The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Before the end of the year, on December 14, 1959, Eisenhower made a good-will trip to Iran. He arrived in Tehran at 8:40 in the morning and left for Athens six hours later, at 2:30 in the afternoon. Though some of his conversation with the Shah was about the Soviet threat, the Shah’s preoccupation was the increased military threat coming from Iraq. He wanted five new fighter-jet air fields, all geared toward defending the country against the possible Iraqi threat. Eisenhower, in his own words, was “much impressed with the extent to which the Shah’s thinking had matured.”48

  The Shah also decided to strengthen his government’s ability to fight back against Soviet as well as Arab Nationalist propaganda. The traumas of 1958, American suggestions that he should improve his “public image” and that the anti-Communist discourse in Iran needed to become more subtle and sophisticated, and finally the relentless nightly attacks on Radio Moscow against the Shah combined to convince him that he should find a more experienced hand to help fight these ideological battles. He dispatched one of his trusted lieutenants, General Hassan Alavi-Kia, deputy director of SAVAK, to Germany and entrusted him with the task of finding just such a propaganda advisor.

  In Bonn, General Alavi-Kia met with his counterpart in the West German security police. “We need someone,” Alavi-Kia said, “who can help with the ideological fight against the communists.”49 The German secret police, the General was told, had the perfect candidate. He was known as “Dr. Anti,” for his relentless fight against the Bolsheviks,50 and was considered one of Germany’s most experienced polemicists against Soviet Communism. What was not mentioned in that day’s discussion was that the candidate had first made a name for himself during the Nazi era but had also been active in the years after the Second World War. His name was Dr. Eberhard Taubert and, though a master propagandist, he was averse to publicity; it was said that the first picture of him was taken in October 1950.51

  Taubert, as it turned out, was not just “an expert for anti-Bolshevik” propaganda, but also a virulent anti-Semite. He had been “Goebbels’s screen writer,” having been involved in making one of the Nazis’ most infamous anti-Jewish films and described by one critic as “an X-ray of the legitimization of the Holocaust.”52 In fact, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was twenty-four years old. From his first days in the party, he was involved in both its anti-Communist and anti-Semitic propaganda. After the fall of Hitler, Taubert began to work for “three thousand dollars a month” for the German Christian Democratic Party in its polemics against more radical Marxists. It was rumored that the KGB had put a million-dollar prize on his head.53 One of the most famous anti-Communist posters in postwar Germany, portraying Soviet spies lurking in every corner, was said to be Taubert’s work.

  In August 1950, along with three others, Taubert established a group whose sole mandate was fighting Communist influence in Germany. It was said that the group received some 600,000 deutschmarks annually from the German government. His past, the fact that Goebbels had called him a “sympathetic fanatic,” and the story that he had somehow contributed to the deaths of more than 200,000 Jews made him an increasingly controversial character. Nevertheless, before his past caught up with him, Taubert moved freely and successfully in the corridors of West German power. For a few months, he had worked closely with Franz Strauss, the conservative Bavarian politician. He was both a liability and a rich source of experience for conservative postwar governments in Germany. Intermittent reports by German investigative journalists made it difficult for conservative parties to easily use him. It was then a pleasant surprise for his friends when the Iranian government asked for an anti-Soviet advisor, and the profile of the person they sought by and large fit Taubert’s expertise. In February 1959, with a salary of 3,500 deutschmarks per month, he was hired by SAVAK.54 His work with the organization was kept a secret, and few people, including the Shah, knew of his role.

  In Iran, as in postwar Germany, Taubert tried to live a semi-clandestine life. He moved in with a colonel who worked in the Iranian SAVAK. He had no friends and no hobbies. Hiking around Tehran’s towering mountains was his only occasional indulgence. In Tehran, his work was concentrated on offering advice on how to fight Bolshevik influence and counter Moscow’s propaganda war.

