The Emperor Who Died an Exile

By Marguerite Johnson

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi: 1919-1980

Is it not passing brave to be a King,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

--Tamburlaine the Great,

Christopher Marlowe

He ended fearing for his life,

On the pinnacle of nothingness.

--Owhadi, Persian poet

Not even Scheherazade could have conceived the splendid scene beside the ancient ruins of Persepolis. The occasion was the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, and the Shah of Iran had decided to throw a party that would dazzle even the most jaded of his guests: Kings and Queens, Presidents and Premiers, sheiks and sultans. More than $100 million was spent on tents lined with silk and furnished with Baccarat crystal and Porthault linens, banquets laden with roast peacock stuffed with foie gras, magnums of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.

The year was 1971. Yet even then, to those who looked beyond the grandeur, there were signs that all was not well in the Shah's realm. The party grounds were sealed with barbed wire; troops armed with submachine guns stood guard. The University of Tehran was closed to forestall embarrassing signs of protest. By 1978, resentment against the imperial arrogance of Persepolis had ignited a revolution that spread from mosques to merchants to the remotest villages of the country. When Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died in a Cairo hospital last week at the age of 60 of lymphatic cancer complicated by a hemorrhage of the pancreas, it was after 18 months of exile.

No longer was he the Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and Shahanshah (King of Kings), absolute ruler of the remnant of the Persian Empire that his father had renamed Iran. Since fleeing the country in January 1979, he had been a man without a country, a man with a price on his head, placed there by the Muslim fundamentalists who overthrew him. His search for a home took him initially from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico. Last October he requested permission to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. Despite warnings that his admission could irreparably damage relations with the new government in Tehran, the Carter Administration, encouraged by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, decided to admit the Shah on humanitarian grounds.

Iranian anger at what was seen as American protection of the ousted dictator boiled over. Militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, took everyone present hostage, and demanded that the Shah be returned to stand trial for various "crimes." Washington refused. There was no indication how his death would affect the 52 Americans who are still being held captive after eight months.

After his recovery, the Shah briefly found a haven in Panama. In March, fearful of extradition proceedings and again in need of surgery, he went to Cairo at the invitation of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who offered his "good friend" a home and medical treatment there.

It was a measure of the manner in which he had ruled that in death, as in life, the former Shah was remembered more generously by foreigners than by his own people. Some of the harshest judgments had been pronounced by those who had faithfully, and sometimes servilely, worked under the Shah. "He was essentially a weak man who played the role of the dictator," said Fereydoun Hoveida, who for seven years was the Shah's Ambassador to the United Nations.

Despite his dynastic pretensions, the Shah was not to the monarchy born. His commoner father Reza Khan, a hot-tempered colonel in the Persian Cossack cavalry, seized power in a bloodless coup in 1921. He forced parliament to dissolve the decadent, 129-year-old Qajar dynasty in 1925 and proclaim him Shah. He took Pahlavi--an ancient Persian language --as his dynastic name. Following his coronation, his first-born son Mohammed Reza, then seven, was designated crown prince. The elder Shah paraded the child around in gold-encrusted uniforms, groomed him in sports and, when he was twelve, packed him off to Le Rosey, an exclusive Swiss boarding school. By then, as the Shah wrote in his 1961 autobiography, he already had a mystical sense of mission and was convinced by visions that he had been "chosen by God" to save his country.

In 1941, when the Allies needed a secure route to ship war supplies to the Soviet Union, Reza Shah, a Nazi sympathizer, was forced into exile. His son, then 21, initially was little more than a figurehead. At war's end he confronted his first crisis when Soviet forces, refusing to leave the country, set up a puppet regime in the northern province of Azerbaijan. Iran took the issue to the United Nations and, with considerable support from the U.S., succeeded in having them expelled.

His next serious test began in 1951, when the popularly elected government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. In 1953, right-wing monarchists in the army unsuccessfully attempted to depose Mossadegh; the Shah was forced to flee to Rome. A few days later, however, a countercoup sponsored by the CIA restored him to the throne. The Shah launched a ruthless purge, particularly of remnants of the Communist Tudeh Party, which had been outlawed in 1948. He also organized a secret-police network, SAVAK, that was to become one of the most notorious in the world.

The Shah set about trying to transform his feudal nation into a modern state. In the early 1960s, he informed his ministers: "I am going to go faster than the left." His dream of economic and social reforms was shared by a new generation of intellectuals, who also believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that political reforms would follow. The Shah's ambitious reform program --the so-called White Revolution--included a number of laudable aims: a literacy corps, equal rights for women, nationalization of forestry and water resources, profit-sharing schemes for workers, and land reforms designed to break up huge feudal estates.

