The Men And Women
Who Made Modern Iran,
1941-1979

Abbas Milani

Syracuse University Press and Persian World Press

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University where he is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution,Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran and Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir

As I walked the halls of Ellis Island one spring day in 2003, there to receive the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and as I watched fellow nominees search for their ancestors among the engraved names of some of the twelve million immigrants to America, I wondered what future generations of Iranian-Americans would think brought us Persians to these shores. Did we come by choice or by force of poverty, because of lack of opportunity or because of religious persecution in our home country? Would they know that we were an educated, successful people with a twenty-five-hundred-year-old history, heritage, and culture, driven out by homegrown zealots full of hatred and greed masquerading as religious piety?

Of all the immigrant groups who sought refuge and opportunity in America and the rest of the Western world during the second half of the twentieth century, the least known—and arguably the most talented—were, and are, the Persians.

Some came as students during the days of the last shah of Iran; most—now numbering, with their offspring, close to three million—followed as refugees from the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which tore down the twenty-five-hundred-year-old monarchy, imposed sharia, executed politicians and military leaders, persecuted intellectuals, and confiscated the possessions of businessmen and pro-Western traders. This Iranian diaspora has made America the world’s second largest Persian-speaking nation. Its members brought with them more education, skill, capital, and technical and medical know-how than perhaps any other immigrant group, while hiding the light of their talents and success, for the most part, under a bushel basket.

Who are these Persians? Among them are successful architects, builders, developers, educators, doctors, researchers, bankers, retailers, and entrepreneurs. Their Western educated children are among the most successful first generations anywhere.

Although there have been many books written about Iran before and after the revolution, none has been written about Iranians from the often-neglected perspective of biography—a book that would focus on the significant role played by individual Iranians in developing the country during the Pahlavi era, between 1941 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

As the Iranians of that generation were aging, this crucial aspect of that period’s history was fast on its way to being lost forever. The current regime shows no interest in the predecessors they had ousted; Persian historians in exile weren’t paying attention; the traditional Persian perspective on history tends to overlook the role of individuals in favor of a few figures, external forces, and conspiracy theories. Present and future generations of Persians were at risk of losing firsthand accounts of recent history and their direct ancestors’ accomplishments.

Eminent Persians was conceived not as a political treatise that advocates or admonishes a certain policy, but as an attempt to provide accurate, impartial, scholarly, and readable accounts of the lives of those who helped shape the economic, cultural, and political life of the era. It seeks to bring appropriate recognition to a generation of our countrymen whose names and lifelong achievements might otherwise be forgotten.

Eminent Persians is living history, a kaleidoscope of adventure and achievement, a record of intrigue and romance filled with revelations of individual courage, betrayal, and great literary and musical talent. Even as age claims these personalities, this book hopes to preserve for posterity the lives and times of the men and women who made this history. It sheds light into the hitherto ignored corners of a nation that, in one generation, went from being the West’s most reliable ally to becoming its putatively most dangerous enemy in the Middle East—a nation whose people, culture, and character are and always will be of global significance and timeless value.

Chosen from hundreds of candidates, these profiles chronicle the lives of the most important innovators of the last shah’s reign, when Iran made a giant leap forward. Represented are industrialists, financiers and bankers, builders, engineers and architects, merchants, publishers and journalists, politicians, government officials, legislators, economists and planners, educators, scholars and teachers, writers and poets, historians, artists, lawyers and jurists, doctors, women’s rights advocates, military leaders, religious leaders, athletes, movie directors, philanthropists, opposition figures, and thinkers. There is everything from heroism to villainy—sometimes in the same person. Three introductory essays—on politics, the economy, and culture—set the scene for the reader and illuminate Iran’s struggles with modernization and with the West, and lay bare the roots of its revolution.

Initially, a list of approximately 700 prominent Iranians was created by peer review. An advisory panel of eight distinguished individuals in a wide range of professions and businesses met on two occasions in New York and reduced the number to about 200. Upon further research, the author suggested further cuts, bringing the final list to 150 Iranians. It was decided that the inclusion of advisory panel members in the book would be at the sole discretion of the author. There is no doubt that there are many “Eminents” who have made significant contributions but were left out owing to space and time constraints.

Dr. Abbas Milani was commissioned to write Eminent Persians five years ago. A well known author and professor, he is currently the director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, where he is also co-director of the Iran Democracy Project and research fellow of the Hoover Institution. He has won acclaim for both the scholarship and the impartiality of his distinguished work The Persian Sphinx, a biography of Abbas Hoveyda, who served the shah for thirteen years and then was executed by the infamous “hanging judge” appointed by the Islamic regime to try him.

Dr. Milani traveled for four years conducting hundreds of interviews and consulting now-declassified British and American archives, piecing the stories together with the help of research assistants based in Tehran, Europe, and the United States. The book is a treasure-trove of original material, most of it appearing in print for the first time. Dr. Milani was granted exclusive access to deathbed letters, private correspondence, and other primary sources. A number of the “Eminents” have died since the project was begun. This book is thus their last authoritative word.

Attempts were made to interview all living candidates and their families, friends, and collaborators, as well as all independent sources of verification that were available. Each life was placed in its proper historical context, thus affording the readers both a micro and a macro account of Iranian history. Neither the advisory panel nor I had any editorial discretion over the interviews Dr. Milani conducted, the material he collected, or what is written in this book. The judgments are his own, as befits an author of his stature, and have not been reviewed by the advisory panel.

The funds required to research, write, edit, and publish this book were substantial. I have invested a great deal of time, energy, and most of the costs in the preparation of this book because it will preserve our history, pass Persian culture to the next generation, honor those who deserve honor, and introduce the eminent men and women of Persia to America and the west. A few others took great interest in the book and also contributed generously.

Sponsoring a book of this magnitude would not have been possible without the help of others who were more familiar with modern Iranian history than I am. Aside from my childhood, I have spent less than ten years in Iran during the subject period. I want to thank the following people who donated their time, ideas, and profound insights to this project: Abolfath Ardalan, Eskandar Arjomand, Siavosh Arjomand, Ali Ebrahimi, Ebrahim Golestan, Farhang Mehr, M. Reza Moghtader, Mehdi Samii, Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, Vahid Kooros, Maryam Panahy Ansary, Sir Eldon Griffiths, and Mary Selden Evans.

Akbar Alex Lari
May 21, 2007
New York, N.Y.

There is no history, only biography—Ralph Waldo Emerson

History, Herodotus tells us, is an attempt to save the great deeds of great men from the oblivion of time and the frailties of memory. When the corrosive power of time is augmented by the trauma of revolution, as it has been in Iran, and when the dislocations of life in diaspora combine with the discomfiture of hybrid (or hyphenated) identity to further contribute to this oblivion, then preserving for posterity the deeds of great women and men becomes even more urgent.

In Iran, where there has historically been a glaring dearth of biographies, where erasing the memory of past dynasties and elites has been an infectious malady of history, and where the handful of reliable modern biographies has covered only the lives of the royal family and a very few prominent politicians, posterity was likely to know little about the lives of the men and women whose feats and failures, hopes and aspirations shaped Iran in the years after World War II. These breaches in the field of cultural memory meant that the recent Iranian past was already becoming a distant country, with no maps—aside from literature—yet drawn to navigate its highways and byways. Eminent Persians is a first step in filling this lacuna and drafting such a map.

But choosing 150 people out of a population that was in 1979 almost 40 million, affording them the privilege of eminence, and trying to make sense of their lives, their dreams, and their defeats from shards of memory and few reliable archives and documents, then cohering the narratives into two volumes of less than a thousand pages each, was fraught with apparently insurmountable challenges. Some of these challenges were rooted in the tumult of revolution and its incumbent dislocations and in the cultural aversion to archives and biographies in Iran, but others arose from the limitarions of biography as a genre.

Biography as narrative is as old as the five-thousand-year-old tablets of Gilgamesh, yet the English word “biography” was only coined in the seventeenth century. Although in Iran the Achamenid tablets, more than twenty-five-hundred years old, were filled with biographical details, the advent of Islam in Iran put an end to biographical efforts. In fact, the Persian language has yet to settle on a native word for biography, using instead either the French word, or a litany of others—Hadithe Nafs, Nafs-al Hal, or Zendegi-nameh.

Every biography is a form of mummification. Biographies traffic in language, and thus, even under the most ideal conditions—where archives and letters, libraries and private logs can offer the biographer a rich mine of information—biographers must perforce reduce the vibrant complexity of life into the static linear structure of language. As Nietzsche reminded us a hundred years ago, language can only describe what is dead. To trim any life to a number of pages and to corral into a cogent, readable, reliable, and suspenseful narrative the complex interplay of memories and desires, dreams and defeats, forces of history, and tenacious individual talents is a Herculean task. In Eminent Persians, my mandate as the biographer was made more Procrustean by the handful of pages afforded each of these individual lives. This difficult task was rendered reasonable and rewarding by the deplorable alternative of allowing these lives to drift into oblivion.

These difficulties were made still more daunting by the fact that in the case of some of these eminent Persians, there was no consistent archival or scholarly data available about their lives. That is why the work of a biographer has been compared to that of an archaeologist—reconstructing lives from “fair or faux” artifacts.1 Sometimes the weight of “received opinion,” or of myths and rumors about a character, can cast a heavy shadow on the biographer’s mandate of impartiality. Other times the complete absence of useable artifacts renders the work of interpretation even more daunting. In reconstructing the lives of a handful of these eminent Persians, I had to rely on nothing save interviews with the personalities themselves, and with their friends and foes. The human tendency to remember the past through a self-soothing and sometimes self-serving prism, the inevitable ravages of time on memory, and the exilic tendency to romanticize “home” made reliance on these interviews perilous. I have made every effort to confirm and corroborate potentially controversial claims by any individual with an independent and reliable source.

An independent, rigorous measure of “eminence” was established, and then decisions were made about who among the Persians of a generation fit that measure. Over the course of a year, prominent Persians from different walks of life were asked to nominate a few of their peers as “most prominent.” Then, after extensive discussions with an advisory board composed of men and women with impeccable credentials in different fields—from Ebrahim Golestan and Farhang Mehr to Mehdi Samii and Siavosh Arjomand—it was determined that “eminence” would be defined not so much by judgments of value as by facts of innovation. For the purposes of this book, women and men who had introduced a new industrial or commercial field, or by the sheer quantity of what they produced brought about a radical change in an already existing field, created a new intellectual idea or artistic form, or adopted a new style of management or paradigm of politics would be deemed eminent. Whether the innovation was of positive or negative historic value would be left to the judgment of history.

Using this criterion, the advisory panel reduced the large peer-nominated list to about 200. It was left to me to further reduce the list to its final size of 150. Last, the panel members withdrew their own names from the roster, leaving it to my discretion to include or exclude them from the book. Several of them, in spite of productive and important careers, were not ultimately included. Needless to say, no one was excluded because of gender, race, or religious identity.

My nonnegotiable stipulation was that I have absolute autonomy in writing the book and that only I should have the right to change anything in it. To his credit, Akbar Lari, an avid reader of biographies and a contagiously enthusiastic advocate of this project, unfailingly respected my authorial privilege. He made no effort to influence the substance or style of the narrative. He was also insistent that he be excluded from the list, and relented only upon my insistence. Although he accomplished much in his life in Iran, and even more in America, his vision in recognizing the great vacuum in reliable biographies of the Iranian elite and his relentless dedication to correcting it would have been, in my mind, enough to afford him a place in this pantheon. He spared no effort to afford me every opportunity and resource necessary to make Eminent Persians the best it can be. One of the great pleasures and privileges of working on this project has been his friendship.

I traveled to different corners of the world to conduct some five hundred interviews— more than half of them on tape. I went to Europe three times, to Latin America once, and around the United States many times. I consulted libraries and archives in the United States and Europe. I owe special debts of gratitude to several families, among them the Khademi, Parsa, and Pakravan families, for kindly providing me with their private papers, notes, and unpublished memoirs.

Ardeshir Zahedi has been infinitely generous not only with his time, but with his papers and rich archive. My debt to his half-century of experience at the pinnacle of modern Iranian politics, to his refreshingly frank discourse, free from the faux solemnities of “polite” or “diplomatic” language, and finally, to his legendary hospitality are truly hard to put into words.

According to Umberto Eco, every text has a “model reader,” whose cognitive abilities shape the substance if not the style of each narrative. The “model reader” of Eminent Persians is anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Iran and the Middle East. I have made every effort to render the narrative devoid of esoteric cultural, historical, or literary allusions, and where they were unavoidable, I have explained each point in the endnotes. Sources appear in the endnotes as well.

It is folly to hope that in making all of these choices of exclusion and inclusion I have made no error. Although the initial plan for a one-volume book was perforce increased to two, I still know that there are many whose lives deserve to be remembered, but who were excluded by the dictates of economy and space. I also know that other writers might have made different choices. I am the only person responsible for any errors of selection or of fact. I am only comforted by the knowledge that such errors, wherever they exist, were never the result of malice. I hope that in future editions, any such errors will be corrected. There is today what one critic has called “an extraordinary renaissance”2 of biography, even in “minibiographies” like those found in Eminent Persians.3 For years biography as a genre was spurned—in spite of the centrality of such works as Gilgamesh or Plutarch’s Lives, and in spite of the biographical nature of much of the Bible and many other books of the Western canon—by the academic community. There has been, in the words of one critic, a tendency “to sniff at biography as under-theorized.”4 But in recent years there has been a rehabilitation of biography as an academic endeavor, and a theoretical turn toward explicating the epistemological and methodological foundations of biography. With this change has come a greater acceptance of biography as a work of scholarship.

Avid interest in biographies also has other roots. Readers’ thirst for history, and their aversion to the complexities of increasingly specialized and often jargon-marred scholarly discourse can account for much of this interest.

Eminent Persians is a social, economical, and cultural history of the thirty-eight-year history of postwar Iran (1941–79), but not through the prism of abstract theoretical vistas or obtuse scholarly analysis. Instead, the book tries to provide a panorama of the period by focusing on the concrete minutiae of individual lives. Because individual lives and their interactions are inherently shaped by “interdisciplinary” forces and do not fall neatly inside academic disciplines, Eminent Persians is by necessity, in its texture and content, interdisciplinary—music and architecture, economics and politics, Shiite jurisprudence, and the poetics of fiction, are all a part of its narrative.

Several factors collect the diversity of these individual profiles into an overarching narrative. There is the push and pull of these individuals’ competing ideas and conflicting identities, including the temptation to emulate the West slavishly, or the lure of “returning” to the authentic self of ancient Persia or Islam. In addition, many of these eminent Persians are members of the Zoroastrian, Jewish, or Bahai faith, and the story of their accomplishments underscores both the commendable religious tolerance of the Pahlavi era and the lamentable intolerance of the Islamic period. These historical changes and personal proclivities, the intrinsic suspense of life during times of transition, and the paradigmatic tensions between tradition and modernity provide the underlying connective thread of the book’s narrative.

Ultimately, Eminent Persians tries not just to save the deeds of great men and women of postwar Iran from the oblivion of time, but also to address the key question of how a country celebrated in the Old Testament, praised by Herodotus, and immortalized by Sophocles in his play The Persians, a culture that centuries ago produced the genius of Omar Khayyam and the wisdom of Rumi, whose poetry inspired Goethe and Emerson, and a society that in the 1970s was by most economic indicators at the height of prosperity, brought to power a latter-day Savonarola in the waning days of the twentieth century, a man who denigrated ancient Persia and dismissed economics as the refuge of donkeys.

Writing is never an act of solitary creation. Projects of this magnitude are a collective act, and thus my debt of gratitude to the individuals and institutions that helped in different stages of preparing Eminent Persians are too many to chronicle exhaustively here.

I was given a budget to hire two half-time research assistants for the first year and one part-time assistant for the second and third years. For the first two-and-a-half years, Hamid Shokat was one of my two assistants. His responsibilities were those of any research assistant—searching for and copying documents and essays from archives and libraries, and preparing synopses of oral histories, articles, and books. In a few cases, the assistants conducted interviews with some of the secondary sources for the book. Anita Burdett was delightfully professional in her work of tracing and copying documents in the British Public Records Office (PRO). Alireza Miralinaghi helped with research on some of the artists in the field of music. His impressive knowledge of the history of modern Iranian music was my indispensable guide in understanding musical modernity in Iran. Several others, particularly my dear friend Bahram Moalemi, helped with research in Iran. To them all I owe a debt of gratitude. Without them, it would have been impossible to finish Eminent Persians.

Aside from these assistants, I also enjoyed the voluntary help of several people. Soon after I began work on Eminent Persians, Mahin Afkhami generously offered to help and remained true to her promise for the next four years. She copied hundreds of important documents, essays, and passages relevant to the story of this book. Through her intercession, Effat Yousefi also helped with the project for about a year.

For the last five years, Stanford University has provided me with an ideal, and idyllic, situation for working on modern Iran. Hamid and Christina Moghadam generously endowed the program and the directorship I hold at Stanford. Hamid Moghadam and Esmail Amid-Hozour are only the most important members of a large group of women and men of a new generation of eminent Persians whose vision made the study of modern Iran possible at Stanford and at the Hoover Institution. Bita Daryabari’s generous endowment this year will enable the Iranian Studies Program to offer more courses on Persian poetry and literature. To them all I owe a great debt of appreciation. One of the great pleasures of teaching at Stanford is the brilliance of both the students and my colleagues. A number of my students helped gather data for Eminent Persians, particularly for the introduction to the section on the economy. The help and advice of colleagues like Judy Goldstein, Mike McFaul, and Larry Diamond have helped me to feel at home at Stanford.

Brooke Fox, Melina Rivera, and Irene Munik in Akbar Lari’s office were graceful and efficient throughout the five-year process of writing Eminent Persians. They managed the formidable work of keeping track of the multiple drafts of these 153 essays with competence and congeniality. I am thankful to all three.

I am also grateful to the staff of Stanford University’s Green Library, the Hoover Institution Archive, the Public Records Office in London, the National Archive, and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries. At the Library of Congress, Ibrahim Pourhadi’s enthusiasm for the history of Iran has been a source of assistance and admiration.

My brothers, Hassan and Mohsen Milani, and my sister, Farzaneh Milani, were a most reliable source of emotional solace and intellectual support throughout this process. All my life, the generosity of Hassan’s soul has been my source of inspiration and aspiration. Farzaneh, herself an eminent scholar, has been my soulmate since childhood, and a reliable pillar of support. Mohsen has been an effervescent source of joy, wit, and advice. During my many trips to Southern California, I have enjoyed the hospitality of Mahvash Delavarian Milani. Hassan and Mahvash Milani’s recent generous contribution to Stanford University will allow future generations of Iranian students to attend Stanford to research and study different aspects of Iranian society and history. My son, Hamid Milani, is “the light of my eyes,” and his presence affords more meaning and value to everything.

Anne Eckstrom edited a small number of the essays in this book, and Jane Cavolina edited the rest of the manuscript. Jane’s way with words, her attention to details, her desire for simplicity, and the unobtrusive changes she suggested made the task of working with her as the editor of the manuscript a delight. Sir Eldon Griffiths read the first draft of many of the entries, and with his impressive command of modern Iranian history, and his eye for the nuances of language resulting from his many years of service as a prominent editor and journalist, offered valuable advice.

At Syracuse University Press, Mary Selden Evans shepherded the book to publication. Her passion for everything connected to the history of Iran was not only indispensable in expeditiously bringing Eminent Persians into print but has been instrumental in making, in a relatively short time, Syracuse University Press a preeminent source of scholarly material on Iran. D. J. Whyte copyedited the entire manuscript with exemplary attention to every detail of the narrative. John Fruehwirth, managing editor at the press, was not just efficient and dedicated to excellence but unfailingly kind and congenial. To the endless changes I made in the last weeks and days of production, the entire staff of Syracuse University Press demonstrated the patience of Job and the wisdom of Athena.

Maryam Panahi, with her legendary hospitality and her firsthand knowledge of modern Iranian society, was a gracious host every time I visited New York and a generous guide to the social and political salons of Pahlavi Iran.

When I began to contemplate undertaking the task of writing Eminent Persians, my dear friend Parviz Shokat was characteristically generous in offering any help I needed. He is a true scholar manqué, and every time he visited a library anywhere in the world, he used his keen and curious mind to find valuable material for the book. All my adult life, he has been a dear friend, and a source of inspiration for his humanity and humility.

I am thankful to the members of the Eminent Persians panel for the time and effort they put into the project. I owe a special debt to Mehdi Samii. Not only is he the embodiment of probity and honesty, but his dignity and wisdom afford his words particular gravitas. A delightful consequence of working on this project was friendship with Ali Ebrahim, a member of the panel, and a man whose hospitality is matched only by his firm and frank dedication to a free secular Iran.

For the last three years, Bill and Nancy Cregor’s friendship, hospitality, unfailing humanity, and passion for the world of ideas has been an inspiration and a reminder of America at its best. Their house on the Stanford campus is a veritable “city on the hill.”

I am deeply grateful to Ebrahim Golestan for his help and guidance, and to Eminent Persians for making my friendship with him an even more valuable part of my life. He helped me in every stage of the project by offering advice on the overall structure of the book and on smaller details in many of the essays. His encyclopedic knowledge of modern Iranian social history, his dedication to perfection and precision, and his storied penchant for what diplomats call “frank and honest” discourse made him a cherished source of advice.

My dear friend Negar Ghobadi read the entire manuscript with the passion and exuberance of an artist and the studied attention to detail of a scholar.

Last and most of all, my debt to my wife, Jean Nyland, is truly beyond words. From the first moments of the project to its last months, when our life had lost all semblance of normalcy and was consumed by the demands of finishing the manuscript, she was my first and last editor, my advisor, and my moral and pragmatic compass. She helped me navigate through the many intellectual and emotional minefields of a project as complicated as Eminent Persians. She is an endearing embodiment of an independent woman—self-sufficient in every sphere of her life, but endlessly generous in her willingness to help others. While her erudition is rooted in her insatiable appetite for the world of ideas and letters, her magnanimity in sharing all she knows with others has been, for me, an education in humility and selflessness.

Abbas Milani
Stanford University
May 6, 2007

Purposes Mistook: Politics in Iran, 1941–1979

Politics and Public Administration
Hoseyn Ala
Assadollah Alam
Alinaghi Alikhani
Ali Amini
Jamshid Amuzegar
Hushang Ansary
Hassan Arsanjani
Safi Asfia
Hamid Ashraf
Shapur Bakhtiyar
Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani
Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi
Dr. Manuchehre Egbal
The Entezam Brothers
Akbar Etemad
Reza Fallah
Aziz, Khodadad, Maryam, and Sattareh Farmanfarma’ian
Mohammad-Ali Forughi
Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh
Reza Ghotbi
Abbasqoli Golshai’yan
Ebrahim Hakimi (Hakim-al Molk)
Aliasgar Hekmat
Sardar Fakher Hekmat
Amir-Abbas Hoveyda
Fereydun Mahdavi
Abdol-Majid and Monir Vakili Majidi
Khalil Maleki
The Mansur Family
Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq
Hushang Nahavandi
Parviz Nikkhah
Nasser and Khosrow Qhashghai
Shapur and Mehri Rasekh
Fuad Ruhani
Khosrow Ruzbeh
Parviz Sabeti
Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi
Seyyed Fakhroddin
Shadman Ja’far
Sharif-Emami Tabataba’i
Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh
Aredeshir Zahedi

Religion
Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani
Ruhollah Khomeini
Ali Shari’ati
Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari

Journalism
Aliasqar Amirani
Darius Homayun
Abbas Masudi
Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh
The Towfiq Brothers

Law
Shahin Agayan
Mohammad Baheri

Military
Abolfath Ardalan
Teymur Bakhtiyar
Hoseyn Fardust
Valiollah Gharani
Alimohammad Khademi
Mohammad Khatam
Ahmad Moggarrebi
Ne’matollah Nasiri
Hassan Pakravan
Hadji Ali Razmara
Hassan Toufanian
Fazlollah Zahedi

Notes to Volume One

Introduction to Politics

Politics in modern Iran has been dominated by protracted battles between competing models of politics and society. One formative battle has been between advocates of a secular Iran, its laws emanating, at least ostensibly, from the will of the people, and supporters of an Islamic Iran, ruled not by law but by sharia and personal fiat and legitimized not by popular sovereignty but by divine anointment. In this contested history, a bewildering variety of political movements, ideologies, and forms of government have appeared on the horizon. Movements as far apart as nationalism, constitutionalism, Marxism, Islamic fundamentalism, social democracy, Islamic liberalism, and fascism have each found powerful Persian advocates. Forms of government as different as Oriental despotism and Islamic theocracy, “guided” democracy and authoritarianism, and, finally, liberal democracy have all been tried at some moment of Iran’s modern history.

The effort to create political parties has also yielded surprisingly varied structures. The first attempt to create political parties in the 1940s helped foster a kind of democratic experience, and the two-party system of the late 1950s was often described by the shah as an experiment in “guided democracy.” At the same time, the shah himself had brought both parties into existence, and had placed at their helms a succession of trusted loyalists. From Manuchehre Egbal and Assadollah Alam to Yahya Adl and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, each had their turn as the leader of a party. What he had created, the shah felt entitled to dissolve. In 1975, the shah dismissed all political parties, replacing them with a single party he called the Rastakhiz or Resurgence Party.

Nearly all the elements of this varied collection of political structures can also be found in the West. In Iran, however, they have often assumed unusual forms, shaped by the vagaries of a long imperial history, by the dictates of geography—particularly proximity to most of the world’s known oil supplies and to the Soviet Union, the now-almostforgotten “evil empire” of the cold war—and finally, by the hegemony of a particular form of Islamic culture called Shiism.

The conflict between modernity and tradition did not arrive with Shiism but has underlain Iranian politics from the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–7, modern Iranian politics has struggled with modernity, and with the temptation to emulate the West not just in politics but in every aspect of culture. Seen as an episode in this continuing struggle, the 1979 Islamic Revolution was not the first but was certainly the most successful attempt to turn back the historical clock and dismantle what little progress Iranian society had made toward political modernity.

From a broader historical perspective, the same revolution appears as one of the twentieth century’s greatest political abductions. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his cohorts co-opted a democratic popular movement that enjoyed the near-unanimous support of the country’s urban population and, instead of a democratic polity, created a pseudo-totalitarian theocracy where nearly all power rests in the hands of an unelected and despotic “spiritual leader.”

This abduction was the more daring, and the more anachronistic, because it took place just as the world was seeing an end to despotic and totalitarian regimes. In the mid1970s the world had begun witnessing what social scientists now term the “third wave” of democracy. Regimes based on ideology—long considered the most pernicious form of despotism—were in their death throes. Liberal democracy, with some form of market economy, was beginning to emerge as the victor in the “culture wars” of the cold war era.

In defiance of this important global development, in contravention of the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and in spite of a long tradition of “quietist” Shiite theology, embodied in the person and practice of Ayatollahs Hoseyn Boroujerdi and Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari—a tradition that discouraged the clergy from any claim to direct political power and that, in the months after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, was brilliantly exhibited in the personality and practice of Ayatollah Sistani—Ayatollah Khomeini used the chaos of the revolution; the organizational weakness of the democratic forces; the weakness, illness, and vacillations of the shah; the policy confusion in the Carter administration’s handling of Iran; and, finally, the West’s continued fear of Soviet expansionism to create an anachronistic Islamic state in Iran. Neither the dynamics of his success, nor the foundation of the lives of the eminent men and women of Iranian politics, can be understood or explained without some appreciation for the overall contours of modern Iranian history.

Decoding the Iranian Past
Deep-rooted cultural obstacles have hitherto hindered the serious and impartial study of Iran’s political history. A dearth of archives, memoirs, journals, and biographies, and the prevalence of a Manichaean view of history, where the cosmos is torn between the forces of good and evil, have been among the obstacles on the road to a clear, accurate understanding of Iran’s political history.[1]

Another obscuring factor, one that has discouraged attention to the role of multiple individuals in shaping modern Iranian political history, has been the cult of hero worship. The belief in the formative role of “great men” has traditionally shaped the Iranian view of history. The dominance of this view has meant that the few reliable biographies and much of the historical narrative written to date have focused on a few important figures only; as a result, the lives of hundreds of men and women who actually shaped the contours, and determined the course, of Iran’s modern political history, have attracted little or no attention. This section of Eminent Persians is intended to fill in and integrate this incomplete and fragmented historical landscape.

Of course the cultural distrust of individualism is not the only reason for this fragmentation or for the failure to chronicle fully or to appreciate adequately the role of the myriad men and women who actually shaped modern Iran’s politics. Iranian culture has long had a propensity for messianic thought; it has had a need for a savior, or mahdi, to arise and deliver salvation. History shows that messianic milieus are fertile grounds for the development of conspiracy theories; one easily begets the other. In fact, a propensity toward conspiracy theories is often the secular corollary of a messianic proclivity. Shiism, the dominant form of Islam in Iran, is at least partially predicated on the idea that the Twelfth Imam—the Mahdi—will reappear after his long absence, and with his return all injustice and want, all inequality and suffering, will end. Indeed messianism and conspiracy theories—both prevalent in Iran—have much in common. In both, a force outside society, beyond its redress and review, shapes the fate of that society; in both, individual responsibility is abjured in favor of some cosmic or foreign force; in neither do individuals with their foibles, or societies with their failures, bear any responsibility for the calamities that have befallen them. In both, the power of the conspirator correlates negatively with the sense of enfranchisement on the part of the populace. In both, order and meaning are imposed upon a world that appears terrifyingly chaotic and meaningless.

Informed and self-assured citizenries do not need the balm of conspiracy theories. If people lose their faith in the redemptive power of the messiah—as they often do when societies secularize—and do not concurrently develop faith in their own powers as citizens to determine their own political life, then lapsed messianism easily morphs into belief in conspiracy theories.

In this conspiratorial cosmos (what one historian calls the “paranoid style of politics”)[2] the role of the individual has little or no explanatory value. A not insignificant number of Iranians even today believe that much of what has happened in the country, particularly the advent and eventual victory of the Islamic Revolution, was conceived and plotted in Freemasonic lodges acting secretly for the British. Ever since their emergence in Iran in the mid–nineteenth century, the Masons have become the archetypal villains of modern Iranian politics. Behind every event there still lurks, in the public imagination, “the British hand,” of which the Masons are the muscle.

Even the shah himself saw both Iranian and global politics in terms of such conspiracies. In his political vision, there were no accidents, no unintended consequences, and certainly no individual gestures of support or opposition free of ulterior, often sinister, and conspiratorial motives. Every political action was invariably part of the Machiavellian machinations of some big foreign power, usually Great Britain, the United States, or the Soviet Union. He went to his grave believing that the revolution that overthrew him was nothing but a conspiracy concocted by the oil companies—payback for his refusal to reduce the price of oil in 1974 and 1975. At other times, he suggested that the revolution was in fact a conspiracy of the communists and that the mullahs were, behind the façade of their faith, tools and allies of the communists. The apparent contradiction between these two views seems never to have bothered him or his allies and supporters.

Such grand theories of external influence, the self-deluding certitudes of conspiracy theories, have obscured the role of individual Iranians in determining the course of Iran’s political history. Certainly the colonial powers have exercised their considerable economic, cultural, and political power to influence the outcome of political intrigues in modern Iran. Nevertheless, it has been the Iranians themselves who have shaped their history.

The contributions of the many Iranian men and women of import have frequently been overshadowed by the traditional Iranian view of politics as conspiratorial, externally driven, or in the hands of “great men.” The role of these men and women has been further obscured by the preoccupation of historians with a few major figures. Understanding their lives is more than an act of respectful remembrance; it also helps us better perceive the labyrinthine path of Iran’s political history. By the end of this journey, we can hope to have a far more nuanced understanding of the dreams and aspirations, the impressive accomplishments, and the formidable frustrations of a whole generation who tried to turn Iran into a modern polity. Before we start, however, it is important to set the stage for these individuals, to look at the broader backdrop of Iranian history against which they played.

Iran, 1908–1945
The calculus of Iran’s history changed radically in 1908 when oil was discovered in the country. As the West increasingly came to depend on Middle Eastern oil to run its industrial and military machine, the face and fate of Iranian society, and its significance for the West, also changed. In the nineteenth century Iran had been of interest as a “buffer state” between Russia and Great Britain. In the twentieth century, particularly in the years after World War I, oil, as well as proximity to the new emerging Soviet giant, were the ultimate sources of Iran’s strategic value to the West.

History has tragically demonstrated that wealth in oil is never an unqualified blessing. It has become something of a truism that in the absence of democracy and free markets— and the economic and political transparencies they beget—oil becomes nothing less than a political, social, and even economic curse. The sudden infusion of oil wealth turns governments into Molochs free from any dependence on popular support. Even among the population it can create a sense of entitlement, of expecting government handouts, thus undermining the spirit of hard work that is essential to the development of any economy. Countries with long-standing democratic political structures, like Great Britain and Norway, have encountered oil wealth without falling prey to this tragic curse. But most oilrich countries—disproportionately rated among the most undemocratic countries in the world[3]—seem to rely on a social contract entirely different from the kind that characterizes modern democracies. In these oil-rich countries, the government owns the oil assets, receives the revenue—more accurately the “rent”—and controls the “purse” from which it doles out money to docile subjects. In a democracy, by contrast, taxation is the ultimate source of government revenue and thus the “purse” relies on the acquiescence of the people. In the third world and in Iranian politics, in other words, oil has been what the philosophers call a pharmakon: a drug at once remedy and poison. Oil has been a “wonder drug” for the endemic problem of capital accumulation in third-world countries like Iran. In Iran, it has also poisoned the country’s body politic by encouraging despotism.

Just before oil was discovered in 1908, in fact, Iran was struggling to free itself from despotism by reducing the feudal grip of its monarchy. In 1905–7, a constitutional revolution promised to catapult Iran into the modern age. A coterie of intellectuals, of middle-class background and democratic leanings, foremost among them figures like Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Ebrahim Hakimi, and Allame Dehkhoda, forced the ruling monarch, Mozafaral-Din Shah, to sign into law a new constitution that defined and limited the king’s powers. Democratic laws, grafted from the Belgian constitution, were adopted for Iran.

The hapless ra’yat (subject) and the all-powerful Gebley-e Alam (“Pivot of the Universe”) of traditional feudal Iran were suddenly expected to become the citizen and constitutional monarch of a modern polity. There was to be separation of powers, and a bicameral system, with a house, the Majlis, directly elected by the country’s male population, and a senate whose members were, in equal numbers, elected by the people and appointed by the king. The king was to reign but not rule. At the same time, he was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and laws could be enacted only after he signed them. Much of the executive power was in the hands of a prime minister, chosen by the Majlis and appointed by the king. Some of the inherent ambiguities in these laws later became the source of much contention, particularly during the early 1950s, when Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was the country’s popular and populist prime minister.

The new 1907 constitution was to be the blueprint for a more or less genuine democratic system in Iran. The only “undemocratic” provision, added to appease the clergy, empowered a committee of five top-ranking clerics to veto any legislation they deemed inimical to the spirit of Islam and its sharia.

Even this truncated democracy proved untenable. Iranians learned, all too soon, that democracy is more than just an idea. It requires an intricate network of institutions; it needs a civil society to act as buffer between the people and power. It is, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau never tired of reminding his readers, a highly sensitive organism, in need of constant monitoring and mentoring. Democracy requires a citizenry conscious of the many perils that threaten it, committed to political patience, and well versed in the rules of tolerance.

In 1907 Iran, the necessary conditions for democracy, particularly a strong and viable civil society, were simply wanting. In addition, a frightening array of powerful forces lined up against the creation of a genuine secular democracy in the country. Indeed, the immediate aftermath of the constitutional revolution was almost two decades of chaos and civil war. The center could no longer hold, and centrifugal forces, sometimes strengthened by the Russians in the north, other times by the British in the south, threatened the territorial integrity of Iran.

With the advent of World War I, the political plague of foreign occupation was complicated by the natural pestilence of famine and cholera. In 1918, the infamous Spanish flu, which killed up to hundred million people worldwide, arrived in Iran and took a heavy toll. Some sources have estimated that over twenty-five years, these outbreaks of cholera and flu together killed close to a quarter of the country’s population.[4] All these troubles combined to hasten the end of Iran’s constitutional era. By 1920, Ahmad Shah, the boy king who ascended the throne in 1909, presided over an increasingly chaotic “congress,” and Iran’s experiment in democracy had turned out to be a flash in the pan. In 1921, Reza Khan, a charismatic officer of the Cossack brigade, joined forces with Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i, a rabble-rousing journalist of eccentric habits and very close ties with the British embassy in Tehran, and together they organized a military coup d’état that toppled the government. They forced the weak, vacillating, hedonistic, and corrupt Ahmad Shah to appoint Tabataba’i prime minister. (Tabataba’i, whose political heroes were Mussolini and Lenin, had actually asked to be appointed “the Dictator” of Iran but the king demurred, suggesting that making such an appointment would ill become the monarchy.) At the same time, Reza Khan was named minister of war.

The new cabinet brought about many changes in the country’s political climate. But it soon became clear that in spite of Tabataba’i’s fierce rhetoric, ultimate power now resided in the hands of Reza Khan. After only a hundred days, a coalition composed of the king, most of the country’s “grandees” and Reza Khan brought an end to Tabataba’i’s dream of dictatorial power. He was stripped of all his power and forced into exile. Before long, Reza Khan himself became not only the country’s all-powerful prime minister, but also, in the king’s stead, commander-in-chief of its armed forces.

As Iran’s new “strongman,” Reza Khan worked to end the virtual independence of the regional warlords, and establish the power of the central authority over the whole country.

Particularly crucial were his victories in the country’s two most important outlying provinces. In the south, he defeated Sheikh Khaz’al, a de facto British subject who ruled oil-rich Khuzestan as a veritable protectorate of Great Britain. In the north, he defeated Iran’s only experiment in Soviet-style socialism—a province that styled itself the “Soviet Republic of Guilan” and was headed by a folksy character named Mirza Kuchek Khan Jangali.

In both of these wars, Reza Khan was helped by a coterie of officers who went on to play important roles in Iranian politics. Foremost in that category was a young, charismatic general who later played a crucial role in the life of the Pahlavi dynasty itself. His name was Fazlollah Zahedi.

In 1925, Reza Khan took the next step. He “accepted” the resolution of a malleable Majlis to depose Ahmad Shah and to name Reza Khan himself king and founder of the new Pahlavi dynasty. Only a handful of deputies—among them Hoseyn Ala and Mohammad Mossadeq—did not vote for the resolution that dissolved the Qajar dynasty and anointed the new monarch. In less than a year, Reza Shah crowned himself king of Persia and named his seven-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, the crown prince.

Although Reza Shah had assumed the traditional trappings of kingship, he was no traditionalist: on the contrary, he was determined to modernize Iran. Reza Shah was an autodidact with little formal education. He had never traveled to the West. But he was a political genius, with an uncanny understanding of what Iran had to do to enter the modern age. His sixteen years in power, along with his son’s thirty-seven-year reign, can easily be considered one of the most transformative periods in the last five centuries of Iranian history.

Reza Shah was helped in his efforts, particularly in his early days, by such formidable intellects as Mohammad-Ali Forughi and Ali Akbar Davar. Later, tireless modernizers like Aliasgar Hekmat joined Reza Shah’s attempt to create a modern Iran. Events in Turkey, and the modernizing efforts of Ataturk there, were also of great importance to Reza Shah.

Reza Shah was by political instinct and inclination a secularist. He moved to curtail the role of the clergy by secularizing the country’s courts as well as the education system. Both had been, historically, the monopoly of the mullahs and one of their chief sources of power and profit.

He was also keen on opening the country to travel, commerce, and industry. In spite of opposition from Great Britain and from such powerful members of the Majlis as Mossadeq, Reza Shah built a railroad that connected the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.[5] He funded this and other massive projects using both oil revenues and a new system of taxation. He seemed, again apparently by instinct, aware of the curse of oil money, and thus ordered that all money earned from oil be kept in a special account and spent only for special projects, particularly the military. He helped build many new industries.

In addition to secularizing the education system, Reza Shah was intent on educating Iran’s brightest minds in modern science and technology. He was a particularly enthusiastic supporter of a government program to send a number of the country’s top students each year to train in Western universities. Many of the most eminent Persians of the postwar years—from Khalil Maleki to Mehdi Samii—were among the students sent abroad on government scholarships.
Reza Shah’s own son, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza, was sent to Switzerland for about five years. The sojourn was to have two long-lasting influences on the young Mohammad Reza’s life. Aside from mastering French, he learned about the ways and values of a liberal and democratic society.

The trip had also another, unintended consequence. In his entourage, carefully handpicked by Reza Shah, there was a young Persian boy named Hoseyn Fardust. Shy and taciturn, Fardust somehow became the future king’s most trusted advisor and would remain so when Mohammad Reza became shah. He also remained a man of many mysteries, rarely making public appearances, but he was reputed to be the shah’s “eyes and ears.” There was about him an aura reminiscent of Rasputin in tsarist Russia. And like Rasputin, Fardust’s real political allegiances are now a subject of immense curiosity and much conjecture. Four decades after their sojourn to Switzerland, in a famous late-1979 television interview with David Frost, a tearful exiled shah had to face the possibility that his old friend might have in fact betrayed him. But in 1931, when Reza Shah chose the son of a lowly lieutenant in the army to accompany the crown prince to Switzerland, he could not have imagined the role this taciturn and self-effacing young boy would play in the future of Iran.

One of Reza Shah’s most controversial decisions, instituted in 1936, was the mandatory unveiling of Iranian women. From the mid–nineteenth century, Iranian women had begun to demand more and more power and presence in the public realm. The incredible life of Gorat-al-ayn marks a fascinating threshold in the history of gender relations in Iran. She was a woman of unusual erudition and an early convert to the new religion introduced by Mohammad Bab—the religion that later evolved into Bahaism. Her voluntary unveiling in the summer of 1848, in a large gathering of men, can easily be considered the first sign of an emerging women’s movement.[6]

In 1936, less than a hundred years after that seminal moment, Reza Shah, well aware of the need to enfranchise women, also began the policy of accepting girls in the education system. By the end of his reign, to the great consternation of the mullahs, coeducational schools had sprung up all over Iran. Women had entered the public realm, never to leave it again.

But Reza Shah’s Achilles’ heel was his unwillingness to accept the dictates of democracy. Despite his many reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, he kept power to himself. He was convinced that his kind of despotism was the necessary, unavoidable, and reasonable price Iran had to pay for progress. Next to his despotism, his personal avarice and his insatiable appetite for wealth and property, particularly in the northern provinces where he was born, were the chief complaints of an increasingly disgruntled populace.[7]

Iran in World War II, 1941–1946
By 1941 Great Britain and the Soviet Union, each for its own reasons, had come to dislike Reza Shah. Great Britain was bitter because, even after the Second World War began, Reza Shah insisted on continuing to receive Iran’s full share of revenues from oil fields leased to the British. Soviet Russia was angry because it had made many gestures of friendship in Reza Shah’s early years, commending him for his anticolonialism, but had never received a favorable response. Reza Shah, indeed, remained an implacable enemy of Soviet communism throughout his reign.

Reza Shah declared Iran to be a neutral nation in the war. He had, by then, taken many steps that hardened the enmity of the Anglo-Soviet allies. In an apparent attempt to use Germany as a countervailing force against British and Soviet influence in Iran, Reza Shah began to court the Nazis. Iran’s trade with Nazi Germany increased substantially. The Germans proved to be the only country in the industrial world willing to sell Iran a steel mill. Such a mill was, in the mind of Reza Shah, the sine qua non of progress. The argument that economic laws of “comparative advantage” and economies of scale rendered such a factory in Iran perpetually unprofitable—and economically unreasonable—made no dent in Reza Shah’s enthusiasm. He never succeeded in establishing his beloved steel factory, but the search for such a symbol of progress would continue unabated by his son.

When the war began, a large number of German technicians and advisors were already living in Iran. Their presence became a source of apparent alarm for the Allies. Soviet and British propaganda began to repeat the claim that “thousands of Germans” lived and worked in Iran, a potentially dangerous “fifth column.” The BBC’s alarming programs on the subject notwithstanding, the actual number of Germans was less than a thousand, and British authorities definitely knew the real number.8 Two facts that no doubt came closer to the Allies’ real concerns were that Iranian oil was needed for the war effort and that the Iranian railroad was an asset of enormous strategic significance.

On July 19, 1941, representatives of the Soviet Union and Great Britain handed the Iranian government an ultimatum, demanding the immediate expulsion of all German nationals. Reza Shah, calling the demand a clear infringement on Iran’s sovereignty, refused. Nazi Germany hailed his defiance; Hitler sent a note praising the king for his “wisdom” and encouraging him to maintain his resolve and “continue [Iran’s] present policy of neutrality.” The führer, as was his wont, also implicitly threatened Reza Shah, suggesting that “the devastation of war” would surely come “into Iranian territory”9 if the king should change his mind.

The Allies were swift in their response. On August 25, 1941, they ignored Iran’s declared neutrality and occupied the country. Although the Iranian army surrendered with only token resistance, the Allies, in an apparent attempt to intimidate the population, continued to bomb the urban centers even after the army collapsed. There is a lingering suspicion among some scholars that Iran’s prime minister at the time, Ali Mansur, known for his close ties to the British, deliberately hid from Reza Shah the seriousness of the Anglo-Soviet ultimatum, and thus paved the way for the invasion. Mohammad Reza Shah himself always believed that it was in fact a British conspiracy that kept his father ignorant of the severity of the situation.[10]

On September 15, 1941, a rumor suddenly spread through Tehran that the Russian army, hitherto camped about two hundred miles from the city, had begun their march on the capital. Reza Shah abdicated immediately, and swiftly left the country. Within hours of his departure, his son, twenty-two-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad Reza, took the oath of office in the Majlis and was proclaimed shah.

Mohammad-Ali Forughi, named prime minister by Reza Shah on the eve of the British-Soviet invasion, and Hoseyn Ala, a distinguished diplomat and politician, played crucial roles in convincing the two occupying governments, particularly the British, to accept the young prince as the new monarch.11 Forughi’s arguments for the necessity of continuing the Pahlavi dynasty were not easy to sell. The British had come to despise Reza Shah. As Sir Reader Bullard makes clear on many occasions, the British felt that Reza Shah, particularly in the last two years of his reign, had humiliated and betrayed them.12 The deliberately cruel treatment they later afforded the once proud soldier and deposed king was, in the words of an embassy dispatch, “the roar” of the much-abused British lion. Indeed, the British would use many occasions during Reza Shah’s exile to humiliate him.

The British were reluctant to see Reza Shah’s son crowned. They toyed with the idea of bringing the Qajars back to power. The surviving Qajar candidate was at the time an officer of the British navy; he also spoke no Persian. They then contemplated turning Iran into a republic and offered the position of president to Forughi. He refused, arguing that monarchy was the best form of government for Iran.

The British and the Soviets begrudgingly and only conditionally agreed to recognize Mohammad Reza as the king. On September 16, l941, Mohammad Reza Shah took the throne, with a pledge to correct the mistakes of his father, to comply with the letter and spirit of the constitution, and to return to the government and people all the assets Reza Shah had illegally confiscated.

The British and Soviets registered their displeasure by boycotting the new king’s official swearing-in ceremonies. The two governments then made it clear that they would be “observing” the new shah’s behavior and would continue their support only so long as he did not meddle in politics.13 These experiences—seeing his all-powerful father exiled and humiliated by the British and feeling himself belittled or ignored by the Allies—left an indelible mark on the soul and psyche of the young monarch. He was particularly angry at the British and would never again trust them. This mistrust was to have farreaching consequences for his thirty-seven-year tenure on the throne.

The end of Reza Shah’s absolutism initiated what would become a decade of democratic experimentation in the country. A variety of parties and groups—some legitimate, others mere tools of greedy, grandiose, or corrupt political figures—sprang up throughout the country. Many public figures who had been relegated to the sidelines or exiled during the reign of Reza Shah returned to the political arena. Among them were Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i, Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh and Mohammad Mossadeq. All three would go on to play pivotal roles in the postwar politics of Iran.

From 1941 to 1946, the Soviet occupiers served their own interest. The Soviets used the 1941 occupation of Iran to create a local communist party called the Tudeh or “Mass” Party. Many of Iran’s most prominent intellectuals joined the party—among them Khalil Maleki, Ebrahim Golestan, and Fereydon Tavallali. Many more were for a while “fellow travelers” of the Left and showed their support in different ways, sometimes by participating in the “front” organizations the party helped create. At the end of the war, furthermore, the Soviet army refused to withdraw from Azarbaijan, a populous state in northern Iran. Instead they created a puppet government there headed by Ja’far Pishevari. They also demanded concessions to explore and develop the oil of the Caspian Sea. Mohammad Mossadeq used the turmoil of the war and these conflicting demands to introduce a bill prohibiting all oil negotiations with foreign countries during the war. Gradually, this simple demand cohered into a powerful nationalist movement, with Mossadeq as its leader.

From 1939, on the eve of the war, the United States also had become more and more “entangled”[14] in Iran. Diplomatic relations had of course been established long before, and missionaries had come even earlier.[15] The missionaries had soon given up proselytizing in favor of establishing high schools, colleges, and hospitals. One of their creations, the college of Alborz, led for many years by the legendary educator and disciplinarian Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi, played a disproportionately large role in training Iran’s future elite.

America’s unique place in Iranian politics can be seen in the fact that when Iran was attacked and occupied by the British and Soviet armies, Reza Shah appealed to the United States for help. On the night of the attack, he sent a telegraph to Roosevelt, asking him, in a desperate tone, to “be good enough to interest yourself in this incident. . . . I beg Your Excellency to take efficacious and urgent humanitarian steps to put an end to these acts of aggression.”[16]

Roosevelt was in no hurry to respond. He had been fully briefed about the British plans. He took a full week to respond to the urgent plea. He could not stop or oppose the occupation, he told Reza Shah, but he made what turned out to be a very crucial promise to the king. He would see to it that Great Britain and the Soviet Union committed to the idea that as soon as the war ended, they would leave Iran.[17] Such a pronouncement would be made two years later, at the Tehran Conference, and would prove helpful in the effort to finally push the Red Army out of Iran in 1946.

Roosevelt in fact traveled to Tehran for the 1943 conference. After a lengthy discussion with his special envoy to Iran, General Patrick Hurley, Roosevelt decided to make Iran a “showcase.” The United States was to promote democracy and prosperity selflessly in Iran and show the world what the power of good will could do. Not only Churchill—to whom Roosevelt had sent Hurley’s report that included a blistering attack on British colonialism—but even the U.S. State Department dismissed the idea as “global baloney.”[18]

In April 1945, Truman became president of the United States. One of the most important crises he had to face at the end of the war was the Soviet refusal to leave Azerbaijan. The Soviet government had on numerous earlier occasions declared that the Red Army would leave Iran immediately after the end of the war. But when hostilities ended, Stalin made it clear that concessions for the rights to develop oil in the northern parts of Iran would be the price for Soviet army withdrawal.

By then the cold war had already started. George Kennan’s historic essay on the expansionist nature of the Soviet Union, and the necessity of “containment,” was already gospel in foreign policy circles in Washington.[19] The first major test of this containment strategy, and easily one of the most dangerous confrontations between the United States and the USSR, took place over Azarbaijan. When it became clear that in spite of Iran’s complaint to the Security Council of the United Nations and in spite of the efforts of Iranian diplomats like Hoseyn Ala and Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, the Soviets did not intend to leave Iran, on March 23, 1946, Truman sent Stalin a stern message—some have even called it an ultimatum—demanding that the Soviets comply with their past agreements and withdraw their forces from Iranian territory.[20]

Although the most crucial negotiations about this withdrawal took place during the tenure of Ahmed Ghavam-ol Saltaneh as prime minister, several successive prime ministers had overseen the crisis with the Soviets. The political instability of postwar politics in Iran was evident in this rapid succession of governments that would come to power only to resign a few months, sometimes a few weeks, later. Furthermore, contrary to the common belief that the young shah was apolitical, he began to push for more power as soon as he ascended the throne. Like his father, the shah believed that if progress was to be made in Iran, ultimate power must reside in the person of the king. His efforts met with considerable resistance, particularly from some of the more forceful prime ministers of the time.

Ghavam was a colorful example of such a prime minister. A seasoned and wily politician, and an arrogant aristocrat, he was one of those men who, according to Shakespeare, is “never at hearts’ ease while they behold a greater than themselves.”[21] He had been a powerful prime minister when Reza Khan was only the minister of war and his son Mohammad Reza but a three-year-old child. In consequence, Ghavam considered the shah a political neophyte and a social upstart. The shah, for his part, had grown to despise and distrust Ghavam. On more than one occasion, he had confided to friends and diplomats his fear that Ghavam was grandiose and overly ambitious and that nothing short of the throne would satisfy him. Recently declassified documents from the British and American archives seem to confirm the shah’s worst fears. Soviet archives, still unavailable to scholars, can surely help clear up this aspect of Ghavam’s long career. Whatever Ghavam’s motives, his relationship with the young shah had an important formative influence in the first decade of the shah’s rule.

Ghavam made several controversial decisions that put him at odds not just with the shah, but also with the American and British authorities. For a few months, while the Soviets were refusing to vacate Iran’s northern provinces, he brought into his cabinet three members of the communists’ Tudeh Party. Furthermore, his handling of the Soviet Union gave rise to the suspicion that he might be making a “deal” with the Soviets, and with their “little brother,” the Tudeh Party. At one point, he even broached the idea of bringing in “a few Soviet advisors” to explore for oil and as a temporary gesture of appeasement. The British and Americans were, needless to say, opposed. The shah, along with a number of key members of the parliament, particularly Sardar Fakher Hekmat, categorically rejected the idea of such a compromise. The shah reminded Ghavam that if any Soviet advisors were invited to Iran, it would be all but impossible to get rid of them. Subsequent events in much of the world confirmed that the shah’s suspicions were well founded.

Another important sign of Ghavam’s ambitions was his decision to create a political party, called the Democratic Party of Iran. Some of the eminent political figures of the time—from Ali Amini and Jahanguir Tafazolli to Sardar Fakher Hekmat and Hassan Arsanjani—were active members of the new organization.

Iran’s negotiations with the Soviet Union were made more difficult because during the war, as soon as it became clear that both the Soviet Union and American oil companies (specifically Standard Oil and Sinclair) intended to press for oil concessions in Iran, Mossadeq authored and helped pass legislation that forbade the Iranian government to sign any oil agreements during the war.

Nationalism and the Roots of Terror, 1946–1953
When the war ended, Mossadeq used his mastery of parliamentary rules, his knack for sensing and swaying public sentiment, and his flair for the theatrical aspects of politics to keep oil at the center of the public debate. Two other global patterns helped him fan the flames of the Iranian nationalist movement and focus its ire against the British. First was the gradual decline of Britain as a first-rate world power. Second, during the postwar years, a rapid burgeoning of democratic movements around the world creating what scholars call the “second wave” of democracy.[22] What gave this democratic surge more potency in the countries of the third world was the fact that it combined with the surge of often radical movements for national independence. Iran was no exception. The swift expansion in the ranks of the Tudeh Party, originally spurred by the ominous support of the Red Army, soon turned it into “by far the most important” political grouping of modern Iran.[23]

On February 4, 1949, an attempt was made on the life of the shah; the Tudeh Party, though not clearly connected to the terrorist act, was immediately declared illegal. It was henceforth ostensibly an underground organization, but in fact it operated in full force through many front organizations. More important, the central government lacked the power and resolution to control the party. The actual role the party played in the assassination attempt has become clear only since the Islamic Revolution. As it turns out, Noural-Din Kianouri, a German-trained architect and one of the leaders of the Tudeh Party, played a role in the sordid affair. With his wife, Maryam Firuz, he remained in the leadership of the Tudeh Party for the next half a century. Their tenure ended only when the Islamic Republic arrested almost the entire leadership of the party and for all practical purposes ended its continuous half-century role in Iranian politics.

The attempt on the shah’s life was not the party’s only link to political assassinations. The communists’ powerful clandestine military organization, composed of several hundred officers, and led by Khosrow Ruzbeh, was later implicated in a number of assassinations, including the death of Mohammad Mas’ud, a muck-raking journalist. Nor were the communists the only force using terrorist tactics. Right-wing groups, some with religious ideology, others with varieties of extreme nationalist tendencies, also began to engage in acts of terror. Darius Homayun, the future editor of Ayandegan, and a minister in Jamshid Amuzegar’s cabinet, began his political life as a member of one such group.

The shah used the occasion of the attempt on his life to convene a constitutional assembly to amend the constitution and give himself more power—particularly the power to dissolve the Majlis and call for new elections. The second house of the stipulated bicameral parliament, known as the Senate, was also to be created. Many in the opposition, even some Western diplomats, were against these constitutional changes. They saw them as potential first steps on the slippery slope of a return to despotism.

Mossadeq and twenty of his followers organized a hunger strike to protest the shah’s new powers, and to register their opposition to fraudulent elections. This collective action has often been considered the first practical step toward the creation of what came to eventually be known as the National Front—a loose union of different political parties and prominent individuals who cohered into a unified voice only because of Mossadeq’s charisma. He had set two relatively simple goals for the National Front: to reform the election laws and to nationalize Iranian oil.

Mossadeq was clearly the man of the hour. Lives were lost and reputations permanently sullied in attempts to circumvent his leadership role in solving the oil question. Abbasqoli Golshai’yan never recovered from the stigma of trying to find a solution to the oil conflict that did not, as Mossadeq envisioned, include nationalization. General Hadji Ali Razmara, a military man with high political ambitions, paid an even heavier price. He was named prime minister after he promised the British that he could solve the oil crisis. His appointment had come in spite of the shah’s initial reservations. All his life, the shah remained wary of ambitious and charismatic generals; his own father, after all, had become king not long after assuming the role of prime minister. Eventually the shah succumbed at the strong urging of England and the United States and accepted Razmara’s appointment.[24] But three Islamic bullets, delivered by a fanatic called Khalil Tahmasebi, ended Razmara’s life and career.

Tahmasebi had been a member of a newly founded terrorist organization called Feda’yan-e Islam. Its fiery leader, Navvab Safavi, was a seminarian who advocated a fundamentalist version of Islam and fought to create an Islamic theocracy. The spiritual leaders of this organization were Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, a well-known mullah with a long history of anti-British activism, and a hitherto unknown junior cleric called Ruhollah Khomeini. The seminaries in those days were dominated by Ayatollah Boroujerdi and his brand of the “quietist” Shiism. He disdained Safavi and came to distrust Khomeini, whom he believed to be the covert source of support for Safavi.[25]

In 1951, the rising tide of nationalism finally swept Mossadeq into power. He was named prime minister on April 29, the day the Majlis also approved a bill that nationalized the oil industry. The shah, who in private opposed Mossadeq and his tactics, publicly supported him and signed the bill into law.[26] The British were deeply incensed—Persian oil had been the cash cow of their colonial empire. Furthermore, at the end of the war, it had become clear that Great Britain’s days of colonial domination were rapidly waning. When Churchill, with his storied reputation as an unrepentant champion of empire, led the Conservative Party back to victory in 1953, holding on to Iranian oil would become for him a point of great symbolic and economic significance.

Not long after Mossadeq’s appointment as prime minister, Great Britain began a policy intended to isolate Iran and overthrow Mossadeq. A strict embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil was put in place. In the meantime, a complicated and protracted legal and diplomatic battle between Iran and Great Britain took Mossadeq to The Hague and the International Court, and to New York and a special meeting of the UN Security Council. In these forums, Mossadeq generally prevailed, and his victories afforded him not only popularity at home, but an international stature rarely matched by another leader of the third world. In 1952, he was chosen Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

Although the Truman administration made every effort to mediate the AngloPersian dispute, ultimately their efforts came to naught. When the new Eisenhower administration came to power in 1953, they were persuaded to the British theory that with Mossadeq in power, the communists would inevitably take over in Iran. This was a clear departure from what had been U.S. policy analysis until then. As late as February 1953, the CIA, in its now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate for Iran, declared categorically that the communists had no chance, in the upcoming year, to overthrow and replace Mossadeq.[27]

The Fall of Mossadeq, August 1953
The plan to replace Mossadeq was put into motion in mid-August 1953. Several key officers loyal to the shah, including Fazlollah Zahedi, Ne’matollah Nasiri, and Nader Batmanglij, were actively involved. Zahedi’s son, Aredeshir Zahedi, played the crucial role of an intermediary between his father, who was in hiding, and his supporters. The plan called for the shah to sign two firmans, one dismissing Mossadeq, the other appointing Zahedi as the new prime minister.

For two years, the shah had categorically refused to participate in such a move against Mossadeq. To his frustrated supporters, and to the envoys of Great Britain, and eventually the United States, he would offer the same refrain: Mossadeq must be eliminated through constitutional means. Eventually, Anglo-American emissaries convinced the shah that the coup would take place with or without his cooperation and support.

Ironically, it was not only Mossadeq’s own policies that made the shah change his mind, but Mossadeq himself who gave the shah the constitutional opening he sought. Frustrated by an intransigent Majlis, Mossadeq, in spite of warnings by such staunch allies as Khalil Maleki and respected ministers of his cabinet, such as Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, decided to hold a referendum asking for the people’s vote to dismiss the parliament. The referendum itself was of dubious legality. The Iranian constitution had no provision for such a form of direct decision-making by the people. Furthermore, the conduct of the referendum left much to be desired. The voting booths were set up in such a way that opponents of the government had to vote in separate tents. But the most crucial aspect of the referendum was that once the Majlis was dismissed, the shah had the authority to issue a recess order and dismiss the prime minister. No fewer than eighteen such orders had already been issued in the twentieth century. Mossadeq, himself an astute lawyer, knew these facts. He had also been warned of the consequences by an authority no less respected than Sadiqi. But Mossadeq assumed, in his own words, that “the Shah will not dare” dismiss him. His calculation proved wrong.

The signed firman dismissing him as a prime minister was delivered to Mossadeq near midnight on August 15. Colonel Ne’matollah Nasiri, the messenger who delivered it, was armed and accompanied by soldiers. Mossadeq decided not only to defy the firman but to arrest Nasiri.
In the early hours of August 16, the shah learned of Mossadeq’s defiance. Frightened and dismayed, he and Soraya, the beautiful woman who had been his second queen, since their marriage on February 12, 1951, escaped from Iran in a small airplane.[28] Mohammad Khatam, a pilot in Iran’s air force (and its future head), as well as another aide, were with the shah. They first landed in Baghdad and soon left for Rome, where the shah began planning his future life as a gentleman farmer, possibly in America.

But less than six days later, he returned home, after his supporters, led by his appointed prime minister, General Zahedi, overthrew the government of Mossadeq. To the shah, the August events were a veritable “national uprising” of legitimizing support. To Mossadeq and his supporters, the August events were an illegitimate coup concocted by the CIA and British Intelligence against a democratically elected government.

Whatever the reality, both the United States and the shah paid a hefty price for their victory. The shah won the day but lost the war of legitimacy. He and his government were henceforth saddled with the stigma of being an American creation. The Americans, on the other hand, lost their privileged position in the hearts and minds of the Persians. The “anti-colonialist” image was replaced with that of the “ugly American.”

“Guided Democracy,” 1953–1958
After 1953, the United States began gradually to have a more forceful presence in Iran. Almost immediately after the overthrow of Mossadeq, the Zahedi cabinet began to negotiate for a new oil agreement with a consortium of Western oil companies. The government knew that its survival depended on its ability to deliver on the economic front, and for that they needed oil money. The oil companies, recognizing Iran’s dire needs and still stung by the losses they had suffered when Mossadeq had nationalized oil, played hardball. The English demanded a hefty sum as “damages.” In less than a year, on August 5, 1954, a new agreement was finally signed. Ali Amini, minister of finance in the new cabinet and the chief negotiator for the Iranian side, lived to pay a heavy political price for his role. The agreement was often seen by the people—and even by some in the parliament—as a complete abdication of Iran’s economic and political interests and Amini was, in the public’s eyes, held responsible.

The Zahedi government moved quickly to suppress all opposition groups, particularly the communists. Two years later, it learned to its great shock that the ranks of the military had been infiltrated by the cadres of the communist Tudeh Party. Meanwhile, the harsh tactics used to control and suppress the opposition further tarnished the government’s image. More important, in spite of general Zahedi’s plan to put Mossadeq under virtual house arrest and forgo a trial, the shah insisted that the old man be publicly tried and punished.[29] But Mossadeq was nothing if not a master orator and a genius of politics as theater. He used his trial to ridicule the government and point to the many injustices the oil companies had inflicted on Iran. By the end of the trial, he was a legend, and the government’s reputation further stained.

By 1955, not even three years after the coup, both the United States and Britain were growing more and more concerned about the long-term security and stability of Iran. In spite of generous American aid—it would total close to $1 billion by 1961—the economy was in shambles, disgruntlement was endemic, and, according to at least one CIA report, Mohammad Reza Shah was deemed “incapable of taking necessary actions to implement” desperately needed reforms. Adding insult to injury was the fact that there was little cooperation or coordination between the shah and the Zahedi government, or among the government’s different branches.
What “little cooperation” there had been hardly outlived Mossadeq’s ouster. Amazingly, only days after the shah had returned home from his brief exile, he had begun to move against Zahedi and had soon started planning seriously for his dismissal. These early efforts of the shah, against the man who had saved him from exile, were thwarted by the embassies of the United States and of Britain, who told him, in no uncertain terms, that retaining Zahedi, at least until the oil agreement was signed, was necessary. Furthermore, Zahedi and Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, who was appointed the head of Iran’s Plan Organization and acted as the de facto economic czar of the country, were not on speaking terms.

In 1955, the shah finally succeeded in his efforts to dismiss Zahedi. He replaced him with Hoseyn Ala, never a forceful political figure and a man known more than anything else for his loyalty to the shah himself. A royal cabal, calling itself the “Polit-Bureau” and composed of Hoseyn Ala, Ali Amini, Assadollah Alam, Ne’matollah Nasiri, and Jahanguir Tafazolli, had worked hard to plan the demise of Zahedi, to decide the composition of the new Ala cabinet, and to prepare public opinion for this changing of the guard.[30]

As the shah’s Anglo-American allies continued to worry about his survival in power, they began to pursue a two-tiered policy. On the one hand, they tried to consolidate the shah’s grip on power by helping create a security police for Iran. The new agency was supposed to combine the functions of the CIA and the FBI. It was eventually called SAVAK, an acronym for the Persian title of the organization. American advisors helped set it up using the same model that had been used in Turkey. The man put in charge of this new organization was General Teymur Bakhtiyar. After the August coup, he had been named military governor of Tehran, and before long he developed a reputation as a tough man, with a weak spot for beautiful women and expensive real estate. Bakhtiyar’s two deputies, on the other hand, were generals with impressive experience in intelligence. One was Hassan Pakravan, a Francophile intellectual and a liberal at heart, and the other was Hassan Alavi Kia, who had long years of service as an intelligence officer. Within a decade SAVAK would become not just a dreaded secret police, but also the subject of repeated criticism from both the Iranian opposition and the Western media. In the 1960s and 1970s, the character and demeanor of Parviz Sabeti, known as the “high-ranking security official” and head of SAVAK’s Third Division—in charge of internal security—came to define the entire organization. The controversies surrounding the work of this division—media reports of arrests, torture, and censorship—would overshadow the work of SAVAK’s other divisions. The Eighth Division, for example, responsible for counterespionage, scored an impressive victory in the mid-1970s when they arrested General Moggarrebi, the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking spy in Iran.

In mid-1950s, however, strengthening the police was only one aspect of the American policy in Iran. The second track of the dual American policy was to encourage the shah toward more liberalism. Eventually, the shah agreed to the creation of a two-party political system. Each was led by one of the shah’s closest advisors. He often referred to it as an experience in “guided democracy.” As numerous reports from the American and British embassies make clear, however, the two parties never succeeded in appearing as anything other than a façade, intended to give the country a thin veneer of democracy.

One of the most important political choices made during the mid-1950s was Iran’s decision to give up its century-old tradition of at least ostensible neutrality and join the Baghdad Pact—later renamed CENTO. Ali Amini and Abdullah Entezam had been the chief advocates of this historic realignment. The final decision was, of course, made by the shah. He was a firm believer in the idea that the Soviet Union was an expansionist country and presented a clear and imminent danger for Iran. His persistent attempts to increase Iran’s military budget—or in the words of one American diplomat, his “obsession” with arms—was, until 1959, the direct result of his fear of the Soviets. In the event of a Soviet invasion, his plan, coordinated with the Americans under the rubric of the “Northern Tier” policy, called for the Iranian army to use the natural barrier of the Zagros Mountains to slow down the advancing Red Army long enough for U.S. forces to come to the rescue. But several events in 1958 and 1959 changed the landscape of Iranian politics and the shah’s military vision.

Shifting Alliances, 1958–1959
On February 27, 1958, General Valiollah Gharani—head of Army intelligence and an officer trusted by the shah—was arrested on the charge of attempting a coup. A number of people were arrested with him. Most sources give the number as thirty-eight; others have gone as high as a hundred. The official governmental communiqué referred to the involvement of certain “foreign powers.” There is no doubt that Gharani had been in touch with the American embassy in Tehran. The purpose of the coup, as it turned out, was not to overthrow the shah but instead to appoint Ali Amini, the minister of finance who had negotiated foreign oil contracts after the fall of Mossadeq, as the head of a new cabinet, and to force the shah to “reign but not rule.”

In spite of the severity of the charges against him, Gharani received a relatively light sentence. He would continue to play a role, albeit marginal, in Iranian politics until the Islamic Revolution, when he emerged as the first chairman of the new Islamic government’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Also early in 1958, the shah, without any consultation with the British or the Americans, invited a secret delegation from the Soviet Union to come to Tehran and sign a long-term nonaggression pact with Iran. Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i and Aliasgar Hekmat were particularly instrumental in advocating this new conciliatory Soviet policy. Soon, the United States and Great Britain learned of the delegation’s arrival. In fact two Iranian officials—Hoseyn Ala and Manuchehre Egbal—both trusted advisors to the shah, decided to inform the British and American governments of the shah’s secret plans. It is not clear whether the two were acting at the behest of the shah and were part of his game of brinksmanship with the West, or if other motives instigated their action. Great Britain had also learned of the presence of the Russians in Tehran on its own—most likely through intercepts.[31]

The United States responded swiftly in the form of a stern, almost threatening letter from Eisenhower. The British sent Sir Denis Wright to have a “frank and serious” conversation with the shah. The letter and the conversation produced their desired effects: the shah “changed” his mind, and finding an excuse in one of the clauses in the agreement, sent the Soviet delegation packing. No sooner had they arrived home than Radio Moscow started a propaganda blitzkrieg against the shah. Iran responded in kind. One of the people responsible for the success of the Iranian propaganda counteroffensive was a timid but highly intelligent bureaucrat by the name of Nasrollah Moinian. He would, in less than ten years, become the shah’s chief of staff.

