The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Afshar summed up the degrading spectacle of the Shah’s departure this way: “It needs a Shakespeare to do justice to what the Iranians did to their sovereign on his last day in his country.”

  * * *

  THE END CAME quickly in a paroxysm of violence and bloodshed.

  Grand Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran on Thursday, February 1, 1979, and was greeted by hundreds of thousands of ecstatic supporters. “Khomeini’s flight from Paris to Tehran was for many of his followers like the Prophet Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622,” wrote his biographer Baqer Moin. “In the new vocabulary developed by the Islamists, Khomeini was ‘prophet-like,’ the man who ‘brought to an end the age of ignorance and introduced the light of Islam.’” Teeming crowds jammed the eleven-mile route from the airport into the center of Tehran. Khomeini did not return the sentiment. Asked what emotions he felt on seeing his homeland for the first time in fourteen years, he batted away his questioner with a single word. “None!” he snapped. When he emerged from the Air France flight he did not speak of reconciliation and unity but of revenge and the need for blood. He said he held foreigners and especially Americans responsible for Iran’s ills. “Our final victory will come when all foreigners are out of the country,” he told his followers. “I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers.”

  The very next day, National Security Adviser Brzezinski sought to assure President Carter that the tumult playing out in Iran was an isolated episode. “We should be careful not to over-generalize from the Iranian case,” he explained, underlining two sentences for emphasis. “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future.”

  Eight days later, on February 10, the armed coup that Mansur Eqbal had predicted came to pass when young Islamist air force technicians staged a revolt at their base in eastern Tehran and turned their weapons on their comrades and officers. Their rebellion was the signal for the armed insurrection that the Mujahedin and Fedayeen had been planning for the past two years. The machine guns, rifles, and explosives they had stockpiled in mosque basements around Tehran were quickly handed out to militias, whose gunmen turned the streets of Tehran into a free fire zone. The ministries, palaces, and national broadcasting headquarters were quickly seized. The Shah’s senior officers held a meeting and debated what to do, but General Gharabaghi vetoed the idea of staging a rebellion when he declared the army’s neutrality. Twenty-four hours later, Tehran fell to the revolutionaries, and the revolutionaries declared final victory over the Shah.

  * * *

  RETRIBUTION WAS SWIFT under Iran’s new Islamic regime. The names of the many hundreds sent to the firing squads in the first eighteen months of the Islamic republic’s existence read like a “who’s who” of Imperial Iran. The rooftop of the school used by Khomeini as a temporary headquarters doubled as an execution chamber, and the crème of the Shah’s officer corps was eliminated, though not in the way William Sullivan had been led to expect. Among the high-ranking former officers and officials sent to the firing squad in the blood-soaked first weeks:

  General Nematollah Nasiri, former chief of Savak.

  General Manuchehr Khosrodad, commander of the air corps.

  General Amir Rahimi, former martial law administrator of Tehran.

  General Reza Naji, former military governor of Isfahan.

  General Nasser Moghadam, successor to Nasiri as chief of Savak.

  General Hassan Pakravan, the former head of Savak who had intervened in 1963 to persuade the Shah to spare Khomeini’s life. In their last days alive Pakravan and Moghadam shared the same prison cell. Moghadam told Pakravan that he was confident he would be spared. He admitted that before the Shah left Iran he had reached a secret agreement with Khomeini’s men to help neutralize Savak and provide them with inside information, including the names of top clergy who collaborated with the regime. “I am helping them to establish a new intelligence service and nothing will happen to me,” he assured Pakravan. “Be careful,” the general told his cellmate. “You don’t know the mullahs.” The other prisoners told Pakravan he would be spared. “General, you saved the life of Khomeini,” they reminded him. Pakravan knew better. “He will execute me because he knows I know a lot about him.” He was right—both men went to their deaths before the firing squad.

  General Parviz Amini-Afshar, head of G2 Military Intelligence and commander of the Imperial Chief of Staff.

  General Amir-Hossein Rabii, commander of the Imperial Air Force.

