The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Initially, the wedding had been planned to take place just after Christmas, and “elaborate preparations for nearly a week of festivities had been made.” But Soraya fell ill on October 26. She was examined by some of the best physicians in the country but only one, the Shah’s private physician, Dr. Ayadi, correctly diagnosed her as suffering from a case of salmonella poisoning. There had been at the time an epidemic of this disease in Tehran.74 Eventually, based on the feeling that “expensive entertainments were not in accord with the spirit of the times,” plans for an elaborate wedding were scuttled in favor of more simple arrangements.75

  Even the simple wedding was badly botched. Someone had printed and distributed a large number of fraudulent invitations, and many more guests than anticipated showed up for the ceremonies. There were rumors of sabotage. Soraya herself was so weak by the time of the ceremonies that she virtually passed out halfway through the wedding. But by February 13, she was the queen of Iran.

  A few weeks after the wedding, the Shah planned a trip to Jordan where, in the words of the British Embassy officials, the “young air-minded monarch” was planning to pilot a plane put at his disposal by the British air force.76 But on April 1, 1951, during a lunch meeting with the British Ambassador, the Shah confided that he was “suffering from appendicitis and [had] been advised that he should be operated on soon.” He said he was on a “strict diet,” that he had been in bed for the last few days, and that he was thinking of going to France or Switzerland for the operation.77 In those days, Hussein Ala was in charge of what was clearly a caretaker government following the assassination of General Razmara. The British Embassy wanted to know whether the Shah thought Ala could successfully resolve the oil issue; the Shah refused to give a definitive answer but said he had asked “Ala for a definitive statement whether he could solve the oil question or not.”78

  As he waited for a clear indication of Ala’s position, the Shah’s health deteriorated. On April 10, he sent Assadollah Alam to see the British Ambassador and say that the Shah sought the British Embassy’s advice on whether he should go to Europe for the operation or have it in Iran. The Ambassador, after saying that “the Shah’s health was the first consideration,” suggested that a specialist be brought in. In an eerie foreshadowing of events in 1978, one Dr. Forkner, who had visited the Shah when he was visiting America, was brought in under the strictest secrecy. He performed an appendectomy on the Shah on July 5, 1951, and decided that no other operation was necessary.79 While the operation forced the Shah to cancel his Jordan trip, he had decided even before his illness to reject the offer of flying the British plane lest it “might be embarrassing in view of the present propaganda against British influence here.”80 Nevertheless, the Shah did give a Rolls-Royce to Soraya as a wedding gift, a Rolls-Royce with special accessories provided by H. J. Mulliner.81 He had first ordered the car two years earlier, but various problems had delayed delivery. It was a “special model of which only one has so far been built.”82

  On a smaller scale, the country’s political turmoil was replicated in the Shah’s private life. Soraya describes, in a bitter tone, how the Shah banned from Court Forough Zafar, the woman she most trusted and called “aunt.” The charge was “seditious activities.” In her view, the entire episode was nothing but a conspiracy “hatched entirely” by the Shah’s mother and his sister Shams.83 Those were the days of the Shah’s confrontation with Mossadeq, the days of anxiety about bugged rooms and spies, double agents and unreliable allies.

  At the same time, descriptions of the royal couple’s favorite pastimes are fascinating. Aside from poker, where Soraya was a mere observer, they played parlor games like charades and telephone. Masked balls were also a favorite activity. In one held in late 1953, “Mohammad Reza decided—royalty demanded it—to disguise himself as a lion”; she describes how she was, as a result of a conspiracy, thwarted in her effort to appear as Madame de Pompadour—instead she was forced to wear “a Joan of Arc breastplate.”84

  Her description of the Shah in this period is mostly positive. She often praises him when she finds European characteristics in his behavior. “Oriental” traits are invariably cause for disparagement. She appreciated his timid tenderness in his relations with women. Despite a first marriage, she writes, and “in spite of countless mistresses he had had before me, Mohammad Reza was extremely shy with women . . . he did not like to show his feelings.” His eyes, however, “were expressive. Dark brown, almost black, shining, at times hard, at times sad or gentle, they exuded charm and reflected his soul.”85 At the same time, she found that he “could not bear the smallest rebuke.”