When in 1958 a bloody and brutal military coup in Iraq overthrew the country’s monarchy and established a republic, the shah grew intensely anxious. Indeed, within a year he changed the whole military posture of Iran. The threat was no longer the Soviet Union, he concluded, but Iraq. The fact that by then Abdul Nasser of Egypt had begun exporting his brand of Arab Nationalism added to the shah’s anxieties. He spared no effort in reminding Western leaders that Nasser and his cohorts were bent on destabilizing and ultimately dismembering Iran.
In the context of these growing local and international tensions, in 1959 Eisenhower wrote a letter to the shah committing the United States to protecting the territorial integrity of Iran. The letter was intended to assuage the shah’s fears and to serve as a surrogate for the mutual defense pact the shah had been demanding for many years. In fact, evidence indicates that Eisenhower’s missive fulfilled its intended purpose. Prominent merchants of the bazaar, men like the Lajevardi brothers, saw the letter as an encouraging sign of long-term security for Iran and began to invest their capital in industry.[32]

Nasser’s increased meddling in the politics of the Persian Gulf also resulted in closer ties between Iran and Israel. From the moment of its creation, the shah had tried to keep
close ties with Israel. The Iranian government had provided free passage and logistical support for thousands of Iraqi Jews who, on the eve of the creation of Israel, wanted to escape Iraq and seek refuge in the Promised Land. By the mid-1950s, the threat of Nasser brought Iran and Israel even closer. In 1958, Israeli advisors helped Iran set up an Arabiclanguage radio station, based in Ahvaz, intended for Arab countries of the Persian Gulf.[33] Economic, military, intelligence, and technological ties were strengthened between the two countries in this period.

The White Revolution, 1960–1963
From 1960, during the Kennedy administration, pressure by the American authorities “convinced” the shah to implement a series of social and economic reforms, later called the “White Revolution.” These were begun during the premiership of Amini, the shah’s nemesis.

Most critics have hitherto seen these reforms as nothing other than dictates of the activist Kennedy administration. In truth, however, the reforms combined some of the shah’s own long-planned ideas with those recommended by the American administration. Ever since his ascent to power, for example, the shah had been advocating land reform. In 1961, this long-cherished goal began to be actualized. Hassan Arsanjani, a rabble-rousing journalist and close friend of Amini’s, was put in charge of the agrarian question. Most scholars believe Arsanjani played a crucial role in radicalizing the reforms and pushing them farther than the shah intended.[34]

The reforms of the White Revolution set in motion changes that were to alter the fabric of Iranian society and the social basis of the shah’s regime. Increased revenues from oil contributed further to the breakdown of traditional structures. New institutions capable of managing these far-reaching changes were simply wanting, and the resulting chaos sparked discontent; charges of financial corruption and oppression on the part of what institutions there were only added fuel to an already raging fire. Ultimately, the Islamic Revolution was to be the unintended consequence of these reforms— particularly of land reform.

The focus of the reform was to end absentee landlordism. Pieces of land belonging to such owners were distributed among the peasants who had until then worked on them. Newly freed and propertied peasants soon left the drudgeries of village life for the lure of the city and their share of oil money. Tehran was a magnet for these would-be urbanites, who brought with them the conservative religious culture of the village. A dangerous divide—cultural, economical, and religious—began to tear asunder the fabric of major cities. The shah’s incessant and grandiose pronouncements about his “great civilization,” and about “catching up” with Japan and Germany, only increased the expectations of this surging mass of new urbanites. As they became increasingly disgruntled, they were the perfect prey for new radical ideologies that promised to deliver bread in this world and salvation in the next. Their first attempt to use this potent brew for political ends came in June 1963.

A law granting American advisors and their families immunity from prosecution in Iranian territory was the spark that turned into a firestorm. The most radical anti-American rhetoric—interlaced with a heavy dose of anti-Israeli and anti-Pahlavi diatribes— came from Ayatollah Khomeini. In June 1963, news of his arrest led to one of the biggest urban uprisings in modern Iran. Assadollah Alam, who had replaced Amini as the prime minister, used the army to forcefully repress the rebellion. Ayatollah Khomeini was eventually exiled to Turkey, and then to Iraq. But 1963 turned out to be the dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1979. In 1979, the same coalition of forces, under the same leadership, would challenge the shah again, but contrary to the 1963 experience, their early efforts would be met with conciliatory gestures by the government, and before long, a protest movement would morph into a full-blown revolution.

Reformists and Radicals, 1963–1965
In spite of its bloody beginning, the reforms of 1961–63, called interchangeably “the White Revolution” or the “Revolution of the Shah and the People,” heralded a new age in Iranian politics. The enfranchisement of women, fiercely opposed by the clergy, led in less than five years to the appointment of the first woman as a cabinet minister. On August 28, 1968, Farrokhru Parsa, a seasoned educator, was named minister of education. Eight years later, a young lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, was named Iran’s first woman judge; much later, she would become the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. Although opponents criticized these changes as superficial and inorganic, women nevertheless entered the political, educational, and scientific arenas in record numbers. Laws based on Sharia and inimical to women’s rights—from laws on marriage that allowed men to have concubines and second wives to laws barring women from becoming judges—began to be changed.

Another important consequence of the reforms was the gradual yet inexorable rise of a new class of experts to positions of political and economical prominence. This new breed, often Western-trained, usually deeply steeped in the discourse of technocracy, replaced more traditional politicians such as Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman, Hoseyn Ala, and Abdullah Entezam.
Hassan Mansur and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, along with their Progressive Circle, were the epitome of those in this new technocratic group who wanted to change Iran through an alliance with the shah.[35] By the time the Progressive Circle transformed itself into a political party and changed its name to the New Iran Party, it had already begun to take the lion’s share of governmental positions. The second party of Iran’s supposed two-party experiment—the Mardom Party—was consistently relegated to the role of a minor, and marginalized, player. The fact that its de facto leader, Alam, enjoyed unusually close relations with the shah was of little help.

The rise of this new type of politician first manifested itself in the realm of the economy. Before the sudden surge of petrodollars in the 1970s, during the 1960s, something of an economic miracle took place in Iran. Under the leadership of a highly trained group of technocrats—men like Alinaghi Alikhani, Mehdi Samii, and Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian—and with the help of a new class of skilled managers and capitalists, often trained in the west—men like the Arjomand brothers, and the Lajevardi family—a solid foundation for the long-term development of Iranian industry was laid. Barter agreements with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where the USSR received gas in return for industrial investments, was an important part of this group’s innovations. As for the shah, he finally realized his and his father’s dream of having a steel mill in Iran, building it with the help of the Soviet Union.

Despite signs that reform was taking hold, opposition to the shah continued in more radicalized form. By 1965, the shah’s reforms had essentially, in the words of an American observer, “taken the wind out of the sails” of much of the reformist opposition, particularly the National Front. Furthermore, the defeat of the July 1963 uprising, and the appointment of the hard-liner Nasiri to replace the reform-minded Pakravan as the head of SAVAK, had convinced many younger radical members of the National Front to join more radical groups. Ali Shari’ati was an Islamic ideologue who helped pave the way for an Islamic version of this new model of militancy. At the same time, he was instrumental in offering a version of Islam that was free from obscurantism and appealing to the new modern middle class. His lectures at Hosseini-ye Ershad were clearly geared to that educated audience and without doubt worked to pave the way for the Islamic Revolution.[36]

The radical wave of the 1960s in the West also left its mark on the thousands of Iranian students who were studying at Western universities. The shah, realizing that his modernizing programs needed the support of a technocratic class, decided not merely to continue but to intensify his father’s policy of sending Iranian students abroad. The children of the newly created middle classes, and sometimes even those of lower classes, began to arrive in Europe. Parviz Nikkhah was one of them. The son of middle-class parents, he had been sent to Europe in the new wave of students. He returned to Iran filled with the Promethean fire of a revolutionary; before long he found himself in prison fighting for his life, charged with attempted regicide and complicity in the acts of a religious soldier who tried to kill the shah in 1965.

This was the second time an attempt had been made on the life of the shah. Religious forces were responsible for both acts; in both cases, however, the regime laid blame on the Left. The regime’s odd insistence on this point was part of an overall policy that helps explain the dynamics of the 1979 revolution. This policy stemmed from a seriously misguided strategic analysis by the regime of its friends and foes. The shah and his intelligence agencies had come to the conclusion that the main threat to the regime came from the Left and the moderate democratic forces.

Although serious obstacles were placed on their path to keep the Left and the Centrist forces from organizing, the clergy were by and large given a free hand in their activities. Every evidence of the dangers posed by the religious forces was consistently undervalued, while exaggerated stories about the influence of the Left became, for the regime, political gospel. Nikkhah’s charge of regicide was one of the results of this myopic vision. In fairness to the regime, it must of course be remembered that those were still the days of the cold war, and the specter of communism haunted the imagination not just of the shah but of Western governments.

An Independent Stance, 1965–1975
After serving four years in prison, Nikkhah had a change of heart and mind. The opposition, he said, should defend the shah. For him, one of the key signs of the shah’s new progressive rule was his successful attempt to secure more and more income from Iran’s oil. Indeed, from 1965 there was a gradual rise in Iran’s oil revenues, and, with it, the shah’s increasing independence from his Western supporters. In the words of Armin Meyer, the American ambassador to Iran at the time, the shah was no longer “the ward of the United States, as in 1941–1945, nor the vacillating youth of the late forties . . . he is becoming more and more like his father . . . independent-minded, impulsive and autocratic . . . and wants an independent stance for Iran.”[37]

The surfeit of oil income allowed the shah to pursue his long-cherished dream of turning Iran into the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. Great Britain’s declaration that it intented to leave the Persian Gulf by 1971 afforded the shah just the kind of opportunity he had hoped for. The British made every effort to “disabuse the shah” of the notion that he would be allowed to dominate the Persian Gulf region after their departure. Such a domination would make the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, all British “allies,” unhappy. The Persian-Gulf Arab countries themselves, particularly Saudi Arabia, were none too happy at the prospect of a dominant Iran. In tense meetings between Iran and Great Britain at that time, Aredeshir Zahedi, then Iran’s foreign minister, spoke forcefully for the inevitability of Iran’s independence and dominance. He simultaneously succeeded in developing closer ties between Iran and the Arab states, while he failed in his concomitant effort to curtail Iran’s ties with Israel.

At the same time, the United States was rethinking its global position and, under the Nixon Doctrine, decided it was no longer capable of policing the entire globe. Instead, local powers were to be strengthened and assigned the task of protecting their designated areas from the communist threat. The shah’s grand designs for local domination fit perfectly with the new exigencies of the Nixon doctrine.

Iran’s newfound wealth did more than allow the shah to pay for his hegemonic dream. It also led to such excesses as the lavish 1971 party celebrating twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran. The celebration became the opposition’s cause célèbre. They pointed to its many excesses—food from Maxim’s of Paris, expensive toiletries from France—and, more seriously, to alleged financial malfeasence. The potentially positive aspects of the celebration—the creation of Acta Iranica as a forum for serious scholarship on Iran,[38] the building of twenty-five hundred schools and hospitals, the implied attempt to strengthen Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage and diminish the Islamic element of the Iranian identity— were ignored, or overshadowed by the absurd expenditures of the celebration.

Despite such occasional waste, by the mid-1970s Iran was clearly poised to experience the famous “take-off” envisioned by Walt B. Rostow. The shah had by then become a figure of considerable international stature. Iran’s oil revenues allowed him to go on a “lending binge.”[39] Everyone from Yassir Arafat to Hafez Assad, from Pan Am to the Krupp Corporation, even developed countries like France, received a share of this royal bounty.
At the same time, the aging monarch was beginning to worry about the question of transition to his son. Furthermore, there were by then clear indications that Hoveyda and his party had developed a formidable lock on all key levers of local power. The shah decided to search for a plan that would solve all of these problems.

Toying with Reform, 1975–1977
For a while, the shah toyed with the idea of creating a genuine, new reformist party. Mehdi Samii, one of the country’s most respected political figures, was entrusted with the task of creating such a party.[40] But before plans for it could be finalized, the shah had a change of heart. The sudden surge of petrodollars convinced him that the country’s political ills could all find an economic solution. More specifically, he hoped to “buy” the acquiescence and allegiance of the lower and middle classes. He scuttled the Samii party plan, and instead surprised the nation by disbanding all political parties and creating a one-party system.[41]

The shah had grown intolerant of “saucy minions,” so no one dared publicly question the wisdom of this cavalier and clearly unconstitutional act. Instead of opening up the system with Samii, he closed it with a resounding bang. It is fascinating, albeit futile, to imagine what would have happened in Iran if the shah had not given up on the idea of a genuine reformist party led by Mehdi Samii and had opened up the system at the height of his power. As it happened, instead of this opening, the shah’s one-party system—called the Rastakhiz Party—turned out to be a serious political liability.

Complicating the picture was galloping inflation, the enemy of the shah’s economic vision. As with politics, so too in economics he tried to force his way to a solution. The shah ordered Fereydun Mahdavi, minister of trade, to reduce prices forcefully. But economics are immune to royal or revolutionary fiat. Only the stubborn facts of reality, or the mysteries of the human mind and mood, can determine or change economic cycles. The shah’s decision made many entrepreneurs and shopkeepers not just disgruntled, but sworn enemies of the state. And it hastened a loss of confidence among investors. Many industrialists and contractors put their expansion plans on hold.[42] A major flight of capital from Iran began. According to one estimate, more capital left Iran between 1975 and 1977 than in the subsequent two years at the height of the revolution.

Unheeded Warnings, 1977–1978
In those troubled times, Senator Gassem Lajevardi made what turned out to be in retrospect a historic speech to the Senate. He warned of the dangers of lawlessness and reminded his listeners that long-term security and the rule of law are both preconditions for the development of capitalism. But his warning would prove too little, too late. No one in the government even bothered to seek him out for advice.[43]

The election of Jimmy Carter in the United States, and his advocacy of human-rights policy, emboldened the Iranian opposition. Small protests demanding minor democratic changes grew into larger demonstrations, with demonstrators shouting radical slogans including “Death to the shah.” These developments coincided with the onset of the debilitating illness that eventually ended the shah’s life. For the next two crucial years, every political decision the shah made seemed inexplicably irrational, ill-timed, or ill-advised.

The first clear sign of impending change was Hoveyda’s dismissal as prime minister. He had by then served longer than any other prime minister in the modern history of Iran. There were two candidates for his replacement. The first was Hushang Ansary, a versatile but highly controversial minister, with a storied rags-to-riches life; the other was Jamshid Amuzegar, a dour technocrat with little political savvy. For reasons that have never been clear, the shah chose Amuzegar, only to replace him in less than fourteen months. While Amuzegar claims that he was told by the shah to start thinking about his cabinet a full week before he was actually named prime minister, others have suggested that his appointment was apparently the result of a last minute change of heart. They say Ansary was assumed the presumptive next prime minister and that he, too, had begun forming his cabinet.[44] He had certainly been Alam’s choice. Regardless of what the truth is, there is no doubt about one point—the Amuzegar tenure not only was short, but had dire consequences.

By this time, Alam lay on his deathbed in France. He had become increasingly concerned about the future of the shah. In the last weeks of his life, in a letter sober in tone and frank in content, he tried to warn the monarch about the seriousness of the situation. The shah paid no attention to Alam’s words of warning and dismissed them as simply the result of Alam’s sickness, or senility.[45]

The Perfect Storm, 1978
It was early in Amuzegar’s tenure that political demonstrations grew in size. In no small measure, their genesis can be traced to when the shah promised liberalization. In retrospect, it seems clear that as far as the shah and his survival were concerned, this liberalization was started at the most inauspicious time possible. Even in the best of times, it is hard for despotic regimes to successfully manage a transition to democracy. As a general rule, years of resentment and discontent turn into torrents of angry and sometimes irrational demands that invariably overflow the banks of reason and peaceful transition. In Iran, these problems were worsened by bad timing: liberalization was begun when the economy was taking a downturn, the shah was increasingly sick, and power was in the hands of a technocrat with little patience for the vagaries of politics. The combination had the makings of a “perfect storm.”
When Amuzegar took over, economists were already predicting a crisis. But the shah, by then fully convinced that he should, in his own words, “listen to economists and always just do the opposite,” simply “refused to decelerate the rate of economic growth. In fact, the government increased taxes and resorted to foreign borrowing. . . . Iran’s surplus of $2 billion in 1974 was turned into a whopping deficit of $7.3 billion.”[46] New taxes on the salaried class, forced price reductions for the entrepreneurial class, and the traditional hardships of the urban poor in transitional economies interacted with the more liberal policies adopted by the shah to create a growing movement of discontent. Amuzegar paid little attention to these early disturbances. Instead he comforted himself by assuming that they were nothing but the petty machinations of his rivals, particularly Hoveyda and his ally in the secret police (SAVAK), Parviz Sabeti.[47]

Amuzegar’s inability or unwillingness to tackle the political issues resulted in a gradual worsening of the situation. His behavior seems less strange, however, if viewed in the context of a larger historic pattern. Ever since Amini’s demise, questions of national security, foreign relations, and the military had been the sole purview of the shah. Prime ministers, and by extension ministers in every cabinet, had been loath to delve into these areas, lest they rouse the ire of the shah. This time, too, everyone assumed the shah to be in full command of the situation.

Other critics claim that one of Amuzegar’s decision, to end the “subsidies” paid by the government to the mullahs, was the cause of the revolution. Aside from the fact that such arguments reduce the complex reality of a revolution to a single cause, this claim flies in the face of the fact that supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini never “deigned to take money from a government they considered a usurper.”[48] In 2004, after a quarter century of silence, Amuzegar finally answered his critics on this point. He claimed that after the August 1953 coup, it was the White House that had begun making regular payments to the Iranian clergy and that it was Carter, and not Amuzegar, who decided to end the subsidies.[49]

In August 1978, as the country was fast falling into a state of chaos, the last meeting of the Amuzegar cabinet was discussing the absurdly insignificant question of the price of tractors produced by a government factory. Only hours after settling that urgent question, the government was dismissed by the shah, and in recognition of the worsening situation, an attempt was made to create a government of “national reconciliation.”

For reasons hard to fathom, the shah asked Ja’far Sharif-Emami to head this government. There is some evidence that Ayatollah Shari’atmadari played an important role in this strange decision.[50] Whatever the reason, Sharif-Emami was unsuited for the job for a variety of obvious reasons. He was reputed to be notoriously corrupt and self-absorbed. He was, furthermore, known to be the grand master of Iran’s Masonic Lodges, the bane of modern Iranian politics. Finally, in 1960, in another time of crisis, he had been named prime minister and even then, when the crisis was far less serious, he had been incapable of solving the problem. He soon proved to be no more capable of solving the new crisis.
His solution was as simple as it was banal, and it showed utter disregard for the lessons of history. His plan was pacification through appeasement. He wanted to disarm the opposition, particularly the clergy, by agreeing to their every demand. The plan, as expected, backfired. Revolutionary appetite increases by what it feeds on. Every concession only strengthens the revolution’s hunger for more. The desperate attempt to arrest and offer as sacrificial lambs a number of the regime’s most trusted ministers and managers—including Hoveyda, by then retired from his post as minister of court, and General Nasiri, sent to the sinecure of Iran’s embassy in Pakistan—backfired. It not only failed to appease the opposition but further weakened the already frayed resolve of the rapidly dwindling ranks of the regime’s supporters.

It soon became clear that Sharif-Emami’s elixir of offering concessions was in fact a poison to the body politic. Not only was he incapable of containing the movement, but his every move and word seemed to contribute to its further radicalization. Eventually, as Tehran and many other major cities were fast falling into chaos, as the government received intelligence that more bloodshed was planned by the clerics,[51] the cabinet decided to show its muscle by declaring martial law. This important decision was reached around ten o’clock on the evening of Thursday, September 7.

Black Friday, September 8, 1978
Mysteriously, by the time government-controlled media got around to announcing the new “get-tough” policy, it was early the next morning and throngs of demonstrators had already gathered in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. The demonstrators were ordered to disperse. When they refused, soldiers opened fire. The regime claimed that 121 demonstrators and 70 soldiers and policemen had been killed.[52] The truth mattered little in those days. What did matter was that by early afternoon, Tehran was awash with rumors of a bloodbath.

By that evening, the powerful myth of “Black Friday” was born. The opposition talked of thousands killed, of Israeli soldiers used in the firing line. The royalists talked of Palestinians who were used by the mullahs to shoot at the demonstrators, and of Arabic heard spoken on the firing lines. Neither side wanted to accept that what had happened was a purely Iranian tragedy, a native story “of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,” and “purposes mistook.”[53]

Last Days
The government of “national reconciliation” failed to achieve even a modicum of conciliation. Pressure began to build for the shah to appoint a military government. Many of his advisors, as well as some in SAVAK, had been arguing that only after establishing law and order could he begin a national dialogue and offer measured concessions from a position of strength. In Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, was of the same opinion and tried to convey that message to the shah. But Cyrus Vance in the State Department and Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran were loath to advise the shah on a policy that could lead to bloodshed. Ultimately it was the latter camp that won the day.

Instead of appointing the much-feared General Gholamali Oveissi, the shah appointed the faint-hearted General Gholam Reza Azhari. In a clear sign of the ruling circles’ utter confusion, General Azhari absurdly insisted on receiving a “vote of confidence” from the Majlis, although the very concept of a military government seemed to obviate the very meaning of such a gesture.[54]

But the general was not the only one who was not clear on the concept. The day after this appointment, the shah, weak in appearance, ashen in color, and visibly shaken in spirit, appeared on television and delivered a speech that in form and substance altogether undermined the intended spirit of a military crackdown. The architects of this “gesture of contrition,” so thoroughly negating the martial law “gesture of power,” have not come forward to claim responsibility for their act. Evidence suggests that at least some of the responsibility lies with Reza Ghotbi—a relative of the queen and the all-powerful head of the government-run Iranian National Radio and Television Organization—and Seyyed Hoseyn Nasr, a teacher of Islamic philosophy and for a while chief of staff to the queen.[55]

The Azhari debacle underscored an obvious fact: not only did the government lack a cohesive strategy, but it was altogether unclear who was in charge in the country. Queen Farah, and her advisors and relatives, particularly Reza Ghotbi and Hushang Nahavandi, seemed to play increasingly more prominent roles. As the shah’s mood deteriorated, the queen filled the vacuum. Experienced observers of the Iranian political scene began to become more and more apprehensive about the future. Of these, few played a more crucial role that Ayatollah Shari’atmadari, who at the time still enjoyed enormous popular support on the street. He tried in vain to encourage the shah to take a more positive and active role. At great risk to his reputation and safety, he met secretly with the king’s representative and tried to warn him about Khomeini’s character and the dangers he posed for the country. But Shari’atmadari’s efforts, as well as those of others who tried to bolster the shah’s resolve, were all for naught. The shah had lost his nerve.

The shah’s predilection to leave Iran when faced with a crisis was now augmented by his fight with cancer, and by an increasingly debilitating depression. His suspicion that the British, the Americans, and the Soviets were behind the demonstrations, hand in hand with the reality that the BBC took an increasingly critical attitude toward the regime, finally and fully convinced the shah that the big powers were united in their strategy to get rid of him. The sight of the streets teeming with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, angrily shouting “Death to the shah” broke what little resolve he had.

It further compounded the shah’s problems that the Carter administration, preoccupied with the historic Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, paid scant attention to the deteriorating situation in Iran. When it came to its policy on Iran, the administration was beset with sometimes acrimonious differences of opinion among the State Department; the Defense Department; the National Security Advisor; the CIA; and finally the American ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan. As the crisis deepened, Sullivan, who according to his own admission was a complete novice on Iran, seemed to follow a foreign policy of his own.[56] It was at best a measure of his estrangement from the realities of Iran—or at worst a sign of his incompetence if not ill-will—that he took a two-month vacation away from Tehran just as the crisis was reaching a point of no return. When the shah most needed the reassurances of the American embassy, the ambassador was away on vacation.

The mistakes of the shah were cunningly exploited by his old nemesis, Ayatollah Khomeini. He had been living in Iraq, and on the occasion of his son’s death in September 1978, he issued a harshly worded condemnation of the shah’s regime. The shah in anger ordered the publication of a now infamous letter, titled “Iran and Black Imperialism.” The letter, vapid in content, and crass in style, suggested that Ayatollah Khomeini was Indian by birth, and it accused his family of being “connected with British colonial centers.”[57] This senseless letter of revenge triggered the demonstrations that finally brought the shah’s government to its knees.
As the crisis deepened in Iran, Saddam Hussein, in a gesture of friendship to the shah, expelled the ayatollah from Iraq. France offered him safe haven. Arriving in Paris in 1978, disguising his ultimate goal of creating a theocracy, Ayatollah Khomeini “played” the Western media. The romantic lure of an exotic turbaned Oriental, his adept handling of reporters, his repeated declarations of his “democratic” intent and of his desire to retire to the seminary and resume his life of contemplation and spirituality, all worked to turn the usually critical Western media into a docile tool of his strategy of dissimulation.

Even the secular National Front fell prey to the ayatollah’s temptations. By then at least three distinctly different strategies had emerged in its ranks. On the one hand, leaders like Karim Sanjabi were eager to jump on the Khomeini bandwagon. Others like Alahyar Saleh refused to meet with either Khomeini or the shah, indicating that the latter must pay for his sins against Mossadeq. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, a respected scholar and a revered minister in the government of Mossadeq, had yet a different approach. The country is in danger, he said, and we must put aside our personal ambitions and past grudges to save the nation.

Sadiqi agreed in late 1978 to form a cabinet and to try to avert the rise of the clergy to power. But his comrades in the National Front, at the apparent behest of Ayatollah Khomeini, did all they could either to dissuade him from his heroic attempt or to make it impossible for him to form a cabinet. Furthermore, by then the shah was in a hurry to leave Iran, and Sadiqi had predicated his acceptance of the prime minister’s post on the condition that the shah stay in the country. All of these factors worked to kill the chance of a Sadiqi government, and his cabinet might well have been the last serious chance for a democratic alternative to the revolution.

As the shah showed more and more signs of despondency and irresolution, Western powers, worried about chaos in Iran, decided in a special conference on the island of Guadeloupe to press for the shah’s swift departure from Iran. Not long after that conference, William Sullivan asked for an audience with the shah, and during the tense meeting he indicated, in no uncertain terms, that the American government thought that the shah must leave Iran. The shah was by then only too happy to comply. All that kept him in Tehran was the need to find someone to serve as prime minister.

When Sadiqi failed in his attempt to form a government, Shapur Bakhtiyar, another member of the National Front, emerged as the only opposition leader willing to fight the tsunami that threatened to sweep the clergy to power. The day his government was sworn in, the shah, teary-eyed, left Iran, never to return. The shah’s rule had lasted thirty-seven years; Bakhtiyar’s government lasted only thirty-seven days. For the shah, his departure meant the beginning of a tragic life as a pariah. For the Iranian people, the jubilant celebrations on the day of the shah’s departure soon gave way to benighted years of oppression, war, and hardship. Once again, the promised messiah had become a Moloch.

Passage of Power, 1979
By the time Bakhtiyar became prime minister, Ayatollah Khomeini had extended his disingenuous policy of dissimulation to Western powers as well. In a still-classified letter to Jimmy Carter, he promised cooperation if the American government would end its support of the Bakhtiyar government and convince the Iranian Army to take a neutral position.[58] When on February 11, 1979, the army finally did declare itself neutral, not only the government of Bakhtiyar but the rule of the Pahlavi dynasty, and with it a twenty-five-hundred-year tradition of monarchy, ended in Iran.

Ayatollah Khomeini appointed a provisional government composed mostly of religious members of the National Front. At the same time, his “representatives” in each ministry gradually became the real source of power. Every neighborhood was controlled by “Revolutionary Committees,” each of which was invariably led by a mullah. The army was virtually “decapitated,” and before long, every Iranian general, with the exception of a handful who worked with the new regime, were either retired or sent to the firing squad. In the place of the regular army, the Revolutionary Guards were founded and soon became the chief weapon of enforcement and terror for the new Islamic regime. Indeed, before long, revolutionary tribunals began executing members of the ancien régime. Sheikh Sadeq Khalkhali, the infamous “Hanging Judge,” sent thousands of people to their death. Trials often lasted no more than a few minutes. There were no juries, no attorneys, and no right of appeal. A new criminal code, inspired by Islamic rules of retribution, replaced the existing laws. The constitution that was promised in Paris, which would have allowed Iran to become a democratic republic, was replaced with a new draft where nearly all power was placed in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the economic realm, the new regime’s policies and laws were no less devastating. Thousands of people were driven from their homes. Hundreds of corporations were “expropriated” and eventually lumped together in a new concoction called Bonyad Mostazafan, or Foundation for the Dispossessed. Although it controlled more than half of the entire economy of the country, it was placed in the direct and personal control of Ayatollah Khomeini. Even today, the Foundation is the private fiefdom of the “Spiritual Leader.” Managers and technocrats, no less than doctors and engineers, were gradually and inexorably disenfranchised. The dread revolutionary terror, this time wearing the guise of a mullah, wreaked havoc in the lives of millions of Iranians.

Radical students, supported by Ayatollah Khomeini, took over the American Embassy and turned Iran into a pariah nation. The war with Iraq only augmented the air of menace and violence in the air. The economic costs of the war and the embassy takeover have never been carefully calculated, but they surely reach hundreds of billions of dollars. Fifty-two of the most important industrial and commercial conglomerates were nationalized in one radical gesture. Banks and insurance companies were also “nationalized.” Thousands of eminent men and women chose exile, reluctantly leaving behind an Iran that, instead of realizing the democratic hopes and aspirations of its people, had soured into a despotic regime claiming divine legitimacy.

August 2007

Hoseyn Ala
Assadollah Alam
Alinaghi Alikhani
Ali Amini
Jamshid Amuzegar
Hushang Ansary
Hassan Arsanjani
Safi Asfia
Hamid Ashraf
Shapur Bakhtiyar
Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani
Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi
Dr. Manuchehre Egbal
The Entezam Brothers
Akbar Etemad
Reza Fallah
Aziz, Khodadad, Maryam, and Sattareh Farmanfarma’ian
Mohammad-Ali Forughi
Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh
Reza Ghotbi
Abbasqoli Golshai’yan
Ebrahim Hakimi (Hakim-al Molk)
Aliasgar Hekmat
Sardar Fakher Hekmat
Amir-Abbas Hoveyda
Fereydun Mahdavi
Abdol-Majid and Monir Vakili Majidi
Khalil Maleki
The Mansur Family
Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq
Hushang Nahavandi
Parviz Nikkhah
Nasser and Khosrow Qhashghai
Shapur and Mehri Rasekh
Fuad Ruhani
Khosrow Ruzbeh
Parviz Sabeti
Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi
Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman
Ja’far Sherif-Emani
Seyyed Zia Tabataba’I
Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh
Aredeshir Zahedi

In Shakspeare, the Earl of Warwick is the ultimate kingmaker. Polonius, on the other hand, is a cunning and clever politician, obedient and dedicated to the stiff solemnities of court. In the postwar politics of Iran, there was no War of the Roses, but Hoseyn Ala, an avid reader of Shakespeare, had the discourse and demeanor of a Polonius while playing the role of Warwick more than once.

His public career lasted more than six decades. He faithfully served the Pahlavi dynasty from the moment of its inception. His power increased considerably when Reza Shah abdicated. During the first twenty years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule, Ala was something of a father figure to the young king. According to Ann Lambton, the chief architect of British policy in Iran in the postwar years, it was—contrary to the common perception that credits Zoka-al Moluk Forughi with saving the Pahlavi dynasty—in fact Ala who convinced the British Embassy in 1941 that Mohammad Reza Shah’s ascent to the throne was the best option for Iran and for Britain. “We trusted Ala,” said Lambton.[1] The same note of confidence and respect can be seen in the memoirs of Sir Denis Wright, for many years Britain’s ambassador to Iran. He writes of Ala as a man of wit and wisdom, patriotism and profound appreciation for the complexities of world politics. He also had, according to Sir Denis, an “encyclopedic knowledge of men and events.”[2]

Ala had politics in his blood. He was born in 1884 (1262) in the lap of aristocratic luxury, into a family that had been steeped in Iranian politics for decades. His father, Ala al Saltaneh, was a politician and courtier. Hoseyn was only four when he accompanied his father to Russia when he was appointed a consular official; he was later and for many years Iran’s ambassador to Great Britain. Hoseyn went with his father to London and was “educated at Westminster, where he seems to have received rough treatment.”[3] After high school, Ala enrolled in London University, where after about four years he received a degree in law. Immediately after graduation, he worked as a special secretary at the embassy where his father was ambassador.[4]

Hoseyn was created a “GMG” in 1905—a high rank in the labyrinth of British nobility titles—“when he accompanied his father on a special mission to London for the coronation of the late King Edward VII.”[5] Later, when his father was appointed foreign minister, he made his young son his “chef de cabinet,” or chief of staff. Ala remained in that post until 1915, long after his father had resigned. The profile of him prepared by the British Embassy in Tehran gives a detailed albeit brief account of his activities during this period. They write that he was

appointed Minister of Public Works in January 1918. . . .Ala was hostile to Sir Charles Marling, His Majesty’s Minister from 1915 to 1916, and caused repeated complaints to be made to the Foreign Office through his brother, who was then Persian Minister in London. He accompanied the abortive Persian mission to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Appointed Persian Minister at Madrid in 1919 and at Washington in 1920. Conducted negotiations in Washington in 1921–22 for the American Financial Mission to Persian, after he had failed to obtain the North Persian Oil Concession, first for the Standard Oil Company and then for the Sinclair Corporation. Returned from Washington in 1925 and took his seat in the fifth Majlis as a deputy from Tehran.[6]

It was in the capacity of a parliamentarian that, along with three other brave souls, he opposed the creation of the Pahlavi dynasty. Nevertheless, it was a measure of his stature and of Reza Shah’s trust in him that he remained in power for much of the next twenty years. In 1927 he was appointed minister of public works and then sent to Europe as Iran’s delegate to the League of Nations. In 1929, Ala was sent to Paris as ambassador. Not only was his English impeccable, but he was also competent in French. When Iran took its complaint against the British oil company to the League of Nations, Ala was chosen to represent Iran. It would not be the last time he was asked to represent Iran in a crucial international arena. Shortly after these oil negotiations, Ala returned to Iran and, “though he had no particular knowledge of banking,”[7] took over the reins of Iran’s National Bank. Managing the bank was only the first of wide variety of activities. During the next two decades, for example, he was active in creating a branch of the International Red Cross in Iran, called the “Red Lion and Sun.” He was also one of the organizing members of the committee to celebrate a millennium of Ferdowsi, Iran’s epic poet, as well as the first head of Iran’s Sports and Athletics organization. Twenty years later, he was one of the founding members of the committee to celebrate twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran.

After Paris, the Iranian government wanted to send him as ambassador to the Court of St. James. The “transfer was mooted. . . . His Majesty’s Government were unwilling to receive him on the ground that . . . it was difficult to suppose that he was then animated by friendly sentiments.”8 Three years later his transfer was finally approved. Two years after that, he returned to Tehran, and after a brief tenure as minister of commerce, spent the last two years of Reza Shah’s reign without an appointment.

Ala was a true renaissance man. He was raised in a family of unusually cosmopolitan erudition and education. He was an avid reader of both Persian and English classics. Ala was an accomplished cartoonist, and in meetings he sat silently listening to discussions
and doodling. Often he drew profiles of the politicians he knew.[9] In the early years of the shah’s reign, he tried to educate the king by giving him books by Thucydides and George Bernard Shaw.

Ala was a man of few words and a subtle sense of humor. He was short in stature and light in weight. He always carried a small notebook in his pocket, in which he wrote a few words on what had transpired in each of his meetings, as well as aphorisms, poems, even recipes.10 He was a master of protocol, knowing even the most mundane details of diplomatic decorum. He often repeated the poem of Sae’di that said two things are the enemies of wit: silence when it is time to speak, and speaking when it is time for silence.11 He was punctual and polite and deferential to power, yet he was willing to give the monarch frank advice and occasionally stand up to him. Reza Shah was said to despise pocket handkerchiefs; Ala used them, and in spite of the king’s aversion, never changed his habit.12 His decorous behavior was reflected in his attire; all his life, he was impeccably dressed, invariably wearing a tie.

He was said to be the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge called “Mehre.” In spite of the fact that England had at one time refused to accept him as Iran’s ambassador, his Masonic ties, as well as rumors of his “connections” to England, caused some of his critics to call him “a puppet of England.”13 Others alleged that he was “pro-American” because of his role in such deals as bringing Dr. Arthur Millspaugh, an American financial advisor, to Iran.14 On the other hand, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, reluctant to praise anyone with close ties to the shah, called Ala “an active, benevolent, humble and democratic man who takes seriously whatever he is involved in and who has not accepted office merely in order to earn his living, and acquire elevated rank; a sincere and truthful man.”15 These democratic sentiments almost led Ala to join the Jangali movement in 1914.[16]

In July 1927, Ala married Rogiye Garagozlou—a woman of independent wealth and assertive personality. She was “one of the first in her generation to leave off the veil.”[17] Her father had translated The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Rogiye inherited properties throughout Iran and, with their occasional sale, helped sustain the household, particularly in the last years of Ala’s life.[18] They had two children, a son and daughter. Rogiye’s independence was sometimes a source of anxiety for Ala. According to Sir Denis Wright, Britain’s ambassador to Iran, “rumor had it that since the Shah had not, as planned, married her daughter, she would not attend parties where he would be present.”19 Other sources critical of Ala have accused her of “arrogance” and “antagonism toward Iranians,” as well as “having a strange domination over him.”[20]

After the war, with the ascent of the young Mohammad Reza Shah to the throne, Ala was appointed minister of court. For the next twenty years, in many of the most crucial days of the shah’s rule, Ala served at his side, or, as he wrote in a letter to Sir Denis Wright, as the shah’s right hand. In August 1945, he was sent to the United States, where he played a crucial role in convincing the United Nations to take up the issue of the Soviet occupation of Iran. He delivered a now famous speech, laying out Iran’s claim against the Soviet aggressor. When he met President Harry Truman to present his credentials, Ala said, “In this critical situation . . . your country alone can save us.”[21] On the day before the case was to be discussed in the Security Council, the Iranian government was forced by the British Embassy in Tehran to write to Ala and instruct him to withdraw Iran’s complaints. But in consultation with Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Ala decided to ignore the telegram and claim that they had never received it. The Security Council did take up the matter and pressured the Soviets to withdraw from Iran. During his days in Washington, Ala, on instructions from the shah, also “inquired whether Iran had been considered for membership in the North Atlantic Pact.”[22] This was only the first hint of Ala’s and the shah’s eagerness to have Iran join some military pact with the West.

In 1950, Ala was called back to Iran, where before long he was appointed prime minister. But his tenure was short-lived; he resigned after about six weeks. The Nationalization movement was at fever pitch, and he was by temperament ill suited to the exigencies of the moment. He was again appointed court minister. During nearly the entire Mossadeq era, Ala remained in that post and was the constant link between the prime minister and the shah. He played a crucial role in preserving the monarchy. Finally, under pressure from Mossadeq, the shah was forced to dismiss Ala and replace him with a confidant of the prime minister.

No sooner had the shah returned from exile than Ala was back in his old job. But in December 1953, for reasons that are not clear, the shah contemplated dismissing Ala from his post as court minister. Before making any moves, he contacted the British Embassy and “enquired whether, if [he] dismissed the Minister of Court, Hoseyn Ala, HMG would regard this as an unfriendly act.”[23] The British chargeé was, he said, surprised by the question and responded that the fate of the court minister was “an internal matter.”

By 1955, however, Ala was promoted and named prime minister, replacing General Fazlollah Zahedi. His tenure marked the beginning of a period when the shah himself was acting as his own prime minister. In fact, a cabal of trusted aides to the shah—including Assadollah Alam, Ne’matollah Nasiri, Ali Amini, and Ala—prepared the ground for the demise of General Zahedi and the appointment of Ala. Ala had served as prime minister in 1951, but that had clearly been in a caretaker capacity, before a permanent appointment could be made. In 1955, however, he was the king’s choice for the simple reason that he seemed malleable. The same cabal that paved the way for Zahedi’s removal also decided on the composition of the Ala cabinet.

Even before he took over, there was an attempt on his life, organized by Islamic terrorists belonging to the Feda’yan-e Islam group. Ala survived the attempt with only minor injuries, but his government went after the terrorists, arresting their top leadership and sending Navvab Safavi, the most important leader of that group, to the firing squad. The Iranian government suspected at the time that Saudi Arabia might be involved in funding the terror group and, through the United States and Britain, tried to pressure the Arab kingdom to cease its aid. The Saudis denied any involvement with the group.

Aside from marking the entry of the shah into the center of daily governmental decision making, Ala’s tenure was memorable for a number of important reasons. It was during his term that Iran gave up its three-hundred-year-old neutrality and officially joined the Western camp by becoming a member of the Baghdad Pact (later CENTO). Ala was a chief advocate of this change of posture.
Before joining the pact, Ala wrote a personal memorandum to the U.S. government wherein “he set forth the Iranian price for adherence to the Pact. The price included: a) greater financial assistance by the U.S.; b) recognition of Iran’s sovereignty over Bahrain; c) guarantee that the U.S. and U.K. would come to Iran’s defense in event of the attack.”[24]

The United States was rather dismissive of Ala’s demands. The State Department “instructed embassy to explain to Iran that accession to the Baghdad Pact should not be regarded as a favor to the U.S.”25 After less than two years on the job, Ala was asked to resign. In April 1957, the U.S. government sent a special emissary to Iran—and other countries of the region—to explain the new Eisenhower doctrine. Upon his return to Washington, the emissary was quite pessimistic in his appraisal of the situation in Iran. The economy, he wrote, “[i]s bogged down, feudal outlook, tendency to play both sides, Shah overambitious, great apathy and inefficiency.”26
Ala’s resignation from the post of prime minister did not mean that he exited the political scene. He returned once again to the Ministry of Court, which by that time had come to seem like a family heirloom. He continued to be involved in most of the important decisions of the time.

In 1959, when the shah invited, in “greatest secrecy,” a “high powered Russian delegation” to Tehran, to “negotiate a non-aggression pact,” Ala was one of the three Iranian officials[27] who tried to solicit British and American help in discouraging the shah from pursuing such a policy. When Denis Wright arrived in Tehran to deliver a stern message to the shah, Ala “also urged [him] to speak ‘very frankly’ [with the shah] as he himself had been unable to make much impression”[28] on the king. Later the same day, Ala informed the British of the “arrival of the Russians,” an act Denis Wright described as “a courageous thing to do.”[29] It is not clear whether Ala and the two other officials were “informers” or were acting as part of the shah’s plan to pressure—or “blackmail,” according to American officials of the time—the West into giving him more arms. Knowing all we know about Ala and his ties with the shah, it is more likely that he was part of the shah’s gambit.[30]

Ala was also involved in private aspects of the shah’s life. In the aftermath of the shah’s divorce from his second wife, Soraya, Ala became entangled in the complicated web of intrigue for the shah to marry again. There were many Persian families who were hopeful that the shah would marry their daughters. For his part, the shah was looking to European royalty for a bride, to be the mother of a future king and give him some much-needed royal legitimacy. His first attempt was to sound out the British about the hand of Princess Anne. The request never made it past the embassy—it was, in the words of Sir Denis Wright, “a nonstarter.” A second, more serious effort was aimed at Italy. Ala offered a refreshingly honest assessment of the political costs and benefits of such a marriage. Mixed in, there is a caustic and critical account of court life. He wrote:

Amongst the diplomatic corps, there are different responses to the news of the possibility of Your Highness’ marriage to [the daughter of the last Italian monarch]. Some are very surprised and ask how can a Christian Princess, and a Catholic one at that, marry a Moslem King? The Pope will not permit it, and the Moslem clerics will not stand for it. They think it might well weaken—or even altogether cause the overthrow of—the monarchy; others believe such a marriage will be a great occasion to reform the Court and improve its image, if of course the unsavory characters who are present in the private gatherings of the Shahanhah are sent away and the Princess Ashraf will cease her taftin va mischief, and give up her attempt to dominate the future queen. . . . Other diplomats think that . . . a horde of Italians will converge on Iran to find work and sign contracts.

The news is well received amongst Persian intellectual circles; they are happy that His Majesty is not choosing a Persian girl, thus aborting the jealousies and intrigues of other disappointed candidates and avoiding the expectations of the family of the new queen. They think it is a sign of progress that the King is marrying a foreign Princess. . . . Even these Persians are concerned that Princess Ashraf and also the Queen Mother will interfere in the private life of the Shah and will once again create dark days for His Majesty and his queen. . . . The wife of the Italian ambassador thinks it best to consult with Zanini, the Pope’s representative. . . . It is important that this time . . . you stop the interference and mischief of the royal family . . . cleanse your private parties of unsavory . . . characters . . . (like Jamshid Bakhtiyar, and Shahbari and his friend, Hajebi, and Sylvia Bebe Adl, Felix Agayan, Amir Alai) and instead of parties for gambling and silly games and striptease, engage in intellectual endeavors like theater, concerts, music and dance and bridge, and films and lectures.[31]

Before long, the shah lost any toleration for such brazen honesty. Ala would himself be a victim of the change of heart in the shah.
As the shah began to assemble around him a new breed of technocrats, old timers like Ala, who had seen the shah in his times of weakness and were not afraid to make their opinions known, were no longer welcome at the court. It was just a matter of time before his tenure as court minister would end. Ala was against some of the changes that were undertaken during the White Revolution. When, for example, Sir Denis Wright arrived in Iran in 1963 and submitted his ambassadorial credentials to the court, Ala, wrote Wright, “rather took my breath away by criticizing the Shah’s newly launched reform programs, saying that ‘he hoped I’d restrain HIM.’”[32] Part of this tension, according to Wright, was because, “Ala and his wife were aristocratic survivors from the Qajar regime, swept away by the upstart Pahlavis.”[33]

Whatever the source of the increasing tensions, the event that acted as a catalyst for Ala’s dismissal from court was his decision to convene a meeting of elder statesmen on the evening of June 5, 1963. The government had used the military to put down an uprising by the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, and Ala invited four people to consult on what to do. At least one invited guest reported the meeting to the shah. Furthermore, after some discussion among the group of five, Ala, accompanied by at least one other person, went to see the shah and suggested that the government of Alam must be dismissed and a new government of reconciliation put in its place. According to the shah, they “even shouted” at him. The king dismissed their warnings, angrily asked them to leave his office, and ordered Alam to arrest them. Alam chose not to carry out the enraged command, but a few days after this hostile encounter, the shah told an American official that he intended to get rid of Ala and his like. They cannot reconcile themselves to the new tempo of change, he said.

Not long after the meeting in the shah’s office, Ala received a call from the court saying that he was no longer welcome there and should no longer come to work. He and his wife both complained about this treatment.[34] In a letter to Sir Denis Wright, Ala wrote, “After more than twelve years continuous service as le bras droit du rois du rois, it was time for an octogenarian to enjoy a lighter occupation and more leisure. In these revolutionary days, the laws of the Medes and the Persians can no longer remain immutable. In fact they are undergoing radical changes.”[35] The letter exhibits Ala’s storied erudition, his mastery of French and English, and his subtle senses of humor and irony.

After the surprisingly bitter end to his tenure at the Ministry of Court, Ala was appointed to the Senate by the shah. But by that time he was old and tired, and his senatorial stint did not last long. On Sunday, July 14, 1964 (23 Tir 1343), he passed away at his home. He was eighty-two years old and had spent more than six decades at the pinnacle of power in Iran.

On September 30, 1975, the New York Times printed an article by John Oaks called “The Persian Mind.” Oaks critically compared the shah of Iran to Louis XIV and predicted that like France after Louis, Iran after the shah might well suffer a deluge.

The next morning, Assadollah Alam, who was the shah’s minister of court at the time, showed the article to the shah. The king derisively dismissed the comparison, claiming, “Louis was the essence of reaction, and I am a revolutionary leader.” A few weeks later, Alam, in a conversation with the shah, offered the “thesis” that the shah and his father were true embodiments of Louis XIV’s famous phrase, “L’état, c’est moi.” This time, the shah was pleased by the comparison.

This revealing anecdote, with its labyrinthine nuances of meanings and intentions described with a brilliant economy of words, is only one example of the myriad fascinating stories and facts that can be found in Assadollah Alam’s Diaries.

For the last decade of his life, Alam regularly wrote entries for his Diaries. He had informed the shah about the project, but taking no chances, he intermittently sent what he had written to the safety of a bank vault in Switzerland. It is hard to imagine that the shah really knew what his trusted friend and advisor was writing in those journals. Today they stand as clear testimony to the qualities and characteristics of Alam, as a man and a politician. They are also one of the most detailed, informed, and sometimes critical accounts of the structure of power during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah.

The narrative is a stunning example of faint praise, heaping sometimes exaggerated words of approbation on the shah for his many accomplishments, but invariably tempering them with cautiously worded critiques of his “master’s”[1] weaknesses, the sycophancy and corruption of other courtiers, and the dangers faced by the country. Alam’s perception of those dangers was acute. Eight days before he died, well before the full torrent of the revolution had begun, Alam wrote a note of warning to the shah. He suggested that if the crisis were allowed to fester, revolution would be unavoidable. The situation, he said, was far more serious than the Mossadeq crisis of 1953. Before sending the letter, perhaps knowing it would be destroyed, Alam showed it to at least one of his daughters. In Tehran, the shah also showed the note to several people, commenting sardonically, “Alam seems to have lost his marbles.”[2] To Alam’s credit, early hints of this concern about the future can also be detected in parts of his Diaries. Even more remarkable is the fact that he asked his family to publish his diaries only after the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty—as if he knew the imminence of its fall.

On the other hand, sharp-sighted as he was about the shah’s faults and their consequences, Alam was less observant, or more reticent, about his own role. The Diaries are chillingly self-congratulatory. Save for a handful of references to the “corruption of the ruling class,” Alam never mentions the role the allegations of his own corruption might have played in fanning the flames of discontent. Yet if American and British embassy reports are to be trusted, in the months leading to the revolution, corruption in high places was among the chief grievances of the people.

In spite of these lacunae, Alam’s monumental seven-volume work[3] is surely the most important single Persian source for any attempt at understanding the character of politics in Iran during the postwar years, as it is for understanding the foibles and strengths of Alam as political figure and as a human being. So replete are the Diaries with subtle criticism of the shah, and so strong is the accumulated impact of his snipes, that some royalists have begun a campaign of whispers questioning the veracity of the text and even hinting that the editor, out to clear a vendetta against the shah, may have tampered with the text. On the other hand, scholars and critics have favorably compared the book with some of the greatest journals by men of politics in Iranian history.[4] More than anything Alam did in his long political career, these seven volumes are likely to immortalize his name and eventually to become the ultimate measure by which his career is evaluated.

In a sense, Alam was a posthumous man. During his life, he was rumored to be financially corrupt, politically a bully, a royal toady, an agent of the British, and culturally a vulgar ignoramus. His weakness for women was legend, as was his propensity for resorting to violence to achieve his political aims. His tenure as the most powerful court minister of the postwar years was marred by stories of financial impropriety, and by whispers that he was the chief procurer for increasingly frequent royal “trysts.” The reality of his life, however, turns out to have been far more complicated.

Assadollah Alam was born in 1920 in the city of Birjand. His father, Shokat-al Mulk, was easily one of the richest men of his time. The Alam family was prominent and reputedly pro-British. The British Embassy described Shokat-al Mulk as “descended from a family the members of which have exercised more or less independent rule in the Qainat [Khorasan and its vicinities] for several generations. . . . Has a long record of friendship with the British and has often been a great help to us. . . . Sir W. Townley obtained for him the governorship of Sistan and Qain in 1913. . . . He presented Reza Shah with an expensive gift on the occasion of the latter’s coronation in 1926.”[5] Shokat-al Mulk was also a patron of the arts, with unusual tastes and sensibilities. He insisted on creating a European atmosphere at his estate, building a tennis court, serving food ordered from Paris’s famous Fauchon, and teaching his family to play bridge and chess. His children, of whom Assadollah was the sole son, were all taught by special tutors, while also attending school. Madam Vigornitsky, wife of an émigré White Russian general, lived with the family and taught the children French.[6]

There was in Assadollah Alam a unique mixture of rustic simplicity, aristocratic refinement, and Machiavellian guile. His critics often assumed him to be a near illiterate. He was, they liked to point out, a graduate of an agricultural college in Karaj, in the suburbs of Tehran—hardly a bastion of scholarship and high academic standards. It was a fact that he had attended Karaj, but it was no indication of his abilities.

After finishing high school, Alam had been on his way to college in Europe, when he accompanied his father to Tehran to be presented at court. In a ritual gesture of deference to the king, Shokat-al Mulk asked Reza Shah for permission to send his son abroad to study agriculture. “Why send him abroad,” the king said, “when we have just built an agricultural college here near Tehran?” Plans for the European trip were scrapped, and Alam was on his way to the new college. But he did not go there alone.

The Tehran journey had two more lifelong consequences for Alam. Reza Shah was in those days searching for suitable husbands for his two daughters, and after much personal sifting of candidates, he had picked two young men from prominent families to be his sons-in-law. One was from the Ghavam family, prominent in the city of Shiraz, as illustrious as the Alam family and no less reputed to have close ties to the British government. (Years later, after Reza Shah had resigned, the British Embassy would still describe the patriarch of the family, Ibrahim Ghavam, as “very friendly to us” and “one of the wealthiest landowners of Persia at present.” They also recalled that “when Reza Shah abdicated and went to Isfahan, it was Ghavam who was sent by the government to obtain Reza’s signature to documents handing over his properties and private fortune to the state and to his son respectively.”)[7]

Reza Shah not only chose one of Ibrahim Ghavam’s sons for his daughter; he also decreed that Assadollah Alam should marry Malek-Taj, one of Ghavam’s daughters. Before the night of their marriage, Alam and his future wife had met exactly twice, both times for a friendly match on the tennis court. As it was never a marriage of love, and as Alam considered philandering a natural right of his aristocratic manly heritage, there would be many flings. And as Malek-Taj was herself a child of affluence, a woman of modern sensibilities, and a future dame d’honneur to queens, she could not remain oblivious to her husband’s infidelities. The marriage was thus destined for rough waters; one unfortunate consequence of these tensions was to be the loss of some of Alam’s diaries.

The other consequence of Alam’s Tehran journey was that through his marriage, Alam joined the Pahlavi court and soon befriended the crown prince. It turned out to be one of the closest, and certainly one of the most enduring, friendships in the life of the future shah. Although rumors of Alam’s ties with the British would be widespread, and although the shah would hear on many occasions about Alam’s financial impropriety, he never moved to seriously diminish his influence. The mystery of Alam’s unusually long tenure has in fact been attributed to the shah’s perception of him as one of Great Britain’s most trusted servants.[8]

At the time of his marriage, however, eighteen-year-old Alam as yet showed no inclination toward politics. His passion lay in farming and hunting. In 1941, after spending three years at the college in Karaj in the company of his new wife and attended by a bevy of household help, Alam returned to his family’s fiefdom. He was dogged in his pastoral love of his birthplace, Birjand, for centuries the seat of his family estate. He took pride in every aspect of the city and its environs. With an almost childish glee, for example, all his life he loved the special thrice-purified liquor that for generations had been made locally from a secret recipe just for the Alam family. He cherished this homemade wine throughout his life, even when the cellar at his palatial home in Tehran—a home it took seven years to build—had hundreds of bottles of the finest French wines. By then he had become something of a wine aficionado. In one purchase, he bought the entire cellar of a British lord, including several bottles of Chateau Petrus, and four bottles of Cognac whose vintage belonged to the time of Napoleon.[9]

Alam spent the first two years of World War II in Birjand, in the company of his father. Shokat-al Mulk was still active in national affairs. The British embassy reported he had been “again Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in Forughi’s cabinet in 1941 when he was very helpful. Returned to his lands at Birjand in 1942, and has since been extremely useful to us in many ways. . . . A very generous, open-minded man.”[10] Then in 1943, Shokat-al Mulk died. Twenty-three-year-old Alam became the head of the vast household at Birjand.
Alam’s first political appointment came the same year. When Ghavam became prime minister, he appointed Alam to Shokat-al Mulk’s old office as the governor of Sistan and Balouchestan.

It was a difficult assignment. The region bordered Afghanistan and Pakistan. Corruption was endemic, and in spite of his family’s substantial reputation in the region, no one took the new young governor seriously. Alam decided to change the atmosphere. The head of the tax office had been particularly intransigent. Alam called for him on a hot day. When the defiant bureaucrat arrived, Alam ordered him tied to a tree, in the burning sun. He then began to play a game of tennis, oblivious to the increasingly desperate pleas of the hapless tax collector. The heat could have easily killed the man. He begged forgiveness and promised henceforth to abide by the young governor’s every wish. Ironically, though the episode smacks of despotic arrogance and illegality, not only does Alam mention it with pride in his Diaries, but his friends legitimize the action by pointing out that no one took him seriously as a governor, and that it was wartime and extreme measures were thus warranted.[11]

Another aspect of his tenure as governor was to serve Alam well in the future. Although Ghavam had appointed him, and although Ghavam was keen on keeping the shah away from the daily affairs of the government and thus marginalizing him, Alam, unbeknownst to the prime minister, sent copies of all his reports directly to the shah. In 1946, with the fall of Ghavam, the shah had finally gained enough power to dictate the composition of a cabinet to his new prime minister, Saed, and insisted on the appointment of Alam. This is how the twenty-seven-year-old Alam thus became the youngest cabinet minister in modern Iranian history. Saed named him to the powerful post of interior minister. If Saed is to be believed, he appointed Alam to that key ministry on the assumption that it was in fact Alam’s father—Shokat-al Mulk—that he was including in the cabinet. As soon as he saw the young man and recognized his mistake (realizing that Shokat-al Mulk had been dead for three years), he reshuffled the cabinet and appointed Alam to a less important ministry.[12] During the early 1950s, Alam began to be more and more identified as a key ally and supporter of the shah. As such, he managed to retain a spot in the cabinet through a series of prime ministers, despite becoming embroiled in a serious controversy in 1951, when he was suspected of complicity in the assassination of Prime Minister Hadji Ali Razmara. Alam had been named a minister in General Razmara’s cabinet, in spite of Razmara’s serious misgivings, at the urgent insistence of the shah. On March 7, 1951, Alam accompanied the prime minister to a memorial service for a public official, held at Tehran’s central mosque. Evidence indicates that Razmara had been unwilling to go the mosque that day and only at the insistence of Alam agreed to attend. As Razmara was about to enter the mosque, an assassin fired three shots, killing him on the spot.

As with nearly all cases of assassination in modern Iran, rumors of conspiracy immediately began to spread. According to one theory, the shah had been trying to get rid of the ambitious general, and Alam had been given the job of leading him into the trap. A few weeks after the assassination, Alam was in fact called before the investigating prosecutor to answer questions about his role. The tenor of the questions, in the record, clearly indicates a suspicion of complicity.[13] This rumor was revived in the years after the Islamic Revolution, when Ja’far Sharif-Emami, the two-time prime minister, brought attention to the role Alam had played in ensuring that Razmara went to the mosque on that fateful day.[14]

Whether or not Alam had served the shah in this particular matter, within a few months after the death of Razmara, as the circle of the king’s trusted advisors shrank, Alam began to play an increasingly important role. In 1952 he was put in charge of all the Pahlavi family holdings inside Iran. In spite of this new prominence, and even though he had emerged as one of the shah’s most faithful friends during the days when these friends faced the threat of arrest by Mossadeq, Alam was saved from prison and persecution only by respect for the good name of his father. Still, Mossadeq ordered Alam’s passport confiscated. It was rumored that he would be exiled to Bandar Abbas. Through an intermediary, Alam inquired about his fate. Mossadeq reassured Alam that if he would go to Birjand and occupy himself only with farming and hunting, no one would bother him.[15] Alam’s friends think of this message not as an offer of asylum, but a forced exile.[16] In either case, Alam took up the offer, and left for Birjand, where he lived through the tumultuous events of August 1953.

Alam was handsomely rewarded for his steadfast support of the shah during the August crisis. After the return of the shah from exile, Alam returned from Birjand. He clearly became part of the shah’s inner circle of advisors. He was again put in charge of the shah’s estate. In 1955, when the shah began to prepare the ground for the forced resignation of General Fazlollah Zahedi, Alam was part of what was sardonically called “the Shah’s politboro.”[17] Once Zahedi was dispatched, and Ala, another member of the “politbureau,” was appointed prime minister, Alam, on direct orders of the shah, was appointed to the crucial post of interior minister. This time, there was no “mistake” in the appointment; Alam had earned his own power. During the remaining years of the 1950s, whether in or out of government, Alam played a key role in shaping Iranian politics. When in 1957 the shah decided to emulate the American model of politics and inaugurated a two-party system in Iran, he put Alam in charge of the Mardom Party (People’s Party). It was a party perpetually assigned the role of the loyal opposition. After a while, Alam resigned the post of party leader, but for the rest of its life the party would continue to be seen as a handmaiden to Alam’s system of personal patronage.

Furthermore, starting in the late 1950s, as the political situation began to deteriorate, and as U.S. and British Embassies and intelligence agencies began to warn of a revolution unless drastic reforms were undertaken, Alam began to meet with key members of the secular opposition. He told some that he was meeting with them at the behest of the shah. From late 1958, for example, he met regularly with Khalil Maleki, the head of Iran’s social democratic forces. From early 1961, he also initiated meetings and negotiations with some of the leaders of the National Front, inviting them to join a coalition government. When the crown prince was born, Alam suggested that Alahyar Saleh, the respected head of the National Front, accept the role of the child’s teacher and mentor.
All these negotiations and attempts at reconciliation came to naught. At the same time, Alam did succeed in gathering around him a team of very respected technocrats, scholars, and poets. Fereydon Tavallali, the famous poet, wrote poems in Alam’s praise, while Parviz Natel Khanlari, Mohammad Baheri, and Alinaghi Alikhani proved willing to join him in the cabinet when, on July 21, 1962, his turn at the helm finally came.

In 1962, the shah came back from a trip to the United States convinced that he could force Amini to resign. No sooner was the issue of a successor raised than Alam was mentioned as a possible candidate—along with Abdullah Entezam, Teymur Bakhtiyar and Ja’far Sharif-Emami.[18] The shah had asked Amini for his suggestions for a successor, and “Amini gave the Shah two names in order of his preference. They were Abdullah AssadollahAlam Entezam, Chairman of the National Iranian Oil Company, and Assadollah Alam.”[19] Entezam was offered the job, but “refused on grounds of ill health.” On July 19, 1962, the shah officially named Alam the new prime minister. American diplomats in Tehran saw the appointment as the “closest thing to direct rule of Shah. Alam completely devoted servant . . . from outset there will be no question in anyone’s mind of independence on part of PM.”[20] They thought of Alam as merely the “instrument and the mouth piece”[21] for the shah. But during an informal meeting with U.S. Embassy officials, Alam himself gave what turned out to be a far more accurate picture of his premiership. He assured the embassy that he “would follow policy of Pro-American and Pro-Western alignment and would consult US on all important problems and issues.” Finally, he told the embassy that he “would be an independent prime minister who would not involve Shah in problems and details of government. He would take full responsibility for his own and . . . would not blame the shah for directing unpopular and unsuccessful policies.”[22] The American Embassy, on the other hand, believed that many of the members of the new cabinet “including Alam have or have had British connections and may have been under British influence.” But they also took comfort in the notion that “British influence is not what it used to be.”[23]

As to the notion of Alam as a close friend of the shah, by mere coincidence, a short time after Alam’s appointment, C. D. Jackson, an American journalist, visited the shah and then wrote a lengthy profile of the king for President Kennedy. During the course of his interview Jackson asked the shah, “Your Majesty, have you any real friends, or friend?” The shah “thought for a minute and sadly shook his head and said, ‘No, I haven’t, anywhere. I have companions for jokes, but no friend to whom I can look up to as wiser than I am, who can give me the right kind of advice.’”[24]

Alam’s tenure as prime minister was, for many reasons, historic. He continued the reform programs that had been undertaken during the days of Amini’s cabinet. Part of his mandate was to continue land reform at a slower pace, and to get rid of the charismatic Hassan Arsanjani, minister of agriculture and by then a popular champion of the peasants. Alam achieved this goal by appointing Arsanjani as Iran’s ambassador to Italy. At the same time, it was in this period that the “New Iran Party,” spearheaded by Hassan-Ali Mansur and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, was inaugurated. The party ushered in a new era of Iranian politics, where politically savvy elder statesmen were replaced by technocrats with no grand political ambition.

It was during this period that the government faced two serious threats in the form of tribal and urban uprisings. On the one hand, tribes in Southern Iran began to once again fight the government. The government used the army to forcefully put down the uprising. On the other hand, in June 1963, during the height of Alam’s tenure, the shah’s government faced and successfully quelled the most serious challenge to its power and survival. By all accounts, Alam played a determining role in this affair.

One of the reforms the shah and Alam tried to inaugurate dealt with election laws. First and foremost, women were to be given the right to vote and stand for office. Second, since 1905, when the Iranian constitution was drafted, members of “recognized” religious minorities, namely Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, were forbidden to hold ministerial posts. Furthermore, the oath of office, for all levels of employment, and ceremonies, was to be taken with the Qur’an. In a small attempt at ecumenical justice, Alam passed a cabinet resolution—which in the absence of Parliament had the authority of law—changing the wording of the electoral bylaws to indicate that the oath must be taken on a “holy book.” The clergy began to agitate against both changes. The government held firm on the question of women’s suffrage, but backed down on the “holy book” issue. The clergy were now emboldened and began a more defiant confrontation with the regime. The secular opposition, too, for reasons hard to fathom in retrospect, sided with the clergy and against the shah’s obviously more progressive position. The height of this confrontation came on June 3, 1963.

Alam’s cabinet had been receiving increasingly alarming reports that the Islamic forces were preparing for a major confrontation with the government. In anticipation of this battle, and fully cognizant of the shah’s inability to stay the course in moments of crisis, particularly if bloodshed might be required, Alam asked the shah for temporary command of the military forces stationed in Tehran. He told the shah that the uprising had to be forcefully suppressed and that he would use what force was necessary to accomplish this goal. If he failed, he told the shah, then the shah could sack him and blame him for the debacle. The shah agreed, and Alam, true to his promise, used the full force of the army to suppress the uprising. Lest the shah change his mind, it is reported, for a while Alam disconnected the phones used by the king. As Alam reveals in the fifth volume of his Diaries, the crisis was so serious that for three days he could not leave his headquarters, and on the third day, when visiting the court, he had to travel in an armored vehicle. All the same, he seems to dispel the rumor that the shah was kept completely out of the picture for those three days.

At the same time, those who served with Alam in those tense days write or talk of his contagious calm in the eye of the storm, of his cool sipping of his soft drink as he ordered the commanders of the armed forces to use their weapons. “These are not toys,” he is reported to have told them, “but necessary tools for days like this. Use them under the authority granted me by the shah.”[25]

Leaders of the Islamic Republic today point to the June uprising as the genesis of the Islamic Revolution itself. The events surrounding that confrontation catapulted the hitherto little-known Ayatollah Khomeini to the center of Iranian politics. The confrontation gave Alam every right to believe, quite correctly, what he would repeat on numerous occasions in his Diaries: that he had saved the crown that day. Far more dangerously, however, the confrontation also led Alam to draw another, false conclusion: that on that fateful day, he had deracinated clerical authority once and for all. Alam never tired of whispering in the shah’s ear that “mullahs are nobody” and that their days of power had ended that June. History proved him badly mistaken, and his miscalculation of the power of the clergy was obviously one of the strategic errors leading to the Islamic Revolution.

Ironically, only days after the uprising, the shah was already planning to replace Alam and “do some housecleaning.”[26] He told his plans to a member of the American embassy, hinting that Mansur would soon be named prime minister. Gradually, to Alam’s bitter disappointment, news of his imminent demise spread throughout the country. For several weeks, he was a dispirited lame duck.

One of Alam’s last acts as prime minister was also one of his most consequential. The shah had been asking the American government for more advisors; the U.S. Department of Defense had insisted that such advisors would arrive only after the Iranian government had signed a Status of Forces Agreement, along the lines of agreements signed by other allies where the United States had troops stationed. According to these agreements, U.S. personnel were exempt from prosecution in local courts for any crimes committed during the performance of their duties.

When Alam first raised the topic in a cabinet meeting, there was strong opposition from some ministers. They saw such an agreement as a revival of the much-reviled “capitulation rights” that were viewed by the people as vestiges of colonialism. Reza Shah, with great fanfare, had ended all these special rights in 1928. Recognizing the strength of the opposition, Alam quietly tabled the issue for later discussion. Ironically, the U.S. State Department too was aware of the sensitive nature of such an agreement in Iran, and had advised against any attempt at its ratification. But the Defense Department refused to allow U.S. advisors to arrive without a prior ratification.

Just days before he resigned from office, Alam wrote a letter to the newly elected Parliament, indicating (falsely as it turned out) that the cabinet had temporarily ratified the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States and recommending that the Parliament follow suit. Realizing how sensitive and important the issue was for the shah, Alam had fabricated the claim of cabinet ratification. Partially on the strength of his letter, the agreement was eventually ratified by the Majlis. It immediately became a favorite topic of attack by the opposition, particularly Ayatollah Khomeini.[27]

On March 7, 1964, Alam’s agonizingly long wait as a lame duck ended, and he resigned. He felt bitter, but did not confront the shah.
Although his tenure as prime minister had ended, Alam’s political life was far from over. Arguably the zenith of his power was still in his future. For the next decade, he would try hard, and unsuccessfully, to mastermind a return to the post he most coveted.
About ten days after his resignation, Alam was appointed chancellor of Pahlavi University. Having established this university with the help of the University of Pennsylvania, the shah was keen on turning it into the preeminent center of higher education in Iran.
Tehran University was identified with his father, and the shah wanted to have his own name identified with a reputable educational institution. Alam used his connection to the shah to increase, substantially, the budget of the university and went on a building binge, expanding the campus and hiring new faculty. Between 1964 and 1968, when his tenure ended, the university’s budget more than quadrupled. Furthermore, he brought in tens of millions of dollars in “special donations” from sources such as the Plan Organization.[28]

Alam’s chancellorship of Pahlavi University was not free from controversy. He appointed as his vice chancellor a man with no academic qualifications and a sordid reputation for financial corruption. Rumors of payoffs in granting of construction projects, and of other misuses of university funds, began to haunt Alam’s stewardship. Indeed, when a new chancellor was eventually named, some six million dollars were discovered to be missing from the university coffers.[29] It was, needless to say, political suicide for anyone to pursue the matter, and gradually the embarrassing issue seems to have died of inaction and inattention. By then, Alam had become, after the shah, easily the most powerful man in Iran.

In December 1966, Alam was appointed as the minister of court, becoming a de facto chief of staff to a shah who had by then amassed in his own hands all levers of power. Alam held this position for more than a decade, until mere weeks before his death. On July 19, 1977, he had his last audience with the shah, the day before leaving for Europe, where he hoped to find some cure for his rapidly developing cancer.[30] Two weeks later the shah called him in Paris and asked him to submit his resignation. But by then Alam had already heard from the media that he had been replaced by his nemesis, Hoveyda. To his friends and family, he complained bitterly about the way the shah had treated him in his dying days. He was also worried about the future of his country, as he had for many years held Hoveyda responsible for the calamitous policies of the government. It is not at all clear whether in these last, bitter days, he made any new additions or amendments to his Diaries.

Alam had begun writing a daily journal sometime in the summer of 1968. He had told the shah of his plan and clearly had convinced him that his purpose was to use the notes one day to write the “definitive” and “real” history of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign.

