Part #3: Shah Thing
“A sovereign may not save his throne by shedding his compatriots’ blood. A dictator can, because he acts in the name of an ideology which he believes must triumph whatever the price. But a sovereign is not a dictator. There is an alliance between him and his people which he cannot break. A dictator has nothing to hand over. Power lies in him, and in him alone. A sovereign receives a crown and it is his duty to pass it on.”
– Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (OTL),
written shortly before his death in exile
*
From – “Time of Troubles: Iran, 1953-1983” by Dr Ebrahim Zahedi (Peacock House, 1999) –
The failure of the West to notice that Iran by the mid-1970s had become a power keg can be considered one of the greatest failures of intelligence since the lack of appreciation for the significance of the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.[1] Perhaps even more so than in the latter case, the Iranian situation can be regarded as the Western powers reaping the whirlwind. The troubled reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi can be traced back to the British-backed CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq – with the Shah’s eventualy complicity – in 1953. Mossadeq’s attempts to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the ensuing Abadan Crisis (as British oil technicians refused to help their Iranian replacements and oil production ground to a halt) had convinced the Americans under Eisenhower to support the British in the coup, whereas the Truman administration had been more hesitant. The crisis demonstrated all the problems that would plague Mohammad Reza’s reign: at a push, he would back foreign powers over his own country’s national interests, and his governing style was an erratic mix of indecision and autocracy. No Iranian Prime Minister after Mossadeq retained anything of the constitutional powers he should possess, and the Shah ruled as absolute monarch. Although the Shah was mistakenly convinced that the people had risen up out of loyalty to himself, he became increasingly paranoid about his position and set up his own answer to the CIA, SAVAK (
Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, Farsi for Nationa Intelligence and Security Organisation) with initial support from the CIA.
The Shah’s reign combined liberalising social reforms with a lack of concern for human rights, with SAVAK having a free rein to ‘disappear’ any potential ‘subversives’ and nightmare stories about Iranian jails seeping out from under the door. This resulted in the anti-Shah political forces being united in a quixotic alliance between religious conservatives and civil libertarians. The Shah’s so-called “White Revolution” initially proved popular with many commoners due to his policies resulting in the parcelling out of land to poor farmers, but gradually turned against his imperial rule. The White Revolution had been intended to prevent a Communist uprising by allying the commoners to the monarchy (and incidentally legitimising the young Pahlavi dynasty) and in this it succeeded; yet it had the unintended effect of lending additional support to radical Islamist critics of the Shah, exemplified by the Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini. This was because the Shah’s reforms had effectively promoted a vast number of Iranian subjects to the influential middle classes and intelligentsia while they still retained their peasant worldview of devout Shia Islam and respect for the clergy.
In 1961 Asadollah Alam, who had been instrumental in organising the coup a decade earlier against Mossadeq, became Prime Minister. Alam was not merely a puppet of the Shah but also his genuinely good friend and confidante, with the result that the government was even more lockstep than it might have been. Alam concerned himself with an anti-corruption drive that largely got nowhere, while the real trouble lay elsewhere: the increasing traditionalism in the Iranian populace brought them into direct conflict with the Shah’s liberalising agenda.
The riots of 1963 started as fairly small affairs in the holy city of Qom, led by Khomeini. The clerics addressed mosques jammed with the faithful and urged the people to ‘protect their religion’ and condemned some of the government’s policies as ‘illegal’. The police arrested the ringleaders of the riots, including Khomeini, and only worsened the situation. Far more serious riots broke out across the country, and ten thousand marched in the capital Tehran, carrying pictures of Khomeini and chanting ‘Down with the Shah!’
Alam’s reaction was swift, decisive and brutal. He deployed seven thousand Army troops on the streets, gave them shoot-to-kill orders and imposed martial law. The official death toll was less than a hundred, while later studies suggest it was at least 400 and much of the violence was covered up. However, despite the brutality, the government response worked. The riots faded away and while they left scars that would reopen in the future, for the moment the Shah’s position was once again secure.
