The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavi’s and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
This month we’ve been looking at Persia, making this weeks book The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavi’s and the Final Days of Imperial Iran by Andrew Scott Cooper. So let’s do this.
The last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on October 26, 1919 to Nimtaj and Reza Kahn. Mohammad Reza was a twin, with his sister Ashraf Pahlavi being born shortly after. They were born under the Qajar dynasty and Reza Kahn was a Brigadier General under the Qajar’s when he basically overthrew the dynasty in 1921 and took the name Pahlavi.
Mohammad is referred to multiple times in the book as being shy, and he well may have been. I have a feeling the better word is reclusive, shy meaning avoiding contact or familiarity with others whereas reclusive means preferring seclusion or isolation. He had quite a cast of characters with whom he had frequent contact and familiarity but he generally did not like the lime light or like to seek it out, which...well, that’s maybe not the best trait for the heir to earth’s oldest dynasty, that being the Peacock throne of Persia.
Mohammad did grow up Muslim, but only because the Arab’s who had invaded Persia in the 7th century forced Islam on her people, so that is literally what everyone grew up knowing. He was a man of faith, but also a man or progress, which became a HUGE problem as the 20th century progressed past WWII, with Mohammad taking the throne unofficially on September 16, 1941, the day his father abdicated. He would not be officially crowned until 1967.
But, from September 1941, for better or worse, he was at least the acting head of state, if not officially crowned on the world stage. And there were multiple assassination attempts against him, with the first and closest to succeeding being on February 4, 1949, while attending an event at the University of Tehran, a gunman took a shot at him that passed through his cheek and out his lip. And with every failed attempt, he took this to be a mandate from heaven. Which...well who can blame him? People keep failing in their attempts to kill you, you’re gonna start believing that better angels are watching over you.
The Shah would marry three times, the first time to Egypt’s princess Fawzia on March 15, 1939, and together they would have a daughter, Shahnaz Pahlavi, born on 27 October 1940. This was a state marriage, which was not the happiest of matches and Fawzia would eventually sue for divorce, which would be granted in May 1945. Fawzia saw Tehran and Persia as backwards, which compared to the very cosmopolitan Cairo, probably was. Eventually, Tehran would surpass Cairo in elegance and sophistication, but it would be another queen who accomplished that.
The Shah’s second wife...was not that queen either. Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary was of noble Persian heritage, but...well...she was a bit of spoiled brat. But the Shah was wholly smitten with her and they married on 12 February 1951. While the marriage itself ran hot and cold, Soraya was often dismissive and rude to the Shah. Not sure if she counted on her beauty to see her through such behavior, and honestly...she was absolutely stunning. If she had been able to get pregnant, her beauty may well have overcome her attitude. But, after 7 years of marriage and no children, it was discovered that she was unable to have children. And while the Shah unquestionably loved her, he needed a male heir. Yes, he had Shahnaz, but in a male dominated monarchy, with Islam as the state religion, there was no way he’d be able to set Shahnaz on the throne upon his passing. So the couple divorced on 15 March 1958.
The third queen of Iran was everything the Shah and Iran needed. Farah Diba was born on 14 October 1938...yes, this made her only two years older than her step-daughter, but this was not a child-bride situation. She was 21 when the couple married on 21 December 1959, and immediately became pregnant, eventually giving the royal line of succession four children, starting with the crown prince Reza on 31 October 1960, followed by Farahnaz on 12 March 1963, then Ali Reza on 28 April 1966, and finally Fatemeh “Leila” born on 27 March 1970. Farah is the one who would actually be crowned Empress (Shahbanou) when Mohammad determined he had earned the right to wear the crown of Iran and hosted a coronation ceremony for himself and for Farah in 1967.
Farah was graceful and elegant, she was well bred and well educated, and she genuinely loved Iran and the people of Iran. And whereas the Shah was shy and/or reclusive, she was not, and so she eventually became the public face of the family, backing a lot of public works for women’s rights and women’s equality.