Unfortunately, not all he wrote has survived. His wife had noticed his new avocation and one night had asked him what he was writing. He had explained. Later, in his absence, she found his notebook, and read that the shah, after listening to Alam’s complaints about his wife, had asked “why don’t you leave this zanikeh[hag]?” and that Alam had replied “because of the kids.” Alam’s wife became so enraged that she burned what she found of the notes.[31] Another notebook, covering some of the early months, is also missing. (It is also likely that some hitherto unpublished notes have been kept by the family and will not appear in the seven-volume collection.)[32]
After the burning incident, Alam took precautions. He gave up the idea of writing in a notebook. Instead, he used loose paper, of any sort he could find. Every two or three weeks, he folded the notes into some magazines and sent them to a trusted friend in Geneva, who put them in a bank for safekeeping. What has survived begins in medias res. On Thursday, February 13, 1968 (24 Bahman 1347), he wrote “I was supposed to arrive on Tuesday, 22, but my trip from Geneva was delayed for two days. I arrived tonight at ten. I kissed my mother’s hands. Thanks god she is healthy.”[33] It is hardly a fitting first line to a seven-volume monument to the politics of power in petroleum-crazed Iran.

No text is a merely passive tool of its creator; it invariably reveals more than the author’s conscious intent. Alam’s Diaries are no exception. In these volumes, the text betrays much about the author: his sense of self, the nature of his complicated and decidedly ambivalent relationship with his “master,” and the daily routines and tensions of his loveless life with a wife he had obviously married for political and family expedience. Reading his Diaries is not unlike watching Aeschylus’s Persians. As the king and his courtiers boast of their power and hegemony, we the readers know only too well that defeat and tragedy wait around the corner.
Indeed, by volume 5, covering the year 1975, Alam seems diminished. He had been stripped of most of his real power, his role reduced to preparing letters of official greeting and arranging the king’s secret trysts with “guests” flown in from Europe and America. His own love life had by then taken an unusual turn. For the last decade of his life, he was in love with a woman called “Hillary.” He went so far as to introduce her to at least one of his daughters. Eventually, he not only bought her a house but also set up a trust that would afford her a comfortable life.[34] While Alam had a reputation for craving European and “native” models, “Hillary” was by all accounts a portly woman with unexceptional looks. Nevertheless, of all Alam’s many affairs, this was the one that caused Alam’s wife the most anxiety; it led to at least one tense moment, when Malek-Taj went looking for the other woman, pistol in hand. Alam went so far as to ask his daughters to act as decoys.[35] “Hillary” has since married and now lives in California. There are several references to her in the Diaries.

In the earlier volumes, we see a different Alam—a man at the center of all major political decisions in the country, in charge of handling the shah’s troubled relations with his daughter, Shahnaz, and involved even in some of the shah’s personal financial transactions. Ambassadors like Great Britain’s Sir Denis Wright and the Americans’ Richard Helms knew that all contact with the shah, all important foreign policy decisions, were handled at the court and through Alam. In 1973, for example, when Helms wanted to negotiate a highly sensitive confidential agreement with Iran over the use of some of its air bases, he wrote to Alam and asked him to get the shah’s response.[36]

All through these years, Alam was a disciplined and hard-working man. He was an early riser, often up around six in the morning. He gave his time selflessly: before going to his office, he had already met a number of visitors at his house. Occasionally he complains in the Diaries about the number of supplicants he had to meet every day. People from Birjand invariably came to him in search of favors. Because access to him meant power, his butler, Pedram, began to cash in on his position and at times charged people who wanted a meeting with his master.[37] Simplicity seemed a watchword: Alam was polite in demeanor, elegant in comportment, and impeccably dressed; at home, he often wore a simple traditional cape. To his daughters he was generous, affectionate, and surprisingly accommodating. He loved riding and was an avid hunter. Generosity, too, was apparent in his character: one of his last hopes, aborted by the onset of his disease and the revolution, was to found a university in his birthplace, Birjand.[38]

At the same time, Alam used his perch of power at the court for personal and illicit gains. In one case, in return for a hefty payment, he made sure that a German company was given the contract for the construction of a silo. (When the revolution made the completion of the project impossible, the company took Alam and his family to court to retrieve the “payment”!)[39] On another occasion, Alam attended a meeting of the committee in charge of planning and supervising the elaborate ceremony celebrating twenty-five hundred years of monarchy. The queen was present. Usually reticent, she apparently threw her customary caution to the winds and complained that the efforts of the committee were being tarnished by rumors and reports of malfeasance and corruption by a few. Alam, pale and visibly shaken, declared in a tone at once anguished and threatening that as he had been in charge of signing some no-bid contracts that were being questioned, he would, “after reporting to His Royal Majesty the proceedings of today’s meeting resign from the committee.”[40] Alam in fact never resigned, and rumors of his corruption, and the ill will they engendered in the people of Iran, only continued to grow.

Surely the Islamic Revolution was, at least in part, the price for inaction on that fateful day, and the seven published volumes of Alam’s Diaries remain as a memorable, albeit tragic reminder of the pathos and pathologies of their author’s rise and fall. Alam died in his sickbed on April 13, 1978 (24 Farvardin 1357).

It is an often-ignored fact of modern Iranian history that the 1960s—long before the sharp rise in the price of oil—were arguably the most crucial years for the development of the new Iranian economy. The decade saw a rapid rise in the drive toward industrialization, and the conditions necessary for what social scientists called the “takeoff” period were prepared. According to Walt Rostow, the “takeoff” period is when third-world agrarian economies leave the vicious cycle of poverty and paucity of capital and begin a rapid process of growth and accumulation of capital. Iran in the 1960s was surely poised to enter its “takeoff” stage, and one of the influential architects of this transformation was Alinaghi Alikhani. A team of technocrats—committed to change; impeccably honest in financial matters; trained in the West but no longer awed by it; as willing to trade with the East as with the West; and disciplined in their habits of hard work, diligent planning, and bargaining techniques—masterminded this change. Alikhani, along with Mehdi Samii, Reza Moghadam, and Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, were key members of this team.

Of this group, Alikhani certainly had the most unusual background. His trajectory to power pointed to another crucial moment in modern Iranian history, when SAVAK began to move away from its original intent, and the result had cataclysmic effects on Iranian society and politics. In 1957, the United States, in conjunction with Great Britain, had decided that Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan—the three key members of CENTO—needed to have new security organizations. An institutional model that combined the mandates of the FBI and the CIA had been given to the three countries, and with the help of advisors from the United States, England, and eventually Israel, a new organization named SAVAK was created in Iran.

SAVAK was, at least according to the original idea, supposed to bring together some of the best and brightest Iranians. Like British intelligence, which recruited in Oxford, and the CIA, which searched for candidates in American Ivy League universities, recruiters for SAVAK went to Europe and searched for the best Iranian students studying abroad. Alikhani was one of those contacted. He accepted the invitation and joined the economic analysis bureau of SAVAK.[1]

Gradually, as General Teymur Bakhtiyar, the first head of SAVAK, began to stamp the organization with his own storied brutalities, and as the organization acquired a tarnished reputation, men like Alikhani began to leave. It is interesting to imagine what Iran’s politics would have been like had SAVAK been able to keep capable, thoughtful, analytical, and ultimately democratic-minded men like Alikhani in its ranks. It is also ironic that Alikhani left just as SAVAK, under the leadership of General Pakravan, the new head of SAVAK after Bakhtiyar, was trying to polish its image and return to its original mandate. Pakravan’s tenure was short-lived and the man who replaced him followed where Bakhtiyar had left off.

Alikhani’s rise to power is also important from another, different perspective. In the early 1960s, as the shah changed the fabric of Iran’s ruling elite and forcefully retired nearly every member of the aristocracy that had, for centuries, dominated Iranian politics, the arena was more open than ever to the rise of self-made men, children of the lower classes who had risen to prominence on their merit and education. In the past, the occasional rise of a cook’s son to the pinnacle of power—as in the case of Amir Kabir— was the exception that proved the rule.[2] In the Iran of the 1960s, Alikhani was no longer an exception but one in a long list of eminent men and women who rose from humble stations in life.

Alinaghi Alikhani was born on January 21, 1929 (1 Bahman 1307) in the small town of Khamseh, near the city of Abhar. His father was the manager of royal properties around the city. After a while, he was moved to the village of Varamin, near Tehran.[3] Much of Alikhani’s early life was spent in that small village.

He was in the third year of elementary school when his father moved again, this time to the village of Takestan,[4] outside the city of Gazvin. As World War II arrived, and the omnipotent Reza Shah fell from power, and much of his property became the subject of litigation and public criticism, Alikhani’s father wisely give up his job and returned to Varamin, where he started life anew as a small farmer.

By then, Alikhani was a student in Tehran. He was a good student, but before long politics became his passion. He was not even fifteen when he entered the political fray. Contrary to the fashion of the time, when most of the youth leaned to the Left, Alikhani joined a small group of similar-minded young men who were decidedly anticommunist and wanted to fight the spread of communism in Iran by any means necessary, including terrorism. At least two of his comrades in this youthful clandestine foray into violence and politics would later play important roles in Iranian politics and culture. One was Darius Homayun, who became a journalist and a minister of information in the months leading to the revolution, and the other was a poet, Nader Naderpour, who became a fierce critic of the Islamic Revolution and a melancholy voice of the Iranian diaspora. Alikhani resigned from the group when, as a result of an accident, one of their comrades was killed by a homemade bomb.[5]

In 1946, Alikhani entered the Tehran University’s Faculty of Law, graduating after three years. During this period, he continued his anticommunist activities, no longer through terrorist means but under the banner of a nationalist, anticommunist organization called the Pan-Iranist Party.

Immediately upon finishing his law degree, Alikhani set out for France. He knew little French and spent the first year mastering the language. At the same time, with the help of his comrade Naderpour, he continued his fight against the Tudeh Party. By then the Pan-Iranist Party had come to support Mohammad Mossadeq; that was where Alikhani’s sympathies lay at the time.

Aside from his problem with the language, his work at the university was further delayed for almost a year when he contracted a complicated sinus infection. Eventually, he entered the Economics Department of Paris University and signed up for the Doctor D’Etat, the most academically demanding degree offered at French universities and the equivalent of a Ph.D.

While working on his dissertation, at the suggestion of his academic advisor he spent a year in England, where he mastered English and delved into some of the British sources for his dissertation, which was on the optimum ratio of labor to capital in economic development. In 1957, having finished his doctoral degree, he returned to Iran.

A year before his return, he met and married a French girl. Almost fifty years later, they are still happily married. They have three children—two boys and a girl, all highly successful in their respective careers. In France, Alikhani also honed his love and knowledge of fine French wines. In later years, he was awarded the honorary title of Chevalier du Vin. Love of wine seems to run in his family. Two of his brothers are successful winemakers— one in California’s Napa Valley, and the other in South Africa. Love of fine wine was, of course, also one of the things that connected him to Alam, his future patron in politics.

In France, Alikhani also indulged his love of classical music—particularly the works of Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. He was a collector of fine recordings of these composers’ masterpieces. At one time, his record collection included all their works. All his life, he was also an avid reader of history. He had a passion for the history not only of Iran, but of France and England. As his life in exile showed, he turned out to be a historian manqué.

While in Paris, he met with a representative of the Iranian government, who told him that he was recruiting for the newly established office called SAVAK. Alikhani agreed to join, and upon his return he began his work in the SAVAK bureau in charge of economic analysis. Sensitive matters of foreign policy, like Iran’s relations with Israel and the oil deal that was about to be signed between the two countries, were relegated to this bureau of SAVAK.[6] At the same time, Iran’s relations with third-world countries were part of SAVAK’s mandate. A new front organization, using an innocuous name, was set up to deal with these countries. At the behest of SAVAK, Alikhani took some trips to third-world countries and prepared reports on their economic situations for the government.[7]
One of the most important political analyses prepared by Alikhani at this time was on the nature of policies the new Kennedy
administration was likely to pursue in Iran. The shah had been close to Richard Nixon and had supported him in his presidential bid in 1960. Kennedy, on the other hand, had often voiced criticism of the shah during his presidential campaign. Alikhani’s brief laid out for the shah the possible contours of the Kennedy Iran policy.[8] When Kennedy won the election, the shah grew wary, his anxiety evident even in the customarily perfunctory letter of congratulation he sent Kennedy on his inauguration. Knowing that Kennedy was likely to promote democracy in countries like Iran, the shah wrote of Iran as “the only democratic country” in the region and emphasized the strategic importance of the country for the West, and thus its need for more arms.[9]

Kennedy’s short, perfunctory response to the shah’s long letter, and his studied silence in the letter about the shah’s urgent pleas for aid, only added to the shah’s worries. The shah took another step to assuage his anxieties. He sent General Teymur Bakhtiyar to meet with Kennedy, sending with him a special letter for the president.[10] It was a measure of Alikhani’s prominence in the ranks of SAVAK, and of his closeness to Bakhtiyar, that he was chosen to accompany the general on this important trip. By the time the general came back, the shah rightfully suspected that Bakhtiyar had conspired against him in America. The trip sealed Bakhtiyar’s fate, and not long after the general’s departure from SAVAK, Alikhani also resigned from the organization. For some time, he had been contemplating his resignation, and a change in leadership seemed like a good time.

Several options were open to him at the time. The private sector was just beginning to grow into a viable economic force. Before he could succumb to that temptation, his friend Amir-Abbas Hoveyda invited him to begin work at the Iranian National Oil Company. Alikhani agreed, but his days in the company were short-lived. Not long afterward, he met Assadollah Alam at a conference. There was not much said between them, but about four months later, he received a call from Jahanguir Tafazolli—a close confidante of Alam— and was informed that he should go see Alam for breakfast the next day. “You are going to become a minister,” he was told.

The next morning, Alam offered Alikhani a new ministry that combined the already existing Ministries of Industry and Commerce. The shah had been unhappy with their work, Alam told Alikhani.

The reason for this meteoric rise to power is not altogether clear. Certainly Alikhani was, as he proved in the course of subsequent years, an unusually capable man. But hitherto he had little occasion to show it. Some suggest that SAVAK supported the nomination,[11] while others claim that Alam and the shah had seen in him unusual promise and had thus elevated him. According to Alikhani himself, the shah wanted a new minister who had been trained in the West, but not in America, and Tafazolli had suggested Alikhani. “I was watched closely for a few weeks,” he said, “and then asked to go and meet Alam.”[12]

Once he was offered the job, he was asked what they should call the new ministry. They settled on the Ministry of Economy. Alikhani held the job for the next seven years and through three different prime ministers—Alam, Mansur, and Hoveyda—and many more cabinet reshuffles. After a couple of years, his political star had risen so high that he was, in spite of his youth and relative inexperience, constantly rumored to be a candidate to become prime minister. It was as minister of economy that Alikhani left his most lasting influence on the Iranian economy.

With the shah’s White Revolution, Iran was entering a new economic stage, leaving behind the age-old feudal system, which had been centered on absentee landlords, and entering a new kind of capitalism. Cities were beginning to attract larger and larger numbers of dislocated peasants in search of work. A burgeoning new middle class, bent on investing in industry, was rising on the ruins of the rapidly fading gentry. As Alikhani saw his mission, his chief task was to support the rise of this new industrial class. Iran, he argued, is an arid land, and its future prosperity could and should not be based on agriculture, but on service and industry. For the new industrialist class to grow, the Ministry of Economy decided on protective tariffs for new industries. Furthermore, it began a multipronged policy that was to create a level playing field for the private sector, decentralize growth away from Tehran, acquire new technologies, train Iranian workers and technicians to handle the new machines, and finally subsidize industrial export by Iranian firms.

Probably because of his anticommunist record in the past, Alikhani never feared advocating greater economic ties with the Soviet bloc. His suggestion found a receptive ear in the shah, who was, by 1965, becoming more and more independent of the Americans and more impatient with the limits the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had put on his ability to purchase arms. The shah decided to buy some of his military needs from the Soviet Union, and Alikhani’s suggestion of increased barter agreements with Iran’s northern neighbor was welcome. Furthermore, the Soviet Union’s willingness to give Iran what the shah had long sought—a steel mill—in return for Iranian gas, increased the chances of this barter. The American Embassy in Tehran began to grow concerned about the eastward tilt of Alikhani. In spite of a clash with the shah over the question of a cement factory, Alikhani still enjoyed the support of the king and thus continued on his program for strengthening Iran’s industrial base.

The cement factory episode was characteristic of Alikhani’s mode of operation. To implement the policy of economic decentralization, plans were drawn for each city, particularly Tehran, determining where factories could be built. They offered incentives to move industries to outlying areas of the country, away from the capital. During this time, a request for a license to build a cement factory near Tehran was received by the ministry. It was known that the shah was part owner of the factory. Alikhani ordered that the request be denied. “We must apply the standard to everyone equally,” he said.[13] But the license was issued by another authority. Although Alikhani did not lose his job over his insolence, the decision came back to haunt him later. When at the height of the oil-fueled economic boom the country suffered from a debilitating shortage of cement, the shah, on more than one occasion, quipped, “and that lanky young man did not want us to build a cement factory.”[14]

As his economic plans met with more and more success; as his relationship with Alam, Hoveyda’s nemesis, became closer; and finally, as rumors grew about his emergence as a candidate for the post of prime minister, tensions between Alikhani and Hoveyda grew. By 1969, they had reached an intolerable state for both men, leading to Alikhani’s resignation. He was immediately appointed rector of Tehran University—a powerful position, on par with a minister, but a political minefield. In fact, so perilous was the job that rumors immediately spread that Hoveyda had masterminded his rival’s appointment to destroy him. The rumor was only half true. Alikhani’s political future would be destroyed, but Hoveyda had nothing to do with the appointment.

When he decided to resign, Alikhani consulted with Alam. It is an enigmatic aspect of Alikhani’s career and character that in spite of his own impeccable reputation in financial matters, in spite of his insistence that his aides and assistants were men of probity and honesty, he could become a confidant and ally of a man like Alam, who, in spite of his refinement and many gentlemanly qualities, nevertheless had a reputation for financial corruption.

Alam discussed the question of Alikhani’s desire to resign with the shah. It was the decision of the shah to allow Alikhani to chose his own job from a list of four. He could become the rector at Tehran or Pahlavi University in Shiraz or he could go to Paris as Iran’s ambassador to France or as the head of a new economic bureau dedicated to promoting investments in Iran. Alikhani chose to become the rector of Tehran University, and he certainly got more than he bargained for.

He is generally considered one of the more effective rectors in the history of the university. He had a long list of reforms he intended to implement, and while he accomplished many of them, his efforts were impeded by a number of obstacles he could not surmount. He happened to arrive at the university when a new armed guerrilla movement had begun in Iran. Many of the leaders of this movement were university students, and the SAVAK’s attempt to have the university expel a number of suspected opposition sympathizers put them on a collision course with Alikhani.

More important, he began a large movement to reform the university’s many stale, tradition-bound, and clique-ridden faculties. In the Medical School alone he expelled some three hundred doctors who called themselves professors and rarely taught. He funded the construction of a new building for the Faculty of Economics. He improved food and service at the cafeterias, instituting a three-rate system for students, staff, and faculty. He increased funding for the libraries and began to enforce a system of peer review for promotions.

In spite of these accomplishments, he found the work of leading and controlling the university increasingly difficult. Eventually, when, in 1972, the police stormed the campus without his permission or knowledge, he offered his resignation, and the shah immediately accepted. By then the shah had grown increasingly agitated by the incessant student activism against the government and decided to entrust Hushang Nahavandi, then the rector of the Pahlavi University, with the job of pacifying Tehran University.[15]

By then, Alikhani had had his fill of public service. He wanted to join the private sector he had helped create. This was the beginning of the oil boom, and there was plenty of money to be made—and Alikhani needed to make it rather urgently. By his own reckoning, on the day he left the university, he had forty thousand tooman in his bank account. On the eve of the revolution, six years later, he says his net worth was “at least six million dollars”[16]—though opposition papers claimed that he wired thirty million dollars to his foreign accounts.[17] He also had a library of some six thousand books, many of them rare manuscripts, including his mother-in-law’s rare French books. His collection of classical records, as well as French wine—“I had some rare Burgundy and Bordeaux” he said wistfully18—were also of considerable value.

In the private sector, Alikhani tried everything from industrial production of inflammable material to starting a bank in partnership with the Chase Manhattan. He spent more time with his family, taking them each year to historically educational corners of the world. In 1979, for example, not long before he was forced to leave Iran, he tried to teach his children about Etruscan art.

Exile changed Alikhani’s life in unusual ways. Surely, the financial capital he left behind in Iran meant that he had to work hard to make ends meet. He works as an economic consultant and lives with his wife in a small house in the suburbs of Washington. He spends much time with his nine grandchildren. But the most important change in his life came when the Alam family decided to entrust him with the task of editing Alam’s Diaries for publication. The seven-volume edition—of which six have already been published—is, by scholarly consensus, one of the most important texts about the politics of the Mohammad Reza Shah period. The often surprisingly harsh and critical tone of the narrative has certainly taken many royalists by surprise, some going as far as accusing Alikhani of changing the text. The same people are angry with the lengthy introduction he wrote to the first volume outlining, clearly and succinctly, his many criticisms of the shah and some of his policies.

Regardless of these criticisms, the book is likely to remain one of the most important journals of its kind in the annals of Iranian history. Long after any interest in policies implemented by him to protect Iran’s fledging industry wanes, Alikhani’s name will be remembered as the editor of Alam’s Diaries and as the man Alam and his family entrusted with publishing this rare gem of history.

ALI AMINI WAS AN ENIGMA OF ENDURANCE.Foralmostfortyyearshewasatthe center of Iranian politics. His longevity is more startling in light of the fact that he was, from the onset of his marathon career, distrusted, if not despised, by the shah.
From 1950 to 1955, Iranian politics was dominated by three powerful prime ministers. The three—Ghavam-ol Saltaneh, Mohammad Mossadeq, and General Aredeshir Zahedi— followed one another to power after fierce and invariably bloody struggles. Ali Amini was a member of cabinets of all three men. He was a protégé to Ghavam, and when Ghavam’s nemesis, Mossadeq, followed him to power, Amini was, to everyone’s surprise, a member of the new cabinet as well. And when Mossadeq was overthrown by General Zahedi, Amini was named minister of finance in the new cabinet. Two years later, in 1955, when the shah secretly created a small team of politicians to help bring about the demise of General Zahedi, Amini, though a member of the Zahedi cabinet, was also a key figure of this secret royal cabal. In fact, most of the meetings of the group took place in his house.[1] Some have accused him of “political opportunism,”[2] others praise him for his pragmatism. To a third group, he traveled in the netherworld between political chameleon and master tactician.

Ali Amini was born on September 12, 1905 (21 Sharivari 1284), to one of the most prominent political families of modern Iran. His grandfather was a prime minister and a man of erudition; his book, Resaleye Majddiye, is praised for its pristine prose and its pioneering support for democratic ideas. His mother, Fakhr-al-Dowleh, was surely one of the most powerful and colorful members of the extended Qajar family. She was the favorite daughter of a king, beloved daughter-in-law of a chancellor, and betrothed to a melancholy aristocrat who was, for much of his adult life, “paralyzed” by grief over his father’s death. In these challenging circumstances, she fashioned for herself a formidable persona: unrelenting and fearless in her advocacy of her family’s cause, and bold, even brash, in her support for her son Ali’s rise to the pinnacles of power. Apocryphal though the story might be, Reza Shah, whose disdain for the Qajars was legendary, praised Fakhr-al-Dowleh as “the only man the Qajar family ever produced.”[3]

Ali was not always the favorite son. He remembers a childhood of discontent in the midst of at least the appearance of affluence. There was parental favoritism in which Ali, to his sad consternation, received less of everything than the more favored child. Their family home, in the famed Park-e Amin-al-Dowleh, was lavish in size, European in design, and usually sad and somber in mood. A Belgium architect had built the house, and its furnishings had been imported from Europe, but the gloomy mood of Ali’s father hung like a heavy cloud over it. Ali and his brothers lived in a separate quarter, attended by an illiterate old peasant woman. The children rarely saw their parents; when they did, few words were exchanged. Father was depressed and distant; mother was often preoccupied by politics and lingering property litigation and thus absent. In Ali’s own words, “my youth was squandered.”[4]

He was particularly disheartened by his father’s political lethargy and his disinterest in the lives of his children. Partly to compensate for his father’s attitude, Ali, from early childhood, was resolved to become a prime minister, “and once again bring to the family” the seat of power it had once occupied. In his attempt to regain what he thought was the family heritage, he was guided and goaded by his mother.

Amini’s unabashed ambition frightened the shah and caught the attention of some foreign embassies, which were soon aware of Amini’s political aims. Ironically, when in 1961 this long-cherished dream became a reality, he was hardly prepared for the challenge. He had assembled no team to work in his cabinet, and even less time had been spent on formulating a program.[5] This stark reality, along with a number of external and internal factors, worked to turn Amini’s long-simmering dream of chancellorship into a short fourteen-month-long nightmare.

Amini went to high school in Tehran at Dar al-Funun, where Sadeq Hedayat was among his classmates. After high school, accompanied by his mother, he left for Europe. He ended up at a small university in the town of Grenoble, where he received an undergraduate degree in law. For him, as he readily admits, law was only a gateway—better yet, the best gateway—to the world of politics.
Upon his return to Iran, he was, like many other eminent men of the time, hired by Ali Akabar Davar to work in the newfound Ministry of Justice. After a brief stint as a judge, Amini returned to France, this time to pursue a doctorate in economics. He wrote a thesis on the subject of the foreign trade monopoly in Iran and returned home in 1931. Once again he joined Davar, who by then had been dispatched by Reza Shah to shape up the notoriously corrupt Ministry of Finance.[6]

Within two years, Amini was married. As in every other major decision of his life until then, the guiding light of this decision was his mother. She had found him the suitable mate: her name was Batul; her beauty was legendary and her political pedigree impeccable. She was the daughter of one prime minister (Vosug al-Dowleh) and the favorite niece of another (Ghavam).

Amini’s rise to political prominence came during Ghavam’s tenure as prime minister. He was a protégé of Ghavam and was named a vice premier. Therein lies at least part of the reason for the shah’s unending animus toward Amini: the king’s hatred of Ghavam extended to his many friends and allies. When Ghavam created a Democratic Party to consolidate his hold on power, Amini was an active founding member. In 1946, he was elected to the Parliament as part of the party’s ticket. Three years later, he was offered his first ministerial portfolio in the cabinet of Ali Mansur. It was a measure of his mother’s influence on his life and career that the appointment was first discussed and offered to Fakhr-al-Dowleh and explained to Amini only later and as a fait accompli.

During the tumult of the early 1950s, Amini was a key player in several cabinets. He served in the Mossadeq government in 1951. In a cabinet reshuffle, he lost his portfolio. They were troubled days in Iranian politics; no sooner had he lost his job than, apparently on the insistence of his mother, he left Iran for Jerusalem and a medical checkup. His trip had the advantage of taking him out of the country during the tense months when the shah and Mossadeq were facing off in a bitter political fight and Iranian politicians were forced to take sides in the acrimonious battle. For many, the side they chose haunted them all their lives. Amini was spared the agony of that choice.

He was back in Iran in 1953 when the August coup overthrew Mossadeq. By his own reckoning, his sympathies were divided. In fact, on the day of the coup, two of his friends—who later became members of his cabinet—wanted Amini to join them in a declaration in support for Mossadeq. Amini counseled patience and prudence. The wait paid off; by the afternoon, it became clear that the day belonged to the shah and his supporters. By the evening General Zahedi was Iran’s new prime minister and, in the early hours of next morning, Amini was named his minister of finance.[7]

When the shah returned from Rome, where he had fled, he talked of his dissatisfaction with the Zahedi cabinet during his first meeting with the U.S. ambassador, Loy Henderson. “Same old faces which had been rotating in office for years. . . . He had been told Americans had insisted Amini be included as finance minister and that Cabinet was selected before his arrival and presented to him as fait accompli. I told him information incorrect. I do not know who had selected Amini. Certainly not Americans.”[8]

In spite of the king’s reservations, Amini stayed in the cabinet and was the lead negotiator in the controversial agreements that turned over Iranian oil to a consortium of primarily American and British oil companies. Although in offering the bill about the agreement to the Majlis Amini admitted that it was not a good agreement but the best Iran could have at the time, the stigma of signing it remained with him for the rest of his life. Amini’s role in these negotiations has been the subject of some controversy. Rumors of a five-million-dollar payoff for his role appeared in the papers, particularly those belonging to the opposition. Amini and his son repeatedly denied the accusation.

Although a key member of the Zahedi cabinet, Amini was also instrumental in its downfall. The shah, dissatisfied with Zahedi’s independence and frightened by his power and charisma, had been trying to get rid of him since he returned from his five-day exile.

The American and British governments would not go along with the shah’s plans until 1955, when the oil agreement was ratified by the Parliament. Then the shah, according to Jahanguir Tafazolli, created a cabal of politicians. Amini was an active member of the group. One of their primary tasks was to facilitate the downfall of Zahedi, who still enjoyed substantial support in the Parliament.
When General Zahedi was finally forced to resign, Amini was given a ministerial portfolio in the new cabinet headed by Hoseyn Ala. It was, in fact, a demotion, from the all-powerful Ministry of Finance to the less-powerful Ministry of Justice. Amini, never at a loss for words, denied at the time that the move had been a demotion, but part of the design to “improve justice” in Iran.

His tenure at Justice was short-lived. After only a few months, he was sent to Washington as Iran’s ambassador to the United States. But before he went on his new assignment, he was, along with Ala and the shah, instrumental in ending Iran’s century-old neutrality and helping form the Baghdad Pact—later named CENTO.

In Washington, Amini was, by all accounts, a successful ambassador. He befriended a number of key political figures, particularly among Democratic Party luminaries. The lore of Iranian politics, strengthened by later accusations by the shah, had it that among Amini’s newfound friends was John Kennedy. In a new biography of his father, Iraj Amini claims that the two men met only once and that the stories of their friendship are highly exaggerated.

The Gharani Affair almost ended Amini’s political career. On February 27, 1958, the Iranian government announced the arrest of thirty-nine people on the charge of attempting a coup. The leader of the plot was General Valiollah Gharani—a key intelligence officer of the regime. According to their confessions, the plotters hoped to put in place a new cabinet led by Amini. The group had certainly been in contact with the American Embassy in Tehran. One of their leaders had also met William M. Rountree, assistant secretary of state at the time.[9] The plotters had also contacted Amini himself, informing him of their plans. His response was typical of his mode of operation: he wrote back telling the plotters that “since I am away from the scene in Tehran, don’t get me involved in this matter.” At the same time, he chose not to inform the Iranian authorities of the impending coup attempt.

When details of the coup became known, Amini was immediately recalled from Washington. Ostensibly the reason for the recall was a speech he made on oil policy without previously clearing it with the shah. The real reason, of course, was the suspicion that he had been involved with the plot. Amini did not immediately return, fearing arrest. He lingered for a while in Europe, returning to Tehran only when his safety was promised by the shah.

In Tehran, he categorically denied any knowledge of or complicity in the plot. “I never knew Gharani,” he said, adding that in Iran, “only His Royal Majesty” can decide who can take over the reins of government. Both his claims about the coup, we now know, were inaccurate. He had in fact met with Gharani when the latter was on a training tour as Iran’s head of military intelligence. Furthermore, he was aware of the impending coup, though he had tried at least nominally to disassociate himself from it.[10]

The Americans were unambiguous in their defense of the troubled ambassador. In a telegram to the embassy in Tehran, John Foster Dulles wrote, “It is in our judgment unfortunate that Ambassador Amini had been brought into matter by Shah. To our knowledge and belief Amini has conducted himself in exemplary role and has loyally and faithfully served Shah. We have had no reports of any conversations by Amini with U.S. reps not wholly consistent with his responsibilities to Shah and Government which he represents.”[11] Although the shah had at the time informed U.S. officials, “with great show of indignation,” that Gharani and his plotters had been encouraged by the American Embassy in Tehran, and though in a meeting of the cabinet at the time the shah had angrily declared that, “I will make Amini take his dream of becoming a prime minister to [his] grave,”[12] in less than three years, Amini was indeed appointed prime minister by the shah.

The country was in the throes of a serious political and economic crisis. For several years now, the CIA had been predicting a revolution in Iran. The economy was in shambles, and the American stability program, underwritten by grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, had yet to put the economy back on the right path. A teachers’ strike had paralyzed the education system and threatened to spread to other workers in the capital. It was in this context that Amini was named prime minister.

Parts of his cabinet—specifically portfolios for the foreign, interior, and war ministries—were chosen by the shah. In return, Amini brought into the cabinet several controversial figures, particularly some who had been on Gharani’s list of candidates. The odd combination of these erstwhile radicals—like Arsanjani—with some of the conservative holdovers from previous governments, made the cabinet an unwieldy, incongruent mix of creeds and affiliations. The fact that the shah was, contrary to his many public pronouncements of support for Amini, fundamentally opposed to Amini, only decreased the latter’s chances of survival and ensured that the army’s top brass never embraced the new government. With the forces of the left and the center opposed to him as well, his failure and fate, in retrospect, seem doomed from the beginning.

Amini’s cabinet was unusual for an entirely different reason. It was the first in the modern history of Iran to have a special advisor on religious questions. Using the advisor—a man named Sharif-al-ulama, who ostensibly enjoyed deep affinities with the clerics—Amini worked hard to mend the government’s fences with the clerical hierarchy. In a much-publicized gesture of reconciliation, he traveled to Qom soon after becoming prime minister and met with some of the most notable ayatollahs. In retrospect, his meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini is of particular interest. As was his wont, Khomeini unabashedly criticized the government, particularly its educational policies. They breed infidels, Khomeini claimed. Amini was no less straightforward in his defense of his government.

His discourse with the mullahs was facilitated by the fact that he was himself a religious man. In his youth, when he traveled to the holy cities of Iraq in the company of his mother, he had toyed with the idea of staying behind and joining a seminary. He was, in those days, convinced that Shiism was in dire need of reformation; he was, furthermore, convinced that he could bring about the requisite changes. At the urging of his mother and her cleric friends in Iraq, he soon gave up the idea of becoming a mullah, but all his life he remained a man firm of faith. He prayed every day, though not always at the exact time prescribed by religious rules. He believed that every society needs religion as the anchor of its moral order. He advised family and friends to raise their children “with firm religious beliefs.” At the same time, he never tired of repeating that if a government tries to “listen to the mullahs, the work of the country will come to a standstill.”[13]

His tenure as prime minister was historic for several other reasons as well. He was surely the last prime minister to have any semblance of independence under the shah. Shapur Bakhtiyar, the shah’s last prime minister, also enjoyed much independence, but he was never able fully to take over the reins of power. Amini tried to reassert the rights of the office of prime minister, and limit the extent of the king’s role in politics. More crucially, under his watch, land reform began in Iran. He brought into the cabinet his close friend, Hassan Arsanjani, a rabble-rousing journalist and protégé of Ghavam who had a penchant for populist rhetoric and a deep distrust of the shah.[14] Amini also tried unsuccessfully to include some elements of the National Front. He wanted to create a government of national reconciliation. For minister of justice he chose Nur-al Din Alamuti, once one of the leaders of the Iranian communist party. For minister of education he picked Mohammad Deraksheh, the leader of the powerful teachers’ union. Interestingly, when Amini had presented the Consortium Agreement to the Parliament, one of the most bitter attacks on the agreement—and on Amini as its architect—had been delivered by Deraksheh. Ultimately, in spite of all his efforts, his attempt to create a government of national reconciliation failed. His own role in negotiating and signing the oil agreement with the Western consortium made him an “untouchable” for much of the opposition.

Amini was a populist, giving speeches bereft of any jargon and with a demeanor free of the haughty quirks of aristocracy. His long, sometimes meandering, often honest talks, broadcast on radio, turned him into a favorite subject of satirists. His warning that the country is “bankrupt,” though accurate and justified in strictly economic terms, was a disaster in terms of its political consequences. The shah never forgave him for the comment, and the satirists never tired of making fun of him for it. Although he was always well dressed, his protuberant eyes and his heavy eyelashes made him an easy and favorite target of the country’s cartoonists.
One of Amini’s most important decisions was to demand the ouster of the powerful head of SAVAK, General Teymur Bakhtiyar. The shah readily agreed. He could thus get rid of a new enemy by an old foe. Ever since Bakhtiyar had visited Washington bearing the shah’s letter to Kennedy, Tehran was abuzz with rumors of Bakhtiyar’s plans for a coup against the shah. Out of office, Bakhtiyar openly began to conspire against the government and use his extensive ties with the security agents to foment trouble. A de facto alliance between him—the butcher of the Iranian communists—and many of the very forces he had earlier suppressed began to take shape. This alliance would, in later years, became the bane of the shah and a source of much anxiety for him.

What finally sealed Amini’s fate was the shah’s official trip to the United States. After meeting with Kennedy, the president agreed, in the course of a news conference, that in Iran the ultimate power must rest with the monarch. By then, the White House had concluded that “Amini was a spent force.” This was, in fact, the judgment of Professor Edward Mason of Harvard, whose words were listened to in the Kennedy White House and who traveled to Tehran at the behest of the administration. He came back convinced that Amini’s days were numbered.

When the shah returned, the question of the military budget became a bone of contention between him and his prime minister. In an apparent attempt to bluff, and to force the shah to reduce the military budget and coerce the Americans to increase their aid to the Iranian government, Amini offered his resignation. To his surprise, the Americans refused to give more aid, and the shah accepted his resignation. On July 19, his brief tenure at a job he had long craved ended.

He was for a while still hopeful of a speedy return to office. By 1965, the shah’s attacks on him and his tenure became more direct, signaling an end to his dream. For the next few years, though he lived the life of a banished politician, he was never much out of the shah’s mind. When Armin Meyer, American ambassador to Iran at the time, indicated at a dinner party that he wanted to meet with Amini, something of a diplomatic crisis erupted. The shah was eventually assuaged only with the promise that the American Embassy would no longer have any contact with Amini. During those years, as embassy documents show, the Americans kept in touch with Amini through an intermediary. His name was Moghadam Maragei. SAVAK, which kept a close watch on Amini and reported his every move, was aware of Maragei’s role.[15]

In forced retirement, Amini’s life was reduced to hosting a political salon. Usually, each afternoon a small group gathered at Amini’s house and whiled away the afternoon with idle chatter about politics. Many of the participants in these meetings were low-level government officials. Ministers, or those hoping to land a ministerial portfolio, avoided any contact with him. Occasionally leaders of the moderate opposition, particularly from the National Front, also met with Amini.[16] Invariably, SAVAK reported on these meetings. The published collection of these reports is interesting only for the repetitious banality of the narrative. Clearly, those in the house seemed to expect that their conversations were “overheard.” A kind of studied superficial caution and conservatism is evident in the reports. For example, in one instance Amini reported that some mullahs wanted to have services for some Palestinians killed in battle with Israelis. As Amini owned the mosque, they had come to ask for his permission. Amini told his friends, “I refused to grant them permission. I said, why should we get involved in politics.”[17]

This caution was for naught. In 1968, the shah, for reasons that were apparently connected to the ongoing oil negotiations, ordered a new round of attacks on Amini. The media began a blitz of accusations, and, more important, the Ministry of Justice was ordered to resurrect an old file that claimed financial malfeasance against Amini and his wife. During her husband’s tenure as prime minister, a piece of land belonging to his wife was sold to the government at allegedly inflated prices. There is now no doubt that such a sale was made. In fact, Iraj Amini, their son, became by accident privy to the plans for the sale and tried unsuccessfully to dissuade his mother from engaging in the deal. He knew by instinct that his father’s enemies would one day use the transaction against him. At the same time, irrespective of the judicial merits of the case, everyone in Tehran seemed aware of the strictly political nature of the accusation.

The early tremors that eventually became the Islamic revolution once again brought Amini back to the center of power. Tehran was filled with rumors of his pending appointment as prime minister. His early reentry into politics had been at the behest of Hoveyda, by then minister of court. As a U.S. Embassy telegram makes clear, Amini’s July 23, 1978, decision to call for a “government of national reconciliation” was made at the suggestions of the court minister and was “an indirect invitation for Prime Minister Amuzegar to resign.” Hoveyda had sensed a serious crisis was on the horizon and wanted Amini back in political action. For a while the shah refused to meet Amini and when he finally agreed to do so, it was already too late. As the embassy concluded at the time, “Amini’s initiative is being viewed with suspicion in view of past allegations that he was a U.S. puppet.”[18] As the embassy further correctly anticipated, Amini did not end up playing “a major role in events” of the next few months. Instead, he became a member of a large bevy of new advisors the shah had acquired. Few reliable sources about exactly what counsel he offered the shah have been available. According to his son, during this period, Amini was, as he had been all his life, an advocate of rapprochement with the clerics, but he also realized that the government must first act forcefully to calm the situation and then negotiate with the opposition.

The day after the shah left Iran, Amini, too, decided to leave—hopeful still that after a brief hiatus, he would return. He made little effort to move any substantial part of his holdings and private belongings to Europe. Instead, he traveled light, with all the appearance of a brief sojourner, not a permanent exile. He was wrong and had become once again prey to his persistent optimism.

The bread of banishment was particularly bitter for Amini. He was instrumental in creating an early opposition group against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once again he went back to the theme of the necessity of “national reconciliation for the liberation of Iran.” Old animosities between Left and Right, liberals and monarchists, he suggested, must be all forgotten in favor of the unity required to end the destructive rule of the mullahs. When it became public knowledge that the CIA had been funding Amini’s operations, and when controversy about the $100,000 monthly stipend by the CIA hit French courts and Iranian and American newspapers,[19] Amini, glum and disappointed, withdrew from all politics. “It was his simplicity,” his son believes, “that allowed him to be duped by upstart political operatives.”[20] As his reputation suffered, he turned increasingly morose. His much-beloved chauffeur was brought from Iran to live with Amini. His wife almost died of cancer, adding to the mounting agonies of the benighted exile. His sole remaining solace were the solemnities of the life of a lapsed aristocrat. Every day was minutely planned: a full agenda, meticulously mapped out, but with little to do.

He died in Paris in 1992.

In the last week of July 1977, as Jamshid Amuzegar stood with a bevy of ministers on the tarmac of Tehran Airport, all there to bid the king, departing on an official trip, a royal send-off, he was beckoned by an officer to go see the shah for what seemed like another routine disposition of royal orders. But this time, Amuzegar finally heard the words he had craved to hear for at least a decade. From as early as 1966, there were secret police reports indicating that he was rumored to be in line to be appointed prime minister, and that he was even contemplating the composition of his cabinet.[1] Over the next long decade of waiting, many a time he seemed on the verge of realizing his dream. Every time, however, his rival and ostensible boss, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, somehow found a way to survive and thwart the ambitions not just of Amuzegar but of all other aspirants to the post of prime minister.

Even this time, when change was in the air, Amuzegar almost missed the opportunity. Not long after William Sullivan, the new American ambassador, arrived in Tehran, he opined in a meeting with the shah that in the embassy’s studied view, Iran’s economic development could not be sustained at its current rapid rate. The shah frowned and grew sullen; for two weeks he refused to meet with the ambassador again. While Sullivan claims that he meant nothing other than an economic view, the shah interpreted Sullivan’s words as a hint, a warning, a sign of displeasure with Hoveyda from the new American administration. Jimmy Carter had just been elected president, and the shah was anxious about what the new president’s talk of “human rights” meant for Iran. No sooner had he met the new ambassador than he began contemplating a change in the government.

When the shah began to consider appointing a new prime minister, the leading candidate had been Hushang Ansary, a nemesis of Hoveyda and Amuzegar.[2] Ansary and Amuzegar had long developed the reputation of being favored by the United States. In a SAVAK profile, prepared when Amuzegar was about to become prime minister, he is described as someone “considered by many circles as an American tool” and rumored to “have two passports, one Iranian and the other American.”[3] On that day at the airport the shah told Amuzegar, “Begin assembling a cabinet.” His dream had finally come true.

Carter’s coming, however, had consequences other than simply making the shah nervous; it also emboldened the opposition. The common perception was that the Americans had just declared open season on the shah. As a result, no sooner had Amuzegar began his tenure than mass demonstrations began all over the country.

It was a measure of Amuzegar’s mold of mind, and a telling sign of the Byzantine nature of Iranian politics at the time, that his first instinct in response to the unrest was to think that it was all masterminded by his rival, Hoveyda, and the latter’s chief ally in the secret police, Parviz Sabeti.

Using Ahmad Goreishi, a prominent political figure, as an intermediary, Amuzegar asked his rivals to cease their machinations. Both were flabbergasted at the suggestion and retorted that they had no role in the unrest. In the meantime, with every passing day the demonstrations picked up momentum and the opposition recognized the disarray in the regime. Before long, the movement had such strength that it swept Amuzegar off the seat he had worked so hard to occupy. After a decade of waiting, his tenure had only lasted thirteen months, ending on August 26, 1978. In the shah’s memoir, Answer to History, he wrote that getting rid of Amuzegar was “a great mistake.” He called his short-lived prime minister a “wise and unbiased counselor”[4] and clearly implied that his departure facilitated the rise of the mullahs to power. But the mullahs figured in Amuzegar’s life and legacy at an altogether different angle.

Many royalists continue to blame Amuzegar for the revolution, claiming that his illegal decision to cut off the regular “stipend” the government paid to the mullahs was the trigger, or even the cause of the revolution. Officials of the ancien régime, including the man who was for many years in charge of dispensing the stipend, had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to answer these critics by revealing that the amount paid to these mullahs by the government was minimal, and that, more important, the real radical mullahs in Ayatollah Khomeini’s camp never “deigned to take our money.”[5] But the rumble of discontent has continued.

After a quarter century of uneasy silence, after repeatedly refusing requests by scholars, journalists, and oral histories for interviews, Amuzegar finally broke his silence and tried to answer his critics by revealing what he claimed was the real story of the stipend. The tone of his essay was surprisingly bitter and critical of the ancien régime. The revolution was, he wrote, more than anything else the result of “the irregularities” that existed at the time in Iran. He simply does not address the issue that he was, for much of that period, a pillar of that regime. He quotes an old Persian text, “Survival of a nation is dependent on one condition: no strong hand should be allowed to overpower the weak.” He goes on to declare that he “knew nothing about suspending the stipends.” Finally, he claims that the money that was paid to the mullahs came, in fact, from the White House, and it had begun after events of August 1953 and was only suspended during the Carter administration.[6] The essay could be seen to confirm the most cynical depiction of Amuzegar as well as the most sympathetic. To his critics, Amuzegar is an arrogant man of dour and rancorous disposition and unable to accept any criticism. His supporters describe him as a man of debilitating shyness, with unfailing competence as a technocrat and kindness as a human being, and a particular affinity for children.[7]

Friends and foes both concur that he was impeccably honest and never enriched himself at the cost of the public coffers. He is a private man who lived nearly all of his life under the often disfiguring gaze of public scrutiny. Since he has yet to publish his memoirs or agree to be interviewed, finding the real person beneath the public persona is in his case even more difficult than in the normal work of biography.
Jamshid Amuzegar was born in Tehran on June 26, 1923 (4 Tir 1302), to a family of letters and politics. His mother was among the first Iranian women to receive a public education, and his father was a journalist and a man of politics who rose up in the ranks to become a senator in the latter part of his life. During his days as a journalist, aside from running a number of papers, he also wrote for Etela’at, the country’s most important daily at the time. A collection of his essays for the paper was the first book published by the company that was created by the paper’s publisher.[8] For a two-month period, he was also minister of culture in a caretaker government that came to power in 1951. Among his many books is one dealing with the necessity of educating women.[9] Three of the children of this ununually cultured family—Jamshid, Jahangir, and Cyrus—entered the world of politics, with Jamshid reaching the pinnacle of power and Jahangir establishing a solid international reputation as a serious scholar of Iran’s economic history and development.

Jamshid went to school in Tehran—Tagrib elementary and Iranshahre high school— receiving his high school diploma with a concentration in literature. The choice was unusual in that most serious university-bound students tended to choose either mathematics or science as their area of concentration. But Jamshid had been influenced by two of his teachers, Jalal Homai and Mohit Tabataba’i, both renowned men of letters. Inspired by parents and by his two favorite teachers, all his life Amuzegar has shown particular affinity for the world of Iranian letters and poetry, prizing himself for the pithy prose he writes and the appropriate poem he can conjure. In his days of glory, some critics scoffed at his use of poetry, suggesting that his literary rhetoric was filled with embarrassing malapropisms, and he became a “subject for satirists.”[10] Nevertheless, among his generation of technocrats, when “technobabble” was the lingua franca, and when, contrary to the old Iranian tradition, mastery of Persian language and literature was no longer a requisite rite of passage into politics, he stood out for his literary bent.

After high school, he entered Tehran University and took the unusual step of taking courses both in the Faculty of Law and Political Science and in the Faculty of Engineering. After two years, he left for the United States, where he enrolled at Cornell University, and received first a bachelor’s degree in public policy and eventually a Ph.D. in a field that was called public health engineering. Between the two degrees, he left Cornell for about two years to take a master’s degree in civil engineering at George Washington University. Before returning to Iran in August 1951, he taught for a short while at Cornell. During the same period, he married a girl of German origins. They remained married for the rest of her life. They had no children, though in acts of philanthropy she often helped with the work of raising orphans. Her last years with her husband were rendered particularly difficult not only by the drudgeries of exile, but also by the difficulties arising from her ill health. Amuzegar was, by all accounts, exemplary in his devotion to her and in the care and affection he lavished on her when she most needed it. Although all his life Amuzegar has been something of a recluse, with a small coterie of friends, in the weeks after his wife’s death he grew even more so, avoiding contact even with his friends. But in 1951, they were a happy new couple, heading back to Iran and an unknown career for Amuzegar.

In Iran, he began almost immediately to work for Point Four, the American aid program involved in public health and hygiene in Iran. Their work was a perfect fit for Amuzegar’s expertise. During his days as a graduate student, he had briefly worked on a UN project studying water supplies in Iran. Amuzegar’s work at Point Four lasted about eighteen months. What he accomplished was impressive by any measure. Even according to sources in the Islamic Republic, he surveyed and established the location for eightyfour wells and drew up the design for water systems for twenty-five different cities.[11]

In 1953, not long after the fall of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, Amuzegar entered public service. His first job was as the director of the office of engineering in the Ministry of Health. Only eighteen months later, he was named undersecretary in the same ministry. He was thirty-two years old. It was during his tenure there that, with help from Point Four, much progress was made finally in eradicating malaria from Iran.
Amuzegar was also active in a different political arena. He was one of the leading members of a nascent group that brought together Iranian graduates of American universities. Many of the technocrats who led the Iranian bureaucracy in the 1960s and 1970s were members of this group. According to SAVAK at the time, the group was more than anything the tool for Amuzegar’s political ascent. There were rumors at the time that this group would soon become a political party and Amuzegar would be its leader.[12]

In 1958, his efforts finally bore fruit when he was appointed minister of labor. From that time until the fall of the shah, there was only a short hiatus when he was not in charge of some ministry. Some have suggested that in terms of the sheer number of years served as a minister, Amuzegar holds the record in modern Iran with almost eighteen years.[13]

He remained in the Ministry of Labor for a little more than a year. He helped draft a new comprehensive labor law for the country and also helped pass legislation banning government officials from entering into business deals with the government. The passage of these bills became part of the pattern of his future appointments: at every new ministry he brought about important, often long-lasting changes.

The best example of these changes came during his next appointment, to the Ministry of Agriculture. While there, Amuzegar helped draft the legislation for land reform. The American Embassy at the time was clearly aware of the public perception of these reforms as something fostered by the United States. In a report assessing the internal situation in Iran, they wrote, “at least four of the technicians and career types who dominate the cabinet come from those Iranians who are trained in the United States and known popularly as ‘American tools . . . ’ e.g. the selection of Jamshid Amuzegar as Minister of Agriculture and guide of the Land Distribution bill and its later implementation.”[14] In a rare intervention in postrevolutionary diaspora polemics, Amuzegar wrote a letter to the editor of Rahavard defending his role in drafting the legislation and insisting that its content and details were all the results of work by him and his staff at the ministry. The Iranian countryside, with its complicated system of harvest sharing and its unique system of qanats—aqueducts that carry water for hundreds of miles in an intricate web of interconnected wells—was, he argued, unique and only the genius of Iranian officials—not the advice of foreigners—could have drafted legislation befitting that landscape.[15] With the fall of the Eqbal cabinet in August 1960 (Shahrivar 1339), Amuzegar’s ministerial days came to a temporary halt. With the help of a few friends, he created a consulting company and entered the private sector. Ironically, it was in this nonpolitical hiatus that he came close to ending his political career altogether.

One of his friends, Mahmood Rezai, was also a close friend of General Teymur Bakhtiyar, the once powerful head of SAVAK. When he was dismissed from his post in 1962, he did not wither away, as old soldiers are supposed to do, but began organizing a coup against the sitting cabinet. But ambitious and charismatic officers like Bakhtiyar were anathema to the shah, and before the general could carry out his ostensibly pro-shah coup against Amini, he was banished from the country, and all who had cooperated with him fell out of favor as well. At least one reliable source has claimed that Amuzegar met with Bakhtiyar at the latter’s behest and was offered but did not accept a ministerial job in the coup cabinet.[16] In fact, not long after Bakhtiyar was banished, Amuzegar returned to the government as the powerful minister of treasury. From that time until a few weeks from the fall of the shah, he was never far from the center of power in Iran. During the late 1960s, long before his appointment as prime minister, Amuzegar had become one of the shah’s most trusted advisors.

Aside from his eight years at the helm of the treasury, he had become the shah’s chosen personal representative in the increasingly cantankerous oil negotiations of the period. In 1971, for example, the shah named him as the head of Iran’s delegation to OPEC. It was in that capacity that he gained international fame and notoriety.

Those were the days when OPEC was demanding substantial increases in the price of oil, and Amuzegar was often, next to the shah, the face of Iran’s militancy. The fact that during several sessions of OPEC Amuzegar was chosen as the chair of the meeting added to his reputation. If that were not enough to garner him international fame, Carlos the Jackal’s daring hostage taking did the rest.

On Sunday, December 21, Carlos, the famous terrorist, and six accomplices (three Germans and three Palestinians), calling themselves the Arm of the Arab Revolution, raided the building where OPEC delegates were meeting in Vienna. Sixty-three delegates and employees were taken hostage. Carlos divided the hostages into three categories—the liberals, the neutrals, and the criminals, with Amuzegar and the Saudi oil minister, Zaki Yamani, heading the criminal list. Carlos intimated that he intended to execute Yamani and Amuzegar and demanded a fueled jet and required that Austrian radio and television read the group’s revolutionary communiqué every two hours.

The plane was provided, and the hostages were taken to it in a bus. Two seats on the plane—one for Amuzegar and the other for Zaki Yamani—were strapped with explosives. During much of the ordeal, Carlos is reported to have repeatedly taunted both Amuzegar and the Saudi minister. After about three days of wandering between Algeria and Libya, not only the hostages, but Carlos and his band, were set free. It was alleged but never confirmed that Iran and Saudi Arabia paid Carlos twenty million dollars for the release of their oil ministers. The experience must have left an enduring mark on Amuzegar, but he has been reticent to talk about the details of the ordeal.

As his international reputation grew, so did his political status at home. During the 1970s, he was more powerful than any other minister and on almost equal footing with the prime minister. He met directly with the shah and took orders only from him. During his tenure at the treasury, among his most important contribution was drafting a new tax law. His tenure at these important ministries helped create an enduring image of him as a dour but dedicated technocrat with no knack for politics, a fair but exacting man, ambitious but cautious, honest and willing to work hard to clean up the bureaucracy but also willing to look the other way when faced with the corruption of those more powerful than himself.

The big turn in his domestic role came in April 1973 when he was moved from Treasury to the Interior Ministry. By then the entire bureaucracy was controlled by members of the ruling Iran Novin Party, and it was a measure of Amuzegar’s power as a technocrat that he retained his role in spite of his refusal to join the ranks of the party. Moreover, at the Interior Ministry, holding elections was among his chief responsibilities. Within a year, helped by Gholam-Reza Afkhami and Amin Alimard, two technocrats he had appointed as his undersecretaries, Amuzegar convinced the shah to allow for a limited experiment in holding relatively free elections. Hitherto, not only the candidates but the winners were decided by the government. In two small cities in the northern part of Iran, the normal governmental channels chose the two candidates, but then the two were allowed to run a serious campaign, and the ultimate winner would be the person who actually won the majority of votes. This experiment was to be the first phase of an eventual easing of government control not of elections themselves, but on who would win them.

But all of this experimentation came to naught when the shah scuttled the existing system and created a one-party system, and this time everyone, including Amuzegar, was required to join. For a while, he was the leader of one of the two “wings” in the party, and then he was promoted to the post of secretary general. Clearly this was the last step before the realization of his long dream of becoming the prime minister.

His eventual appointment as prime minister led, as expected, to a flurry of rumors, some wild and fantastical. To most observers, his appointment was a nod to the new Carter administration. Some saw it as a victory for Princess Ashraf over the queen, who had been exerting more and more influence on the Hoveyda cabinet. Amuzegar and Ashraf had been friends for many years, and some observers considered the new Amuzegar cabinet filled “with members of the Ashraf gang.”[17] Those less inclined to conspiracy theories simply believed him to be a competent technocrat getting a promotion he had long deserved.

His brief tenure in office was significant as much for what happened as for what did not. He was slow in responding to the rising unrest, focusing instead on the austerity program he had implemented. By the time he came to lead the cabinet, Iran had witnessed a sharp downturn in its oil revenue. Buoyed by the shah’s repeated grandiose promise of the “Great Civilization” and of standards of living comparable to Western Europe, the austerity measures were particularly unpopular and added fuel to the fires of discontent.

Easily the most controversial event of his days in power was the big fire in the Cinema Rex in the city of Abadan. More than four hundred innocent spectators burned to death. The government was slow to respond. Its attempt to lay the blame on the opposition fell on deaf ears. Although in retrospect the dastardly act has all the hallmarks of Islamic terrorism, and although in future years evidence emerged showing the culpability of the clergy, the people at the time blamed the government. Amuzegar was surely a competent technocrat, but he was without the savvy and political gravitas required to weather the storm. He realized the futility of clinging to power. He offered his resignation a little more than a year after he assumed the premiership. Before long, worried particularly about his wife’s deteriorating health, he left the country, never to return.

In exile, he steered clear of émigré circles and exile politics. The private life he seemed to crave all his life was now, by force and choice, his to cherish.

Hushang Ansary is one of the most enigmatic characters in modern Iranian politics. His meteoric rise was more than matched by the incredible rise in his personal fortune. His detractors attributed his sudden wealth directly to his political power and the alleged abuse of his position to enrich himself. They see in him a man of steely determination. Everything in his life, they claim, from his marriages to his politics, was part of a grand design for success. His defenders, on the other hand, suggest that his wealth was simply the confirmation of his brilliant mind, his tireless energy, his personal skills, and his entrepreneurial acumen. They point to the fact that he made a second fortune in exile, far greater than the one he made in Iran.

In spite of the controversy over his character, several things are usually not contested: Ansary was a highly intelligent politician and a businessman with uncanny intuition. His mind was more agile than erudite, his determination was relentless, and his generosity was calculated and rooted in the complicated trajectory of his character. His ability to master languages from Japanese to English was legendary, and, according to many sources, it was his initial ticket into the inner circles of power. He had a knack for surrounding himself with good lieutenants and assistants, and though he was a stern and demanding taskmaster, he showered those around him with gifts and bonuses.

His generosity and his hospitality were inseparable parts of his reputation. He gave away millions while in exile, much of it, in the early years, to causes unrelated to Iran. In 1998, he was ranked the 147th greatest contributor to the Republican Party in the United States, and most of his philanthropic donations are to causes dear to his friends in the upper echelons of that party. He contributed millions of dollars to stem cell research, donated one hundred thousand dollars to George W. Bush’s inaugural and gave “a check to the GOP for $250,000 in unrestricted ‘soft money.’”[1] But like much else in his life, these contributions were not without controversy. The contributions of two of Ansary’s staff to the Senate campaigns of Robert Torricelli, Alfonse D’Amato, and Robert Dole became the subject of inquiry and controversy when it was alleged that the employees had made the donations with the understanding that Ansary’s company would reimburse them—a potentially illegal act.[2]

Ansary’s myriad talents afforded him the ability not only to reinvent himself constantly, but to succeed in each of his reincarnations. His ambitious soul, and his unerring ability to measure the mettle of his opponents, helped him overcome any handicap that resulted from his lack of any obvious physical charisma. In fact, some sources have claimed that Ansary’s shortness was one of the reasons the shah fostered his promotion. The shah, it is true, had a complex about height—a fact confirmed by many sources—and he chose Ansary, these sources claim, because he offered no threat in an area where the king was most vulnerable.[3] While it is impossible to verify such long-distance Freudian analysis, their common currency shows the important place Ansary occupies in the public imagination.

He was born in 1927 (1306) in the city of Ahwaz. Little is known of his childhood, save that he did not come from one of the “thousand and one families” that ruled Iran for much of the twentieth century. It is a measure of the kind of controversy that swirls around every aspect of his life that critics have claimed that his childhood name was in fact Mostamande Shirazi and not Ansary.[4] He was an outsider bent on beating the insiders at their own game. His father was a bank clerk, and economic hardships were a fact of Hushang’s early life. He had an affinity for the worlds of journalism and photography as a young man and worked for newspapers and magazines in both his city of birth and then in Tehran.
He had some education in England, the extent of which is not clear, with some sources suggesting he received a master’s degree and others claiming that he simply took a number of courses and spent most of his time taking photographs. Then in 1954 he went to Japan. What he did there is also not clear. Ebtehaj, for example, known for his tongue-lashings, dismissively calls him “an office boy” (padow) at the Iranian Embassy in Japan.[5] Others suggest that he worked as a trade representative for some Iranian businessmen and was noticed by Iran’s ambassador to Japan, Abbas Aram. By then Ansary had married a Japanese woman and mastered the Japanese language. Eventually, helped by Aram, he came to the attention of the shah, who asked Ansary to come back to Iran.

He did, and in 1961 he was appointed an undersecretary in the Ministry of Commerce. In short order he served as ambassador at large in Africa, and ambassador to Pakistan. It was the period of heightened tension between India and Pakistan, and Ansary came into direct contact with the shah as he kept the king abreast of developments in the subcontinent. In 1966, he was named minister of information. Reports of his style of work in that sensitive ministry offer ample clues to his managerial system. He established close ties with editors, publishers, and journalists, inviting them to meetings and encouraging them to aim big. According to Ali Behzadi, a well-known journalist and editor in Iran, Ansary told a gathering of editors that everywhere in the world, publishers and editors are amply rewarded for their work and have no financial worries; why shouldn’t it be so in Iran? He also invited them to parties where sumptuous meals were served and generous gifts were given in tasteful surroundings.[6]

His meteoric political rise, as well as his attention to decor and decorum and the tastefulness of his parties, was said to be in no small measure the result of his second marriage. Not long after his return home, he divorced his Japanese wife and remarried—this time to a Persian woman. His mentor, Aram, had been something of a surrogate father to Maryam Panahi, an unusually accomplished young woman who was as comfortable in the corridors of Washington power as in the labyrinth of the Pahlavi court. She also had extensive contacts with powerful men and women in Iran and in the United States. The powerful head of the CIA at the time, Richard Helms, had been a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and in Tehran Aram was only one of her many conduits to power. At his instigation, Maryam and Hushang met and before long they were married, in 1964. They had two children—a girl and a boy—and remained married for almost three decades, while Ansary rose even more in the hierarchy of power in Iran. By then, he had developed a reputation as “an American favorite,” while General Hoseyn Fardust,[7] the shah’s close confidant, claims in his consistently critical memoirs that he was close to the British, writing, “while in Japan, Aram decided that Ansary was the right person, and introduced him to the British.”[8]

All through these years of political and emotional change in his life, Ansary was also a full-time businessman. When he initially returned to Iran he was made partner, and eventually director, of a company called Fakhre Iran. It was part of the Nemazee empire, and according to the Nemazis it had been losing money. Ansary turned the company around, and in the early 1970s, when the country was flush with cash, and when the shah ordered that ministers must not have concurrent business activities, he sold it to the government. The details of the sale are murky. The final sale price has been said to be anywhere from seventy million to four hundred million tooman [$10 to $50 million]. It is also not clear how much the partners received, nor what the real value of the company was. There seems to be a consensus among different sources that the price was certainly more than the partners expected, and the result of a “sweetheart” deal with the government, masterminded by Ansary and Dr. Abdolkarim Ayadi, the shah’s close confidant and his physician.[9] When I interviewed Hassan Nemazi, one of the partners, he denied knowledge of any wrongdoing, adding that his family, as majority owners of the company, were “very happy with the deal and with what Ansary had done for the company.”[10]

His business did not interfere with his politics. After his first ministerial portfolio, Ansary was made Iran’s ambassador to the United States—the most important job in the Iranian foreign ministry. On May 26, 1967, he presented his credentials to President Lyndon Johnson.[11] Ansary’s tenure as ambassador was extremely consequential, both for himself and for Iran. Those were the days when the shah was trying to replace Britain as the hegemonic force in Iran. Even before the election of Richard Nixon, and the Nixon doctrine, Ansary was trying to convince the Americans that “the Shah [was] rather hoping that U.S. will pick Iran as its ‘chosen instrument’ in the Middle East.”[12] At the same time, as the American Embassy in Tehran reported, Ansary was known for “assiduously cultivating high-ranking contacts,”[13] and that trait was certainly evident during his ambassadorial days in Washington. The fact that his wife, Maryam, was connected to the highest echelons of power in America, and that she was a hostess of impeccable taste, was of considerable help in Ansary’s attempt to cultivate these ties. During his days of exile, these contacts became crucial in his attempt to fashion a new career for himself.

His days as an ambassador to Washington were without any major crisis. Aside from the issue of Iran’s future role in the Persian Gulf, Ansary spent most of his time relaying messages between the shah and the U.S. government on the issues of oil, arms, and the shah’s growing fear of Nasser. He also tried to mend fences between the shah and those in the U.S. government—such as Senator William Fulbright—who occasionally criticized the shah.[14] One issue he handled was the shah’s angry response to meetings between U.S. officials and Ali Amini. The shah was worried about U.S. agencies—like the CIA—contacting Iranian opposition figures. Amini was one example of such sensitivity. Another instance was the alleged contacts between some U.S. officials and student demonstrators in Tehran.[15] It was an example of Ansary’s style of work that in May 1968, in anticipation of a visit by the shah, he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the shah was to receive an honorary degree and “personally walked through the proposed proceeding” and raised “a lot of concern . . . about possible threats to shah’s personal safety.”[16]

After about two years in America, Ansary was recalled, only to assume the key Ministry of Economy. Before long, the Ministry of Treasury was combined with his ministry, making Ansary, after the shah, the de facto economic tsar of the country and the shah’s advisor in all economic matters. As early as 1968, there were also rumors that Ansary would “shortly take over the premiership.”[17] By the mid-1970s, he was, according to a CIA report, considered part of “the Shah’s Inner Circle,” along with sixteen other political figures.[18] While others such as Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and Assadollah Alam, and even Jamshid Amuzegar, had a paragraph or two describing their role and relationship with the shah, as a newcomer to the group, Ansary received only a passing reference. But by then he was a permanent fixture in the court’s limited social circle. To no small degree, his entry into that circle was as much the result of his own accomplishments as of his wife’s extensive web of connections to the key elements of that circle, particularly to Alam.[19]

Although in the 1970s Ansary was a member of the cabinet, he was also one of only three ministers—with Amuzegar and General Reza Azimi—“with independent prestige and direct line to HIM which represent competitive threat to Hoveyda’s authority.”[20] Even as minister of economy, he was sometimes used by the shah as a conduit for messages to the United States and the United Kingdom over negotiations with the oil Consortium.[21] Nevertheless, if Alam is to be believed, Ansary was dismayed that the oil negotiations, by law under his jurisdiction, were, on the orders of the shah, primarily handled by Amuzegar.[22]

It was also during this period that Iran went on what the CIA called “The Shah’s Lending Binge,”[23] committing Iran to over $1.3 billion in aid and grants in 1973—including millions of dollars for London’s water system. Ansary played a key role in dispensing this part of Iran’s petrodollars around the world. Moreover, during this period he was the cochair of the joint Iran-U.S. Economic Commission, created at the suggestion of Henry Kissinger.[24] In that capacity, Ansary ultimately signed a $15 billion agreement with the United States that called for, among other things, the construction of eight nuclear power plants in Iran.[25] Iran also invested millions of dollars in often-troubled European and American companies, and Ansary, whose brother was in charge of Iran’s overseas investments, played a crucial and sometimes controversial role in these decisions.

According to William Shawcross, Ansary “was one of the richest men” in Iran.[26] It was believed by some scholars that through these investments and the extensive network of connections he had created in the United States, Ansary wanted not only to consolidate his network of friends in the West, but also to “reinforce” the “sinews of the American-Pahlavi connections.”[27] It is ironic that in spite of his ubiquitous presence in this crucial role, in Answer to History, the shah’s postrevolution memoir, there is no mention of Ansary, and in the queen’s Enduring Love, written in 2003, she only says that after the revolution, Ansary was among a handful of “important people” who “managed to get through to the king and give him their support”[28] Moreover, many who had witnessed his actions were unwilling to talk about him even in exile, at least on the record. For example, Abolqassem Kheradju, the esteemed chairman of the Industrial and Mining Development Bank of Iran, simply says, “Since I don’t have a good view of him, I don’t want to talk about it.”[29]

All of this power meant that in 1976, when the shah decided to replace Hoveyda, Ansary was one of the two main contenders. In fact, Alam told him that he had been picked by the shah as the next prime minister. Bouquets of flowers began to arrive at his houses in Tehran and in the South of France, where his wife was staying at the time. But for reasons that are still not clear, the appointment never came, and much to his consternation, Ansary was forced to serve as a minister in the cabinet of his rival and nemesis, Amuzegar. In retrospect, some of Ansary’s supporters think that had the shah chosen Ansary, a revolution might have been avoided in Iranian politics. Even according to Maryam Panahi, Ansary’s now estranged wife, “not appointing Hushang was one of the shah’s two biggest mistakes, leading to the revolution.”[30]

In 1977, there was still no sign of a revolution, and it was still possible for Ansary to hope that his dream of becoming the prime minister would one day become a reality. By then he had also become involved in party politics. When the shah created the Rastakhiz one-party system, Ansary was named as the leader of one of the two wings of the party. In September 1977, as leader of the Constructive wing, he issued a statement asking for “free flow of information . . . which is like the flow of blood in the body.”[31]

The uneasy peace between him and Amuzegar was resolved when, after the death of Dr. Manuchehre Egbal in November 1977, Ansary was named chairman and managing director of the NIOC. At that time he was “considered by many Iran-watchers to be a shifty-eyed ambitious maneuverer . . . and one of the most powerful figures in Iran.”[32]

His tenure at the oil company was short-lived. As the early signs of a gathering storm appeared on the horizon, Ansary began to think about leaving Iran. Some visitors to his opulent house, “full of expensive rugs and antiques,” noticed that gradually the most expensive of the house’s appointments and decor were disappearing. When he began to complain of chest pain and of shooting pains in his arms, not everyone believed him.[33] His resignation in 1978 and his claim of a heart problem became the subject of controversy and criticism. His defenders claim that his resignation was the result of his “disgust over their lack of freedom to act.” They even suggest that Ansary had boldly told the shah, “you cannot have a liberal-economic system together with an autocratic setup.”[34] Critics, however, suggest that “his resignation as Chairman and Managing Director of the NIOC for ‘personal’ reasons” actually happened while he was in Europe in November 1978, and “when the revolution was well under way.”[35] Some of these critics have even alleged that Ansary took his private plane to the south, supposedly to visit oil facilities in the region, and then simply flew to Europe, whence he wrote his letter of resignation to the shah.[36] His former wife, Maryam, rejects these rumors and declares categorically that he was, in fact, having heart problems.

