The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  “His Majesty put all the burdens on his shoulders and somehow you’ve aged while I have stayed young,” Bakhtiar said he told the Shah. “We talked about politics, he listened, he was very responsive, and showed lots of interest. He asked what I wanted to drink—I had tea but he did not sip from his cup. He was very happy. It seemed the Shah accepted me.”

  When their half-hour conversation drew to a close the Shah asked, “And when do we have to leave?”

  Bakhtiar was taken aback: “I didn’t know what he meant.”

  “Everyone is telling us to leave the country,” the Shah explained.

  “I think Your Majesty must stay,” said Bakhtiar. “After the government takes power you may leave the country for a short period. You can take a vacation and then return.”

  Bakhtiar informed the rest of the National Front that he had accepted the Shah’s offer to form a government. They were appalled at his decision to break ranks and condemned the Shah’s announcement on December 29 that their former colleague had decided to accept the post of prime minister. Ambassador Sullivan and his staff were just as aghast—the stunning news threatened to unravel their own strategy, which depended on Mehdi Bazargan forming a government with Khomeini’s support. Even before Bakhtiar was sworn in the Americans decided he was finished. “Everyone knew that he would not survive,” said John Stempel, who employed a more choice turn of phrase behind closed doors. “Bakhtiar doesn’t have a fucking chance,” he lectured his colleagues. The Shah’s prime minister–designate, he decided, was a “nonentity.”

  * * *

  PERHAPS IT WAS fitting that at this late, desperate hour the Shah received the man who had been at his side during the turmoil that had surrounded his ascension to the Peacock Throne. As a young army officer, Fereydoun Djam had captured the heart of Princess Shams and won the favor of Reza Shah, who looked on him as the son he never had. Widely regarded as a respected and competent officer, Djam had incurred the Shah’s wrath in the early seventies with his habit of challenging Imperial decrees. At that time the Shah had removed Djam from his post as army chief and packed him off to Madrid to serve as ambassador. Djam, who by now was living in London, still carried a grudge over the earlier incident.

  Though the Shah suspected Djam’s ambitions, he called him back to Tehran in January 1979 in deference only to Shahpur Bakhtiar, who wanted to appoint the general to run his war ministry. Djam was a popular figure with the army rank and file and just the sort of strong-willed individual who could boost troop morale and discipline during the decisive days ahead. But the Shah did not hide his unhappiness, and Djam received a cool reception at the palace.

  “Bakhtiar asked for you, I didn’t,” said the Shah.

  Djam returned the sentiment when he made it clear he would only cooperate with Bazargan if the Shah relinquished the title he prized most. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I have a request.”

  “What is your request, General?”

  “If you are leaving the country, you must give me responsibility as commander in chief.”

  “General Djam,” said the Shah, “I don’t think that is necessary.”

  Djam’s bitterness spilled out. He pointedly refused to serve in Bakhtiar’s administration and before departing Niavaran warned the Shah that he risked the same fate as Nicholas II of Russia. Farah had her own unhappy run-in with Djam when he called on her and advised her to leave. He scoffed at her pretensions to say behind and lead the resistance. “You don’t want to be Marie Antoinette,” he lectured the Queen. Farah was outraged by the comparison and appalled that one of the kingdom’s most respected senior generals and diplomats would dare encourage the Shah or anyone else to flee during a national crisis. “You don’t want to hear this from the person with the sword,” said Reza Ghotbi, “the person charged with protecting you.” Farah had no intention of leaving Iran and despaired at her husband’s choice of exile. “I offered to stay,” said Farah, “not to be active, but just as a symbol, for the army and the people. I wouldn’t do anything.” But her husband wouldn’t hear of it and told her, “You don’t have to be Joan of Arc.” He preferred that she “stay by his side.”

  In those final days the Shah’s face was a mask of exhaustion and grief. “His Majesty was in a very bad state,” said Amir Pourshaja. Professor Jean Bernard made a final trip to Iran to treat the Shah and was shocked at his ragged appearance. “On that last occasion,” he wrote, “the patient was almost unrecognizable, visibly suffering from apparently dreadful tension. He would not stop listening to the news on the radio while I examined him that Sunday morning.”