  He was not the only brain behind Iran’s surprisingly spry, clever, informed, and acerbic responses to the attacks by Comrade Khrushchev. Some of the most appealing broadcasts were prepared by Nosratollah Moinian, then a young journalist and aspiring bureaucrat. Before long he rose to become the Shah’s chief of staff—a position he held with distinction. Amongst his innovations was the broadcast instruction on Islam on radio programs heard by Muslims of the Soviet Union.

  Aside from working on the anti-Communist polemics, Taubert offered advice on a variety of political domains. For example, it is a question of some lingering interest whether Taubert had initially given the Shah the idea that soon became one of the pillars of the 1963 “White Revolution.” The idea was to use army conscripts to fight illiteracy. It was called Sepah-e Danesh or “army of knowledge.” It was one of the most successful elements of the White Revolution. Like most good ideas, this one too had many fathers, and Taubert was easily the most controversial. The idea, according to General Alavi-Kia, was first articulated in a policy paper that Taubert had prepared. It was a replica of the idea of Hitlerjugend going to the countryside to educate illiterate peasants.55 And Hitler himself might have picked up the idea from the populist movement in nineteenth-century Russia where intellectuals flocked to the countryside to educate the masses.

  But after quietly working for five years in Iran, in 1963, as the Shah was trying to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, and as the propaganda war with the Russians was about to end, firing Taubert became one of the conditions for normalized relations. Taubert was forced to leave Iran, and went to Egypt, Lebanon, and South Africa. The Russian gamble of 1959 had failed to produce for the Shah the results he anticipated. But his desire to use the Russian card did not dissipate or disappear. Only two years after Taubert left Iran, the Shah was once again trying to use Russia against the West, and, that time, he had higher cards.

  A hint of what was on the Shah’s political horizon came in a memorandum of a conversation between him and the British Ambassador. The Shah, the British envoy reported, “is moving toward the position of a liberal autocrat, relying largely on bourgeois support, not unlike Louis Philippe. His antipathy to the great landed aristocracy is increasingly plain.”56

  Chapter 13

  THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT

  The means that heaven yields must be embraced.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.2.29

  For the Shah, there was nothing numinous about the Kennedy Camelot. The Iranian monarch was no King Arthur, and every aspect of the original medieval story—from the cuckold king to his novel democratic idea of deferring power to a roundtable of knights—was anathema to the Shah’s disposition. It is far from hyperbole to suggest that the first four years of the sixties were for the Shah the most trying period after the Mossadeq ordeal. Conspiracies real and imagined, bloody rebellions in the cities, combined with his effort to lead a “White Revolution”—what the Kennedy White House had earlier called a “controlled revolution”—while trying to consolidate his hold on power made those four years for him at once tragic and triumphant. The four-year period was also singularly significant in shaping the dynamic forces that changed the fabric of Iranian society, brought the Shah to the height of his power, and the country to unprecedented prosperity. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was in no small measure the unintended consequence of the confluence of forces unleashed in the first years of the 1960s. The country’s domestic realities, as much as the changing international situation and the new policy ushered in by the Kennedy administration, shaped the Shah’s policies and politics.

  In February 1956, in a now-historic secret report to the twentieth Soviet Communist Party conference, Khrushchev criticized the once-deified
Stalin and called him a “sadistic . . . and egotistical” leader, and something of a bumbling fool when it came to military matters.1 Until the Khrushchev speech, the Soviet Union had followed a policy promulgated by Stalin that was in appearance and trappings ideologically austere and indebted to Marxian internationalism but was in fact fiercely nationalist and expansionist. It was predicated on the idea that there would be an inevitable Armageddon, wherein the “Socialist camp,” the camp of labor led by the Soviet Union, would defeat the “imperialist camp,” the camp of capital led by the United States. Instead of a global cataclysm and a nuclear war, Khrushchev now posited what he called the era of “peaceful coexistence” and “wars of national liberation.” The USSR, he promised, would support these movements throughout the Third World and through them defeat the United States and bring capitalism to its inevitable end. The fact that in the early 1970s, there were at any time more than forty armed conflicts around the world that were in fact proxy wars between the two superpowers was the direct result of this theory.