In exile, Ansary began to fashion a new life for himself. Although he had clearly come to America a very rich man—Forbes called him a “multimillionaire refugee”—he made a bigger fortune here by what Forbes called “Creative Financing.”[37] The connections he had made during his days of power in Iran came in handy. He established partnerships and companies with such American luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and James Baker. In one case, for example, he purchased SunResorts, which consisted of “two hotels, a casino, and a car rental agency in the Caribbean tax haven island of St. Maarten,” and after giving it “a glow of profitability,” adding big names such as Kissinger’s to the company’s board of directors, and using “creative financing,” the company ended up with a paper value of fifty million dollars. In another case, he made an initial investment of five million dollars in a company called IRI; when he took the company public, he made more than seven hundred million dollars in the initial offering.[38]

But as he was amassing his newfound wealth, there was trouble in his private life. His marriage to Maryam came to a bitter end, and he married another woman, Shahla. It is interesting that in the three distinct phases of his life, Ansary had three different wives—a Japanese wife in Japan, Maryam in Iran, and Shahla in exile. He continues his business while spending some of his time and money on philanthropic endeavors.

Hassan Arsanjani was a rabble rousing journalist, a charismatic orator, and a self-styled social democrat with a big appetite for power and for the limelight. He also had a lucrative law practice. His resilience and his instinct for political survival were evident in the fact that though he was closely allied with at least three of the shah’s chief nemeses—Ghavamol Saltaneh, Valiollah Gharani, and Ali Aminiand was a key figure in the intrigues that led to a failed coup attempt against the Iranian government in the late 1950s, he nevertheless survived these adversities to become one of the most powerful ministers in the shah’s thirty-seven-year rule. There was even talk that he might be named prime minister. Ultimately, he quickly fell from the pinnacle of power to what must have been to him an abyss, a life bereft of politics. To the surprise of many, his exit from the political scene came more with a whimper than a bang.

Hassan Arsanjani was born in Tehran in August 1923 (1302). His mother, Hajar, came from a religious family, and his father, Mohammad Hoseyn, was a clergyman and a farmer in the town of Arsanjan. Hassan was only six when he lost his father. His mother took charge of the family and moved to her brother’s house. At the same time, she took up sewing to make ends meet. She spared no effort to ensure that her children—Hassan and his brother and sister—were well educated.1 In her efforts, she was helped by her own father, who owned a small farm and a store in a village not far from Tehran. Hassan saw the difficulties faced by Iran’s poor peasants and farmers—at the time about 90 percent of the Iranian population. The importance of these early experiences became apparent in his populist, pro-peasant rhetoric and his radical activism during his tumultuous tenure as minister of agriculture. At the same time, his childhood experience led to an unusually strong, life-long bond of deep affection between the son and his dedicated mother.

Hassan attended the newly established Pahlavi elementary school—one in a series of schools that taught a modern curriculum and were rapidly replacing the traditional mektabs. In spite of his uncle’s dogmatism, and buoyed by his mother’s support, Hassan even joined the Boy Scouts, the bane of traditional Iranian families of the time, who simply could not fathom the idea that a boy would appear in public in shorts.

Hassan was a good student. According to his brother, even as a child he was “something of a bully, and fearless.”[2] Preemptive attacks on his enemies were a style he began to hone as a child. As a young boy he was a voracious reader and showed an early knack for writing. He began learning French, and he was only seventeen when he decided to translate his first book—Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. He worked as a tutor to help his mother with household expenses.

After high school, he entered the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University. At the same time, he began his career as a journalist. He worked with Mohammad Mas’ud, the most controversial and fiery journalist of his time. He also wrote for other papers. Sometimes he published his essays under the pen name of Sheikh Hassan Mahalati. “Sheikh” was an inside joke between him and his friends. They jokingly called him that because he always carried a large string of worry bead in his hands.[3]

There was another name friends and colleagues used to refer to him in those days. They called him Hassan Iradi—Hassan, the Constant Complainer. He was notorious as a “nabob of negativism.” When he wanted to find another pen name for himself, he played around with Iradi and came up with Daria—otherwise a word without meaning in the Persian language. He was by then barely twenty years old. It was an early measure of his penchant for self-promotion and grandiosity that he published articles under the name Dr. Daria.[4]

The same two traits meant that he could not take orders from an editor. He needed to have his own paper. But he was only twenty-two, and the law required that editors be at least thirty years old. With characteristic brio, he moved on two fronts to solve the inconvenient age limit. He convinced a relative to “front” as the publisher, and, more important, he filed a petition legally to change his date of birth, making him nine years older, thus qualifying for a license.[5] The paper he launched, Daria, soon established its reputation on the strength of Dr. Daria’s relentlessly aggressive editorials against the status quo. The paper was temporarily suspended on numerous occasions, but Arsanjani would find another magazine to publish his essays.

By then he had graduated from law school, and after passing the bar he began to practice law. Practicing law became a temporary albeit highly lucrative respite from the toils and turmoil of politics. In addition to his legal and journalistic activities, in 1945 he also established a party of his own. His Freedom Party soon fizzled away in the context of dozens of other parties created by political activists.

His first effective foray into politics came when he was chosen by Ghavam to be a founding member of the party Ghavam was creating. They had met in 1945 and, not long after, Arsanjani devoted a lead editorial to promoting his new friend for the job of prime minister. In the next election, Arsanjani was elected to the Majlis on Ghavam’s party’s slate but he never took his seat because his credentials were challenged and rejected by a coalition of forces opposed to Arsanjani and Ghavam. Arsanjani had been elected from the city of Lahijan, a town known as one of Ghavam’s seats of power, and the fact that Arsanjani had never actually lived in that city made the job of his critics much easier. Furthermore, an editorial Arsanjani had written in March 1946 strengthened the hand of these foes. He had argued that the continued Soviet occupation of Iran after the end of the war was not altogether without legal justification. The editorial was seen by many as legitimizing the Soviet occupation, and that fact alone, argued Arsanjani’s critics, disqualified him from holding a seat in the Majlis.[6]

His consolation prize was the job of editor for the party’s organ. When after about two years the cabinet of Ghavam fell, Arsanjani was out of a job. He returned to the private sector and his lucrative law practice. In 1951, after Mohammad Mossadeq’s resignation, Ghavam was again appointed prime minister. His first order of business was to appoint Arsanjani—who was no more than thirty years old—deputy prime minister in charge of public relations.

Ghavam’s new tenure lasted all of six days. Arsanjani later published an essay describing the events of those six crucial days. He dispelled the common notion that he was the author of the famous speech Ghavam delivered on the radio minutes after his appointment to the post of prime minister. Ghavam had threatened the people with prison and dire punishment if they opposed him and, waxing poetic, declared with bravura bordering on hubris that there was a new sheriff in town—one who would tolerate no opposition. The arrogant tone has been said to have helped solidify opposition to the new cabinet.

After the debacle of the six-day cabinet, Arsanjani spent the next few years out of the limelight. He went back to school and finished a doctorate in law at Tehran University, writing a dissertation on the question of sovereignty and international organizations.

His next major political entanglement was in the Gharani affair, which began in 1955. He befriended General Valiollah Gharani—who was at the time the head of military intelligence—and began planning a coup against the government. The plan called for installing Amini as prime minister and having Arsanjani as a minister of the cabinet.[7] While he was engaged in these clandestine activities, he was also negotiating with Assadollah Alam, and through him with the shah, about establishing a new political party. By 1956, the shah was bent on creating political parties in Iran, and Alam considered Arsanjani a prime candidate for heading one of these parties. After long hours of negotiation, they agreed to mutually satisfactory terms, and Arsanjani founded the Freedom Pary. Among the people he convinced to join was Malekal Shoara Bahar, the famous poet. The party was short-lived. The coup, too, was defeated in January 1958, and Arsanjani landed in jail for a few weeks.

Such were the vagaries of Iranian politics at the time that in less than three years, Amini was appointed prime minister and Arsanjani was not only the spokesperson for the government, but far more important, he was given the key post of minister of agriculture.

A centerpiece of the new Amini government’s platform of change was land reform. The shah had talked about such reform for many years, but the resistance of the clergy had convinced him to delay action. The first land reform law was passed in May 1960. When Arsanjani set to work on reforming the system, he realized that the existing law was lax in language and limited in scope. In January 1962, at his behest, and with a nod of approval from the shah, the cabinet passed a special resolution “augmenting” the law. Before long, Arsanjani had made land reform his own and was, according to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, widely “credited with having given the original impetus to Iran’s land reform program.”8 In fact, as early as the 1940s, Arsanjani had often suggested in his editorials that “Iran shall not progress until and unless we eradicate feudalism.”[9] Then in 1950, when Hadji Ali Razmara was prime minister, Arsanjani, in an effort to get close to the new government, wrote him a letter outlining the contours of a plan to reform the landholding system in Iran.[10] There is a consensus among scholars and observers that his stamina and radicalism made the initial plans for the land reform far more radical than the shah, or Amini, had envisioned.

So crucial was his role in the process that when Amini resigned and Alam replaced him at the helm, he asked Arsanjani to stay on. The Amended Land Reform Law of January 1963 was praised by some scholars as a work of “genius,” and the most crucial part of the gamut of land reform laws was the work of Arsanjani.[11] At the same time, landlords increased their attacks on Arsanjani as a rebel “against the constitution, the laws of religion, and the civil laws of the country.”[12] He served as a minister in the next cabinet, which was also headed by Alam. But relations between Arsanjani and the shah had begun to sour and soon became strained at best.

As minister of agriculture, Arsanjani had particularly close ties with Israel’s embassy in Iran. Long before his arrival at the ministry, the Israelis had been active in training Iranian experts in the work of creating and maintaining agriculture cooperatives. Israel also had a keen interest in developing agribusiness companies in Iran. In his memoir, the Israeli ambassador—an Iranian-born Jew who became a citizen of Israel and was for many years that country’s effective envoy to Iran—called Arsanjani one of Israel’s “good friends.” It was a friendship that began after Arsanjani’s initial refusal to meet the ambassador, saying, “ I don’t like foreigners, particularly Iranians who serve foreign countries.”[13] He eventually warmed up to the ambassador and became instrumental in facilitating the establishment of important Israeli industrial farms in Iran. As a result of this close friendship, when Arsanjani’s mother—with whom he lived at the time and on whom he doted— got sick, she was sent to Israel for medical care. It was to visit his hospitalized mother that Arsanjani first traveled to Israel. He made three other official trips to that country and was afforded special treatment. In one trip, Golda Meir, the prime minister, gave a gala dinner in Arsanjani’s honor.

On some of these trips, Arsanjani had with him one of his long list of “beautiful girl friends.” Although he was short (163 cm), bald, plump, and hardly a heartthrob, he was in his days as minister something of a playboy. Power is, as Henry Kissinger reminded everyone, an aphrodisiac and a strong potion that bestows sexual charisma on those who wield it. Arsanjani in those days wielded great power and carried with him the promise of even more.

At that time, he received a love letter from a young girl in Germany whom he had never met. He used to receive many such letters in those days. In fact, some months earlier, an eighteen-year-old girl had made a bet with her friends that she could ensnare the eligible bachelor through anonymous calls and letters. Eventually she published her story in one of Tehran’s magazines. Although the prey’s name was not mentioned, it was an open secret that it was Arsanjani.[14] The girl in Germany was of mixed parentage and seemed serious in her affection. Her name was Maryam Daftari—apparently a relative of MatinDaftari, who had been prime minister on the eve of World War II. She had seen Arsanjani on television and fallen in love. After professing her love, she and her beloved began talking on the phone. The long-distance conversations sometimes lasted for hours. Eventually, he invited her to visit Iran. By the time she came, he was on his way out of power. There were more than twenty years between him and his young love.

His habit of having thousands of peasants bused to the cities, where, in a frenzied pitch of populism, he delivered long, rousing speeches against the injustices of feudalism, created for him many fans among the poor and many foes among the rich. Many people saw him as a dangerous demagogue. Others close to the shah worried about the fact that Arsanjani’s ambition knew no bounds. Eventually the tone and tenor of the choreographed mass meetings began to attract the ire and anxiety of the shah. He had, after the 1953 experience, resolved never to allow any politician to develop an independent political base of his own, and Arsanjani was dangerously courting precisely that. When the shah asked Meir Ezry, the Israeli ambassador to Iran, what he thought of the minister of agriculture, he responded that Arsanjani was not “Minister of Agriculture but Minister of Peasants. That was a warning to the Shah. As soon as he could he shipped [Arsanjani] out of Iran.”[15] In February 1963, Arsanjani was dismissed as a minister and named Iran’s ambassador to Italy.

There was little for him to do in Italy. Such ambassadorships were often sinecures for politicians past their prime. That certainly was not how Arsanjani saw himself. Early in 1964, he approached the shah and asked his permission “to expound certain theoretical views on economics and government.” In an interview with an Iranian magazine, Omid Iran, a few months earlier, and in a television interview in August 1963, he had given a summary account of his views. The shah agreed to Arsanjani’s request. Arsanjani described a social democratic theory of governance, but in this article, he took it one important step further and criticized the Mansur government that had only recently come to power. A few days after the article’s publication, he tried to convince the shah that his views were shared by the Americans and that the “U.S. was actually supporting the democratic socialists in Italy, and according to reliable information available to him, also in England and Germany.” He told the shah he had evidence for his claims. The “evidence” turned out to be an article by the USIA entitled “The Semantics of Socialism and Capitalism,” and he had erroneously described it as a “CIA document.”[16]

In early September 1964, Arsanjani gave an interview to a small group of journalists in Rome. He directly criticized the Mansur government’s policies. He again repeated the idea that capitalism as promoted by the Mansur government “is an obsolete form of that system that has long been rejected by western democracies.”[17] The publication of these articles, and the fact that Arsanjani had been coming back to Tehran often from his post in Rome, gave rise to rumors that he would “soon return for good, and that he would found a ‘social democratic party.’”[18] Others talked of his appointment to an even more important political post.

On September 17, three days “after he had made his highly critical remarks about” Mansur government’s economic policies, he was summarily removed from his position as ambassador to Italy. The shah was angry and told the American Embassy that Arsanjani had “gone too far and that is inadmissible that an Iranian ambassador should publicly attack the government he was supposed to serve.”[19] According to the embassy report, Mansur had complained to the shah about Arsanjani’s back-biting.

When Arsanjani returned to Iran, he was not alone. In Italy, he had married the young girl he had first met through letters and long lingering phone conversations. They married in a simple ceremony attended only by Israel’s ambassador to Tehran, who traveled to Rome for the occasion and bore a gift from the government of Israel, and Saed Maraghei, one-time prime minister of Iran, and at that time Iran’s ambassador to the Vatican. Before long, the couple had a son. In Tehran, Arsanjani returned to his law practice. He was by then among the most famous lawyers in the country, and thus his practice became increasingly lucrative. He also began to accept cases that were of dubious legal merit but offered great financial rewards. In one case, for example, he agreed he received one million tooman ($150,000 in those days) for defending a notoriously corrupt businessman. Surely, as a lawyer, he was entitled to defend anyone accused of an alleged crime. But his practice was in sharp conflict with his past rhetoric about the evils of capitalist greed. He was amassing substantial sums of money, and he was stashing some of it away in a bank in Israel. “I want the people to know,” he told the Israeli ambassador, “that they can save here and not just in Swiss banks.[20]

One night in June 1969, he had a lavish party at his house. Later that evening he called doctors and complained of chest pain. He died before he reached the hospital. In addition to the history of rumors of foul play that invariably follow the death of every prominent modern Iranian politician, there was also the added factor that Arsanjani had been denied his passport for a while before his death.[21] His brother claims that he saved the glasses from the party and had them analyzed in foreign labs, and they confirmed the existence of poison.[22] The culprit in his brother’s narrative is a mysterious Marlyn, a beautiful woman who befriended Arsanjani shortly before his death and disappeared immediately after. It is not clear who masterminded the alleged conspiracy. Arsanjani’s friends point to his history of heart problems and to the fact that he did not pay any heed to earlier warnings by physicians. His only concession to them was that he walked from his office in Shemiran to his offices in the heart of the city every day. He was forty-seven years old when he died.

After his death, his family became involved in a bitter feud over money. His marriage had come to a relatively quick end. The controversy between his wife and his family bled into the pages of Tehran’s gossip columns and daily papers. His brother claimed that thirteen months before his death, Arsanjani had written a will clearly stipulating who should inherit his wealth. His wife’s lawyers contested the legality of the document on a technicality and won in court. At the same time, the brother claimed that his deceased brother had no money outside Iran.[23] He was wrong. Eventually the case became entangled in lawsuits in Israel, and the Israeli courts ruled in favor of his wife.[24]

Safi Asfia was the technocrats’ technocrat. He had the petulance of a prodigy, and his intense intelligence was an essential component of his identity and reputation. He had a way with numbers and figures, charts and plans, that bordered on wizardry. He was erudite and educated, disciplined and hardworking, with a knack for survival, and the combination of these attributes made him a consummate bureaucrat. He was among the small number of ministers of the ancien régime who decided not to leave Iran on the eve of or after the revolution, and he paid dearly for his decision. In the darkest hours of revolutionary terror, he was in prison and, by all accounts, conducted himself with exemplary integrity and grace, seeking solace in Sufi poetry.[1]

The prison experience, or maybe the harsh realities of the revolution itself, chastened him, making him wary of participation in anything that might appear political. Instead, he reinvented himself by returning to electronics, the passion of his youth, and now spends countless hours with his computer, in the safe harbor of the Internet. He was well into his seventies when he learned how to program computers and wrote a program “for celestial bodies calculations for every day use of astronomers.”[2] In the same period, he joined the board of the Zirakzadeh Science Foundation, which is committed to creating science centers for children and young people.

His life of relative isolation changes once a year when he travels for a few weeks to France, where he stays with his only daughter. Even during these summer sojourns, he is reluctant to rekindle many friendships, lest his friends are involved in politics. He even refused to be interviewed for this book.[3]

Although his reluctance was partially the result of his understandable anxiety about what might await him in Iran, even in his days of power he was known to be haughty, cautious, averse to the limelight, distant, even arrogant. He was never a man of many words. For him, as for Shakespeare’s Polonius, “brevity is the soul of wit.” He was known as a man “sparing in words, most cordial and appreciative.”[4] Friends and foes concurred that he was one “of the ablest of the Iranian technical and administrative men.”[5] They describe him as “a redoubtable little man, a flyweight with the punch of a heavy, like some of those lightweight greats.”[6]

Along with the common profuse praise come also a few acerbic words of criticism. Even some of his friends accuse him of too much accommodation. During the reign of the shah, there were three kinds of technocrats. There were those who were corrupt, and in retrospect their number was far smaller than the public perception at the time, when corruption was deemed to be pervasive and had become one of the people’s main complaints. There were those who were impeccably honest, and tried to stop any kind of corruption, even if they ended up paying a price themselves. The third group were those who were honest but looked the other way when witnessing corruption. Safi Asfia was, according to some of his detractors, of the last group—no doubt honest but unwilling to stand up to the corruption of others. One of his friends, Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, accuses him of “giving up something [he] believed in without any fight at all.”[7] Critics like Fardust, on the other hand, go so far as to claim that Asfia even accommodated the corrupt practices of others, and they accuse him of giving big awards to the shah and the queen’s friends and family.[8] Asfia had an unusually close relationship with the queen, whom he has described as “a charming, fine girl, a good mind, intelligent and capable,” adding that, “she was in school with [his] daughter.”[9]

In spite of the occasional rumblings of critics, there is consensus that he was one of the most efficient, honest, and beloved officials during the last quarter century of the shah’s rule. The judgment of Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian—the same man who also had a few words of criticism for him—is typical of views often articulated about Asfia:

Safi Asfia served for fourteen years at the Plan Organization. Few could match him in terms of education or depth of knowledge. During those years, I rarely saw anyone who could match his technical know-how. He was no economist but easily understood these questions and as easily determined what was in [the country’s] best interest. He was not after political power, nor was keen on showing off the power he had. Even when he felt like he had power, he never bragged about it. There was a special calm and tranquility about him. He never insisted on his own views. We could go and convince him. In meetings, he would calmly say a few words, and then sit back and watch. But I must tell you that in those years. . . . I never saw a minister be as popular as Asfia. Anytime a minister had a problem, they went to him, and he was something of a arbiter.[10]

The engineer-technocrat-arbiter was born in Tehran in 1916 (1295). Some sources say he was born in 1915.[11] He was something of a child prodigy, and was only fifteen when he completed high school. In spite of his youth, he was the top student in the country. His age was an obstacle to his participation in the national exam used to select the recipients of government scholarships for studying abroad. As soon as he was of age, he took part in the exam and, not surprisingly, he won one of the coveted scholarships.[12]

He went to Paris, where he was accepted to France’s most prestigious school of engineering—the famous Ecole Polytechnique of Paris. Set up at the time of the French Revolution, the school was intended to train public servants in the sciences. It was where the elite of French society study. The school’s motto is “Pour la patrie, les sciences et la gloire.” Among the schools alumni are Henri Poincare, Auguste Comte, and Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Even in that august company, Safi stood out. He was only twenty-three when he graduated with degrees in engineering and mining.

Soon after finishing college, he returned to Iran and began to teach at the university. He loved teaching and maintained his contacts with the university long after he had joined the government. He even published books on Iran’s natural resources.[13] His first job outside the university was in the Ministry of Mines, where he worked for eight years. It was during these years that he helped develop blueprints for the Tehran water system; before that there was no system for distributing water in the city and each household had to fend for itself. He also completed a study of Iran’s underground water resources.[14] Although in those years the whole country was caught in the passion of nationalist politics, Asfia essentially steered clear of any political entanglement. He was a true bureaucrat, in the sense meant by Max Weber, who introduced the concept into social theory. Bureaucrats, Weber said, are apolitical experts who maintain continuity and stability in democracies where elections intermittently change the government. Asfia also worked part-time in the private sector as a consultant. His employer was Majid A’lam, who owned one of Iran’s biggest construction firms. But Asfia’s life changed in 1954.

Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj was appointed the director of the Plan Organization, and in 1954 he created two new offices—the technical office and the economic bureau—and began recruiting the best and brightest Iranians for posts at the organization. He had heard of Asfia, and after much effort he convinced A’lam to “lend him Asfia” for only four months. For the first few months, Asfia refused to become a full-time government functionary, receiving instead monthly checks as a “special advisor.” Ebtehaj eventually convinced Asfia to stay on, losing A’lam’s friendship as a result.[15] Thus began Asfia’s stellar career of public service, where he became, according to many, “one of the most important officials responsible for Iran’s economic development.”[16] He served at the Plan Organization for the next fourteen years, beginning as consultant to Ebtehaj and within seven years becoming the director himself.

During his tenure there, the Third Plan was implemented and the Fourth Plan began to be developed. He had a crucial role in the development of the Khuzestan Development Project, put in place with the help of American companies led by David Lilienthal. Both Lilienthal, whose company drew up the plans for the entire ambitious project, and AbdolReza Ansary, who was for many years the Iranian director of the project, praise Asfia and commend him for fighting off the many foes of the plan. In Ansary’s words, “with power and prudence, he oversaw and safeguarded the completion of the [Khuzestan] project.”[17] Asfia also played a crucial role in planning and building two of Iran’s most important dams, Karaj and Dez. In recognition of his role in the Khuzestan Development Project, a research center connected to the dam was named Safiabad.[18]

As the director of the Plan Organization, Asfia was also responsible for developing a comprehensive new system for categorizing contractors and determining the size of projects they could bid for. Moreover, he was keen on decentralizing some of the work of the Plan Organization, for example allowing local governments to oversee some of the construction projects themselves, something that had been anathema to Ebtehaj.

At the end of his tenure at the Plan Organization, Asfia became deputy prime minister, in charge of social and economic development. For almost the entire thirteen years of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda’s tenure as the prime minister, Asfia was at his side—his trusted confidant, advisor, and troubleshooter.[19] There were few development projects undertaken in this period in which Asfia did not play a role, however small.

Not only was he at the center of power for much of the last two decades of the shah’s rule; he was also connected by marriage to other powerful men in the regime. His sister was married to Abbas Khalatbari, Iran’s foreign minister in the early 1970s, while his own wife was the sister of Taher Ziai, a leading entrepreneur and a powerful senator.

His long years at the center of power and his blood ties to prominent figures of the shah’s regime combined to land Asfia in jail when the Islamic Revolution came. Those were the days when Khalkhali, the infamous “hanging judge,” was wreaking havoc on the lives of generals, ministers, senators, and entrepreneurs of the ancien régime. In terms of the importance of the posts they had held, or the longevity of their days in power, few of those arrested or executed could match Asfia. It has been claimed that what saved his life was more than anything the fact that Mehdi Bazorgan, the prime minister of the new Islamic government, knew Asfia from their days in Paris and thus “[he] was spared death.”[20]
After prison, Asfia returned to science and mathematics, the passions of his youth, and found new avocations in the field of computer technology. The studied silence he has maintained has only added to his mystique as the engineering prodigy who entered politics and remained true to the values of the prestigious school he attended in Paris, “For country, science, and glory.”

To the Shah, he was an obsession. Beaming with the successes of the early 1970s oil boom, eagerly anticipating hundreds of world leaders to help him celebrate twenty-five hundred years of monarchy, and anxiously attempting to portray Iran as an island of security in a turbulent area, almost every day the shah asked his increasingly agitated security chief, General Nasiri, about him. For the SAVAK, keen on reinforcing its image as omnipotent and omniscient, and for its chief, bent on keeping the king satisfied, he had become an embarrassment and a political liability. The general knew only too well that on occasions too numerous for comfort, he had slipped through their fingers. One time, he slipped out of three lines of encirclement around his hideout.[1] Even his enemies had come to praise his mental and physical agility, his unfailing instinct for finding a way out of dangerous situations, and his cool fearlessness in times of trouble and danger. To the shah and his secret police, he was a heartless terrorist, a bank robber, an agent of “foreign forces” ill at ease with the shah’s unbending stance on increasing the price of oil.[2] To a whole generation of young Iranian activists, he was the icon of a new kind of revolutionary: fearless, free from orthodox Marxist dogma, armed and ready to die and kill for the cause. His name was Hamid Ashraf and his cause was “armed revolution” against the shah, or, in his own words, “the treacherous regime and its imperialist lackeys.”

A badly rebuffed attack on a small military outpost in the village of Siahkal on February 8, 1971, became a celebrated seminal event for a handful of radicals who called themselves the Feda’yan Khalgh (martyrs for the masses). At that time, their number was so small, their organization so miniscule that they did not want to call themselves an organization. Ashraf became the public face of this movement. Their tactic of choice was terrorism. Nothing in his decidedly middle-class past hinted at what lay ahead in his life. The longer he escaped arrest, the more successful acts of terror he and his group engaged in, the more prestigious they became.

When the regime put a price on his head, and when his picture (along with eight of his comrades) was published throughout the country, he became a household name. Before long, this group combined with a couple of other similar-minded ones and formed what they called the Organization of the Feda’yan Khalgh.[3] They also established a logo that combined the traditional communist red star and hammer and sickle with the raised machine gun that was in that decade fast becoming the symbol of armed guerrilla movements. Thus was a myth born.

Hamid Ashraf was born on December 31, 1946 (10 Dey 1325) to a family of middleclass means and manners. His father worked for the Iranian railroad system. After the events of 1953 and the fall of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, Hamid’s father was named the head of the railroad offices in the city of Tabriz. His older brother, Ahmad, by then already fully immersed in the world of politics and an advocate of Mossadeq, became a mentor to Hamid and instilled in him a love of the fallen prime minister and disdain for the shah.

Hamid’s first brush with Marxist ideas came when he was in the third grade of elementary school in Tabriz. His teacher was a devout Marxist and taught his young and impressionable students about class struggle and the evils of capitalism.[4] As a child, Hamid was taciturn and quiet. As an adult, he remained a man of few words. He listened more than he talked. He had piercing, observant eyes that combined with his calm and quiet manner to give him an air of mystery.[5] He was polite and deferential to others, particularly his elders. He was organized to a fault, and disciplined in all he undertook. When he set his mind on a task, he was tireless and relentless in his pursuit of his goal. These traits served him well in his days of underground struggle.

By the time he was in high school, the family had moved back to Tehran. Always a student of sterling academic achievement, Hamid was admitted to the much-coveted Alborz high school. But his defiant manners and his inability to tolerate stern authority put him on a collision course with the school’s renowned disciplinarian principal, Dr. Mojtahedi. Eventually Hamid was thrown out of Alborz.

In 1961, as he was attending summer school at Kharazmi and looking for another high school, he met Farokh Negahdar. The school was rumored to have been founded by erstwhile communists; it also had a reputation as one of the best schools of its kind. It attracted highly intelligent but often political-minded students.

Before long, Ashraf and Negahdar became close friends, joined by their common passion for politics and social action. Of the two, Negahdar was the more seasoned activist. They visited Tehran’s working class ghettos and often discussed the perfidy of the system that allowed such disparity of wealth.[6] They also began to read works of literature, philosophy, and Marxism. Occasionally they worked all day and night to copy, by hand, a whole Marxist manuscript they had been lent. After spending a year at Hadaf high school, Hamid joined his friend Farokh at the Dar al-Funun high school, the country’s oldest institution of modern pedagogy, famous in the fifties and sixties as a hotbed of student radicalism. At least five of the students in Hamid’s class were killed in armed confrontations with the shah’s regime in the course of the next decade. Hamid spent his last two years of high school there.

For Hamid, as for a generation of students, a conjunction of internal and external factors worked to shape the ideology and practice of their new brand of radicalism. The Cuban revolution and the romance of Che Guevara, the itinerant revolutionary; the Algerian revolution, with Franz Fanon and his apotheosis of violence; the war in Vietnam and its advocacy of “wars of national liberation”; Nasser of Egypt with his brand of Arab, anti-shah radical nationalism; and finally Mao’s model for revolution in the third world, provided the global backdrop to this new revolutionary movement.

In Iran’s internal politics, the reforms fostered by the Amini government in 1961 had brought about a revival of the activities of such traditional and hitherto dormant groups as the National Front, or moderate religious forces led by Bazorgan. Also emerging was Ayatollah Khomeini’s new rhetoric of an Islamic revolution, and even a new group claiming to be a revival of the communist Tudeh Party. But the relatively peaceful activities of these groups all came to an abrupt end on June 5, 1963, when an uprising in support of Ayatollah Khomeini was forcefully put down. The shah’s “White Revolution,” with its land reform, enfranchisement for women, and workers rights, was, in the words of a United States government analysis, taking the wind out of the opposition’s sails. But Ashraf and his small but dedicated group of students took a different lesson from these events. They decided that the time for peaceful transition and political reform had ended and that the only solution to Iran’s problems was “armed struggle.”

The problem was, of course, “the complacency” of the masses, which seemed unwilling to participate in any revolution. For Ashraf and activists like Bijan Jazani, sold on the cult of the proletariat and its revolutionary zeal, this complacency was temporary and only the result of the regime’s oppressive policy. The people, they felt, had become intimidated. They falsely assumed the regime to be invincible. The solution that Ashraf and like-minded radicals envisioned was simple: a small band of dedicated radicals, ready and willing to die for the cause, must take heroic action to break the regime’s veneer of invincibility. They must show the people that the regime was, in fact, vulnerable and become “the motor” for starting the revolution of the masses.[7] This theory was being propagated at about the same time in much of Latin America by the Castro revolution and in the writings of such radicals as Michelle Debre and Carlos Mariguella of Brazil. More important, it had deep roots in the Iranian cultural heritage and in the annals of revolutionary thought as well.

One of the most tenacious tenets of Iranian Shiism is the cult of martyrs. Hoseyn and his small band of friends were martyred to keep the cause alive. The word feda’y clearly conjures this cultural memory.

Furthermore, in the history of the nineteenth century, when the romance of redemptive revolution was enshrined in radical thought, the figure of Sergei Nechaev played an often ignored but crucial role. His Catechism for a Revolutionary is eerily similar in tone and texture as well as content and intent to what Ashraf and his cohorts believed. A small dedicated group of “professional revolutionaries,” single-minded in their commitment to the group, ready to kill and die for the cause, must use any means necessary to achieve the goal of fermenting a revolution. It was in the smithy of this eclectic mix of “local” and global ideas that Ashraf’s ideology was shaped.

In 1965, Hamid was accepted to Tehran University’s Faculty of Engineering, reputed to be another hotbed of student radicalism. About this time, he joined a loosely organized, highly secretive organization committed to “armed struggle in the cities and the countryside.”[8] The group was led by Bijan Jazani. Before long, Jazani was arrested as a student activist. His role as the leader of this nascent organization remained unknown to the regime for several years. When the regime learned of it, when they realized that he had been leading the movement from inside the prison for some time, they exacted a brutal revenge. In what is arguably the most brazenly brutal and illegal act of the shah’s entire reign, Jazani and eight other prisoners—two of whom had tried to escape and had been caught[9] —were taken from prison to the wilderness around the infamous Evin prison and shot to death. Newspapers claimed they had been shot while trying to escape.

In the meantime, during his university days, Ashraf tried never to take the leading role in any of the student actions. Only once did he agree to become part of the student committee chosen to meet with the chancellor of the university after a particularly bitter strike. In that meeting, Ashraf took the lead and attacked the university’s policies in particularly harsh terms. He was later reprimanded by his comrades for risking their underground work by such an overt show of sentiment.[10] Not long after that meeting, Hamid was forced to go underground, and thus began a new phase of his activities.

He had become the kind of full-fledged “professional revolutionary” Nechaev and Lenin had talked about. But Ashraf’s brand of revolution, focused on armed and violent battle with the regime, was different from Lenin’s more “political” path. After several months, Ashraf wrote a brief note to his parents telling them he was safe. He was fast emerging as one of the leading members of the still embryonic group.

The life and activities of this group were almost aborted by a member of SAVAK who had infiltrated it. Much of the leadership was arrested. Ashraf escaped and took upon himself the task of reviving the organization. A few years later, after the group had begun open confrontation with the regime, Ashraf was apparently involved in an action that killed—or, in the parlance of the group, took part in the “revolutionary execution” of—the man who had betrayed their organization, Abbas Shahriyari. He had come to be known as “a man with a thousand faces.” He was arguably the secret police’s most effective weapon in infiltrating opposition groups. In fact, he created from scratch a whole new supposedly “revolutionary organization” connected to the Tudeh Party. He was also involved in the SAVAK’s successful attempt to kill General Bakhtiyar, once the powerful head of SAVAK and by the mid-1960s an enemy, and another of the shah’s obsessions.[11]

In 1974, Shahriyari reappeared in Tehran with a new identity. Ashraf and his friends found him and tracked his movements; as he left his house on the designated day, a team that apparently included Ashraf approached him, opened fire and, after making sure he was dead by firing a shot to his head, distributed pamphlets describing their action, as was their wont, then disappeared into the crowd.[12] Of course in the murky world of radical underground politics, where survival is dependent on leaving no trace, where everything is on a “need to know” basis, and where curiosity really does kill the cat, it is hard to establish beyond a reasonable doubt whether Hamid Ashraf was personally involved in this action. There is, however, no doubt that at the time it took place, he was the leader of the organization.

Indeed, after the attack at Siahkal, literally the entire leadership of the nascent organization had been either killed in the confrontation or arrested and later executed. Hamid was the sole surviving founding member of the group.[13] The actual quality of his leadership is buried in an avalanche of hagiographies on the one hand, and speculation and hearsay on the other. Some call him the “Great Comrade” and a shining light in the movement against the shah. Others accuse him of pursuing “Stalinist practices,” ignoring internal democracy, and engaging in “Machiavellian problem solving.”[14] They write of his role in executing several members of the organization “for wanting to leave” the group.[15] What is clear is that he was less a man of theory and more a man of action. He wrote little. He was so busy with the work of running the organization and planning and executing its attacks that he had little time for romance or for attending to his family. He avoided all contact with them, in fact. The police tried to put pressure on him to surrender by arresting his younger brother, but the move had no effect. He seems to have been romantically involved with one woman, also a member of the underground group.

There is some evidence to indicate that as the situation his group faced grew more desperate, he considered accepting help from the Soviet Union, but when the Soviets required “intelligence on the Iranian military,” he refused to provide it and ordered his representatives to break off all discussions with them.[16] What is also clear is that with every day that he escaped arrest, he became more of a myth—and produced more of a headache for the SAVAK.

What made his arrest particularly urgent, and contributed to the sense of danger, was the fact that the regime had planned, for almost twenty years, a massive party to celebrate twenty-five hundred years of monarchy. According to Hamid Ashraf, the shah wanted to show the world that Iran was an island of security, ripe for investments from Western companies. Ashraf’s group, on the other hand, had set up as one of its immediate goals the disruption of these celebrations.[17] Although they only succeeded in destroying a few electrical relay stations and robbing a few banks—in one case their haul was a mere three thousand tooman, or four hundred dollars, while their biggest heist brought in six hundred thousand tooman, or about eighty-five thousand dollars[18]—and though they never numbered more than fifty members in all of Iran, and often could distribute no more than three thousand leaflets,[19] the shah and his secret police panicked when they learned of the group’s existence and went on an all-out war against them. Ashraf and his group were caught off guard by the massive show of force by the regime. They paid dearly for their miscalculation.

The more the regime panicked, the more the group’s reputation and prestige increased. A dangerous game of one-upmanship seemed to exist between the regime and the group. Every action by one side—the assassination of a general or the execution of a political activist in prison—brought about reprisals from the other side. Ashraf and his group also targeted American interests in Iran, though they did not kill any Americans in these actions.

Reports about torture in Iran’s prisons—a public relations fiasco for the shah’s regime throughout the 1970s—and tales of heroism in face of this brutality, began immediately after members of this group arrived in prison. Furthermore, stories about Ashraf’s repeated daredevil escapes and of his mockery of the SAVAK by slipping through their traps, made him a cultural hero and icon to some, and a dreaded and despised nemesis to others. His continued ability to escape finally forced the secret police to extreme measures. An elaborate trap was set up for him, on the outside chance that he would fall for it. In his words, the “golden rule” for a successful guerilla was “absolute mobility, absolute distrust, and absolute vigilance.”[20] The plan would work only if Ashraf failed to follow those rules.

Early in 1976, SAVAK arrested a member of the organization who had been in touch with Ashraf. After a few months, the regime decided to free him but to track him closely in the hope that Ashraf would contact him. By then the organization had suffered numerous hits and lost many of its members. After about two months, Ashraf called his freed comrade. Keeping in mind his own “golden rule,” their conversations were always brief—less than a minute—so that the police could not track the call.

Frustrated after a few weeks, the SAVAK was about to give up on the scheme when one of the agents suggested a last-ditch effort. In those days in Iran, the sudden existence of new phone lines led to repeated disruption in services. All too often lines would get jammed or crossed. Unexpected overlapping conversations had become a fact of life. The SAVAK decided to jam the line when Ashraf called, and just as he began to talk, they would begin a particularly scintillating conversation, filled with juicy political gossip about the regime. Their hope was that Ashraf would be enticed by the gossip to stay on the line long enough for them to track it.

He took the bait. Ashraf stayed on to hear the overlapping conversation, and the police tracked the call to a public phone in a lower-middle-class neighbor near Tehran’s airport. After carefully and discreetly keeping the neighborhood under close surveillance, they located Ashraf’s house and began to plan their attack. On the designated day (June 29, 1976), they had close to seven lines of encirclement around the house and the neighborhood. When they tried to arrest him, he and those with him in the house fought back. As it turned out, the police had attacked on the day when the remaining leaders of the organization were holding an emergency meeting in the house. All ten present were killed, including Ashraf. He was killed on the roof as he was trying to escape once again. A sniper in one of the many helicopters that were used in the attack shot him in the forehead. The shah was called almost immediately. He wanted them to make sure they had positively and correctly identified the body. They had.[21] The papers that night declared in big headlines that Hamid Ashraf was dead. By then he was the oldest living member of the Feda’yan organization. His family was ordered not to hold a wake for him. Three years later, the Islamic Revolution came, and with it the Left used its cultural clout to begin the apotheosis of Hamid Ashraf.

Mahshid Amirshahi is an angry Iranian woman. She is also a clever writer, with an eye for the foibles and fantasies of human beings, and a talent for prose that pulsates with the vigor and tempo of life itself. The drudgeries of exile have embittered her already exacting disposition toward the men and women of her country.

In her two scathing novels about the days leading to the Islamic revolution and about the émigré life in Paris in the post–Islamic Revolution period—each a combination of journalist reporting and roman à clef—the moral, cultural, political, and emotional center of the sprawling narratives is a character unmistakably modeled on Shapur Bakhtiyar. In one of the books, he is actually called Bakhtiyar. When the narrator first hears that Bakhtiyar has accepted the post of prime minister, she “feels first a sense of security and then joy. So it turned alright after all. The wish of people like me finally became reality. From tomorrow, we can begin to live—protected by a popular government, which will take control, begin reforms, establish order.”[1]

For Amirshahi these were not mere words of praise, written in the comfort of exile or with the privilege of hindsight. She was that rare intellectual who dared to swim against the tide of revolution and bravely declare herself a supporter of the Bakhtiyar government.[2] Later, in an interview with a popular magazine, she hailed Bakhtiyar as “the embodiment of human perfection, and intellect.”[3]

In the midst of the deracinated souls who inhabit her two novels and never miss an opportunity to show their moral, intellectual, financial, and political mendacity, Bakhtiyar is unfailingly fearless and clever. He is urbane and erudite, as much a cosmopolitan as a patriot, equally at home with Hafez as with Victor Hugo. He is honest beyond reproach, generous to a fault, and humble to the point of self-effacement. He is a social democrat in the most idealized sense of the words—dedicated to both economic justice and political democracy for all.

Amirshahi’s apotheosis of her beloved Bakhtiyar is typical of one pole of reaction to the man who was active in Iranian politics for thirty-seven years but entered the annals of history when he defied most of his friends and comrades and became Iran’s prime minister for thirty-seven days. Was he, as supporters like Amirshahi suggest, a true patriot and statesman who risked life and limb, and the reputation he had worked thirty-seven years to build, to save the country from its march to madness and clerical theocracy? Or had he come to save a moribund monarchy, as his leftist critics allege, while catering to his insatiable appetite for power? Was he a weak politician with a heavy opium addiction, or was he a strong leader with a constitutional aversion to any addiction?

The shah, when referring to Bakhtiyar, only offered the kind of faint praise that smacks of bitterness. He wrote, “It was with some reluctance and under foreign pressure that I agreed to appoint [Bakhtiyar] Prime Minister. I had always considered him an Anglo-phile and an agent of the British Petroleum. . . . I finally decided to name Bakhtiyar Prime Minister after my meeting with Lord George Brown, once Foreign Secretary in Britain.”[4]

In Queen Farah’s account of the appointment, prepared a good quarter of century later, there was no mention of the British role. Instead, she wrote that the head of SAVAK, General Nasser Moghadam, and the notoriously hard-line General Gholamali Oveissi were the ones “who put forward the name of Shapur Bakhtiyar.”[5] The contentious question of Bakhtiyar’s character and legacy followed him in exile and was further complicated by rumors that he had accepted money from Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein to maintain his government in exile. While the debate about his role and intention continued unabated among Iranian émigrés, assassins—apparently hired by the Islamic Republic of Iran—were busy worming their way into Bakhtiyar’s tightly guarded inner circle. They had come to kill one of the most intriguing personalities in modern Iranian politics.

Shapur Bakhtiyar was born on June 26, 1914 (4 Tir 1293) among the Bakhtiyar tribe. Half a million strong, the Bakhtiyaris were nomads, moving between their summer and winter grounds in the southern half of the country. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were one of the most influential tribes in Iran. Many of their members played significant roles in the politics of the country. One of Shapur’s relatives, Teymur, was for four critical years the powerful head of the secret police, SAVAK, while another relative, Soraya, was the shah’s famously beautiful second wife. Shapur’s maternal grandfather was Samsam-al Saltaneh, a key political figure of his time who had held numerous ministerial portfolios and had even been prime minister.

Shapur was seven when he lost his mother. He was sent to school in Shahre-Kurd and Isfahan and eventually to Beirut, where he enrolled in a French high school. In the years before World War II many of Iran’s elite families sent their children to Beirut to be educated. French and American schools of all levels afforded these young Iranians a chance to get a first-rate education yet also to be relatively close to home. Shapur was a charismatic member of this group. It was there that he first dabbled in social democratic politics and ideas. His love of French language and culture began in those days and remained with him for the rest of his life.

Bakhtiyar planned to go to France for college after he finished high school but tragedy changed his plans. In 1934, the Iranian government, in an attempt to forcefully settle all nomads, executed his father along with four other relatives. Shapur had no choice but to return home. While family exigencies required him to stay in Iran for the next two years, his heart and mind were in Paris.

When he finally went to Paris in 1936, he immediately enrolled at the Sorbonne, from where he graduated in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. His education was disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Bakhtiyar then made the unusual decision to join the Orlean Battalion of the French army.

After a two-year term in the French military, he resumed his education. In 1945 he earned a doctoral degree in political science from the Sorbonne. Not long afterward, he returned to Iran and began to work in sundry jobs. By then he had married a French woman named Madeleine, and they had four children—Giv, Viviane, Patrick, and France.

Late in life, when he was in exile, the septuagenarian Bakhtiyar married again, this time to a Persian woman named Shahin. She was his distant relative and many years his junior. Together they had one child, Goudarz. The union was kept a close secret for several years. He and his aides feared that the prudish and brutal propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic might use his marriage against him.

When it became apparent that the regime in Tehran was complicit in Bakhtiyar’s assassination, one of his daughters sued and won a still uncollected judgment against the Islamic Republic for the murder of her father. The second wife, Shahin, and her son are also suing, in American courts, for similar damages. They are still waiting for a court date.[6]

After receiving his doctorate in Paris, Bakhtiyar returned to Iran, where he was soon drawn to the arena of politics. In 1949 he joined the Iran Party—a party of middle-class values and ways—and was soon named the head of its youth organization. As a member of the party, he also joined the National Front in 1949, of which he remained a part for the next three decades. During the days of Mohammad Mossadeq’s government, Bakhtiyar was still on the margins of leadership of the nationalist movement. His highest appointment during Dr. Mossadeq’s tenure as prime minister was undersecretary of labor. After the events of August 1953, Bakhtiyar spent a short time in prison. By 1961, he had emerged as one of the leaders of the National Front and a fierce proponent of Mossadeq.

The years after August 1953 were a period of agony and defeat for people like Bakhtiyar. Mossadeq was in prison, and his movement was in retreat. There was a sense of despair in the air. Bakhtiyar, like many leaders of the National Front, tried to combine prudent caution, tactical silence, and strategic enmity to the shah. The little political activity he engaged in was done under the rubric of what was called “the National Resistance Movement,” in cooperation with figures like Mehdi Bazorgan and Ayatollah Taleghani.[7] Both later became central figures in the first Islamic government in Iran.

In the meantime, Bakhtiyar was biding his time. He began to work in the private sector, managing factories or acting as an advisor to big companies. The shah tried to combine a policy of appeasement and cooption with one of containment and suppression toward the National Front. The shah occasionally attacked the leaders of the National Front, particularly those like Bakhtiyar who were members of the Iran Party, for complicity with the communists and with Mossadeq—“they had drunk champagne” with the secessionists of Azerbaijan, the shah often railed against them—but nevertheless allowed these leaders to find jobs that allowed them to survive. At the same time, those who made their peace with the shah were generously rewarded. Fereydun Mahdavi, a leader of the National Front’s youth organizations in the early 1960s, was by the early 1970s a powerful member of the Hoveyda cabinet.

In Bakhtiyar’s own words, the advent of the Kennedy administration in 1961 was a great impetus for the revival of the National Front, or, more exactly, for the creation of what is often called the Second and Third National Front. From 1961 to 1964, under heavy pressure from the United States, the shah was forced to consider a coalition government with the National Front. There were intense internal debates within the National Front about whether to join such a coalition. On the one hand, those still deeply embittered by the events of August 1953 wanted nothing to do with the shah and his regime. On the other hand, people like Bakhtiyar advocated a policy of using any opportunities to negotiate with the shah and try to bring to power a more democratic and nationalist government.[8]

Ultimately, the leaders advocating a no-contact policy won the day. They proved unwilling to enter into a coalition with any of the shah’s prime ministers—from Amini and Alam to Mansur and Hoveyda. Ironically, the same leaders were surprisingly amenable to the idea of a coalition fifteen years later, when Ayatollah Khomeini offered them a minor role in a transitional government. In the 1960s, Bakhtiyar was one of the few voices advocating a more nimble policy. In 1978, he was again one of the lone voices opposed to a coalition with the clergy. In both periods, he directly attacked some of the most venerable leaders of the Front as ineffectual, passive, and dogmatic. His motto, he said, had always been that “true men of action dare take chances, and accept risks.”[9]

Of all the leaders of the National Front, he was particularly prominent for his uncanny combination of feisty, sometimes reckless militancy, and a Machiavellian pragmatism that preferred tactical flexibility to ideological purity. He was, in consequence, always ready to negotiate and talk not only to the shah and his regime but to foreign embassies as well. As early as 1951, he was willing to discuss the political views of the National Front with the British and American Embassies.

These meetings might have been at least partially responsible for the charge by his critics and foes that he was an Anglophile. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, for example, in 1951 one of the most important allies of the National Front, claimed that when he and his party activists attacked the famous Sedan house, where the head of the British oil company lived, and confiscated his papers, they found evidence among them that Bakhtiyar not only worked for the British but had received at least once a ten-thousand-tooman payment. Sometimes the British even prepared his speeches, Baqa’i-Kermani claims.[10]

Bakhtiyar, for his part, dismissed the documents as fabrications. “Only Baqa’i had ever seen them,” he said sarcastically, when asked about them.[11]

Other times, his fiery character, his fierce independence, and his frankness created problems not just for him, but also for his comrades in the National Front. In the early 1960s, for example, as the National Front was trying to reorganize, nearly the entire leadership deferred to Alahyar Saleh, the elder statesman of the Front. But Bakhtiyar openly and defiantly asked Saleh to step aside and allow new blood into the leadership.[12] He also gave a fiery speech at a tour de force mass rally organized by the National Front at the Jalaliyeh racetrack, in which tens of thousands of people participated, advocating not only an end to Iran’s membership in CENTO but complete neutrality for Iran. Once translations of the speech found their way to Washington, the American government grew wary of the National Front and support for it began to dampen.

But these qualities mattered little in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The shah was on the offensive at that time. He had made wide-ranging reforms and had tried to take the wind out of the opposition’s sails.[13] Some of the most radical activists in the National Front had given up on the idea of peaceful reform and opted instead for terrorist activities—or guerrilla activities, in the parlance of the time. The confluence of these factors led to a tactical retreat for the democratic opposition and people like Bakhtiyar. But then Jimmy Carter was elected president in America, and his repeated references to the human rights records of the shah injected a spirit of optimism into hitherto dormant groups like the National Front. The shah was now vulnerable, they assumed, and they reentered the political fray.

In fact, in early 1977, Hoveyda, by then court minister, cognizant of the gathering storm, was convinced that Amuzegar lacked the political temperament to face the coming crisis.[14] He invited the leaders of the National Front, including Bakhtiyar, to reenter politics. Before long, Bakhtiyar and two other leaders of the Front—Karim Sanjabi and Darius Forouhar—signed and published an open letter to the shah asking him to respect the constitution, disband the single-party system, and free all political prisoners. The country was in crisis, the three leaders claimed, and the source of the crisis was the shah’s “style of management . . . that is contrary to the letter of the Iranian constitution and to articles of Declaration of Human Rights.”[15] After the letter was published, Bakhtiyar was among those beaten up by thugs and arrested by the police. But their arrest did not last long. The tide was turning in their favor. In fact, one of the three leaders—Sanjabi—was taken directly from prison to the palace to meet with the shah.

As the crisis deepened and the increasing role of the clergy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, became more evident, the leadership of the National Front was split into different camps. While the bulk of the leadership joined Sanjabi and jumped on the Ayatollah Khomeini bandwagon, a handful joined Sadiqi and Bakhtiyar to do all they could to forestall the advent of a theocracy. Within days of one another, the two leaders accepted the challenge of forming a coalition government to try to thwart the clergy’s grab for power.

Between these two leaders, there was, however, a crucial point of difference. While Dr. Sadiqi predicated his acceptance of the post of prime minister on the shah staying in Iran, Bakhtiyar’s condition was that the shah must leave. Was this only a tactical difference, or did it imply different strategic goals for the two men? Did Sadiqi want to preserve the monarchy but reduce it to a ceremonial role? Was Bakhtiyar bent on dismantling it? Of all the leaders of the National Front, Bakhtiyar was the most vocal and unabashed in defense of secular democracy and in his willingness to criticize the clergy openly. From the cracking of clergy’s sandals, he famously said, he heard the sounds of fascism.

On the late December night when Bakhtiyar was having his first press conference as the prime minister designate, the shah was watching the program while paying cards with three of his closest friends. Journalists were asking barbed questions, and Bakhtiyar answered them with aplomb. The shah, impressed with the performance, turned to Majid A’lam and said, “Do you see how he handles the press? I wonder where he has been all of these years?” A’lam gingerly responded that Bakhtiyar had, all these years, worked for A’lam, and that even his work in the private sector had been opposed initially by SAVAK.[16] A’lam’s reply pointed to a crucial fact of history: During the 1960s and 1970s, all political parties, including the moderate National Front, were denied any place or voice in the political process. The only exception to this rule was the clergy, and they had used the opportunity to create an elaborate political network that reached into every neighborhood. By 1979, they possessed the only nationwide network of sympathetic cells, which could be found in every corner of the country. The secular democrats, on the other hand, were dispersed, disorganized, and dispirited. The odds, in other words, were heavily stacked against Bakhtiyar when he agreed to become prime minister.

Aside from this structural imbalance, which favored his foes, other factors also made his decision to accept the post as much an act of patriotic heroism as the delusion of a quixotic political knight-errant. The army was deeply suspicious of Bakhtiyar and when General Fereydun Jam refused to join the cabinet—either because the shah refused to grant him command of the army as Jam claimed, or because Jam too had demanded that the shah must leave Iran, as the shah claimed—Bakhtiyar’s fate was sealed. Moreover, President Carter sent General Robert E. Huyser to Iran on January 5, 1979, without Bakhtiyar’s or the shah’s knowledge. His job was to convince the army that the United States would not support a coup in favor of the shah. Most generals interpreted this gesture as a sign that the days of the Pahlavi dynasty had ended and that America had already made its peace with the new revolutionary regime. The American Embassy, too, was by late 1978 convinced that nothing short of “regime change” could bring stability to Iran.

Bakhtiyar’s comrades in the Front announced his expulsion from their ranks even before the official declaration that he had agreed to form the cabinet had been made. Of the many secular intellectuals who shared Bakhtiyar’s vision, and his fear of theocracy, only a handful dared to support him publicly or join his government. Nevertheless, in spite of these formidable odds, in his first public appearance as the prime minister designate, he tried to sound optimistic, defiant, even heroic when he recited a poem and declared that he was a bird of many storms and would not shirk this one.

Only minutes after he received a vote of confidence from the Majlis, the shah, anxiously waiting at the airport, left the country. Bakhtiyar knew that he had only a small window of opportunity to turn the tide, calm the situation, implement drastic reforms, and consolidate his hold on power. He wanted to cash in on the notion that he had forced the shah off the Peacock Throne. At the same time, he knew that if he went too far in celebrating the shah’s departure, or in his reforms, he might lose the tenuous support of the army—at the time his mainstay of support.
He dismantled SAVAK and promised swift judgment against corrupt officials of the ancien regime. He freed all political prisoners and lifted all censorship. More than once in the tone of a jeremiad he reminded the nation of the dangers of clerical despotism, and of how the fascism of the mullahs would be darker than any military junta. He suggested that he would build a Vatican where the clergy could exercise their sovereignty. Repeatedly he declared that he would use any means necessary to block Ayatollah Khomeini’s climb to power.

He made a concerted effort to contact moderate clergy and solicit their help in isolating Ayatollah Khomeini. To the last person, while they often voiced concern over a clerical despotism, they declined, out of pragmatic considerations, to criticize Khomeini publicly. Moreover, according to Bakhtiyar, they all demanded large sums of money for changing their allegiances, and what they wanted was far more than he had at his disposal.[17]

In the end, his reforms, his rhetoric, even the incipient fears of the middle class were all too little too late to save Bakhtiyar. Not only could he not get prominent members of the opposition to join his cabinet, but many of his ministers were refused entry into their ministries by striking workers or employees. Even the Regency Council that was created on January 13, 1979, proved a disaster, as its chairman resigned as soon as he arrived in Paris, ostensibly to negotiate with Ayatollah Khomeini.

It all came to an end on February 11, 1979, after the army declared its neutrality. By early afternoon, Bakhtiyar could hear the clamor of the jubilant crowds moving toward the prime minister’s offices. He had no choice but to take a helicopter to a hideout where he spent the next few weeks. He was convinced that if the army had continued to support him for a few more weeks, he could have calmed the situation and held on to power. Instead, he lived in hiding in Tehran for a while and then, with the help of a foreign intelligence agency, and his friends, possibly even the new Islamic prime minister, Bazorgan himself, he fled Iran and before long, became a powerful center of political opposition to the clerical regime in Iran.

With Mehdi Samii acting as a mediator, Bakhtiyar and Ali Amini, along with Prince Reza Pahlavi, tried to create a unified opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran. After three lengthy negotiations, a draft declaration announcing the creation of the unity front was prepared. But then for reasons that were never made clear, the unity broke down and was replaced with considerable acrimony.[18]

Bakhtiyar continued his fight against the regime in Iran. He created a government in exile by reassembling his cabinet—those who had successfully fled to the West. His cabinet met regularly and he paid them a stipend. He clearly had considerable funds at his disposal and dispensed it with his characteristic largesse. A number of émigré intellectuals—poets and journalists, scholars and writers—received monthly stipends from him. Counting on the possible future military assistance of the nomadic tribes of Iran, he also paid hefty monthly stipends to at least three of the tribal leaders living in the diaspora. While the rumored source of these funds—Saudi Arabia or Saddam Hussein—undermined some of Bakhtiyar’s legitimacy, fights over the money and over access to Bakhtiyar led to intense rivalries and jealousies among his entourage. Nevertheless his organization published a paper and broadcast a radio program to Iran that was stationed first in Cairo and then in Baghdad and Paris.

But it all came to an abrupt end on August 6, 1991. It had almost ended a decade earlier, when in 1980 there was an assassination attempt on his life in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. He had survived the first attempt, and the French police had beefed up security around him. One of his children was by then an officer of the French police, and he used all his knowledge and connections to ensure his father’s safety. But on August 7, assassins who had gained entry into the compound as supposed supporters and allies of Bakhtiyar knifed him to death. It was believed that the Islamic Republic was behind the murder. The assassins were eventually freed by the French government.

From the time of Plato and the genesis of political theory to the days of Machiavelli and the advent of modern social science, the word “politician” has invariably conjured controversy. It often carries pejorative connotations. For Plato, the word was synonymous with depravity of soul, dearth of principles, surfeit of ambition and greed, and a proclivity to use any means, evil or ethical, to achieve ends that are driven by personal interests rather than the dictates of social justice. Politicians, on the other hand, often try to portray themselves as public servants, forgoing private gains for the public good. No figure in modern Iranian politics has captured in his life as much of the complexities and controversies that swirl around the word as has Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani.

To his supporters, Baqa’i, who taught ethics at the university, was the perfect practitioner of what he preached. They compare him to Socrates, living and dying for a life dedicated to ideas and truth. He was, to them, a man of principle, who spent his life in pursuit of lofty goals. Saidi-Sirjani, a writer of considerable reputation who was killed in the prisons of the Islamic Republic, referred to Baqa’i as “the most ethical politician I have known in our time” and a “true student of Socrates.”[1]

To his detractors, he was a man of infinite ambition and no principles, who would make any deal with anyone as long as it facilitated his rise to power. To an impartial observer, he was certainly one of the most colorful, controversial, and pivotal political figures of postwar Iran. In his almost half-century-long political career, he was involved in nearly every major political event of the era. Moreover, his shifting alliances—most of them ending in acrimony—involved nearly every major political figure of the time.

During the early days of the oil nationalization movement, he was one of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq’s chief allies and advisors. It was a measure of his significance that when Mossadeq went to the United Nations to present Iran’s case against Britain, Baqa’i was among the handful of advisors that accompanied the delegation. Even his staunchest critics agree that in this period, Baqa’i was “next to Mossadeq the most prominent” personality of the movement, and that contrary to other leaders, “he did not owe his fame and reputation to Mossadeq.”[2] In the late 1940s he and Khalil Maleki established the Toilers Party, the largest, most organized foe of the Tudeh Party and of Soviet influence in Iran.

After an acrimonious split in the party and a public break with Mossadeq—during which he flippantly compared Mossadeq to Hitler—he joined forces with Ayatollah Kashani against Mossadeq. He was suddenly one of the pivotal foes of the government. In the months leading to the 1953 coup that toppled Mossadeq, Baqa’i became a close ally of General Fazlollah Zahedi. But this alliance did not last long either, and there was a bitter break in 1954. Throughout this period of shifting alliances, what remained constant in his politics was his devotion to the monarchy. He wanted the shah to reign, not rule.

In the polarized world of Iranian politics of the fifties, the opposition generally dismissed Baqa’i as a royalist, if not a traitor to the cause of Mossadeq. Moreover, the intensity of his views, the bitterness of his breaks, and his often abrasive manner meant that not just his politics but his personal life, too, became favorite subjects of often vicious rumors. A biographical sketch of him prepared by the CIA in 1953 offers a glimpse into this aspect of his life by reporting that Baqa’i is “known to have been a near-alcoholic and widely rumored to have taken dope.”[3] Even his sex life, particularly because he had never married, became the subject of rumors and innuendo. But most important of all, he was said to be involved in murder.

During that era, there were two political assassinations that shook the country’s political tectonic plates. The first was the murder of General Hadji Ali Razmara when he was the prime minister. The other was the brutal killing of General Mahmoud AfsharTous, Mossadeq’s loyal chief of police. Baqa’i was allegedly involved in both assassinations. In the case of Razmara, it was reported that a group of secular leaders, including Baqa’i, met with Navvab Safavi, the leader of Islamic terrorists, and agreed that Razmara must be assassinated. As for Afshar-Tous, those convicted of the murder claimed that the plans for the kidnapping and killing of the police chief were made in Baqa’i’s house, and under his direct instruction. In fact, the man implicated in the kidnapping and assassination, Hoseyn Khatibi, claimed in his confession that secret and sensitive documents found on Afshar-Tous, related to his plans for an impending purge of all CIA agents from the Iranian police, had been turned over to Baqa’i.[4] Baqa’i consistently denied any involvement in either of these two acts. He claimed that Razmara was killed on the orders of the shah.[5] But in a speech in the Majlis, Baqa’i openly praised the assassin of Razmara as a patriot and a hero.[6] While friends and foes disagree on the exact nature of his involvement in these two pivotal assassinations, they generally do concur that Baqa’i lived an eventful life, never shying away from the limelight or from taking controversial positions.

Mozaffar was born in the city of Kerman to a middle-class family. There is some discrepancy about his date of birth. Some sources have suggested that he was born in 1908 (1287);[7] he said he was born on July 23, 1912 (1 Mordad 1291).8 His father was a judge. After a while, he took on the job of principal in the city’s first modern school. Around town, in the days before last names became mandatory in the country, Mozaffar’s father was simply known as Mirza Shahab, the principal. The family were said to be members of the Sheikhi sect—a small Shiite sect that was popular in parts of Iran in the early years of the twentieth century. His father was also one of the advocates of the Constitutional Revolution. He was eventually elected to a seat in the Majlis and moved to Tehran, taking his son with him.

Mozaffar finished high school in Tehran. He attended two of the city’s most famous schools—first Dar al-Funun, and then the equally storied institution called Saint Louis that was run by French Jesuits. In 1929, he won one of the coveted government scholarships to study in Europe. Another student selected was Issa Sepahbodi, who became Baqa’i’s closest friend and confidant for the rest of their lives. Sepahbodi turned out to be a controversial figure—a Svengali type, according to some of Baqa’i’s critics.[9] Yet, in spite of the heavy political cost, Baqa’i remained loyal to Sepahbodi and never wavered in his support.

Upon winning the scholarship, Baqa’i was sent to France to study philosophy. He enrolled first at the Ecole Normale, in the city of Limoges, and then at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Saint Claude. Most of his courses were in the area of morality and aesthetics, psychology, and the history of religion.[10] He had, he claimed, finished all his required classes and exams for a doctoral degree; all that remained for him to receive his degree was to defend his thesis. He had written it on the subject of the concept of ethics in the writings of Ebn-e Meskawayh, a medieval Muslim scholar of theology, philosophy, and alchemy.[11] Baqa’i never explained why he did not attempt to publish his finished thesis. He claims that before he could successfully go through the defense and receive his degree, Iran broke diplomatic ties with France over a silly joke in a French paper. As a result, Baqa’i was forced to leave France. In February 1938, he returned to Iran, having been away almost nine years.
In Iran, he began to teach at a high school as well as at the Teachers College. The law required that only those with a doctorate could teach at Tehran University. Eventually he somehow convinced the Iranian Ministry of Education to accept his work in France as the equivalent of a doctorate. He immediately began calling himself Dr. Baqa’i. In those days, Iran had few graduates of foreign universities, and the title gave him cachet and considerable political capital.[12] After serving the mandatory two years of military service, he began teaching at Tehran University’s Faculty of Literature. At the same time, he was an avid reader and an intellectual, and these qualities helped him befriend some of the country’s most famous intellectuals, particularly Sadeq Hedayat and Jalal Al-e Ahmad.

Soon after the establishment of the Tudeh Party, Baqa’i was invited to join. One of the party’s founders had been a friend of his father’s. Although Baqa’i had been, from his days in Paris, a dedicated foe of communism, he entertained the idea of joining the new party on the assumption that it was a social democratic party. Some sources have claimed that he actually joined the party and stayed in it for a while. He offered a different version, suggesting that he only attended one meeting of the party’s “fellow travelers” and never actually joined.[13] World War II ignited Baqa’i’s interest in politics. With a few of his father’s friends, he helped establish the National Union Party, dedicated to promoting democratic and nationalist ideas. But like about a hundred similar organizations and parties that had mushroomed in the years after the fall of Reza Shah, the National Union did not last long. Not long after it was established, he was appointed the head of the Office of Education in his native city of Kerman. He took a leave from his post at the university and in a practical sense embarked on the life of a professional politician.

In Kerman, helped by his family’s name and reputation, he quickly succeeded in developing a large and dedicated following. He was simply known as “The Doctor” or “The Leader.” The people found him charismatic, and they were impressed with “his knowledge, his magnificent voice and manner, his style and poise.”[14] After a while he decided to join forces with Ahmed Ghavam-ol Saltaneh and his new Democratic Party. It was on this party’s platform that he was first elected to the Parliament. This alliance, too, did not last long. With the help of a small group of party members, Baqa’i organized a split.[15] In spite of the split, he eventually came to believe that Ghavam had been the best politician of postwar Iran.[16]

It was in the mid-1940s that he first met the shah. It is not clear whether the meeting was specially set up or took place as part of the normal meetings between members of the Majlis and the shah. What is clear is that from the beginning, Baqa’i established a special two-track relationship with the shah. Publicly he was an advocate of constitutional monarchy and the theory that the shah should reign and not rule. As late as 1978, when the revolution seemed imminent, he still quixotically held on to his constitutionalist belief. At the same time, he consistently tried to maintain for himself and his group some legitimacy as members of the opposition. All through those years he had a secret and close relationship with the shah, and he even facilitated keeping the court informed about developments in the opposition, particularly in the Tudeh Party.[17]

By the late 1940s, his political activities put him in touch with Dr. Mossadeq. Both men were members of the Majlis, and both worked to rouse the nationalist sentiments of the country. In 1950, as the two became closer allies, Baqa’i joined forces with Khalil Maleki—a prominent political figure who had earlier split from the Tudeh Party—to create what was called The Toilers Party. The party, according to its platform, was dedicated to the establishment of “a constitutional monarchy, elimination of upper-class privilege, encouragement of small industries, national independence from all forms of imperialism, including Russian imperialism, and alleviation of class tensions between employees.”[18] It was the most successful attempt of forces allied with Mossadeq to find a base among the working class and challenge the Tudeh Party for this crucial group. Baqa’i’s constitutionalist, nationalist, democratic, and monarchist footprints can clearly be discerned in the party’s eclectic ideology.
Because of Baqa’i’s immense popularity, on at least a couple of occasions in this period the shah discussed with him the possibility of appointing him as the prime minister. For reasons that are not entirely clear, it never materialized.[19] Moreover, the Toilers Party soon went the way of most other political alliances in Baqa’i’s political life. The split was bitter. According to a CIA report, the split was the result of “long-standing differences over domestic policy and party organization.” According to Maleki and his allies, “the open break came as a result of Baqa’i’s intention to participate in the ‘Zahedi conspiracy’ to overthrow Mossadeq with the view of enhancing his own political position. Baqa’i was said to be looking toward the prime ministership at some point in the future.” Baqa’i and his allies, on the other hand, accused Maleki of wanting to move the party toward a more radical socialist path.[20]

In fact, Baqa’i soon did join forces with General Fazlollah Zahedi, and he certainly harbored ambitions to become Iran’s prime minister. From the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the hope and temptation of becoming the prime minister was an important part of Baqa’i’s political life. On many occasions, he openly declared his willingness to accept the job if it was offered to him. In 1953, months before Baqa’i’s open break with Dr. Mossadeq, the two had a series of increasingly contentious meetings. Baqa’i complained that in spite of documents showing that two of Mossadeq’s closest allies—Ahmad Matin Daftary and Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi—were agents of the British, he kept them in power. The documents were part of what was famously known as the “Documents from the Sedan House.” Sedan was a British oil company executive, and his house had become a center of activities against the government of Mossadeq. Baqa’i and his Toilers Party activists had, in fact, kept the house under surveillance and used an opportune moment to climb the walls and confiscate the documents. But ignoring documents from the Sedan House was not the only point of contention between Baqa’i and Mossadeq.

Baqa’i also opposed Mossadeq’s desire to rule by emergency powers. He was against the government’s decision to hold a referendum on the fate of the Majlis. On more than one occasion, he warned Mossadeq of the fate of democrats in Central Europe—particularly in Czechoslovakia—and reminded him that communists seized dictatorial powers after an initial period of alliance with democrats. By August 1953, Baqa’i had come to believe that Mossadeq was a despot, and that he had secretly conspired with the Tudeh Party to overthrow the monarchy. On the other hand, he saw the army, and General Zahedi as its de facto leader, as “a bulwark against communism.” Months before the coup, when General Zahedi began meeting with a number of disgruntled army officers to organize action against Mossadeq, Baqa’i was among the handful of civilians who were invited to attend.