Western failure to appreciate the significance of the 1963 riots is at the heart of the events that would come to pass more than a decade later. Alam’s deft if bloody handling of the crisis convinced Washington and London that Khomeini was a minor figure whose popular support was transient and had melted away. A belief persisted that the Shah had outgrown his youthful indecision, when he had been unable to even decide which city he was flying to when fleeing unrest in the 1950s, and had struck hard to secure his rule. This idea was reinforced by the fact that everyone knew how autocratically the Shah was ruling. But in reality the strength of the response to the rioters came solely from Alam; if the Shah had had a weaker Prime Minister, it is likely that he would have dithered and dithered until Khomeini’s mob was battering down his door.
The Shah misinterpreted the events no less than Western intelligence, and became convinced that the crushing of the traditionalists meant that he now had a free hand to pass further reforms. However it was not a social liberalisation that would cause the next troubles in 1964, a year later, but what was seen as manifestly an ‘unequal treaty’ by the Iranian people: the Shah granted diplomatic immunity to American military personnel in Iran, meaning if they committed crimes against Iranians they would be tried in American courts. This was widely condemned as ‘capitulation’ by many, including the now released Khomeini. Alam by this point had rather wisely stepped down as Prime Minister and Hasan-Ali Mansur had been appointed in his place. Khomeini, by this point released once more, publicly denounced both the Shah and the United States. He was summoned to a face-to-face meeting by Mansur, who demanded an apology. Khomeini refused and Mansur, enraged, slapped his face. Khomeini fled the country into exile, initially to the city of Bursa in Turkey, while two weeks later Mansur was assassinated. The killers were members of the radical Islamist group Fadayan-e Islam, which predated Khomeini but had turned to him as their new spiritual leader after the execution of much of their original leadership in the 1950s.
What happened next illustrates the arbitrary nature of power under the Shah’s regime. Mansur’s death was reported to the Shah by Finance Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveida. The Shah promptly ordered Hoveida to form a new government on the spot. While Hoveida was among the senior ministers in Mansur’s government, he was not the automatic choice for successor and indeed under any circumstances less extraordinary it is debatable whether he could ever have become Prime Minister of Iran – let along the longest to serve in said post.
The Shah could not have made a better choice to antagonise the traditionalists and Islamists if he had tried. Hovieda came from a Bahá’i family but was not religious himself. He was a Freemason, a francophile, and a supporter of technocratic government and liberal reforms. Though the disempowered position of Prime Minister under the Shah hampered his attempts to bring these about, he was considered dangerous enough to incur the wrath of Asadollah Alam and SAVAK’s leader General Nematollah Nasiri, both participants in the 1953 coup, and also his own Foreign Minister Ardeshir Zahedi, son of the military prime minister who had followed the coup. All three did their best to try and smear Hovieda (though largely without success) by quietly approving books proclaiming conspiracy theories about Freemasons and the Bahá’i.
Despite all this, Hovieda was reasonably popular with the people, in part
because of the divisions against him in the government. Although a staunch defender of the Shah he was perceived as adding a new voice to government. As well as committing to anti-corruption drives of his own, his chief policy was to attempt to split the anti-Shah coalition by trying to connect with the liberal intelligentsia and separate them from the Khomeini-supporting Islamists. He had only limited success but managed to temporarily defuse the tensions. Iran, which had threatened to boil over, was reduced to a simmering. Once again, this arguably led to the West underestimating the importance of the forces at work within the country.
Iran profited greatly from the oil crisis of 1973. By breaking with the OPEC line, Iranians successfully undercut the Arab embargo and by the mid-1970s were producing 12% of the world’s oil. The country enjoyed a far more equal trade balance with the West than it had in the past, and its oil riches led to it becoming a significant customer for military materiel, helping prop up the West’s flagging industry. Iran’s top five suppliers in this regard were the United States, Japan, West Germany, Britain and France, with more minor European Community states also getting involved. Arguably the country had now achieved the assertiveness over its oil that Mossadeq had always wanted, yet the wounds inflicted by his overthrow still refused to heal.
