As they went through the first terminal doors, it was the dwindling minutes of dark before dawn broke. In the distance, Iranian mothers held toddlers in the air, pleading to move to the front of the queue. My parents didn’t speak to anyone, keeping their heads down and staying close to the Lufthansa desk. When they expected the worst, Iranian customs actually asked no questions, seeing their tickets were legitimate and, in truth, wanting foreigners and their problems out. Safety felt so close. With their eyes closed, slouched in seats right by the gate, the final boarding call came. Joan and Les watched as the Lufthansa staff carefully ripped out the correct ticket, and they smiled to each other as they pushed through the glass, took each other’s hands, and walked out onto the cold tarmac at dawn.
And then came a scream. With the stair car just fifty feet away, and the first light over the mountains touching the fuselage of the airliner, two shouts in Farsi came over their shoulders. A line of two dozen passengers ahead of them froze. Two military officials with guns pushed through the crowd, weapons cocked, and for a moment their eyes locked on my father. The blue chill returned in his throat, and he felt a weight move through his chest, thinking of all the possible reasons why he and Joan would be refused entry onto the plane. He closed his eyes for a moment, unable to accept how close they’d come. His eyes met the official and, as he prepared his best Farsi explanation and defence, the soldiers left his face and stared through to the queue beyond him.
At the same time they heard a young woman weep, and my parents turned to see her face convulse, her shoulders collapse, and the deepest river of tears fall from her face as she fought to stand up on the tarmac. Feeling nothing, the soldiers pulled her to her feet, shook out her last fits of resistance, grabbed her by her elbows and dragged her back towards the terminal. Joan and Les never knew if she was a dignitary’s daughter, or saboteur student, but they felt her first moments of suspense, because they lived it themselves – and they had watched the moment that would probably define her life, when she saw the light hit the plane that would grant her freedom, only to see it taken away. My parents could only imagine the dark unknown she was being dragged back into, and in that moment, couldn’t even bear to ponder it.
*
The taxi and safety checks were a matter of minutes. The Lufthansa crew flapped around the cabin, clearly under instructions to move fast and ensure no small delay allowed the Imperial Iranian Air Force to ground or halt the flight. In the fleeting seconds before take-off, my father allowed his head to fall gently against the window, looking out to the last view of the snow-capped Elburz mountains above Tehran. He thought of the rose and paprika smells, the warm feel of tea from a village samovar, the nightingales in the city dawns, and the ski slopes of Dizfin. The Iran he first fell in love with seemed an act of remembrance already; a place gone from the present, never to return.
The jet plane increased its speed and lifted its wheels. The morning sun slid off the wings, and my mother caught the thinnest strip of auburn in the snow, the same deep auburn of her Highland youth.
New rain fell on the silver valleys near Tabriz, and the crimson ancient cities aged another day. The young Australian and Scot drifted through low sleeps and talked about whatever pleased them – the small things that never really mattered, but now felt worth a little more. And then with a brief word from the pilot, they left Iranian airspace to a short burst of applause through the plane. Lufthansa Flight 81 left Tehran for Frankfurt at 7:30 am local time on Friday 8th December 1978, and landed at 11:45 am. The tail turned north, bathed in brightness, and always flew with its back to the glare of the lifting sun.
*
When did Mohammed Reza decide to go? An early hint was dropped in a meeting with the US Ambassador William Sullivan on 1st November, when the Shah said he “would rather leave the country than submit to [a] referendum on the monarchy”116.
Perhaps by Moharram, it was inevitable. Every day that passed, the world saw more of a dysfunctional Iran, and a calm and measured Khomeini waiting in Paris for his moment to return. The Shah’s options had been narrowing every day for months; universities, bazaars and oilfields were in turmoil, and relations had broken down between the government and the military. Many senior figures had felt betrayed or mistrusted by the Shah’s refusal to let them restore order. Others believed disaster was inevitable and had been quietly smuggling out their wives and children for months.
With so many shifting factions and uncertainty on the ground, Khomeini’s dogged refusal to play by normal diplomatic rules or bow to preferred types of power transition meant all the anti-Shah movements aligned behind him. Looking back, the dye was already cast; but at the time, preparations for every course continued. Sazegara and other Khomeini followers had begun sending students to Lebanon and Syria to be trained in warfare in December 1978 – just weeks before the Shah fled.
‘We had no idea it would be so easy,’ he said. ‘We were planning for years of struggle. The Shah’s fall took everybody by surprise.’
On the 10th –11th December weekend, a sacred Shia commemoration came together with Khomeini’s political goals in the most stunning way. The great martyr of the Shia struggle, Hussein, has his death re-enacted each year on the ninth of Moharram in the Islamic calendar. This is the day before Ashura, the annual ritual of mourning for the death of Ali, Hussein’s father. For the ordinary Shi’ite, it is the medieval moment of Shia persecution brought into their personal existence. Ask Iranians why they cry during Ashura, and they will speak through tears of an event 1300 years ago.
