"Nobody Influences Me!"
Seven Presidents praised him; now he's condemned. How bad was he?
He once was a rather shy and indecisive young princeling, installed on his throne by the foreigners who had forced his humbly born father to abdicate. He became an enormously wealthy monarch, Shah of Iran, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, who dreamed of creating an economic and military superpower that would recall the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. He developed an imperial ego to match his vision, placing his crown on his own head like Napoleon, dismissing all opposition as "the blah-blahs of armchair critics" and boasting that "nobody influences me, nobody!"
Today Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is a man of 60, battling cancer, unwelcome in most countries of the world, and bearing a price on his head (an all-expenses-paid pilgrimage to Mecca, offered by the revolutionaries who overthrew him to anyone who succeeds in killing him). Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides are filling the air with tirades against the Shah as a "U.S. puppet," a Hitlerian "criminal" who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, a thief who looted Iran of untold billions. At the other extreme, the Shah's defenders cite the praises heaped on him by seven U.S. Presidents, beginning with Harry Truman, who lauded the Shah's "courage and farsightedness," and ending with Jimmy Carter, who told the Shah in 1977, "Iran is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you."
The truth about the Shah is far more complex. He was indeed a staunch U.S. ally, restored to his throne by a CIA-organized military coup after a six-day exile in 1953. Yet he damaged the U.S. economy by leading a quadrupling of world oil prices in 1973-74, something that no mere puppet would ever dare do. He was a despot whose secret police did use torture, as he once admitted to TIME, and who eventually earned the passionate hatred of his people. But his repressions were hardly on the same scale as those of this century's worst tyrants. Probably the Shah's greatest failing was a megalomania that led him to think he could haul Iran from the camel age to the heights of industrial and military technological power in one lifetime, while retaining the political structure of an absolute feudal monarchy.
Such imperial hauteur contrasted powerfully with the Shah's beginnings. Though he took great pains to present his reign as a continuation and fulfillment of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, his dynasty had not even been founded when he was born on Oct. 26, 1919. His father, Reza Khan, was a soldier's son who did not learn to read and write until he was an adult. Reza Khan started as a noncommissioned officer in the Persian army, rose to colonel, and in 1921 led a military revolt that finally ousted the last Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1925. Even before he had seized the bejeweled Peacock Throne-- for himself, he chose Pahlavi, one of the ancient languages of Persia, as his dynastic name.
Reza Shah was a stern figure of whom his son once wrote, "Strong men often trembled just to look at him." Though the Shah often said that he was raised with kindness, some associates suspected that his later imperiousness masked a basic insecurity caused by his father and by some of his own early experiences. Sent to study in Switzerland, the Shah-to-be once walked into the school lounge and proclaimed, "When I enter a room, everybody rises"; his classmates merely looked at each other in amazement. At the start of World War II, Reza Shah declared neutrality, but the British suspected him of pro-Nazi sympathies. In 1941, Britain and the U.S.S.R. jointly occupied Iran (an ancient name for Persia that Reza Shah restored in 1935) to secure a land bridge between their armies. The British sent the King off to South Africa and installed his son, then 21, on the throne.
In the early days of his 37-year reign, the Shah acquired a reputation as a playboy fond of women, card games and any amusement involving speed--flying a plane, driving racing cars, skiing. With American backing, he sent troops in 1946 to the province of Azerbaijan to throw out a pro-Soviet regime that had been set up by the withdrawing Soviet army. But in 1953, when Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran's British-run oil wells, stirred the Tehran crowds to a frenzy, the Shah fled. In Rome, where he had stopped for some shopping on the Via Veneto, he received news that a coup organized by the CIA had deposed Mossadegh and made it safe for him to return.
The chastened Shah thereafter became a far stronger ruler. By 1960 he had launched what he called a "White [e.g., non-Red] Revolution" to distribute land to the peasants. According to government figures, 20 million acres were eventually distributed to 2.3 million families, though critics charged that only relatively well-off peasants, not the poorest ones, benefited. The Shah also began educational programs that reduced the illiteracy rate among Iran's 35 million people from 95% at the beginning of his reign to around 60% toward the end. His father had freed women from having to wear the veil and opened the universities to them; the Shah gave them the vote and the right to divorce their husbands. In the late 1970s some 38% of the students in Iran's universities were women.
