester and dangers to build was the monarch’s growing distance from the people.
Even the shah’s bitterest enemies recognized he was a workaholic, often toiling in his office for twelve or fourteen hours a day, but it begged the question of just what, other than the papers set on his desk, he actually saw. Beyond the high walls and numerous guard posts of the royal compound of Niavaran was a city that by 1970 had grown an astounding sevenfold since the shah had assumed the throne and
was now a sprawling and unplanned tangle of three and a half million inhabitants whom he could hardly recognize. With the city expanding at the rate of fifteen thousand new residents per month, this was becoming truer all the time, and so horrendous was Tehran’s traffic that the shah now held almost all his meetings within the Niavaran enclave, with days, even weeks, going by when he ventured no farther than the few hundred feet between his home and his office. On those occasions when he did leave his leafy preserve for the city proper, it was almost always by helicopter.
But the shah’s remove also found reflection in the formal parlor where he and Alam usually met. That began with the room’s almost eerie symmetry. At its center stood the king’s desk, at either end of which matching end tables held matching lamps beneath matching chandeliers. Set precisely the same distance away from the end tables, two identical armchair and coffee table arrangements were placed atop identical Persian carpets, which in turn were situated in perfect alignment with two French doors, two ornate porcelain urns and two lacquered armoires. A visitor standing at the middle of that room would have been hard-pressed to find an item on its left side that didn’t have its match on the right.
If this symmetry spoke to a person who craved order and system, a couple of other features of the room offered clues to how this was put into practice. The royal desk was really more akin to a table, with none of a desk’s deep drawers or side cabinets for the storing of papers. That’s because papers didn’t linger in the office. Instead, they were carried in by palace functionaries at the king’s request, to be read or signed and then whisked out again. Also revealing was the absence of any chair beside that desk other than the shah’s own, no place for an advisor or government minister to sit alongside while he and the monarch conferred. That’s because such conferences rarely occurred. While the shah and Alam might repair to one of the room’s armchair and coffee table setups if their talks became lengthy, almost any other Iranian who entered the sanctuary, from lowly palace minion to senior minister, remained standing before the king for the duration of their visit, ever vigilant for the sharp nod or flick of the royal hand that indicated their audience was over. To a man enamored of routine, who issued literally thousands of directives every week, this assembly-line approach to governance must have been highly pleas-
ing: Papers were brought, signed and taken away; humble men hurried in, explained themselves and hurried out again.
But to Alam’s mind, these displays underscored a deepening dysfunction within the palace. In keeping with his fear of potential conspirators, the shah had developed the habit of meeting with his ministers and senior officials individually, only rarely in a group. In this way, each official ushered into the Jahan Nama sanctum was given his own set of instructions and each ministry its own mandate, often without any consultation between them or with the prime minister, who, if not bestowed with any real power, was at least meant to act as a coordinator of the shah’s wishes. With no branch of government fully grasping what any other was doing, the result was massive duplication, staggering cost overruns, even at times government programs working at direct cross-purposes with others. Joined to this was the king’s innate distrust of any minister who displayed excessive intelligence; as a biographer astutely noted, these men were chosen “not for their ability but for their limitations.”
Along with profound inefficiency, this divide-and-rule approach inevitably fueled ferocious competition, with every minister and palace functionary vying to gain the king’s favor. And how best to gain favor with a ruler both fearful of rivals and averse to hearing bad news? By besmirching the work of one’s colleagues and by telling that ruler exactly what he wished to hear. Indeed, the scramble to avoid being the bearer of bad news sometimes led to a perverse form of alliance among court competitors, a mutual protection pact to simply withhold unpleasant details from the king altogether. In fact, this finely crafted system of deflection had very nearly led to disaster just weeks before Alam’s April 6 meeting with the shah.
