Indeed, the Shah made headlines around the world at the close of 1977 with a lavish New Year’s Eve party at the Niavaran Palace, where President Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger, and former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller celebrated the Pahlavi Dynasty. The festivities, however splendid, could not hide the fact of mortality: Sooner, rather than later, he would be gone. And here is where the unremitting support of the Ford administration permitted the Shah to think about an Iran without him.
“There was no way he would have planned for his departure if he thought his most important ally was wavering in its support, or secretly working with his enemies,” one high-ranking Ford official said. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if Jimmy Carter had been elected, and had begun pushing the Shah on human rights and democracy. It was because Ford was so clearly on his side that the Shah began to really think about succession.”
What that official did not know, what only a handful of people knew, was that there was one other element central to the Shah’s willingness to turn over power: the elimination of his most tenacious, dangerous enemy—by any means necessary.
FOR ALMOST FIFTEEN YEARS, Grand Ayatollah Imam Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini had been calling for the downfall of the Shah from his home in exile in Najif, Iraq. It was Khomeini who had triggered the first mass uprisings against the Shah in 1963, and even from exile the seventy-six-year-old Khomeini was still an influential figure in Iran and a potential threat to the U.S. strategy in the region. A hostile Iran would be a dagger at the throat of American economic and geopolitical interests.
“It was clear from the beginning,” Brent Scowcroft said much later, “that Khomeini was very dangerous.”
It was also clear to three closely linked intelligence agencies: Iran’s Savak, Israel’s Mossad, and America’s Central Intelligence Agency, headed by former Texas congressman George H. W. Bush, who had eagerly agreed to stay on after Ford’s election. Because of Congressional hearings into CIA practices back in 1975, the Agency was under strict Congressional legislation about how it could deal with adversaries. This did not prevent increasingly urgent communications among Langley, Jerusalem, and Tehran about what Khomeini was saying and doing.
Perhaps it was simply a coincidence that in May of 1978, Khomeini was ordered to leave Iraq at the insistence of an increasingly important official, Vice President Saddam Hussein. It was perfectly plausible to believe the decision flowed from clear Iraqi self-interest: the government was in the hands of Sunni Muslims, despite the fact that Shiites formed a large majority of the population, and the fear of Khomeini stirring up Shiites within Iraq was surely reasonable. Nor was Iraq interested in a diplomatic confrontation with its well-armed neighbor to the East. So there was little reason to ask if there were any other motives behind Iran’s insistence that Iraq expel the Ayatollah. It was less clear why French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing would allow Khomeini to relocate to a comfortable suburban home in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, a far more convenient location for journalists from around the world to seek out the cleric. Giscard, after all, had been concerned enough with access to Iran’s oil to have made the Shah the guest at his first state dinner after his election as President in 1974. Perhaps it was Giscard’s intention to offer a gesture to the growing population of Muslims now living in France. And perhaps it was that explanation that was offered to the Shah during a visit to Iran by Giscard’s personal representative, longtime French politician Michael Poniatowski.
Perhaps these were dots that could have been connected. Perhaps not. What is certain is that on Friday, September 1, 1978, the Ayatollah and two aides were driving in a black Mercedes-Benz 450SEL, heading to the al-Sallam Mosque on the Left Bank. Just as they entered the Pont de l’Alma underpass, the driver lost control of the Mercedes, and it crashed head-on into a pillar supporting the roof. In the confusion just after the crash, wildly conflicting reports emerged: that an unidentified car approached them at great speed and overtook them; that the driver of the Mercedes may have been blinded by flashbulbs from cameras pointed directly at him from the other car; that a person or persons leapt from the other car, briefly approached the Mercedes, then fled. There was one indisputable fact: Ayatollah Khomeini was dead, apparently of a heart attack caused by the trauma of the crash.