That might seem strange, since the Shah, though he married three times,* had no great regard for women. In 1973 he exploded at Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci: "Does it seem right to you that a King, that an Emperor of Persia, should waste time talking about such things --talking about wives, women? Women are important in a man's life only if they're beautiful and keep their femininity. You're equal in the eyes of the law but not, excuse my saying so, in ability."
The Shah's goal, however, was to make Iran a modern, Westernized state, and if that meant equal rights for women, so be it. He aimed to make Iran one of the world's five great powers, along with the U.S., the Soviet Union, France and Japan. The idea might have seemed laughable initially but, as Western demand for oil kept climbing, the Shah's ambitions began to look more plausible. The Shah, whose country pumped 7% of the non-Communist world's oil imports, led the way in the first huge price increase, from $3 to $12 per bbl. between 1973 and 1974 and, though he aided the West by refusing to join the Arab oil embargo, he also kept urging OPEC to go on increasing its prices.
The Shah's oil revenues soared from just over $1 billion a year at the beginning of the decade to $21 billion by the late 1970s. That enabled him to buy nuclear reactors from France and Germany, steel mills from the Soviet Union, telecommunications systems from the U.S. In the mid ' 70s, the growth rate of the Iranian economy shot up to an unbelievable 41% per year. The Shah further set out to build one of the world's foremost military machines, and in the last 20 years of his reign spent a cool $36 billion on arms--Chieftain tanks from Britain, sophisticated F-14 fighter planes and Hawk and Phoenix missiles from the U.S. By the time the Khomeini revolution broke out, the Shah had placed orders that would have given Iran a 1980 supersonic fighter force larger than that of any Western country except the U.S.
While the Shah's military machine frightened some Arab neighbors, the U.S. looked on it as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East, and President Nixon gave the Shah carte blanche to buy all the American weapons he desired.
Although formal U.S. aid to Iran ended in 1967, the ties between Washington and Tehran continued to tighten. The U.S. gave its blessing to extensive American business investment in Iran; in its heyday the list of major U.S. corporations with operations in Iran looked like a not-too-abridged version of the FORTUNE 500. A sizable army of American technicians --engineers, teachers, military men on training missions--moved into the country. President Carter in his press conference last week asserted that in the Shah's last days no fewer than 70,000 Americans were in Iran. Considerable traffic flowed the other way, too; Washington ended the last training programs for Iranian jet pilots in the U.S. only two weeks ago.
The general attitude in Washington was that, although the Shah could be a most stubborn and inconvenient ally (former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon once called him "a nut"), he was on the whole a force for stability and moderation in the Middle East. In return for all the American help, the Shah did give a valuable assist to the U.S. in strategic, though hardly in economic, policy. Among other things, he set up electronic listening posts close to the Soviet border from which the CIA could monitor Soviet missile tests.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that the Shah's oil money was buying trouble as well as power. His army could not protect him from the discontent of his own people, and the boomtown nature of Iran's economic growth nourished that discontent. Glittering apartment houses rose in the big cities, but 63,000 of Iran's 66,000 villages still have no piped water. Tehran, a city of around 5 million, boasts traffic jams rivaling those of Tokyo, but it has no sewer system. Inflation soared as high as 50% a year. So many rural residents left the land to seek industrial jobs in the cities that well-cultivated farm land reverted to desert and Iran, long self-sufficient in agricultural production, had to import much of its food.
Though the Shah proclaimed himself a pious Muslim who in his youth had experienced mystic visions of God, his Westernization of the country deeply offended the mullahs; they became a kind of network of resistance. The clergymen were displeased initially by the land reform, which broke up some of their own properties. They resented the Shah's centralization of power, which diminished their traditional role in guiding the society. Modernization brought such appurtenances as gambling casinos and discotheques, abominations to the mullahs and many of their followers, and Western-style apartment buildings that were despised by many of their tenants, whose traditions called for an architectural style emphasizing privacy and seclusion.