Khomeini by this point was in exile in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq. In 1974 Iran backed Kurdish rebels led by Mustafa al-Barzani, giving them weapons with American support. Khomeini continued to denounce the Shah and there were some, not particularly successful, attempts by the Iranian government to paint him as a traitor. The Iranian operation was arguably a success: at an OPEC conference in 1975, an agreement was signed between the Shah and Vice-President Saddam Hussein, considered by many to be the real power behind the ailing Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. This consisted of Iraq giving up considerable concessions in her territorial disputes with Iran – primarily in the Shatt al-Arab waterway – in exchange for Iran cutting off support. Iran did so and the Kurds were left helpless, soon to be crushed by a concerted Iraqi campaign. The operation helped shore up the government’s position, damaged by the Shah’s unpopularly sybaritic celebration of 2,500 years of the monarchy in 1971.
By 1976, when a new chain of events would be set into motion, Iran’s future was no less volatile than it had been ten or twenty years before...
*
From – “Lions’ Den: A History of Anglo-Iranian Relations” by Mehran Farahani (HarperCollins, 2004) –
Relations between Britain and Iran, as we have seen, date back a long way – to the point that they were once relations between England and Persia. In order to understand the context of the events of the 1970s, one must realise that by this point Britain had become something of a bogeyman to the Iranian people. British interference in the country’s politics for more than a century meant that Iranians were always readier to ascribe any suspicious event in the country to those meddling
Engelisi. For that reason, the 1953 coup was widely seen as being an exclusively British operation, when in reality though launched largely for British interests it had been masterminded by the CIA. Iranians were ready to attribute superhuman qualities to MI6, regarding the CIA and Israel’s Mossad as far inferior organisations.
This must be understood, as it was not at the time, in order to comprehend the strange consequences of the visit by the British minister David Owen in November 1976.[2] Owen was no stranger to Iran, having travelled there as a student in 1959 and again as part of an all-party MP delegation in 1966, and therefore in retrospect was far less a fish out of water than many would be when placed in his position. However he had an uphill struggle ahead of him. Owen was a junior Minister of State at the Foreign Office, having previously served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Navy under Denis Healey and then as Minister for Health under Barbara Castle. Neither of these were Cabinet positions and Owen was only 38 years old. However, Tony Crosland’s deep involvement with the Rhodesian peace process and his ensuing estrangement with James Callaghan meant that Owen had effectively been thrust into the position of stand-in Foreign Minister.[3] In retrospect then it is hard to criticise, even in hindsight.
Owen met with the Shah after a grand dinner. He had particular objectives communicated to him by Crosland and the Prime Minister, most of which had to do with Rhodesia and South Africa. Since the fall of the Portuguese Empire, South Africa had found itself increasingly surrounded by hostile countries and in many ways it was only Iranian oil that kept the country afloat. Owen’s role was to try and persuade the Shah to use the ‘oil weapon’ to put pressure on South Africa to back black majority rule in Rhodesia (and, it was hoped, eventually topple apartheid itself).
The Shah proved polite and receptive.[4] From the conversation Owen determinedly (falsely, as he later admitted) that the Shah had grown into his peacock throne since his early days of panicked indecision in the 1950s. In reality Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was simply better at hiding his weaknesses. Encouraged by the responses he was getting, Owen moved on to some of Crosland’s suggestions and spoke of supplying more advanced military technology to Iran in exchange for the concessions over South Africa. In particular, he mentioned a plane that Britain was developing capable of unprecedented manoeuvring capabilities.
This was Owen’s first mistake, yet it is difficult to see how he could have foreseen it. He was of course speaking of the Hawker Siddeley Harrier, which had entered British service in the 1960s and had seen considerable foreign interest for its VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) capability. The British were working on
improving the Harrier, which had a tendency to be unforgiving to pilots, and were in negotiations to sell the plane to the People’s Republic of China after the warming of relations due to Nixon Diplomacy.[5]
Owen assumed the Shah knew what he was talking about and he was trying to be vague and subtle, trying to suggest there would be further future benefits from such a deal with Iran. However, the Shah took the comment exactly the wrong way. Owen had no way of knowing that two months before – just as Tony Crosland had departed for Geneva and left him in his current difficult position – a UFO had been spotted over Tehran and pursued by two F-4 Phantom IIs of the Imperial Iranian Air Force. Both Phantoms had separately lost instrumentation on approaching the object, which was said to have a similar radar signature to a Boeing 707 but was travelling at a far faster velocity. A civilian airliner and a ground control tower also reported temporary loss of instrumentation and communications when near to the glowing object, only for it to be restored when the distance widened again.