So where did things go wrong for the Shah? He had a country that was up and coming, with massive oil reserves which were in heavy demand the world over. He had inherited a constitutional monarchy, with the Iranian constitution having been passed well before he was born in 1906, and elections were pretty standard and set.
A quick search for Iran 1906 Constitution will get you the text in English, or a quick AI recap which shows that everything was in place for a successful republic that should have lasted for centuries, not the scant 73 years it did last...not even that if you consider how the Pahlavi’s, both Mohammad and his father Reza before him, tended to...ignore….the parts of the Constitution they didn’t like. Like the freedom of speech part. Freedom of press part. The electoral framework...I mean, the Shah did have the right to replace the prime minister, as of a legal revision to the constitution which occurred in 1949. A right that the Shah used in 1953 to dismiss Mohammad Mosaddeq. Or rather, there was a coup against Mosaddeq that saw him removed from office.
And it seems THAT was the watershed moment that led to his own downfall. So what happened?
Well part of it was, for lack of a better description, professional jealousy. Mosaddeq was well liked by the people and adept at turning a crowd to his side in any situation, sometimes through rhetoric, and sometimes through guile, feigning lightheartedness to draw attention from the Shah when the Shah was speaking, for example. And he would do this a lot, whenever it appeared the Shah was trying to be anything more than a reigning figurehead. But the Shah wanted to rule, not just to reign. He wanted to be more hands on.
And so there was this power struggle between the two, with Mosaddeq holding the power of the people, but the Shah having the ultimate political power to dismiss Mosaddeq. Which he did not exercise, instead choosing to leave Iran for an extended vacation with wife number two in 1953. His moment of leaving was an interesting gambit, historically speaking, as he left just when the tides of popular opinion were turning in his favor, and the people of Iran started seeing Mosaddeq as the showman he was.
The CIA, using Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt as a liaison, offered to support the Shah in a coup against Mossadeq, which the Shah declined. It actually speaks a lot to how much care he had for the people of Iran that he would not authorize bloodshed even against his enemies to secure his own throne, a character trait which would be with him his entire life, and would, eventually, cost him his throne.
The army undertook the coup in his stead, and on 19 August 1953, after only 43 deaths...I know that some reported thousands, but the only confirmed number is 43...Mossadeq was overthrown and the Shah reinstated, with General Fazlollah Zahedi as the Prime Minister.
So from 1953 on the Shah was firmly in power. He would eventually run through prime ministers like hotcakes, I think he had a new one every one or two years, and most of them….were not awesome. More on that in just a bit.
From 1953 to 1963 the Shah nationalized the oil fields and made strides in civil liberties for the people, and it was in 1962 that he first clashed with Ayatollah Khomeini. The source of their clash was Khomeini’s entrance into the political arena, which was actually taboo for religious leaders. The 1906 Constitution made Islam the official state religion, but the holy men were supposed to be above the fray. But, the Shah actually kept strict distinctions between church and state, which meant while the constitution technically gave the Imam’s the ability to veto any law that was a violation of Islam, in practice, the Shah did not give them that opportunity. And Khomeini took that personal like, condemning the Shah for allowing members of other faiths to stand for elected office and for giving women the right to vote.
In 1963, the White Revolution was launched by the Shah, which was a series of massive reforms going all in, confirming women’s right to vote, religious freedoms, expanding public education and public works, museums and arts...ok the museum and arts were more Farah’s doing, but she did so with his full blessing. Again, Khomeini took extreme exception to this and began calling for the Shah to be overthrown. And he did have quite a bit of reach, with riots happening, before Khomeini was exiled on 4 October 1965.
He should have been executed. A fact that was so well known, several people over the years would comment on the same. Khomeini truly was a mad man. In 1970 or 71, he published a pamphlet, it was like 70 pages, that was his manifesto. Describing in detail how Iran should return to a time when Islam was pure...like 7th century conditions. Veiling of women, men dominating, no arts, only religion...it was abhorrent enough that when a copy found it’s way to the Shah’s hands, he was delighted. Because he knew if this was broadly published, support for Khomeini would collapse, it’s release coinciding with massive income booms in Iran and at the height of the Shah’s own popularity.