Under other circumstances, the death of Khomeini might well have triggered a full-scale civil war in Iran, ending in the violent overthrow of the Shah, and the imposition of a regime that fully embraced a rigid version of Islam, one that sternly rejected any hint of democratic freedoms and a separation of mosque and state. As it happened, the fate of the nation was held in the hands of the man Khomeini had designated as his successor, a man whose lifelong immersion in Islamic scholarship was fused with an outlook utterly different from that of the Ayatollah.
At fifty-eight, the Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri was almost as prominent and revered a figure among Iranian’s Shiite community as Khomeini himself. He had studied under the Ayatollah at Qom, the center of Iranian Muslim scholarship, and more important, had joined in Khomeini’s campaign to fight the Shah’s 1963 “White Revolution.” When Khomeini was exiled, Montazeri became the key figure in the clerical network that continued organized protests against the Shah. He had, in fact, only recently been released from a four-year prison term for his campaign against the Pahlavi Dynasty. His credibility among the disaffected Muslim community was unchallenged. His loyalty to Khomeini, however, did not extend to his vision of a post-Pahlavi Iran. Montazeri leaned toward “quietism,” the idea that mere mortals could not establish a “true” Islamic government. He favored a democratic republic, with Islamic jurists proving spiritual and theological guidance; he was fully capable of negotiating with disparate elements of the opposition movement, excluding only the Communists. In spite of these tendencies, and in spite of the fact that he could not claim descent from Muhammad, he had the one asset that could not be trumped: Khomeini himself had designated him as his successor.
Montazeri’s first act may have been the most consequential: He “demanded” that the Shah permit the Ayatollah’s body to be returned to Iran for burial. That established him even more completely as the voice of religious-based opposition to the Shah (not until years later was it learned that this “demand” had been pre-sanctioned by the Shah’s closest advisors). It was, then, seen as a matter of obeisance to theologically sound thinking when Montazeri decreed that Khomeini be buried in Qom, where Khomeini had lived and taught, and not in Beheshit-e-Zahra, a graveyard in the Southern suburbs of Tehran named after the Prophet’s daughter.
One U.S. Embassy official, Gary Sick, said, “We all breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the news. A funeral march through the streets of Tehran would have meant millions of Iranians, unhinged by grief and anger; it could have led to anything from mass suicides to mass slaughter of anyone who looked like a Westerner.” With the funeral held ninety miles south of the capital, the frenzied crowds that surrounded the body were confined to Qom; they did not spill over into an attack on the nation’s power centers. A week later, Montazeri came to Tehran to announce the formation of a broad coalition, including merchants and business leaders, students, and democratic reformers, to demand an end to the dynastic rule of the Pahlavis. In what was a carefully orchestrated sequence, the Shah engaged in protracted negotiations with Montazeri and his new allies, and then announced that he would step down from the Peacock Throne.
Not everyone who had opposed the Shah welcomed this transfer of power. Some of Khomeini’s most fervent supporters protested that Montazeri had “betrayed the Imam” by agreeing to a less-rigid Islamic supervision of a new government. They charged that he had become a “stooge of the Americans and their Central Intelligence Agency.” The charge carried some weight, given that the U.S. ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, had in fact once headed the CIA. And they did more than rally. On September 24, four hundred students, calling themselves “The Muslim Student Followers of the Imam,” brok
e through the gates of the U.S. Embassy and took sixty-five embassy officials hostage. For five days, the students paraded blindfolded Americans in front of the embassy’s entrance, demanding the establishment of an “authentic Islamic Republic” under strict obedience to Sharia law. Just as the spotlight of international media was shifting to cover the crisis, Montazeri ordered local police into the embassy grounds to break the siege and free the hostages. Four students were killed in the action, including a twenty-two-year-old student at the Iran University of Science and Technology, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was unclear whether Ahmadinejad was part of the operation or had gone to the embassy to urge that the students end the “un-Islamic action.”
