Part #4: The Death of Princes
Then these men assembled unto the king, and said unto the king, Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is, That no decree nor statute which the king establisheth may be changed.
– Daniel 6:15
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From – “A Decade of Crisis: The British Seventies”, by John A. Alexander (Penguin, 2017)
The Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II had an air of unreality to it, a sense of the glories of the past clashing with the troubles of the present. On the one hand, the British people assembled en masse to hold street parties of the kind that their mothers and fathers had had to celebrate the Queen’s coronation or VE Day. A Royal Navy fleet review was held in Portsmouth, and if the fleet the Queen surveyed from HM Yacht
Britannia was somewhat diminished from the one she had observed twenty-five years before, it was nonetheless an impressive display of naval might.
The Silver Jubilee Fleet Review. HM Yacht Britannia
is the white ship at bottom right. The two immediately above it are the aircraft carriers HMS Ark Royal
and HMS Hermes.
At the same time, though, even while the values of the
Eagle still seemed to be on display, the discontent and radicalism of the 1970s reared its ugly head. Punk trailblazers the Sex Pistols released the single
God Save the Queen, describing the monarchy as a ‘fascist regime’ and sneering at ‘England’s dreaming’, which had ‘no future’. Despite the public continuing to show strong loyalty to the royal family and the institution of the monarchy, it was the resonance of the second aspect that rocketed the song to number 2 on the hit parade. For all the splendour of the Jubilee, there was no getting away from the fact that the ongoing conflict between the government and the unions – and between the unions, and
within the unions – was resulting in rubbish piling up on the streets and industries grinding to a halt.[1]
The government nonetheless enjoyed a little relief from pressure as the public celebrations distracted the voters from the intolerable domestic situation. As far as foreign relations went, things were more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, by the time Tony Crosland returned in triumph from Switzerland to attend the Fleet Review, he came clutching a peace process document signed by every major player in the Rhodesia mess except the obstinate Robert Mugabe. Crosland’s achievement was largely seen as a success by the British press and he was congratulated by both the new American administration of Jimmy Carter and by Henry Kissinger from the old. However, a minority – emphasised by a sceptical
Daily Mirror editorial which compared the treaty-waving Crosland to Neville Chamberlain on his way back from Munich – thought the supposed breakthrough would turn out to be yet another false dawn. One particular objection from the left-wing press (and, more privately expressed, President Carter[2]) was the lack of participation by Mugabe, although both Crosland and Ivor Richard believed that Mugabe would have eventually withdrawn under any circumstances: he was hidebound by his doctrine that lasting black-majority settlements in African countries could only be achieved through force of arms, not the ballot box. Mugabe believed that it was only a matter of time before the new peace process broke down, and then he would benefit from being the only rebel leader not to have collaborated with Ian Smith.
For the moment at least, however, the parties abided by the provisions for a transition to black majority rule, with ZANLA and ZIPRA both abiding by ceasefires (de facto in the case of the Mugabe-led ZANLA) and Ian Smith’s regime allowing the international forces to enter the country. Britain’s role in the whole business, as one cartoon by Mac in the
Daily Mail dryly put it, seemed to be to stand in the middle of the South Africans and Nigerians and hold the two groups at arm’s length: she seemed to have enough trouble preventing the blacks and whites among the peacekeeping forces clashing, never mind the black and white Rhodesians. Though Ian Smith dragged his feet as much as he dared, operations went forward to create a new transitional constitution, under which a certain number of seats would be reserved for white members and elected by white constituents, while the majority would be black members elected by black constituents.[3] Although the British were sceptical of such an arrangement as it continued to enshrine race as part of the constitutional framework, even if the apportionment of seats would become more or less proportionate, Smith said that it was a dramatic enough change for now and could be further reformed at the demands of whichever government won the general election.