  Everyone felt the end was near. On Friday, December 29, Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk flew out of Iran aboard an Iranian military aircraft to join her daughter Shams in Los Angeles. “The queen mother was carried off the Boeing 747 on a stretcher to a private ambulance,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “A convoy of limousines and sedans sped the group out of the airport, losing pursuing newsmen on the San Diego Freeway.”

  The Shah told his valet to start packing his clothes for a trip. “Don’t pack too much because it is just for a short period of time,” he assured Amir Pourshaja.

  * * *

  TEHRAN TOOK ON the twilight air of revolutionary-era Petrograd.

  Each morning at six o’clock Elli Antoniades waited patiently in line to buy a precious bottle of gasoline. “When the power failed you had to throw out all your food,” she said. Every night around midnight she received a phone call from her old friend former prime minister Amir Hoveyda, who was living under house arrest. “He would call to hear a friendly voice,” she recalled. He wanted to know, ‘How are you? What did you do today?’ We didn’t discuss politics or what was going on. His phone line was bugged. On New Year’s Eve he called to wish me a happy new year. I asked, ‘What is so happy about it?’”

  Elli’s last conversation with the Queen came on Wednesday, January 3, at the end of another day of strikes, power blackouts, and shootings. “I don’t know how long I will stay,” Farah told her, “but if you have your passport ready it is time to leave.” Elli phoned her cousin and asked him to drive her to the airport. They left shortly after curfew lifted in the early hours of Thursday morning. “I took one suitcase. We arrived at the airport and there were already five thousand people there. Americans with their children and dogs. And people like me.” She wept at the memory of it. “I went to Swissair. I had no ticket. There were a thousand people in line. I said to the guy behind the desk, ‘You know, I have to leave.’”

  The strike in the oil fields meant that passenger jets could not take off fully loaded with fuel. The caterers were on strike, too, and so there was no food. Worse, the traffic control tower was not working because the controllers were on strike. This meant that pilots were having to rely on visual signals at one of the world’s busiest airports. “We had to carry our own bags out to the plane and there were no stairs so we climbed a ladder. Our flight left at two o’clock. We sat on the plane hungry. And nobody said anything until we reached the frontier and the pilot said, ‘We are safe. We are no longer in Iran. We are in Turkey.’” The foreigners cheered and clapped but for many Iranians it was a day of tears—only when they left did it dawn on them they were never going back.

  * * *

  AS ROYALISTS AND foreigners fled Iran in their tens of thousands, hundreds of religious extremists, Communists, and anarchists living in exile flocked back to join the revolution. Someone else who returned to Tehran on Sunday, January 4, was General Robert E. Huyser, deputy commander of U.S. ground forces in Europe, and the official who had visited the Shah at Nowshahr to discuss the plan to reform the armed forces’ command control system.

  This time Huyser had been sent to Tehran at the orders of President Carter to work with the Shah’s generals and make sure they did not launch a coup in his absence. The Americans tried to smuggle Huyser into Iran without the Shah’s knowledge. “By then we knew he was finished,” admitted National Security Adviser Brzezinski. “We knew th
at sending a senior general to Iran would not be welcomed by the Shah because it harked back to 1953 and he was determined to leave as best he could. My own simple view was that we support a military action to end the unrest and then follow it up with reforms. I conveyed this view to him. But the Shah opposed a crackdown. He told me he did not want to bequeath a bloodied throne to his son and shed the blood of Iranians.”

  The U.S. decision to try to circumvent the Shah backfired with disastrous consequences for American policy and a near-fatal outcome for the general. The Shah quickly learned about Huyser’s arrival and naturally interpreted it as confirmation that Carter was trying to arrange a coup. His generals were so outraged that they offered to put an end to the American game right away. “The generals came to me and offered to shoot Huyser,” recalled Ambassador Zahedi. “The fear was that the Americans were about to repeat their involvement in the 1967 coup in Greece against King Constantine.” The Shah wouldn’t hear of it, but Zahedi was so furious he urged that Huyser be arrested and deported.