General Azhari entered into negotiations with the clergy and made a commitment to withdraw men and tanks from the streets if the march avoided attacks on public buildings. The clergy kept their word, and the crowds policed themselves. But the scale of the two-day marches was unforgettable for anyone alive in Iran at the time – as many as two million people on each day. All the classes marched together, all in black, all expressing support in one form or another for an Islamic Republic. From Tehran University to the centre of Isfahan, statues of Mohammed Reza and his father had been torn down.
By mid-December, Tehran was effectively a war zone. Burned tire piles and barricades had made street grids of the poor, working-class southern suburbs impossible to enter for weeks. But the trade-off of maintaining security in the bourgeoisie and government suburbs of North Tehran was the abandonment of bases in the south and east (including the Doshan Teppe airfield and an arms factory). Local councils or komitehs had begun to take control of smaller rural towns. Oil had run to such short supplies that gas stations across the major cities resorted to roping up jerry cans, as people left and returned the next day when their place in the queue had improved.
The stress of the situation led to General Zahari suffering a heart attack on the 19th, and together with the Shah’s continued indecision, the army was effectively broken. Then on Saturday 23rd December, Paul E. Grimm, the acting manager of the Oil Services Company of Iran (OSCO) was assassinated in Ahvaz by three gunmen who filled his car with bullets on his commute to work. Almost simultaneously across the river, his Iranian counterpart Malek Borjuerdi was killed with a single bullet to the chest.
For the few remaining members of the expat oil community, the news of their murders was a personal tremor. Pets were sedated or put down, children pulled from the last open schools, and short flights scrambled from Abidan to Bahrain on the Gulf Coast. Two of Khomeini’s close advisers flew to Ahvaz and Abidan on New Year’s Eve to convince the strikers to run a minimum of 600,000 barrels per day for domestic consumption. It was an order that stemmed from the words of Khomeini himself – in effect, the transfer of power had begun.
On 3rd January, President Carter confirmed through US Ambassador Sullivan that Mohammed Reza would be welcome in the United States. A ranch in Palm Springs, Southern California was arranged through Walter Annenberg, a newspaper proprietor. In the final days, the Shah was urged by senior military fig
ures to set up a reporting arrangement, as they were desperate to contact him in the event of new developments. He stressed this could not happen. To the very end, his most loyal arm of government felt confused and abandoned.
The departure was heart-breaking for a small group, and also joyous for the nation. On the afternoon of 16th January 1979, Mohammed Reza emerged with Farah from Niavaran Palace in a dark suit, as staffers and servants wept and threw themselves at his feet. In his possessions was a tiny box of Iranian soil.117 At 1:24pm, his plane lifted off. An hour into the flight, he asked for lunch to be served, but with the airport under revolutionary komiteh control, the plane had not been stocked, and the last Royal Family of Iran shared tinned beans with their bodyguards.118 Barely out of the country’s airspace, a life of exile had begun. After a difficult battle with an aggressive cancer, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died in the summer of 1980, with much of his family and descendants still in exile to this day.
News of his departure in January 1979 reached the streets of Tehran within the hour. People danced, car horns blared, and thousands waved banknotes with the Shah’s face scratched or cut out. A local reporter noted the foreboding slogan: “Now the Shah is gone, America is next”.119
*
A range of scenarios looked possible through the second half of January 1979, with the US, Iranian military and other opposition groups all vying for a political situation that might stop short of a full Islamic Republic. But in many ways, a referendum wasn’t needed – the turmoil of the prior twelve months and the factions falling in behind Khomeini all pointed to only one outcome.
Did the secular, moderate parts of Iran cave in too easily? Could the army have done more even after the Shah’s departure? In truth, it was difficult for the military to organise themselves because of the lack of fuel. Any attack on Khomeini’s life would’ve thrust the nation into civil war, in a cold winter where nothing worked. And so, in the end, he returned to a nation broadly open to seeing what he would do with power.
Months of positioning, purges and recriminations followed, and for a time, it was not clear what sort of government would ensue. But Khomeini’s vision survived, and the world’s first Islamic Republic was proclaimed.
For the US, however, two events on Valentine’s Day 1979 offered a foreboding view of the future: Adolph Dubs, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped and shot; and the US Embassy in Tehran was stormed, with a Marine taken hostage. Negotiations between seasoned Iranian politicians and the US Ambassador led to the Embassy being surrendered and returned to US control within hours, and eventually the Marine was released after being beaten and tortured.
But worse was to come. On 4th November 1979, Iranian students stormed the US Embassy again, and fifty-two US diplomats, service people and citizens were taken hostage in a crisis that lasted 444 days, crippling the Carter Presidency and reshaping America’s relationship with political Islam forever.
On the flight back to Iran, a young US ABC reporter named Peter Jennings had happened to ask Khomeini, ‘What do you feel in returning to Iran?’
“Hich ehsâsi nadâram,” was his response. The translation? ‘I feel nothing.’