  Aside from the Shah’s mother and siblings, there was another source of tension between Soraya and the Shah, and that was Ernest Perron. “How can I,” she writes with bitterness, “describe this shetun [piece of shit], this limping devil who dragged his leg and spread his poison around the palace as well as in our own quarters?” He was, she says, “a homosexual,” who “detested women, all women.” She found him to be “cunning, perfidious and Machiavellian, he roused hatred, stirred up gossip, reveled in every intrigue.” She writes of the Shah’s fascination with this “diabolical Swiss,” who claimed to be a “philosopher, a poet, and a prophet”; she writes of how every morning, the Shah “would shut himself up in his room with [Perron] and talk about affairs of state or gather some piece of information which the shetun had been able to glean in the bazaar.”86 She had to throw him out of the room, when “one day he lewdly set about asking questions concerning my life with Mohammad Reza.”87

  In these trying times, Soraya attempted to bring some joy to life on Court evenings by having the Shah listen to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, and Sarah Vaughan. But it was all to no avail—the Shah looked “somber and distressed,” and he remained taciturn. He even stopped playing poker with friends at night. Rumor had it that the Shah oftentimes played high-stakes games at Court, sometimes with a couple of hundred thousand tooman (about $70,000) changing hands. The Shah was said to be reticent about receiving or writing checks at the end of the game.88 Though he enjoyed these poker games immensely, he quit playing. He believed his phones and his rooms were bugged. He no longer “laughed at their jests” or played parlor games organized to divert him.89 With her characteristic candor, Soraya even writes of their embrace in the “nuptial bed” and how it was invariably “to console him.”90 About the same time, the British Foreign Office concluded that “the Shah appeared on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”91

  As Mossadeq’s confrontation with the British continued, and as his relations with the Shah grew more and more strained, the Shah’s mood deteriorated even further. He was “becoming increasingly tense and worried. He continued to go to his office every day but it was merely a formality. Nobody asked for his advice.”92 More than once he complained to Western diplomats that the current state of affairs was untenable for him. By April 1953, he succumbed to Mossadeq’s demand and dismissed his loyal Court Minister Hussein Ala and allowed the Prime Minister to name Abolgassem Amini in his place. By then visits to the Shah by politicians were deemed by Mossadeq to be an unfriendly gesture. Ministers were banned altogether from making any such visits. The Shah’s nadir was reached when even the commanders of the military were barred, on the orders of Mossadeq, from giving him reports. As Mossadeq had demonstrated in the aftermath of his July 21, 1952, confrontation with the Shah, in his mind the Shah’s constitutional title of commander in chief was no more than a perfunctory formality; the Shah, on the other hand, saw his constitutional role as commander in chief as a pillar of his power and a license to micromanage the military. Even after he had succumbed to Mossadeq’s demand and allowed him to take over the command of the military, the Shah tried to continue his control of the armed forces through the secret officers group that had come to exist in the aftermath of the Second World War.

  As his power dissipated, the Shah began to pay ever more attention to every gesture of those he met l
est they show any sign of disrespect. In Soraya’s view, he began “to distort every remark,” to see an affront or an assault behind every word and gesture. He felt, in her words, “like a hunted animal.” At night, “he would sleep with a revolver under his pillow and repeatedly changed his room.”93

  In one meeting with the American Ambassador, late in 1951, he made no effort to “hide his great anxiety”; he declared “again and again in seeming despair . . . ‘But what can I do; I am helpless.’ ”94 He went on to say “no matter how strong and resolute I may wish to be, I cannot take unconstitutional moves against strong current nationalist feelings.” He asserted that “Mossadeq’s policies are leading Iran towards ruin,” but then asked, “What slogans have I to change this time? Can I appeal to balanced budgets?”95