Ironically the fall of his nemesis Mossadeq also seems to have brought an end to Baqa’i’s importance, even his raison d’etre. In subsequent years, he never regained the prominence and power he had in fighting Mossadeq and the communists. With General Zahedi in power, Mossadeq in prison, and the Tudeh Party under attack by the new hardline government, Baqa’i had lost much of his relevance. He was nothing if not a fighter, however. He continued to fight for free elections and the rule of law, but in contrast to the 1950–53 period, he was no longer at the center of the political arena. He became an increasingly marginal figure, closely watched by SAVAK and happy occasionally to write broadsides against the government and its excesses.21 At the same time, he continued his contacts with the shah, mostly through letters. He claimed to have written a total of at least one hundred letters to the shah and to have received answers to only two of them.[22]

Another example of his modus operandi can be seen in his behavior in the crisis that followed Parliament’s ratification of extra-territorial rights for American forces in Iran in 1964. On the one hand, he wrote a harshly worded statement condemning the agreement and condemning colonial designs on Iran. On the other hand, he wrote a letter to the American Embassy, reassuring them of his friendly attitude toward the United States and suggesting that he was forced to issue the anti-American statement only to keep with the spirit of the times and to keep his political fortunes alive.

Indeed, his policies during the tumultuous early 1960s were a clear indication of his pragmatic style. As Ayatollah Khomeini and some of his clerical allies rose against the shah’s reforms—from the rights of women to land reform—Baqa’i was among the handful of opposition figures who did not join the Khomeini bandwagon. Like many other opposition parties, particularly those of the National Front, the Toilers Party had become active again in 1960. Baqa’i’s initial response to Khomeini’s stern opposition to reforms was to order his party to stay clear of any demonstration in favor of the ayatollah. But gradually, as the ayatollah’s popularity increased, Baqa’i was pressured by his own comrades to support the clergy, and he changed his views. In a long, meandering, and patronizing open letter to the clerical leadership, he called for the global acceptance of Ayatollah Khomeini as the leader of the Shiites.[23] At the same time, in private, he often dismissed the clergy as unable to offer serious leadership for the country. Iran is headed for a revolution, he said, and the often implied and occasionally explicit solution was the appointment of himself as prime minister. On more than one occasion in the period he declared his readiness to accept the post and save the monarchy from the disease of sycophants, and the country from the dangers of a revolution.[24]

Even when he was no longer actively involved in politics, the same caution, and the same duality between public and private views, could be seen. During the Harvard Oral History interview, he was asked whether he approved of the shah’s policy of establishing de facto diplomatic ties with Israel. He answered that he “was not opposed to recognizing Israel. Arabs were never our friends. . . . I shed no tears when the Palestinians were thrown out.”[25] At the same time, he insisted that “this aspect [of his views] need not be made public.”[26]

The crisis leading to the Islamic Revolution provided Baqa’i with a last chance to take center stage. As the shah began to seek help and advice from some of Baqa’i’s peers—once important political figures who had been marginalized after the White Revolution and the establishment of the shah’s increasingly personal rule—he was invited to meet with the shah. He describes a deeply distraught man. They talked of the impending crisis, and how to solve it. “The country needs another Ghavam,” he told the shah. Clearly, he implied that he was that new Ghavam. Baqa’i expected to be offered the job of prime minister, but the offer never came. “The Shah wanted me to volunteer for the job,” he convinced himself later, “but if I did that, I could not then set any conditions.”[27] In December 1978, as the situation worsened, he was contacted by Aredeshir Zahedi, who asked him to come “and fix the situation. I said I am willing to accept if you are willing to accept my conditions. What then are the chances for success [Zahedi asked]? I said, ten percent chance for the Shah to survive. Twenty percent, the preservation of monarchy, and the rule of the Crown Prince. Khomeini’s success, seventy percent.”[28]

Zahedi took the message to the shah, who was unhappy with the percentages. The shah wanted to know whether there were any ways to improve them. By the time the message got back to Baqa’i, he had revised his numbers. The chance of survival for the shah himself was all but nonexistent, Baqa’i responded.

Baqa’i describes a similar conversation with the queen, who, in his rendition, was weeping throughout the conversation. He further claims that he told the shah and the queen that the king’s policies were responsible for what had befallen the country. Had the shah only listened to Baqa’i, none of this would have happened. Neither in the shah’s Answer to History, nor in Queen Farah’s An Enduring Love is there any reference to these meetings with Baqa’i. Aredeshir Zahedi confirms meeting Baqa’i and arranging his meeting with the shah.[29]

Baqa’i even claims that he was a serious candidate for the post of prime minister after the Islamic Revolution. He believes that at least two influential clerics “were my advocates. One of them was Mr. Pasandideh [Khomeini’s brother]. I told them if they dismiss the Revolutionary Committees and dissolve the Revolutionary Guards, I might accept.”[30]

The alleged offer, once again, never came. By then Baqa’i knew that the end of his career was not far away. On the eve of the revolution, he delivered a three-and-a-half hour lecture to a small group of his devoted followers. The speech has since been published by his fans as his last testament. Its title reveals their reverential attitude toward their leader. It is called He Who Said No.[31]

Not only was he a powerful orator, but throughout his public life he was also an indefatigable journalist. In the days when the Toilers Party was at the height of its power, he regularly wrote the lead editorial for the party paper. His style, in editorials or speeches, was simple, though never parsimonious. In his last testament, he waxed eloquent about the ethical basis of his past politics and called on the party to find and train new leaders who could follow in his footsteps.

Baqa’i’s end, like his beginning, was unusual. Although he was by the mid-1980s living in the United States and could easily continue to live there in safety and comfort, he ignored pleas from family and friends and decided to go back to Iran. There had already been several indications that the Islamic regime was no fan of his. After the assassination of Hassan Ayat, once a follower of Baqa’i and a powerful member of the new Islamic regime, Baqa’i had lost his most important defender. But he chose to ignore all the omens and indications. When he arrived in his hometown of Kerman, the local authorities arrested him. They did not keep him long. He had been in prison before—first in 1949 for allegedly insulting the honor of the army. But the Islamic Republic’s system of punishment and prison, particularly in its early years, was altogether different from that which existed during the shah’s reign. The goal was not just depriving people of their freedoms or rights, as it was during the shah’s reign, but total destruction of their character and annihilation of their humanity, as was common in totalitarian systems. When they arrested the septuagenarian Baqa’i, they claimed they had found “a great deal of illicit documents and things” in his house. They said they had released him early because he was “old and sick” and they alleged that only a month after his release, he died of a recurrence of syphilis on November 17, 1987 (26 Aban 1366).[32]

Ever since Plato and Aristotle,the“womanquestion”hasbeenacentralproblem for political and social theory. For Plato, men and women were equal in every respect, and women were as qualified as men to become philosophers and to rule the ideal Republic; women were once, in the primordial moment of bliss, united with men in an androgynous species. Then they were torn asunder, leading to a relentless ontological longing and the desire to regain this lost unity. Plato’s student, Aristotle, on the other hand, argued only a few years later that women were the “weaker vessel” and even played a secondary role in the process of procreation—with men providing the “seminal” role and women simply being the vessels for reproduction. For the next two millennia, varieties of similarly misogynist theories were developed to legitimize denying women their rights.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, thinkers of both sexes began to call for equality for women. From John Stuart Mill, the theorist of continental liberalism, to Karl Marx, the prophet and philosopher of radical communism, and from feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft in Britain and Gorat-al-ayn in Iran,[1] the question of women and their role in society, and the need for them to have full equality in every sphere, became a central preoccupation of men and women of politics and letters.

In mid-nineteenth-century Iran, the activities of Gorat-al-ayn, an erudite follower of the new religion of Bab, were the harbingers of the Iranian women’s movement. Her defiant decision to appear in public without a veil caused such an uproar that one man took a knife to his own neck while another stormed the stage and tried to kill her. Eventually she was brutally murdered on the orders of the king, Nasir al-din Shah. During his reign, another woman was a center of power in the country. She was the king’s mother, the Dowager Empress Mahde-Olia. Among her many important acts was her role in masterminding the death of the powerful reformist prime minister Amir Kabir.[2]

If Mahde-Olia exercised her power behind closed doors and from the isolated quarters of the andarun—the inner sanctum of the house set aside for women and children—in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 women for the first time took a direct role in politics. During the reign of Reza Shah (1925–41), women found a staunch supporter in the country’s king; it was during this time that education for girls became mandatory, and veils became illegal by royal fiat. Many scholars and activists, including many women, have criticized the despotic manner of this unveiling.

When Mohammad Reza Shah came to power, he gave in to pressure from mullahs to lift the ban on veils and to end the practice of coeducational schools.[3] At the same time, the shah, much like his father, was committed to the idea of affording women equal rights. During the early days of his reign, women’s organizations, many of them inspired by ideas of the Left, had emerged, and they took issue with the idea that women’s rights were something that the king can “give” or “take away.” These rights were, they argued, inalienable, and they need no man to give them their rights and wouldn’t allow any man to take them away.

At the same time, a small fissure appeared in the heart of this burgeoning women’s movement, with orthodox Marxists disparaging the idea of an autonomous feminist movement, arguing instead that the women question is an inseparable part of the “class struggle,” and that only when classes are abolished will women achieve true equality. Where all feminists from the center and the left concurred was the idea that “royal actions and declarations” about women’s rights lack genuine substance and are nothing but window-dressing. The fact that the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, was for many years the leader of the Women’s Organization in Iran, and the fact that her reputation was deeply tarnished by rumors of corruption, added fuel to the fire of discontent against government-sponsored organizations advocating equality for women.

When the shah launched his “White Revolution” in 1962 and enfranchisement of women was one of its six principles, Shiite clergy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, rose in opposition to the idea. But the clergy lost that battle, and before long, women were not only voting but sitting in Parliament as members of the Majlis and the Senate. Less than a decade after the launch of the revolution, Dr. Farrokhru Parsa became the first woman in Iranian history to become a minister. Throughout those turbulent years, Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi was never far from the center of the debate and action.

She was born in Tehran in 1919 (1298)[4] to a family of culture and power. Her mother was of the Hedayat family, whose scion was Sadeq Hedayat, and her father was an enlightened man with progressive ideas about equality between men and women.[5] When Reza Shah first came to power, Dowlatshahi was among his close advisors and worked at the court ministry as chief of protocol. Mehrangiz was five when she and her sister began to be tutored in Persian letters and literature. She attended an elementary school founded by the Iranian Zoroastrians. Neither her father nor her mother made any pretense of piety at home. According to Mehrangiz, her father was one of the two people—the other being Teymurtash—who constantly tried to encourage Reza Shah to end the mandatory practice of wearing chadors, Islamic veils that covers women’s bodies from head to toe. He also read stories about Napoleon to Reza Shah.[6] Dowlatshahi’s niece, Esmat, became Reza Shah’s fourth and last wife. She remained his companion and lived by his side in South Africa until the last days of his tragic life.

Mehrangiz was only fifteen when she finished high school in 1936, spending her final school years at an institution run by American missionaries. Even before Reza Shah ordered the lifting of veils, she and a number of other students in her school, as well as a handful of other brave women, would appear in public simply wearing a hat. For several years, she had been asking her father to allow her to go abroad to continue her education—a rare practice in those years. But much to her grief, her father died when she finished high school, and her maternal grandfather, more traditional in matters relating to women, became her legal guardian. He was against the idea of sending a single young girl to Europe and agreed to her departure only when he was reassured that she would go for a brief sojourn, and only in the company of relatives—a husband and wife assigned to an Iranian embassy. Accompanied by her relatives, she went to Germany, where she stayed in Berlin for about ten months.

When she returned home, at her mother’s instigation she was married to a relative who had also gone to school in Germany. Before long, she realized her dream of traveling back to Germany in the company of her husband, who was part of a team of engineers sent by Iran to take possession of the steel mill equipment Iran had bought from Nazi Germany. By the time they arrived, World War II had begun, and the couple spent much of the war years in Berlin. Nevertheless, she worked to realize her dream, and in spite of the howling of the “dogs of war,” she enrolled in college, taking courses in communication and sociology. She wrote a thesis on the role of newspapers in the Constitutional Revolution, and by the end of the war she had received a bachelor’s degree.

Her journey had taken seven years.[7] The last months were spent in the city of Dresden, where she lived through the infamous bombing of the city for forty-eight hours. The bombing, depicted in the great antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five, led to the single greatest loss of life in one day in World War II—even greater than Hiroshima. After this ordeal, and after months spent trying to get back to Iran through a circuitous route that took her to Egypt and India, she finally arrived home.

In Iran it did not take her long to join the political fray; she was the first woman to join the Democratic Party created by Ghavam. Her sister was married to Mozzafar Firuz, Ghavam’s controversial right-hand man. In descriptions of her career, she and her supporters have often claimed that she was “the first woman to become an active member of a political party.”8 In fact, long before her decision to join the Ghavam party, dozens of women had already become active members of the Tudeh Party.[9] By the time she joined the party, she was pregnant with her first child.

In 1949 she accompanied her husband, who was sent on another government assignment to Germany, this time to settle the fate of the industrial equipment Iran had paid for and never received. They lived in Stuttgart and became friends with Abdullah Entezam and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who were both working at the Iranian Embassy. More than anything, Mehrangiz was interested in resuming her education. She went back to school, and before she returned home in 1953 she had completed all the required work for her doctoral degree except for the dissertation, which she finished when she returned to Iran.

Back home, she began working for the American aid program, Point Four. There she began her first bureaucratic involvement with the question of women, when she was assigned to work in the section of the Point Four offices dealing with “Women’s Activities.” Less than two years later, she was one of the nine founding members of a new women’s organization called Jam’eyate Rahe Now, Society for a New Way. The group was an element of Iran’s nascent civil society and was dedicated to teaching women about the rights and responsibilities of full membership in society.[10] In her capacity as a leader of this society, she also joined an international organization that brought together similar organizations from around the world.

As she became more involved in a rapidly rising political career, tensions between family life and professional responsibilities finally broke her marriage. It was an amicable breakup, and she was granted guardianship of their child. But as a single mother, even in Iran where family and friends often help with the work of raising a child, she could not keep up with both her duties as a mother and the demands of her career. In 1958, after consulting with her husband, she followed a path often taken by members of the Iranian economic elite and decided to send her son to a boarding school in Germany. She accompanied him to Germany and only after helping him settle in to his new environment did she return to Iran.

One of the many career demands was her role in organizing the International Women’s Fair in Iran in 1960. Her Society for a New Way was the chief organizer of the fair. But those were the days of the White Revolution and of the enfranchisement of women. She was part of the first group of six women to be elected to the Majlis. She was sent to the Parliament from the city of Kermanshah, though it was not clear what her relationship with the city was. Her tenure lasted three consecutive terms, after which she became the first woman to be named an ambassador. She was sent to Denmark, where she served until the revolution overthrew the shah’s regime.

During her parliamentary days, she played an important role in the passage of a new family protection law that in many ways improved the lot of women in Iran—particularly in terms of their ability to file for divorce (hitherto a monopoly right of men). The government was obviously acting with great caution in this arena as it did not want to anger the clergy and bring about a political crisis. One aspect of Dowlatshahi’s role that caught the attention of the media at the time was her support for keeping in the law provisions allowing men to have four wives, as Islamic Sharia demanded. Some applauded her pragmatism, while others wondered why a supporter of women’s rights would support such a provision. What made the issue even more fascinating at the time was the fact that it coincided with the days when Tehran was awash with rumors that the shah had fallen in love with a young girl and was about to marry her.[11]

After her three active terms as a representative, her diplomatic days in Denmark were relatively quiet. Her ambassadorial days were cut short by events in Tehran and the fall of the shah. Instead of returning to Tehran after the revolution, she chose Paris as her place of exile. She occasionally goes back to her youthful interest in history and makes an effort to lay out the history of her illustrious family.[12] The travails of exile were in her case augmented by personal tragedy when on July 9, 2001, her only son passed away.[13]

To some, Dr. Manuchehre Egbal was the tragic epitome of sycophancy and its dangers. It was, surely, during his forty-month tenure as prime minister that the shah consolidated his absolute authority over all branches of the government, and Egbal became instrumental in reducing the hitherto powerful post of premier to a mere malleable chief of staff to the king. In appraising the shah’s rise to absolute power, the American Embassy in Tehran describes Egbal as “the zealous administrator” who, like other prime ministers after him, was a “willing instrument charged with carrying out the Shah’s commands.”[1]

Others saw Egbal as a consummate, ambitious technocrat, a capable physician, and an astute politician who dedicated his life to public service. Some praise him for his reputation for financial probity and his advocacy of the famous Az Koja Averdeyee [Where did you get it from?] law requiring public servants to explain the sources of their wealth. Still others chastise him for the rampant corruption that continued in each of the offices he directed. At least one journalist has found his first name, Manuchehre, noteworthy. It is a Persian and not an Arabic word and Egbal, he claims, was the first in a long line of new technocrats whose families discarded Islamic names in favor of Persian ones.[2]

Friends and foes concur that Egbal had mastered the art of survival and remained at or near the center of power for almost forty years. He has been called the one person in the twentieth-century history of Iran who ran the gauntlet of the top ten political appointments in the government hierarchy—from prime minister and cabinet minister to governor and ambassador.[3] His tenure in each office was often marred by ignoble events or controversial decisions. His longevity in power did little to satiate his appetite for the pomp and perks of authority. No job, no appointment, was too small for him. During the twilight of his long and eventful career, he was not only chairman of the board of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), but also a member of the board or a director of more than seventy institutions. These auxiliary jobs ranged from the mundane membership in the Society for the Friendship Between Iran and Turkey to the significant position of Director of the Iran Medical Association—a job he stubbornly clung to for many, many years.[4]

Manuchehre Egbal was born on September 15, 1909 (24 Shahrivar 1288) to an old aristocratic family in the city of Meshed. He was one of twelve siblings; he had five brothers and six sisters. His father wrote his date of birth on the frontispiece of the Qur’an, adding next to the date, “May he, god willing, be a god-worshiper.”[5]

Politics was in the family blood, and the family had been a permanent fixture in the political and economic elite of their province. Nearly every one of his male siblings followed the family calling and ended up in some position of public or political prominence. His sisters, too, followed suit by marrying into prominent political families. Manuchehre’s father was a member of the Constituent Assembly, and when he went to Tehran to serve his term he took Manuchehre with him. Manuchehre finished high school in the famous Dar al-Funun high school and not long after set out for Europe to continue his education.

He ended up in France, settling first in Montpelier and eventually in Paris. In both cities, he studied medicine. He finished his training in 1933 and wrote a dissertation on early onset of the mumps. His thesis won the university’s prestigious silver medal. By the end of his life, Egbal had won many other academic honors, including several honorary doctoral degrees and membership in the important French Academy of Medicine.[6]

Soon after finishing his medical training, Egbal returned home. He was not, however, alone. He had married a French girl named Alice. Together they had two daughters. Of the two, one eventually chose the contemplative life of a nun, and the other first married one of the shah’s brothers and, after divorcing him, married a son of princess Ashraf.[7]

The fact that the young girls were, like their mother, Christians, and that they wore crosses around their necks—or in the anti-Christian language of the SAVAK report, that they were khaj-parast or cross-worshippers—caused a small ripple of discontent.[8] But to the shah’s credit, neither the marriage nor the girls’ avowed Christianity and its inadvertent political cost impeded Egbal’s ambitious political plans.

Those plans were put in place not long after his return home. He settled in his hometown of Meshed and enrolled in the army, where he was put in charge of a military hospital. His medical acumen helped him rise faster after he cured Reza Shah, according to some reports, of a bad infection. As recompense, he was moved to a bigger hospital.[9] In 1936, after having finished his two-year military service, he moved to Tehran to teach in the newly founded medical school at Tehran University. Throughout the rest of his political life, he never completely severed his academic ties to the university and the world of medicine. His tenacious hold on the job of directing the Iranian Medical Association was the most obvious manifestation of his affinity for medicine as well as a sign of his raw ambition.

In spite of his academic attachments, the world of politics was even more tempting. By 1942, he already had his first important appointment when Ghavam picked him to become an undersecretary in the Ministry of Health. Although Egbal owed much of his initial rise to power to Ghavam, and although he was a minister in Ghavam’s cabinet, he had no qualms in taking a lead in the 1946 shah-orchestrated move to force the resignation of his mentor. He now had Princess Ashraf and eventually the shah himself to rely on.[10] Moreover, his emotional ties with the shah were further cemented on the day in 1949 when there was an assassination attempt on the shah. Egbal was a minister at the time and in the line of dignitaries meeting the shah upon his arrival. Moments after the failed attempt, Egbal helped the wounded shah to the car and from there to the hospital.[11]
None of this was of any avail when in 1950 he was listed as a “J category civil servant.” These were people deemed unfit for employment in the civil service by a committee of venerable political figures appointed by the prime minister, General Razmara. The list never became a law, or operational, but the damage to Egbal’s reputation was permanent.

As a result of this designation, and with Mohammad Mossadeq’s rise to power, Egbal was forced out of the political arena from 1951 to 1953. At the end of this temporary hiatus, he was named the rector of Tehran University. His tenure was particularly eventful. He took over the university when it was still more or less occupied by the military forces. He asked the armed forces to leave and after a while arranged for the return of some of the National Front leaders who had been professors before August 1953 and had since been barred from teaching.[12] In those days, the United States was also pressing the shah to ease the pressure on that group.

While still a rector, on June 2, 1956 (12 Khordad 1335), Egbal was appointed court minister. These appointments to two of the most sensitive positions of power at the time were a clear indication that Egbal’s star was on the rise, and that he was trusted by the shah. By all accounts, he tried to bring about rapid improvements at the court, too. For example, in spite of his close ties to some members of the royal family, he attempted to curtail the illicit economic activities of other members.[13] By then he had cultivated close ties with a group of prominent journalists and editors. He was clearly angling for the job of the prime minister, and there was little surprise when on April 4, 1957, he was appointed to the post he coveted.

His appointment was initially met with the approval of many in the Iranian media. A new leaf had been turned, some suggested, and better days were to come. In fact, Egbal’s tenure was tumultuous and consequential. His political persona—a zealot reformer and a frank talker—changed so drastically that some of the editors who had once praised him talked of a “Jekyll and Hyde” transformation.[14] Many of the decisions made during his days at the helm were to remain the subject of controversy for many years.

During his first day in office, Egbal ordered an end to military rule in the capital—a lingering remnant of the August 1953 events. It was also during his early days as prime minister that SAVAK was created. Egbal also bore the infamy of being the first prime minister to sign his letters to the shah with such humiliating titles as Golame Khanezad, or “Your Humble House-born Slave.” He was the first prime minister openly and publicly to declare that foreign policy was the sole purview of the shah. All too often he attacked the press and the Parliament for their temerity in criticizing a “servant of the Shah.” The man who had carefully cultivated an image as a “zealot administrator” was becoming a champion of sycophancy. It was more incredible still that in spite of his repeated public profession of fealty to the shah, he often complained to the British and American diplomats in private about his inability to bring about change because of the shah’s interference and because of the shah’s recalcitrant aversion to change.[15]

It was during Egbal’s forty-month tenure that Iran signed a highly controversial oil agreement with an Italian company. The agreement was intended to loosen the power of the oil consortium that had taken monopoly control of Iran’s oil after the August 1953 coup. It was also during this period that Iran came close to signing a long-term nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. In fact, Egbal was one of the two Iranian officials who, in “confidence,” warned the British and American governments of the presence of a secret Soviet delegation in Iran. Egbal wanted the United States and Britain to help dissuade the shah from his decision to sign such an agreement with the Soviets. Both the American and the British governments reacted angrily to this development.

On January 30, 1959, President Eisenhower wrote a tartly worded letter to the shah about Iran’s intention of signing a “new treaty with the Soviet Union.” Eisenhower told the shah that his “friends would be unhappy” if he should do so, and that such a step “would imperil your country’s security.”[16] The British sent Sir Denis Wright to warn the shah.[17] The threats worked, and the shah walked away from the brink. But the question remains whether Egbal acted of his own volition or had “confided” to the Americans and the British at the behest of the shah. Considering his unfailing loyalty to the shah, and given that he was appointed to important posts in subsequent years, it is more likely that the shah used him to bluff the West and that Egbal’s secret contacts with Western diplomats were on the orders of the shah.

Another such royal order was for the creation of a two-party system, much along the American model. Egbal was the founder of one of the two parties—the Melliyune—while another confidant of the shah, Assadollah Alam, established the other.

What brought Egbal down in 1960 were the elections to the twentieth session of the Majlis. Even by the standards of the time, they were an embarrassment. As the furor over them continued unabated, the shah needed someone to blame, and Egbal was the best candidate. Much to his chagrin, Egbal was forced to resign, and, before long, he was appointed rector of Tehran University. He did not last long in his new post. Students, angry at his record in office, attacked his car and set it on fire. Egbal was whisked away by the police. Rumors of his imminent arrest spread through the city. But suddenly he left Iran, leaving behind rumors that he was only allowed to leave because he knew too much. The shah had in fact worked to arrange for his safe departure.

His hiatus from power was short-lived. After a few months, he was appointed Iran’s representative to UNESCO, and before long he was called back to Iran, where he was named chairman of the National Iranian Oil Company. His arrival at an otherwise traditional company was initially met with strong opposition from the staff. He was said to be flagrantly ignorant of the intricacies of the oil industry.[18] He overcame these objections and remained at the helm of the NIOC for a record fourteen years. His long tenure was remarkable only for the degree to which he was completely out of the loop on critical decisions on oil policy. By then the shah handled the country’s oil policy and used Jamshid Amuzegar as his emissary. Egbal was a true figurehead, happy to enjoy the perks of power—including a special elevator he had set up for himself and his guests.

During these years, he was not altogether free from the temptations of politics or of a return to the center of power. He brought together a group of about seventy people, called Yaran (Friends) whose sole point of convergence was their dedication to Egbal and his political fortune. During these years, along with numerous other jobs, he accepted the presidency of the government-sponsored Pen Association, created to overshadow the Writers Union that was being launched by opposition writers, poets, and playwrights at the time.

Early in his career Egbal had joined a Freemason Lodge. But there was also an altogether different side to his character. Throughout his career he was a member of a Sufi sect and considered himself something of a “darvish”—a word that in Persian connoted an aversion to worldly attachments. In a profile prepared by SAVAK, he is described as “extremely arrogant, selfish, and pretentious.”[19] Every adjective used in the profile is the opposite of what is expected of a selfless darvish. In November 1977, Egbal was asked by the shah to resign from his post at the NIOC. Around this time, he wrote a letter to the king warning “that people are unhappy in this country.” The shah dismissed the words of warning, responding only that Egbal “had lost touch” and that the shah “knew better.”[20] This kind of epistolary jeremiad is, ironically, a recurring theme of the lives of some of Egbal’s peers. Only when they are out of power do they exhibit clarity of vision and searing, fearlessly honest discourse. It is, of course, an old adage of the Persian language that after they are deposed, even despots turn Sufi saints. On the night of November 25, 1977, Egbal died of a heart attack, or, as many of those who knew him well suggest, of heartbreak.

Egbal had begun his career in politics as a wunderkind of politics—bright, educated, honest, and disciplined. By the end, all that could be said of him is that he, too, succumbed to the temptations of power and all but gave up on the ideals of his youth.

For the almost fifteen years that he was out of royal favor, Abdullah Entezam spent nearly every day in a small corner of the exclusive French Club in Tehran, lunching with friends. His demise had begun on June 5, 1963. He was among the group of five elder statesmen who went to the court on the afternoon of that day, reprimanded the shah for the army’s bloody suppression of demonstrations, and suggested that he should dismiss the government of Assadollah Alam and attempt a rapprochement with the opposition. In those days, Entezam was the chairman of the National Iranian Oil Company.

On that June day, the shah angrily dismissed the suggestions, even ordering the prime minister to arrest them all. Alam delayed the implementation of the order and eventually convinced the shah to change his mind.[1] But before long, the shah, as he had told a member of the American Embassy, began a “housecleaning” and threw out nearly the entire old guard of Iranian politics, including Abdullah Entezam and almost everyone who had dared criticize the shah’s policy. He talked of Entezam specifically as a member of “another useless group.”[2]

Fifteen years later, in 1978, the shah felt beleaguered by the rising tide of discontent. He decided that maybe Entezam wasn’t “useless” after all. Abdullah was invited to the court and even asked to form a government of national reconciliation. Although Entezam demurred, there was no hint of rancor or revenge in his attitude.[3] In fact, he did all he could to help convince the opposition, particularly his friends among the National Front, to join such a coalition. He was, for example, involved in the meetings that led to Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi’s ill-fated decision to accept the post of prime minister.[4]

During the last days of the shah’s reign, some of Entezam’s time was devoted to his ultimately failed effort to save his protégé, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who had been arrested and was in danger of being offered to the opposition as a “sacrificial lamb.”[5] It is a measure of Abdullah Entezam’s longevity in politics that while he was playing a key role in 1979, he was also considered one of Iran’s political elite by the British Embassy in Tehran as early as 1943. They described him as someone who has served “the Foreign Ministry since about 1921 . . . a pleasant and go-ahead young man.”[6] His younger brother, Nassrullah, was at that same time described as “a quiet and attractive young man” who had by 1943 already held some of the most important diplomatic posts in Iran’s foreign service.[7] The two brothers went on to become two of Iran’s most accomplished, internationally recognized diplomats and political personalities. They both enjoyed sterling reputations for honesty and probity.
Abdullah was born in Tehran in 1895 (1274), the oldest son of a career diplomat. The father was also a Sufi, a member of the Safi-Alishah order. Both diplomacy and Sufism became inseparable parts of Abdullah’s character and career.

He was educated in Tehran—at the German Technical School, Dar al-Funun, and the School of Political Science—and upon the completion of his education he joined the Foreign Ministry. His younger brother, Nassrullah, born in 1897, followed his brother’s footsteps, and took the exact same trajectory to the Foreign Ministry.

Nassrullah began working at the ministry in 1927. For the next few years, he held a variety of jobs, beginning at Iran’s embassy in France. One of his most politically sensitive jobs was in 1933 when he presented Iran’s case against England at the League of Nations.

The job that made him a witness to Iran’s history in one of the country’s most crucial moments was his role as chief of protocol at the court in 1941. In that capacity, he saw nearly everything that happened in the days before and after the abdication of Reza Shah. His memoirs of those days offer fresh and important insights into the behind-the-scenes developments.[8]

In 1943, Nassrullah was appointed minister of health, and that was only the beginning of his ministerial career. He went to hold a number of portfolios. Nassrullah owed his ministerial appointments, at least according to British Embassy in Tehran, to the support of the shah, and to the fact the prime ministers wanted to placate the king.[9] After a number of such portfolios, Nassrullah was sent as Iran’s representative to the San Francisco Conference establishing the United Nations. For the next decade, he worked intermittently as Iran’s ambassador to the UN or to the United States. It was at the UN that he established his international reputation. In 1948, he was chosen as the chairman of an ad hoc political committee of UN’s fourth General Assembly. Finally, in the fifth, he was elected president of the General Assembly, the only Iranian ever to hold that position. The presidency of the General Assembly was the crowning glory of his career, rightfully affording him the aura of an international statesman.

He was Iran’s ambassador to the United States when Mohammad Mossadeq became prime minister. Surprisingly, Nassrullah survived for a few months, and only after Mossadeq came to the United States was Entezam replaced with one of the prime minister’s own confidants. When on October 8, 1951, Mossadeq did not allow Entezam to participate in a meeting with American officials, Nassrullah knew his days as an ambassador were numbered.[10] In his memoirs, Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA operative who went to Iran and helped organize the coup against Mossadeq, wrote about meeting with Entezam while the latter was still ambassador, and about his surprise at the ambassador’s unambiguous opposition to the government. Other American officials found Nassrullah to be a “reasonable, and friendly” Iranian politician.[11]

After the fall of Mossadeq, Nassrullah regained his old job and returned to Washington, where he served until 1956. When he returned to Iran, he no longer had a central role to play in the Iranian political process. Aside from brief appointments in the Alam cabinet, the only public display of his power came in 1975, when he agreed to chair the first convention of the Rastakhiz, Iran’s only party at the time. Contrary to his brother, who was known for his modest demeanor, Nassrullah was impeccably dressed and given to the solemnities of the diplomatic world. He never married and died in Tehran on December 18, 1980. If Abdullah lacked the sartorial flamboyance and elegance of his brother,[12] he had a solid reputation as a consummate diplomat, an erudite intellect, and a man of impeccable integrity.

Abdullah’s first posting was to the United States, where he served as secretary to the legation. While there, he not only worked at the embassy, but he also returned to school, this time studying mechanical engineering. Making things, and learning how they worked, was a passion of his all through his life. He also married. His wife was a daughter of one of Washington D.C.’s most prominent families. Entezam and his American wife had a son named Hume. (He later took the name of his mother’s second husband and became Hume Horan.) Horan joined the State Department, was a polyglot, and went on to become one of the most noted “Arabists”—State Department officials with deep knowledge of Arab culture and language. Horan was often referred to as “Lawrence of America.” He had a storied life himself. His last posting was to Saudi Arabia. It is not clear why he left his post and quit the State Department. He followed a woman he loved to a small Pacific island where the two ran a small school for girls.[13]

Abdullah’s marriage ended before his tenure at the Iranian embassy did. He would not remarry for another two decades. In May 1958, he married again, this time to an Iranian woman named Farah Ansary.[14] Between these two marriages, he was appointed to nearly every important post in the Iranian diplomatic services. They included appointments in Tehran, in the Foreign Ministry, and in such European capitals as Bern and Prague. During the months after the invasion of Iran, he was put in charge of the politically sensitive job of getting rid of citizens of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy who were living in Iran at the time. After a couple of years, he left for Paris, where he lived before his next appointment, to Stuttgart.

Abdullah was a man of formidable intellect with an eclectic mind and erudition; he was at the same time a Francophile. He was an omnivorous reader, regularly devouring everything from Reader’s Digest to esoteric texts of mysticism. He loved classical music, and Beethoven was his favorite. He had an impeccable reputation for financial honesty and for frankness. He was—along with Mehdi Samii and Ja’far Sharif-Emami—one of only three people who refused to kiss the hand of the shah when the gesture was made mandatory for Iranian officials. He was also a Freemason, a member of the Forughi lodge, and it was apparently at his behest that Amir-Abbas Hoveyda also joined the ranks of the controversial organization. Abdullah was himself a Sufi and remained dedicated to this tradition all his life. Although for some members of the Iranian elite, particularly in the 1960s, becoming a Sufi was something of a fad—the way Kabala is a fad in Hollywood today—in his case, it seemed earnest. He showed a decided disdain for worldly riches all his life, living in Tehran in a small apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of the city.

In Paris, Entezam held something of a salon. Many of Iran’s future elite were regulars at these meetings, where Entezam talked on everything from the mysteries of classical Persian texts to mundane cures for the common cold. Among those who attended was Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who took Entezam as a surrogate father. For the rest of his life, regardless of Entezam’s position, Hoveyda would call him patron, French for boss.

After a period of waiting in Paris, Abdullah was put in charge of Iran’s new embassy in Germany. He served there for about three years; his first ministerial appointment came in 1951 when he was named foreign minister in the short-lived cabinet of Hoseyn Ala. When the cabinet was about to fall, Entezam’s name, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, kept “cropping up” as a candidate for prime minister.[15] His next big appointment came in the Zahedi cabinet, after the fall of Mossadeq, when he was again foreign minister. During the first months after his new appointment, he was in charge of the politically charged issue of reestablishing relations with Britain.[16] He was also part of the team that negotiated a controversial oil agreement with a consortium of oil companies. Most of those involved in these negotiations, particularly the head of the Iranian team, Ali Amini, never fully recovered from the political liability of signing the agreement. Entezam, however, seemed untouched by the negative consequences. He managed both tasks with his usual combination of patience and prudence. The fact that he was known as a Freemason made both jobs, particularly the work of normalizing relations with England, even more difficult.

It was also during his tenure at the Foreign Ministry that Iran joined the Baghdad Pact—with Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as permanent members and the United States and the United Kingdom as observers—ending Iran’s three-hundred-year declared neutrality. Although in later years he indicated to his friends that he personally had been against the idea, he nevertheless worked hard to make the pact a reality.[17]
After the Foreign Ministry, Entezam served from 1956 to 1963 as chairman of the National Iranian Oil Company. Before his appointment to that post, there was once again talk of his appointment to the post of prime minister.[18] It was during this period that he hired Hoveyda as an aide at the oil company, and with his support the latter launched a new magazine called Kavosh, intended to bring a measure of reconciliation between the members of the opposition and the regime.[19] Entezam’s days at the NIOC came to an inglorious end when the shah, angry at Entezam’s criticism of Alam’s handling of the 1963

religious riots, dismissed him from his job. For the next fifteen years, Entezam was not offered any other posts. Then in 1978, when the regime was in crisis, Entezam was offered the post of prime minister; he refused, feeling that he could do nothing to turn back the tide of the revolution. He spent his fifteen years of forced retirement on many different projects—from working in his engineering workshop to translating and writing works on Sufism, which he published under pseudonyms. In these he advocated “self-abandoning” and relying on “remembrance of God” as a way to truth and salvation. “For Self-abandoning after Self-Vigilance . . . we attempt, slowly, to remove all thought from the head, even the thought of Remembrance of God.”[20] When he died in March 1983, his old friend, Sir Denis Wright, wrote that Entezam was “a man of charm, modesty and considerable ability. . . . [He] had a great capacity for friendship and was respected by all who knew him. The Shah would never have lost his throne had he listened to and made full use of men such as Abdullah Entezam.”[21]

Iran’s nuclear program has been the subject of increasing international concern. The nature of the program, the extent of its development, the degree to which Iran possesses the knowledge base necessary for the production of a bomb, and how far the Islamic Republic is from having a nuclear weapon are some of the most pressing issues facing the international community.

The genesis of the program goes back to the years when Mohammad Reza Shah still ruled Iran. A rapid rise in the price of oil gave Iran the capital necessary to begin a nuclear program. Mohammad Reza Shah wanted it completed as quickly as possible and allocated two billion dollars a year to the project. Akbar Etemad led it in its early phase. Assadollah Alam, the shah’s trusted court minister and confidant, clearly stated more than once in his Diaries that the shah wanted the bomb but did not talk about it. But even Etemad himself was not sure of the ultimate goal of the program he launched and directed.

Akbar Etemad was born on January 9, 1933 (19 Dey 1311), in Hamadan. The city was in those days still a hub of east-west as well as north-south trade, and one of the most prosperous in the country. It was unusually multicultural, with large Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Christian minorities living amicably with the Muslim majority. Akbar’s father was one of the most respected and affluent members of the city’s political and economic elite.[1] His mother, a deeply devout Muslim, came from a family of small landholders. His family was steeped in Iranian tradition. Akbar was one of nine children, but by the time he was born, his parents were no longer young, and his education and supervision were entrusted to his elder brother.

His father was the de facto liaison between the government and the people. The city had long, cold winters that entailed months-long isolation from the outside world. During those long winter months, the hundreds of aqueducts that provided irrigation and drinking water for the city and its farms had to be kept clean, and the poor had to be provided for. The city’s elite, under the leadership of people like the elder Etemad, pooled their resources to tackle these problems. They contributed to a fund that would eventually bring electricity to the city and create a de facto welfare system. They hired a German engineer to launch the city’s electrical plan. He turned out to have been a Nazi spy; a radio he had brought from Germany was a covert communication device.

Akbar was schooled in the city’s private and public schools. He also had private tutors. He had an unusual proclivity for mathematics and a love of literature. For high school he was sent to Tehran to the famed Alborz American college in 1946. By then, Hamadan had one of Reza Shah’s model high schools. Called Pahlavi, these schools were unusually modern for Iran. They had laboratories, art studios, sport facilities, and theaters. But Alborz had a unique academic reputation, and that is why Etemad continued his schooling there. After living with one of his older sisters, he decided to rent a house with three of his classmates. Etemad began to experience the freedom of living away from the rules and rituals of his deeply traditional family.

A far more important change in his life took place at this time. In Hamadan he had shown no interest in the country’s increasingly tumultuous political developments. In Tehran, all his elder brothers had joined the newly formed communist Tudeh Party. He, too, joined the party’s youth organization, and he rose rapidly in its ranks.[2] By 1949, the party had been forced to go underground, and Etemad continued his activities covertly. His job was to help publish the party’s daily paper. It meant collecting articles from the writers and money from those who sold the paper. “By the end of each day,” he remembers, “I had a suitcase full of cash that I took to the bank.”[3]

He gradually began to feel estranged from the party and its policies. Utopian idealism, as well as the natural urge to follow in his brothers’ footsteps, had led him to the party, but his recognition of its servile attitude toward the Soviet Union and the undemocratic nature of inner-party affairs convinced him to leave the organization in 1950. One of the causes of his split was the party’s refusal to allow him to go abroad for his education. Once free, he set out for Lausanne, Switzerland.

His school of choice was the Polytechnique of Zurich, but he had to show mastery of German before he could be admitted. He had learned enough French in Iran to enable him to study electrical engineering in Lausanne. There he established his reputation as a brilliant student. When, on the occasion of his father’s death a few months after his arrival in Switzerland, the stipend he received from home was temporarily suspended, the school offered him a scholarship that allowed him to continue his education.[4] Even his boardinghouse agreed to let him stay although he could no longer pay rent.

Iran was in the heat of a struggle between the shah on the one hand and Mohammad Mossadeq and the Tudeh Party on the other. Etemad decided to revive his ties to the party. He and a small group of like-minded Iranians formed a cell. He traveled to countries behind the Iron Curtain to participate in international conferences. When the Iranian government and the Swiss authorities learned of these trips, the Iranian consulate refused to renew his passport, and Swiss police questioned him about his activities. By 1954, after new disappointing encounters with unsavory aspects of the party, Etemad once again left its ranks, this time not to return. Henceforth, all of his energy and talent was focused on physics and mathematics.

In 1957, he received his engineering diplome d’ingenieur electrician and was hired as a researcher for the Swiss company Brown Boveri and Cie. He was a troubleshooter, assigned to solve difficult engineering problems. He had married Mahshid Ghaznavi, the sister of one of his close friends.
By sheer accident, Etemad came across an article that changed his life. He read about new developments in nuclear physics at a French center for research called Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucleaires, located at Saclay. He immediately wrote to the school and applied for entrance. His brilliant record gained him access, but when he went to the French Embassy to apply for a visa, his past caught up with him. The Swiss police reported on his communist activities, and France, involved in those days in a bloody war in Algeria, was wary of allowing potential Algerian sympathizers into the country. His visa application was rejected, but when authorities heard that he had been accepted at the Saclay Institute to study nuclear physics, they gave him a temporary tourist visa. His wife stayed behind in Switzerland to continue her education.
The French government refused to give him the student visa he coveted. He lived in a hotel, and for several weeks he was on constant watch, lest the police, who were making nightly roundups of suspicious foreigners, catch up with him. Eventually, he took refuge in the Iranian Embassy and asked the ambassador, Abdullah Entezam, to intercede on his behalf. Entezam was a much-respected man in the French foreign office, and his intervention was all that was needed. Etemad was issued the visa and continued his education with peace of mind.[5]

He received a graduate degree in nuclear physics, a master’s from the Saclay Institute, and then he returned to Switzerland in December 1959 to work for the Institut Federal de Recherches en Matiere de Reacteurs, at the same time continuing his graduate studies in nuclear physics at the University of Lausanne. In October 1963, he received a doctoral degree. He had published close to fifty articles and papers on various aspects of nuclear physics and electrical engineering in different scientific journals and conferences[6] and was, for a while, chair of the group responsible for reactor shielding.

In September 1965, he decided to return home. “I felt the time for my productivity had arrived,” he says, “and I wanted to be productive in Iran.”[7] But the decision came at a cost. His wife, a member of the Bahai faith, was unwilling to return to Iran and, after a decade of marriage, they decided to divorce. Etemad was wary of what SAVAK might do to him because of his past, and though he had cut all ties with the Tudeh Party, he still had lingering doubts about whether the shah’s regime truly worked for the benefit of the Iranian people. What convinced him was the signing of the agreement with the Soviet Union for the construction of a steel mill in Iran. “The mill had become a national obsession,” he says, “a source of humiliation. When the shah succeeded in constructing it, I knew he meant well for the country, and that I could well work with the system.”[8] He talks of the day he read about the agreement in the paper, and how tears of joy welled up in his eyes.

In Tehran, he heard that the shah had been very dissatisfied with the slow pace of development at Tehran University’s small nuclear reactor. The reactor was a gift from the United States, part of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. The shah ordered the Plan Organization, then under the leadership of Safi Asfia, to take over the job of building a new reactor. Etemad went to see Asfia, told him about his education and experience in Europe, and offered to work on the nuclear project. Etemad also told him the story of his political involvements and insisted that the shah know all the facts before he started work. Asfia agreed, and when the shah heard about Etemad, he ordered that he be hired. He said, “The past is not important. He wants to serve his country now and we must use him.” In nine years he would take the helm of the new Iranian Atomic Energy Organization.

He rose rapidly in the ranks of the Iranian bureaucracy. He began at the Plan Organization, where he was part of the technological staff supervising the development of the nuclear reactor. For a couple of years, he worked in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, where he helped found and direct the Institute for Research and Planning for Science and Education. The institute’s mandate was to develop common curricula and texts for Iranian institutions of higher education and to help expand a unified cataloging system for the country’s libraries. It became one of the most effective centers for pedagogical planning in Iran.[9]

In 1969, he met and married Roshanak Zarabi, but his life was dedicated primarily to his work. Like many other technocrats of the time, sixteen-hour days were not unusual.

In October 1972, he was named rector of the new Abu-Ali Sina University in Hamadan. All universities before this had been built on Western models. Etemad suggested that instead of embracing all that is modern and Western and discarding Iranian tradition as useless and retrograde, they begin with what has worked well in Iran’s tradition and enrich it with the wisdom of science. The other innovation at the university was the combination of practice and theory. Students were to spend one semester in class and the next working in the field.[10] Etemad loved his work at the university. It offered him a chance to innovate and to give back to the city of his birth. “All my life,” he says, “my father was my model. In everything, I try to do what I imagined he would do.”[11] His father had helped the city all his life, and now the son had a chance do so too.
But all of that changed with a phone call in March 1974 from Reza Ghotbi, the queen’s cousin and the head of Iran’s National Radio and Television Organization. The shah wants to build a nuclear program, Etemad was told, and he is going to name you as its head.[12] Within twenty-four hours, a royal decree appointed Etemad director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The shah gave him two weeks to develop a plan. In their next meeting, Etemad gave him the thirteen-page-long report. The prime minister, AmirAbbas Hoveyda, was also present. The shah read it carefully, then went over it a second time. He handed the document to Hoveyda and said, “This is the country’s nuclear program.”[13] It was one of the most ambitious programs undertaken by Iran under the shah and, according to Etemad, “one of the components of an ambitious energy plan based on optimum utilization of energy resources.”[14]

There was, of course, another reason for the nuclear program, and that was its possible transformation to military use. Iran had been one of the first countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but the treaty was flawed. It allowed countries to remain within the legal bounds for as long as it was necessary for them to develop the technology, and then to withdraw from the treaty and make the bomb. The North Korean experience is a perfect example of how this pattern could be abused by a rogue state. Etemad wrote of his decision to find out what the shah’s real intentions were in this area.

Etemad began by trying to teach the shah the rudiments of nuclear physics. For six months, he met the shah on a weekly basis and taught him what he needed to know. He finally asked the shah whether he wanted Iran to have the bomb. The shah responded with a two-hour narrative, explaining “the geopolitical position of Iran . . . the basic instability of the region, the overwhelming presence of the Soviet Union . . . the vital need for the free flow of oil. . . . Under the existing circumstances the military nuclear option would create tensions . . . and upset our foreign policy. . . . The only factor that may bring about a dramatic change and weaken our position is the acquisition of nuclear weapons by one of the countries in the region.”[15]

It was Etemad’s job, he said, to prepare for this eventuality. He allowed “dual-use” technologies not only to prepare for the day when the shah would make the decision to go nuclear, but also because he believed the distinction between military and peaceful use of nuclear technology was arbitrary.

Before long, the West became suspicious of the shah’s intentions. If we are to trust the words of Alam, they were right to be. In his Diaries, on more than one occasion, he offers opinions like this: “[The shah is definitely thinking of getting the nuclear technology (although he denies it).”[16] As the shah invested heavily in uranium enrichment plants in France and developed secret ties with South Africa, Americans began to believe that the shah intended either to develop the bomb or to master the process of enrichment to the point where Iran could enrich weapon-grade uranium. When the United States tried to “impose restrictive conditions on the management of the nuclear fuel cycle . . . [d]uring more than four years of negotiations, I refused, with the full support of the Shah, to surrender to America the sovereignty of our nuclear fuel cycle management.”[17] An agreement was eventually reached, but the revolution came before it could be signed.

Iran’s atomic program was demonized by the new Islamic rulers as yet another example of the shah’s willingness to spend billions of dollars in frivolous programs that enriched the West. The program was halted, and Akbar Etemad had to go into hiding. After spending several fearful months in Tehran, he left the country. With the help of a foreign government, and in an elaborate operation reminiscent of a James Bond film, he was whisked away under an assumed name. He now lives in Paris.

IN A LIST of “Intermediaries and Influence Peddlers” prepared by the American Embassy in Tehran, Reza Fallah is described as

a long time member of the Iranian oil industry who began his career as a petroleum engineering student in England under an Anglo-Iranian Oil Company scholarship. As the second man in the NIOC, after the chairman . . . and as a close advisor to the Shah on oil matters, Fallah uses a network of associates from his former days in the oil industry who are now his subordinates in the NIOC to funnel opportunities for pay-offs and kick backs to him. He received pay-offs from IMEG during the preparation and execution of the IGAT pipeline and to the embassy’s certain knowledge, has offered his services to whichever would pay the most of a group of foreign companies bidding for large NIOC construction contracts. He has survived several drives to clean up corruption in the NIOC by deflecting disciplinary action to subordinates who were involved with him in corrupt practices.[1]

In the often cautious language of diplomatic discourse, such definitive statements about the corruption of an official are indeed hard to find. But it is also hard to find a character from the last two decades of the shah’s reign more controversial than Reza Fallah.

In the rumor mill of 1970s Iran, Reza Fallah occupied an almost mythic position. It was something of a parlor game to guess his net worth, his most recent escapades, his alleged partners in crime, or the legendary excesses of his house in the most fashionable neighborhood in Tehran. Even his private life—his reputation as a womanizer, his notoriously tense relations with his wife, and his long entanglement with a paramour for the last decade of his life—was the subject of gossip and curiosity. The parties at their palatial home in Tehran and the ruckus between husband and wife were the talk of society.

In exile, the stories and allegations continued. The London émigré community is still abuzz, almost three decades after the revolution, with rumors about the extravagant party he threw at his summer estate, outside London, with liveried servants and cauldrons of beluga caviar. But there were also interesting stories recounted by reliable sources that gave credence to even the most exaggerated gossip. Meir Ezry, for many years Israel’s de facto ambassador to Iran and famously informed about the intricacies of Iranian politics and culture, wrote in his memoir of two episodes that shed light on Fallah’s fortune.

“One day, Egbal [the chairman of NIOC] insisted that I find for him a copy of Petroleum Intelligence, published in America and only for subscribers who pay a thousand pounds a year. A noted Israeli writer named Meyer had written in an issue of the magazine that Fallah had invested one billion dollars in an oil project.” Ezry quotes Egbal saying that he gave the copy of the article to the shah, who threw it in the garbage and said, “they have nothing better to do than write nonsense.” Egbal, according to Ezry, ended his story by saying, “I don’t know what is going on between the Shah and Fallah.”[2] Ezry offered no direct judgment on whether the claims in Petroleum Intelligence were accurate, but he went on to add that after the revolution, “I saw Fallah in London and he told me an American company is on the market for nine billion dollars, and if I could find two partners, I could buy it . . . incredulously I asked, is your three billion investment ready, and he said, ‘yes, that will be no problem.’”[3]

When I asked Fallah’s daughter, Gina, commonly known as Gougouli, about this story, and about the other allegations of corruption, she flatly denied them, saying stories of her father’s wealth are greatly exaggerated. “This apartment and the small summer home in the country,” she said, “are all that is left of my father for us.”[4] The apartment we were meeting in is located in the most fashionable neighborhood of London, and the liveried servant added extravagance to the large apartment, which was decorated with modern masterpieces of painting. Friends and foes agree on one thing: Reza Fallah was one of Iran’s most talented oil experts and a man of intense intellectual capabilities. “I think he was a genius,” his doting daughter suggested.[5]

Reza Fallah was born on September 15, 1909 (24 Sharivar 1288), in the city of Kashan to a family of middle-class means. After spending his early years in his city of birth, he finished high school in Tehran at the top of his class. He was sent on a British Petroleum Company scholarship to England, where he enrolled in the University of Birmingham. In 1932, he received a bachelor’s degree with honors, and two years later a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering. Before returning to Iran, he married an Iranian girl also studying in England. Her name was Mahin, and though the two remained married for the rest of their lives and had three daughters, the last two decades of their life together was fraught with tensions that often bubbled to the surface.

In 1939, the couple returned to Iran, and Fallah started work in the oil industry. After a short tenure as deputy director of the office of research and development of the oil company, he got a job in academia, where he was named dean of the Abadan Technical Institute.[6] He also taught in the school, and many of Iran’s future oil engineers and oil company operatives were his students. In the mid-1960s, when he was clearly the most important expert in the National Iranian Oil Company, and the most familiar with the intricacies of the oil industry and pricing, he used his former students—who had been given the nickname “Fallah’s men”—to curtail the power of the company’s chairman, who was the nominal head of the institution.[7]

Fallah gained fame and became the center of a controversy in 1951, when he was entrusted with keeping the refinery up and running after Mossadeq nationalized the oil industry. British engineers and technicians were no longer allowed to work in the Iranian industry, and it was Britain’s hope and belief that the Iranians would be incapable of running the refinery on their own. Fallah proved them wrong. In those days, the refineries were sometimes called “Fallah’s Flames.” By that time he had a reputation as an Anglophile, as someone too close to the British, and thus the appointment was opposed by many of Mohammad Mossadeq’s allies. The fact that in later years Fallah’s name appeared on the list of members of the Forughi Lodge of the Freemasons confirmed his British ties in the public imagination; Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani for example, called Fallah “a British spy.” But other Mossadeq confidants considered Fallah the only person who had the gravitas and the engineering knowledge to keep the refinery running.[8]

The fall of Mossadeq ended the political careers of nearly everyone who had sided with him, but it did not end Fallah’s power. In fact, his power, surprisingly, increased. He was a member of the negotiating team that signed the oil agreement with the consortium of oil companies. Gradually his influence grew, and by the early 1960s, he was the shah’s closest confidant in oil matters.

In the 1970s, an American businessmen named Marc Rich—later made infamous in America when Clinton pardoned him in one of the last gestures of his presidency—began to frequent Iran. He was interested in the purchase of oil on the spot market. He ended up making billions of dollars, by some estimates. It has been suggested that his partner in Iran was Fallah.[9] These stories, along with those of close ties to the shah, gave rise to more rumors about Fallah as the shah’s “bagman” in the oil company.

As his power and wealth were on the rise, he began building a controversial, ostentatious mansion in Tehran—with artisans brought from his birthplace, Kashan, to decorate the ceilings with elaborate carved designs. According to Israel’s ambassador to Iran, Fallah spent the staggering sum of twenty million dollars on the house.[10] Then tragedy disrupted what seemed like a charmed life. One of his daughters died after a car accident. She was only nineteen, and her death left his parents deeply grieved, exacerbating the already tense relationship between husband and wife. It is hard not to imagine that the weight of this grief, the problems of marriage, and his ultimate exile contributed to his slide toward drugs and alcohol.11 It also led to Fallah’s more open relationship with a new lover. Even in exile, Fallah and his paramour continued their relationship, and much to his family’s consternation, he made sure she was amply provided for after his death.

As it turned out, there were other controversies connecting the Fallah family to the problems of the ancien régime. In his memoirs, Jack Anderson, the famous muckraking American journalist known for his acerbic columns against the shah, revealed that one of Fallah’s daughters had been his “inside source” in Iran. He wrote of meeting the daughter in an “elegant Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park” after the revolution. He revealed that in the past, during the days of the shah, when she was an intimate part of the shah’s court, “she would occasionally make excuses in Tehran about having to fly to London or Athens or Johannesburg to shop; when her sole reason for the visit was to call me from an untapped phone . . . and [report on the] excesses of the Shah and the cruelty of his secret police SAVAK.”[12] Another of his daughters was part of Tehran’s jet set.

In the oil company, Fallah was known as a workaholic. He came to work around six in the morning and stayed longer than most employees. His desk was notoriously clean. There was never a paper or a file on it. He was also averse to signing notes and documents. Some say that despite his many years at the oil company, there is not a single document or agreement that bears his signature.

He was an avid reader, with particular affinity for the classics of Persian literature and poetry. He was also a fan of films. Golf was his favorite sport, and he was also a good rider. His wife was a collector of fine antiques, and he had an interest in fine Persian calligraphy. When the family left Iran for the last time in December 1978, it is claimed that they succeeded in bringing out some of their wealth in the form of this collection.[13] In exile, Fallah had bought a big estate in the British countryside where he could tend to the garden.

On December 6, 1982, he died at his home at Windsor. As in life, so too in death, rumors were tied to his name. In his obituaries in the New York Times and the Times of London, it was claimed that the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic, Mehdi Bazorgan—who had worked with Fallah during the days of Mossadeq—had asked Fallah to come back to Iran to take over the management of the oil industry.[14] It is impossible to verify that claim or its source.

Aziz Farmanfarma’ian is a jovial man, at once amiable and self-assured. His intense gaze is occasionally broken by a crescendo of loud laughter. His long and decidedly democratic education in prewar socialist France has mitigated whatever aristocratic airs he inherited from his family and their occasional proclivity to attach the title of prince or princess to their names.[1]

His large and spacious apartment in Paris, facing an exuberantly green park, is the perfect metaphor for his complicated, cosmopolitan sensibilities. Magnificent Persian rugs—some specially designed and woven for his Francophile father-in-law—and an ample supply of fine Persian antiques cohere tastefully with a brazenly blue painting of a menacing industrial facility with an ominous white cloud hanging over it. On another wall not far from it hangs a small exquisite Persian miniature.

His education and taste, at once modern and traditional, worked to create in him an architectural style known for its clever combination of traditional Persian motifs and the efficient functionalism of modern architecture. In Western modern architecture, the house is viewed a “living machine” designed for the comfort of the individual; in traditional Iran, a complicate set of rules about andarouni and biruni, or the private and the public, about climactic exigencies, and finally about constricting cultural parameters to protect the living space from the intruding gaze of the outsider, shaped the feel and the flow of traditional Iranian architecture. Aziz’s goal and achievement was to combine the two and arrive at what he calls “a genuine modernity” and a “true connection to the Persian source.”[2] His philosophy of architecture and aesthetics, as well as his political disposition toward aristocratic privilege, were all evident in the tasteful opulence of his apartment.

Across the English Channel, in an austere office not far from London’s financial districtor “The City,” as it is called—works his brother, Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian. He is one of the directors in the offices of the Henduju brothers. In the 1960s the brothers were upstart Indian businessmen in Iran, “wheeler-dealers” who tried everything, including importing Bollywood films to Iran, to make a fast fortune. Khodadad, on the other hand, was in those days one of the most powerful and respected technocrats in Iranian government, with successful tenures as governor of the Central Bank and director of the Plan Organization—two of the most important financial nerve centers in the Iranian economy. At one time, his name was even mentioned as a possible candidate to become prime minister.

Khodadad is credited as being a member of a team of impeccably honest, economically erudite, and managerially experienced young men who engineered the Iranian industrial and economical expansion of the 1960s—before the avalanche of petrodollars changed everything. With no discernable hint of rancor or self-pity, Khodadad talks with disarming honesty and candor of his past, his present, and of his family and his friends. Hints of the past grandeur of his family abound in the small apartment he shares with his wife in one of London’s more fashionable neighborhoods. Pictures of his father and grandfather, of his mother and brothers, of Persian royalty in their hour of glory or past their prime, all in ostentatious attire with the smiles of affluence on their faces, adorn the walls and table tops, along with an impressive and tasteful selection of classical Persian calligraphy.

Halfway around the world, to the south and to the north, live two Farmanfarma’ian daughters. In Tehran, Maryam was under virtual house arrest by early 2000, after having spent several years in prison. In her youth she was the Iranian Lou Andreas-Salomé of her generation. A few of Iran’s prominent intellectuals—from Sadeq Hedayat to lesser figures who aspired to greatness—were besotted by her wit, wisdom, and beauty. The wealth of her father and the power and prominence of her extended family only added to her allure and luster. She was also much beloved of her otherwise stern, diffident, and distant father, the famous Shazdehor The Prince, as he was called by his children.

Despite her many suitors, and the possibility of a life of riches and ceremonies, she eventually settled on Nour-al Din Kianouri, a flamboyant, ambitious, and adventurous leader of the Tudeh Party. For much of the rest of her life she lived with him in exile in Eastern Europe. She embodied the ideological sclerosis of a generation for whom the Soviet Union was the mecca—no dose of reality could shake their convictions. After the revolution, she and her husband returned to Iran, and in spite of their party’s unflinching support for the Islamic regime and its excesses, she and her husband, along with the entire leadership of the Tudeh Party, were eventually arrested. In forced public confessions reminiscent of the worst of the Stalin era, most of the leadership—many septuagenarians— confessed to spying for the Soviets and all manner of treason. She remained resolute in her ideology. Even after the death of her husband, she remained committed to the ideas and ideals of her past. In her apartment, his collection of pipes sat prominently on the table, and every day she dusted them. She prepared a still-unpublished memoir. Her death in May 2008 brought a flurry of eulogies from past comrades, admirers, and family.

While Maryam was undergoing the travails of radicalism, another Farmanfarma’ian daughter, Sattareh, lived a life of exile in California. She is the fifteenth child of Shazdeh. He married several wives, each out of some pragmatic exigency. Class and lineage were not for him deciding factors. Some of his wives did have an aristocratic lineage; others were daughters of his employees. Sattareh’s mother was of the latter group. As a rule, he treated his children equally, regardless of their mother’s rank. The only exception were the children of his first wife, herself a Qajar princess. But in his mind, all his children were Farmanfarma’ians. To cultivate in them a sense of difference and superiority, Shazdeh insisted on giving his children unusual names—thus names like Alidad, Khodadad, and Sattareh.[3]

Sattareh is ambiguous about her age. Referring to a picture in her memoir, she writes that it was taken in 1931, offering only that she must have been about ten years old when it was taken. In another part of the narrative, she writes that the Qajars were still in power when she was born.[4]

She went to school in two of Tehran’s best institutions. Shazdeh was keen on affording his children the best education possible, and it was an indication of his ecumenical sense that Sattareh first attended a school run by the Bahais—Tarbiyat School—and then went to a high school managed by Protestant missionaries in Iran. With the help of one of these missionaries, in 1943 she was accepted at the University of Southern California, where she majored in social work. By the time she finished her education, she was married to a man from India. They had a daughter together, but the union eventually split under the weight of his family’s objections.

By the early 1950s, she was working under the auspices of the United Nations in Iraq. It was there that she accepted the invitation of Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj to come back to Iran to help establish institutions of social work. She returned in 1956, and by 1957 she succeeded in establishing the first College of Social Work in the country. Before the establishment of the school, social work was, by and large, the pastime of affluent ladies and mosques. With the advent of the school, a cadre of rigorously trained professionals emerged. Aside from the college, in the course of a few years she helped create a number of other important social welfare institutions in Iran. They ranged from the equivalent of Planned Parenthood in poorer sections of major cities to offices dispensing a wide array of services. Her professional training in the field, her impressive experience in Iraq, and her family name helped her establish a reputation as the mother of modern social work in Iran.

Queen Farah and Princess Ashraf, both keen on leaving their mark in the field of social work, helped her in her efforts. In the long run, however, Sattareh’s association with the royals came back to haunt her. When the Islamic Revolution came, she was harassed, even temporarily arrested, by the new authorities on charges of complicity with the ancien régime. Her memoir of her triumphs and tribulations during this time is also a paean to the grandeur of the Farmanfarma’ian family.[5]

They are surely one of the most colorful families in modern Iran. In them, the decreasing opulence of a dying aristocracy, the wounded pride of the Qajar dynasty, the deserved pride of a modern extended family of singular accomplishment, the clanlike unity, and an acute but sometimes exaggerated sense of history have combined to make them unique. Shazdeh, the patriarch of the family, was one of the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan, and most controversial men of Iran in the early part of the century. Born in Tehran in 1857, he was on both his maternal and paternal sides a descendent of Qajar kings. In 1883 his father was given the title of “He who issues firmans,” (orders), and when family names became common in Iran, he chose the title, with a small change, as the family name. His first wife, Ezat al-Dowleh, was the daughter of Mozafar-al-Din Shah. Shazdeh went on to marry many more times and had thirty-six children. He was steeped in politics and occupied some of the most important posts in the Qajar bureaucracy—including that of prime minister in December 1915. Many of the legendary officers of colonial England in the Middle East—from Pico to Sykes—had met him, and in their respective memoirs and reports offered widely differing accounts of his character and quality.

After World War I, Shazdeh’s political fortunes began to decline. His son Nosrat alDowleh became involved in one of the most infamous cases of bribery in modern Iran, when it was learned that along with two other politicians and the king, Ahmad Shah, he had accepted money from the British government to help pass the 1919 Agreement, which would render Iran a virtual colony of the British. For this walk on the dark side, Nosrat al-Dowleh ultimately paid with his life.

During the same period, Shazdeh was the governor of Fars. In the mid-1990s, Sir Denis Wright, using British government documents, claimed in an essay that Shazdeh had been in this period in the pay of the British. The large Farmanfarma’ian clan joined in protest. The essay had been intended for publication in Encyclopedia Iranica, but the family outrage and the power of their purse convinced the encyclopedia to withdraw it. The article was published in other venues, however, and also translated into Persian and printed in Iran. Some of the Farmanfarma’ian children went on to publish essays that tried either to deny the Wright accusations or to put into the right historical context the money that was allegedly paid to Shazdeh. Among their suggestions is the idea that the money he received was intended to defray the cost of saving the bankrupt local governments of the region.[6]

The 1921 coup was a further blow to Shazdeh. He was among the first of the three hundred “grandees” who were arrested by the masterminds of the coup. The British Embassy found itself in a double bind. It supported the new coup cabinet, and its leaders, Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i and Reza Khan, but it also wanted to offer help to friends of the British. After a few weeks, Shazdeh was freed, but he knew his days of power and glory were behind him. In a letter to one of his sons, written after his release from prison, he wrote, “the political situation is very bad for us . . . and it is getting worse by the day . . . never in history have I felt so defenseless. . . . I had noticed that even the king [Ahmad Shah] no longer takes us seriously nor considers us a confidant.”[7] For Shazdeh real tragedy came when the son accused of accepting the British bribe died in Iranian government custody in 1937. The patriarch himself died in November 1939, leaving a larger-than-life but contested image and a impressively large number of highly educated, ambitious children who went on to occupy important positions of political and economic power in the years after World War II.[8] In spite of his vast fortune, Shazdeh made sure there were no petty money squabbles among the large bevy of children by setting up a file for each child and designating while he was still alive precisely what each would receive as an heir.[9] Moreover, he had left strict instructions with the executors of his will that expenditures for his children’s education took priority over all other expenses.[10]

He lived in a big compound, with four of his wives each occupying a building of her own. The size and opulence of the compound has become, for the children, a matter of some controversy. While Sattareh claims that two thousand people worked there, another Farmanfarma’ian daughter, in her sympathetic biography of her father, has provided a list of everyone who lived in the estate, including members of the family, staff, and their dependents. The total number in this reckoning is seven hundred and one.[11]

Shazdeh lived in a quarter by himself. The children would line up every Friday morning before lunch and each give a brief report of their lives. What he was most interested in was their education. He also read their report cards with particular care. He had a notebook where he marked the educational progress of each of them. His grave authority, on the other hand, meant that for the children, a mere hint of his displeasure brought terror to their youthful hearts. Khodadad, for example, was in elementary school when he failed a class in Arabic. He next met his father during a masquerade ball—itself an interesting indication of the kind of cosmopolitan life the family lived in Iran. “No sooner did he lay eyes on me,” Khodadad said, “than I pissed in my pants.” It is a measure of Shazdeh’s charisma and authority and of his relationship with his children that there was no rancor when Khodadad recounted the story. He added that his father had such an influence on his life that when he became governor of the Central Bank and needed to sign the new currency, “I noticed that unwittingly I had copied my father’s signature. The A of his first name had just become a K.”[12]

Khodadad was barely fifteen when, accompanied by two of his other brothers, he was sent to Beirut. He finished high school in an institution run by American missionaries. After a brief journey back to Iran, he was sent to Britain and one of its dread boarding schools. Eventually he ended up in the United States, where another of his brothers, Hafez—who later became a noted historian of the Middle East and worked for many years at the University of Texas—lived at the time.

Khodadad spent the next few years pursuing degrees in economics. For his bachelor’s and master’s degrees he attended Stanford University. For his Ph.D. he went to University of Colorado, where he wrote a dissertation on economic development in third-world economies. Before he went to Stanford, he spent a few months at Colorado State College of Education in the city of Greeley. Playing bridge was a favorite pastime of his, and during a friendly game he met a young woman named Joanna Parkhurst, and he was besotted. She was an X-ray technician. Before long, they married and moved to California. “I have lived with her over fifty-three years,” he said, “and every day I enjoy her more than the day before.”[13]
Not long after graduation, he was hired to teach economics at Princeton. But then he met Ebtehaj, who invited Khodadad—or Khodi, as he is affectionately called by his friends—to go back to Iran and work at the Plan Organization. Even as a student, directing the Plan Organization had been his dream job.14 With a little nudge from Ebtehaj— who used the good offices of a friend in the White House to convince Princeton to give Khodadad an extended leave of absence—he returned to Iran in 1957 and began to work in the new Office of Economics set up at the Plan Organization. He considered Ebtehaj his mentor and teacher. “He taught us patriotism; he taught us principles; he taught us discipline.”[15] Even in exile, when some criticized Ebtehaj for his stern management style long after his death, Khodadad wrote a passionate letter defending every aspect of his mentor’s character and style.[16]

Like the shah and many in his own generation, Khodadad believed that “deliberate” state intervention could override or replace market mechanisms to spur economic growth.[17] He delved into the heady waters of planning under the tumultuous leadership of Ebtehaj. One problem for Khodadad was that his Persian, particularly when discoursing on technical matters, was rusty, and he was prone to errors. Like many of the new technocrats ascending to positions of power in Iran at the time, he was more fluent in the jargon of technocracy than in the nuances of Persian language and poetry.[18] For his father’s generation, the subtle curves of their calligraphy and the supple sophistication of their prose was far more important than mastery of a foreign language; for Khodadad and his coterie of technocrats, mastering the language of social science, or knowing French or English, was the true badge of honor.[19]

After the fall of Ebtehaj, Khodadad became deputy director of the Plan Organization, in charge of economics. In 1961, when Ali Amini was named prime minister, the power of Khodadad only grew as a result of his family ties and his own friendship with the new premier. On more than one occasion, Amini sent Khodadad on sensitive and secret missions. Discussing with Robert Kennedy the Kennedy administration’s treatment of the shah is one example of such missions.[20]

Amini’s tenure was short-lived. Even shorter was Khodadad’s ability to work with him. The break-off was difficult for both men. For nine months, Khodadad was unemployed, and when in 1963 Mehdi Samii was appointed governor of the Central Bank of Iran, he appointed Khodadad as his deputy. After six years he was named governor, and then in a few years his lifelong dream came true and he was appointed director of the Plan Organization.