In practice, however, many of the reforms were ineptly administered; others were deeply resented. The Shah, like his father before him, soon found himself at odds with the country's powerful Muslim clergy. After a series of violent riots, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, one of the most prominent spiritual leaders in Iran, was arrested and sent into exile, where he laid the groundwork for the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and eventually became the leader of the revolution.

"Tragically," writes Hoveida in his highly critical book, The Fall of the Shah, "the Shah's reforms were eclipsed within a few years by his increasing authoritarianism. In his consuming passion for what he conceived of as his divine mission, he came to believe in his own in fallibility." Some observers sensed elements of megalomania when, in his long-delayed formal coronation in a lavish 1967 ceremony, he placed the crown upon his own head as a symbol of his absolute supremacy.

Throughout his life, the Shah sometimes seemed to be conducting a kind of psychological battle against what he apparently feared was his own weakness. He became an accomplished pilot, a versatile sportsman, a reputed womanizer -- and an insensitive despot before whom even Premiers were expected to bow. "Nobody can influence me, nobody," he once told Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, adding contemptuously: "Still less a woman."

In 1975, he dissolved various throne-directed political parties -- the only ones allowed to operate -- and created the Rastakhiz (National Resurgence) Party. All Iranians were instructed to join it. Those who disagreed with the party's ideology, in essence a civil religion based on Shah worship, were blasted as "traitors" and told to leave Iran and renounce their citizenship. The jails filled with thousands of political prisoners, and SAVAK was universally reviled for its tactics of terror and torture. "No country in the world," concluded Amnesty International in 1975, "has a worse record in human rights than Iran."

The Shah's dreams of glory were fueled by Iran's oil wealth. In 1973, the Shah's voice had been the decisive one at the Tehran conference that vastly increased the price of oil. Over the next year, the country's revenues from its wells and refineries shot up from $2 billion to more than $20 billion a year. Rather like a child who has suddenly won big at Monopoly, the Shah dreamed of transforming Iran into a new industrial power, a kind of West Germany of the Middle East. Western visitors were subjected to stern lectures by the Shah on the profligacy of industrial nations, which wasted "the noble product" on heating homes and fueling factories. As with his early promises of reform, the dream of rapid industrialization went awry. Inflation ran wild, and so did corruption, especially among members of the royal family. Billions of dollars were wasted on misconceived, mismanaged, prestige-oriented development projects.

Staunchly antiCommunist, the Shah dreamed of making Iran a military power, the protector of the Persian Gulf. Convinced that he was a reliable and unassailable ally, Washington--most notably the Nixon Administration--encouraged him to build up his arsenal. He did--to the tune of $36 billion. By 1978, Iran had one of the world's most sophisticated collections of advanced weaponry, including F-14 jet fighters and a variety of guided-missile systems. Meanwhile 63,000 of Iran's 66,000 villages had neither piped water nor electricity. The capital of Tehran (pop. 5 million) lacked a sewer system.

Throughout 1978, riots and protests were harbingers of the coming revolution. By and large, Western leaders accepted the Shah's assurances that his opposition was merely a gaggle of "Islamic Marxists," abetted by "foreign agents and traitors." Eventually, the Shah made some concessions to placate his critics; he lifted press censorship and released some political prisoners. By then it was too late.

Caught up in his dream, the Shah worked hard, putting in 15 hours a day at his desk in Niavaran Palace in Tehran. He seemingly found little happiness in either his public or his private life. He seldom smiled, and his voice lacked warmth or expression. His first marriage, to Egypt's Princess Fawzia, King Farouk's sister, ended in a 1948 divorce when the Shah concluded that she could not give him a male heir (a daughter, Princess Shahnaz, is now 39). Three years later, the Shah married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful Iranian commoner. He divorced her in 1958, again because the union failed to produce an heir. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, then a 21-year-old architecture student in Paris. Sensitive and compassionate, Farah sought to soften the harsh policies of her husband when possible. She is the mother of his four other children: Crown Prince Reza, 19, Princess Farahnaz, 17, Prince Ali Reza, 14, and Princess Leila, 10.

The Shah's end was far from princely: the hasty flight, the uncertain wandering, the last hours in a hospital far from Tehran. Those images make it hard to assess history's ultimate verdict. "He ruled as a lion and a fox," concludes Professor James Bill, an Iran specialist at the University of Texas, "but in the process he forgot the needs of his people. He insulated and isolated himself from them, and in the end failed to build the political institutions and social trust they needed." He steered his country into a revolution, only to find that, as it gathered force, his people decided that they would no longer allow him to steer his country anywhere.

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