  A few months later, the Shah sent Alam to see the British Ambassador, to reassure him that the Shah was “fully aware of the danger of keeping Mossadeq in power” and that he was determined to get rid of him. The problem was that he felt “completely alone and thought if he took action against Mossadeq no one would support him.” More importantly still, he believed that “a secret hand was supporting” Mossadeq and that this secret hand, in the King’s mind, was the American government.96

  To give a sense of the country’s mood, the Shah recounted to one British official how on the same day of their meeting, he had “received emissary with a message from [Ayatollah] Boroujerdi . . . stating that all Iran must stand together in face of British threat.”97 He concluded the meeting by saying, “at present, he did not know where to turn.” The reference to Boroujerdi was particularly poignant. As a matter of principle, Boroujerdi rarely entered the political arena directly. Just as his clear support for Mossadeq at this time was, for the Shah, a sobering indication of his foe’s power, so too, when Boroujerdi and others in the clerical establishment ended their support for Mossadeq and aligned themselves with the Shah and his supporters in early 1953, that change of heart was a harbinger of the Shah’s rising star and a sign that Mossadeq’s base of power was weakening.

  More than once in those days, British and American officials complained that the Shah “is lacking in courage and in resolution.” Loy Henderson, the American ambassador, for example, said that while the Shah “[was] conscious of his weakness,” he was nevertheless inclined to “conceal his true character by finding excuses for inaction, and even laying blame for past mistakes on those around him.”98 For this reason, as early as July 31, 1952, Henderson concluded that if a coup against Mossadeq was to be successful, it had to be “carried [out] and executed by Iranian army in name of the Shah without knowledge of Shah since Shah would probably not have stamina to see it through and might at certain stage weaken and denounce leaders.”99

  During those months, the Shah’s behavior at times bordered on the fatalistic. He often engaged in his passion for speed. He sometimes drove one of his many fast cars to Kalardasht—his favorite vacation spot near the Caspian coast. A British Embassy official described one such trip. The Shah drove “eighty miles an hour” in his Packard convertible. The narrow, curvy two-lane road to Kalardasht—the Chalus Road—was in those days a notorious death trap.100

  Even the venue in which he would hold sensitive conversations reflected his “haunted” mood. When discussing plans to topple Mossadeq or choosing who should replace him, “to obtain maximum privacy,” the meetings “took place in palace gardens.”101 Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, the CIA operative who went to Iran to arrange for the fall of Mossadeq, offers startling accounts of his crucial early August 1953 meetings with the Shah—a strange brew reminiscent of a Le Carré novel made into a bad Hollywood movie. Around midnight on Saturday, August 1, Roosevelt describes crawling into the backseat of a “suitably unroyal” car, a blanket covering him as he “huddled down on the floor” as they entered the royal palace gates. Security was lax. By then, Mossadeq had substantially reduced the Court’s budget, closed the special offices of the Shah’s siblings, exiled the more active members of the royal family (particularly the Shah’s twin sister and his mother), and demanded that the King give up his annual revenue from the Imam Reza Endowment—the richest religious endowment in the country at the time. Before long, the Shah’s security detail and even the number of tanks that protected the palace were reduced as well. No sooner had the car neared the palace itself than “the finely drawn, distinctively regal features” of the Shah appeared.

  Roosevelt was there to convince the Shah that the United States and Britain were both behind him and supported the idea of toppling the Mossadeq government. A few weeks earlier, the Shah had demanded to know whether the British government still supported him, and on May 28, Churchill had asked the U.S. government to convey to the Shah his personal message—that is, that Britain “should be very sorry to see the Shah lose his powers or leave his post or be driven out.”102

  The United States too declared its support for a move against Mossadeq. Now Roosevelt was there to talk tactics and strategy. They walked in the garden in the dark of night, and Roosevelt promised that the United States would confirm its earnest support of the project by having “President Eisenhower . . . confirm this himself by a phrase in a speech he is about to deliver in San Francisco.” Britain would reassert its commitment through “a specific change made in the announcement on the BBC broadcast” the next night.103

  With tensions between the Shah and Mossadeq mounting, on February 19, 1953, Hussein Ala, the minister of Court, received a call from Mossadeq, asking him to send a “responsible” representative from the Court to take a personal message from the Prime Minister to the Shah. Mossadeq was increasingly using health excuses not to go to meet with the Shah. The same reason, as well as his fear of assassination, was given for moving the Prime Minister’s office to his private home, where he conducted many of his official meetings in bed, in his pajamas.