Smith was plotting to find a way to delay the election indefinitely, perhaps by stirring up violence with Mugabe, but his strategic retreat nonetheless alienated some hardliners within his Rhodesian Front party. Currently all fifty white seats were held by the RF, while the sixteen black seats were held by Independents due to most of the formalised black political parties being banned. This was a dominant situation Smith had managed to regain in the 1977 election, wiping out the breakaway Rhodesian Action Party that had split off with a dozen defecting MPs in protest towards Smith’s (unilateral) negotiations with the African groups in a failed attempt to find an internal settlement that did not involve Britain. Now, however, former Foreign and Defence Minister Pieter Kenyon van der Byl reacted. Originally close to Smith, Smith had been forced to dismiss him in 1976 after van der Byl had been involved with a unilateral raid into Mozambique. Van der Byl’s presence in government had also helped contribute towards South Africa’s decision to engage with Britain over the peace process: South African Prime Minister Vorster hated van der Byl, whose fervent ‘anti-communist’ operations had undermined South Africa’s attempts to establish good relations with its newly independent black-majority neighbours. The feeling was mutual: despite his own Afrikaner ancestry, van der Byl hated the South Africans’ dominant National Party as his father had tried to oppose it in the past.
Former Rhodesian Foreign and Defence Minister P.K. van der Byl
The result of all this was that van der Byl broke from the Rhodesian Front in August 1977, forming the breakaway Rhodesian Conservative Party with seven like-minded MPs; the remnants of the Rhodesian Action Party soon merged with it. Ian Smith could not deal with the problem as he had the last time, by holding another election; it would derail the peace process, and not in a way that would save his skin. But van der Byl’s betrayal was insufficient to remove the two-thirds majority Smith needed to pass constitutional amendments, and so the process continued. There have been some conspiracy theories that van der Byl was secretly acting on Smith’s orders, faking a breakaway in order to remove the majority and give Smith an excuse to delay, but if this is the case it failed.
Ian Smith was not the only one who had to worry about losing his majority. James Callaghan had inherited his parliament from Harold Wilson, who had begun with a knife-edge majority of only three in 1974 and even that was being whittled away through by-elections. In November 1976, the by-elections in Walsall North and Workington – both thought to be ultrasafe Labour seats – went to the Conservatives on massive swings, cutting the government majority to just one. Then, in March 1977, former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins resigned his seat in order to become President of the European Commission. A by-election held in his seat of Birmingham Stechford not only resulted in another swingeing defeat for the government and a victory for the Conservatives, but also showed the extent of public dissatisfaction with the ongoing crisis from the rise of the far left and right: the International Marxist Group and Socialist Workers’ Party both stood, but what alarmed the establishment most was the success of the far-right National Front, whose candidate Andrew Brons beat the Liberals and finished third. The government’s majority had now vanished.
A month later, Labour MP David Marquand resigned his seat in order to take up a position as Jenkins’ Chief of Staff in Europe. His seat of Ashford was also ultrasafe, but this time the Labour Party was taking no chances and local activists campaigned vigorously. The Conservative candidate, Tim Smith, still managed a 16.4% swing, but was unable to entirely overturn Marquand’s old majority of more than 22,000, and Labour candidate Michael Cowan became the new MP with a much reduced majority over his predecessor.[4] Though a pale shadow of a victory, this emboldened Callaghan, who had been contemplating the idea of a pact with the Liberals.[5] Although now technically a minority government, Labour had at least broken its losing streak and could regain a little of its confidence. Furthermore, a deal with the Liberals was probably more trouble than it was worth, considering that party would probably demand concessions on issues Labour opposed, such as the introduction of proportional representation.
Therefore, Callaghan instead pursued a more informal alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party.[6] By this point the UUP had distanced itself from its former Conservative master and was its own animal. Callaghan’s chief means of negotiation took the form of the friendship between maverick UUP MP Enoch Powell and Lord President (and Labour Deputy Leader) Michael Foot.[7] An agreement was reached, approved by UUP leader Jim Molyneaux, whereby the UUP would quietly support the government (while making no formal pronouncement on the subject) in exchange for concessions over increasing the number of Northern Ireland seats; in terms of constituents per seat, Northern Ireland was underrepresented compared to the the rest of the UK. Callaghan acceded to this and the Labour government was shored up to fight another day...