And in fact, he ordered his prime minister, I believe it was Amir-Abbas Hoveyda at the time, to do exactly that. Publish it widely. Let the people see what kind of lunatic they had been supporting. And Hoveyda, on his own, decided this was a mistake. And buried it.
Remember last week, when I said trying to bury ideas lets them fester underground...or something like that. Everyone knew the Shah had a copy of that tract. And when it was NOT published and distributed, the people started thinking the Shah was burying the words of a holy man on purpose. And Khomeini’s popularity began to climb upwards.
Sometime during the 1970’s, the Shah was diagnosed with lymphoma. And he began a running fight with the disease, seeking secret medical treatment from doctors flown in from Paris I think it was every other week. And they would treat him like this up until his abdication. But I suspect his illness helped contribute to his eventual retreat. That, and his overwhelming desire not to harm any Iranians.
In the year leading up to his final overthrow, author Andrew Scott Cooper did a masterful job rebuilding the timeline of events, creating a gripping account of the absolute terror that grabbed the country and had anyone with the means to do so fleeing overseas as quickly as they could. He reports that over the summer of 1978, $3 billion fled Iran as her people moved overseas en masse. Everyone with any kind of foreign presence in the country started getting their people out, with Americans, Armenians, Europeans, and Israelis causing crushing panic at the airports, which were poorly serviced due to ground crews going on strike. Flights would leave only half full of fuel, having to stop and refuel once the plane reached Turkey. All of this helps explain the enormous number of demonstrators in support of Iran from places outside of Iran. Her sons and daughters fled to the corners of the globe, awaiting better days for the chance to return.
In the year leading up to the end, the CIA dropped the ball. In a major way. As only one of them actually keyed to the unrest being the end of the Shah. And that one said it in a throwaway line during a group meeting, in which deputy chief of mission Charlie Naas was being briefed on what the situation was in Iran. Naas asked Michael Metrinko what he thought about everything. Metrinko responded “The Shah will be gone before I leave.”...which was the following summer. And very prescient, because that’s exactly what happened.
Before that though...there were a couple of chances to derail the steam train that was coming down the tracks. First, was when Iranian intelligence officer Parviz Sabeti, in early 1978, made one of his twice a year trips to Qom to visit with Grand Ayatolloh Kazem Shariatmadari. The other Ayatollah’s were well aware of the terrifying vision that Khomeini was hoping to rain down on Iran. And Shariatmadari offered to place a fatwa on Khomeini’s head. A fatwa is an Islamic legal ruling by a qualified Islamic jurist...according to Wikipedia. But it’s basically a holy mandate to execute a person. Sabeti reports that Ayatollah Shariatmadari told him “Khomeini has to be assassinated. I, as a marja, can give you a fatwa to send someone to kill him.”
Marja is like a prince of the church. It would be like a cardinal giving someone holy permission to kill another cardinal. Now, Iranian Intelligence was called colloquially the Savak. And a lot of bad press has been put out about the Shah’s Savak. However, Sabeti responded “Your Holiness, we are not in the business of killing people. If you want this taken care of you can give the fatwa to one of your followers.”
Another chance would be given to assassinate Khomeini, this one from a surprising quarter….Saddam Hussein. When Khomeini was exiled, he bounced around a bit before settling in Iraq for his exile. And he had been stirring up the Shiites in Iraq as surely as he’d been stirring up the Shiites in Iran. And at a state dinner one night, I think it was with a representative from Japan, the Shah got a surprise call from Hussein offering to take care of the Khomeini problem for him. And he declined again. Hussein wasn’t about to kill an Iranian holy man on his own initiative. A few months later he would repeat the offer directly to Empress Farah, who also declined.
The last great hope the Shah had to turn the ship around was to appoint Imam Musa al-Sadr as Prime Minister. Al-Sadr was greatly respected as a politician and as an Imam. He was well known for his moderate policies and was popular in Iran. If the Shah could have gotten over his own dislike of al-Sadr, the ship might have righted. But he could not, and instead appointed Jafar Sharif-Emami, who would serve less than three months before being replaced. And three days after he appointed Sharif-Emami, Musa al-Sadr went missing, after a visit to Libya. He has never been found.