  In the case of Iran, soon after the bitter breakdown of negotiations over the non-aggression treaty between the two countries in 1959, Khrushchev not only launched an all-out propaganda campaign against the Shah, but also suggested provocatively that Iran was like a rotten apple, that all the Soviet Union had to do was wait and the apple would fall into its lap.

  In September 1961, there was also evidence of Soviet military buildup—including troop movements near the Iranian border—that indicated “the Soviets may seek to put pressure on Iran in connection with the Berlin crisis.”2 The United States began to develop contingency plans to respond to such a Soviet move.

  Another consequence of Khrushchev’s secret Twentieth Party Congress report was an increasingly open ideological, political, and even territorial rift between Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists on the one hand and Khrushchev and the Soviet Communist Party on the other. The Chinese Communist Party would soon begin supporting Maoist groups around the world, including Iran, and encourage them to fight the twin evils of political imperialism and social imperialism. By the early 1970s, several small and ineffective Maoist groups existed in Iran.

  The Cuban revolution of 1959 was afforded the same romantic aura of heroism and struggle that had, a quarter century earlier, been reserved for the Spanish Civil War. Che Guevara became not only the darling of radical chic in the West, but also the universally appealing symbol of a peculiar theory of revolution. According to this theory, embodied in Iran in the life and death of figures like Hamid Ashraf,3 a small cadre of dedicated armed revolutionaries must begin to fight oppressive regimes, allowing their own heroism and, if necessary, their martyrdom to became the catalyst that incites a hitherto intimidated, oppressed, and dormant mass into an assertive revolutionary action. About the same time, a similar model of revolutionary action was put into action in an Islamic context in Algeria, and many of the leaders of that revolution became models for the Iranian youth.

  Even before the rise of this new theory, radical Islamist forces had been, since 1941, organized in a remarkably successful terrorist organization called Feda’yan-e Islam. The Shah and his regime, particularly in the first years of the sixties, had to contend with the power and fury of this group.

  The easy spread of this theory amongst Iranian secular and religious youth can be at least partially explained by its structural and emotional similarity to the story of Imam Hussein, a narrative central to Shiite iconography. In that story too, a band of seventy-two dedicated revolutionaries, led by Hussein, the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson, rose up and fought against the superior army of the “usurping” caliph. Their foredoomed death created the enduring myth of martyrdom in Shiism.

  A corollary, or even an epistemological precondition of this Shiite theory of martyrdom, is the postulate that the genuinely pious are invariably in the minority. Che and Lenin’s theory of revolution, no less than Feda’yan-e Islam’s vision, demanded a similar belief that genuine revolutionaries are invariably a minority. In Iran, as in many other countries of the Third World, armed “guerrilla movements”—called in the parlance of our time “terrorist groups”—mushroomed into action. What made the Iranian experience peculiarly interesting was that the theory appeared both in an overtly religious guise and in one with a Marxist veneer. Both incarnations had similar religious roots and structural affinities. A Marxist group even called itself Feda’yan-e Khalq—the Martyrs of the People. One of the leaders of this group, Hamid Ashraf, developed by the early 1970s an almost mythical reputation for his Houdini-like ability to escape from any trap laid by the security forces. For months, the Shah became intensely anxious, even obsessive, about Ashraf’s fate and pressured the security forces to use any and all means to arrest or kill the mythical fugitive.4

  September 1960 was also the time when some of the oil-producing countries in the world—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela—decided to form a cartel and called it the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, known since then by its acronym of OPEC. After the trauma of trying to sign a separate deal with Enrico Mattei, the Italian maverick oilman, joining the new organization was for the Shah both a relief and a challenge. The Shah believed Mattei’s death in a plane crash, said to be an accident caused by “lack of visibility,” was in fact the result of a conspiracy. “I have never believed that Mattei’s death was an accident,” the Shah said. He went on to add that in his view, Mattei “was amongst the first casualties” of the Shah’s attempt to steer an independent course in oil negotiations.5 The United States and Britain both tried to dissuade the Shah from signing the controversial deal with Mattei, as it would have given Iran 75 percent of the profits. Both countries moved gingerly to muscle Mattei out and, until his death, their effort failed.6 Maybe that explains the Shah’s initial reluctance to make a serious commitment to OPEC.