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From – “Time of Troubles: Iran, 1953-1983” by Dr Ebrahim Zahedi (Peacock House, 1999) –
The Shah was already beginning to act in a paranoid and erratic fashion thanks to his conviction that British junior foreign minister David Owen had been attempting to blackmail and intimidate him. He found himself sharing the popular Iranian conception that the British were willing and able to achieve any surreptitious plot to undermine his rule and extend their own influence. Inevitably, Iranians in the street compared him to the title character from the popular sitcom
Dear Uncle Napoleon, which had aired the year before. That Iranian show, based on a novel, was set in the British-occupied Iran of the Second World War and its setting was a family household whose patriarch – Uncle Napoleon – was convinced that the British were constantly plotting against him because he was the reincarnation of their great enemy Napoleon Bonaparte.[8] Some of the rumours about the Shah’s words coming out of the Niavaran Palace could have come right out of one of Uncle’s paranoid rants.
Gholam Hossein Naghshineh, playing the title role in Dear Uncle Napoleon
However, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s early behaviour was as night and day to what came to pass after his confidante and former Prime Minister, Asadollah Alam, began to sicken in early 1977.[9] The Shah paid for the best French and Swiss doctors for his sick friend, and was shocked to learn that Alam had cancer – as was Alam himself. The Shah attempted to secure treatment, but Alam was too far gone by this point and died in July, an event largely unnoticed by a world media focusing on Queen Elizabeth of Britain’s Silver Jubilee.
The Shah became convinced that Alam’s condition was due to the British, and his mind was constantly brought back to David Owen’s ill-chosen words... ‘
Please, don’t let my words poison the relationship between our countries’. Poison...fearing for his own life, the Shah demanded tests from his new Swiss doctors. He had been diagnosed with a rare blood condition called Waldenstrom disease in 1974 by the French haemotologist Dr Jean Bernard, but had been told it did not require treatment. In fact, as the new doctors were unwise enough to tell him, he was suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. This, in his mind (and not a few other conspiracy theorists’) confirmed his worst fears: Britain had decided that he had outlived his usefulness and was stretching out her insidious hand to strike him down.[10]
Convinced that he could be killed at any time, the Shah reacted reflexively. He summarily fired Prime Minister Hoveida, who if not popular was at least capable and respected. He considered appointing another Prime Minister from the Majlis[11] but became convinced that they were all dangerous francophiles like Hoveida. France was clearly Britain’s lackey in all this, what with those French doctors keeping his poisoning quiet![12] The Shah was acutely aware that the West, which he had courted for so many years, which he had tried so hard to emulate in his own country, had turned its back on him.
But what could he do? He could not turn to the anti-Western and nativist groups in Iran, because those same groups, whether they be the liberals or the conservative clergy, had formulated themselves when opposition to the West was the same as opposition to the Shah. He could not possibly trust them. And the country was falling apart around him, doubtless thanks to more British machinations. What kind of legacy was this to leave his son?!
Therefore, the Shah hesitated and then dissolved the Majils altogether, before appointing General Nematollah Nassiri as the head of a military government with orders to crack down on both subversiveness and Western spies. From the Shah’s perspective, this was a good choice. Nassiri was loyal, an opponent of the suddenly suspicious Hoveida, and most importantly was head of the SAVAK secret police. If anyone could root out these perfidious British plots, if anyone could act with ruthlessness towards the dissidents cramming the streets, it would be Nassiri.
From the perspective of someone sane, however, this could not have been better calculated to inflame the situation. Nassiri was possibly the most hated man in Iran, with fearful whispers of what happened in SAVAK’s cells casting a shadow of resentment over the country. Furthermore, in his younger days Nassiri had been instrumental in organising Operation Ajax, the overthrow of Mossadegh. (On behalf of Britain and America, of course, but the Shah appears not to have considered that). Finally, this had the effect of isolating the Shah and making the formerly hated Rastakhiz Party deputies of the Majlis into martyr figures. Several important Rastakhiz deputies denounced the move and then went into hiding to escape SAVAK. Jamshid Amouzegar, the party chairman and leader of the Progressive faction, sought out Shapour Bakhtiar, leader of the banned civil-libertarian National Front party, who had been in hiding for years, and the two forged a political alliance. Reportedly, when asked if he feared SAVAK hunting him down, Amouzegar retorted that ‘I was taken prisoner by Carlos the Jackal and lived to tell the tale, and Nassiri is no Carlos the Jackal.’[13] Amouzegar’s rival and counterpart leader of the Liberal Constructionist faction in Rastakhiz, Hushang Ansary, remained in the country under effective house arrest for a while as he attempted to walk the tightrope of safety in the new environment. However, SAVAK soon came for him and he barely managed to escape to the United States (his choice of destination was due to him being an Americophile). As for Hovieda himself, he disappeared without trace.