  General Ali Neshat, commander of the Immortals.

  General Nader Djahanbani, deputy commander of the Imperial Air Force, the handsome “blue-eyed general” whose brother Khosrow was married to Princess Shahnaz.

  By the time former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda was brought to trial the revolutionaries had abolished the monarchy and established Iran as an Islamic republic. During this time the prisons were packed with thousands of people suspected of ties to the Pahlavi regime. Press reports spoke of upwards of ten thousand who had “disappeared.”

  Hoveyda was held in brutal conditions and tried for “crimes against the people” in a circus atmosphere that caused widespread outrage inside and outside Iran. Over the protests of Mehdi Bazargan and Karim Sanjabi, the courtly former prime minister and court minister was executed along with six military officers at 6:00 p.m. on April 7 by young volunteers who enthusiastically blasted them with Israeli-made Uzi machine guns.

  Other prominent civilian officials put to death included:

  Manuchehr Azmun, the former minister of labor and minister of state for executive affairs who oversaw the disastrous handling of September’s martial law announcement.

  Gholam Reza Nikpey, former mayor of Tehran.

  Mahmud Jaafarian, Reza Ghotbi’s successor as head of the national broadcasting service.

  * * *

  IMAM MUSA SADR was never seen alive again. According to Palestinian sources who tipped off the CIA, in the spring of 1979 Colonel Gadhafi telephoned Ayatollah Beheshti and asked what he wanted to do with his “guest.” Beheshti reportedly told Gadhafi that “Musa Sadr is a threat to Khomeini.” The Americans later learned that Musa Sadr and his two traveling companions had been “summarily executed and buried at an unmarked desert gravesite.”

  Following the overthrow of Colonel Gadhafi in 2011 a former top aide came forward to reveal that the Imam had survived his imprisonment well into the late 1990s. Hopes were briefly raised that Musa Sadr’s family and followers would finally learn the truth about his disappearance. Following his election to the Iranian presidency in 2013, Hassan Rouhani pledged to undertake a new investigation to find out the truth about Musa Sadr’s disappearance. Libya’s descent into civil war soon provided Rouhani with a convenient excuse not to act. If Shia Muslims ever learned the truth about the disappearance of their beloved “Missing Imam”—that he had actually sided with the Shah against Khomeini in 1978 and that the founders of the Islamic republic were complicit in his murder—the tremors would be felt from Najaf to Qom.

  * * *

  GRAND AYATOLLAH MOHAMMAD Kazem Shariatmadari refused to accept his rival Khomeini’s claim to rule Iran and denounced velayat-e faqih or “guardianship of the jurists.” He opposed the referendum to abolish the monarchy, protested the seizure of U.S. diplomats in November 1979, and bitterly attacked Khomeini’s regime as a totalitarian fraud. Khomeini placed him under house arrest, and members of the Marja’s family were arrested and tortured by the secret police. These actions led to a brief popular revolt in Tabriz. Shariatmadari was later accused of complicity in an abortive coup attempt and on Khomeini’s orders Iran’s most senior marja was sensationally stripped of his black turban and beaten by thugs. In a final act of vengeance, Khomeini deprived Shariatmadari of the life-saving drugs he needed to treat cancer. Kazem Shariatmadari was living under house arrest when he died in obscurity in 1986.

  * * *
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br />   ON MARCH 20, 1979, the CIA quietly announced that it had translated and published a seventy-four-page book that it gave the innocuous title Translations on Near East and North Africa, No. 1897. Nine years overdue, the agency had finally published Islamic Government, Khomeini’s blueprint for the establishment of an Islamic republic and the expulsion of U.S. influence from Iran.

  * * *

  GRAND AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH Khomeini assumed the mantle of Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic and ruled Iran with an iron fist until his death in 1989. Sharia became the law of the land, tight censorship was imposed, and no independent political activity was tolerated. “Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis,” observed Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian. “One who survived both writes that four months under [Khomeini] took the toll of four years under Savak. Another writes that one day under the former equaled ten years under the latter.… In the prison literature of the Pahlavi period, the recurring words had been ‘boredom’ and ‘monotony.’ In that of the Islamic republic they were ‘fear,’ ‘death,’ ‘terror,’ ‘horror,’ and, most frequent of all, ‘nightmare.’”