‘[When I heard this]… [T]hat for me summed everything up,’ said Reza Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza’s cherished first son, who was on a pilot training scheme at Reese Air Force base in Lubbock, Texas, when Khomeini returned from exile to form the Islamic Republic. Reza continued, ‘This was shocking for many Iranians, including many of the pro-Khomeini faction, and is at the core of what ensued. Now, decades later, that one word – nothing – encapsulates the whole raison d’être of this regime.’120
Afterword
On 30th April 2009, just an hour or so after midnight, I sat under the frame of my father as he left this world. Through the laughter, cursing, tears and smiles of our twenty-five years together, I held his body in the very moments when he passed into the next life.
As I dragged his chest towards mine, his head and arms fell back with an awful heaviness. The last morsels of strength were gone. Only moments before, my palm had rested in his safe hands. I listened as the warm blood pumped, pushed and passed into a lifeless and final state. I opened my eyes and gasped for air, united with his frame in a short but breathless passage of time. The speed at which his body cooled to the stiff temperature of the room was startling. The pulseless wrist chilled and the limbs filled with a hard and empty matter. My mother sat just a few feet away, leaving me to know this moment by myself.
Until someone has seen it, until one has laid on the hard ground and cradled with another body at the instant of death, it is impossible to imagine the mettle of this moment. Even now, I find it hard to describe. Yet in the haze of those uncountable minutes, I walked through the corridors of my lifelong home, and turned into the dining room to see the flint-golden power of the samovar my mother had brought back to Scotland in the embers of 1977. It had outlived him. It might end up outliving us all.
My mind turned to their stories of the Iran they knew through the samovar; a beautiful ornament that found a way to bring people together, either at the edge of a roadside family meeting, in mountain cafés, or wealthy homes on the tree-lined boulevards. No Iranian walked away from the samovar and its invitation to sit, reflect, and ponder questions with others. I also retain one carpet from the corridors of my parents’ life there, brought back by my mother on that trip to her Highland home in 1977. In that small way, the colours and cloth I walk on everyday are still tied to the last days of the Shah.
Thirty years had passed since the Revolution. Sometime after those hazy months, when the grief of losing my father had passed from a persistent concussion to a settled acceptance, I made the decision to write this story, now shared on the fortieth anniversary of Iran’s insurrection. Anyone who writes on the Persian domain does so in the shadow of stiff competition; there are many thick spines of archived histories, meticulous in their documentation. I would recommend anyone who enjoyed this to read those as well. This is a different history, accessible to me through the tales of the two people that brought me into the world.
In this moment, the events of the Revolution feel close; and yet how far away they will increasingly become to the generations that follow. No photos exist of Ali, and his fate was never confirmed. There are no rock samples left to hold from the collection of my parents’ Isfahan hallway. The tables and chairs throughout the apartment were left to look like a tornado had ripped through; documents, clothes, flint clippings and photos strewn across every surface. There are only their stories, and we are all left to construct our own imagined orbits of those days from that.
I owe so much to my mother. When I look through her scribbled notes, it sometimes feels like the act of remembering made it all come to life again. She etched out what she could recall, and together with the stories my father shared with me, I drew out the map of time that brought us to the steps of Lufthansa Flight 81 out of Tehran Airport on 8th December 1978. Only now, we are all at the same point. And from that collective point, I offer this conclusion.
Why does any single story matter? Every Iranian must have a story of 1978, I thought to myself. If only that were true. Many disappeared. Many more lived the disappointing years after, and feel a quiet remorse. Some have stayed true to the belief that, forty years on, an Islamic Republic was the right and chosen path. But they are small in number, and unlikely to ever grow.
This is a story of distance, memory and time as much as it is of the Iranian Revolution. But it is also about the fragility of life; and in this case, my life. What if the arrests, or the stray bullets, or the twists and turns of the Qom mob had been different? What if my mother’s pin in the Glasgow travel agent had jumped in another direction, or my father’s classmate had not walked past the mining school noticeboard, and flown on a whim to Central Asia? I am one person raised by two very different people, each with a pathway and worldview so unimaginably stark I can scarcely believ
e this experiment succeeded at all.
Documenting the past is a dangerous business. It takes the liquid amber of family legend and etches it into a hard-fossilised truth, accepted by the generations to come without question. But I am glad my mother scribbled down so many notes and anecdotes in red-rose folders when I asked her some years ago. Because I could not have remembered them. And now they are here. Now they are at least somewhere. If just one person reads this and is motivated to document a chapter of their own parents’ lives, then for that one person, it is an incalculable victory.
Without remembrance, there is no record. Recording this part of their lives has brought me a rare, quiet peace; had it been lost, the parents of my lived experience would’ve kept a lonely remoteness that I honestly didn’t believe to be. They met in an ancient land and fell in love. They loved each other long enough to have me, and my existence sustained something in both of them; whether it was a core purpose or a sidecar to a life of adventure that continued on, it matters little to me.
Some men have their fathers in their distant gaze all their lives. They grow up and out, and have that watchful eye through the years that shape and harden them. My father didn’t get that satisfaction. I missed the benefit. But we now live with the unintended consequence, and the modest gift of a revolutionary tale that I and all my descendants will be forever tied to.
Endnotes
1James Buchan, Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and its Consequences (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p.163.
2Ibid.
3Ibid, p.203.
4A. Shapour Shahbazi, The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5 G. N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London, 1892), Vol. 1, p.480.
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