  In the meeting with the Court representative, Mossadeq, in the presence of three of his closest aides and allies, “briskly requested emissary to tell the Shah that he could no longer tolerate unfriendly attitude of Shah and Court” and that on February 24, he would submit his resignation. He accused the Shah of “intriguing against him” and maintained that the Court was engaged in all manner of conspiracy, all intended to bring about his fall.104 It was a dangerous gambit by Mossadeq, intended to force the Shah to either totally submit to him or leave the country. This was a move sure to alarm the American government as well as Mossadeq’s more moderate supporters, since both were opposed to the idea of regime change. Keeping the U.S. government on his side remained, up until the night of August 18, 1953, high on Mossadeq’s agenda. But he was banking on the idea that, under the prevailing circumstances, the Shah could not afford to be seen as playing any role in the demise of the Prime Minister. Ever since his victory in the showdown with the Shah in July 1952, Mossadeq had acted as if he was impervious to any action from the Shah, as if he knew that the King would never dare dismiss him. The emissary, as well as Mossadeq’s allies, all asked the Prime Minister to “reconsider . . . [he was] however adamant.”

  The Shah was deeply distraught when he heard the message and “asked Ala to intervene.” The Court Minister too found the Prime Minister “intractable.” Amongst Mossadeq’s charges against the Shah, the strangest was that the Shah had supported “Qavam against him.” In reality, the Shah had been much against the idea of Qavam’s appointment. Moreover, the appointment had come only after the parliament had shown its inclination toward Qavam. By law, after such a vote, the Shah had no choice but to appoint Qavam. Implicit in Mossadeq’s complaint was that any move to support another candidate for prime minister was itself treason; many of his aides and closest advisors made this claim much more openly. Mossadeq also criticized the Shah’s decision to divide some of the Crown lands “among tenants. He had said the Shah should turn lands [over] to Government and allow” it to determine their disposition. He seemed to believe that the Shah’s move was a publicity stunt meant to undermine the
government. In reality, belief in the necessity of a land reform had been part of the Shah’s vision as soon as he ascended the throne. In fact as early as April 1950, the Shah had told the British Ambassador that land reform was a “must” in Iran and that he would begin with the Crown lands. He went on to say that landlords were terrified at the prospect of land reform and were “even in some cases working up the mullahs into a counterattack, on the ground that such a movement would be against the religion of Islam.”105 The Shah’s words proved prescient: in about a decade, when he did in fact launch land reform, precisely such an alliance between the clergy and the landlords was formed to fight the Shah.

  In that February 19, 1953, meeting Mossadeq also accused the Shah of encouraging the uprising amongst the Bakhtiyari tribes against the government. Ala defended the Shah, arguing that he was firm in his belief that Mossadeq should remain as prime minister, as he was “better qualified than anyone to effect a solution” to the oil crisis.106

  When the Shah was told of Mossadeq’s intractable position, he asked Ala to inform the American Embassy of the problem and to continue negotiating with Mossadeq. He also relayed a message to Mossadeq that he was “prepared to leave the country and to stay abroad until Mossadeq requested his return.”107 The Prime Minister responded that in his view, the “Shah should not leave the country.” Neither Ala nor the Shah believed him on this point. They both believed that the ultimate goal of Mossadeq’s most recent threat of resignation was in fact to force the Shah’s exit from the country. The American Embassy, too, concurred, believing that Mossadeq intended to use the feeling of euphoria in the country about an imminent solution to the oil problem to “crush his political enemies” and settle his score with the Shah.