He successfully worked on Iran’s Fifth Plan and began to implement some of the ideas he had long entertained about economic growth. He assembled a high-powered group of technocrats around him. But his rapid rise to power was followed by an equally rapid fall. His demise, in his own view, was precipitated by the fact that his name was mentioned as a potential prime minister. That possibility, he writes, turned Amir-Abbas Hoveyda into an enemy and spurred him to plan for his rival’s fall.[21] Khodadad resigned and never worked in the government again. He spent the eight years before the revolution as managing director of the Industrial Bank of Iran.

In the Plan Organization, one of his most difficult decisions involved his brother Aziz and the competition to build the one-hundred-thousand-seat stadium being built on the occasion of the Asia Games. Aziz was by then the head of the biggest architectural firm in Iran. A complicated computer program commissioned by the Plan Organization, had classified different firms by a number of factors, from the size of past projects to the number of employees and their level of education. Aziz Farmanfarma’ian and Associates was the biggest company in the country, and he and his partners were awarded the contract for the stadium. But Khodadad, as the director of the Plan Organization, which had funded the project, was reluctant to accept it, lest it appear that cronyism was at work. Aziz did finally get the contract, and the stadium was built—with plans purchased from a firm in San Francisco that were used for a similar stadium in Mexico City. Aziz reminisced about the stadium and his family with the jocular ease of someone who has seen much and forgotten little.

Aziz was born in Tehran in 1920, just at the time when his father’s fortunes were changing. He spent his first seven years in the large family compound. He remembers his father as “a pharaoh who sat on top of the pyramid and controlled everything.”[22]

To Aziz’s terror, one day when he was about eight, he was summoned to Shazdeh’s room. When he entered, he noticed that two of his brothers and one of his father’s secretaries, Ali Asghar Khan, were also in the room. He was told that he was being sent to Europe and that Ali Asghar was to be his guardian. He was frightened by the prospect of living in a land he had never seen and whose language he did not speak, but at the same time he rejoiced in the prospect of freedom from the starchy solemnities of life in the compound. He and his brothers arrived in Paris in the summer of 1928. Before long, the guardian went back to Iran, having found a family to take Aziz in as a boarder.

He spent the next few years in a French family. Gradually he learned the language and new rituals of everyday life. “I was a mediocre student and lived a melancholy life.”23 The France of his early youth was dominated by the Left, and the egalitarian ideas they espoused left a mark on his mind. In 1935, he was beckoned back home. Shazdeh was unhappy with his less-than-sterling academic record. By then the young Aziz had forgotten much of his Persian. Even stranger to him were the rituals of the house, and the patriarch’s expectation that his sons kiss his hand or feet in deference. The strict honorifics he had to heed, and the stark inequalities he witnessed were hard for him to bear. He no longer felt at home. The French lycée was, he said, “now more my home than any house in Tehran.”[24]

In spite of some resistance from his family, he eventually was allowed to return to Paris. He almost took a detour through Spain. Appalled by all the inequalities of the feudal system he had witnessed in Iran, and temporarily spurred by the romanticism of youth, he contemplated joining the Spanish Civil War to fight on the side of the anti-Franco revolutionaries. News of a massacre of communists, however, changed his mind.[25] In Paris, he was finally inspired to finish his education. “Suddenly a light was aglow in my mind,” he said. He realized his facility with math, and more crucially, he learned how to study. He was now on a determined course. He wanted to be an architect. Beaux-Arts was his ultimate goal; a lesser school—Ecole Special D’Architecture—was where he began.

In the meantime, events in Tehran began to cast a shadow on his life in Paris. In 1939, his father died, and his monthly stipend was suspended. He traveled to Romania, where one of his brothers-in-law was Iran’s ambassador. The next year turned out to be one of the most difficult in his life. No money came from Iran, and when he was not enjoying the hospitality of his sister he was often on the verge of hunger.

By September 1940, frustrated by the problems he was experiencing in Europe, he returned to Iran. He was an early specimen of a breed that was to become more and more prevalent in the higher echelons of power in Iran: at home neither in the Europe of his youth nor in the Iran of his childhood.

He was employed in the mayor’s office in Tehran. His salary was barely enough to support one person. At the same time, his mother wanted him married. As a foreigntrained young man, fluent in French, and a handsome member of a well-known affluent family, he was certainly an eminently eligible bachelor. But his bifurcated sensibilities made it difficult for him to become interested in the traditional Iranian girls he met.
But then he met Leila Gharagoslou—the daughter of a rich family with deep ties to France and its culture. Her mother was French, and the family was steeped in the solemnities of French haut-bourgeois culture. “They were as rich as us,” he said, “but more refined. They had finesse. Their servants always wore white gloves.”[26] Before long they were married. They had one son, and lived together for almost sixty years. “She died two years ago,” he said with sad resignation on his face.

In the years after his marriage, his mind was still set on architecture and Beaux-Arts. In 1946, he went back to Paris, this time with his wife, and enrolled in the school of his dreams. It took him four years to graduate. They lived with his in-laws, and he “was perfectly happy” with the arrangement. Finally, in 1950, he returned to Iran. He was hired to teach in the College of Arts and Architecture at Tehran University. He was also put in charge of the university’s construction department.

He stayed in that post for the next three years, including the years when his relative, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, was prime minister. He found Mossadeq a “demagogue and despot” and said that only “when Mossadeq was overthrown hope came back to Iran.”[27]

By that time, Aziz had decided to leave the university. “I was never meant to be a teacher,” he said. He set up his own firm, and his first major commission was the mosque at Tehran University. Elegantly simple, recognizably modern in its articulation of lines and spaces, the building immediately established Aziz’s name as one of the best architects of his time. In the next two decades, the company he built expanded into the biggest of its kind in Iran. Many of Iran’s top architects and engineers began their careers in his office. Not all of those associations remained cordial. When, for example, in the years after the revolution Nader Ardalan wrote an essay on modern architecture for the Encyclopedia Iranica, Aziz wrote a blistering critique suggesting that the Ardalan essay was self-adulating and that the author was taking credit for many buildings that were, in fact, built by Aziz Farmanfarma’ian’s firm.[28]

Regardless of this controversy, Aziz had clearly established his reputation as a master architect by the mid-1970s. His style had gradually undergone a radical change. In his early years, he wanted, “to emulate the Beaux-Arts style in Iran. I wanted to bring modern architecture to Iran.”[29] Some of his earliest buildings were the houses he built for his many brothers, and they were all in the French style he had learned in Paris. But by the mid-1960s, he had begun to incorporate more and more elements of traditional Iranian architecture. He became part of the paradigmatic shift that was occurring in Iranian architecture. “I regret,” he said, “that in some of my earliest works, I simply forgot the Persian element.”[30]

His talent and his vast network of friends and powerful relatives helped him develop the company that began in the garage of his mother’s house into one of the Moslem Middle East’s most accomplished firms. By 1975, the company had four hundred engineers, architects, draftsmen, and service employees in its offices in Tehran. They also opened another office in Athens, where many construction plans were drawn and where another 120 people worked. Several governmental commissions—including the shah’s new palace in Niavran, the Ministry of Agriculture, Tehran’s Master Plan, and finally the big Tehran stadium— were the projects that garnered him the most publicity. His last commission was to build the new headquarters for the National Iranian Radio and Television Organization.

When the revolution came, his company was among those confiscated by the new Islamic regime. At Christmas in 1978, not long before the fall of the shah, he finally left Iran, settling in Paris, which had always been his second home and where his wife had already settled. And just as he, Khodadad, and Sattareh were leaving Iran, Maryam, their sister, was returning home from her long year of exile in the Soviet empire to join the incipient revolution. The moloch she and her husband helped to create soon devoured them.

Mohammad-ali Forughi (zoka-al mulk) is the ultimate scholar-statesman of modern Iran. He stands peerless among politicians in terms of his erudition and his contributions to modern Iranian letters and politics. He was tutor to two kings and present at the creation of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–7, the League of Nations, the Versailles Treaty, and the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925. In 1941, he was, arguably more than anyone else, responsible for the preservation of that dynasty. He was also a prolific scholar.

Forughi was born in the city of Tehran, in July 1877 (1256). His father, Mirza Mohammad Hoseyn Forughi, was among the educated elite of his time. He was a friend and a scribe to the famous Etemad-al-Saltaneh, whose journals are the most important books about late Qajar Iran. The elder Forughi worked at Dar-al Tarjomeh (Office of Translation), headed by Etemad-al-Saltaneh. It was Etemad-al-Saltaneh who asked the king for a title for his friend, and thus Forughi became known as Zoka-al Mulk, or “the Light of the Realm.”1 The elder Zoka-al Mulk’s stipend of a hundred tooman was similarly requested by Etemad-al-Saltaneh and approved by the king.2 For the last three years of his life, the elder Zoka-al Mulk was named the head of the Office of Translation. Eventually, his son inherited the title and for much of his life Mohammad-Ali Forughi was simply known as Zoka-al Mulk.

In an age where the aristocracy was notorious for leaving the education of their children to nannies and tutors, when indifference and aloof despotism were the sine qua non of paternal authority, the elder Forughi was, by all accounts, a man of unusual tenderness. He paid close attention to the education of his children and was particularly keen on tutoring his eldest son, Mohammad-Ali. Every morning, according to the son, the father would lovingly wake him up with a poem or two and invite him to stroll in the garden, where he would wax eloquent about the beauties of nature and the mysteries of flowers.[3]

About the family lineage there is some controversy. In an introduction to his own collected essays, Forughi offers a family tree tracing his ancestors back for some four hundred years. By his reckoning, all paternal ancestors were of the merchant class from the city of Isfahan; nearly all were known by the title of Hadji, indicating some measure of Islamic piety and an unmistakable Islamic faith. Several were also known as Arbab, or “The Boss,” a word usually used for men of wealth.4 A variety of foreign sources—from the British Embassy in Tehran to the Israeli Ambassador to Iran—have claimed that the Forughis were, in fact, Jewish, and converted to Islam only in the nineteenth century; as the British write in their own inimitable style, they were “converted Israelite[s].”5 A usually reliable Iranian source claims he was from a family of Jewish merchants in Baghdad who came to Iran for trade, settled in Isfahan, and converted to Islam.[6]

Mohammad-Ali’s early education was under the supervision of his father, who insisted on teaching his young son not only Persian and Arabic, but French and English as well. The son eventually entered Dar al-Funun, where he first dabbled in medicine. But science and medicine had little appeal for him. His forte and his favorite topics were politics and letters. He followed in his father’s footsteps and was hired at the Office of Translation when he was seventeen years old. It is said that his first job was to deliver the daily paper published by the Office of Translation and intended for governmental bureaucrats. His mastery of French soon led to his promotion. He was thirty years old when, upon the death of his father, he inherited the title of Zoka-al Mulk. In the same year, he married into the prominent Mafi family.

In spite of his scant formal education, Mohammad-Ali soon developed a reputation as a man of impressive erudition, impeccable command of French, and unimpeachable honesty. In his early years, he had shown a particular affinity for law. Indeed, by 1898, he had begun teaching at the College of Political Science, the country’s first modern institution of higher education and its first secular law school. His father was dean of the school, and the young Mohammad-Ali was asked to write the text for the history of Eastern societies. “This was the first text ready for use by the students,” he wrote.[7]

The young Forughi was then asked to teach a course on economics, and in preparation for that class he translated The Wealth of Nations from the French. When his father died, Forughi was named dean. As he recounts, the job of running the school was made more difficult by the clergy, who had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly of the judicial system and rightly saw the College of Political Science, where new lawyers and judges were being trained, as their nemesis.[8]

Forughi’s judicial and linguistic reputation led to his choice as the person to translate into French the new constitution that was adopted for Iran in 1906. But his scholarly and academic career was cut short when he was elected to the Parliament in 1909. In the next term, he was elected to the powerful position of Speaker of the Majlis. During those turbulent years, when the country was torn between the forces advocating democracy and change and the defenders of despotism, Forughi clearly stood with the liberal faction. At the same time, he joined the Freemasons, becoming a founding member of the Bidariye Iran Lodge in January 1908.[9] In Iran, where Freemasons have long been something of a political obsession of the populace, this decision was to cast a long and lingering shadow on the rest of his political career. In the eyes of the populace, he was sometimes seen as beholden to the British, while the same perception occasionally led to his rise in power— most notably in 1941, when a beleaguered Reza Shah imagined that Forughi’s appointment as the new prime minister might calm the British then occupying Iran and allow Reza Shah to remain on the throne.

Of course Forughi’s ministerial career had commenced long before that. In 1911 Forughi was appointed as minister of finance, and for the next thirty years he would serve or head numerous cabinets, often during the most pivotal times in Iranian history. Soon after his first appointment, he was named minister of justice. In 1915, he was again appointed to the Ministry of Justice, where he attempted to implement a series of judicial reforms. On the heel of these two ministerial portfolios, he was named the chief of the Court of Appeals, developing a reputation as a learned jurist and a fair judge.

In 1909, when the young Ahmad Shah was amed king, Forughi was among the group entrusted by the Parliament to tutor the under-age king. Two decades later, when Reza Shah decided to send his son to Europe for his education, he also ordered the crown prince to send letters regularly, in his own handwriting, both to Reza Shah and to Forughi, who was then to report on the ability of the future king to write Persian. It is a sign of Forughi’s energy and enthusiasm for the world of ideas that throughout these years, in spite of his many important political appointments, he also consistently worked as a contributing editor to the journal Tarbiyat, established by his father in 1899. Important as these essays were, his most important scholarly contributions would come later, after he fell from political grace.

At the end of World War I, Forughi was in Paris as a member of Iran’s delegation to the Versailles Conference. In a pithy dispatch from Paris, he laments the fact that neither the Iranian government nor many members of the country’s delegations were cognizant of the perils that threatened the country’s autonomy. Although he was all his life known as an Anglophile and was often reviled as a “Freemason,” and although British officials in Tehran referred to him as the only Persian “on whose support Britain could count,”10 in the letter he criticizes the British for what he calls their attempt to “devour all of Asia.” He further criticized them for their constant and ultimately successful attempt to thwart any effort by the Iranian delegation to be accepted to the Versailles Conference.11 At the same time, contrary to the common habit of many Persians, he was not prone to the selfcomforting tendency to blame only foreigners for Iran’s miseries. Repeating one of the refrains of his own political creed, he also placed part of the responsibility for the plight of the country on the Iranian government and part on the Iranian people. “We have no nation,” he wrote, and thus “we have no public opinion.”12 There is no hope for the future, he suggested, if there is no “public opinion.”

In 1921, Forughi returned to Iran and resumed his presidency of the court of appeals. Two more ministerial appointments in 1923 placed him again at the center of the rapidly changing Iranian political arena. By then, Reza Khan was the man of the hour, and Forughi soon joined forces with him. When Reza Khan was named prime minister, Forughi served in two of his cabinets as foreign minister; when Reza Khan began a campaign to turn Iran into a republic, Forughi was an avid supporter. And when, under pressure from the Shiite clergy who saw a republic as synonymous with secularism and a loss of clerical authority, Reza Khan changed his mind and decided instead to topple the Qajar dynasty and become king himself, it was Forughi who played a crucial role in making Reza Khan’s dream come true.

In 1925, Forughi, as acting prime minister, helped convene a Constituent Assembly that named Reza Khan as king. With Reza Shah on the throne, Forughi was named prime minister. On the day of the coronation, Forughi delivered an exceptionally eloquent speech, praising the new shah for the strength of his vision and reminding him of the glorious royal heritage he had inherited. The darker days of Iran’s history had ended, he said, and a new beacon of hope had arisen.[13] By then Forughi had developed a reputation as a great orator. Parsimony and precision, as well as rich allusions to Persian letters and philosophy, became hallmarks of his speeches. He almost never prepared his talks, but instead delivered them extemporaneously.[14]

Forughi lasted about a year as prime minister. In fact, much of the power now rested with the king, his minister of court Teymurtash, and Ali Akbar Davar. On June 1926, two months after the new king’s coronation, Forughi resigned and was given the titular post of minister of war. He was soon sent to Turkey as Iran’s ambassador, entrusted with the task of finding a solution to the border disputes between the two countries. By April 1930, he was back in Iran, and after a brief stay at the new Ministry of National Economy, he was again named foreign minister. It was in that capacity that he traveled to Europe to participate in meetings of the League of Nations. He eventually served a term as president of the League.

In August 1933 he was again named prime minister. This time, his tenure was shortlived. Reza Shah ordered the execution of Vali Assadi, implicated in the turmoil in the city of Meshed over the question of lifting the veil. Assadi’s son was married to Forughi’s daughter. The conditions of his dismissal are not clear; some sources claim that he tried to intervene on behalf of his relative,15 while others claim that in the police search of Assadi’s house, a letter from Forughi that was deprecatory to the king was found. When the letter was shown to Reza Shah he angrily demanded Forughi’s resignation.16 Embittered, Forughi fell from political grace for six years, which turned out to the most productive scholarly years of his life. He is reported to have said that they were also the “happiest days of his life.”[17]

Forughi was arguably the person in twentieth century Iran most responsible for forging a modern Persian language capable of tackling the problems of a modern polity, social and human sciences, and philosophy. His three-volume History of Philosophy in Europe is surely the most readable, erudite introduction to the history of Western philosophy. He also translated into Persian Descartes’ Discourse on Method and a volume on Socrates and his philosophy.18 More important, his translations and writings helped fashion a lexicon of Persian terms capable of articulating complex concepts and problems of philosophy.

In fashioning this modern discourse, he avoided neologisms at all cost. He mined the classics of Persian letters and philosophy to find words and concepts that could be refashioned into words befitting a modern philosophical discourse. With words culled from the Persian philosopher Mulaadra, for example, he wrote elegantly about Hegel.

This aversion to neologism, coupled with his insistence on using the classics to find modern words, was in fact part of his overall assessment of the Persian cultural legacy and the role it can play in a cultural renaissance. His first intervention on the topic came in his essay for the journal Kaveh, in which he talked about the perils as well as the necessity of borrowing words from other languages.19 Contrary to many cultural pundits of his time—who disdained all that was Persian and believed that Iran could embrace modernity and progress only if Iranians embrace Western values and ideas and shed their own tradition—he believed that Persian culture was not only rich but was the only foundation on which a genuine renaissance could be created.[20]

This rich cultural legacy is, in his opinion, based on the foundation of the works of Ferdowsi, Sa’di, Hafez, and Rumi. His masterful praise of Sa’di’s prose is itself a masterpiece of modern Persian prose.21 In the same essay, he offers seven practical ways to preserve and embrace the value of these canonical cultural figures, including publishing critical and annotated editions of their works and their biographies, and dedicating libraries to their lives and times. When he was in a position of political authority, he used his office to implement these ideas, and when he was out of the political limelight, he used his time working to bring out editions of the works of these four poets. The creation of the Academy of Persian Language (Farhangestan) during one of his tenures as prime minister, and his classic, often-quoted message to the academy counseling it to moderation, are prime examples of his political interventions. On the scholarly side, for more than a generation his Complete Works of Sa’di was the standard text.[22] He worked with Habib Yagmai to bring out editions of Sa’adi and Shahnameh.

His life of quiet contemplation and long days of hard work came to an end when Iran was occupied by the British and Soviet forces. Reza Shah immediately, and apparently very reluctantly,[23] sent for Forughi and offered him the post of prime minister. To the consternation of his family, who knew him to be in frail health, and who well remembered the Assadi fiasco, he accepted the offer, telling his relatives, “The country has opened all doors to me for sixty years and now that the head of state needs me, how can I refuse?”[24] The British Embassy in Tehran reported that Forughi suffered from “angina pectoris.”[25]

Forughi’s role in the historic events that followed has been subject to some controversy. Twenty-one days after his appointment, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate. His letter of abdication was prepared by Forughi and is in his handwriting. Some sources credit him with saving the Pahlavi dynasty and rebuffing British suggestions that he accept the role of president in a new republican Iran. Without his intervention, they argue, the Pahlavi dynasty would have ended. Others claim that in fact Reza Shah’s departure was the work of Forughi, and that it was he who told the British that the only solution to the problems of the country was for Reza Shah to go.[26] The young shah, referring to the history of bad blood between his father and Forughi, confided to the British Ambassador that Forughi “hardly expected any son of Reza Shah to be a civilized human being.”[27] On the other hand, eyewitness accounts testify that Forughi tried unsuccessfully to convince the crown prince not to leave the country with his abdicating father.[28]

There is, however, little controversy about Forughi’s role in getting Britain and the Soviet Union to sign an agreement that would guarantee Iran’s independence at the end of the war and force the occupiers to leave the country. That agreement played a crucial role in finally forcing the Soviets to leave Iran in 1946.

But the country’s increasingly fractious politics were more than Forughi could master. He was forced to resign in March 1942 after a little more than a year in power. Sir Reader Bullard, British ambassador to Iran, captures the dilemma of the time by taking another of his famous digs, writing that Forughi “was not made to deal with such a crisis . . . he believes in the power of reason, a commodity in small demand among the Deputies of the Majlis.”29 He was appointed minister of court and made a political tutor to the young and novice king. Eventually the shah tried to get rid of him by offering him the post of Ambassador to the United States. Before he could depart, reluctantly, for his new assignment, he died on November 26, 1942 (5 Azar 1321).

Even his staunchest critics agree that he was an honest man. His friends write of his utter disdain for worldly matters. He had, at his death, little by way of worldly possessions. He was polite to a fault and congenial in conversation. He was an avid fan of Persian poetry, and a good line from a poem brought tears to his eyes or laughter to his countenance. To his inferiors he was impeccably polite. He never smoked. After the early death of his wife, he never remarried and, emulating his father’s path, carefully attended to his children’s education. He was religious about not allowing his friends or relatives to use his office for personal gains. He was an avid walker, often using his trademark cane on his walk to work. In his discourse, he was cautious and careful and averse to hyperbole. He dressed impeccably and kept a well-groomed beard all his life.30 He also wore his famous wire-rimmed glasses and recounted, with jocundity, how early in his career many traditional Iranians saw the eyeglasses as a sign of heresy. As prime minister, he delegated authority to his ministers and hardly ever interfered in the business of each ministry. He was a statesmen-scholar in an age more at home with demagogues and despots.

In August 1906, a sickly Mozafar-al-Din Shah was kept in isolation by his German physician. One of the two men who were allowed to visit him was his private scribe, a talented young man and the scion of an aristocratic family that had been a permanent fixture at the court and in the corridors of power for at least a century. His name was Ahmad Ghavam. A few years earlier, he had been given the title of Ghavam-ol-Saltaneh— the Strength of the Throne—by the shah. The title was ironic; the throne was in imminent danger, and, through the rest of his life, Ghavam was anything but a reliable source of “strength of the throne.” In the summer of 1906, pressure had been building on the shah to sign a firman inaugurating constitutional government in Iran. On August 5 (14 Mordad 1285), a hesitant king approved a proclamation declaring the advent of a new age in Iran. Ghavam, known for his fine calligraphy, had in fact penned the firman. For the next half century, he was in the center of every event that shaped modern Iranian politics. He was often accused of harboring dictatorial ambitions himself, and his retort to all such accusations was the same: the constitutional firman was in his own handwriting.

Nearly everything about Ghavam is enveloped in mystery. Even his date of birth is uncertain. Some sources, including his nephew, claim it is November 1877 (Azar 1256). Mehdi Bamdad in his famous biographical dictionary of the last century’s Iranian elite suggests that 1873 (1252) is the more likely date.[1] Both sides of his family were aristocrats. His mother was the sister of Amin al-Dowleh, the patriarch of the Amini family. His father, too, was from a prominent family of courtiers. For much of the twentieth century, offspring of the two families were part of the country’s power structure. Ghavam’s elder brother, Vosug al-Dowleh was also one of the most important political figures of modern Iran. They lost their mother early in childhood and were raised by their father and uncle.

Ahmad began his traditional education in Tehran, first under tutors and then at the Marvi School. He had a particular talent for calligraphy. His Nastealig—one of the more famous styles of classical calligraphy—was known for its elegance. Some of his works of calligraphy are today considered collector’s items.

Ghavam also dabbled in poetry. A few of his poems, in classical meter and rhyme, have been published. He was a voracious reader of Persian poetry and prose. In one of his many periods of political hibernation, he wrote out the whole of Sai’di’s book of poems, Bustan. He knew many by heart, and in the tradition of Persian scribes of the past, he often used them in his letters, directives, and talks.

His talent in calligraphy gained him entry into the Qajar court. He wrote out in his florid style the whole Monajate Ali (Ali’s prayers) and his father offered it as a gift to Nasir al-din Shah, an avid worshipper of Ali. The gift impressed the shah, and Ghavam was hired as a Dabir Hozour, or “scribe in attendance.” He kept his job even after the shah was killed and a new king had come to the throne, and thus Ghavam traveled to Europe in 1903 as part of the royal entourage.

He was named undersecretary of interior in 1909, his first important political office. Two years later, he was minister of war in a cabinet headed by Sepahdar when constitutionalist forces converged on the capital after defeating Mohammad-Ali Shah’s attempt to dismantle the Majlis and restore the old regime. In an attempt to bring law and order to the city, the government made an effort to disarm the constitutional forces. Sattar Khan and Bagher Khan, two of the most famous leaders of the constitutional movement, refused, and on August 7, 1910 (15 Mordad 1289) the government, under the leadership of Ghavam, attacked their Park Atabak temporary headquarters. Sattar Khan was wounded, and his forces were badly beaten. The blemish of conspiring against revered leaders of the revolution remained with Ghavam for the rest of his life.
Ghavam married a distant descendent of the Qajar family. Although late in life he took a second wife, his first wife stayed with him for the rest of his life. They had no children. With his second wife, he had a son.

On January 30, 1918 (10 Bahman 1296), Ghavam was named the governor of the state of Khorasan. The civil war that erupted in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution—pitting Lenin’s supporters against other leftist groups and tsarist forces—often spilled across the border into Iran. Furthermore, peasant uprisings, often instigated by leftist activists, made the region ripe for a revolution. The combination of Soviet agitation and internal conditions favorable to a revolution made the situation a dress rehearsal for what was to happen in Azerbaijan in the aftermath of World War II. If in 1946 Ghavam was an almost omnipotent prime minister, in 1918 he was a powerful governor. He used coalitions with local grandees and tough military action against radicals, and finally his friendship with a powerful military commander, Colonel Pessian, helped him keep Khorasan from falling into the hands of Iranian or Soviet Bolsheviks.

His governorship was emblematic of his overall political persona. The region was rife with rumors of an illicit fortune he had amassed. He seems to have toyed with the idea of declaring the region autonomous, and himself its ruler. In some public ceremonies, he ordered his picture displayed in the place reserved by tradition for the king.

His days as a governor came to an end in January 1921 when Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i and Reza Khan’s coup gave them the reins of power in Tehran. When Seyyed Zia, the new prime minister, issued an order to all the governors, Ghavam was one of the three who refused to comply. On Seyyed’s orders, Ghavam was arrested on April 2, 1921 (13 Farvardin 1299), and his properties confiscated. It was said that four hundred thousand toomans, a fortune at that time, was found in his house. He was transferred to Tehran.

Fortunately for Ghavam, Seyyed Zia’s tenure lasted only one hundred days. Ghavam was taken from prison directly to the court and named prime minister. On her way to Tehran, Ghavam’s wife wrote a letter to the prime minister, asking whether she would be allowed to go back to the house she owned with Ghavam. The telegram she received was reassuring: “Go to your own house,” the note said. It was signed by the new prime minister, Ghavam himself.

Ghavam did not take his revenge against Seyyed Zia immediately. Twenty-four years later, when Ghavam was again the prime minister, Seyyed Zia returned from his long years of banishment. At that time, Ghavam had him arrested on trumped-up charges. His attempt to take vengeance against Reza Khan backfired. In 1923, a plot to assassinate Reza Khan was aborted, and four men confessed to the crime and implicated Ghavam. He was arrested but was spared prosecution when Ahmad Shah interceded on his behalf. He would not be put on trial if he agreed to leave Iran. He began his first period of exile in Europe. The exact nature of his role in the assassination attempt has never been made clear.
He spent the next years in Paris. Before his departure, he sold one of his houses to the Egyptian embassy for fifty thousand toomans. This house was after a while sold to the Israeli embassy in Tehran; after the Islamic revolution in 1979, it was turned over to the Palestinians as their embassy.

Eventually, Reza Shah agreed to allow Ghavam to return to Iran after he promised not to interfere in politics and to live on a tea plantation he owned in Lahijan. For a few years, he became a gentleman farmer, and took a peasant girl as his second wife. His only son, Hoseyn, was the result of this marriage. Although his parents doted on Hoseyn, he had a deeply troubled life and died young as a result of complications arising from addiction.[2]

Ghavam’s forced “retirement” from politics ended not long after World War II began. Reza Shah abdicated and before long Ghavam offered himself as a candidate for the post of prime minister. His relationship with the new king, Mohammad Reza Shah, was testy. The shah considered him a conspirator who wished to seize power for himself. For his part, Ghavam considered the young shah and the whole Pahlavi family to be peasant upstarts who had usurped powers that rightfully belonged to Ghavam and his class.

In addition to the shah’s opposition, Ghavam’s rise to power faced another obstacle. The British thought he was a German agent. Even as late as 1944 they reported:

It was at the interview of the 29th of January that I informed the Shah that His Majesty’s Legation no longer considered Ghavam . . . a suitable candidate for that post [of prime minister]. I showed His Majesty the note drawn up by British Security authorities and based on good evidence showing that Ghavam at least connived at fifth column activities when he was prime minister. The Shah was not sorry to have his original dislike of Ghavam justified. . . . I gave a copy of the note to the Soviet Ambassador.[3]

It has been suggested that in early 1940 Ghavam sent an emissary to Nazi Germany to try to solicit their cooperation in a coup against Reza Shah. Later on, when the Nazis sent their own operative to Tehran to arrange for a possible coup in favor of Germany, again Ghavam was among those with whom the German spy met.[4]

On later occasions, Ghavam also tried to convince the British and the Americans to help him seize power and put the country’s house in order. His gestures were rebuffed. There is some evidence that he tried in vain to reach a similar understanding with the Soviets.

When he did become prime minister for a second time, in August 1942, he did everything he could to marginalize the shah and his role in politics. He even used public rebuke and ridicule to cut away at the new monarch’s legitimacy; he arranged to arrive at official ceremonies later than the shah, or got a step or two ahead of the king. In private they belittled and criticized one another. The British and American embassies reports of the time often refer to the shah’s “fear” and “distrust” of Ghavam, and to Ghavam’s dismissive attitude toward the shah. The shah was not the only figure who suffered from Ghavam’s arrogance. It has been reported that he ordered all chairs but the one behind his desk removed, lest any visitor sit in front of Hazrate Ashraf, or His Noblest Highness.

His first attempt to become prime minister came about with the demise of the Mohammad-Ali Forughi cabinet. Ghavam withdrew his name from consideration when the shah “asked him to withdraw in favor of Suhaili,”[5] he later claimed to friends. The truth, of course, was far more complicated and had to do with British objections to the premiership of someone they considered a “fifth column” of the Nazis. But on August 13, 1942, Ghavam’s turn finally came and he was named prime minister. Ghavam’s insistence on keeping the Ministry of War for himself put him on a collision course with the shah. Control of the military was the shah’s ultimate power. Nearly all the serious crises of his regime occurred when a prime minister—first Ghavam, then Mohammad Mossadeq— tried to take control of the army and the Ministry of War.

On December 8 and 9, Tehran was rocked by bread riots. Since the beginning of the war, the British had used their control of the wheat supply as a tool to get concessions from the Iranian government. In spite of repeated warnings by the Americans and by the Iranian government, the British failed to provide enough wheat for the capital. In modern Iranian history, a shortage of bread or an increase in its price is an unfailing trigger for mob violence. The British and the Americans believed that the shah had been at least tacitly behind the bread riots and that he had used the army—or failed to use it—to undermine Ghavam. The ploy worked, and a few weeks later Ghavam resigned.

This time Ghavam used his forced retirement to cement his relations with the Soviets. He realized their power was increasing in Iran; their handmade Tudeh Party had emerged as the biggest political party. They also controlled Azerbaijan and after a decision by the Central Committee of the Soviet Community Party, they had created a movement there that apparently sought autonomy but was, in fact, a tool of Soviet hegemony.[6]
In January 1946, Ghavam was again named prime minister. It would be his longest tenure in office—twenty months—and would provide him his best chance to consolidate power. He created a Democratic Party whose oath of allegiance, like those of the European Fascist parties, was to him personally. He used the party and his close friends and confidants, particularly Mozzafar Firuz and Hassan Arsanjani, to attack the shah and undermine his authority. In party meeting halls it was Ghavam’s pictures that hung on the wall—not the shah’s.

Ghavam had come to power to solve the Azerbaijan crisis. In the course of his efforts, he created the most enduring myth about himself. Ghavam went to Moscow, according to the myth, with the intention of outwitting Stalin. He told Stalin that if he withdrew his forces from Iran, he would, with the approval of the Majlis, give him the rights to the Caspian Sea oil the Soviets so desperately coveted. Stalin fell for the trap, according to the myth, and once he withdrew his forces, Ghavam, who had never intended to live up to his promise, had the Majlis, which was dominated by his supporters, reject the bill authorizing the oil agreement with the Soviets. Little of this story is true.

On his return to Iran, in fact, Ghavam did try to convince the Majlis, the shah, and Britain and the United States that such an agreement was necessary. In other words, he wanted to keep his promise to Stalin. He toyed with the idea of giving them an oil concession, as well as permission to start a private airline.[7] Only after stern opposition did Ghavam change his tune.

Second, a threat by the American government—scholars disagree on whether it was a formal ultimatum or only a harshly worded threat—also played an important role in the Soviet decision to withdraw from Iran.[8]

Before his trip to the Soviet Union, Ghavam had agreed to form a coalition government with the Tudeh Party; it was the only time in modern Iranian history that active members of the communist party were in the cabinet. Now that Ghavam no longer had any use for his coalition partners, he unceremoniously dumped them.[9] Ultimately the Soviets left Iran, and there is today near consensus that tension over the crisis was in fact the dawn of the cold war.

After the resolution of the Azerbaijan crisis, the shah publicly commended Ghavam for his services and gave him the title of Hazrate Ashraf and yet behind the scenes he worked hard to undermine him. Ghavam’s increasing arrogance and continuing stories of corruption undermined his authority and helped the shah mastermind a cabinet coup.

Among those stories was the tale of a bribe he received to reappoint an Iranian as ambassador to France.[10] With the shah and his twin sister working behind scenes against the prime minister, all but one of his cabinet ministers suddenly resigned on December 4, 1947. It was even alleged that the shah agreed to pay the gambling debts of the Speaker of the Majlis in return for his help in overthrowing Ghavam. The writing was on the wall that Ghavam had lost the fight with the court, but he quixotically refused to resign.[11] He appeared in the Majlis, where he received a vote of no confidence.

Worried about the wrath of his many enemies, Ghavam left for Paris soon after his resignation, where he followed the situation in Iran. When the shah decided to amend the constitution to enhance his own power, Ghavam wrote him a long note reminding him that with increased power came increased responsibility, and that if a dark cloud ever appears on the horizon, it will be the throne that will be in jeopardy, not the cabinet or the prime minister. The shah did not respond. Instead, he had his court minister Ebrahim Hakimi deliver a blistering attack on Ghavam that questioned his loyalty and his honesty. The title of Hazrate Ashraf was taken away. The correspondence is still a key document in understanding the nature of power during the shah’s period and a fascinating window into the political persona of Ghavam.

With the rise of Mossadeq and his successful effort to nationalize Iranian oil, Iranian politics entered a new phase. Ghavam, reassured of his safety by the shah—who was becoming increasingly worried about Mossadeq’s rising power and popularity, and who was encouraged in issuing this “pardon” by the British—returned to Iran. As tension increased between Mossadeq and the British, Ghavam met with embassy officials and promised that he would “solve” the oil problem in an equitable fashion. On July 16, 1952, Mossadeq suddenly tendered his resignation. The issue, once again, was the Ministry of War. The Parliament immediately showed its “inclination” to have Ghavam named the new prime minister. The appointment was supported by the British and American embassies. Ghavam accepted on the condition that his coveted title of Hazrate Ashraf be restored. He had once again trumped the shah. The king reluctantly agreed. At the same time, though, he informed Mossadeq’s allies that Ghavam did not have his support.

The harsh tone of Ghavam’s first speech and his disdain for popular sentiment worked hand-in-hand with the shah’s disapproval and weakened Ghavam’s power. Finally, the Tudeh Party came out against the man who had thrown them out of the government only a few years earlier. July 21 was declared a day of “National Uprising.” Furthermore, Ghavam’s attempt to appease Ayatollah Kashani and form an alliance with him also did not work. His final term as prime minister lasted only four days and was a disaster.[12]

Back in power, Mossadeq punished Ghavam for his insolence. He requested permission from the Parliament, as the constitution stipulated, to file charges against Ghavam. It was granted, and Ghavam was questioned about his actions of July 21, particularly whether he had had a role in the killings of sixty-three people—officially declared “martyrs” by the Parliament—by the army and police. When he was called to appear before the Special Tribunal, he claimed ill health.

By then he was a broken man, physically and emotionally. To some he was a corrupt and ambitious politician, to others he was a pro-American man of politics who not only tried to give the American companies an oil interest in Iran as early as 1920s, but was also instrumental in increasing their power in postwar Iran. At other times, he was accused of being in concert with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Others saw simply a wily politician who was prime minister five times. It is far from hyperbole to claim that Ghavam is one of the most enigmatic Persians of the twentieth century.

Three years and two days after the July 21 events that proved to be his futile attempt to resurrect his political life, he died in Tehran. Politics, it seems, was his raison d’etre.

When in 1959 a young girl named Farah Diba married the shah and became the queen of Iran, the man who “gave her away,” in lieu of her deceased father, was Mohammad Ali Ghotbi. The Ghotbi name was unknown at the time. By 1978, it was ubiquitous and conjured not only Mohammad Ali, but his son, Reza Ghotbi—the former for allegations of corruption and cronyism and the latter for his politics and his controversial management of the country’s official media.

Reza Ghotbi’s name had become synonymous with radio and television, and with a management style that was considered enlightened and liberal by many and simpleminded, even treacherous, by others. To some royalists, Reza Ghotbi and the television network he ran were the cause of the revolution. Tensions over this even manifested themselves in exile, when eyewitnesses recount how, on more than one occasion, the shah angrily disparaged Reza for his role in lingering political problems in the last months of the monarchy in Iran. Although in the 1970s Reza Ghotbi was a permanent fixture at court parties, and the queen’s closest confidant and advisor, by the time of the shah’s exile he had become anathema to the king and almost never visited the royal family. Moreover, it is reported that the shah often talked about Ghotbi in harshly disparaging terms.[1]

Reza Ghotbi was born in Tehran in 1938 (1317). He was six months older than his cousin Farah, the future queen. When Farah lost her father, she and her mother moved in with Reza’s parents. His father, Mohammad Ali, was the brother of Farah’s mother. Reza and Farah spent much of their childhood together; in the queen’s words, “Reza became the brother” she had never had.[2]

Reza went to school in Tehran, and like many intelligent and diligent boys of his generation, he attended the famous Alborz[3] high school. He showed an affinity for Shahnameh, the grand epic of Persian culture and literature. His interest in that book seemed as much political as literary. Reza was a nationalist, and Shahnameh was a gospel for many Iranian nationalists. In fact, Reza’s days in high school coincided with a period of political ferment and activism, and Reza too became active, developing ties with a group called the PanIranist party. They were a pseudofascist organization, deeply anticommunist and devoutly nationalist. They often provided the muscle for the forces fighting communism and were occasionally known to assault their opponents.[4] Reza engaged in this kind of physical confrontation with the communists at least once. He was still in high school at the time. He was stabbed in the scuffle and ended up in the hospital.[5] Ever since those youthful indiscretions, Reza’s political affiliations were a lingering subject of controversy and curiosity.

After high school, Reza and his cousin Farah set out for Paris. There, too, Reza had ties with his Pan-Iranist comrades, who had by then become opponents of the shah. These contacts, and the close ties between Reza and his cousin, Farah, later gave rise to rumors that the queen had also been a member of the opposition before her marriage.

But Reza was now more focused on his education than on politics. He was studying to become an electronic engineer, and he had a particular affinity for math. But all semblance of normalcy in his life ended when the little girl he had grown up with was chosen to become the queen of Iran. Reza returned to Iran as soon as he finished college with an engineering degree in electronics. Not long after that, the shah decided to launch a government-sponsored television station, and Reza was picked to direct the new endeavor. The fact that he had no background in management gave the appointment an air of cronyism. On the other hand, Reza’s engineering background afforded him a privileged position in managing the new technologies. Moreover, before long he developed a reputation for competent management. He was said to be a good judge of character, with a desire to surround himself with talented men and women. He freely delegated authority to others, and in return expected excellence.

Once ensconced in his new job, he used his proximity to the queen, and the fact that the shah wanted his message taken to as many households in the country as possible, to expand the fledgling new station into a vast national network. He increased the hours of broadcast and invested heavily in new programs. After a few months, the shah ordered the existing private television station to be bought and included in the government station. After that time, there would be no private broadcasting in Iran. Most important of all, Ghotbi used his considerable political capital to hire many dissidents who had either just come out of prison or were banned from their jobs by SAVAK. The political cognoscenti among the opposition knew that often the only government office that would employ them was Ghotbi’s rapidly expanding organization.

In March 1967, the new Iranian National Television Organization began, and because of its large budget and the protection provided by Ghotbi, many of the country’s filmmakers, theater directors, and artists also joined the staff. By 1971, Iran’s official radio station was merged with the television station, in spite of resistance from the staff, creating a media juggernaut that brought under one roof —and in Ghotbi’s orbit—all broadcasting in the country.

Early in the life of this organization, before the merger with radio, Ghotbi and a group of his managers began to develop a mission statement for the television service. What they crafted was partly influenced by the BBC model in England and PBS in the United States—trusted by the people, independent of the state, and dedicated to high art and sophisticated programming. Advocacy of government policies or being a tool of government propaganda was not part of their stated mission.[6] A clash between the stated mission and the purposes of television that the shah and the SAVAK envisioned was inevitable. Moreover, the “high art” model left many viewers thirsting for the kind of light entertainment that had been offered by the private station. Ultimately, three stations were developed, one for “high art,” another for lighter entertainment, and a third in English, intended for the increasingly large number of Americans living in Iran.

One of the first sources of tension between Ghotbi and more traditional royalists was his decision to stop the practice of making the deeds of the royal family, regardless of their insignificance, the top of the news every day. A couple of years later, as the shah’s cult of personality grew, Ghotbi had no choice but to join the national chorus of praise and apotheosis of the shah. Once again the shah and his family led the news every day. But tension about the order of the news was, in fact, only the most overt manifestation of a wider breach that existed in the shah’s center of power.

Beginning in late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, there were at least two different paradigms about how to deal with the changing landscape of the Iranian society. They were never clearly articulated, but it is easy to piece them together from the practices and words of their advocates. Although the queen claimed in her memoirs that “my husband and I actually had no basic differences,” when it came to politics they advocated and often implemented glaringly different approaches to social and political problems.

The shah, and people like Assadollah Alam, believed that an iron fist, an authoritarian king, a powerful state, and a dread secret police were the tools necessary for modernization. The regime’s allies, in addition to the military and the police, were the clergy (but not Ayatollah Khomeini) and the middle class, induced into submission by economic incentives.

The other paradigm was advocated by the queen, and most clearly articulated in the work and management style of Ghotbi as a media tsar. The queen’s other close confidante, Lily Amir-Arjomand, who managed the Organization for the Intellectual Development of Children at the time, was also an advocate of this approach. They believed that the regime should unite with the middle classes and co-opt the intellectuals. Iranian National Radio and Television (INRT) was a haven for lapsed or lingering communists, leftists, democrats and disgruntled intellectuals. It advocated innovative cultural productions like Parviz Sayyad’s Octopus.[7] Some consider this serial among the best ever produced in Iran. But easily the most celebrated and controversial innovation of the queen-Ghotbi team was the Shiraz Festival that began in 1967. It was where some of the most radical theatrical groups in the world were invited to perform.8 At the same time, the left, the center, and the conservative clergy joined forces to condemn the festival for its “insensitivity” to the mores and values of the masses.

For almost fifteen years, there was a tug of war between the queen-Ghotbi camp and the shah-SAVAK group. Alam’s memoirs are replete with instances in which some program on radio or television caused the ire of the shah, the secret police, or some other powerful figure, and only the protection provided by the queen kept Ghotbi on his job. Ultimately, the shah had come to believe that INRT was staffed by communists and subversives, whose goal was to overthrow the regime.[9] The discovery of a conspiracy to kidnap the queen and the crown prince by some of the television employees strengthened the shah’s suspicions.[10]

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the shah could dictate the terms of his paradigm and leave little room for any other vision, but from 1973, when he was diagnosed with cancer and gradually slipped into debilitating depression, inaction, and paranoia, the queenGhotbi team took on more power and their ideas became more prevalent. According to some royalists, this change is what led to the revolution. They offer the events of July 7, 1978, as an example.

Early in the afternoon of that day, the cabinet and Iran’s National Security Council decided to declare martial law in Tehran, beginning the next morning at six. An order was sent to Ghotbi from the prime minister, asking that radio and television programs broadcast the news about martial law every half hour. That way, they hoped, people would learn of the new rules and would not go to the streets and confront the soldiers. For reasons that are not clear, the order was not executed. Only past midnight, when most people were already asleep, was the news broadcast. Was it sabotage, some asked, and if it was, what role did Ghotbi play?11 Some concluded that the radio and television organization had by then become “an instrument of propaganda for the opposition.” They also point to the fact that the ostensibly official media in those days even refused to broadcast news that was favorable to the regime.[12]

In spite of these allegations, Ghotbi remained the queen’s most trusted advisor, and as she gained more and more power in the waning days of the Pahlavi regime, his power, too, increased. On November 18, 1978, when the queen traveled to Najaf and tried to solicit the support of Ayatollah Khoi, one of Shiism’s most venerable ayatollahs, Reza Ghotbi was with her and participated in all their meetings.[13]

Ghotbi’s most controversial decision was to help draft a speech with Seyyed Hoseyn Nasr that the shah delivered on prime-time television on November 6, 1978. The speech came the day after the shah had appointed a military cabinet, hoping to show the opposition the regime’s muscle. The speech, however, was pathetic in tone, pitiable in delivery, and defeatist in attitude. It was the clearest sign that the shah had given up the idea of saving his throne and was now desperate simply to save his life.[14]

Ghotbi’s final political intervention was to help arrange a meeting between the shah and Shapur Bakhtiyar, leading to the latter’s thirty-seven day tenure as prime minister. Even this role has not been without controversy. Sadiqi had already accepted the task of forming a cabinet, and he was deemed by many to be the only man capable of saving the throne. Why did the queen-Ghotbi team suggest Bakhtiyar instead? Had Sadiqi already given up? Eventually, Ghotbi’s demise was brought about when he resisted the orders of Sharif-Emami, the new prime minister. This time even his cousin could not save his job. In September 1978 Reza Ghotbi was relieved of his duties, and an era in Iranian broadcasting came to end.

His royalist critics point to his excessive independence in those years. Even the shah, they claim, could not always get Ghotbi to do what he wanted. In fact, tensions between the shah and the de facto brother of his queen had come to a boil behind the scenes in the mid-1970s. At that time, Ghotbi received a letter from the shah’s office asking for an explanation for how an American company had received a contract. In a terse letter, Ghotbi laid out in detail the process whereby the company was awarded the contract, forcefully insisting that no sweetheart deal existed with the American company.[15] In an age when many politicians and technocrats were accused of malfeasance, Ghotbi was deemed to be free of financial taint. The same could not be said of his father. He had, by the 1970s, become a bone of contention in the battle against corruption. General Hoseyn Fardust, the shah’s “eyes and ears,” claimed that in the last two decades of the shah’s rule, Ghotbi’s father illicitly received many government contracts.[16] Documents from the British Embassy also make it clear that the elder Ghotbi had developed a badly tarnished reputation.

Exile was particularly hard on Ghotbi. Not only had he lost his powerful perch, but also his parents had gone through a rancorous divorce and his relationship with the shah had reached a new nadir. For a short while, when royalists tried to launch a radio program intended to undermine the Islamic regime in Tehran, it was Reza “who set up a [royalist] resistance network.”[17] But it did not last long. Soon Ghotbi faded from the public view. He works as a consultant and surfs the Internet for the news of the land he has lost.

Abbasqoli Golshai’yan was born in 1902 (1281 in Tehran. His family was connected to the then-ruling Qajar dynasty through blood and service. His father was a greatgrandson of Abbas Mirza, the reform-minded crown prince whose hopes of changing and modernizing Iran were aborted by an early death. His mother was the daughter of the chief telegraph operator for Nasir al-din Shah. Abbasqoli, the fifth child in a family of seven children, was only five years old when his father died of cancer. There was, as a consequence, a sharp decline in the family’s financial situation. In his own words, much of his “childhood and youth was spent in misery and poverty.”[1]

Abbasqoli was first educated in a traditional maktab, where discipline was hard and the curriculum consisted of heavy doses of Arabic and the Qur’an, with some dabbling in the classics of Persian poetry and prose. He was later enrolled in a French-run school called the Alliance Française. Eventually, in 1920, he entered Dar al-Funun,[2] and then enrolled in the new law school created by the Ministry of Justice. Two years later, after he completed the required courses, Abbasqoli was hired to work at the ministry.

Two other personal events of Golshai’yan’s early years had a long-lasting influence on his life. He began taking lessons in playing the Persian instrument the tar from Darvish Khan, who became, Golshai’yan later recalled, “like a real father” to him.3 And at Darvish Khan’s behest, in April 1924 Golshai’yan became a darvish himself, joining the Akhvane Safa branch of the sect.

In 1929, Golshai’yan was engaged and soon married to Vahideh, a daughter of another Qajar family. By his own account, theirs was, and remained to the end of his life, a marriage of love. They had three children, two boys and a girl.

Golshai’yan’s political career began in the 1920s. At the Ministry of Justice, he met and soon became a protégé of Ali Akbar Davar. With a combination of his own disciplined hard work and the sponsorship of Davar, he rapidly rose in the ranks of Iran’s new modern and secular bureaucracy. At the ministry, he first served as a judge and then as Tehran’s chief prosecutor.

It was as chief prosecutor that Golshai’yan handled the case, and wrote the official report, of the controversial death of Teymur Tash. Teymur Tash had been one of the most powerful men in Reza Shah’s inner circle when he was arrested. He died in prison. His sudden arrest and death became immediately shrouded in a thick veil of mystery and conspiracy theory. He was reported to have been a Soviet spy and, even more dangerous, planning to take the reins of power from his monarch. His death in prison was and is believed to have been ordered by the angry king.

After a while Davar, who himself eventually would run afoul of Reza Shah, arranged for Golshai’yan’s transfer to the Ministry of Finance. There, on May 17, 1941, Golshai’yan was named acting minister. His hard work and early success on the job gained him the favor of the king and ensured that his temporary appointment was quickly made permanent.

Golshai’yan was part of the cabinet when British and Soviet troops occupied Iran in 1941. He witnessed, firsthand, Reza Shah’s abdication as well as the ascent of the crown prince to the throne. During the interim days, when the resigning monarch was preparing to leave Iran and his young son had yet to seize the reins of power, the cabinet and Golshai’yan played a crucial role in facilitating a more or less peaceful transition of power. In spite of early British and Soviet pressures, the cabinet preserved the monarchy, while avoiding chaos in the cities, and ensuring the long-term territorial integrity of the country. Golshai’yan’s account of these developments, his knowledge of the behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Iranian government of Prime Minister Forughi and representatives of the occupying British and Soviet governments, his observations on the character of the young shah and the deposed Reza Shah, are among the most valuable components of his memoirs.

Recalling these early years, Golshai’yan would also draw an unabashedly positive portrait of his mentor, Davar. Golshai’yan’s account remains to this day one of the most detailed, and informed, portraits of a person who played a singularly important role in consolidating Reza Shah’s rule, secularizing the Iranian judiciary, and modernizing the bureaucracy in general, and the Ministry of Finance in particular. Furthermore, as Golshai’yan would make clear, the existing portrait of Davar was only a small part of a greater work he had begun to prepare on his mentor’s life. It was at the instigation of a friend, Dr. Gassem Ghani, that he had begun to work on the subject, and he had prepared extensive notes for it. Sadly, his notes seem to have been lost.[4]

In spite of these important contributions, and in spite of his significant role in Iranian politics during the war years—in a series of prominent positions including many ministerial portfolios and his tenure as the mayor of a Tehran caught in the chaos of war—Golshai’yan’s political legacy was primarily shaped, to his dismay, by his role in the ongoing oil negotiations of the late 1940s. It was as minister of finance that he signed, on behalf of the Iranian government, a draft oil agreement that came to haunt him for the rest of his life.

With the rise of nationalism in postwar Iran, a controversial 1933 oil agreement between Iran and Great Britain became the subject of renewed debate. In 1948, and again in 1949, the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) sent their representative, Neville Gass, to renegotiate the terms of that deal. The terms that were eventually worked out became known as the Gass-Golshai’yan Agreement (also known as the Supplemental Oil Agreement). According to Golshai’yan, this agreement would have raised Iran’s share of royalties to the highest level ever. Other estimates confirm this: Iran’s income would have risen from twenty-two cents per barrel to thirty-three cents, and had the agreement become law, an additional revenue of forty-nine million pounds sterling would have come to Iran through 1951.5 But in those days, Mossadeq’s nationalization movement had changed people’s expectations.

The agreement was signed on July 17, 1949. The often recalcitrant chairman of AIOC, Sir William Fraser, claimed at the time that the Supplemental Oil Agreement was the best deal hitherto offered to any Middle Eastern country. But many Iranian officials took an entirely different view. A special twenty-man commission of the Iranian Majlis, chaired by Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and empowered with the oversight of all oil negotiations, voted on November 25, 1950, to reject the Gass-Golshai’yan Agreement.[6]

The press coverage of the deliberations, and the claims of Golshai’yan’s detractors, made the agreement go down in history as an act of infamy, and his role as nothing short of treason. Golshai’yan, on the other hand, was firmly convinced that the agreement was a prudent nationalist act, even more beneficial to Iran than Dr. Mossadeq’s move to nationalize Iranian oil.7 In his own memoirs, he goes to some lengths to show his own nationalist credentials, and the unbending animosity of the British toward him; but his role in these negotiations made him, in the public imagination, a “lackey” of the British and one of their key operatives in Iran. In fact, archival evidence in the British Public Records Office clearly shows that early in his tenure as minister of Finance, Golshai’yan did confront, and anger, the British, and that even during the oil negotiations, he tried his best to drive a hard bargain for Iran.

In 1949, there were rumors that Golshai’yan would soon be appointed prime minister. Public opinion held that he was a candidate of the British Embassy, which hoped to quell the rising tide of nationalism. In Golshai’yan’s own mind, however, it was precisely British opposition to him—because of his unwillingness to heed the demands of the British government, particularly in determining the rate of exchange between the pound sterling and the Iranian rial when he had been finance minister—that worked to kill his chances to become prime minister.

In the 1950s, Golshai’yan’s political career saw much upheaval. He would at times rise rapidly only to fall sharply. For a long while, he was unemployed and in his own words in dire financial straits. Intermittently he was named governor, first of the province of Khorasan (1948), then of Fars (1950), and finally of Azarbaijan (1954). All three provinces were, in those days, of immense importance to the central government. Khorasan and Azarbaijan shared borders with the Soviet Union, and for almost a century Fars had been a hotbed of tribal agitation against the government.

By the mid-1950s, Golshai’yan was called back to Tehran as a minister of justice. Toward the end of the decade, once again there were rumors that his appointment as prime minister was imminent. Golshai’yan claims that he had even gone so far as to write his acceptance speech and had had the content ratified and corrected by the shah. The appointment never materialized. This time, he surmised, it was his unwillingness to promise the Americans his full cooperation that torpedoed his chances.

The 1960s were the twilight of his career. Golshai’yan was for a while appointed a senator. He then retired from all governmental jobs, except for membership in the board of directors of Iran’s Melli Bank. After his retirement from government, Golshai’yan practiced law and occasionally acted as an arbiter in judicial cases. In this period, he returned to the beloved avocation of his youth and spent time promoting classical Persian music, as well as playing and practicing the tar.[8]

It is at this stage of his life that he grew increasingly disillusioned with the shah and his leadership. His memoirs contain surprisingly sharp attacks on the character of the shah (as weak, vacillating, and prone to gossip and sycophancy)9 as well as his policies. He also had strong words of admonition for the Islamic revolution, and lamented the bloody work of the revolutionary tribunals.

Golshai’yan was a hard-working man, taciturn and honest. There was a quality of intractability about him that easily could have resulted from his early training and work as a judge. The sudden poverty of his childhood had left him an embittered man, creating in him “a deep sense of cynicism towards everything and everybody.”[10] He was nevertheless loyal to his friends and mentors. He had an unfailing love for his family, and the untimely death of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter in 1974 was a grief that all but crippled him. Indeed, the death of his child, as well as the hardships that came with the rise of the Islamic revolution, caused him to live the last years of his life in a state of despondent melancholy. “Every day and night,” he wrote late in his memoirs, “I pray to God to bring about my speedy death . . . and end my agonies.”[11]

Golshai’yan also used the pages of his memoirs to accuse his son-in-law (who was also his nephew) of “neglecting” his marital duties and thereby contributing to his young wife’s untimely death. According to the son-in-law, these “unfair allegations” reveal not just Golshai’yan’s delusional view of his beloved daughter’s death, but the usually hidden cruel and resentful side of his character.

Behind the stoic façade of the darvish, he suggested, there lurked an unforgiving man, beset with deep hatreds and resentment at his many missed opportunities in life. In his own mind, according to his son-in-law, Golshai’yan believed he could have been a major force in Iranian politics. The fact that he had been driven to the sidelines and unjustly branded with the infamy of the Gass-Golshai’yan Agreement, caused him to see the world through a poisoned prism.[12]

If Golshai’yan’s thoughts about his thwarted destiny created in him a tormented soul, he remained reticent. Aside from his memoirs, Golshai’yan’s writings are few, and in nonpolitical genres. In his youth he had dabbled in poetry, writing some verse using the poetic name of “Heyran” (“the wanderer”). He prepared, but never published, a translation of Rousseau’s famous novel Emile. Even his memoirs, for all their length, reveal few secrets. They are an unwieldy and agonizingly uneven narrative, full of repetition. The prose is hurried and haphazard, and its nuggets of insight and information are hidden in its voluminous digressions. Yet Golshai’yan’s youthful chosen pen name proved succinctly prophetic. Despite his steadfast, devoted loyalty to profession and country, neither offered him an unclouded haven. He spent much of his political life exiled from his early promise. By fate or misfortune, Golshai’yan became indeed what he had called himself, a wanderer. He died on October 11, 1990 (19 Mehr 1369).

Aliasgar Hekmat was a man of letters and politics. His most important contributions to Iranian culture and politics were made during the reign of Reza Shah. Nevertheless, his postwar contributions were also significant.

He was born in Shiraz in 1892 (1271). His affluent family had been famous in the city for the long line of prominent physicians and scholars they had produced. His schooling began in 1908 when he entered the Church Missionary Society School in the city of Shiraz.1 After a year, he attended the traditional Islamic Madrese-ye Mansuriye.[2] In 1914 (1293), he went to Tehran and enrolled in the American College. He graduated from the school in 1919. During this period, he also studied the traditional curriculum of Persian literature and Islamic theology (Fegh) with clerics such as Mirza Taher-e Tone-kaboni.[3] When in later years he was sent abroad on an official governmental mission, he enrolled at the Sorbonne and received degrees in both law and literature. He was eventually awarded several honorary doctoral degrees from universities in Asia and Europe.[4]

Hekmat was hired by the Ministry of Culture not long after his graduation from the American College. His first job was as head of the personnel office. He was later promoted to the office of the Inspectorate, where he had more to do with cultural policy. In March 1925, in his new post, he began a journal called Talim va Tarbiyat. He successfully solicited articles from many of the literary and scholarly luminaries of the time, including Badi’ozzaman Foruzanfar, Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, and Abbas Egbal-e Ashtiyani. The journal later changed its name to Amouzesh va Parvaresh and continued to thrive until the eve of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.[5] The issues of the journal during the early phase of its life made it one of the more influential publications of its time.

It was also soon after graduation from the American College that Hekmat met Ali Akbar Davar. Together they created the Radical Party (hezbe radical). When Hekmat’s innovative ideas and his enthusiasm for change riled the traditionalists in the Ministry of Culture, and they arranged for, in Hekmat’s words, “his departure from his post,” his friend and mentor Davar came to his rescue and transferred him to the Ministry of Justice. Shortly thereafter, in preparation for establishing a modern university in Iran, Davar sent Hekmat abroad on an exploratory mission to study European institutes of higher learning. Hekmat was in London, “broke and despondent,” in his own words, when in September 1933, he learned that he had been appointed acting minister of culture.[6] The appointment was, in no small measure, the result of Davar’s support. In June 1935, as a reward for his hard work and impressive accomplishments, Reza Shah promoted him to the rank of minister.

It was in his capacity as the minister of culture that Hekmat left his most indelible marks on modern Persian history. In cultural advocacy, he was indefatigable. His tenure is easily the most constructive period in the history of that ministry. He was a consummate creator of cultural institutions and a tireless advocate of new buildings intended for artistic or pedagogical purposes. He was instrumental in the construction of such important buildings as those of Tehran University’s campus, the famous museum of ancient Iranian arts (Musey-e Irane Bastan), and the now iconic tombs of Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Sa’di. His fascinating account of how the university was constructed, and his difficulties in building the first dissection hall at the medical school, are revealing and readable anecdotes about that era’s cultural history and the travails of those bent on modernizing Iran.[7]

In October 1934, he helped organize the first international conference of scholars on Ferdowsi. Many of the papers presented at that conference are still considered seminal works in the field. A conference to commemorate the works of Ibn Sina and another to celebrate the seven-hundredth anniversary of the compilation of Sa’adi’s Golestan were his ideas as well. The establishment of the Persian language academy called Farhangestan, in October 1936, also occurred during his tenure as culture minister. The academy was at least partially inspired by the work of Zabih Behruz in developing a pure Persian lexicon for the military and was modeled on the French academies.8 Hekmat was himself one of the founding members of the Farhangestan. It was largely on account of his effort and support that an encyclopedic two-volume account of Iranian history, called Iranshahr, was published.9 He is credited with the establishment of a teachers’ college in Tehran, as well as several other similar institutions and scores of high schools in other cities around the country. He supervised the restructuring of the curriculum in Persian elementary and high schools and, following Reza Shah’s orders, made physical education a mandatory part of every student’s program.[10] He helped build the first modern sports stadium in Tehran, called Amjadiye. He also championed the first chapter of Boy Scouts in Iran. Indeed, the Persian word for Boy Scouts, Pishahang, was coined by him.[11]

Once Reza Shah decided to embark on the policy of unveiling Persian women, he put Hekmat in charge of mapping out a plan of action. The meeting in Tehran’s Teacher College, on January 8, 1936 (17 Day 1314), when Reza Shah’s wife and daughters, along with the wives of ministers, appeared in public without veils, was planned by Hekmat. In his memoir of those days, he reports in a critical tone the occasional use of violence in unveiling women in the streets of Tehran and claims to have advocated a more gradual, voluntary approach. The monarch, he implies, did not heed his advice.[12] Furthermore, as a minister of culture, he commissioned scholars like Allame Qazvini to copy and send to Iran rare Persian manuscripts found in European libraries. He helped organize the National Library of Iran. It was in light of such services that Qazvini waxed eloquent in praise of Hekmat’s cultural contributions to the country.

Yet, in spite of all his services, he fell from grace in December 1938 as a result of his inadvertent role in the diplomatic row between Reza Shah and the government of France. When a French magazine made a pun of the word “shah” by replacing it with the French word chat (cat), the monarch was not amused, and he severed Iran’s diplomatic relations with France. Hekmat, apparently unaware of these developments, sent a perfunctory telegram of congratulations to his French counterpart on the occasion of the opening of Iran’s booth at the Paris Exhibition. Hekmat was immediately dismissed and, facing an uncertain future, went into self-exile in Shiraz.[13] Six months later, in October 1939, he was called back to Tehran and appointed minister of the interior.

In spite of his short exile, Hekmat was one of the longest-serving ministers in the often-tumultuous days of Reza Shah. He was minister of culture for four years, minister of the interior for about a year, and, as minister of culture, served ex officio as the rector of Tehran University for three years. Some feel that his longevity was the result of his affable character, his commitment to and competence in cultural matters, his strong sense of discipline and organization, and his mastery of the art of bureaucratic survival. Others, on the other hand, see it as a sinecure for sycophancy. In a letter to Taqizadeh, Bagher Kazemi writes of Hekmat in stark terms, calling him a man who “is with everyone and no one. He is altogether without any ideology and principle.”[14] Still another group detected in him a hint of vanity, an unrelenting wish to be near the center of power.[15] As evidence, they point to the fact that in nearly every building constructed during his tenure, he made sure his own name appears in some noticeable corner of the structure.[16]

With the abdication of Reza Shah, Hekmat’s political fortunes did not completely wane, but his long and often-lustrous career entered a new and different phase.

Although culture was clearly his forte, in the second phase, for reasons that are hard to fathom, his appointments were all in the political arena. His long friendship with Forughi, and the fact that all through the years when the latter was out of Reza Shah’s favor Hekmat kept in secret contact with him, seems to have helped him land the post of minister of industry and commerce in Forughi’s wartime cabinet.17 As a member of Foroughi’s inner circle, Hekmat had, in the words of the British Embassy in Tehran, “a good deal to do with the negotiations about the Tripartite Treaty of 1942” that ultimately proved very important in safeguarding Iran’s territorial integrity at the end of World War II.18 After the fall of the cabinet, Hekmat ran for a seat in the Majlis, and failed. In 1943 he was named minister of health. Later appointments included tenures as minister of the interior, minister of justice, and minister without portfolio. Twice he was named Iran’s foreign minister, for a year in 1948 and then again for two years in 1958. The second appointment coincided with the days when Iran was on the brink of signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. He seemed to have played an important role in the failed January 1959 negotiations with the Russians. The American Embassy in Iran concluded at the time that Hekmat had had an important role in initiating the negotiations. He was, in their assessment, an advocate of neutrality for Iran and had convinced the shah that “the best defense against the Soviet Union was diplomacy and cleverness.”[19] The British also concurred, describing him as, “hard-working, friendly, and shrewder than he first appears. . . . A protagonist of neutralist views.”20 During his tenure at the Foreign Ministry, he commenced the publication of a journal called Majaleye Vezerate Omur Khareje, devoted to serious discussions of foreignpolicy matters.[21] Another of his appointments during this second phase was as ambassador to India, where he served from 1953 to 1958. He was active in promoting cultural ties between Iran and India. He published a memoir of his Indian sojourn, as well as essays about the mutual influences of Persian and Indian cultures.[22]

Of course, in the second, more political stage of his life, he did not altogether abandon his culture pursuits. When in 1946 the Tudeh Party, with help from the Soviet Embassy in Iran, organized the first Congress of Iranian Writers, Hekmat was not only a member of the committee that chaired the proceedings, but himself read an essay on the fate of poetry during the Reza Shah period, and to the surprise of many of those present, criticized the ill effects despotism had had on Iran’s poetic tradition. In addition to his own writings of the period, he was for two decades the head of the Iranian committee of UNESCO. His participation in the communist-organized Writers’ Union and his unswerving devotion to the view that Iran must normalize its relations with the Soviet Union made him suspect in the eyes of many of the more conservative elements of the Iranian political establishment.

Finally, in the later stages of his life, when he had already left public service, he helped establish Madreseye ali Adabiyat va Zabanhaye Khareji, a private college for teaching literature. With the establishment of the school, he had, in a sense, returned to his true passion for the world of letters. Although politics was for many years his vocation, his avocation and passion was always for literature. He was an accomplished and prolific man of letters. He wrote close to a hundred articles; he also wrote thirteen, translated twelve, and edited six books. They cover an eclectic array of subjects ranging from scholarly treatises on Iranian history and literature to books like How to Teach the Koran to Children. Among his works of translation were five of Shakespeare’s plays, including Romeo and Juliet. He also wrote a long essay comparing Shakespeare’s tale of the “star-crossed lovers” with Nezami’s tale, Leili va Majnoon. He was a keen critic of Persian prose and under the auspices of UNESCO published Parsiye Nagz, an anthology of his favorite examples of Persian writing.[23] His own prose was rich and solemn, bordering on the baroque and ostentatious. He not only taught the history of Persian poetry at Tehran University and published important texts of literary history, he was himself a poet. He published two collections of his own poems.[24] In poetry, his style and critical sensibility was strictly

classical and traditional. In fact, he dismissed modern Persian poetry as a passing fad, and an “inadequate imitation” of Western verse.[25]

For much of his adult life, he kept a daily journal. The journals, in the words of his daughter, “fill a small suitcase.”[26] Save for small segments published by him in his important Si Khatere, unfortunately no other part of the daily journal has been published.

He had a particular affinity for teaching and tried to continue his classes in spite of his many political engagements. He was also tireless in seeking, nurturing, and encouraging new talent. Among his most notable students were Ehsan Yarshater and Saidi-Sirjani, whose decision to come to Tehran was the direct result of Hekmat’s support and encouragement. Among Iranian men of letters, he had an impressively large and varied circle of friends that included Qazvini, Forughi, Bahar, Sirjani, Sadiqi, and Yagmai.

He was by all accounts a man of myriad talents, endless energy, unfailing organization and discipline, endearing congeniality, and subtle wit. The British Embassy in Tehran described him as “a go-ahead, pleasant young man . . . always very helpful and approachable” In financial matters, his probity was legendary. He was also a collector of books and manuscripts. Late in his life, he donated his library of 5,549 books (of which 275 were old manuscripts) to the Tehran University Library, where they were to be kept as a separate collection. He also donated the large collection of rare manuscripts he had inherited from his family to the library of Astane Gods Razavi in Meshed. A bibliography of these manuscripts was prepared and published by the renowned bibliophile Mohammad Taghi Daneshpajooh.