(The swift end to the embassy siege had an immediate impact at home. On the third day of the hostage crisis, ABC News President Roone Arledge ordered up a late-night special, called, somewhat portentously, America Held Hostage, anchored by one of the network’s most accomplished reporters, Ted Koppel. Using satellite technology to conduct simultaneous conversations with Iranian and American officials in Tehran and Washington, the specials won widespread praise. But just as Koppel was concluding the sixth night’s broadcast, news came that the hostages were being freed. The program disappeared. Four months later, Koppel left ABC for CNN, where he anchored an hour-long late-night public affairs show; the ABC Entertainment division soon took the 11:30 time slot away from ABC News and filled it with a low-key talk-show host from Cincinnati named Jerry Springer.)
No one pretended that the new Iranian government was a permanent answer for the nation. The tensions among Islamists, political reformers, entrepreneurs, and remnants of the old dynastic order were palpable. Those same tensions, however, helped ensure that no one faction would be strong enough to topple the unwieldy mechanism; which meant that as the 1970s ended, the Ford administration could count several assets that would have vanished had the Shah been toppled by a regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini:—The new government would need the money from U.S. oil purchases to reach something approaching solvency, so Iran would not use its oil reserves as a diplomatic or strategic weapon.
—Iran and Israel would remain strategic partners; there was no appetite within the ruling Iran coalition for a break with a nation that supplied it with arms and intelligence.
—Nor was there any appetite to make common cause with the more radical forces in the Middle East, now popping up everywhere from Jordan to Lebanon to Syria to the West Bank. When a militant wing of a Lebanese-based political organization, “the Party of God,” or “Hezbollah,” reached out to the Islamists within the new coalition government, Ayatollah Montazeri and Prime Minister Mehdi Barzagan sternly rejected any notion of tactical or financial support. That rejection, in turn, brought expressions of gratitude from Jerusalem, where the Israeli government began to send signals that continued calm on the West Bank might well lead to “reciprocal gestures” in the form of sharply limiting the growth of settlements.
In this sense, then, those insignificant clusters of Ohio and Mississippi voters in 1976 had been the first link in a chain of events that reshaped the Middle East. Unhappily for President Ford, the escape from a dangerously hostile regime in Iran led to other consequences as well, consequences that would demonstrate the truth of a piece of political folk wisdom: “When you are up to your neck in alligators, it is hard to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp.”
FOR EGYPTIAN PRESIDENT ANWAR SADAT, and Saudi Arabia’s royal family, the close relationship between the United States and Iran was a source of unease. Washington may have looked at the Middle East as simply one region in the worldwide Cold War, but for Cairo and Riyadh, Iran’s role as a populous, well-armed nation of Shiite Muslims was the central fact of life. The 1,300-year-old schism in Islam, rooted in a struggle over who could legitimately claim the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad, along with Iran’s potential to dominate the Middle East, ensured that Cairo and Riyadh would instinctively regard its Persian neighbor with wariness, especially since both Arab nations, in strikingly different ways, were pursuing paths that put them a far distance from Iran.
Egypt’s Sadat was a modernizer with little use for the customs of Islam. His scorn had earned him the wrath of Islamists, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the younger, more militant students and intellectuals who called themselves the Islamic Brigade. Their leaders, including a medical student named Ayman al-Zawahiri, despised everything about Sadat, and among them, one of the continuing debates was whether to organize an assassination attempt against Sadat, or attempt a coup to topple his government.
By contrast, Saudi Arabia was ruled by a family that had long since made its peace with the most rigid, unyielding brand of Islam, one that went under the name “Wahhabi,” although the Saud family preferred the term “Salafist.” Under an agreement that stretched back decades, the family had agreed that not only was Islam the only religion to be permitted in the Kingdom—no churches, certainly no synagogues—but that only the Salafist version of Islam would be sanctioned. The rulers even permitted the clerics to operate their own “morals police” to roam the streets of the Kingdom, arresting or beating couples who dared to sit together in public, or women whose dress did not conform to the rigid Wahhabi code.