In late February 1970, the shah had been on a ski vacation in Switzerland when the Tehran municipal government abruptly decided to triple bus fares. Amid a great public outcry—university students boycotted classes, and rioters destroyed several buses—the prime minister held an emergency meeting of the cabinet. In light of the turmoil, nearly all cabinet members urged that the fare increase be rescinded, but the prime minister, not wanting to look like an appeaser, chose to withhold this consensus opinion from the shah. In this information vacuum, the king was initially swayed by the contrary advice of his generals to call out the troops, an outcome averted only by a frantic
phone call to St. Moritz from Alam. “Remember, I was prime minister the last time we used force to quell a riot,” he told the shah, referring to the June 1963 protests, “but the present situation is very different. For goodness sake, tell the government to refrain from using force.” Heeding this advice, the shah quickly ordered the fare increase to be canceled, ending the tempest, but to Alam’s way of thinking the crisis should never have occurred in the first place. But how to prevent a reprise in the future? And if the people were ready to take to the streets over bus fares, what greater flash points lurked out there that the government didn’t even know about?
Most crucially of all, how to get the King of Kings to pay attention to such dangers? By the spring of 1970, virtually every Iranian who came into contact with the shah bowed down to him, both literally and figuratively. They raptly listened to his every utterance, agreed with his every judgment, obeyed his every command. In the process, the monarch was coming to inhabit a make-believe world of his own construction. In this world, all the Iranian people were enjoying the fruits of progress as never before, the annual growth rate was an astounding 22 percent, and Iran’s international standing and military prowess were propelling it into the first rank of nations at a speed never equaled in human history. Shortly after the bus fare contretemps, Alam had urged the shah to stop relying on his Greek chorus of ministers and palace hangers-on and to appoint actual experts to study the nation’s problems and propose real solutions. “He’ll have none of it,” Alam wrote in his diary that night. “One day, I fear we may pay for this neglect.” Even if he didn’t dare voice it aloud, what he most feared was a tumbling into another situation like 1963, another crisis where a stunned and lost king would ask, “But what shall we do?”
Yet amid these deepening worries, Alam saw at least one great reason for hope. It stemmed from a curious contradiction in the shah.
For all his imperiousness, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi secretly scorned the excessive groveling of those who came before him almost as much as he delighted in it, distrusted the dulcet words of his flatterers even as he demanded to hear them. In 1970, Iran’s foreign minister was in the habit of going one better than the hand-kissing ritual upon meeting the shah, instead prostrating himself on the office carpet in order to kiss his shoes, but rather than be impressed by this, the shah frequently ridiculed the man to Alam. More important, this impulse
toward modesty, heavily veiled though it was, often caused the king to place greater trust in those who didn’t always supplicate, who had the temerity to occasionally disagree or stand up to him. There was no better proof of this impulse than Asadollah Alam himself, of course, still a presence at the palace when so many others had been cast off over the years.
But how to make sure the shah listened when it truly mattered, that, as in the case of the bus fare protests, Alam’s preempting phone call got through in time? And if not him, who else was out there whose judgment the king respected, whose words of warning might rise above those of the fawning chorus? In the spring of 1970, there was really just one other person in the shah’s inner circle who fit this bill: It was his thirty-one-year-old third wife, Farah Diba Pahlavi.
As might be expected in a memoir titled An Enduring Love, Farah Pahlavi in exile places a rather high gloss on her relationship with her now-deceased husband. In the book, the shah is portrayed as endlessly solicitous of her opinion on all manner of topics, and there is scant mention of any serious disagreements between them. The reality was quite different, as a number of palace intimates, including Asadollah Alam, could attest. While the king tolerated the queen’s displays of modernity and independence, she was liable to come in for a severe tongue-lashing if she aired her disagreements with him too publicly or forcefully.
Yet despite their squabbles, it’s clear the shah greatly valued his wife’s political acumen, and that just as he begrudgingly respected Alam for his candor, so the same held true for her. It was no coincidence that in selecting those who should oversee the planning of the 1971 Persepolis celebration, certainly the most ambitious and important public relations effort of his entire reign, the monarch turned to these same two “dissidents” in his immediate circle.
But if Alam and the queen were kindred spirits of sorts—each was alarmed by the culture of sycophancy taking hold in the palace and admired the willingness of the other to stand against it—their relationship was a complicated one. On the one hand, there was Alam’s role as sexual procurer for the shah, for which he was made acutely aware of Her Majesty’s icy displeasure. For his part, Alam didn’t much trust in either the queen’s judgment or her maturity, as was evident amid recent talk of naming her crown regent, the royal stand-in should
the shah die before his heir, the crown prince, came of age. The court minister had been fiercely opposed. “HMQ is an angel of purity but she is inexperienced and rather impulsive,” Alam wrote at the time, before condescendingly comparing her to her eight-year-old son. “Like the Crown Prince she is simply too young to assume power.”