Industrialization and education created a huge new middle class, estimated ftCMi by U.S. Iranian Expert James Bill to constitute 25% of the population. The Shah thought that gratitude for material prosperity would make this new class a bulwark of his regime. He was wrong; members of the middle class eventually helped the Islamic clergy lead the demonstrations that toppled him. The middle class was angered by the lack of political rights and by the corruption and inefficiency of a government system in which top jobs were awarded on the basis of loyalty to the Shah rather than ability.
The Shah sent hundreds of thousands of middle-class youths abroad for government-paid study--an enlightened policy, and also a handy way of getting potential dissidents out of the country for a while. But the result was a severe brain drain that aggravated social imbalances. For example, so few medically trained Iranians returned to their country to practice that in 1974 the nation had only one doctor for each 3,300 patients, a worse ratio than in neighboring, and much poorer, Syria. To replace the students who would not come home, the Shah brought in foreign technicians, and their presence and high salaries annoyed many Iranians.
Hardly anyone reported to the Shah the extent of the opposition. He kept some of the forms of representative government, such as a toothless parliament, but in fact he ruled as an absolute monarch. His picture appeared on all currency and postage stamps (almost a year after the revolution, in fact, many of the old bills are still in use), and on the front page of every Tehran newspaper virtually every day. In 1971 he staged a $100 million festival at Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the monarchy; 165 chefs were flown in from Maxim's in Paris, and 50 members of the court were decked out in Lanvin-designed uniforms that required one mile of gold thread--each. The Shah personally approved all army promotions above the rank of major and forbade all criticism of his policies. In 1957, with the help of the CIA, he set up SAVAK, the notorious secret police, to crack down on dissidents.
Documentation of its activities is still difficult to come by, partly because SAVAK spread an atmosphere of terror so intense that victims--those who survived --were long afraid to talk. International investigators tell of families beseeching them to try to find out what had happened to relatives who had disappeared months before, but simultaneously begging them not to let the Shah's government know they were asking.
The number of SAVAK's victims is also difficult to establish. In 1976 Amnesty International, a London-based organization that keeps track of "prisoners of conscience" around the world, estimated that 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners were being held in Iran. The Shah's own figure was 3,000 to 3,500--but then, he regarded most dissidents as potential or actual Marxist terrorists and thus common criminals rather than political prisoners. Some of the dissidents really were Marxists; the Tudeh (Communist) Party has long been outlawed but is still active. And some were indeed terrorists; the Shah survived at least two attempts on his life during his long reign. But according to Amnesty International, many Iranians were arrested for acts like reading banned books and possessing pictures of Khomeini or Mossadegh. They were then tried in secret before courts that accepted anything in a SAVAK file as established fact, needing no corroboration. The accused were represented by military counsel, but defense lawyers who put up a vigorous argument were occasionally prosecuted and imprisoned themselves.
There is no longer any dispute that SAVAK practiced systematic torture. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council, described to TIME'S Raji Samghabadi how SAVAK agents in 1964 lashed the soles of his feet with electric cable: "The flesh was torn apart, and the bones jutted out. There were multiple fractures." The agents, he says, also held a knife to his throat for hours, making small nicks and telling him to guess "when the blade might go all the way down and sever my head." Amnesty International in the 1970s described other methods of torture: electric shock, burning on a heated metal grill, and the insertion of bottles and hot eggs into the anus. Last spring Anne Burley, an Amnesty International researcher, was shown by the government a SAVAK file that she deems authentic, containing pictures of victims who had been tortured to death. Several were women, she says, and "in each case the breasts were mutilated."
William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then one of them tries to rape you while you are still hanging upside down." Baraheni himself was beaten and whipped, and released only after agreeing to make a statement on television condemning Communism. Many other SAVAK victims were tortured briefly and then released, after the secret police satisfied themselves that they would no longer oppose the Shah.