Hekmat spent the last twenty years of his life reading and writing in the isolation of his small library, where only close friends visited. His body grew frail, forcing him to spend many months in the hospital. He had also become deaf. Although he had played an important role in the unveiling of Iranian women, he was spared the wrath of the new Islamic zealots after the revolution. Yet in the frenzy of Islamic revolutionary politics, his death in August 1980, (Shahrivar 1359), in spite of long years of notable service to the country, was all but unnoticed. Only a small note in one of Tehran’s dailies—President Bani Sadre’s Jomhouriye Islami—appeared on the occasion of his death. A few months later, the scholarly journal Ayandeh also wrote an obituary. Hekmat is buried, befittingly, in the hall of a small library in the Bage Tuti cemetery, not far from Tehran.

Sardar Fakher hekmat was a man of obstinate aristocratic taste. Even his name, laced with recognizable remnants of his patrician past, and his insistence on using it long after the employment of all such titles were officially banned in Iran, hints at his aristocratic obduracy.

He was born in 1891 in a house near the Baharestan Square in Tehran. The old and graceful Majlis building, the vessel of Hekmat’s eventual rise to prominence, was only a block away. In Hekmat’s own words, their house was a vast compound with many servants, a stable of fine horses, coachmen, and three kaniz, or “little slave girls.”[1] One of them was an older woman who acted as the purser of the house; the other two kaniz were younger—one feigned madness and defied any master and the other was more docile and cooked for the family.

Hekmat’s father was from a family of renowned scholars and physicians in the city of Shiraz. They were, according to some sources, of Jewish decent but converted to Islam sometime in the mid–nineteenth century. Their conversion and rapid political rise is reminiscent of Disraeli and the politics of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic England. Although it has been suggested that the name Hekmat is related to the Yiddish word hakham, or wisdom, members of the family were in later years loathe to discuss the question of this conversion.[2] Hekmat’s father had been a successful physician in the court of Nasir al-din Shah; his medical acumen earned him the title of Masih-al Molk, or the Messiah of the Realm. But by the time Sardar Fakher was born, his father had forfeited medicine in favor of attending to his large holdings in land. Hekmat’s mother, Fatemeh Mostofi, also came from a prominent family in Shiraz. In his meandering memoirs, Hekmat, more concerned with peerage than policy, focuses his adulating gaze on his paternal lineage and tells us next to nothing about his mother and her ancestry.

Sardar Fakher was the third child of a family of seven. In 1891, the year of his birth, a cholera epidemic was wreaking havoc in Tehran. It killed 10,000 of the city’s 120,000 population. A year earlier, an influenza pandemic had a staggering death toll of 6,000 of the city’s children. In fact, the overall impact of these diseases over the next thirty years was biblical in proportion. An estimated quarter of the country’s population was lost.[3] In 1891, however, Hekmat’s family, like other patricians of the time, sought sanctuary away from the bustle and bacteria of the city.

The child who at birth had been given the name of Hedayatollah was not altogether spared, however. He began to have mysterious fainting spells, and when doctors failed to find a cure, his devoutly religious mother took him and a group of servants to Meshed and the shrine of Imam Reza. The child was cured, and the mother changed his name to Reza as a token of pious gratitude. That would not be his last name change.

Reza was five when he was enrolled in the Elmiye School. Aside from what he learned in later years as an autodidact and an avid fan of Persian poetry and prose, the six years he spent at this school turned out to be all the formal education he ever received. He had a smattering of French from those six years, and his many subsequent travels to Europe helped him find his way around the language better. In July 1908, he was on his way to more schooling in Beirut—then the educational mecca for the sons of Iran’s eminent families—when his father was killed in an ambush. It was a blood vendetta by peasants who held him responsible for the death of two of their leaders.[4] Hekmat’s life abruptly changed; he was forced to go to Shiraz and take over the vast family holdings. He also entered the arena of Iranian politics, then fraught with civil and social strife. Although in his memoirs he claimed to have been fifteen at the time, in fact he was close to seventeen.[5] He became an advocate of the constitutional cause.

By then another important change had also taken place in his life. In 1909 he married “Hajiye Khanoume Aliye Mohazab, the only child of the deceased Mirza Seyyed Ali Mohazebaldoleh.” In his entire memoir, these few words, and the fact that she bore him several children, of which only one survived, are the sole references to his wife.[6]

World War I and the Russian revolution brought about radical changes in Iran’s political landscape. England, by then fretful of Soviet expansion and, as always, deeply concerned about protecting the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, used all its power[7] to pass the infamous 1919 Agreement and turn Iran into a virtual colony of England. Iranian nationalists fought against the agreement, and Hekmat joined the fray. He entered politics as something of an idealist and the head of an army of five hundred armed men. When the radical communist revolutionary Heydar Amogli traveled to Shiraz to set up a branch of his Democratic Party, Hekmat accepted his invitation and became a founding member of the party’s local chapter. Later in life, he twice toyed with the idea of creating a socialist party in Iran, and both attempts came to nothing. He also joined forces with the famous Tangestani Movement. In the days of World War I, Tangestanis were a ragtag army of peasants fighting the might of the British Empire; in later years, after Sadeq Chubaq wrote his successful semihistoric novel about the movement, and particularly after the novel was turned into a popular film, they took on legendary dimensions, icons of an indigenous, nationalist movement.[8]

Hekmat’s activities brought him to the attention of Persian nationalists, as well as the British legation in Iran. At the behest of one of the democratically minded courtiers, the last Qajar king, Ahmad Shah, bestowed on Hekmat the title of Fakher-al Saltaneh (Pride of the King); henceforth he would be known to everyone by the name of Sarder Fakher. The British, on the other hand, sought to have him thrown out of the southern provinces of the country. They eventually pressured the governor of the region (Farmanfarma’ian) to confiscate Hekmat’s properties and force him to seek refuge in Tehran. But there, too, he soon realized that his powerful relatives and friends could not protect him.9 At their behest, he left Iran late in 1919 and spent the next few months traveling in Europe.

Hekmat returned from his European exile in June 1920, very much back in political favor. His confiscated properties were returned to him, and the prime minister, Moshir al-Dowleh, sent him on an important mission. His job was to negotiate with Mirza Kuchek Khan Jangali—a nationalist who had allied himself with communists and created a Soviet Republic in Gilan—on behalf of the central government. According to Hekmat himself, he was instrumental in convincing the rebel leader to sever his ties with his communist allies.[10] Independent scholarly sources have offered a more complicated picture. According to some, the alliance was already broken when Hekmat arrived,[11] while others point out that Mirza’s decision to meet with Hekmat was itself the most likely source of the breakdown.[12]

Not long after these negotiations, Hekmat was elected to the Majlis, where he seems to have found his true calling. He began his career as legislator during the fourth session of the Parliament. He also served in the fifth, seventh, eighth, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth , nineteenth and twentieth sessions. During the reign of Reza Shah, aside from his two terms as a representative, he also served as governor in the provinces of Gorgan, Kerman, and Yazd. None of these appointments proved to be of particular significance; in none did he show any remarkable qualities.

He almost lost any chance for a future in politics when Mostofi-al Mamalek, a prominent and popular political figure, died while a guest in Hekmat’s house. Rumors of poison and foul play began to spread immediately. Eventually, Hekmat felt it necessary to publish a letter categorically denying any role in the death of his friend. He also offered as supporting evidence a letter from the son of the deceased, who described in some detail the manner of his father’s “natural” death. In a line that borders on the absurd, the son reassures posterity that “my dearly beloved father, may he rest in peace, ate nothing at the house of Sardar Fakher Hekmat.”[13]

The fall of Reza Shah and the advent of a period of relative democracy in Iran helped bring Hekmat back into the political limelight. He was reelected to the Majlis. He soon joined forces with Ghavam-ol Saltaneh who, after years of exile and forced seclusion, was emerging as a key figure in the wartime political landscape. Hekmat became a founding member of Ghavam’s Democratic Party of Iran. With the help of the party, in 1946 he was elected Speaker of the Parliament. It was a position he loved, and he held it for nearly fifteen years. For much of two decades, his burly face and corpulent build, his fine tailored suits, his occasional outbursts while scolding rowdy members of the Parliament, and his intermittent notes of self-adulation became a part his public persona.

In his early days as Speaker, he tried to abide by the traditions of the Majlis and maintained some semblance of independence from the fractious factions in the Parliament. Majlis was in those days the center of gravity in Iranian politics, and its Speaker exercised considerable power. Soon after his affiliation with Ghavam, Hekmat began to wield that power in favor of his new ally and his policies. But Ghavam was caught in a fierce power struggle with the young shah, and Hekmat stunned the world of Iranian politics when in 1947 he suddenly changed alliances and sided with the king. It was an alliance that would determine and shape the rest of Hekmat’s political life.

The first steps in this alliance were taken in October 1947. A highly controversial bill granting the Soviet Union the right to explore for oil in northern parts of Iran was headed for the Majlis. In the tense days and weeks leading to the crucial vote, Hekmat, in the words of the American Embassy in Tehran, showed “statesman-like behavior” and was one of the leading “patriotic Iranian leaders in position to take appropriate action” to kill the bill.[14]

To Mohammad Reza Shah’s great relief—or if British and American Embassies are to be believed, at his behest—Hekmat not only played a role in defeating the proposed agreement, but, more important, he helped mastermind the fall of the recalcitrant Ghavam. Hekmat was then immediately nominated by the Majlis to become the next premier. He agreed, and the shah issued a firman in his name, making him modern Iran’s fifty-fourth prime minister. But in less than forty-eight hours, Hekmat had another change of heart. His love for the Majlis, his desire for job security, and the clear recognition that cabinets in those days often had dismally short lives, led him to predicate his acceptance on a strange demand. He wanted to be reassured that once his cabinet fell, he would be allowed to return to the Majlis and take up his seat. The demand was clearly against the law and was rejected. Hekmat, in turn, rejected the offer to become prime minister and retained his seat in the Majlis.

Ghavam and his friends accused Hekmat of nothing short of treachery. Tehran was filled with rumors about the reasons for Hekmat’s change of heart. By then, an aspect of his private life had become a matter of public debate and considerable controversy. Hekmat was, by temperament, a man of extravagant taste; he invariably spent more money than he earned. He was generous to a fault. Most of the meager salary he earned as speaker of the Majlis he gave away to supplicants. Throughout the years, he survived mostly by selling off pieces of the large family holdings he and his wife had inherited. In the last years of his life, as those properties dwindled, the shah apparently ordered the government to purchase from Hekmat a couple of his houses at highly inflated prices.[15] Hekmat’s profligate ways with money, his support of a lavish lifestyle, his strict adherence to the traditions of a dead, or dying, aristocracy all turned him into the kind of eccentric character found, for example, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or the novels of Dostoyevsky.

Hekmat also loved gambling, and poker was his favorite game. In those days, poker could be highly political in Iran. Members of the royal family, particularly the shah, were known to indulge nightly in high-stakes games. There were varieties of poker parties or dowreh, and membership in the right dowreh was a much-coveted prize, and a sure ticket to rapid political and economic success. Hekmat became the focal point of an eponymous dowreh. He often lost, and sometimes his losses reached astronomical figures, or so the whispers went. In the often-cantankerous sessions of the Parliament in those days, opponents taunted and ridiculed Hekmat for his gambling habit. On December 6, 1947, the British Embassy in Tehran reported that the shah had secured “Hekmat’s collaboration [in getting rid of Ghavam] through the extension of substantial financial help” to pay his gambling debt.[16]

Gambling was not the only aspect of his private life that became the subject of public scrutiny and occasional criticism. Hekmat had been instrumental in the passage of a bill authorizing a special committee set up by the Parliament to classify all governmental employees based on their past performance. Employees who had been in breach of the law in the past were to be classified in the infamous “Bande Jim” (or J Clause) and barred from holding office in the future. Hekmat’s name appeared on this dread list. He first gave a tearful, and much lampooned, speech defending his record—his version of Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech—and then he worked hard and successfully to abort the bill’s implementation. He also began a whisper campaign of his own, accusing his enemies of sinister machinations. He had been a foe of the British, he would say to anyone who listened, and it was their lackeys who had now placed his name on the list as punishment.

The bruising political battles with Ghavam and the even more bitter fights with Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq a couple of years later not only damaged his hitherto friendly relations with the nationalist forces in the Majlis, but gradually cast a shadow on his reputation, and darkened his mood and vision. He came under increasing attack by his peers. Some accused him of leaking the most confidential deliberations of the Parliament to the shah, while others criticized him for consciously rendering the Majlis impotent and making it subservient to the whims and wishes of the monarch.[17] By the time Mossadeq’s battles with the shah had reached a point of no return, Hekmat seemed to have embraced ideas that were contrary to his normally congenial and conciliatory disposition. He began to “emphasize the necessity of certain amount of bloodshed and even suggested the appointment of a few hundred assassins in order to overthrow Mossadeq.”[18]

It was this kind of unabashed support of the shah that made Hekmat a political pariah during much of the Mossadeq era. On the other hand, when in August 1953 the shah was returned to power, Hekmat was well rewarded for his unwavering support. He was once again named Speaker of the Majlis and played a crucial role in the passage of a highly controversial bill ratifying the agreement between the Iranian government and a consortium of British, American, and European oil companies. The agreement was a hard sell; it had many opponents, coming as it did on the heels of Dr. Mossadeq’s fight with the British government. The struggle had fueled the fires of nationalism in Iran. Persian oil had been nationalized and now a Western consortium was taking it away again, or so said the powerful campaign waged by the opponents of the regime and the consortium. In fact, Hekmat, too, “was rumored in segments of the press to be less than firm in support of Agreement,” but he went on to reassure his erstwhile enemies, the British Embassy, that such rumors were “untrue” and that there should be “no worry about Majlis.”[19]

Hekmat was not a man who bore political grudges for too long. He fought bitterly against Mossadeq and his allies in the years leading to Mossadeq’s appointment as prime minister. But when Mossadeq fell, Hekmat used his favored position with the shah to seek relief and reprieve for some of the leading figures in Mossadeq’s camp. For example, he lobbied vigorously though unsuccessfully to save the life of Hoseyn Fatemi, Mossadeq’s fiery foreign minister and the author of some of the most vitriolic attacks on the shah, and on Hekmat himself.[20]

In the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration grew increasingly concerned about what it deemed to be the likelihood of an imminent social revolution in Iran. In 1956, the CIA, in a Special National Intelligence Estimate, reported that “the present regime in [Iran] is not likely to last very long.” The American panacea was “to get the Shah to accede to certain demands of the middle class” and bring into the government a new breed of political figures, more modern and in tune with the demands of the disgruntled Persian masses. For a whole generation of old-style political figures like Hekmat, the future looked rather bleak. In his case, the events of June 1963 sealed his fate.

On June 5, religious forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini poured into the streets of Tehran to protest the arrest of their leader. The shah was unhappy about the response of some of the elder statesmen to the way Alam had used an iron fist to quell the uprising. He decided the time for a “housecleaning” had arrived.

As a result of the “housecleaning,” Hekmat was not reelected to the next Majlis and in fact never had another governmental appointment. He can be considered the last Speaker of the Majlis with some power and independence. In spite of virtually dismissing him from the Majlis, the shah continued to have a particular affinity for Hekmat. He was offered an ambassadorial position or a seat in the Senate. He rejected the ambassadorial offer outright and indicated that he would accept the seat in the Senate only if he could be guaranteed the presidency. His condition was not accepted, and he spent the remaining years of his life out of the political limelight. The Senate seat was then, in apparent recompense, given to his son, Abbas Goli Emad.[21] By then the son was well on his way to following in his ancestral footsteps. He had gone to Europe, trained as a physician, and returned to Iran only to forfeit his medical career in favor of one in politics. After serving some time as an undersecretary in the department of health, he was catapulted into inheriting his father’s senatorial sinecure.

During the last decade of Hekmat’s life, his health began to deteriorate. He often traveled to Europe to attend to his myriad ailments. His wife of some seventy years was also in frail health.[22] Aside from entertaining his vast circle of friends, a game of poker continued to be his favorite pastime. He died after what had been a long and lavish party at his house. The guests left; he tipped the chef, as had been his habit, and began to climb the stairs to his bedroom. He never reached the top but was felled by a stroke. He lost control and dropped to his death.23 The year was 1978. He was given a state funeral in the Sepahsalar Mosque—not far the house he was born in and the Majlis he had dominated for so many years.

Amir-Abbas Hoveyda was the longest-serving prime minister in the history of modern Iran. It was a distinction he fought hard to achieve. His admirers point to his long tenure as the “golden age” of the shah’s thirty-seven-year reign. But to his many detractors, Hoveyda’s achievement came at a terrible price: the revolution that took his life and ended the monarchy in Iran. He was a man of protean character and conflicting personae. Few in modern Iran have been the subject of so much controversy and so many sharply divergent views.

Hoveyda was born on a cold winter day, February 19, 1919, in Tehran.1 His family was of hybrid identity and incongruous affinities. His mother, Afsar-al Moluk, descended from the Qajars, and was therefore one of more than ten thousand men and women who trace their lineage to some king, queen, or prince of that dynasty. From this aristocratic pedigree, she had inherited a title but nothing else. His father, Habibollah Hoveyda, came from a middle-class family with deep roots in the newborn Bahai religion. As a very young man Habibollah had been tutor to an important aristocratic family and, at the urging of that family’s patriarch, Sardar Assad, had traveled to Europe with the family’s children. In appreciation, Sardar Assad asked Ahmad Shah to grant the favorite tutor a title, and that is how Habibollah had come to be called Ayna-al Molk.

When, in the second decade of the twentieth century the Iranian government decided to issue identity cards for its citizens and asked each family to pick a surname, it was the practice of Bahais to pick meaningful and usually optimistic names for themselves. Habibollah’s family had chosen Hoveyda (“visible”). His new title, “Ayn-al Molk,” means “Eye of the Kingdom.” This ocular theme is particularly ironic in that both father and son came to be known, among other things, for the opacity of their characters. The name given to the newborn Amir-Abbas is assumed to have had a religious undertone, in that it echoes the name of Abbas Afandi, one of the most revered leaders of the Bahai faith.

The year of Hoveyda’s birth was a critical one for Iran. The British—after bribing the king and three prominent politicians, including the prime minister, and promising them all safe haven in Great Britain in case they were forced to leave Iran2—attempted to pass the 1919 Agreement, which would assign British advisors to key ministries and turn Iran into a virtual colony. A nationalist movement that brought together forces from a variety of political persuasions defeated the British attempt.

More important for Hoveyda personally, in 1919, in another corner of Tehran, a son was born to Reza Khan, a charismatic officer of the Cossack Brigade. The child was Mohammad Reza, who was later to become the shah, and with whom Hoveyda’s fate would be inexorably bound.

Amir-Abbas was only two years old when his father, now a mid-level diplomat in Iran’s foreign ministry, was dispatched to Damascus as Iran’s representative to that wartorn city. Amir-Abbas would spend a great part of his early life abroad, first in Damascus and then in the city that in those days was called the “Paris of the East,” Beirut. Hoveyda’s years in that cultured, cosmopolitan city, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews created a vibrant multicultural enclave in an otherwise dour and dogmatic Middle East, left an indelible mark on his character. French became, in essence, his native tongue, and he was also fluent in Arabic. As a result, he always spoke his Persian mother tongue with something of an accent. Yet once he settled back in Iran in 1956, Hoveyda would resolve never again to leave his homeland. Only those who have experienced the exigencies of exile, he lamented, would understand his stubborn refusal. It was a refusal that would ultimately cost Hoveyda his life.

When he was four years old, his parents had their second child, named Fereydun. Fereydun turned out to be a creative thinker, more inclined to challenge authority than Amir-Abbas—or Amir, as he was affectionately called by his family—who tended to identify “more closely with parents and authority . . . [to be] ambitious, conscientious, and achievement-oriented.”3 The differences between the brothers seem proof of the thesis in Frank J. Sulloway’s monumental study of birth order and its impact on an individual’s political, social, and intellectual life.
Both young boys were much closer to their mother than to their distant, often brooding father, of whom they saw little. He spent much of his time traveling, leaving to his wife the work of raising the children. Amir-Abbas developed particularly close, lifelong ties to his mother. Fereydun became so deeply immersed in the question of the father’s role that he eventually wrote a book in which he looked at much of Iran’s history, and the revolution itself, through the prism of the Oedipal complex and the over-dominant role of fathers.[4]

In Beirut’s French school, Amir-Abbas was an unexceptional student. One subject, however, caught his passionate attention. He delved into the classics of French literature. He had a particular affinity for André Malraux and his famous novel Man’s Fate. One of its characters, Baron Clapique, exhibited many of the traits Hoveyda himself was later to display in the course of his public career. Clapique was, as Hoveyda would become, an enigmatic, paradoxical and complicated character, a lapsed aristocrat with deep cynicism toward the world and all that is in it.

While at school, Hoveyda had also dabbled in Marxism. (Among his fellow students were several boys who later became prominent Iranian Marxists, including Shapur Bakhtiyar, the shah’s last prime minister.) This early involvement had surprisingly long-lasting consequences. Added to friendships developed in later years with renowned Iranian Marxists and idealists, Hoveyda’s schoolboy dabbling gave him a persistent reputation as a leftist. Even though the Iranian Left never embraced or supported him, Iranian conservatives would never trust him.

Hoveyda’s father, who had been forced into retirement from the Foreign Service at an early age, died when Amir-Abbas was seventeen. Not long after his father’s death, Hoveyda set out for college in Europe, arriving in Paris in September 1938. He carried with him André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres—the virtual bible of his youth. Paris was a city he had yearned to see and was to love all his life. But no sooner had he settled there than he was forced to leave. A diplomatic row erupted between Reza Shah and the French government, over a pun used in a French newspaper (involving “shah” and “chat”), and he—and all other Iranian students—were forced to leave France. For a while he settled in London and studied English; he finally ended up in 1939 in Brussels, where he enrolled at the Free University.

Europe was then engulfed in the World War II. As his published memoirs make clear, in Brussels Hoveyda managed to live a student’s bohemian life, pining for Paris. Just as in high school, his university grades were stubbornly mediocre. After four years, he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. At the same time, he witnessed firsthand some of the calamities of war.

Hoveyda arrived back in Tehran in 1942. The city of his birth, then occupied by Soviet and British forces, was altogether strange to him. On his first day back he got lost. Eventually he settled in the house of one of his uncles. With the help of another relative, and relying on his mastery of the French language, he was hired at the Foreign Ministry. Soon he entered the army as a conscript officer, keeping his job in the Foreign Ministry. His avid interest in the world of literature and his familiarity with the new wave of French writers and philosophers gained him access to some of Tehran’s most exclusive intellectual circles. He befriended Sadeq Hedayat, with whom he would keep up a sporadic correspondence, and Sadeq Chubak, who would remain a close friend until the end of Hoveyda’s life.
Hoveyda’s first diplomatic posting almost proved to be his last. When the war in Europe was ending, Iran appointed Zaynal-Abadin Rahnama ambassador to France. Rahnama was the father of two of Hoveyda’s closest friends, and at his urging Hoveyda, in spite of his junior status in the diplomatic service, was appointed to the muchcoveted post of press attaché in Paris. Soon after Hoveyda arrived, however, the Iranian embassy was embroiled in an embarrassing scandal. Some members of the embassy had used their diplomatic passports to engage in illegal cross-border transactions in gold and currency.

For no apparent reason, Hoveyda was mentioned in the Iranian press as a culprit. The accusation was quickly withdrawn: the Marxist newspaper that had originally accused Hoveyda printed at least two retractions. (Documents in the archives of the French foreign ministry prove, beyond any doubt, that Hoveyda was in fact innocent in this affair.)5 Nonetheless, the accusation somehow entered Iran’s collective memory and cast a long and lingering shadow over Hoveyda’s career. Four decades later, when he was fighting for his life in the Islamic “court” of the infamous “hanging judge” Sheikh Sadeq Khalkhali, the indictment included the charge of “direct participation in smuggling heroin in France.” Somehow the false charge of currency trafficking had metamorphosed into the equally untrue and more serious accusation of heroin smuggling.

Despite this incident, unfair and ultimately damaging as it was, Paris was not all bad. It was there that Hoveyda made two of the most enduring friendships of his life. He met and became a protégé of Abdullah Entezam—a colorful man of much erudition and long years of experience in the foreign ministry and one of Iran’s leading Freemasons. Another friend gained in Paris was Hassan-Ali Mansur, the ambitious son of an ex-prime minister and a member of one of Iran’s more powerful families.

In 1946, Hoveyda’s friend and mentor Entezam was named Iran’s new emissary to postwar Germany. He arranged to take Hoveyda with him. Hoveyda served three years in war-ravaged Stuttgart, before returning to Iran in 1950.
The country was by then in a fever to nationalize its oil and throw out the British. Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was the man of the hour. His new appointees to the foreign ministry, Bagher Kazemin and eventually the fiery Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi, began to purge the ministry. In the case of Hoveyda, aside from his close ties to Entezam, there was bad blood between him and Dr. Fatemi from the days when they were both students in Paris. Hoveyda was unhappy with the new developments and worried about his prospects. He used the occasion of his mother’s developing a heart ailment to leave Iran, and when he had secured employment at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, he left with his mother for Geneva.

In his position at the UN, Hoveyda began a peripatetic career that took him all around the world—particularly to new nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He occasionally visited his friend Mansur, who since 1955 had been posted to Iran’s embassy at the Vatican. Mansur was by then boasting about his many contacts with his “American friends,” who, he claimed, had promised to facilitate his rise to the post of prime minister in Iran. Sanguine about his own future, he urged Hoveyda to give up his job at the UN and return to his position in Iran’s Foreign Ministry.
After some original trepidation, Hoveyda agreed. In 1956, he rejoined the Foreign Ministry and was posted to the Iranian embassy in Turkey, where Mansur’s father was ambassador. Soon, however, the elder Mansur was replaced by General Arfa’, notorious in Iran for his unbending devotion to military discipline. Even in the embassy, he introduced

and personally enforced soldierly routines. Every morning, Arfa’ required the staff of diplomats and clerks, drivers and guards, to line up, according to their height, and he would inspect their hygiene—the cleanliness of their shirts, the length of their fingernails. Hoveyda was soon at his wit’s end. He was about to resign when his friends Abdullah Entezam and Fuad Ruhani, executives in the new National Iranian Oil Company, offered him a managerial position in its offices back in Tehran. Hoveyda accepted quickly—and gratefully. In later years, whenever this episode was mentioned, Hoveyda would credit Entezam and Ruhani for his rescue.

The new man at National Iranian Oil Company was not made welcome by his colleagues. Most were averse to outsiders parachuting into leading positions in the company, and Hoveyda was at first treated with no small measure of resentment and bitterness. It was a sign of his future style of management and politics that he overcame this resentment with a combination of savvy, subtlety, and Machiavellian guile. Instead of dining in the director’s hall, he broke with company tradition and ate where the employees ate, standing in line to collect his food, just as they did. At “town hall” meetings he would appear on the stage and allow the employees to offer their criticisms of his decisions.

At NIOC, Hoveyda also began publishing a journal that, using company money and relying on the support of Entezam, paid handsomely for articles. This was Hoveyda’s way of making a name for himself and also helping support some of the intellectuals opposed to the regime.

In this journal, Talash, Hoveyda began to write about some of the themes that would later define his political creed. He talked of the necessity of pulling Iran out of its cycle of backwardness, suggested training a new technocratic class to replace Western managers and technicians, and wrote of forming a “conditional cooperation” with the shah. The objective, he said, should be to modernize Iran under the shah’s banner, with the hope of achieving democracy in the future.

In Tehran, in those days, there were no true political parties or pressure groups. Iran was instead experiencing the shah’s “guided democracy” and the phony “two-party system” he had created. What emerged in the place of parties was, according to the American scholar Marvin Zonis, a number of dowrehs6 or small gatherings of like-minded people who met regularly and tried to find coherent strategies and goals for themselves. With Mansur back in Iran, one of the most important was the Progressive Circle dowreh that Hoveyda and he formed together.

Hoveyda’s closeness to Mansur was cemented when he fell in love with Mansur’s sister-in-law. Mansur’s young wife, Farideh Emami, was a girl of unusual beauty who from early youth had decided to devote her life to raising a family. Her younger sister, Laila Emami, was born in 1933 in Abadan, capital of Iran’s oil-rich province of Khuzestan. Their mother was the daughter of a prime minister—Vosug al-Dowleh—and their great-uncle was Ghavam-ol Saltaneh, another pivotal figure of twentieth-century politics in Iran. Laila was sent to an English boarding school in Surrey. Afterward, she went to UCLA, where she received an undergraduate degree in art. While there, Laila fell in love with a young American. The affair soon ended, leaving Laila broken-hearted. It was under these circumstances that she and Hoveyda met at her sister Farideh’s wedding. Hoveyda was smitten immediately, but their romance would take a long time to blossom.

Hoveyda’s frustration in love was more than compensated for by his meteoric rise in politics. It was a time when the Eisenhower administration was getting seriously worried about Iran. The American Embassy in Tehran warned Washington that reforms were essential, and that unless something drastic was done quickly, a revolution, most likely of the type that would benefit the Soviet Union, would be unavoidable. The American government thus began to pressure the shah into a series of reforms and tried to convince him that he must bring to power a new breed of political figure—less encumbered by the past, better trained in the ways of the modern world, and, above all, committed to the idea of remaining allied to the West. Hoveyda, Mansur, and their friends in the Progressive Circle were the perfect embodiment of this new type.

By 1963, it was clear that Mansur was being groomed for the role of prime minister. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he enjoyed the support of at least some in the American Embassy. Although the American ambassador at the time considered Mansur “a lightweight,” there was at least one person in the embassy who championed his cause. Gratian Yatsovitch was a tenant of Mansur’s, renting one of several Tehran houses Mansur owned. He also happened to be the CIA station chief in Tehran. Mansur boasted about his close ties to the American spy.

In 1963 the Progressive Circle received an important nod of approval from the shah and changed its name to the Iran Novin Party (New Iran Party). By late 1963, Hoveyda and Mansur were literally offering jobs in the future government to prospective new ministers and undersecretaries. They were in contact with Assadollah Alam—the prime minister and leader of the “opposition party”—about the composition of the future Majlis and the number of representatives each side was to have in the yet-to-be-elected parliament. Their selections had to be approved by the shah, which created a somewhat farcical political situation. The farce ended in March 1964 when, on the eve of Persian New Year, a bitter and disgruntled Alam submitted his resignation, and Mansur introduced his new cabinet to the shah. Hoveyda was named minister of finance.

Soon afterward, Hoveyda had his first private audience with the shah. All evidence indicates that the shah took an almost instant liking to him. Somehow, he seemed to put the shah at ease. They shared a love for French culture and the French language. In Hoveyda, the shah also found an intellectual of sound credentials, with a voracious appetite for books and ideas, who could banter about the history, culture, and politics of the West with the best of his Western counterparts. More important, Hoveyda was also accommodating toward the king’s growing appetite to concentrate more and more of the government’s daily functions in his own hands. Hoveyda seems to have realized, as much by instinct as by experience, that the shah no longer tolerated “saucy minions” or independent ministers. The humiliations the shah had suffered at the hands of Mossadeq had convinced him never again to allow a charismatic man of independent political persuasion to become a minister of any kind.

As in his days at the oil company, Hoveyda put in long hours at the Ministry of Finance, an unwieldy department notorious for its corruption and opposition to change. Hoveyda’s attempts at reform were stiffly resisted, particularly by those who stood to lose their positions of power and privilege. In his efforts toward reform, Hoveyda was helped by Farhang Mehr, who enjoyed a reputation as a no-nonsense manager, impeccably honest and highly educated. Together they introduced computer technology and ended some of the government monopolies, most famously in sugar. Another change was to streamline the making of the government budget, a process hitherto cumbersomely divided between the Ministry of Finance and the Plan Organization. For at least four years the government had been trying to make this change, but the intransigence of past ministers, and their attachment to their own turf, had proved an insurmountable obstacle. Hoveyda made it look easy and was about to implement several other reforms when his career took a sudden and unexpected turn.

On Thursday, January 21, 1965, barely a year after reaching his lifelong goal of becoming prime minister, Mansur was shot and severely wounded by a gunman as he was about to enter the Parliament building. Religious fanatics who accused Mansur of insulting their religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had organized the attack. To lead the cabinet while Mansur was in the hospital, the shah appointed Hoveyda. He was a surprising choice. Hoveyda had little experience in government; he had not been close to the shah, or to any member of the royal family. But all of this mattered little, since the appointment was assumed to be only for a few days. Then on January 26, Mansur died as a result of internal bleeding and other postsurgical complications. Hoveyda, this time officially, was named by the shah to form a new cabinet, though again it was the consensus in Tehran political circles that the appointment could not be more than a short-term one.

Hoveyda brought to his new post as prime minister the same kind of populist style that had won him the support of his peers in the oil company. He began to drive back and forth to his office in his small Paykan, a new car just starting to roll off the production lines in Iran. He lived in a small house with his mother. On one occasion, when the shah visited the house, he called it the “chicken coop.” Hoveyda was also a master of using small gestures of kindness to cement friendships and political alliances. No birthday, wedding, or mourning ceremony of friends, colleagues, or enemies passed without a card or gift from the prime minister.

In politics and economic policy, Hoveyda essentially continued the strategies that had begun under Mansur. A posse of competent cabinet ministers and undersecretaries, in charge of planning, commerce, and industry, began to implement a far-reaching set of programs. During Hoveyda’s tenure, these programs gradually changed the face of Iranian society and of its economy. As he proudly announced in a conference toward the end of his career, when he took over, Iran’s

GNP per capita was estimated to be around $100 per annum. By 1977, it was $2,069. . . . In 1963, there were only 10 centers of higher education in this country, with a total student population of less than 20,000. The number of universities and centers of higher education in this country has now reached 184, with a total student body of 149,000 . . . Seven million Iranians of all ages are attending some institution of learning. . . . Over forty thousand Iranians are attending universities . . . in Europe, North America and elsewhere.[7]

Hoveyda’s prime ministership coincided with another, more personal change to his life. On July 19, 1966, he married Laila Emami. She had just returned home from a long and painful trip to Europe, accompanying her sister, Farideh, who was still devastated by the death of her husband, Mansur. All through Farideh’s mourning, Hoveyda had been gently attentive to her increasingly irrational and angry demands. His sensitivity, Laila says, was one of the reasons she decided, at long last, to marry him.

Their happiness was short-lived. Laila proved a woman of strong opinions and short temper, particularly when she had had a drink. Her behavior—she refused to attend official ceremonies, and more and more frequently disparaged her husband in public— became increasingly embarrassing. Tehran was agog as well with rumors about Hoveyda. Indeed, all through his political life, Hoveyda was the constant subject of vicious rumors about everything from his drinking habits to his sexual exploits, even to his religion. Although his mother was without doubt a Muslim, and Hoveyda himself a man of no faith, the rumor mills had it that he was a Bahai. Iran’s preeminent journal of political satire, Towfiq, had a field day with the orchid he wore in his lapel and the cane he carried. Few weeks passed without some satirical new cartoon of the prime minister and his increasingly corpulent build.

Hoveyda’s enemies were not his only critics. Even his friends, including Laila, deplored his all-too-docile demeanor in politics. His deference—amounting to servility—toward the shah was rightly blamed for contributing to the demise of the office of prime minister. He deferred in all matters to the shah, despite the 1906 constitution’s explicit limits on the shah’s power. He further elevated the level of sycophancy by offering the shah often absurdly extravagant praise. Hoveyda once claimed he was no more than a chief of staff to the shah. It was a statement, and a view, he would live to regret.

Hoveyda was also rightly criticized for tolerating the financial corruption of those in power, and of the royal family. Although he was himself beyond reproach in financial matters, there is strong evidence that, most of the time, he looked the other way when he saw others abuse their positions. Some of his critics have suggested that he went one step farther and ingratiated himself with the royal family by actually facilitating their illicit economic gains. His defense, to Laila and to his other critical friends, was always the same: “If I resign, someone worse will take over.”

Hoveyda’s attempts to appease his critics and enemies were rarely successful. Aredeshir Zahedi and Assadollah Alam never liked or trusted him, while Hushang Ansary, Jahanguir Amuzegar, Hushang Nehavandi, and Alinaghi Alikhani each at one time sought to unseat and replace him. A key to his success in thwarting these attempts must be sought in his friendship with Parviz Sabeti, arguably the most powerful official in SAVAK.

By 1975, as the demands of his job and the chorus of criticism increased, Hoveyda grew more and more tired and dispirited. His marriage had come to an end, and he regularly took a heavy ten-milligram dose of Valium to get through the day. His cynicism, which he had kept reserved and circumspect in the past, was now a permanent part of his political persona. The more he consolidated his power, the more he seemed bereft of joy, enthusiasm, or confidence that he could bridge the gap between the shah and the opposition.

On March 2, 1975, Hoveyda’s world was turned upside down. The shah suddenly announced his decision to make Iran’s government a one-party system. Hoveyda’s Iran Novin party, his creation more than anyone else’s, was thus summarily demoted from its status as the ruling party. The party had been catapulted into the center of power by the same kind of royal fiat that now dismantled it.

The party, only weeks earlier, had held its most successful convention ever. Five thousand delegates from all over Iran, as well as hundreds of foreign guests and dignitaries, had converged on the capital to attend. At the end of the program, delegates, arms locked in fraternal unity, had sung the party’s song to celebrate, if not boast about, their consolidated power. Hoveyda, ever mindful of the shah’s sensitivity to manifestations of independent party power and support for the prime minister, would normally not have allowed such an exhibition of power. But for once he had been so overcome by the spirit of party unity that he had thrown his customary caution to the winds. The resulting scene was reminiscent of the dour orchestrated spontaneity of Maoist China’s celebrations. It may also have been the trigger that led to Iran Novin’s demise.

The shah dubbed his new single “party” the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party, and asked Hoveyda to serve as its first secretary. Although in private Hoveyda was harshly critical of the new party, he nevertheless accepted the job. The shah had ordered a party platform based on what he enigmatically called “the laws of dialectics.” Using a coterie of lapsed leftists, Hoveyda tried to develop such a platform, while at the same time infusing it with his own pragmatic ideas.

The work of running the party, as well as the government, was only adding to his exhaustion. During the last week of July 1977, accompanied by Laila—no longer his wife but still one of his closest friends—he went to one of the Greek islands for vacation. He spent his days lounging on the beach, reading his favorite mystery novels.

As Hoveyda knew when he left, problems had been accumulating in the last few months. Tehran was often forced to suffer hours of blackouts. There were increasing confrontations between the regime and the impoverished masses, who had converged on the capital and were building illegal housing. He did not know, however, that roughly two weeks earlier, the new American ambassador, William Sullivan, had told the shah that the current pace of economic growth was untenable. According to Sullivan, the shah construed this as a hint by the American government that Hoveyda must go.
Hoveyda returned to Tehran on August 4. On August 5, the shah ordered Hoveyda to resign. In the same meeting, he was offered the job of minister of court. Hoveyda obligingly accepted. For more than a decade, Hoveyda’s nemesis, Assadollah Alam, had been minister of court and had used his position to ridicule Hoveyda, curtail his power, and conspire to bring about his political demise. Now Alam was on his deathbed, suffering from herpes and cancer, and Hoveyda was the new minister of court. In his place as prime minister, the shah named Jamshid Amuzegar. Hoveyda’s days even in this new post were numbered. From the outset, he complained about the intransigent atmosphere at court. The old established cliques in turn despised him. But more important, the country was in turmoil. After only a few weeks in his new job, Hoveyda realized the seriousness of the new upheavals and thought his successor, Amuzegar, incapable of handling the situation.

Whether deliberately or inadvertently, Hoveyda then proceeded to play a key role in fanning the flames of discontent. In his capacity as minister of court Hoveyda was instrumental in publishing an infamous letter considered by many to be the trigger of the revolution. The shah had read one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s angry proclamations against the Pahlavi regime, and he ordered the publication of a harsh attack on the character of Ayatollah Khomeini. The king entrusted SAVAK and Hoveyda conjointly with the task of preparing the letter. While SAVAK was reluctant to prepare such an inflammatory piece, Hoveyda had two of his aides immediately prepare the letter and publish it in Etela’at. If, as Joseph Kraft of the New Yorker suggested at the time, part of Hoveyda’s motive in speedily preparing the letter was “to embroil the Amuzegar government with the religious opposition,”[8] he surely got more than he bargained for.

Hoveyda’s strategy for solving the growing crisis was three-pronged. First, he wanted to bring into power a coalition government led by either the National Front or Ali Amini. But the shah, still convinced of the invincibility of his army, in the beginning was unwilling even to meet with these parties. By the time he realized the necessity of such a meeting, it was too late.

The second prong of Hoveyda’s strategy was to curtail the royal family’s involvement in the financial affairs of the country. After many discussions he finally, in July 1978, convinced the shah to issue a proclamation to that effect. But that also was too little too late.

The third component of the Hoveyda strategy was that the shah should forcibly reestablish order in the country before addressing the demands of the opposition. Concessions, he said, must be made from a position of strength, not weakness. But the shah was by then in no mood to make such decisions. His paralysis only deepened the crisis. Finally, on September 8, the army opened fire on demonstrators who had broken the curfew. By the following day, Hoveyda was no longer court minister. In a letter he later smuggled out of prison, he claimed to have resigned to protest the killings. Others claim that he was forced to resign because it was becoming clear that the people held him responsible for many of the country’s problems.

On the day of Hoveyda’s resignation, the shah offered him a chance to leave the country to become ambassador to Belgium. Hoveyda, who had always accepted what the shah suggested, now asked for some time to think about the offer. Two days later, he refused. Many of his friends and relatives tried to convince him to leave Iran, but to all, his refrain was the same: “I have done nothing wrong and I shall face any accuser in any court.” He would also cite his mother’s ill health, and her unwillingness to leave Iran, as further reasons for remaining.

Meanwhile, Amuzegar’s successor, Ja’far Sharif-Emami, had set out on a policy of total appeasement. He not only granted every wish of the opposition but strove to anticipate their next demand, and to beat them to the punch by caving in before they even made it. The arrest of Hoveyda, on November 8, 1979, the two-month anniversary of the September shootings, was arguably the most consequential gesture of appeasement made by the government.
Even as a prisoner, Hoveyda was given a chance to escape. His friends in the French government devised a plan to pluck him out of house arrest—at a villa owned by SAVAK and used as a guesthouse—and out of Iran. He refused their offer.

Eventually, in February 1979, on the day of the revolution, he had a final chance to escape when his guards, fearing for their own lives, left him alone. Friends and family came to the villa to help arrange his escape to safety. Hoveyda stubbornly refused the offer, arguing naïvely that he had no blood on his hands, that he had taken no bribes, and that he therefore had no reason to once again subject himself to the drudgeries of exile. This time, his intransigence cost him his life.

Any chance of escape was now gone. The same day, Hoveyda was transferred to Refah School, which had become the revolution’s headquarters. He was the highest-ranking member of the ancient régime to fall into the hands of the new rulers. Among them, a battle of wills and strategies was now fought over the question of his fate. Some, like Mehdi Bazorgan, wanted to try him in a court of law, with a jury and attorneys. This way, they argued, the revolution could put the past on trial and show the world the legitimacy and justice of its cause. Others, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, were advocates of revolutionary violence—at once purgative and punitive.

Ultimately, although Hoveyda received a “trial,” it was the radical coalition that won the day. Hoveyda’s fate was put in the hands of the regime’s most bloodthirsty judge, Sadeq Khalkhali, already known as “the hanging judge.”

The trial was farcical in its style, and tragic in its consequences. The first session, which lasted about two hours, began well past midnight on March 15, 1979. It was held in the school where Ayatollah Khomeini lived. The second session, even more bizarre than the first—with stories of telephones hidden in refrigerators and unauthorized helicopters flying low over the prison—took place on the afternoon of April 7. This session lasted less than two hours. The indictment was a rambling seventeen-count list that included such judicial gems as “ruining agriculture and destroying forests” and of course the ubiquitous “spreading corruption on earth.”

The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Minutes after Khalkhali read the expected verdict, he and his blood posse followed Hoveyda into the courtyard outside and used a pistol to fire two shots haphazardly at Hoveyda. They struck him in the neck and in the chest, wounding but not killing him; his was to be a slow and painful death. Some have suggested that the shots were fired by Khalkhali, while others claim that another cleric named Ghaffari had been the culprit. Hoveyda, after a couple of minutes in agony, finally beseeched another member of the posse to “finish him off.” The man obliged by firing a third bullet, this time into Hoveyda’s brain.

Hoveyda was dead. His body was kept at the morgue for about three months, lest the burial become occasion for further attacks on his family, or on his corpse. He was then buried, anonymously, in the cemetery outside Tehran.

Hoveyda’s mother, by then bedridden, was never told of her son’s death. A pretense was made of reading letters he had supposedly written from Europe and of opening gifts he had supposedly sent. But her response was silence.

HE WAS CALLED THE BULLDOZER, yethehasthedemeanorofaconcertpianist.In spite of a gruff political bravura, he is short and bespectacled, with soft hands, gentle manners, and the agitated look of an intellectual. He is by training an economist, by profession a banker, yet by passion a man of politics. His rise in Iranian politics was meteoric; no less rapid was his demise. “Violent delights,” as Shakespeare said, “have violent ends.”[1]

For more than a decade he was considered a member of the opposition, one of the young leaders of the National Front. Yet overnight, after offering a passionate defense of the shah’s role in signing an oil agreement in 1973 that in his view truly and “for the first time completely nationalized Iranian oil,”[2] he was catapulted into the center of politics. He was soon considered one of the most active ministers in Amir-Abbas Hoveyda’s cabinet. He shared much with Hoveyda, with whom he developed an unusually intimate friendship. He was, like Hoveyda, a modernizer who decided that only by following the shah could he bring about the requisite changes in Iran. The American Embassy in Tehran called him “a case study of the co-opted Iranian radical” who had decided to work within the system, for he believed “that the Shah, though distasteful was all that stood between Iran and chaos.”[3] Like Hoveyda, too, he was a true cosmopolitan—more at home with French and German than with Persian. Before long there was talk of him as “prime minister material.” But his glory days were short-lived. Today, some royalists think his program for forceful reduction of prices added fire to the storm that eventually consumed the Pahlavi dynasty.

Even in exile, his life has been never far from controversy. His friendships with some of the main actors in the Iran-Contra affair and with alleged operatives of the CIA have occasionally brought his name to the attention of the American media.

He is the grandson of Hadj Amin-al Zarb, arguably the richest man in Iran at the turn of century and the symbol of its then-burgeoning private sector. Yet today he lives in Paris in a small apartment the size of a Texas walk-in closet. Ironically, he was one of the few ministers accused of financial malfeasance. His case never reached the courts, yet two of his undersecretaries were arrested on charges of financial corruption, and their trials turned into media frenzies. He himself was cleared of any wrongdoing, as was his undersecretary in charge of the controversial purchase of “sugar futures.” A few months before the revolution, Mahdavi had left Iran, relegated to political purgatory. Yet he was called back by Hoveyda and asked to act as a mediator with his “old friends” in the National Front. His return was a disaster. Times had changed. The National Front no longer fully trusted him and saw him as a turncoat, and had itself decided to play second fiddle to Ayatollah Khomeini.

Mahdavi’s failure in that mission was not the end of his problems. When the government decided to arrest some of the old ministers and offer them to the opposition as tokens of appeasement, Mahdavi seemed like the perfect offering. He was arrested, along with dozens of other ministers. He escaped to freedom in the revolution’s early hours, when jubilation and violence, anarchy and compassion created moments of chaos. His survival was something of a miracle. He escaped with another prisoner, like him a minister in the falling regime. Together they hit the streets, rapidly moving away from the prison and the mob that had attacked it. Soon, however, the two men realized they had reached a dead end. Anxious and angry, they turned around. At the first intersection, they decided to split up. One turned right, and Mahdavi turned left. Minutes later, mobs caught up with the other man, while Mahdavi soon found safe haven in the nearby house of a friend. “He served me a cold beer, and some koofteh, and that was maybe the most delicious meal of my life,” Mahdavi remembers.[4] The man who had turned right was less fortunate. A few weeks later, he was executed by a firing squad.

Mahdavi spent the next two years in hiding in Iran. Friends and family offered him safe havens. But as the situation worsened, he had no choice but to leave. Today, twenty-seven years later, in spite of the many hardships of exile, he is incorrigibly optimistic. “Change is around the corner,” he tells his friends or anyone who cared to listen, assuring them every time, “This time it is serious. I know from very reliable sources.” When I met him, in 2003, he talked of imminent change in three months. He made the same promise when I met him again, two years later.

Fereydun Mahdavi was born in 1932 (1311) in the lap of bourgeois luxury in Tehran, the city where his grandfather, Hadj Amin-al Zarb, had been for many years a political and financial power broker. At the turn of the century, Hadji had first brought electricity to the city. Fereydun was the firstborn of three siblings. When he was five the family moved to Berlin, and he spent the war years moving between Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Baden Baden. His family—along with a group of other Iranians of similar economic background—moved among these cities to avoid falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. In Vienna, a bomb hit his boarding school, and he felt firsthand the fears and calamities of war. His gypsy life meant a gypsy education. He attended schools in Vienna, Prague, and Paris, where he finally graduated from high school. By then French and German had become his true native tongues. He spoke Persian with difficulty and an accent.

In 1950, his father grew gravely ill. He was hospitalized in Hamburg. The whole family moved there, and in 1951 Fereydun began his university studies in economics. By 1953, he finished his bachelor’s degree, and three years later, in 1956, he completed all the requirements for a doctorate in economics from Hamburg University. His advisor and mentor was Professor Schiller, who had worked on theories of development and the role that private sector, particularly trade, can play in economic development. Schiller had been an economist during the Nazi era, and his experience of those years came to figure prominently in Fereydun’s future political life.

All through these years, politics was Fereydun’s passion. “All my life,” he said wryly, “I’ve been a political junkie.”5 He was an avid reader of political news. But he had been living away from Iran for almost two decades, and thus his political interests were driven more by the dictates of geography than by blood. All that changed rapidly when in 1958 he decided to return to Iran. Before going home, he made a stop in London, where he spent six months learning English.

In Tehran, he was soon introduced to Mehdi Samii, an already prominent man of politics and finance and a relative of Mahdavi’s mother. Samii offered Mahdavi a job at the Industrial Development Bank in Iran. Fereydun also began to meet a number of other prominent Persians—from establishment figures like Jamshid Amuzegar to some of the leaders of the National Front. Dormant for many of the years after the August 1953 defeat, the National Front was suddenly reawakened by the rise of John F. Kennedy in America. Leaders of the Front, through their regular contacts with sympathetic diplomats in the American Embassy, had learned that the new Kennedy administration was bringing pressure on the shah to reform and even to include the National Front in some form of coalition government. Mahdavi had a job at the new bank and membership in the Second National Front.

Another important change took place in his life a few years after his return. His cousin Sima had been the love of his life. The two had loved one another from childhood. But the gypsy years when Mahdavi was away from Iran had lasted too long. Sima had married another man. With Fereydun’s return, the long dormant love was rekindled. In 1963, Sima divorced her husband and married Fereydun. They are still married. Their only children are the two girls Sima had from her first marriage.

His fiery character, his family’s reputation, and his own dedication to the cause made him, by 1962, one of the leaders of the new National Front. He was involved in negotiations between representatives of the United States government and the leadership of the National Front in an attempt to forge a government of national reconciliation. At least two important ministries were to be given to the Front. The Kennedy administration even toyed with the idea of trying to push for a government headed by the National Front. They quickly changed their minds when in the great rally of Jalaliye, organized by the National Front, Shapur Bakhtiyar, to the consternation of many in the leadership, declared that the future Iran would be, “like India,” an nonaligned nation. A nonaligned Iran was more than the Kennedy administration was willing to accept.

Instead of receiving ministerial portfolios, the leadership of the National Front ended up in prison. Their intransigence at that historic juncture, their insistence on a maximalist policy, and their stubborn refusal to accept any compromise had grave consequences not just for modern Iranian politics but for Mahdavi as well. He recalls meeting a “tall American” in the office of one of his comrades a few weeks before his arrest. The American offered a simple proposition: Mahdavi and like-minded young leaders should split from the National Front and join the cabinet or else expect to end up in jail. The split never came, and the Front never agreed to join any cabinet, and Mahdavi was among those who paid for this refusal with his freedom. He spent eight months in prison.

After prison, he joined the bank again. Indeed, his relatively early release was, to no small measure, the result of Mehdi Samii’s intervention. He had raised the issue with the shah himself, who had ordered Mahdavi’s release. Mahdavi returned to the bank as a low-level analyst. He was beginning to have second thoughts about the National Front and the wisdom of their policies. In September 1965, for example, he told Ted Eliot of the American Embassy in Tehran that he was now “more pessimistic than [in] the past. He no longer thinks (hopes) that an economic crisis will soon precipitate a political crisis. . . . He continues to believe that the regime will sooner or later get into trouble . . . the middle class too has lost its spiritual incentive.”[6]

At the bank, he impressed the director, Abolqassem Kheradju, with his analytical ability and his probity in financial matters. He was given increasingly important assignments. When in 1968 it was decided that Iran should have a stock market of its own, Mahdavi was sent to Paris to study the laws and regulations of the Paris Exchange and then implemented them in Iran, becoming the first director of the Tehran Stock Market.

His “recognition that the bank, as well as the shah, wanted nothing but the best for Iran,”[7] and its success in providing seed capital for many eventually successful industrial enterprises, worked to convince him to rethink his allegiance to the National Front. There was also, he says, “the recognition that these gentlemen of the National Front are not men of action.” The last factor causing his change of heart and position was the oil agreement of 1973. “I saw,” he says, “that it was in earnest the best agreement for Iran.”[8]

When it was signed, he received a call from Alinaghi Alikhani, who called on behalf of Alam. “The shah,” he was told, “wants you to go and explain the new agreement to the Iranian people.”[9] Mahdavi asked to read the agreement. The oil company was ordered to provide him with all the information he needed, and once he finished his reading, he called his friend back and declared his willingness to go on television, defend the agreement, and explain its merits. Less than a year later, he received another friendly call, this time from Hoveyda, asking him to join the cabinet. Since 1971, after the attempted coup in Morocco served as a warning shot to the shah and his government, Hoveyda had convened a weekly meeting of de facto advisors who freely talked of the country’s problems and of ways to solve them. Corruption was a constant theme of these weekly meetings.

Two years later, Mahdavi was being asked to join the government and do something about these problems. His wife was adamantly opposed to the move, but ultimately his passion for politics, his palpable desire to be “a player,” overcame any doubts.

According to Mahdavi, he had been promised the Ministry of Treasury, held at the time by Hushang Ansary, Hoveyda’s bitter enemy and rival. This was one in a series of invariably unsuccessful attempts by Hoveyda to get rid of his nemesis. When Ansary ended up staying, Mahdavi was offered the new Ministry of Trade. “I had the title but no ministry,” he said, “no staff, no office. I had to create everything.”[10] For many of his top assistants, he recruited friends from his days in the National Front.[11] But before he could set up his actual ministry, he almost lost his job when he was caught in the crossfire of political intrigue in the cabinet. Hushang Ansary was the mastermind of an attempt to unseat Hoveyda.

When Mahdavi joined the cabinet, the shortage of foodstuffs was becoming a serious crisis. There had been a mass migration to the cities, increasing the demand while decreasing the supply of such items as grain, fruit, and vegetables. Furthermore, an increase in standards of living had increased people’s abilities to demand and purchase all sorts of commodities. Mahdavi’s first mandate was to make sure there was an ample supply of grain. For all of the twentieth century, bread had been one of the major triggers for uprisings and popular strikes in Iran. A slight rise in its price or a fall in its availability had wreaked havoc on many past cabinets. The shah was particularly sensitive to this question, and thus it was urgent for Hoveyda to ensure that no shortages of grain, thus bread, disturb the social and political equilibrium.

With his characteristic zeal, Mahdavi set out immediately to buy as much grain as he could on the open market. He even succeeded in purchasing and diverting to Iran two shiploads of grain headed for Iraq. In one day, he said, “I had purchased seven hundred thousand tons of continental grain, and I still did not have an office.”12 As he basked in the glory of his success only two days after his appointment, he was summoned to Hoveyda’s office. Hoveyda was sad and somber. The shah, he said, had heard rumors that Mahdavi had made illicit gains in the grain deal and had ordered him fired. Hoveyda had asked the shah for a reprieve and a chance to investigate the matter further. The rumors were not true. It took Mahdavi a while to prove his innocence. In the meantime, he learned about the complex web of intrigue and interests around the question of grain purchases. He had, innocently, stepped on many toes, and rendered ineffective a plot to unseat Hoveyda. The purchase of grain had been, by royal fiat, entrusted to Kermit Roosevelt and Gratian Yatsevitch—both CIA men, both once active in Iran. Every purchase had, for many years, gone through them, ensuring that they receive a percentage of the deal as commission. Furthermore, the Omran Bank, owned by the shah, had been the only financial institution to handle these transactions. Mahdavi had ignored them all and simply purchased grain on the open market.[13]

Furthermore, Mahdavi claimed that the whole issue of grain shortage was fabricated by a cabal of Hoveyda foes, foremost among them Ansary, as part of their attempt to unseat him. Iran had, in fact, bought ample supplies of grain but had not yet taken delivery, creating a false crisis. A few weeks after the affair, Mahdavi claimed, Ansary told him at a party, “We had Hoveyda cornered; all was needed was a nudge and he would have been finished, but you came and saved him.”[14] No other source confirms Mahdavi’s claims.

The shah then entrusted Mahdavi with the job of bringing down prices and cutting down the rate of inflation. “You have three weeks,” the shah told him, “or else I will deploy the army.” Befuddled and anxious to prove his mettle to the shah, he remembered Dr. Schiller, his mentor and economic professor. In his class, he recollected, they had learned about price control under the Nazi regime, and how the government decided on a price and ordered everyone to abide by it or face penalties and punishment. He decided to replicate the policy in Iran. He deputized thousands of college students as “price police” and gave them the power to arrest businessmen and shopkeepers who were in breach of the law. Prices came down, but only in appearance. In reality, there were two prices for almost everything. The “government” price, at which no commodity was available, and the real market price, at which there was ample supply of everything. Even greater was the political cost of this policy, as it turned more and more of the entrepreneurial class and members of the bazaar against the shah.[15]

If Mahdavi dodged the bullet in the grain deal, the purchase of large quantities of sugar a few months later proved fatal to his career. Next to bread, sugar and tea were key elements of the traditional Persian daily diet, and thus their price and availability had been, like bread, of extreme political sensitivity. Early in his term as minister of commerce, Mahdavi’s undersecretary in charge of the Department of Sugar and Tea, Hoseyn Alizadeh, had made a large purchase of sugar on the market. Hitherto, all sugar purchases had been handled by Felix Agayan, a close friend of Princess Ashraf. They had an agreement with a French company from whom they purchased sugar. When Alizadeh set out to solicit offers from a wide variety of companies, a British company called Tate and Lyle was included on the list of those invited to bid. The decision to include that company had come, according to both Mahdavi and Alizadeh, at the direct suggestion of the shah and Hoveyda. During the same week, in a meeting with ministers and undersecretaries in departments dealing with the economy, the shah told them of the coming confrontation with oil companies, and that the Western powers might retaliate by imposing an embargo on Iran. In anticipation, he wanted Iran to purchase and keep in reserve ample supplies of all foodstuffs. On the question of sugar, again according to Mahdavi and Alizadeh, the shah specifically mentioned that the ministry should consider the British company Tate and Lyle. Before long Mahdavi and his British counterpart, Lord Gelico, signed an agreement for the purchase of 250,000 tons of sugar, amounting to $250 million. Alizadeh had negotiated the terms of the deal, which was, among other things, Iran’s first foray into the futures market for sugar.

A few days after the agreement was signed, Mahdavi received a letter from the shah’s chief of staff indicating that there were rumors that he had received illicit commissions for signing the sugar contract. According to Alizadeh and Mahdavi, it was Felix Agayan who had complained about the deal to the shah. Agayan was angry because he had lost a profitable monopoly. Thus began an odyssey that continued for four years and ended in a court of law in which Alizadeh was tried and found innocent of any wrongdoing.

Hoseyn Fardust’s Office of the Royal Inspectorate was the first group to look into the deal. The generals initially assigned to the case were altogether ignorant of the mechanics of the futures market. To them, it was clear that Iran was paying higher than global market price for sugar. Eventually, an expert accountant with knowledge of commodities markets was brought on board, and he was categorical that there had been no foul play in signing the contract. Still not convinced by this finding, the shah ordered a team of accountants to go to London and check the accounts of Tate and Lyle to make sure no kickbacks had been paid. They, too, reportedly cleared Alizadeh of any wrongdoing.[16] It turned out, in fact, that Shapur Reporter, who acted as the representative of the British company, admitted in sworn testimony to receiving a legitimate commission of “three hundred thousand pounds.”[17]

Alizadeh was declared not guilty, and Mahdavi was absolved of any wrongdoing by a three-man commission of senior ministers appointed by Hoveyda. Iranian law at the time stipulated that criminal charges can be brought against a minister only after a commission of ministers has found the person guilty. Although they found Mahdavi innocent, the damage had been done. He could no longer serve in the ministry. In the public’s mind, his name conjured corruption. In fact, the Ministry of Trade had the worst reputation for financial corruption. Several of the staff became rich after a short tenure at the ministry. There was no choice but to remove Mahdavi from his post. He was given the largely ceremonial job of state minister. His political career seemed all but finished.
In Iranian politics, however, there is often a second chance. Mahdavi returned to the limelight for a while when the Rastakhiz Party was created. There was even talk of his appointment as the first secretary of the party. For several months, he acted as Hoveyda’s de facto chief of staff for party affairs. He spent countless hours meeting with different political figures, hoping to fashion for the party some genuine form of political organization.[18] He again invited some of his friends from the National Front to join him in the new job. Ironically, while Hoveyda, then first secretary of the party, thought of it as a project doomed to failure,[19] and Alam considered it a farce,[20] Mahdavi, hopeful of resurrecting his damaged reputation and career, spared no effort to turn it into a working organization. But it was all for naught. The party never took off, instead becoming a political albatross around the regime’s neck. People despised it as something alien, an illegal institution that was being forced on everyone. Mahdavi’s activities on behalf of the party only further damaged his reputation.

As the crisis in the country deepened, as the party became more and more a façade and a congregation of opportunists and careerists, as the power of his friend, Hoveyda, began to wane, and, finally, as hopes for an appointment to head the party were dashed, Mahdavi lost his passion for politics. He decided to take a vacation, and left Iran for France with his family.

While Mahdavi was in France, Hoveyda decided that it was time for the National Front and figures like Ali Amini to enter the political fray. He called Mahdavi and asked him to return. “It is again your turn,” he said. After some trepidation and doubt, Mahdavi finally decided to go back. Here was his chance to be once again at the center of action, a key player who could act as a bridge between the regime and its more moderate opponents.

But he, like Hoveyda, had misjudged the severity of the crisis, and the torments of his life in the next two years, the agonies of prison and the anxieties of living underground, were the heavy price he paid for this error.

The rise of technocrats in Iran came at the junction of two importantdomestic and global sea changes. On the domestic front, the shah wanted a new kind of public servant, with no political base or ambition and committed to promoting his version of modernity. In the wider world, there was a trend away from traditional politicians and toward a new kind of social scientist, the technocrat. In the early part of the century, Max Weber had heralded the advent of “civil servants”—officials without political affiliation and committed to the execution of the letter and the spirit of the law. After the end of World War II, sociologists in Europe and America predicted the rise of technocrats—champions of modernization and market economy, advocates of infrastructure improvement and globalization.

There was pressure on the shah from the United States, particularly the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, for change in Iran. The Americans believed that unless the shah undertook drastic measures, social revolution would be unavoidable. One proposed change was the empowerment of a new elite that would be less corrupt, less entangled with the aristocratic classes, and more aware of the urgent needs of modernization. AbdolMajid Majidi fit this profile perfectly. He was the consummate technocrat.

Abdol-Majid was born in Tehran in 1928 (1307) to a middle-class family, the second son of seven children. His mother was from a prominent family of merchants in the city of Amol, in the northern province of Mazandarin. Although she was deeply religious, she also played the violin and learned to speak some French. His father was as a lawyer and one of the founders of the Iranian Bar Association. His most famous client was Dr. Mossadeq. Although his father had warned him that “[i]f you work for the state, you are forever looking to the end of the month and your next paycheck,”1 Abdol-Majid became the ultimate functionary.

He began school at six, and was, in his own words, “never on top of the class.” But he was an avid reader, and mysteries were his early favorites. He became interested in classical music when, at the house of a family friend, he listened to records for the first time. It was “from something called ‘His Master’s Voice,’” he said.[2]

He attended Dar al-Funun high school, leaving during his last year to attend Alborz and focus on business. In 1946, he entered the Faculty of Law at Tehran University—one of the country’s first institutions of higher learning. He graduated in 1950.

The country was in one of its most intense political periods, and the university and law school were hotbeds of radicalism and nationalism, but Majidi had little interest in radical politics. “Most of my friends,” he remembers, “were members of the Tudeh Communist Party, and though I had some affinity for their utopian goals, I never joined.”3 Nevertheless, thinking that the future belonged to the Soviet Union, he began to learn Russian.4 As his relations in party circles cooled, so did his enthusiasm for the language. His early proclivity for long-term planning, his caution at attaching himself to a political party or platform, his pragmatism, his willingness to change his position, and his acute awareness of the context of his decisions would, in later years, define him as a man of politics. Late in Majidi’s career, the shah said of him jokingly, “Majidi is like a cat. Regardless of how you throw him up, he lands on his feet.”[5]

After law school, he went to Paris to continue his education. While pursuing a law degree, he also attended to one of his lifelong avocations—he took a class in painting. Even at the height of his political career, he continued his painting lessons with an Iranian painter named Ziapour. Some of Majidi’s paintings were shown at an exhibit at the Officers Club in Tehran.6 He still paints today.

Most of his friends in Paris were members of the Tudeh Party, including Monir Vakili, a beautiful woman, a vocalist with classical opera training, who was married at the time to Dr. Razavi, one of the leaders of the party. Since her days in Iran, Monir had been a “fellow traveler” and friend of the party’s most senior leaders, including Maryam Firuz7 and Nour-al-Din Kianouri.8 Her meeting with Majidi and their eventual decision to marry ended her ties with them.

They married in 1951, and when they returned to Iran, they were one of the most artistically active couples in the capital, Tehran. They had a clear understanding that they would continue their individual careers and would not allow one partner’s work to impede the other. Monir kept her maiden name—a common practice in Iran. Even at the height of their careers and fame, many people did not know they were married. For Majidi there was an element of his customary caution in this separation. Women’s singing was anathema to religious zealots, and in Majidi’s own words, he “did not want her career to become an unnecessary liability.”[9] Monir, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to these religious restrictions and the dangers they might pose for her.

The most crucial aspect of her life had always been music. She had a beautiful and powerful voice. Opera was unknown in Iran before the twentieth century. But as society modernized, Western art and music also grew in popularity and prestige. Monir Vakili played a pivotal rule in introducing Iranians to this new form of music. She also used her musical sense to search for overlooked gems of Persian music and to make them part of the emerging sounds of “international music.”

She was born in Tehran to a family of artists. Her mother loved opera and was an accomplished singer. Her childhood home was filled with the sound of music. Monir began singing arias at seven, then later began to train with a professional voice teacher. Many years later, she went to Paris and took classes at the famous Conservatoire, where her voice was classified as soprano.

While she followed her musical career with full intensity, she was no less dedicated to her family life. Their first child was a daughter named Shahrzad. She was born in Paris and now owns a boutique in the upscale district of Marin County, California. Their second daughter, Jamileh, now known as Jaja, was born in Tehran six years later. She is a successful singer in California. Married to a scion of the Saleh family,[10] she has dedicated much of their Sausalito home to the memory of her mother. Her photographs adorn the walls; the colorful dresses she wore while performing are displayed on mannequins; and reviews of Monir’s performances, articles written about her, and issues of Iranian magazines with Monir on the cover are cherished family heirlooms preserved in a handsome box11 There is much evidence to indicate Monir was able to manage the conflicting demands of motherhood and a career. More than two decades after her tragic death, Majid remembers her fondly as a “model mother and wife.”

In 1952, the couple returned to an Iran that was torn asunder by the rivalry between the shah and his increasingly hostile prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. Although Mossadeq was a client of Majidi’s father, and although the Tudeh Party had become an ally of Mossadeq, Majidi himself did not side with the prime minister, concentrating instead on finishing his apprenticeship in his father’s law firm.

By the time he finished his training, the Mossadeq government had fallen. A number of new institutions—banks, insurance companies, construction firms—were burgeoning, buoyed up by the generous aid given to the new Zahedi government by England and the United States. One of these was the Export Bank, and Majidi was hired by its legal department. Realizing that the days of French as the language of power and culture in Iran were ending, he began learning English. By the end of the 1950s, the center of gravity in Iranian politics had shifted to the Plan Organization. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, its powerful director, had secured the support of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, and the U.S. government. The Plan Organization would be the heart of the economic stabilization program, the key enforcer of fiscal responsibility in Iran. Majidi soon joined the Plan Organization as a specialist. It was the beginning of a government career that lasted for more than two decades and included his rise to managing director of the Plan Organization itself and two ministerial portfolios.

His rise in the Iranian bureaucracy was helped by his decision to join two groups—or dowrehs, in the parlance of social science—that brought together technocrats united by their advocacy of modernity. Tehran was in those days filled with these dowrehs.[12] Anyone who hoped to rise on the ladder of power created one. Majidi joined the Kanoune Egtesad (Economic Center), which was composed of graduates of French institutions. But America was clearly gaining power and prominence in Iran, and Majidi, recognizing that, also joined a group whose members, with the exception of Majidi, were graduates of American universities. Manuchehre Goudarzi, Cyrus Samii, Manuchehre Mahamedi, Cyrus Ghani, Karim Pasha Bahadori, and Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian were all members of this group. Eventually, Majidi went to Harvard for a master’s degree in public administration, which he received in 1961. At the same time, he took a course in agricultural economics at the University of Illinois.

Monir accompanied her husband and trained at the famous New England Conservatory of Music. Her singing career was in full bloom. A record she had released in Europe in 1957 had won critical acclaim and the Grand Prix du Disque. Called The Songs and Dances of Persia, the record was the fruitful collaboration between her and Amir Hoseyn Dehlavi, a composer and compiler of Persian folkloric music.

Soon after their return to Iran, Majidi was appointed deputy director of the Plan Organization. In that capacity, he met Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and became one of his closest confidants.[13] The friendship was cemented a couple of years later, when Hoveyda, upon the sudden death of his friend Hassan-Ali Mansur, was appointed prime minister. Hoveyda insisted on submitting that year’s budget to the Parliament on time, and he succeeded, with the help of Majidi. Hoveyda not only impressed the shah but also established his reputation with the Parliament. More important for Majidi, the budget victory meant that Hoveyda appreciated Majidi’s ability as a manager. At Majidi’s urging, Hoveyda agreed to streamline the process of budget planning in Iran, hitherto badly bifurcated between the Plan Organization and the Ministry of the Treasury.