  * * *

  THOUSANDS OF MILES away from Iran’s death spiral, on Friday, January 5, President Jimmy Carter, Prime Minister James Callaghan of Great Britain, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France, and West Germany’s chancellor Helmut Schmidt arrived on the French Caribbean island territory of Guadeloupe for a four-power summit to discuss a host of issues related to the Cold War. Iran was expected to be a major topic of discussion for Western leaders. Arab oil producers led by Saudi Arabia had taken advantage of Iran’s political turmoil to push through a double-digit price increase. The Saudi decision combined with Iran’s cutoff of oil exports had led to a surge in oil prices that experts compared to a second “oil shock.”

  The leaders’ morning session covered East-West relations. Carter could tell that Schmidt was in a foul, negative mood. The German chancellor was delivering a small lecture on Romania’s president, Nicolae Ceauşescu, criticizing his “dangerous and idiotic policy toward the Soviet Union,” when he veered off topic to say that “he considered Tehran and Bucharest to be similar. That he had long known the megalomaniac Shah would be brought down.” The other leaders let the remark pass and the conversation shifted to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whom Giscard d’Estaing said was “almost incoherent and approaching senility.” The four leaders and their wives enjoyed a pleasant lunch at the Villa Creole. Carter wrote that his daughter, Amy, was “a good swimmer and during the stay in Guadeloupe we thoroughly enjoyed the snorkeling and scuba diving.” The evening ended with a barbecue supper, a demonstration of surf sailing, and “a remarkable concert by natives of Guadeloupe playing tuned oil drums where they have a note to the scale very clearly and purely defined by tapping out little sections of the top of an oil drum which they play with xylophone sticks.”

  * * *

  CARTER RAISED THE subject of Iran and the Shah’s future during the leaders’ Saturday morning session. “Found very little support among the other three for the Shah,” he wrote in his journal. “They all thought that the civilian government would have to be established. And they agreed with me that the military ought to be kept strong and intact if possible. They were unanimous in saying that the Shah ought to leave as soon as possible.” They failed to realize that it was only the Shah’s presence in Iran that kept the military cohesive. The British record of their talk provided additional details. “In the course of a general discussion there was general agreement that the Shah would have to leave Iran within the next few days. Nevertheless President Carter thought that the chances of a stable outcome to the crisis were rather better than they had been a fortnight earlier and that General Djam had returned to the country. We had however to face the fact that any future Iranian Government was likely to be less of a moderating influence in Arab councils and would possibly be more friendly to the Soviet Union.”

  France’s Giscard d’Estaing defended his decision to admit Khomeini in the first place and tolerate the political activity and speech making that clearly violated the terms of his visitor’s visa. “Valéry reported that he had decided earlier to expel Khomeini from France,” wrote Carter, “but the Shah said it would be better to keep him in France instead of letting him go to Iraq or Libya or some other place where he might stir up even more trouble for the Shah. Therefore Valery had decided to keep Khomeini in France.” The French president at least acknowledged “the Shah’s restraint in not taking ruthless measures when he was in a position to do so but said that politicians would now count for nothing in Iran. The struggle would be between the Army and the religious leaders.” After repeatedly imploring the Shah not to crack down, Western leaders now blamed him for being too soft and losing control.

  The leaders of the four powers moved on to other matters that at the time appeared at least as pressing as the Shah’s political collapse: the price of oil, Israel’s refusal to give up the West Bank and Gaza, Turkey’s economy, Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, and unrest in Zaire and white-ruled southern Africa. After a press conference at the Meridian Hotel the four leaders “ate lunch together, with topless women bathers walking down on the beach below us.” Callaghan joked that he could not see the action because “his back was turned to the beach!” The sun, surf, and sand put everyone in a good mood. “Jim is one person I enjoy being with,” Carter mused. “I promised to send him a book about the 100 most influential people in history.” The president returned to his bungalow and asked his Secret Service agents to brief him on “how to use scuba diving equipment.” With the business part of the trip out the way, Jimmy Carter could look forward to his winter vacation.