Yet as 1970 progressed and his apprehensions about the future grew, Alam seemed to increasingly regard the queen as his most important potential ally—perhaps his only such ally—in trying to pierce the remoteness and inertia of the palace. It was a recognition that set the stage for a remarkable conversation between the two. It took place on May 9, just one month after Alam’s meeting with the shah about the Persepolis banquet hall, when he accompanied the queen on a day trip to the holy city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran.
Over the course of that day, the court minister stood alongside Queen Farah as she saw to a grueling round of public receptions. In contrast to her husband, the shahbanou had a pronounced “common touch,” a warmth and charisma that were infectious, and the crowds in Mashhad that day were joyous, straining and pushing to get closer to her. The highlight of the trip was a visit to a leprosy hospital, an experience that brought the emotional queen to tears and moved Alam to try to comfort her.
A different interplay took place between them during that evening’s flight back to Tehran. Perhaps due to exhaustion at the end of that very long day, the queen derided the government’s myriad public relations campaigns as hackneyed and laughable. On top of this was the parade of government initiatives, so often announced and loudly promoted but really meant only for show. Such cynical exercises, she pointed out, only shook the people’s faith in the regime that much more. Her concerns neatly mirrored many of those Alam had been quietly harboring, and his relief at finding a confederate was evident in his diary entry that night: “Her Majesty, like the mass of the Iranian people, has good cause to be worried.”
It had been six months since Alam first pressed the shah to enact democratic reforms, only to see the idea wither, but emboldened by the shahbanou’s concurrence, he resolved to raise the matter again. He did so on May 13, just four days after that trip to Mashhad. In a touch of cleverness—or cowardice, depending on one’s perspective—he thought to couch his new effort as originating with the queen. The
stratagem didn’t work. “It’s beyond the bounds of possibility to act on every suggestion she makes,” the shah said of his wife after Alam made his pitch. “She’s well-intentioned, but no one could honestly credit her with much experience or patience.”
But whether born of the same unease that had stalked him for months or encouraged to discover his worries were shared by the one person even closer to the shah, Alam tried again a few weeks later. The setting was another of his morning meetings with the king, and he broached his idea in the form of a novel proposition. “From time to time,” he suggested, “why don’t you summon representatives from all walks of life, ordinary people, off the streets, and question them about their cares and concerns? I’m sure you’d obtain a fascinating response.”
The shah dismissed the idea. “But I already know what the people think,” he replied. “I’m fed report after report from goodness knows how many sources.”
But on that day, Alam was ready to push the point much further than he ever had before. Far from a reliable gauge of public opinion, he told the shah, those reports were part of the problem, composed by underlings with an eye toward generating exactly what they thought the king wanted to hear. As Alam recounted, this rejoinder “went down very badly,” but still he pressed on. Over the course of their meeting that day, he repeatedly argued that it was time for a change in how the nation was governed, and to start with, the shah needed to stop listening to his flatterers and find new ways to hear the voices of his people. It was a brash overture, one that only Alam was capable of delivering so strongly, but by the end he felt it had worked. “He greeted these remarks in silence,” he wrote of the shah that night, “but all the same I got the impression that their sincerity had hit home. Within the next few days I’m confident that he’ll issue instructions to get things moving along the lines I suggest.”
The minister of the imperial court was soon proven wrong once again. Just as with his early advocacy of free elections, so his new proposals to politically engage the people were bandied about the palace for a few days before floating off into the ether. Alam received an indication of this a short time later when he tried to give the shah yet another warning about the tenuousness of power, of how quickly a nation can turn against its ruler. In this, the court minister was clearly
remembering both the 1953 coup, what a close-run thing it had been, and the upheavals of 1963, the shah’s paralysis as the wrathful mobs roamed the streets. But the king was no longer listening. “The Iranian people now love me,” he said, “and will never forsake me.” In the face of such obstinacy, Asadollah Alam could only hope that one day his warnings took hold—perhaps in conjunction with those of his new tentative ally, Farah Diba Pahlavi.
But in the meantime, for both court minister and empress, there was a party to plan.