Given the enmity between the competing versions of Islam, the Saudi rulers might have been pleased when Ayatollah Khomeini was conveniently removed from the field and that Iran’s spiritual life would be guided by the far less rigid Ayatollah Montazeri. That theological issue, however, was more than trumped by the Saudi fears of what a post-Shah Iran, in collusion with its American allies, might portend for the region. Reza Pahlavi had made no secret of his belief that he was destined to be the dominant force in the Near East. And there were disturbing signs that, with his abdication, the Americans were prepared to indulge the Persians’ insatiable hunger for something close to hegemony.
Worse, the continued Iranian partnership with Israel was making it harder for the Saudi Kingdom to maintain its own close ties with Washington. “How,” the clerics demanded of the royal family, “can you continue to do the bidding of the Jewish-dominated American government when it favors the Persians?” The key members of the family—King Fahd, Prince Abdullah, Sheik Yamani—had their own grievances. They had saved America from a crushing economic blow at the end of 1976, when they had turned on the oil spigot to undercut the Shah’s attempt at a price rise. And this is how the Americans were repaying their kindness? By nurturing the growth of more powerful Iran, by encouraging Tehran’s close association with Israel?
Both Egypt and the Saudis took significant steps in 1979 to make clear their displeasure with Washington’s Iranian tilt. Sadat stepped back from shaping a full-scale peace treaty with Israel; and with Jerry Ford in the White House, there was no chance that the American President would step in and prod the two sides into an agreement.
“Maybe,” Brent Scowcroft reflected, “Jimmy Carter would have been persistent enough, or stubborn enough, to sit down with Begin and Sadat day after day to comb through the details. Ford just wasn’t that kind of personality.”
So Egypt and Israel remained in limbo: no longer adversaries on the brink of war, but no closer to a partnership in peace. That limbo may well have saved a life. “If Sadat had signed a peace treaty with Israel,” Zawahiri said later, “he would have signed his own death warrant. There were a hundred people who would have been happy to pull the trigger.”
If Egypt’s hesitancy was a moderate diplomatic disappointment, the Saudi action was more like a multi-megaton hit. On May 25, 1979, just as the U.S. travel season was hitting its peak, the Saudis signaled their discontent with American policy by announcing a 20 percent cutback in oil production. What that did to America in the summer of 1979 was captured in striking images of long gas lines, shuttered businesses, major highways jammed with convoys of protesting truck drivers. Beneath the image was a reality even more grim: The oil shock was one more piece of evidence that the ground under some of America’s most f
undamental assumptions about itself was no longer secure. And that, in turn, would shape the terrain, and the course, of the 1980 Presidential campaign.
JERRY FORD’S SECOND TERM was doomed before it began—literally.
In late December 1976, President Ford and his advisors gathered in the White House Cabinet Room to talk about the agenda for the coming year.
“What we need, Mr. President,” said Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, “is to use your Inaugural, your State of the Union speech, and your budget message to present a unified, clear message about your vision for the next four years.”
“Excellent,” said the President. “So what do I say then?”
That went to the essence of who Gerald Ford was—and was not.
“Just before the ’76 convention,” Republican adman Doug Bailey recalled, “my partner John Deardourff and I sat down with Ford. One of the things John and I tried to do was to elect a sense of vision. ‘If you could wave a magic wand, what would you do?’ John and I interviewed the President on tape for hours . . . we tried to get at this question. He just did not think in these terms. He was a wonderful family man, with a great sense of calm, but he could not project where he was going because there was no vision . . . Gerald Ford knew exactly how to deal with Congress, but he had nothing to put in front of them. Maybe Rockefeller could have done that, if he’d stayed as Vice President, but Ford had to dump him to save his nomination . . . and both Ford and Dole were creatures of the Congress. ‘What do the leaders want done?’ they ask, not, ‘What do I want done?’ ”
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