Mother Father Revolution

by Owen W. Cameron

  The forty days of mourning became a challenge. Ambassador Parsons could feel a strange repetitive loop where life returned to normal and members of the regime became confident the worst had passed. He even recounted a backseat car meeting in the days just after the Qom unrest through the Tehran traffic with Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the country’s Prime Minister from 1965 to 1977. After a routine diplomatic call and joining him for a ride on the way to Hoveyda’s dental appointment, Parsons watched the traffic come to a stop in the well-lit streets, and with no guard or escorts, pedestrians approached Hoveyda, kissing his cheek and patting him on the back.88 Surely life was returning to normal? he wondered.

  But on each anniversary of the forty-day period ending, another riot would commemorate the last unrest; and in that next spontaneous city, local police would feel out of their depth, and more people would be beaten, arrested or killed. And the cycle of mourning began again.

  *

  With the American Hospital of Tehran close to blacklisting foreigners, Joan tried to find work in Isfahan, so she would not be apart from Les. He earned more, had a stable contract, and lived in a lavish corporate apartment which went unused most of the week while he was on site. There was one obvious and highly reputable employer for her to apply to: Bell Helicopter International.

  Bell had built the most reliable rotorcraft in history – not to mention the most iconic image of the Vietnam War – in the Huey UH-1, a helicopter that flew over 7,500,000 flying hours during the nine years of the War. In 1970, the idea arose of a “Huey Plus”, which morphed into the Huey 214, designed to provide good performance in high temperatures and high altitudes (both important in Iran). After successful field exercises and demonstrations with the Imperial Iranian Air Force, the Shah placed an initial order of 284 Huey 214s.89 The intention was that these aircraft would be constructed by Bell in their Dallas-Fort Worth facility, and that a further 50 214A and 350 214ST helicopters would then be built in Iran (the Revolution meant the final delivery was well short of this).

  The connection between helicopters and the oil industry is not a well understood (or intuitive) one, but they are critical for movement and transportation to often remote sites. Through the late 1970s, Central Iran turned into one of the great hubs of the helicopter world – a thousand hard-bitten Vietnam veterans brought their exotic Asian wives to the desert city of Isfahan, training local pilots and ground crew by day, and drinking themselves into submission by night.

  In retrospect, it is clear to see that the presence of the US contractor community in many parts of Iran led to irritation and social unrest. They partied in big numbers, chatted up local girls in very Western ways, and earned foreign salaries when rampant inflation had pushed the local population to the brink. This all came at a time when many Iranians felt Pahlavi policy over many decades had led to a changing morality that was not distinctly theirs. In every hotel corridor and late-night bar around Isfahan, the sound of an American accent usually came with a Bell employee card. At their peak, Bell employed 3,000 people in the city. Nevertheless: helicopter pilots and ground crew have accidents, and those accidents require nurses.

  My mother found the number of Dean Johnson, the Director of the Bell Clinic, and rang him every day through the spring. Every day, he heard her voice and every day he hung up the phone. Dean had a big, booming African-American voice, and more than once asked Joan if she would ever stop calling. He had a genuine case for discrimination – Bell were an “American only” company, with the Clinic staff cautious of bringing other nationals into the country. Had Joan not already been in Iran, begging for work, she would never have found her way in.

  After two and a half weeks of a polite, persistent young Scottish voice on the phone, he relented; and in May 1978, my mother felt delight in her move to Isfahan for a start date in June. What she didn’t know was that this famous old city was on the brink of insurrection.

  The Bell Clinic was the best of all worlds: minor accident and emergency (A&E), with facilities superior to the major A&E facilities in the rest of the country. The staff dealt with limited cardiac cases, miscarriages, shoulder injuries, and injurious trauma to the skin, which required suturing. On weekend, evening and night shifts, the nurses worked alone as receptionists, file clerks, dieticians and housekeepers in addition to their regular nursing duties. Joan was still tested and certainly learned a lot but had the peace of mind to know a physician was never far away.

  The bed numbers were modest, with a high nurse-to-patient ratio. Medical evacuation was in place for all serious cases. The differences with the American Hospital in Tehran were everywhere; at the Bell Clinic, Joan had more than she needed.

  *

  My mother’s move down to Isfahan was one of my parents’ happiest days together in Iran. They opened a bottle of wine mid-afternoon and laughed in wild fits as they chased each other around the three living rooms and a thirty-chair dining table. Joan would leave to explore the flat, and Les would holler like a man in a labyrinth of caves.

  The grounds around the property were well manicured, with high walls, and a sense of calm amid the chaos. Much of the landscaped trees, shrubs, and bordered plot gardening was tended to by Hamid, the houseboy. This was a prestigious job hugely sought after and, like Ali’s work with my father on the mine site, it was usually considered a great honour to work for foreigners among ordinary Iranian families. Every day Hamid would appear, take care of house chores, buy any general groceries and thrash out the numerous large and small Persian carpets strewn all around the property. Isfahan was an incredibly dusty city, and this was an awful job to watch; Hamid would struggle to hoist each rug over the clothesline, bashing away the dust with a specially designed carpet beater. At the end of each visit, he would smile, wish my mother a peaceful sleep in Farsi, and walk out the front gate for his long walk home.