Needless to say, the new regime utterly failed to keep control of Iran. It even failed as a junta. Much of the military hated SAVAK and Nassiri, and some generals refused to serve under him. Prominent among them was General Gholam-Reza Azhari, prone to speaking his mind, who dismissed the new regime as an example of the Shah being unable to make up his mind.[14] He was placed under house arrest and there were allegations of torture, but Nassiri did not dare dispose of him altogether lest he antagonise the rest of the military.
Nassiri’s ruthless approach to the unrest sweeping Iran was like pouring oil on a fire. The Zhaleh Massacre of September 27th is only the best-known war crime against unarmed protestors by SAVAK and the security forces under Nassiri’s auspices, when 35 protestors in Tehran’s Zhaleh Square were mown down with machine guns.[15] Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, denounced the massacre as ‘an act of Zionist murder’ and urged the people to rise up against the Shah and his SAVAK lackeys.
General Nematollah Nassiri
General Nassiri himself was by now in a desperate situation. Knowing how dangerous his position was, he knew he had to do something to dampen the causes of the escalating violent protests. The Shah by now was practically delirious and demanded to go to Switzerland for treatment of his cancer.[16] Nassiri nervously agreed, but attempted to keep the story quiet, knowing the streets would explode all over again if word got out that the Shah was gone – and especially if it was known for what reasons. However, his attempt was doomed to failure.
The Shah had repeatedly complained to the British government about the BBC World Service’s BBC Persian radio station, which broadcast deep into Iran and presented an uncomfortably unbiased view of the Shah’s rule. Since Owen’s visit and the Shah’s paranoid turn, these complaints had turned into all-out attempts to jam the transmissions. Of course, all this achieved was to make the Iranian public wonder what all the fuss was about and soon BBC Persian was more popular than ever. When only a few could receive the signal thanks to the jamming, the news travelled by word of mouth, often through the bazaar. Initially some were suspicious, seeing the BBC as a mouthpiece of the insidious British, but they were soon reassured by the BBC’s typical biting-the-hand neutrality and constant criticism of the British government. Therefore, BBC Persian became the most reliable source of news in Iran, and it was BBC Persian that broke the news that the Shah was gone mere hours after his plane left.
As Nassiri had feared, the mob dominated the streets and now his source of legitimacy had vanished. He knew he would have to make some attempt to reach out to one of the underground leaders, yet had burned too many bridges to approach the Majlis deputies or the military. That left exactly one, extremely cynical, choice.
Hassan Pakravan was a Counsellor at the Royal Court in his old age, but in previous years had been the head of SAVAK, one of Nassiri’s predecessors. The two men could not be more unalike, however; where Nassiri was a vindictive figure with great ambition, Pakravan was a liberal intellectual quite unsuited to the menacing image of SAVAK. Most importantly for Nassiri, though, Pakravan had a colourful history. In 1963, it had been Pakravan who had persuaded the Shah to commute a death sentence on Ayatollah Khomeini for the latter’s role in the riots of that year. In the aftermath, the two had become good friends and had often had luncheons together, discussing politics and religion. Pakravan was also friendly with the more moderate Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, Iran’s most senior cleric. Nassiri’s idea was for Pakravan to try and approach Khomeini with a compromise, including rolling back elements of the Shah’s White Revolution (with no permission from the Shah, of course), and granting the holy city of Qom independence as a Shia Muslim version of the Vatican City.[17] The two SAVAK leaders despised each other, but Pakravan was enough of a patriot to see that a deal with Khomeini might be the only way to stop Iran disintegrating altogether.
To that end, Pakravan travelled in secret to Iraq by ship. Iranian-Iraqi relations remained coldly correct at best due to the fact that the Iranians had armed the Iraqi Kurds and fanned their rebellion at the start of the 1970s. Pakravan knew he could not fall into Iraqi hands, or he would never leave the country alive.
