The Shah Read online

  The

  SHAH

  Abbas Milani

  THE SHAH

  Copyright © Abbas Milani, 2011, 2012.

  All rights reserved.

  First published in hardcover in 2011 by

  PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

  in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

  Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

  Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

  ISBN: 978–0–230–34038–1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Milani, Abbas.

  The Shah / Abbas Milani.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: 2011.

  Summary: An Iranian scholar chronicles the life and legacy of the last Shah of Iran, including his role in the creation of the modern Islamic republic.

  ISBN 978–1–4039–7193–7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978–0–230–34038–1 (paperback)

  1. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 1919–1980. 2. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 1919–1980—Influence. 3. Iran—Kings and rulers—Biography. 4. Iran—History—Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 1941–1979. 5. Iran—Politics and government—1925–1979. I. Title.

  DS318.M494 2012

  955.0593092—dc23 2012006686

  [B]

  A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

  Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

  First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN paperback edition: May 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 The Flying Dutchman

  2 A Compromised Constitution

  3 The Peacock Throne

  4 Jocund Juvenilia

  5 Happy Homecoming

  6 Crown of Thorns

  7 Hurley’s Dreams

  8 Dawn of the Cold War

  9 Palace of Solitude

  10 Ajax or Boot

  11 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  12 Russian House

  13 The Dark Side of Camelot

  14 Garrulous Premier

  15 The Bright Side of Camelot

  16 The Desert Bash

  17 Architecture and Power

  18 The Perfect Spy

  19 The Perfect Storm

  20 The Shah’s Last Ride

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  For Hamid Moghadam

  A humanist, a visionary, and a friend

  who best embodies Iran’s quest for

  democracy and dignity

  INTRODUCTION

  You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

  Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.358

  Why a biography of the Shah now?

  There have been at least a dozen books on his life. Most have been “commissioned,” written to lionize or demonize him. Even those that were dedicated to finding and reporting the truths of his life were stymied by the fact that much remained hidden in still-classified documents, mired in adulating or acrimonious whispers, or marred by conspiracy theories concocted by his friends and his foes, or by himself.

  He was one of the pivotal figures of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most tragic. The passion and pathos of his thirty-seven-year tenure on the Peacock Throne first turned Iran into one of the fastest-industrializing authoritarian countries in the world, comparable to Taiwan, South Korea, and Turkey. But the pathologies of his rule ultimately begot a revolution that turned the country into a center of Islamic radicalism.

  The Cold War began in Iran when the Shah was but a novice king, and his fall more than three decades later heralded the beginning of its end. The failure to predict his fall must be considered one of the great intelligence failures of the twentieth century. The aftershocks of his fall in 1979 continue to be felt not just in Iran but in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Understanding his life, and mapping out the contours of his fall, are possible only now, when thousands of pages of hitherto classified documents in British, American, and Iranian archives have been made public.

  In fact, a new look at the Shah’s life, free from the excesses of his overzealous defenders and detractors, is now not only possible but more than ever necessary. The revolution that overthrew him in 1979 was democratic in its nature and demands. Sadly, it begot a regime more despotic than the Shah’s own modernizing authoritarianism. The continuous tumult in Iranian politics over the last three decades is rooted in the fact that the democratic dreams and aspirations of that revolution were aborted and remain unrealized. Understanding the forces that overthrew the Shah, then, helps us understand the dynamics of Iran’s current democratic movement. Like all histories, this one is as much about the future as it is about the past.

  The book has been ten years in the making. My work on the Shah’s life began as soon as I finished The Persian Sphinx—an account of the life of Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the prime minister who served the Shah for thirteen years. The new study was partially delayed when I accepted the invitation to lead a research project about the lives of eminent men and women who shaped Iran during the postwar period. The two-volume Eminent Persians was the result of that project. All through my work on these two books, and on virtually everything else I wrote in the last decade, the Shah cast a shadow.

  Though books often have the name of one person as their author, they are invariably a collective effort—every conversation, every question, every book or essay we read, every criticism, fair or unfair, that we encounter, combine to shape our vision and words and leave indelible marks on any narrative we form. I have made every effort to reduce the affects of these influences to a minimum and allow the facts, reflected first and foremost in primary documents, to speak for themselves. I have conducted more than 500 interviews with people who knew the Shah, or whose lives were touched by him and his policies. Members of the royal family refused my repeated requests for interviews. More than once they agreed to meet, and every time, for reasons never explained to me, they changed their minds at the last moment.

  It is easy to sensationalize the Shah’s public and private lives and infuse them with “enticing” stories of sex, power, backstabbings, and financial corruption. I have steered clear of sensationalist stories and have covered only those aspects of his private life that had serious public repercussions. My silence on some issues, and my decision to discuss others, may anger the ideological readers of the book. But my responsibilities are fulfilled only if impartial readers find some answers to the enigmas of his remarkable rise and fall.