  A new chapter began for Les and Joan in the famous old city. But all the while, forces around them were shifting.

  *

  In the middle of spring 1978, the Shah – and the region – were dealt a shock. The Afghan President Sardar Mohammed Daoud was overthrown and murdered in a coup on 27th April, led by pro-communist rebels, and most likely in retaliation for the death of a Communist Party leader earlier that month. The coup had been timed perfectly, on the day before Friday, the Muslim day of worship, when most military commanders and government workers were off duty. Military units loyal to a different faction stormed Daoud’s residence in the heart of Kabul, and he and most members of his family were slaughtered that day in the palace corridors.

  Daoud had been a friend and ally of Mohammed Reza. By year’s end, Afghanistan had signed a twenty-year “friendship treaty” with the Soviet Union, and the Shah now wondered if the arc of history was turning, with Russian dominance in the region about to return.

  Meanwhile, a small issue had been building in secrecy for years – and completely out of the public eye. As far back as September 1974, the Shah had complained to Asadollah Alam – the Minister of the Royal Court, and the man who all national affairs passed through – that his spleen felt enlarged. Alam decided that Professor Jean Bernard, a French blood specialist, would travel to Tehran under the pretext of treating him.90 (Alam was in fact ill with cancer himself, and had just a few years to live).

  Mild anti-cancer drugs for Mohammed Reza were prescribed and not properly taken, and by February 1975, the Shah was in great pain on the slopes of Switzerland. This began as many as thirty-five incognito visits to treat the Shah by a range of French doctors in the years up to the Revolution; all the while keeping the seriousness of his issues a complete secret from even his closest family. Right through to 1978, the Shah had maintained an exclusively French set of doctors for the treatment; partly because of a long Iranian tradition of rulers being treated this way, but mostly because British or American knowledge might cause them to make other succession plans.

  *

  The S
hah’s approach to instinct and his illness in a way mirrored the instinct of the earliest expats to leave. Mike Walsh grew concerned at the changing atmosphere in the streets. By May 1978 he had begun to make plans. Though Chris had felt the pressure to leave the hospital in late 1977, many expat offices were still running as normal. At Mike’s farewell drinks, some American colleagues made the common jokes.

  ‘Rats deserting the sinking ship, Mike.’

  ‘What do you know that we don’t?’

  Mike had never done well with the language, or the fatalistic side of Islam; culturally he’d felt very different. He’d also met a very Westernised Iranian girl called Shirin (who’d also dated my father for a brief time); she had studied in the US and planned to return there. Like Les, Mike was paid in rials. Chase Manhattan’s San Francisco branch wrote out a bank cheque for $8,000 in exchange for his rial account in July 1978. Had he waited another month, he would’ve lost everything.

  David Wilkie and his family had also decided it was time to leave. They’d lived in a laid-back expat area of North Tehran, further up the cool mountainside. With a commute to his own mine site that took him over the Elburz mountains and north beyond the inner city, David had missed most of the demonstrations through the early months of 1978. After a demonstration shooting in March, the message went out that people in Tehran should stay indoors for the funeral. That afternoon, David went to the rooftop of this three-storey building and watched Huey helicopters flying over South Tehran, with smoke and gunshots ringing over the skyline. The next day, the major newspapers reported many more shootings.

  David’s nine-month-old child had been battling with gastro all year, once or twice in life-threatening situations, and after giving three months’ notice, he and his wife evacuated at the beginning of August. Standing in Amsterdam Airport with the last of his Iranian Rials from three years in the country, he found a duty-free shop that would accept the crumpled scraps of his cash for a brand-new Canon camera. The amount of Iranian money handed over meant the price of the camera had been equivalent to 500 US Dollars. After the sale, the teller offered him a free strap with his purchase and stuffed it in the bag as he walked out.

  Two days later, Wilkie was in Houston, Texas; safe in America, and trying to figure out their next steps. He walked past a camera shop window and saw the typical retail price of the Canon camera he’d purchased in Amsterdam: 250 US Dollars. He smiled, turned to his wife and said, ‘Well, there you go honey – it turns out I bought a 250-dollar camera, and a 250-dollar camera strap.’

  Ramadan Rebellion

  The Ramadan of 1978 (6th August–4th September) changed Iran forever. The peak of the brutal Iranian summer came together with an ill-tempered population on their fast, aggressive sermons from the mullahs, and nightly violence in random alleyways and traffic intersections across the country. By the month’s end, many thousands of foreigners began scrambling for flights out, while evacuation lists started to be prepared by many US firms. With my parents’ being non-American citizens employed by American companies, they were the last to be dealt with.

  It was a warm Wednesday on 9th August 1978, with my father out of Isfahan and on site, when a crowd attacked the Shah Abbas Hotel – a beautifully restored caravanserai or roadside inn, and one of the finest hotels in Iran. Two days later, Chahar Bagh (or the Four Gardens, as it was known) was burned, with a cinema and liquor store destroyed.91 On the Sunday, my mother had planned to meet friends before her evening shift at the Bell Clinic; and with a want to stay familiar, they chose the Khansalar – a popular restaurant for foreigners.