Pakravan arrived on the 16th of October, only to overhear alarming news presented with gloating tones on an Iraqi propaganda radio station. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, absolute monarch of the Imperial State of Iran, had died that morning in a Geneva hospital: not from his cancer, ironically, but from his insistence that overly powerful chemotherapy be used in an attempt to eradicate it utterly. In something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, it was indeed poison that killed the Shah.
Pakravan wondered whether he should just turn around and go home, knowing Iran was about to explode into an inevitable revolution, but decided Nassiri’s idea still held and a deal with Khomeini might be able to head off the violence and ensure a stable transition to a new government. To that end, he sought out the exiled leader in Najaf.
And got the shock of his life.
When Hassan Pakravan had paid enough informers to locate Khomeini’s anonymous lodgings, he found six people there, the ayatollah and five of his followers and aides.
And all of them had their throats cut...
[1] As mentioned before, this is actually rather a lot worse than things were in OTL 1977, as unions which did not strike until the Winter of Discontent have begun acting earlier due to the perception that Denis Healey’s austerity measures were rammed through without political opposition and go too far in scope.
[2] OTL Carter nearly ruined the (later) peace process by publicly announcing at a delicate point in negotiations that the new Zimbabwean police force should be formed primarily of the black liberation fighters’ forces, which Ian Smith could have used as an excuse to call the positions unreasonable and break off negotiations again. Fortunately for Rhodesia, here he’s a little more circumspect in expressing his opinions.
[3] This is similar to the compromise system unilaterally adopted by the short-lived Zimbabwe Rhodesia regime in 1979 in OTL. Prior to this, Rhodesia had a similarly structured but unbalanced system where the House of Assembly had 66 seats, 50 of which were whites electing whites and the other 16 open to blacks.
[4] This is the first (noticeable) change in the by-election results. OTL, as Tony Crosland died in February 1977, his seat of Grimsby went up for by-election on the same day as Marquand’s Ashfield. Grimsby was a far less safe seat, so the Labour activists focused on there, and got Austin Mitchell elected as the new MP – only to be stunned to find that Ashfield had been lost to the Conservatives. In TTL, as Crosland remains among the living, there is only one by-election and Labour are able to focus their attentions on it, retaining Ashfield.
[5] This is indeed what happened in OTL, with the formation of the Lib-Lab Pact with David Steel’s Liberals.
[6] This was also achieved at the same time in OTL, though it’s much less widely known. Unlike the Lib-Lab Pact, which had petered out by 1978, the Lab-UUP alliance lasted until the OTL end of the government in 1979.
[7] Their unlikely friendship was also how Callaghan achieved the Lab-UUP alliance in OTL.
[8] A real Iranian TV show from 1976.
[9] Alam’s condition is accelerated a few months relative to OTL by the Shah constantly demanding his presence at all hours and the stress weakening him.
[10] You can’t blame the Shah for leaping to some of these conclusions. It sounds ridiculous and made-up, but it’s perfectly true that both Asadollah Alam and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi suffered from cancer, and both of them were unconnectedly and possibly deliberately misdiagnosed by doctors that they had only mild blood conditions. In OTL the Shah himself does not appear to have ever found out. A bizarre and unlikely coincidence. Far easier to assume it’s the work of James Bond and his poisoned pens.
[11] Iranian Parliament. At this point all its seats were held by the Rastakhiz (Resurrection) Party as the Shah had banned all others, although there was internal division between factions in the Rastakhiz.
[12] There is a
grain of truth to this: the French government found out about the Shah’s condition from one of his lying French doctors, and neglected to tell anyone else about it.
[13] Indeed happened in 1975, when Carlos the Jackal took an OPEC meeting hostage. Notably he was ordered to execute Amouzegar, but didn’t.
[14] Azhari said something similar in OTL. Ironically, in OTL he briefly headed up an ineffective junta himself.
[15] A massacre of this type took place a year later in OTL, but was worse.
[16] OTL the Shah was offered treatment in Switzerland but insisted on the USA. Here he remains paranoid about the West in general, though less so about the USA than Britain or France.
[17] The latter is part of an OTL proposal.