  But gradually he changed his mind. He appointed Fuad Rouhani as Iran’s representative to the new organization. Rouhani was one of Iran’s most respected oil economists and jurists, known for his intimate knowledge of the complicated calculus of oil pricing and of the arcane world of oil contracts and agreements. Rouhani was selected as the first secretary-general of OPEC. Before long, the Shah himself took a leading role in pushing OPEC to demand higher prices for oil. In fact, if the Shah is to be believed, not only the troubles in the early 1960s, but the revolution of 1979, were the direct result of his role in OPEC and his becoming known as a “price hawk.” In a bitter passage of his memoirs, the Shah wrote, “[F]rom the moment that Iran became the master of its own underground wealth, a systematic campaign of denigration was begun concerning my government and my person. . . . It was at this time that I became a despot, an oppressor, a tyrant. Suddenly malicious propaganda became apparent; professional agitators operating under the guise of ‘student’ organizations appeared. This campaign begun in 1958 reached a peak in 1961. Our White Revolution halted it temporarily. But it was begun anew with greater vigor in 1975 and increased until my departure.”7

  It was in the context of these changing circumstances that the Shah also had to face a new administration in Washington. He had clearly favored Richard Nixon; in his campaign, John Kennedy had openly criticized the Shah, suggesting the necessity of an overhaul of U.S. policy not just in Iran but around the world. The Cold War’s Manichaean view of the world reduced everything to a simplistic dualism between “us” and “them,” and “good” and “evil;” the view was shared by both the United States and the Soviet Union, but the Kennedy administration favored a more nuanced approach.

  In Iran, this change of U.S. policy took place against a backdrop of the constant threat of the Soviet Union and of the character of the Shah and the danger that the “US might push him” into the temptation to leave the Western camp and join the growing ranks of nonaligned countries.8 U.S. intelligence agencies claim that America even entertained the idea of removing the Shah, so urgent was the need for change in Iran at that time.9 But contrary to the
perception shared by many scholars and students of modern Iran, and countering the view shared by many Iranian royalists that Republican presidents were friends of the Shah and Democratic presidents his foes, pressure on the Shah to reform had begun in the last three years of the Eisenhower presidency—the Republican president with whom the Shah had developed particularly close relations.

  Throughout much of the late fifties, a point of constant contention between the Shah and the United States was what John Foster Dulles, writing to President Eisenhower, called “the Shah’s military obsession.”10 In the same note, Dulles, using a tone that reeked of sarcasm, brought up the fact that “the Shah consider[ed] himself a military genius” and was determined to build his military to the point where Iran became the dominant power in the region.

  But in the 1950s, when much of Iran’s military buildup was funded by the U.S. government, American policy makers exercised considerable control over the size and structure of the Iranian army. At the same time, the United States occasionally chose to cater to the Shah’s “military obsession” as a kind of inducement, even an emotional bribe. American officials believed that “the Shah’s interest in military forces is in part emotional rather than logical. . . . [This] psychological bias,” they concluded, “renders him immune to logical persuasion in this field.”11 When reason was wanting, American officials tried to appeal to the Shah’s emotions. In 1958, for example, when the Shah was planning a private visit to the United States, Secretary of State Dulles wrote to Eisenhower, first apologizing for getting the President “in this” and then suggesting he should “flatter the Shah with the prospects of an exchange of view with [Eisenhower] on modern military problems.”12