  The president arrived back at the White House on Tuesday evening to find Brzezinski’s latest update on the situation in Iran on his desk. In addition to outlining what he thought would happen once the Shah left office, the national security adviser had provided his own brutal assessment of the Shah’s handling of the crisis. “We are giving up on the Shah only after being forced reluctantly to conclude that he is incapable of decisive action,” he reminded Carter. But Brzezinski failed to point out that during the unrest the administration had repeatedly and consistently pressed the Shah not to use force against protesters, even as it denied him the means to purchase antiriot equipment that would have made a nonviolent response work. Carter’s neat scrawl lined the edge of the memo: “Zbig—After we make joint decisions deploring them for the record doesn’t help me.”

  * * *

  FAR FROM WASHINGTON, there were stirrings of life in a Libyan prison cell. According to intelligence that reached the CIA after the revolution, Musa Sadr was alive.

  Yasser Arafat had lied when he told Abolhassan Banisadr that the Imam had been killed during a late-night altercation at Colonel Gadhafi’s residence. The truth was more diabolical than the crime: Arafat and Gadhafi had agreed with Ayatollah Beheshti that Musa Sadr posed a real threat to their effort to overthrow the Shah, America’s closest ally in the Persian Gulf and Israel’s firmest friend in the Muslim world. By now Palestinian involvement in the revolution was out in the open. Palestinian arms and gunmen were flooding into Iran, and a senior Palestinian official, claiming to speak on Arafat’s behalf, had already declared that “the PLO is proud to be accused of fomenting trouble in Iran.”

  With victory in sight the revolutionaries were not about to allow anyone, least of all Musa Sadr, the leader of a million Shia, to interfere with their plans. For now—if the CIA’s Palestinian source was correct—Musa Sadr would stay where he was: underground.

  25

  FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE

  We are leaving for a long-needed rest and shall soon return.

  —THE SHAH

  We are leaving. God knows what will happen.

  —QUEEN FARAH

  The final days were an agony. Following Shahpur Bakhtiar’s presentation of his new cabinet at Niavaran on Saturday, January 6, 1979, the Shah confirmed that as soon as his new prime minister won a parliamentary vote of confidence he planned to leave Iran for an indeterminate p
eriod of time. “I’m tired,” he said. “I need a rest. If this rest takes place in a foreign country, a Regency Council will be created according to the Constitution. More important than this is that the wheels of the economy start turning again and that the economy returns to normal, because if this does not happen, I don’t see a good future for the country, I don’t forecast a happy future for any Iranian.” Grand Ayatollah Khomeini immediately denounced Bakhtiar’s government as illegal and declared the formation of a rival shadow cabinet called the Council of the Islamic Revolution. He made it clear that he would hold American citizens responsible if the Iranian military tried to foment a coup when the Shah left. “The influence of the U.S. in the Iranian military is well known,” he said. “A military coup will be implemented by the Americans in the eyes of the Iranian people. It is difficult to imagine a coup that could take over without the influence of the Americans.”

  Ambassador Sullivan was so anxious to prove American goodwill to the revolutionaries that he all but helped walk the Shah to the door. Each time the Shah returned from his audiences with Sullivan, he told Queen Farah that Sullivan pestered him about a departure date. “He keeps asking, ‘When are you leaving?’” The ambassador bluntly told the Shah that “it would be best for stability in Iran if he left” and asked if he would like him to secure an invitation to enter the United States. In Sullivan’s typically acerbic retelling of their conversation the Shah “leaned forward, almost like a small boy, and said, ‘Oh would you?’” Sullivan didn’t need to be asked twice. State Department cable traffic reported that at 10:54 a.m. on Friday, January 12, Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi telephoned Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher of TV Guide and close friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, to let him know that the King and Queen would arrive in Palm Springs the following Thursday or Friday after making a brief stopover for several days in Egypt to visit their friends the Sadats. “Zahedi indicated that he would like the party to arrive at a nearby military base and be helicoptered to Annenberg estate,” Secretary of State Vance informed Sullivan. “At our request Annenberg is willing to receive the Shah and party of up to 15 and put them up through the first week in February and he so informed Zahedi.” The Shah’s initial plan to stay at the Beverley Hills residence of Princess Shams was scotched by security concerns after Iranian student protesters rioted outside the grounds. The Annenberg estate, by contrast, said Vance, was “completely walled and surrounded by barbed wire.” He added that State Department officials were working with the office of former vice president Nelson Rockefeller to find a second port of call once the Pahlavis left Palm Springs.