  In a bizarre historical twist, Khomeini and his coterie fulfilled the litany of crimes they had laid at the Shah’s feet. Royalists, leftists, liberals, homosexuals, Jews, Baha’i, and Freemasons were severely repressed. An estimated eight thousand Iranians were put to death for political “crimes” during the four-year period from 1981 to 1985, and in total twelve thousand Iranians were reportedly killed by the Islamic republic during Khomeini’s decade in power. Under Khomeini, prison space more than doubled and torture practices banned by the Shah were reinstated. The single deadliest atrocity occurred in July 1988, when an estimated three thousand young men and women accused of holding leftist political views were slain in a single week. In the 1990s a number of prominent Iranian intellectuals were murdered in their homes by regime death squads. In 2009 several hundred pro-democracy protesters were massacred and hundreds more tortured when they protested the rigged election that returned Mahmud Ahmadinejad to power. In addition, about a million Iranians and Iraqis perished during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war fought from 1980 to 1988. During the revolution, Saddam Hussein had presciently warned Queen Farah that “it is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.”

  The men who brought Khomeini to power were consumed in the inferno.

  Mehdi Bazargan served as Khomeini’s first prime minister and resigned in November 1979 to protest the seizure of the American embassy compound in Tehran. Bazargan died in exile in Switzerland in 1995 at age eighty-six.

  Abolhassan Banisadr was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic in 1981. He clashed with Khomeini, who suspected his populism and his leftist pretensions. Impeached by the Iranian parliament in 1981, Banisadr made a dramatic escape to France. He lives in exile in France and now resides in a château in Versailles, the seat of the French kings.

  Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti served as chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for selecting Khomeini’s putative successor, and emerged as kingmaker in the new republic. In June 1981 he was blown up along with seventy-one other senior officials in a blast reportedly carried out by the Mujahedin, which had declared war on the Islamists. To this day many Iranians suspect he was actually assassinated by jealous rivals within the regime.

  Sadegh Ghotzbadegh served as Iran’s foreign minister and handled the negotiations to release the American diplomats seized when student radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979. In April 1982 he was arrested and accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Imprisoned and tortured, Ghotzbadegh was executed in September 1982.

  Ibrahim Yazdi served in Bazargan’s government but resigned with him to protest the takeover of the U.S. embassy in November 1979. He assumed the leadership of the Liberation Movement and emerged as a critic of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. His house was firebombed and he was arrested and rearrested, most recently during the 2009 upheavals.

  * * *

  THE ARCHTRAITOR HOSSEIN Fardust, the Shah’s friend and aide since childhood, was one of the few pillars of the ancien régime who stayed in Iran after the revolution and was not consigned to the firing squad. As penance for his service to the Pahlavi Dynasty, Fardust wrote a scurrilous memoir that accused the Shah of corruption, brutality, sexual deviancy, and treasonous dealings with foreign governments. Fardust played to Iranian paranoia about British influence in Iran when he “revealed” that the secret brains behind Savak’s special intelligence branch was actually the “satanic” Queen Elizabeth II. The Shah, wrote Fardust, used to meet each day with the head of British intelligence’s Tehran office to receive his instructions. It was unclear whether Fardust wrote the book on his own initiative or acted under duress. He died in 1987 shortly after giving his first television interview.

  * * *

  THE FALL OF the Shah led to a great deal of soul-searching and not a little retribution in Washington, where President Carter and his top officials were accused of failing to support an ally in his hour of need. Carter’s election defeat in November 1980 was blamed in large part on his handling of the revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. Carter went on to found the Carter Center to advance democracy and human rights and alleviate conflict, poverty, and disease. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.

  Today, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski teaches American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and is a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the nation’s capital. He continues to speak out on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations and supported the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.