All of 1978 was filled with violence and rioting and honestly, if I had read this book before last weeks book, I’d have been a lot harsher in my review of last weeks book, because that author’s prevarication and intellectual dishonesty is glaring, comparatively speaking. Like, Homa Katouzian mentions the great tragedy of the Cinema Rex fire which killed over 400 people. Katouzian wrote about this like it was faulty wiring. It was known even then that Khomeini’s followers set that fire.
And through all of this, the Shah kept insisting on liberalizing further, giving the people more and more freedoms. And refusing his army the ability to take control of the streets. He did ultimately mandate a curfew, but it was too little too late. The inmates were running the asylum, and his refusal to spill Iranian blood left the people to defend themselves against Khomeini’s strongmen. And on 16 January 1979, he and the Shahbanou left Iran. And less than a month later, Khomeini swept in and began cleaning house.
What does that entail? Well, all the worst abuses Khomeini accused the Shah of, he performed plus some. “The names of the many hundreds sent to the firing squads in the first eighteen months of the Islamic republics existence reads like a “who’s who” of Imperial Iran.” The book reports that in the first four years of Khomeini’s rule, 12,000 were executed by the Islamic Republic, and torture practices which had been banned by the Shah were reinstated.
These practices continue to modern day and were consistently brutal from 1979 on. In 1988 an estimated 5,000 young men and women accused of holding the wrong political views were executed. In the 1990s, Iranian intellectuals were murdered in their homes by regime death squads. In 2009, when Ahmadinejad had his rigged election...which is where last weeks author stopped his book...several hundred protesters were were tortured for their objecting to the rigged election.
When Saddam Hussein made his second offer to take out Khomeini, the one he made to Shahbanou Farah, he did so saying “it is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.” Which was incredibly prescient, as between 1980 and 1988 the war between Iran and Iraq raged, and a million Iranians died in that conflict.
It wasn’t until two months after the Shah left Iran forever that the CIA actually got around to translating and reading Khomeini’s political treatise….the one the Shah had ordered widely published. If the CIA had actually done their job in 1970, they would have seen the calamity barreling down the tracks and set to take out stability in the middle east, and they might have killed Khomeini on their own, sparing the Shah the necessary details.
But they did not. They saw the Shah’s refusal to act, determined he was done, and yes, tried to form their own partnership with Khomeini. Who outfoxed them all by pretending to play nice. In Islam it’s called Taqiyyah, or lying for self-preservation. You’re allowed to lie to non-believers. And Khomeini loathed and despised the United States. You really can’t hate Carter enough for turning his backs on our allies at the expense of stability in a highly volatile region.
The Shah bounced around a bit, seeking medical treatment in the United States before settling in Egypt under the hospitality of his friend President Anwar Sadat, and he died there on 27 July 1980. He’s buried in Egypt, I believe with a bag of Iranian soil he took with him into exile.
This book was outstanding, you get a sense that the Shah was a gentleman in the literal sense of the word… a Gentle Man. All he ever wanted was good things for his people and he saw not just the advancements the West had achieved, but how those advancements improved the lives of Westerner’s, with medical care far outstripping what was available at the time in Iran. And he aimed to improve the lives of his people. His educational initiatives weren’t just so the kids could read and write, he wanted to make Iran a center of medical industry, where people would come to from all over the world for advanced treatments. He wanted culture, and art, and industry for the people of Iran.
And in the end, a tiny minority of people...and it truly was a minority...wanted that power over others that Khomeini promised them. Most of the people just wanted to feel safe in their own homes. And when the Shah couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver that, refusing to round up and jail the dissidents in the name of liberalization, they were left bereft and foundering as the Shah fled the country. I think he intended to return. You can’t love your people for as long and as hard as he did and intend to leave them to a butcher like Khomeini. But his long fight with cancer caught up with him. And while he fought his last battle for his own life, Khomeini got to work executing the military corps that would have helped the Shah return in triumph.