  There is an element of hubris to biography as a genre. It claims to illuminate the dark corners and the infinite complexities in the life of an individual, a life invariably shaped by concentric influences, dreads, dreams, and pressures. James Joyce used all his mastery of language and narrative to try and capture one day in the life of a man, yet after some 900 masterful pages of Ulysses, he could offer but a glimpse of that life. Any narrative of a life entails a constant process of cutting, encapsulating, eliminating, glossing, and sometimes surmising. A good biography is not one that forgoes these choices, but one that makes them without any a priori assumptions and in the humble recognition that the search for the truth of a life is ever-elusive, yet never bereft of interest. The Shah
’s sixty-plus-year life, more than half of it on the throne of a country at the vortex of history, is exponentially more difficult to capture.

  For the sake of brevity, I have not listed all archivists, librarians, and friends who in different ways helped me in the process of writing or researching this book. But some debts are too great not to mention. When I began working on the book ten years ago, my brother Hassan Milani and his friends Farhad Tale and Ahmad Tabrizi spared no effort in facilitating my early research. They believed in the value of the project and went out of their way to make it possible for me to conduct my preliminary research. To them, I owe a debt of infinite gratitude.

  For the last twelve years, one of the pleasures and privileges of my life has been the friendship of Ebrahim Golestan. With his legendary attention to detail, his unsparing honesty, his penchant for perfectionism, and the infinite generosity known best to his friends, he read the entire manuscript and offered extensive marginal notes on everything from substance and style to the use of language and the precision of translations. He has been a mentor, critic, model, and, most important of all, a treasured friend.

  Ardeshir Zahedi is one of the most remarkable statesmen of the ancien régime. I met him in the early phase of this research, and his subsequent endless hospitality, his generosity with his time, his memories, and his archive have been indispensable to this project. The complex reality of his character and his passionate nationalism stand in sharp contrast to the caricature drawn of him by his opponents.

  Hamid Moghadam kindly read the entire manuscript and, with his remarkable attention to detail and editorial acumen, offered invaluable comments, criticism, and suggestions.

  My sister Farzaneh read a few chapters, and my brother Mohsen heard parts of a few others. More than once, Farzaneh’s words of encouragement were just the necessary balm to my exhausted anxieties.

  My dear friend of four decades, Parviz Shokat, read the book in its early iteration and offered much useful advice. My debt to him is more than words can convey.

  At Stanford, Farbod Faraji and Chuck Stern have been sterling student assistants. Their brilliance in locating even the most obscure passages and essays has been a great source of support. The perceptive questions of my students in the classes I have taught in the last eight years have helped hone the arguments of this book. My esteemed colleagues Larry Diamond and Mike McFaul have also helped formulate some of the arguments about U.S. foreign policy in this crucial period.

  Airié Stuart at Palgrave Macmillan has been more than a great editor. Without her passionate interest in stewarding the manuscript to its conclusion, without her resolute dedication to navigating the many obstacles in our path, The Shah might never have seen the light of publication. In her office, the work of Isobel Scott, Victoria Wallis, and Alan Bradshaw, who oversaw the process of copyediting and proofreading, have made my unwieldy typewritten manuscript into the book you have in your hands.

  My son, Hamid, and his avid and increasing curiosity about the history of the land of his childhood have been not just a source of encouragement and of many delightful discussions, but have convinced me that a whole generation of young men and women like him, around the world and in Iran, are deeply interested in the history that begot Khomeini and his followers. Their curiosity and their relentless fight for democracy, particularly over the last year, made understanding the rise and fall of the Shah doubly urgent and relevant.

  My wife, Jean, has been the first and last relentlessly careful critic and heroically patient reader of the entire manuscript. It is hard to avoid hyperbole when describing her patience and magnanimity in allowing not just my life but ours to be consumed with the exigencies of finishing the book. Oftentimes, when I concluded in desperation that the book might finish me before I could finish it, only her calming words and her optimism and her offer to help even more had the needed soothing effect on my intermittent feelings of frustration and exhaustion.

  ABBAS MILANI

  Stanford University

  Chapter 1

  THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

  The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,

  And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;

  Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap . . .

  These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.4.10–12, 15

  As the Shah sat on the vast veranda of the Al Janan-e Kabir—“The Great Garden of Eden Palace”—overlooking the city of Marrakesh, he saw not a paradise but a purgatory. The once-powerful King of Kings, the Light of the Aryans, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was alone and did not know where he would go next. Oblivious to the vast sun-drenched sky shimmering on the horizon, he had the dour disposition of a jilted lover, “Of one that loved not wisely but too well.”1 Above his head hung a massive chandelier made of dozens of handcrafted colorful bulbs. In the light breeze, the Shah felt a chill.