  Ambassador William Sullivan left Tehran in 1979 and retired from the State Department to accept a post at Columbia University as head of the American Assembly. Sullivan, who died in October 2013 at age ninety, never fully explained the logic behind his support for Khomeini’s return, and his memoir Mission to Iran left many unanswered questions.

  Charlie Naas, Sullivan’s deputy, is today retired and living outside Washington, DC. He still closely follows events in Iran.

  Henry Precht was blamed by many White House officials and members of Congress for mishandling the State Department’s response to the revolution. Congressional opposition ended his chances of securing an ambassadorship. He remains an unrepentant critic of the Shah.

  George Lambrakis is retired and living in Paris.

  John Stempel recently retired after twenty-six years as administrator and teacher at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He recalled the events surrounding the Shah’s downfall in his book Inside the Iranian Revolution.

  * * *

  THE PAHLAVIS’ FRIENDS and courtiers scattered after the revolution.

  Elli Antoniades settled in New York, later retired to Athens, Greece, and maintains her close friendship with Queen Farah.

  Amir Pourshaja, the late Shah’s valet, lives with his family in Maryland.

  Reza Ghotbi lives in Maryland and works as an IT consultant.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a professor in Islamic Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and has authored and edited fifty books. In later years, Nasr tried to distance himself from Queen Farah and in interviews with the Iranian press expressed regret at his decision to head her office in the final months of 1978. He is the father of Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a prominent expert on Iran and U.S.-Iran relations.

  Ardeshir Zahedi retired to Switzerland and has completed his volumes of memoirs. He continues to speak out about the Pahlavi era and U.S.-Iran relations.

  Parviz Sabeti, who urged the Shah to crack down against Khomeini in the spring of 1978, lives in the United States.

  Ali Kani, the friend to Imam Musa Sadr who conveyed Khomeini’s Islamic Government thesis to the Shah, settled in e
xile in France.

  Colonel Kiomars Djahinbini, the Shah’s faithful head of security, lives in Virginia with his family.

  Fereydoun Djavadi, friend to Queen Farah, lives in Paris.

  * * *

  OF THE SHAH’S surviving brothers and sisters, Princess Ashraf and Prince Gholam Reza moved to France. After the revolution the Princess became a vocal opponent of the Khomeini regime and wrote two books, Faces in a Mirror and Time for Truth, about her life and the revolution that deposed her beloved brother and destroyed the Pahlavi Dynasty. She died on January 7, 2016.

  Pahlavi family matriarch Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk died of cancer in 1982.

  Former Queen Fawzia, the Shah’s first wife and the mother of Princess Shahnaz, died in Alexandria, Egypt, on July 2, 2013, at age ninety-one.

  Former Queen Soraya, the Shah’s second wife and the woman he divorced to sire an heir, died in Paris on September 26, 2001, at age sixty-nine.

  Khosrow Djahanbani, scion of the powerful and wealthy Djahanbani Dynasty, whose brother Nader was executed by Khomeini’s men, died in 2014. He supported the goals of the revolution to the end and never recanted his support for the man responsible for overthrowing his father-in-law and killing his brother.

  Princess Shahnaz followed her husband’s lead when after the revolution she took an Islamic name and rejected her Pahlavi heritage. After Khosrow’s death, however, Shahnaz insisted on being addressed as the King’s daughter and a member of the Imperial House. Now unveiled, she lives quietly in Switzerland.

  * * *

  THE SHAH WAS pursued to the ends of the earth by his mortal enemy Khomeini, who never let him rest. He and the Queen were condemned by the new rulers of the Islamic Republic as the “corrupt on earth,” sentenced to death in absentia, and hunted by trained assassins. Gunmen sent from Tehran successfully eliminated the three men considered most capable of leading organized resistance to the Islamist regime. General Oveissi and Prince Shahriar, Princess Ashraf’s naval commander son, were both shot in Paris in 1980 in separate attacks. Former prime minister Shahpur Bakhtiar and his assistant had their throats cut by armed intruders who made their way into Bakhtiar’s heavily secured Paris apartment.