  The meal and laughter with her friends was the same as ever, and after the bill was settled, she walked at a regular pace through the quieter, cooler side streets of south Isfahan to the Clinic. Closer to sunset, she moved through the rooms of the ward, taking her handovers, and stopping to speak with the patients she recognised from earlier in the week. Once or twice, she looked up to see someone running through the corridor. An hour into the shift, she treated a man with a dislocated shoulder and a startled look on his face. Joan calmed him, and after a time he just stared blankly at the floor, before saying, ‘Did you hear they blew up the Khansalar today? Fire and debris everywhere, a lot of Americans injured.’

  My mother froze and double-checked the restaurant name. She asked what time the arsonists came through and checked her watch – she’d missed the bombing by less than forty-five minutes. Forty were injured, including ten Americans, some of whom were Bell employees. A young local labourer was allegedly killed.92 Martial law was declared that week in Isfahan – and from that moment on, the city my parents knew was never the same.

  Telephone access throughout the country was patchy to non-existent. Through all of 1978, my father only knew news from the city or the outside world when he returned for a break, or a visitor to site would tell him. For the most part, he wasn’t fussed by this; he’d lived a desert life for a long time and worked on mines in Australia with the same sense of isolation. But after each weekly visit back to Isfahan, the mood changed each time in little ways. Hearing news of the attacks from a midweek visitor who had frequented the Khansalar himself, Les had to stay on site and assume Joan had been OK.

  My father’s return that weekend forced a hard conversation. For an hour or so, they both looked around the ceilings of the apartment and said little. There wasn’t much to say. They were double foreigners on fixed contracts, and required employees. They were not married. They had no children, which was a common excuse to rise up the pecking order of evacuees. Some friends had left, but others had stayed. Assurances from nervous bosses offset some of their concerns, but the rumours from friends continued – Western men with Iranian girlfriends being beaten by the family in the street, acid attacks on non-chador wearing women in the bazaar, and bullets into foreigners’ driveways in the dead of night.

  And Les eventually rose, doing the same thing he would do a hundred times through 1978 – he made a joke and reached for a bottle of wine. They were twenty-three and thirty-one, scarcely able to make sense of it all. And so they drank at home on their Friday night, to numb the reality of it all. But by the end of that weekend, the country they were struggling to understand would never be the same again.

  *

  Twenty-four hours later, four young men walked into a cinema in the old British oil town of Abidan and set fire to it – and in just five minutes, more men, women and children died than they had in all the prisons and torture-chambers of half a century of Pahlavi rule.93 The death toll of the Rex Cinema fire ended up between 430 and 470 people; but the Abidan cemetery staff spoke of 600 corpses, and the cinema cashier who’d gone home for the day told of collecting over 650 tickets.94

  Why did history take the course it did? In part, because almost no one in Iran knew what we know today – the perpetrators of the fire. No one came forward, and so it remained a mystery; a void left to fill with all the conspiracies one could conjure. Khomeini blamed the Court. Many foreign correspondents reported that it was SAVAK provocateurs, hoping to pin such an atrocity on extremists, and rally the people around the monarchy. It was well known that Khomeini loathed the cinema. He purportedly never set foot in one and was suspicious of the ability for men and women to be promiscuous in the dark auditoriums.95 This should’ve been enough for the Shah and Prime Minister to piece together that a rogue element of his following committed the crime, but they now led a government so divided, neither could be sure it wasn’t the hand of one of their own. Their silence incriminated them.

  Iran was sickened. Many turned their backs on the monarchy for good. The oil industry began a sustained period of strikes and shutdowns, which continued in fits and spurts until the Shah’s end. Over the next six months, this choked revenue, spooked international investors and broke the back of the economy. In retrospect, the Rex Cinema fire was the point of no return for Iran; but even more symbolically at the time, visitors to the Court observed somethi
ng change in Mohammed Reza’s conscience – like he couldn’t believe any of his own people were capable of such a heinous act.

  The history books would’ve stayed filled with a raft of conspiracy theories to this day, were it not for the courage of the victim’s families – and the guilt of Hossein Takbalizadeh, the only perpetrator believed to have survived. A hundred-day sit-down strike, first in the streets of Abidan, then in the cemetery, led to a continued spotlight on a genuine trial or inquiry into the events surrounding the fire.

  Sometime after the Revolution in the summer of 1980, the families were granted a trial of sorts. To house the 700 relatives in the same place, the authorities chose a cinema of all places, built by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the 1940s. The judge perpetuated the paranoia of the Revolution, and still blamed “Satanic Pahlavis, and their American and Israeli overlords”,96 but there was little one could do to dispel the conviction of a confessor. After travelling the length of Iran by bus to admit his guilt to clerics and post-Revolution authorities every chance he could, Hossein confessed his unilateral role in the fire in front of scores of weeping mothers and was sentenced to death. He was shot on 4th September 1980 – but the hundreds killed, and the new Iran his actions accelerated, would never be undone.