Did the Shah know? He told TIME in 1976 that "we don't need to torture people any more," implying that torture had in fact been practiced earlier. In any case, as an absolute monarch he obviously was responsible for the actions of his own security forces.
There is some more direct evidence of the Shah's complicity in executions too. Early this year, SAVAK agents testified before" Khomeini's Islamic revolutionary courts that the Shah, under international pressure to liberalize his regime and therefore eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then machine-gunned them. He and another agent, Fereydoun Tavangari, said that SAVAK murdered other prisoners in their cells, then turned their bodies over to police medical examiners with an explanation that they had been killed in gun fights while resisting arrest.
The new revolutionary courts are hardly more objective than the Shah's tribunals. Naderipour and Tavangari had no hope of winning leniency from the revolutionary courts by fabricating stories. Both were executed, as they knew they would be, and as some 600 of the Shah's officials have also been.
For all the torture tales, U.S. experts estimate the number of political executions under the Shah at about 150 per year. By far the greatest bloodshed under the Shah occurred in the demonstrations that convulsed the country in 1978 and early 1979. The Shah's troops several times opened fire on crowds. Khomeini claims that 100,000 people died; the best guess probably is around 5,000 to 10,000.
Khomeini's demagoguery notwithstanding, even after that slaughter, the total number of the Shah's victims simply cannot be compared to the millions killed by Hitler and Stalin; nor can the tenor of his regime be likened to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. Even among contemporary despots, the Shah is not the worst. One prominent member of the International Commission of Jurists classifies the Shah as in a "second league" of tyrants, below Uganda's Idi Amin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Central African Emperor Jean Bokassa I. One Iranian expert notes that the Shah often exiled enemies rather than killing them. He adds: "Khomeini himself is the living embodiment of that policy."
Even in this grim area, rational distinctions must be made. Is there justification for calling the Shah a criminal and treating him as one? If so, the same would have to apply to scores of other rulers, rightist or leftist. Moreover, Iran, like many developing countries, has never known any really free institutions. And cruelty, by whatever regime, has always been a fact of life there and in many other countries the U.S. must live with. These considerations do not exonerate the Shah, but they must be kept in mind by the U.S. as it tries to cope with the real world. Besides, whatever the Shah's offenses, they do not justify the taking of hostages in order to force his surrender to his enemies, which strikes at all international practice and order.
The facts about the Shah's alleged corruption are also difficult to pin down, especially because in Iran, as in other Middle Eastern monarchies, there traditionally has been little distinction drawn between the treasures of the ruler and those of the nation. A lawsuit filed in New York last week on behalf of the revolutionary government accuses the Shah of diverting $20 billion in national assets to his own use, and charges Empress Farah with taking $5 billion. But it offers no evidence and indeed admits that the sums are pretty much a guess. The Shah's own figure for the size of his fortune, given to Barbara Walters of ABC, is $50 million to $100 million. Even that would represent a spectacular increase over the years.
Much of the Shah's wealth was funneled into the Pahlavi Foundation and several others, established ostensibly to fund charitable activities, like aid to the handicapped. The New York lawsuit asserts that the Iranian state budget "provided annually a subsidy of approximately $10 million" to the foundations. In addition, it says, "plaintiff [the Khomeini government] is unable to account for several billion dollars of revenues earned by the National Iranian Oil Co. between 1973 and 1978." In 1976 alone, it asserts, Nice's receipts as published by the company were $1 billion less than the NIOC earnings reported by the Central Bank of Iran; the suit implies that the $1 billion went into the Shah's foundations. While no proof is offered, the practice is by no means uncommon; other national oil companies also set aside sums for undefined state purposes.