There was serious speculation in the Iranian military that the object might genuinely have been of extraterrestrial origin. However, as with most UFO sightings, the general consensus was that it must have been an advanced prototype military project of some kind.[6] Most countries would have attributed such an aircraft to the Americans, or perhaps the Soviets. In Iran, though, where people were quite ready to grant superpower capabilities and infinite insidiousness to the United Kingdom...
The Shah, who had learned about the UFO over dinner a few days before,[7] became convinced in his paranoia that Owen was making an oblique reference to what must surely be the mysterious aircraft that an American investigation had determined had had the same electromagnetic effects on three separate aircraft. An aeroplane capable of travelling at high speed and knocking out enemy aircraft and ground installations with an electromagnetic weapon would be a potent tool of war indeed...! Potent enough that there was no way Britain would ever sell it abroad. Therefore, Owen’s comment could only be a veiled threat, twentieth-century gunboat diplomacy!
The Shah visibly became both panicked and paranoid, his previous cultivated image sloughing off and shocking Owen. He made incoherent comments about not giving in to British blackmail and stormed out, but not before Owen unsuccessfully tried to apologise and used his second poor choice of words for the evening: “Your Majesty, I apologise if I offended your person, it was never my intention. Please, don’t let my words poison the relationship between our countries.” Owen’s manner of speaking, however, meant that he placed undue emphasis on the word
poison. The Shah thought this must be another veiled threat of some kind (though admittedly by this point he was so paranoid he would doubtless have thought this about any comment Owen might have made). Nonetheless, those words would come to have significant consequences before long...
In the end, it was only a temporary truce between Amir-Abbas Hovieda and Asadollah Alam that managed to talk the Shah down from panickedly imposing new oil tariffs on Britain in response to her ‘brinksmanship’. Needless to say, the Shah did not act against South Africa, and even increased oil supplies as a smaller-scale act of rejection of the British ‘threat’. Therefore, South Africa’s position with regards to Rhodesia remained a strong one.[8] Owen returned to Britain and faced some muted criticism, but for the most part everyone in Parliament was at a loss to understand exactly what had happened. The British Ambassador in Tehran, Sir Anthony Parsons, attempted to learn more and his efforts did uncover part of the truth, but he dismissed it as absurd hyperbole and never communicated it to London.
The Shah’s paranoia was such that he was constantly commanding Asadollah Alam to his presence at all hours to discuss matters of state with his friend, who was now Minister of the Royal court. The Shah slept lightly, and some said with a dagger under his pillow. He was not immune to the national conviction that all the SAVAK and bodyguards in the world could not stop an MI6 assassin if Britain had decided to do away with him the way she had to Mossadeq all those years ago. And as Alam was harrassed, he grew gravely ill...[9]
[1] No matter the timeline, Godwin’s Law is never far away.
[2] OTL, Owen visited Iran for the first time in 1977 after becoming Foreign Secretary.
[3] OTL Owen succeeded Crosland as Foreign Secretary on his death in February 1977, surprising many due to his youth and the importance of the position.
[4] Owen records the Shah always had a reasonable response when questioned on human rights abuses or South Africa, fuelling the false impression that he had become a stronger ruler.
[5] In OTL, Britain broke off these negotiations when China invaded Vietnam in 1979.
[6] In reality, we still don’t know the truth about the Tehran UFO sighting of 19th September 1976, not least because the Iranian records were lost in the 1979 revolution.
[7] There doesn’t seem to be any evidence whether the Shah knew about the UFO or not in OTL. Consider this a butterfly if you want.
[8] OTL there were at least token efforts by Iran after Owen’s 1977 visit to cut supplies to South Africa, though these probably didn’t have much effect in the long run because of the revolution.
[9] Alam suffered from cancer since at least the 1960s, but was never informed of the diagnosis and believed he had a blood disease. In OTL he sickened in 1977 and died in 1978. Here, the Shah’s demands on his time have weakened his condition and quickened the onset of the final stages of his cancer.