  For the past two years now, he had been besieged by increasingly ominous news. In the beginning, his response to the surge of protest in Iran had been defiant disbelief. For a quarter of a century, he had been met with what looked like jubilant throngs of grateful subjects. Economic indicators often registered leaps of development, sometimes placing Iran on top of the list of countries marching toward rapid industrialization. A constant chorus of sycophants, both domestic and foreign, sang songs of his singular greatness. In 1975 his Court minister and closest confidante, Assadollah Alam, had assured him that he was as wise as a prophet, as politically astute as General De Gaulle—the Shah’s great “ego-ideal.”2 During the same period, Nelson Rockefeller had compared the Shah to Alexander the Great, adding, “We must take His Majesty to the US for a couple of years so that he can teach us how to run a country.”3 This praise gave the Shah a false sense of security, and he developed a haughty disposition toward many Western leaders. On one occasion, Alam told the Shah, “these miserable Americans needed some words of encouragement from Your Majesty, and Your Majesty surely gave them what they needed.” The Shah, Alam wrote, was particularly pleased by this comment.4

  The ubiquity of the adulation, along with Iran’s impressive economic improvements in the sixties and early seventies, had created in the Shah a strong sense of imperial grandiosity, even political imperviousness. As late as 1964, his country had been in desperate need of a $5 million loan.5 Eleven years later, the Shah went on what the CIA called his “lending binge,”6 giving away, to a variety of countries, almost $2 billion. Even England, once the imperial overlord of Iran, was now the recipient of royal largesse. With this radical change of fortune in the back of his mind, it is not hard to understand why the Shah found it difficult to fathom the idea that Iranians—those he often called “my people”—were now in revolt. Less than five years after that lending binge, he had, in desperation, become a guest of the Moroccan king, unable to find a country willing to grant him asylum. And so there he sat on the great veranda, beneath the chandelier.

  By the mid-seventies, his many “eyes and ears” had been either unwilling to tell him the truth, or unwelcome in his entourage. In the forties, when the Shah had just ascended the throne, he traveled freely amongst the people. He loved driving, and in those early years he would often take one of his many fast and fancy cars and drive around the city.

  During some of these drives, the people converged on his car, showering him with words of support and notes of supplication. But after failed assassination attempts against him, first in 1949 and then again in 1965, security around the Court and the Shah changed. The idea of the Shah’s driving around Tehran became unthinkable, and in the seventies he could only fly over the city in a helicopter.

  In the early years, what the Shah might not see or learn in his drives he was likely to hear from a variety of elder statesmen who had easy and regular access to the throne and were usually not afraid to tell him the truth. These men were often as old as his father and had served with distinction in many key positions. But beginning in the early
1960s, these advisors were increasingly unwelcome at the Court. The Shah surrounded himself with young and docile technocrats—men like Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who was for thirteen years Iran’s prime minister and had an unimpeachable trust in the wisdom of the Shah’s absolutist power. Only late in 1978, when the country was already engulfed in a serious and systemic crisis, did the Shah call the wise elder statesmen he had shunned back into his inner circle. But it was too little too late.

  By then the secret police (known by its acronym of SAVAK) was one of the Shah’s main pillars of power. According to a blueprint provided by the United States, SAVAK was meant to undertake functions performed by both the CIA and the FBI in the United States. In the sixties, as a leftist urban guerrilla threat appeared on the scene in Iran, SAVAK developed a notorious international reputation for using torture. At the same time, some in SAVAK had come to consider financial corruption a matter of national security and monitored the activities of not just the political and economic elite, but also members of the royal family. The Shah was often angered by their reports—as much by their content as by the temerity of the security agents to pry into matters he considered beyond their purview.

  When the Shah was at the height of his power, a journalist asked about his knowledge of what was happening in the country. He boasted that he received intelligence from at least thirteen different sources. But in retrospect, it is clear that these sources of intelligence were badly compromised. In one case, the Shah threatened to court-martial Parviz Sabeti, the powerful head of internal security in SAVAK, simply because he had dared write a report critical of one of the Shah’s close friends.7

  In 1971, when the Shah seemed most secure on his throne, the CIA noticed his growing estrangement from reality and warned of its consequences. As the Shah’s power grew, according to the agency’s analysis, so did his isolation. This combination, the CIA suggested, was likely to ensure that he would “fail to comprehend the intensity of, say, a political protest movement.” This failure, in turn, would inevitably increase “the chances for miscalculation in dealing with” such a movement.8 The price for the Shah’s miscalculation would turn out to be the end of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty and an end to the almost 2,500-year-old tradition of monarchy in Iran.