Though the foundations did do some charitable work, the Shah invested most of their money in income-producing assets. In a new book, Iran: The Illusion of Power, British Journalist Robert Graham published a 3 1/2-page list of holdings of the Pahlavi Foundation that he was able to track down as of the end of 1977 and that he estimated to be worth $2.8 billion to $3.2 billion. They included total ownership of Bank Omran, one of Iran's largest banks; 80% ownership of Bimeh Melli, the nation's third largest insurance company; and full or partial interests in auto factories (10% of GM Iran), cement plants, sugar mills, housing projects and a string of hotels, including the Tehran Hilton. Indeed, Graham estimates that the Shah, through the foundation, once owned 70% of all the hotel beds in Iran.
All these assets, of course, are immovable and now in the hands of the Khomeini government (as are the famous crown jewels). But the Shah could easily have transferred cash income from them to banks abroad before his downfall, though stories of such transfers have so far proved unverifiable. Information on the Shah's holdings outside Iran ranges from sketchy to nonexistent. The New York lawsuit lists only four in the U.S. The most prominent is a 36-story Manhattan skyscraper owned by an American branch of the Pahlavi Foundation.
Whatever the size of the Shah's personal fortune, he ran a corrupt government from first to last. Foreign companies frequently had to pay "commissions" to government officials or members of the royal family to get any kind of contract in Iran. One example: between 1973 and 1975 the Bell Helicopter division of Textron Inc., which was selling choppers to the Iranian air force, paid a $3 million commission to a company that turned out to be secretly owned in part by a brother-in-law of the Shah. The Shah indirectly acknowledged the corruption by periodically announcing drives to root it out, but he never succeeded in doing so--if, in fact, he ever really tried.
Author Graham believes that the Shah's motives in tolerating the corruption, and in guiding the network of investments of the Pahlavi Foundation, were less personal aggrandizement than a desire to retain tight control of the Iranian economy and win the loyalty of subordinates by lavish financial favors. Nonetheless, the Shah in power lived very well, to put it mildly. He shuttled among five palaces in Iran. Journalist Fallaci, interviewing the Shah in 1973 in one of them, noted that "almost everything in the place was gold: the ashtray that you didn't dare dirty, the box inlaid with emeralds, the knickknacks covered with rubies and sapphires." The ruler's sisters also basked in opulence. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi owns two town houses and a lavish triplex coop apartment in Manhattan. Princess Shams is said to have bought a seaside showplace in Acapulco and to have once planned a gold-domed palace overlooking Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Shah's life in exile, since he fled Iran last January, has been considerably less grand but still rather more than comfortable. In Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lived for almost five months before coming to the U.S. for medical treatment, he occupied a rented four-building compound with spacious gardens set inside a twelve-foot wall. He can afford a personal security force and a staff of servants--and he pays the $975-a-day bill for his New York hospital suite promptly. But the Shah last week whiled away much of his time in the unregal pastime that many hospital patients are reduced to: watching television. Said one of doctors: "He watches some real crap. Westerns. Detective movies. Bad romances."
In reflective moments, the deposed monarch is bitterly angry. Immediately after he left Iran, he told President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, where he made his first stop, that "my advisers built a wall between myself and my people. I didn't realize what was happening. When I woke up, I had lost my people."
In part, it was a perceptive comment. The Shah had become isolated from his people. He failed to realize how deeply they hated the corruption and police terror, how seriously the country's Westernization offended its Islamic traditions, how much the middle class on which he pinned high hopes yearned for political expression as well as material prosperity. But the wall was built not by his advisers but by the Shah himself.
* Differing legends say that the original jewel-encrusted throne was lowered from heaven or made by a hired jeweler from Germany. At any rate it stood in the Great Mogul Palace in Delhi, India, and was brought to Persia by a conquering Shah in the 18th century. The throne on which Mohammed Reza Pahlavi sat is a copy made during the reign of Path Ali Shah (1798-1834) and named after one of his favorites, Tavous Khanoum, or Lady Peacock. * In 1939 the Shah married Princess Fawzia, a sister of Egypt's King Farouk, who had been chosen by his father before he ever saw her. He divorced her in 1948 and married Soraya Esfandiari, whom he divorced in 1958 after she failed to bear him an heir. The next year he married Farah Diba. They have four children: Crown Prince Reza, Prince Ali Reza and Princesses Farahnaz and Leila.
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