Mehrdad Pahlbod, the perennial minister of culture, invited Majidi to join the High Council of Culture and Art. Pahlbod was a trained violinist who knew Monir. Majidi had a few clashes with SAVAK as the head of this council, which was the ultimate authority on film censorship and decided what films would receive distribution licenses in Iran. Majidi was in favor of cultural openness, but representatives of SAVAK were sometimes comically cautious about what they considered subversive. They were against issuing a license for the film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The film, SAVAK suggested, taught the dangerous lesson of regicide.[14]

Two films by Daryush Mehrjui created considerable controversy. One was called The Cow, about the metamorphosis of a peasant into his cow; the other, The Cycle, showed in cinema verité style the trade in blood in Tehran, where corrupt dealers preyed on the poor and sick. SAVAK was against The Cow (“it offers a negative view of the Iranian village life”),[15] and Iran’s Medical Association and its powerful head, Dr. Manuchehre Egbal, opposed The Cycle. Majidi supported the release of both films. They were eventually shown, after the intervention of the queen. At her insistence, the shah finally watched The Cycle, but he angrily walked out halfway through the film, complaining about intellectuals—or “an-tellectuals”[16] as he liked to call them pejoratively—who insisted on depicting the darker side of society.[17]

Majidi also served as head of the jury for the Tehran Film Festival. In the mid-1970s, at the height of Iran’s oil boom, the festival became one of the most important in the world. Many top directors sent their films to the festival, and dealers and producers pitched serious and zany projects to Majidi and other Iranian authorities. One of the suggestions Majidi received was for Iran to purchase the sole international rights to all of Charlie Chaplin’s films.[18]

In 1965, Pahlbod had helped stage the first full production of an opera in Tehran, with Monir in the lead. Eventually, with her encouragement and active participation, a modern concert hall, Talare Roudaki, was built in Tehran. Experts from La Scala helped design the acoustics and the stage that enabled it to put on ambitious operas. Some of the biggest names in international opera were performing there by the mid-1970s. Monir had a leading role in nearly all of these productions. One such role was the occasion for a famous quip by Hoveyda. When Monir’s character died on the stage, Hoveyda, sitting next to the royal couple and not far from Majidi, said, “Amen for that. Now Majidi is finally free.”[19]

With government support and generous donations from rich Iranians, Monir started a new voice school for girls in 1975. She traveled around the country attending the applicants’ recitals, and chose the most talented voices in Iran. After three years of intense training, the girls sang in the Tehran choir or the opera.

Majidi’s political career was steadily growing, and he had become one of the most powerful ministers in the government. His first portfolio was in the Ministry of Agricultural Product and Consumer Goods, a new ministry that Majidi created. The appointment lasted for a year, beginning in November 1967; his mandate was to improve the quality and availability of agricultural foodstuffs for the rapidly growing urban population. He helped create a number of government-sponsored retail stores and tried to introduce common labeling standards. Before he could implement his other plans, he was sent to the Ministry of Labor, where he increased the minimum wage, tried to create a number of government-controlled unions based on the AFL-CIO model in the United States, and set up technical training centers. Taking a page out of early Soviet history and its Stakhanovite Movement,20 he established an award for the “Iranian hero of labor.”

In 1973, he was named minister in charge of planning and budget for the Plan Organization. The boom in Iran’s oil revenues had led to growing tensions between different elements of the bureaucracy over the distribution of the money. The biggest piece of the pie went to the military and intelligence agencies, and only the shah had a voice in determining the size of their budgets. Majidi claims that he advocated a smaller military budget, but he was rebuffed.[21]

His most controversial decision in this period was to succumb to the wishes of the shah at the Ramsar Conference in 1975. The experts at the Plan Organization had said that Iran did not have the infrastructure to absorb all the new revenues, and that failure to control the size of government expenditure would lead to a “revolution.” The shah, who was by then dismissive of economists, angrily rejected their advice and ordered all new oil revenues to be spent on government programs—from the military to ambitious social programs such as free health insurance, free education, and meals for every Iranian student.[22] Majidi chose not to defend his experts’ advice and like other ministers, simply succumbed to the shah’s orders.

At this time, Majidi was appointed by Hoveyda to head the Ministerial Committee for Social Affairs, an attempt to emulate the French system of “super-ministers” in charge of several related ministries. The Departments of Education, Women’s Affairs, and Labor worked under Majidi’s guidance. By then, he was considered one of the shah’s favorite ministers.

During a meeting with the shah in Switzerland, Majidi first heard that the shah was going to dismantle the existing two-party system.[23] Majidi was to play an important role in the new party and eventually became the head of one of the two wings the shah ordered into existence. But the one-party experiment was a disaster and fueled the fires of discontent in Iran. Both the shah’s days on the throne and Majidi’s tenure at the center of power were nearing their ends.

After Jamshid Amuzegar became prime minister, Majidi was out of office and out of a job. For reasons that are not clear, the shah had vetoed another ministerial appointment, and Majidi began to think about entering the private sector. In those days, fast fortunes could be made readily by someone with Majidi’s background. Before he could put his plans into action, he was named head of the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, his last job in Iran. Many of Iran’s most important museums were under the control of the queen’s foundation. As the situation in the country deteriorated, Majidi, at the behest of the queen, arranged for the transfer of some of the country’s most valuable artifacts to safe places.

In an attempt to avert the crisis, the shah consented to imprison a number of the regime’s top leaders. The arrests were a ruse to convey to the people the idea that it was not the shah, but his misguided minions, who had been responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the country. Majidi’s days were numbered. He was with Hoveyda on the day he was arrested in November 1978. The arresting officers, two generals from the office enforcing martial law in Tehran, warned Majidi that they would soon come for him as well.

A few days later, Reza Ghotbi called Majidi to warn him of the worsening situation and to suggest that he leave the country. Majidi had received an invitation from UNESCO to attend a meeting in Paris. He went to the Foreign Ministry and tried to get a passport, but the new prime minister, Shapur Bakhtiyar, had ordered that Majidi not be given one. In a show of independence and willingness to “correct the mistakes of the past” Bakhtiyar kept former officials from leaving the country and even arrested them. Desperate, Majidi called Ghotbi, who suggested that he talk to the queen. He followed Ghotbi’s advice, but the queen told him, “It is no longer in our hands.”24 Not long afterward, she and the royal family left Iran, leaving behind a deeply distraught Majidi. A few days after their departure, Majidi received a call from the martial law authorities asking him to come in for questioning. That night, soldiers stormed their house and arrested him. Majidi was taken to Jamshidiye, the jail where many once-powerful figures were being held.

Anxiety, suspicion, angry recriminations, and mistrust, along with remorse for missed opportunities to escape and increasingly despairing news from the outside world made Majidi’s days in prison a torment.

On the morning of February 11, 1979, as the radio announced that the army had declared neutrality and was returning to barracks, and the sound of gunfire filled the air, soldiers guarding the prison fled, doors were flung open, and in the chaos that ensued, some prisoners, including Majidi, escaped. A few were recognized by the crowds milling outside and arrested. They invariably met a tragic end. Majidi was luckier.

He took refuge in one of his daughter’s houses and then moved around to the safety of other friends’ and relatives’ homes. As the number of executions increased, he decided it was time to leave Iran.

He asked one of his brothers to seek help from the French government. Eventually a passport with a false name was giving to him by the French. “At least seventeen top officials,” he remembers, “including Bakhtiyar, were saved by the French authorities.”[25] With the help of smugglers, he crossed the Turkish border on foot in the middle of the night. On Sunday, May 26, 1979 (5 Khordad 1358), he left Tehran, and on Wednesday of that week he was in Paris. French police met him at the airport, whisked him through customs, and helped him settle down, advising him to keep out of cafés and places frequented by Iranians. Monir was already in Paris and after a few weeks of nervous living, they began to acclimate to life in exile.[26] But tragedy was not far away.

On a rainy February 28, 1983, Majidi and Monir were on the road in their Citroën. Majidi was driving. Near the city of Nieville in Belgium, the car hit a truck parked on the side of the road. Monir was killed instantly. Majidi was taken to the hospital, unconscious. Doctors operated and saved his life. He was unconscious for eleven days, and it took him months to recuperate fully.[27]

He still lives in Paris, frequently traveling to the United States to visit family and friends. He has worked at a number of consulting firms and headed the Mihan Foundation, dedicated to promoting Iranian culture and history, for a time. He is one of the queen’s advisors and helped negotiate the publication of her memoirs in France.

Khalil Maleki easily ranks as one of the most unjustly maligned characters in modern Iranian politics. Distrusted by the shah’s regime, ignored or derided by the radicals, and disdained and demonized by the Stalinist Left, he was nevertheless indefatigable in his struggle for social democracy in Iran. In a country whose traditional philosophy has thrived under the shadow of the Manichaean vision, in a culture whose religion tolerates no purgatory, he was a tireless advocate of compromise and of the Aristotelian “Golden Mean.” He was pragmatic in a culture whose intellectuals advocated, at least in public, a culture of ideological purism. While the radicals’ pretense of purity was not just oblivious to the dictates of reality but bordered on the naïve, his pragmatism was fearless, and oblivious to the cost he, as an individual, would pay for his ideas.

More than anyone else, he tried to fight Marxian dogmatism and despotism on the theoretical level, and he thus became the primary subject of the powerful Soviet propaganda machine. As their attacks increased in venom, and as the government of the shah continued to persecute him for his candor in advocating democracy and transparency in government, he felt more and more isolated and tired. At times he took refuge in alcohol, providing his enemies more material for their factory of lies. He died a lonely and broken man. Even his meager retirement payment was cut off in his last year of life. But in recent years there has been increasing interest in his life and books. His writings about the nature of the Soviet brand of “socialism” as a malignant form of state capitalism were precociously accurate.

Khalil Maleki was born in the city of Tabriz in 1901 (1280). His father was a merchant of the bazaar and an advocate of the Constitutional Revolution. As a child, the young Khalil witnessed the violence and the exuberance of the revolution. He was still in elementary school when he lost his father. His mother remarried, and as a result the family moved to the city of Arak, where Maleki continued his schooling. For high school, he moved to Tehran and enrolled in the German Technical School. His first entanglement in politics took place at this time. His behavior in that encounter presaged his mode of action for the rest of his life. In him, caution and prudence in choosing a goal combined with tenacious steadfastness in the pursuit of his goal to make his character cautious and brave, prudent and defiant.

This incongruent mix was even evident in his writing habits. He was intellectually and politically a firm believer in consultation and pluralism, in learning from others and accepting the contingency of his own beliefs. Indeed, the supple quality of his mind and his humility were two of his most endearing qualities. At the same time, he was renowned among his colleagues and comrades for the poor quality of his prose. His sentences were often long and meandering, and his arguments as hard to follow as his syntax. Yet he only begrudgingly tolerated others editing his writing.[1] If his stubbornness translated into bad prose, in politics it often came through as bravery. His role in the first political strike of his life is a clear example of this quality.

One of the teachers in the German Technical School had slapped a student. Other students, angry and rebellious, decided to go on strike and demand the expulsion of the teacher. Maleki had been against the idea of making what he thought were unreasonable demands. All his life, politics for him was the art of the possible. He counseled caution and moderation, and he was overruled. He was beginning to learn that passion and rhetoric often prevail over prudence and reason in politics. Maleki begrudgingly joined the strike. With the first hint of a threat by the administration, the ranks of the striking students cracked and nearly everyone went back to class. Maleki was the exception. He stood his ground and as a result was expelled from the school.

He was despondent. He contemplated seeking asylum in the Soviet Union—the only neighboring country that seemed to him to hold any promise. Lucky for him, before he took any steps to realize this harebrained idea, he was, through the good offices of a friend, reinstated in school.[2]

His real salvation came in 1928 when he was chosen by the government as one of the recipients of the much-coveted scholarships to study abroad. Accompanied by a group of students that included some of the future political luminaries of the country, he set out for Germany and the pursuit of an education in chemical engineering. Weimar Germany was a hotbed of communist and Nazi radicalism in those days, and before long Maleki had joined a small circle of leftist Iranian students led by the charismatic Dr. Taghi Arani. In his memoirs, he writes of his turn to communism, “We did not choose communism; communism chose us.”[3]

Before he could finish his doctoral degree, his scholarship was abruptly withdrawn. He had fought with the Iranian Embassy over their attempt to conceal the facts about the suicide of another scholarship student. Maleki returned to Iran and enrolled in the Teacher’s Training College; after graduation, he began to work as a chemistry teacher. His early training as a chemist would later appear in many of his philosophical writings in the form of references to scientific theory and repeated comparisons of societies and human beings to biological or chemical organisms.[4]

Two years after his return from Germany, Maleki met and eventually married Sabihe Ganjei, a biology teacher from a family famous for their democratic sentiments. She remained for the rest of his life his most steadfast supporter. Without her help, it has been suggested, “Maleki could have never accomplished his mission. She was the only person who never left him.”[5]

About the time of his marriage, he reconnected with his friend Dr. Arani, who was keen on establishing a magazine called Donya (The World). It was a journal of ideas, with a decided leftist tilt. Before long, everyone associated with the magazine, including Maleki, was arrested by the police. Their number totaled fifty-three and the group was made famous by a book by Bozorg Alavi, a writer among the group arrested, who later wrote his prison memoirs under the title Panjaho Se Nafar (The Group of Fifty-Three). Since then, several other prison memoirs have shed new light on the dynamics of the group before, during, and after prison. Maleki’s Political Memoir also covers his prison days at some length.

For Maleki, the most bitter memory of this experience was the death of his first child. The infant was born while Maleki was in prison. The father had thus seen his child only through bars. Furthermore, according to Maleki, the fact that his wife often traveled between Arak, where she lived, and Tehran, where he was incarcerated, was the probable contributing cause of the infant’s death. In his historic 1964 letter to Mohammad Mossadeq, Maleki waxes eloquent about her and her independence, and her willingness to bear the burden of running the house, even financially supporting the family when he is in prison or otherwise engaged in his political activities. In the letter, he laments the loss of his child.[6]

The fall of Reza Shah changed Maleki’s life. He was freed from prison and joined a society that was beginning to exercise democratic experimentation. Many of the members of the of the “Group of Fifty-Three”—with the exception of Arani, who had died in prison under suspicious circumstances—united to create the Tudeh Party of Iran. From its inception, the party was beholden to the Soviet Union, and eventually, in spite of the good intentions and aspirations of many of its members, it grew into an instrument for Soviet foreign policy and espionage. Maleki originally refused to join the new party. As he recounts in his memoirs, he had seen the corruption and moral weakness of many of the party’s leaders. Ultimately he overcame his original trepidations and joined, and he immediately emerged as one of the party’s chief theorists.

No sooner had he joined than tensions began to grow between him and most of the party leadership. Points of dissension and contention were many. Maleki advocated more in-party democracy, less dependence on the Soviet Union, and more attention to the realities of Iran. The simmering tension grew to a boil over the question of Azarbaijan. The Soviet Union had been occupying that part of Iran since 1941. It had, unbeknownst to the Tudeh party, propped up a Ferge Democrat, or Democratic Party, in the region, and the party was, by 1944, sounding more and more like a secessionist movement. Moreover, the Soviets ordered the Tudeh Party to dismantle its organization in that region and have its members join the “Ferge.” Maleki was sent by the Central Committee of the party to check out the situation and prepare a report.

What he found was simply appalling. The Soviets were behaving like an occupying force, and their officers treated even the Iranian communists with disdain. He found the ranks of the communist movement in that region infested with opportunists. By the time he came back, he was ready to leave the party and create a better, more reform-minded, independent party. His plan eventually led to the biggest split in the ranks of the Tudeh Party. The significance of this split has led to numerous narratives about its origin and the sequence of events. The Tudeh Party, in the great tradition of all totalitarian parties, claimed that Maleki was “thrown out.” In the annals of orthodox Marxism, no one seems to have left the party voluntarily. Instead, they have all been “expelled.” The “official” story of Maleki’s departure from the party was no different: he had been about to be thrown out, and instead he beat the party to the punch and claimed to have “split.”

When the break with the party finally came, the anxieties of separation and, more important, the trauma of the brutal and ruthless campaign of character assassination launched against him by Radio Moscow and their Iranian henchmen, drove Maleki to utter despair. He decided to withdraw from politics altogether and was driven to the verge of suicide. Like thousands of “true believers” around the world, Maleki had imagined the Soviet Union—led by Stalin, a leader of “infinite wisdom” and “justice”—to be the closest humans have come to a utopia. If there are inequalities in the Soviet Union, if the country behaves in Iran with brazen nationalism, Maleki, like other believers in the Soviet myth, had naïvely assumed that it must be because Stalin and his “true Bolshevik” comrades were being kept in the dark. All that is needed, Maleki assumed, was for someone to tell them the truth and they would embrace it. He had a bitter surprise coming.

The Soviet Union’s ruthless radio campaign against Maleki and the other “splitters of party unity” was not the only attack. The Tudeh Party itself, by then already renowned for its “dirty tricks,” went into operation against Maleki. Their strategy was to portray Maleki as an ally if not a “stooge” of the shah, and of the British. One of their first acts was to publish a telegram, supposedly signed by Maleki, on the day there was an assassination attempt on the shah. The telegram, prominently placed in one of Tehran’s two most popular dailies, protests “the dastardly treacherous attack” on the shah. The Tudeh apparatchik thought they had put Maleki in a no-win situation. If he dared deny the fact that he had signed the telegram, he would face the wrath of the regime. The denial would imply that Maleki was not saddened by the attempt on the shah. If he did not deny it, as they hoped he would not, then they would have succeeded in marking him a “royalist.” He broke with the party, they never tired of repeating, because he wanted to make his private deal with the regime and with the British. Maleki surprised the Tudeh conspirators by immediately issuing a statement in the same paper denying that he had signed the infamous telegram.[7]

For about three years after the traumatic split from the party, Maleki was politically inactive. By the late 1940s, as the battle to nationalize the country’s oil industry was heating up, Maleki decided to reenter the fray. He did so primarily at the urging of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who remained for the rest of Maleki’s life a true and tirelessly dependable friend and advocate. At Al-e Ahmad’s behest, Maleki joined forces with a prominent anticommunist and controversial political figure by the name of Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani. Together they formed the Toilers Party of Iran. Their plan of action was to support the government of Mossadeq and defeat the communists.
For about a year, the party was more or less on par with the Tudeh in terms of its mass appeal and its ability to mobilize masses in support of the Mossadeq government. A series of events contributed to a growing rift between Maleki and Baqa’i. While the latter had become more and more disenchanted with Mossadeq and wanted to criticize what he called Mossadeq’s increasingly despotic rule, Maleki was unwavering in his support for Mossadeq.

Ultimately, the two sides clashed in a forum where activists sympathetic to Maleki accused Baqa’i of complicity with the court. He walked out, and the Toiler’s Party was split. Maleki’s followers began to call themselves the “Third Force,” a title that hinted at General Tito and his hopes of finding a path that followed neither American capitalism nor Soviet socialism.

It was in this period that Maleki began to publish and partially edit a magazine that represented the ideas and ideology of the “Third Force.” The journal was also characteristic of Maleki’s own temperament and was a clear indication of his ability to gather around him men and women of intelligence and artistic ability. The magazine’s editorial board consisted of some of the most influential voices in modern Iranian letters. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, his novelist wife, Simin Daneshvar, and the renowned poet Ali Zohari were on the magazine’s editorial board with Maleki. Furthermore, a whole litany of literary luminaries wrote for the journal. A sampling of the magazine’s content is the best indicator of its cultural and political aspirations. The new year issue of 1951, for example, included an article on the Chartist movement in England, a translation of a poem by W. H. Auden, a critique of daily life in Soviet Union, an essay praising the contributions to physics of early Muslim scholars of the twelfth century, a critique of Soviet genetics, a short story by Thomas Mann, and an essay by Maleki himself in which he points to similarities between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and writes of the Iranian pro-Soviet communists as a “fifth column” of an imperialist government.[8] The back of the magazine advertised the imminent publication of a Persian translation of Arthur Koestler’s famous antitotalitarian and anti-Soviet novel, Darkness at Noon. The translators of the book were regular contributors to the magazine, and their association with Maleki was used by the Stalinists to blacklist the book and dismiss it as nothing but “imperialist propaganda.[9]
While the pages of the journal were devoted to a wide range of literary, philosophical, and social topics, Iran’s current problems and the fate of the Mossadeq government were never absent from its pages. On many occasions, Maleki combined his praise of Mossadeq with polite and deferential but invariably serious critiques of his policies. He accused Mossadeq of not having a program to solve Iran’s domestic problems. Almost exactly a year before the August 1953 coup that overthrew him, Maleki chastised Mossadeq by saying, “fighting the foreign foes” is not enough. The government, he laments, has no program for ending inequality in Iran. He also criticizes Mossadeq for his failure to form a political party.[10] Unless Mossadeq changed his policies, Maleki hinted, his fall was imminent.

Maleki’s prediction came true. The fall of Mossadeq was a devastating blow to Maleki. Alhough he had been adamantly against some of the prime minister’s most controversial decisions—particularly his decision to hold a referendum and dissolve the Majlis, thus affording the shah the legal ground to dismiss him as prime minister—he had told the aging, tired Mossadeq that though he disagreed with him, “I will follow you to hell.” With the defeat of the movement, with leaders of the government in hiding, and with the shah back on his throne, Maleki grew despondent. He, too, was in hiding. His first thought was suicide. After three days, he was dissuaded from the idea. In his own reckoning, the only thing that kept him alive was the love of his family. On August 23, just before turning himself in, he wrote a passionate open letter to the people of Iran. The letter has never been published, and it describes in considerable detail the circumstances that lead to the defeat of the movement.
Maleki begins by attacking the United States, England, and the USSR for complicity in the overthrow of Mossadeq. He calls on his followers to keep the “movement alive” and not to be deterred by the childish radicalism of the Left or the brutality of the Right. He reasserts his commitment to “peaceful, legal reforms” as the sole legitimate path for transforming Iran, as for any society. He attacks the Tudeh communist party as being a more dangerous enemy than even the regime, as they “are the most reactionary and dangerous force in the world today.”11 The theme of fighting the communists remained a constant element of his ideology for the rest of his life. All too often he tried to convince the regime that his group, with its moderate leftist ideology and its unbending anticommunism, should be allowed openly and legally to participate in the political process. His appeals invariably came to naught. A few months of toleration would ultimately bring about a period of suppression in which he and his comrades were put back in prison.[12]

His second lengthy experience in prison came in the aftermath of the events of August 1953. After he turned himself in, he was kept in prison for about two years. As he wrote in his memoirs, the worst torture was inflicted not by the police but by members of the Tudeh Party, who saw him as their ideological enemy. He complained to the authorities, but to no avail.

No sooner was he out of prison than he prepared a lengthy indictment of the oil agreement Iran was about to sign with a consortium of Western oil companies. The speech was given to Mohammad Derakshesh, a friend and erstwhile comrade, who valiantly agreed to read it in its entirety in the Majlis, where he was a deputy and enjoyed immunity. The speech is arguably the most harshly critical commentary on the consortium agreement in the Iranian Parliament.[13]

For Maleki, as for the whole generation of postwar radicals, the mid-1950s were years of despondent resignation to the status quo. Poets talked of “dark nights” and “cold winters.” Maleki, too, took a brief leave from politics and went back to teaching. He translated a few essays and books into Persian. By the end of the 1950s, Maleki decided to revive his socialist group. For about two years, he had been meeting, secretly and regularly, with Assadollah Alam, the shah’s most trusted advisor and friend and at the time minister of the interior. These meetings had been taking place with the prior knowledge of Maleki’s comrades.[14] In one of these meetings, Maleki gave Alam a copy of a draft program of the party and asked him to submit it to the king and solicit his views.[15] In the course of one of the next meetings, Alam suggested that Maleki should meet with the shah. “His Majesty is deep down a Social Democrat himself,” Alam opined.[16] After consulting with his friends, Maleki agreed to the meeting.

This would be his second meeting with the king. The first encounter had taken place in May 1953. Relations between the shah and Mossadeq had deteriorated. At the same time, Maleki had been meeting with Mossadeq every Monday night.[17] His “Third Force” party was considered one of the more powerful allies of the beleaguered government.

The first meeting with the shah had lasted three hours. According to Maleki, he tried unsuccessfully to convince the shah to find a way to compromise with the prime minister. The shah instead talked of the dangers of the communists, pointing out that with Mossadeq as the prime minister, the communists were sure to win. He went on to tell Maleki, “if the communists come to power, you will be one of the first they will kill.”[18] Maleki reported the gist of the meeting to Mossadeq, who responded, “The young man is under British and American influences.” Maleki also claimed to have told Mossadeq that from the tone of the shah’s talk, it was evident that plans to remove the prime minister were afoot. He further recommended that the prime minister should protect himself by setting up a special guard. Mossadeq concurred, but before he could establish such a unit, the events of August swept him from power.

The second meeting took place under different circumstances. This time the shah was far more powerful and in full command of the country. He had been pressured by the Americans to bring new blood, particularly the National Front, into the government.[19] Maleki was to act as a go-between. The negotiations came to naught. Neither side trusted the other, but as with the first meeting, this time, too, the mere fact that Maleki had met with the shah gave his opponents more ammunition to attack him as an “agent” of the regime.

One of the most interesting phases in Maleki’s life, the period when his wisdom and realism, his prudence and aversion to the self-deluding bombast of ideologues became most clear, are the tumultuous years between the beginning of the shah’s reforms in 1961 and the June uprising of 1963 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini as a leader. Maleki’s honesty and realism, his readiness to go against the political fads of the time, is clearly evident in his writings of this period. The analysis he wrote under the name of the central committee of the “Society of Iranian Socialists” is a perfect example of his candor and realism. He declared that the shah had taken away the political initiative by taking up and implementing some of the opposition’s main slogans and demands. Even if fair elections were held, he conjectured, the opposition would not win but a few seats.[20] Later, in a nowfamous letter to Mossadeq, Maleki complained about the leaders of the National Front for their failure to understand the nature and scope of the shah’s reforms, their inability to seize the initiative and form a government when the chance was offered them, and their abject opportunism.[21] Eventually, the failures of the secular movement, the obvious emergence of a new clerical leadership whose values were inimical to all Maleki believed in, led to his decision to leave Iran in 1963.

Accompanied by his younger son—the older son was already in Italy at the time, studying—Maleki went to Vienna. There he suffered a minor heart attack and was hospitalized for almost a month. His cardiologist suggested a change in his dietary regime, as well as abstinence from alcohol. He responded to the doctor with an anecdote from Avicenna, the great medieval Persian sage. A patient asked him how to prolong his life. Avicenna had a long list of dietary recommendations. A few days later, the patient and the physician happened to be guests at the same party. Avicenna was burrowing into the many delicacies when the patient, surprised at the dietary excesses of the sage, asked, “Why are you not following the suggestions you gave me?” Avicenna answered, “You are interested in the length of your life, whereas for me, the width is just as important. This diet is for width.” For Maleki, too, the width was as important as the length and alcohol was, as he told the cadriologist, a “necessary ingredient of that width.”[22] Furthermore, Maleki probably knew that alcohol was a sort of self-medication to fight the anxieties inherent in his kind of political life. In a letter to his trusted friend and comrade, Dr. Amir Pishdad, he wrote, “These doctors who talk of quitting drinking just don’t know what we go though here.”[23] After about a year and half in Europe, Maleki finally returned to Iran.

Back in Tehran he tried to use his doctors’ recommendations as political cover. He told one of SAVAK’s interrogators that he had given up politics because “My physician had forbade me from partaking in any activity that could excite me.”[24] But politics was in his blood. He played a crucial role in trying to revive not only his magazine, but his political group as well. He told the SAVAK that his kind of voice is an antidote to the dangers of orthodox Marxism.[25]

When he had the temerity to meet with a Labor member of the British parliament, he was once again arrested and this time given a three-year sentence. The world socialist leaders strenuously objected. After about a year and a half, SAVAK decided that Maleki was sick and dying. “If he dies in prison, they will make another martyr of him,”[26] SAVAK wrote in a report, recommending that he be pardoned. In the meantime, Maleki was using Jalal Al-e Ahmad as a conduit to Alam, from whom he requested help in securing his freedom. The recommendation was accepted. Maleki was freed, and again through the good offices of Alam, he was given a job at the famed Center for Social Science Research.[27] His tenure was short-lived. When he decided to meet with an American human rights attorney visiting Iran, the shah was angered and ordered that Maleki be fired “from all his jobs.”[28] Needless to say, the order was carried out. His retirement pay was also cut.

To make ends meet, Maleki rented out part of his house. He was drinking more heavily than ever before. On more than one occasion, friends and family had found him passed out in the street. On July 13, 1969 (22 Tir 1348), he died a lonely man. About a hundred people participated in his funeral. He had asked to be buried at the village of Ahmad Abad near Tehran. It is where Mossadeq lived and where he is also buried. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Maleki’s wish was not granted.

Hassan-Ali Mansur was a scion of one of Iran’s most famous—or infamous— political families. Yet all his life he was an incorrigible name-dropper. His father was one of the more notorious Anglophiles of his time, and it has been suggested by a variety of sources, including Mohammad Reza Shah himself, that the father, Ali Mansur—who was prime minister in 1941, at the time of the initial attack on Iran by the British and Soviet armies—intentionally kept from the king the seriousness of the Allies’ ultimatums, and thus paved the way for the invasion. The son, on the other hand, was reputed to be a creation of the American Embassy and the CIA. In his Diaries, Assadollah Alam claims that on the night of the 1963 elections, Mansur called him from the home of Stuart Rockwell, the American diplomat, and begged him to order that he “be declared the highest vote getter in Tehran”; Alam added that, in his view, Mansur “was really the lackey of the Americans.”1 Of course, Rockwell flatly denies the story, insisting he “did not have a high opinion of Mansur. He was not my idea of a great thinker. He was not particularly profound or remarkable. He knew a lot of people but was not an expert in any field.”[2]

Rockwell and the American Embassy were not the only ones who did not have a high opinion of Mansur. In a biographical sketch prepared by SAVAK, he is described as,

very handsome, white face, dark eyes, and very beautiful, and of medium height, and a pleasant heft. His father is extremely rich, worth approximately fifty million tooman [$7 million]. He is a graduate of the Law School, with a Bachelor’s degree in political science. He has good command of French and knows enough English to get by. He reads all the papers and magazines, and occasionally, books on the economy. He likes women and power. He finished high school at Iranshahr High School. He does not have much competence and worth. Because his undeserved rise in the ranks was due to his father’s influence, and because Dr. Manuchehre Egbal [one-time prime minister] owed his father a favor and thus appointed him to the post, he is hated by the youth. . . . He is humble, but without a strong character. He is altogether free from noble thoughts . . . he lacks brains and experience and is overly pampered. . . . Evidence indicates that the CIA’s station chief in Iran, who rented a house from Mansur, openly guaranteed his eventual appointment to the post of Prime Minister.[3]

What makes his life tragic and complicated is the fact that, though his unusually scripted life was completely geared toward the position he coveted, his tenure in that post was short-lived and one of the most controversial in the history of twentieth-century Iran. It was under his watch that Iran signed an infamous agreement with the United States granting all U.S. personnel and their families immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts. It was a shameful resurrection of the capitulation rights so painfully remembered from the colonial days of imperial hegemony. The signing of the agreement, and Mansur’s dishonesty with the Parliament about the actual contents of the bill ratifying the agreement, are sure to go down in the annals of Iranian history as an early ripple that ultimately swelled into the tsunami that was the Islamic Revolution. It was a decision that cost the shah his throne and Mansur his life.

Hassan-Ali Mansur was born in April 1923 (Ordibehesht 1302) in Tehran. Both his parents were members of the Iranian ruling elite. His father, Ali Mansur (Mansur-al-Molk), was a prominent politician who had, by the time his son was born, already served as foreign minister and the governor of Eastern Azerbaijan; his mother was from the eminent Rais family. Before becoming prime minister, one of Ali Mansur’s major accomplishments was his role in building the Trans-Iranian railroad during his tenure as the minister of roads.

It was also during his time there that the famous Chaloos highway connecting Tehran to the Caspian coast was built. The road was an engineering marvel—carving and curving its way through snow-capped peaks and river valleys. It also became a subject of continuous political controversy. Every year, avalanches and the resulting deaths of innocent travelers put the treacherous road on the front page of the papers. Rumors flew about payoffs and corruption.[4] Hassan-Ali was twelve years old when, in January 1936, his father was put on trial for financial malfeasance in granting contracts for roads. As Ali Mansur was a minister, and thus enjoyed legal immunity from prosecution, he had to be stripped of all immunity by the Parliament before being put on trial. It all meant that he was at the center of a great scandal. Even today, those who know nothing of his life and work vaguely remember that he was “the crook put on trial by Reza Shah.”

As it happened, he was found innocent. But it was a while before he was back in the limelight. In 1938, he was rehabilitated and back in the cabinet as minister of industry and mines. Two years later, in June 1940, as the countries on Europe’s periphery were gripped with fear of being consumed by the flames of World War II, Ali Mansur was appointed prime minister. It was he who received the Russo-British ultimatum about the presence of too many German advisors in Tehran and an impending invasion on August 25, 1941.

When the invasion took place, Mansur was suspected of complicity with Britain, and on August 28, 1941, he was forced to resign. But he was not entirely out of the political loop. In February 1942, he was appointed governor of Khorasan. There, too, rumors of corruption followed him. Even the British Embassy, which certainly approved of him and had arranged for him to receive a CBE,[5] asserted that Mansur, in his earlier tenure as interior minister, “is believed to have made money out of the sale of promotions,” and that later as governor, “his administration of the funds of the shrine [of Imam Reza] laid him open to various accusations of embezzlement.”[6] After a few months, he was removed from the post of governor; he held various posts in the next few years, but his eyes remained obsessively fixed on the position of prime minister.

Ali Mansur’s dream came true again, albeit briefly, on March 28, 1950. But the times had changed. His old ways, and more important, his reputation as a crooked Anglophile, made it impossible for him to be effective. Before his appointment, he had increased his contacts with the British Embassy, clearly hoping to garner their support. But by then, even the British had grown wary of him. They referred to him as a man with “certain definite weaknesses. He is an opium addict and is reputed to take bribes in a big way.”[7] With his short-lived tenure ended, he spent the last years of his life serving as ambassador to different countries and grooming his son to take up the tarnished Mansur mantle.

In the meantime, Hassan-Ali had been spending his time at various schools in Tehran. He was a mediocre student throughout his life. After high school, he entered Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, eventually receiving his degree in political science. The university at the time required all seniors to write a thesis. In preparing his thesis, Mansur met a man who was pivotal in acquainting him with the people who would prove to be key characters in his life. The man was Fereydun Hoveyda, who was working at the time in the library of the Foreign Ministry. Fereydun had impeccable command of the French language. He had just returned from Europe and Lebanon and was a polished cosmopolitan with a wide array of friends among intellectuals. Fereydun helped Hassan-Ali finish his senior thesis.[8]

After graduation, Mansur joined the Foreign Service. It is not clear how he was hired, as there was a fairly strenuous exam that everyone had to take. By then the war was in its last days, and Mansur decided to take a trip to Europe, see the Continent, and await his first assignment. In Paris, at the instigation of his friend Fereydun, he met Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who was working in the scandal-ridden Iranian Embassy. Some embassy officials had been found to be engaged in the trafficking of foreign currency. Although Hoveyda worked at the embassy, he was not involved. At the same time, the two aspiring young diplomats fell under the spell of Abdullah Entezam, a doyen of Iranian diplomacy who was holding court in Paris. At the end of the war, Iran wanted to reestablish diplomatic ties with Germany, and Entezam was chosen as Iran’s ambassador. He used his influence to have Hoveyda and Mansur assigned to the new legation in Germany.

In Stuttgart, Hassan-Ali Mansur was a roommate of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. They shared a house given to them in the American zone of occupation. The building had once belonged to a high-ranking member of the Nazi party. A German lady cooked for the two bachelors. Although in later years Mansur developed a reputation as a womanizer, his German days were spent with a young woman he met soon after his arrival and almost married.

In addition to endearing himself to Ambassador Entezam, Mansur used his German posting to cement one of the most enduring and, at least in his mind, important relationships of his life. The American high commissioner and military governor in Germany was John McCloy, otherwise known as “Chairman of the Board.” His influence in Washington was great and did not wax or wane with Democratic or Republican administrations. For the rest of his life, Mansur would refer to McCloy as “our friend” and considered it one of his duties “to keep our American friends informed about what goes on in Iran.”9 It was an interesting fact of Mansur’s character at the time that although he was only a junior member of the diplomatic staff, in rank and standing even below his friend Hoveyda, he talked of the premiership as a predestined chapter of his future life. Nothing short of the prime minister’s seat, he said, would make him happy. There was, in his puerile view, a definite sense that the job was part of his family inheritance—as much destined for him as ownership of the family home.[10]

Hassan-Ali Mansur spent the next decade in different low-level jobs at the Foreign Ministry. At the same time, he kept in close contact with his friend Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and with his “American friends.” In 1956, as he was posted to Rome, he convinced Hoveyda that they should both return to Iran. He told Hoveyda that his American friends had told him that his turn at the helm should soon come.[11]

Back in Iran, from 1957 to 1964 he rose from callow, ambitious young politician to the job he had coveted all his life. In the course of his meteoric rise, he stopped at different stations—secretary of the High Economic Council and two ministerial portfolios. But easily the most important vehicle for him—aside from the American “friends” of which he shamelessly boasted—was the Progressive Circle. It was a small group of technocrats, brought together with Mansur’s charisma and charm and promises of power and position, as well as Hoveyda’s skills as an organizer and a manager. In spite of the fact that he was younger than Hoveyda, Mansur was clearly in charge.

Before long, the Progressive Circle received the official approval of the shah when he took the unusual step of announcing to the world that Mansur’s group was his de facto economic advisory group. With that pronouncement, there was a sudden surge of applicants for membership in the group—soon renamed the New Iran Party. Mansur was at the helm of the new party, which was to dominate Iranian politics for the next twelve years. Its fortunes then plummeted, when the shah, angered and even frightened by the pomp and ceremony of the last party congress,[12] dismissed it.

Mansur was a politician by temperament; he craved the glare of the media and the glow of power. After his return to Tehran he also developed his reputation as a dandy and a womanizer. For a while, he had a defiantly public affair with the Polish wife of a dentist. Prudish Tehran was aghast. Then came a long and passionate affair with a beautiful woman of the theater world. But all of these dangerous liaisons came to a temporary halt when he married Farideh Emami, a beautiful woman committed from early girlhood to the dream of becoming a wife and mother. She, too, came from a family of considerable political prominence—her grandfather was Vosug al-Dowleh, her granduncle was Ghavam, both highly influential prime ministers, and at least four other prime ministers were part of her extended family tree. Farideh was possessive of her husband, and as he ascended the ladder of power, her sense of self-importance also rose until it bordered on haughty arrogance. The afterglow of her husband’s power was most evident when he was finally appointed prime minister.

The appointment came after a six-month period in which the Alam cabinet was awkwardly a lame duck. Everyone in the capital knew that it was on its way out, and the work of the government had come to a virtual halt. What made the wait even stranger was the fact that Mansur went around town offering jobs to his future cabinet ministers and meeting regularly with the shah. He and his coterie of friends and advisors were a virtual shadow cabinet. Finally, in March 1964, Alam’s agony was replaced by Mansur’s ecstasy. Alam remained bitter until the end of his life for the way he was dismissed. On one occasion, after his initial pain subsided, he passively chided the shah by presenting him with a poem lamenting the fact that a learned man had been replaced by an effeminate homosexual. That rumor persistently haunted Mansur and Hoveyda for the rest of their political lives.

Mansur’s cabinet hit the ground running. They had been planning for their day in the sun for many years. It was, according to some Western media sources, the first time in the modern history of Iran that a cabinet with an actual agenda and plan of action had come to power. Mansur’s cabinet was remarkable for another reason as well. It was composed of new men, all technocrats who had been trained in the West, and without political ambitions of their own. They were united by their vision of bringing modernization to Iran, and they believed, contrary to the dominant intellectual paradigm of the time, that working with the shah, and not against him, was the best way to bring about the desired end. The cabinet’s composition was also remarkable for still another, altogether different, reason. Every man in the cabinet was new to the political realm; none had seen the shah during his hours of desperation and isolation during the Mossadeq era. By the time Mansur was named prime minister, the shah had concentrated all power in his own hands, and he no longer wanted politicians who had seen him in his weakest moments.

Mansur’s most unpleasant responsibility was to pass the Status of Force Agreement; the United States wanted it passed before any American advisors were sent to the country. Alam had cleverly refused to work for the passage of the bill he knew would go down in history as an act of infamy. Instead, he had arranged to have a draft of the legislation passed as a recess decision of the cabinet, in need of final ratification by the Parliament. Mansur finally introduced the bill to the newly elected Parliament. The majority, 140 of the 189 deputies, were members of his party. The politically limp Senate passed the controversial bill without discussion, and by the mere formality of voice vote. By the time the bill went to the lower house, there had already been public agitation and demonstrations against the bill as a vestige of colonialism. According to the American Embassy in Iran, the shah, hoping to give some semblance of legitimacy to the bill, signaled to members of the Parliament that they should feel free to voice their opposition.[13]

The result was almost catastrophic for Mansur and the shah. Usually docile members of the Parliament suddenly found the nerve to oppose the bill. Heated discussion was held on the floor of the Parliament, and Mansur, trying to quell the unexpected rebellion, deliberately lied to the Parliament about the nature and details of the agreement by making it appear that the law in question was the same as the Vienna Convention, which covered immunity for all diplomats. The American Embassy, worried that Iran had changed its mind and wanted to limit drastically the scope of the privately worked-out agreement, called for an emergency meeting with Mansur. When Rockwell, representing the American Embassy, raised his concerns, Mansur’s response was chilling even to the otherwise experienced Rockwell. The prime minister declared that what he had said in the Parliament was a lie, and that he’d done it out of political necessity. The government of Iran, he reassured his American friends, intended to implement the letter of the agreement and not his blemished rendition of it in Parliament.[14] The bill was ratified, but the shah and Mansur later paid a heavy price for their role in its passage.

The angriest cries against the agreement came from the pulpits in the city of Qom, particularly from the increasingly radical Ayatollah Khomeini. Before his now historic sermons against this bill, in which he ridiculed the shah and attacked the colonialists and Israel for enslaving Iran, he was little known outside religious circles and his own coterie of followers. But his opposition to the bill during Alam’s ministry, and his eventual arrest, catapulted him into the center of Iranian politics. The arrest came during the June 1963 riots. When Mansur came to power, he pushed for Ayatollah Khomeini’s release. As he told the American Embassy, “he had difficulty persuading shah that Khomeini should be freed.”[15] The ayatollah was freed, according to Mansur, only after “the government made clear to Khomeini that if he engaged in political activities, he would be rearrested; Khomeini allegedly promised to behave.”16 Of course, as soon as the ayatollah returned to Qom, he delivered a blistering sermon against the government, denying claims that he had made any agreement with the regime. Tapes of the sermon were soon “circulating in Tehran opposition circles.”[17] The American Embassy had believed that “a judicious mix of bribery, conciliatory tactics, and the ever-present threat of the regime’s mailed fist” would be enough to lessen “the virulence of Khomeini’s opposition.”[18] But contrary to this prediction, Ayatollah Khomeini continued with his fiery speeches until the government eventually decided that he must be exiled. That decision arguably cost Mansur his life.

On January 21, 1965, at ten in the morning on a snowy day in Tehran, Mansur was on his way to the Parliament to ask for the ratification of a new oil agreement. Tehran had once again been in a state of agitation after the government’s decision to raise the price of gasoline. The initial optimism that Mansur’s appointment had created in Tehran was gradually dissipating. More and more people had come to believe that he was a man of little substance, and that the mission he claimed to have accepted—promoting democracy and acting as a stand-in for some of Iran’s intransigent opposition groups— had been completely sacrificed at the altar of political expediency, greed, and his need to cling to power.

Islamic circles were also angry with him for exiling their beloved leader. It mattered little to them that, along with General Hassan Pakravan, Mansur had been in no small measure responsible for saving the life of the ayatollah. But they believed their venerable leader had been abused, and they intended to take revenge. As Mansur got out of his car, a young man of eighteen approached him. A Qur’an in one pocket, a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini in another, and a gun in his hand,[19] he was a soldier of God, an early incarnation of the multitude of soldiers who fought for Khomeini for almost a decade. He shot Mansur at close range. Another of his brethren was waiting down the street, lest he lose his nerve at the last moment and fail to pull the trigger. But the young assassin, Mohammad Bokharai, did not hesitate. The bloodied body of Mansur was rushed to a nearby hospital. He was immediately taken to the operating room. Before long, a team of doctors, some from Iran, some from Europe, and some from the United States, were brought in. The hospital became the de facto center of government. The interim prime minister, Hoveyda, spent nearly all his time in the hospital, as did many other political luminaries. The most distraught and disturbed person was Mansur’s wife. She was inconsolable; she was also dissatisfied with the care afforded her husband and consumed with all manner of conspiracy theories about the fate of her dying husband. For a long time, she believed that SAVAK was responsible for his shooting.

On January 26, on the anniversary of the White Revolution he had come to symbolize and five days after he was shot, Hassan-Ali Mansur died. On the day of his funeral, the shah delivered an angry diatribe railing against those who had taken the life of his prime minister. He made it crystal clear that he meant, more than anyone else, Great Britain. The British Embassy was not amused. But the shah reassured them, in a private meeting with Sir Denis Wright, the British ambassador, that he did not in fact hold the British responsible and that there was some misunderstanding about the exact meaning of his words.[20] Temporary tensions thus gave way to a troubled amity between the two sides. Mansur’s rise to power was surrounded by mystery and unsolved riddles. His death, too, remains an enigma, and a favorite topic of conspiracy connoisseurs.

ICONS OFFER FORMIDABLE CHALLENGES to the work of scholarly biography. Every detail of their lives is afforded an air of mystery and magic, considered sacrosanct by their devotees and contested by their detractors. Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq is easily the most popular as well as the most contested and scrutinized icon of modern Iranian politics. Nothing about him, not even his date of birth, is without controversy. A kind of Manichaean disposition that sees him as either demonic or divine has permeated much of the discourse about him. To his credit, even at the height of his power and popularity, Mossadeq admonished his supporters for trying to turn him into an idol. “The damnation of the good lord and his Prophet be upon anyone,” he wrote, “who tries to render me into an idol [bot] during my lifetime, or after my death.”[1]

His iconic status was not limited to Iran. In 1952, Time magazine chose him as the Man of the Year, and called him “The Iranian George Washington” and “the most renowned man his ancient race had produced in centuries . . . and in some ways the most noteworthy figure on the world scene.” The Time editorial also called Mossadeq “a nobleman” who “put Scheherazade in the petroleum business and oiled the wheels of chaos.” He is, they said, from “a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar” who spent a lifetime “carping at the way the kingdom was run.” Before long, the man had “the whole world hanging on his words and deeds, his jokes, his tears, his tantrums.” The article talked of Mossadeq’s “grotesque antics” but added that behind them “lay great issues of peace or war, progress or decline.”2 The article ended on a bleak note, suggesting that Mossadeq’s single-minded and uncompromising opposition to the British would probably leave the country in ruin and chaos.

In fact Mossadeq’s fierce nationalism, combined with his intellectual aversion to compromising his political principles, and his dogged determination not to tarnish his name and reputation, were at once his Achilles’ heel and his Herculean club. Today, more than half a century after the Time editorial, Mossadeq is arguably the most beloved statesman in modern Iran, praised by many for his defiant struggle against the British; he is also begrudged by the royalists for organizing what they claim was a veritable coup against the shah. Counterpoised to these Manichaean visions is the work of a small but growing number of scholars who are trying to “historicize” not just the August 1953 events but Mossadeq’s life as well. Only then will sober facts and historical contexts replace emotional fictions or a priori judgments. But in spite of these sharp interpretive differences about what happened in Tehran on August 19, 1953, there is a consensus among scholars that Mossadeq’s fall, and the U.S. decision to participate in the process, was a turning point not just for Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty, but for the United States as well. Even September 11, 2001, has been traced to the events in Tehran on that day.3 And at the center of those events stands the charismatic figure of Dr. Mossadeq.

Mohammad Mossadeq was born in Tehran in a cultured family with aristocratic roots and political and blood ties to the Qajar dynasty. Mossadeq’s date of birth was, like most Iranian children of the time, marked on the back of a Qur’an. It is most likely that he was born on June 16, 1882 (26 Khordad 1261). The date became controversial on at least two occasions: once when he was deemed too young by his critics and the other when he was said to be too old to take a seat in the Majlis. On those two occasions, Mossadeq offered different birth dates. His supporters suggest that these differing dates were simply honest mistakes, while his detractors see them as evidence of his conscious effort to manipulate facts to fit political exigencies.[4]

The young Mohammad was educated by private tutors at home. His mother, Najmol Saltaneh, was a self-assured woman of unusually forceful character. She married several times, itself a rarity among the women of her class at the time. Mohammad was the fruit of her second marriage. The young boy was only ten when he lost his father, and his upbringing was left to his mother. The two developed an intensely close relationship, and she remained a towering figure in his life. According to Dr. Mossadeq’s son, “My father loved two things the most; first his country Iran, and then his mother.”[5]

It was at the behest of his mother that when he was nineteen years old he married Zahra Emami—a young girl from a prominent family with roots among the Shiite clergy. All his life Mossadeq remained a devout Muslim. His discourse was invariably peppered with religious words and concepts. At the same time, he was serious in his lifelong dedication to secularism.

Mossadeq and his bride had a marriage shaped, at least initially, more by the dictates of tradition than the pathos of the heart. By the end of the first year, they had their first child. They would have six more children—one of whom died young. Their bond grew in intensity as they grew old together. He was a septuagenarian when she passed away, and, according to one of their children, Mossadeq lost his joie de vivre after her death.

There is no evidence that Mossadeq played any role in the early struggles of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. Nevertheless, in 1907, when elections for the first session of the Majlis were held, he decided to run for a seat. During the next half century, Mossadeq emerged as one of the most astute parliamentarians of his generation. He not only published monographs on the nature of the parliamentary system, but he also mastered the tactical tropes of the legislative process. But his initial foray into the field was fraught with difficulties. Electoral laws stipulated that candidates must be at least thirty years old, and Mossadeq was about twenty-four. Nevertheless, he decided to run. His justification was that “others less than thirty” had also run and taken their seats.

In his case, the attempt to circumvent the law failed. His bane turned out be the gravestone of his mother’s first husband. Someone took a picture of the grave and argued that based on the designated date of death, even if Mossadeq had been born exactly nine months and nine days after the first husband’s death, he would still not be old enough to take his seat. Ironically, the same evidence that barred Mossadeq from the Majlis in 1907 came in handy more than forty years later when his foes tried to bar him from the parliament by arguing that he was over the age limit of seventy.

During the same period, Mossadeq decided to join a Freemason Lodge called the Adamiyat Society, or Humanity Society. Although Mossadeq quit his membership after attending only a few meetings, his critics never allowed him to forget this brief foray into that group.

In the same year, Mossadeq made another strange decision when, albeit briefly, he joined a consultative body set up by a despotic new king called Mohammad-Ali Shah, who was keen on dismantling the Constitutional Revolution.6 One of the king’s tactics was to set up an appointed consultative assembly in place of the elected Majlis. But before long, in March 1909, Mossadeq set out for Europe. He settled in Paris and enrolled in a program on public finance at L’Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Within a year, deteriorating health forced him to return home. In his memoirs, he writes of a bout with a neurological problem that forced him to spend some time in a sanitarium. The exact nature of his malady has never been known. Did he have epilepsy, as the British claim?[7] Was he a manic-depressive, as evinced by his bursts of energy followed by bouts of depression and his penchant for weeping? All we know is that in 1910, the problem forced him to return to Iran, where he stayed for two years.

In 1912 he went back to Europe, this time in the company of his wife and children. They eventually settled in Switzerland, where he entered law school. He finished within two years, writing a dissertation on the subject of the laws of inheritance in Shiism. Not long after finishing his doctoral program, he returned home, where he began teaching at the School of Political Science.

About a year after his return, he published a monograph on capitulation rights.[8] During the same period, at the urging of the great scholar and journalist Allame Dehkhoda, Mossadeq joined the Edalat, or Justice Party. The membership did not last long, but it was the beginning of a long friendship between Dehkhoda and Dr. Mossadeq.
In 1918, Mossadeq had his first important political appointment when he was named undersecretary of treasury. As a young man, he had inherited his father’s title and job when he had become the mostofi (tax collector) for the province of Khorasan. Now he was given a job based on his own merit, not one he had inherited. He lasted in the position for about a year. By late 1918, distraught by the ominous political realities of the country, Mossadeq decided to emigrate to Switzerland, where he planned to become a citizen. Switzerland, he wrote, “was like my second home.”[9]

But his journey of exile turned out to be short-lived. Before long, home beckoned again. This time, he was asked to become minister of justice. He accepted, but on his way to his new job, as he was passing through the province of Fars, he was appointed governor of that state. The area had been, for many years, difficult to govern. The many nomadic tribes who lived there intermittently rose against the central government. The British were in favor of Mossadeq’s appointment. They wanted southern Iran free from war and violence, and Mossadeq was, they figured, the man who could deliver peace to the region.

The coup of 1921 by Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i and Reza Khan ended Mossadeq’s tenure. He was one of three governors in the country who refused to accept the legitimacy of the new cabinet. But such opposition was not without danger, and fearing for his life, Mossadeq went into hiding and spent the next few weeks among the Ghashghai tribe.
The coup cabinet lasted only a hundred days, and in the new government, headed by Ghavam, Mossadeq was offered the key Ministry of the Treasury. He accepted on the condition that the Parliament would give him extra powers to clean up the notoriously corrupt ministry. This demand for emergency powers foreshadowed his style of governance as prime minister. After a tumultuous tenure at the Treasury, Mossadeq spent the next couple of years moving between jobs. During this period, Reza Khan was emerging as the most powerful man in Iran, and Mossadeq was for a while part of a small coterie of respected intellectuals and statesmen who met with Reza Khan and offered him advice on the future of Iran.

This age of amity ended in considerable acrimony when in 1925 Mossadeq delivered a stinging rebuke to the idea of ending the Qajar dynasty and turning power over to the soon-to-be-anointed Reza Shah. Moreover, Mossadeq also disagreed with many other plans proposed by the new king. These acts of opposition brought to a temporary halt Mossadeq’s political career.

At the end of the sixth session of the Majlis, Mossadeq was not allowed to run again. He spent the next thirteen years in Tehran and in Ahmad Abad, his estate near the capital, in virtual exile. In his own words, “I saw nobody, and did not socialize with anyone.”[10] The only exception to this routine of solitude came in 1936 when he developed mysterious bleeding in his throat. He left Iran for Germany, where he consulted two prominent physicians in Berlin, and neither could detect any ailment. They told him, “there is nothing wrong with you . . . they didn’t even prescribe any medications.”[11]

Mossadeq’s forced solitude came to an abrupt end in June 1940, when he was suddenly arrested. He was, he writes, offered no reason for his incarceration. But the imprisonment did not last long. After a few days, he was sent to internal exile again—this time not to his estate but to the city of Birjand.

On his way to exile, depressed and despondent, Mossadeq is said to have attempted suicide by taking a heavy dose of sedatives. By 1941, as Iran was begrudgingly engulfed in the war, Mossadeq was freed. His release came after the crown prince pleaded with Reza Shah for leniency. Ernst Perron, a Swiss national who was a close confidant of the crown prince, had been a patient of Dr. Mossadeq’s son—a physician under contract with the Swiss Embassy for the care of that country’s citizens living in Iran. Mossadeq’s son asked Perron for help in securing his father’s release, and before long an ailing Mossadeq arrived back at his estate.[12]

In 1944, only three years after his release, Mossadeq’s first real chance[13] to become the prime minister came about. In the democratic interlude that followed the fall of Reza Shah, Mossadeq emerged as one of the most popular figures of the time. He was handily reelected to the Majlis and became one of its most powerful leaders. According to the shah, his relations with Mossadeq “were good at the time, for he was a respected public servant, and he symbolized opposition to foreign influence in all its forms.” For these and other reasons, the shah offered him the post of prime minister. Mossadeq’s response surprised the shah. He “was prepared to accept the responsibility,” he told the shah, “but only on two conditions.” He should be assigned his own bodyguard, and “prior approval of the British” must be confirmed. “It is the British who decide everything in this country,” he told the shah.[14]

In his memoir, Mossadeq confirms the fact that the offer was made but offers different reasons for his refusal to take the job. He did not, he said, believe the shah had the power to appoint a prime minister outright. Moreover, he believed that “considering that the country was at the time occupied by foreigners,” his success would dependent on “the fact that the British embassy should not oppose” him. And he knew, he said, that the British would.[15]

British Foreign Office documents provide yet another account of what happened. According to Sir Reader Bullard, the Minister of Court informed him that the shah proposed “not to open the Majlis on January 22, and that he would appoint as Prime Minister Dr. Mossadeq, who will declare the election null and void.” Bullard argued against the idea, suggesting that “this would in the long run be bad for the Shah and for Persia.”[16] The Foreign Office concurred with Bullard’s initial response and directed him to “to choke [Mossadeq] off . . . if there is still time.”[17] In another lengthy telegram, Bullard offered his own assessment of Mossadeq. “He is however old for his age which is over 60,” Bullard wrote, “and according to a good source he suffers from epilepsy. As governor general of Fars . . . the British military attaché found him not without ability but touchy and nationalistic. The description of him in Personalities as a wind bag is by Sir G. Harvard who knew him well.”[18]

The personalities profile, prepared in 1940, shows the extent of the British dislike of Dr. Mossadeq even before he nationalized Iran’s oil and deprived them of their lucrative monopoly. In it Mossadeq is described as:
born about 1885. Is a nephew of Farman Farmayan. Has studied law in Paris to a certain extent and poses as a jurist. Appointed Governor-General of Fars in 1920; appointed Minister of Finance in 1921 and sought and obtained authority from Parliament to purge and reform that ministry. However, during his six months tenure of that portfolio he destroyed indiscriminately the good with the bad, and at the end the organization was worse than before as he proved himself entirely incapable of making reforms . . . owing to his opposition to the Government in the sixth term of the Majlis, steps were taken to prevent him from being elected to the later terms. . . . He is a demagogue and a windbag. Speaks French fluently.[19]

It is likely that the British Embassy’s negative attitude was also influenced by Ann Lambton, who worked in the British Embassy in Tehran and had developed a visceral dislike of Dr. Mossadeq. In later years, when Mossadeq finally did become the prime minister, these negative attitudes contributed to the early decision of the British to try and organize a coup against the Mossadeq government.

In the fierce political battles of the postwar years, Mossadeq emerged as a master tactician. Before long he became a key leader of the nationalist movement, and oil was his forte. Relying on his intuitive sense of the national mood and sentiment, Mossadeq began, as early as 1944, to move toward nationalizing Iranian oil. As the Soviet Union pressured Iran for oil concessions in the north, Mossadeq passed a bill banning all oil negotiations for the duration of the war. Gradually and inexorably he was emerging as “undisputedly the most prestigious and popular deputy in the Majlis.”20 By 1949 he had helped launch what came to be known as the National Front—a loose union of parties and personalities who were united on two simple issues: nationalization of oil and legislation to guarantee fair and free elections. Mossadeq’s own charisma was the true cement of the organization.

Between 1944, when he again joined Parliament, and 1951, when he was finally named prime minister, he had emerged on a couple of other occasions as one of the top candidates for the job. But each time he fell a few votes short of the needed majority. Finally, in February 1951 (17 Esfand 1329), Mossadeq shepherded through a fractured and resistant Parliament a bill that nationalized Iran’s oil. Less than two months later, on April 28, 1951 (7 Ordibehesht), by the vote of the Majlis and the order of the shah, Mossadeq was appointed prime minister. The country was clearly heading for a crisis. The British, on the advice of the prominent scholar Ann Lambton, almost immediately decided that overthrowing Mossadeq was their only option. “I knew him well,” Lambton said, “and I knew he would be stubborn. I told the government, you have to get rid of him.”[21] Thus began the planning for the fateful events of August 1953.

The tensions with the shah had their source in events long before 1951. There had been a history of animosity between Mossadeq and the Pahlavi family. He had, for example, voted against the establishment of the dynasty. Even in his prison memoir, Mossadeq was not afraid to declare that in his opinion the Pahlavi dynasty was a creation of the British.[22] In his mind, nothing betrayed this British allegiance as clearly as Reza Shah’s decision to build a railroad connecting the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea.

When the bill authorizing the budget for the construction of the railroad came before the Parliament, Mossadeq voted against it, arguing that Iran in its current state of backwardness did not need a railroad. In the words of one of his proponents, Mossadeq engaged in a cost/benefit analysis of the project, and concluded that it did not make economic sense.[23] Better build a sugar mill, he suggested, and then, once the economy was more developed, the construction of a railroad would be economically viable.

Mossadeq was also opposed to the path chosen for the railroad. When the idea of a railroad first emerged, two different paths were considered. One was on an east-west axis that would connect Iraq and Turkey to Pakistan and India. The other was on a northsouth axis that would connect the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.24 Mossadeq believed that Britain had dictated the decision to choose the north-south axis based on its own interests. In fact, according to documents from the British Foreign Office, Britain was initially opposed to the very idea of the railroad. Once they failed to dissuade Reza Shah, their next strategy was to convince him to build it along the east-west axis. “It has hitherto been the policy of His Majesty’s Government to urge upon the Persian Government the desirability of constructing a railway on an West-East Axis. . . . There appears to be strong strategic and economic reasons why this alignment would be preferable, from the point of view of British interests, to a railway running in a northerly direction from Mohammareh to the Caspian Sea.”25 The railroad was built along the north-south axis, as Reza Shah had willed it, but Mossadeq never wavered in his belief that the whole project was a colonial concoction.

In 1951, a quarter century after this initial confrontation, he was involved in a battle of wills with the new Pahlavi king. While the shah wanted to amass almost as much power as his father and believed that only with him in command could Iran make any progress, Mossadeq never tired of repeating that in the Iranian Constitution, the king has only a ceremonial role and that he must reign and not rule. These two conflicting views of the shah’s power turned into a crisis on July 16, 1952, when Mossadeq demanded control of the army from the shah and the shah refused. To show his muscle, Mossadeq resigned, and the next day Ghavam was appointed by the shah as the new prime minister. But almost a week of massive demonstrations forced the shah to back down and Mossadeq was reappointed on July 22. As a result of these events, according to the American Embassy in Iran, “Mossadeq [was] clearly in a stronger position vis-à-vis the Shah, the Majlis, and the public now than at any time since the nationalization of Iranian oil.”[26]

The fact that members of the Tudeh Party had played a crucial role in the July demonstrations worked, in the long run, against Mossadeq. It helped the British convince the Americans that Mossadeq would soon be unable to control the communists.[27] The change of administration in the United States, and the rise of the Dulles brothers to the top of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, helped the British in this effort. Another difficulty for Mossadeq, shortly after his July victory, was that Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, who had been instrumental in mobilizing the mass participation of the religious forces, wanted a share of power and its perks.
Furthermore, the realities of governance began to chip away at Mossadeq’s support. To fight his many enemies, Mossadeq asked, and initially received, “special powers” granted by the Majlis. For nearly the entire duration of his tenure, he ruled by decrees. The fact that he trusted only a handful of people made decision making difficult in his government and helped alienate some of his allies. Britain’s economic embargo, helped by the effort of some Iranian businessmen opposed to Mossadeq who shut down their industries, was also beginning to hurt all strata of Iranian society.

The clergy, too, had new demands. Mossadeq was a deeply devout man. His political discourse was often peppered with Qur’anic references. He was closely allied with Ayatollah Kashani, whose terrorist followers in the Feda’yan-e Islam had already killed two prime ministers—the last one was General Hadji Ali Razmara, whose death paved the way for Mossadeq. But after helping secure Mossadeq’s victory in July, Kashani wanted to appoint some of the ministers, and Mossadeq openly demurred. Before long, the wily cleric was an enemy of Mossadeq.
Even ostensibly apolitical ayatollahs were disgruntled. They had begun to push for more Islamic flavor in the government. For example, when Ayatollah Boroujerdi sent Mossadeq a message and asked him to curtail the activities of followers of the Bahai religion, Mossadeq again demurred. They, too, are citizens of Iran, he wrote back. By early 1953, nearly the entire religious leadership ended their support of Mossadeq.

Mossadeq also began to lose the support of some of his key secular allies. Many of them found his idea of holding a referendum to dismiss the Majlis dubious in its legal basis and dangerous in its political consequences. The American Embassy described it “as a referendum organized on [the] ground [of] ‘popular will’ above constitution.” It was to the American Embassy an indication that Mossadeq was moving “steadily in authoritarian direction using technique of ‘mobocracy.’”28 The lopsided results of the election (166,607 in favor of dissolution, and 116 opposed) also became a cause for criticism. Mossadeq had, critics rightly pointed out, ignored the basic democratic demand of a secret ballot by forcing opponents of the government to vote in a separate tent.

Maybe most important of all, without a Majlis, Mossadeq’s allies told him, the shah would have the constitutional right to dismiss and appoint a prime minister. There had been at least eighteen such recess appointments in the past.29 Mossadeq’s retort was that the shah would not dare dismiss him. Events proved him wrong.

As Mossadeq’s internal base of support was beginning to crack, and as America grew frustrated in its mediating efforts and became convinced that no negotiated settlement would be possible, and finally as the Eisenhower administration took over the White House, plans for a coup to topple Mossadeq began to take shape.

A few days before action against him began, Mossadeq received a hint of what was to come in a sobering report filed by Alahyar Saleh, Iran’s ambassador to the United States. Salah informed Mossadeq that he had been told that the United States was worried about Mossadeq’s relationship with the communists, and what they perceive would be his inability to stand up to them even if he chose to. Furthermore, the American official who met Saleh at the State Department complained that if Iran succeeded in all of its demands, then other oil-rich countries in the world might also be tempted to nationalize their oil industries, and even demand compensation, as Iran had.30
Under a plan designed in Cyprus by intelligence officers from England and the United States, the shah was to issue two firmans, or decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq, and the other appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as his replacement. At the same time, lest any part of the plan did not work, the shah decided to leave the capital for the coast of the Caspian Sea.

What happened between August 15, when the orders were delivered to Mossadeq, and the fateful events of August 19, when he was forced to flee his house, is a matter of considerable controversy. Near midnight of August 15, an officer named Colonel Ne’matollah Nasiri, accompanied by two truckloads of soldiers, tried to deliver to Mossadeq the note of his dismissal. Concurrently, other ministers of the cabinet were being arrested. But Mossadeq had been expecting Nasiri, and when the colonel finally arrived, Mossadeq received the order but refused to heed its content. He also ordered Nasiri’s arrest. Early the next morning Iranian radio announced that there had been a coup attempt against the government and that the attempt had failed. No mention of the royal decree was made.
Within the next forty-eight hours, Mossadeq and forces loyal to him moved swiftly to arrest anyone connected with the coup attempt. The fact that the shah fled the country as soon as he heard of Nasiri’s arrest helped Mossadeq and his allies in their effort to discredit the shah. Some of Mossadeq’s more radical allies, like his foreign minister, Fatemi, wanted to move to end the monarchy. Members of the Tudeh Party took to the streets advocating the overthrow of the shah and the creation of a republic. Everywhere, statues of the shah and his father were pulled down by agitated crowds.

By the evening of August 18, both the American and British governments concluded that the attempt to topple Mossadeq had failed. CIA operatives were ordered to evacuate Iran. In a memorandum prepared for the president, the State Department recommended that the United States must “take a whole new look at the Iranian situation and probably have to snuggle up to Mossadeq if we are going to save anything there.”[31]

As a part of this “snuggling up,” the American ambassador, Loy Henderson, who had been out of Iran during those fateful August days, hurried back from his “vacation” and was taken directly to Mossadeq on the night of his arrival.

Mossadeq was in a good mood that night. He received the ambassador “fully dressed (not pajama clad) as though for ceremonial occasion.” Mossadeq told Henderson that “Iran was in throes of revolution . . . [but] Iranian government did not want Americans [to] leave.”[32] Although polite throughout the meeting, Mossadeq, according to Henderson, interspersed his comments “with number [numerous?] little jibes which although semi-jocular in character, were nevertheless barbed. These jibes, in general, hinted that US was conniving with Britain in effect [to] remove him as Prime Minister.”[33] Both the acerbic sense of humor and the demure sense of decorum were well-honed tools of Mossadeq’s discourse. If politics is theater, then Mossadeq was a master thespian. He used his body as a prop—fainted when he wanted, feigned weakness when the occasion demanded, frowned or laughed at will. He moved seamlessly from one gesture to another. He had turned his chronic weakness into a nimble weapon. All through his days as a prime minister, he had held nearly all important meetings in his bedroom. His blanket and his pajamas had become emblems of his political style—a sign of chicanery to his enemies and critics, and an indication of his political genius and mastery of the theatrics of politics to his supporters.

On the evening of August 18, all these qualities were on display during Mossadeq’s historic meeting with Henderson. Eventually, a frustrated Henderson asked Mossadeq to “tell him confidentially . . . just what had happened during recent days.” Mossadeq told him that he had dissolved the Majlis because “it was not worthy of the Iranian people.” He then recounted his version of the events of the last three days. In Mossadeq’s version “the Shah had been prompted by the British” to arrest him, and when Nasiri had come to carry out the plan, Nasiri himself was arrested. Moreover, Mossadeq denied ever seeing the shah’s decree. More crucial, Mossadeq added that even if there had been such a decree, “it would have made no difference. His position for some time had been that the Shah’s powers were only ceremonial.”[34]

Henderson knew that here was the crux of the matter. “I [am] particularly interested in this point,” he said, adding that, “I would like to report it carefully to United States Government. Was I to understand that a) he had no official knowledge that the Shah had issued firman removing him as Prime Minister, and b) even if he should find that the Shah had issued such firman in present circumstances he would consider it to be invalid? He replied, ‘precisely.’”[35]

These words in essence convinced the American Embassy that what had happened on August 16 was in fact a “counter-coup” by Mossadeq. But that night of August 18, after meeting Herderson, Mossadeq went to bed convinced that he had won the day and beat back the attempt to topple him. The key historical question is what happened the next day, and how and why did the tide turn?

From around seven in the morning of August 19, small crowds of about two hundred each began to crop up around the city, shouting pro-shah slogans. Before long, increasing number of soldiers and officers joined the pro-shah crowds. Mossadeq and his cabinet’s response to these events is simply hard to fathom.

Dr. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, a lifelong supporter of Dr. Mossadeq’s who served as his minister of the interior, has provided a meticulous account of events of that day. At around noon, he left the ministry and went to Mossadeq’s house. The beleaguered prime minister, according to Sadiqi, did nothing other than wait for events to unfold. No organized force, no jubilant mob, no political party, came to his help. He made no appeals on the radio. His attempt to change the commander of the national police only worsened the situation. The new commander, though a relative of Mossadeq’s, immediately betrayed him and joined the royalists. Mossadeq himself was holed up in his house, despondent and paralyzed. He did not even know that Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi, his minister of foreign affairs, was also at the house.[36]

By early afternoon, royalists captured the radio, and the day was clearly theirs. By then an angry mob was swelling around Mossadeq’s heavily guarded house. Soldiers and officers loyal to Mossadeq fought heroically to keep the mob at bay. But then a couple of tanks rolled around the corner and took aim at the house. Resistance was no longer a serious option. Toward evening, as it became clear that the house was no longer defendable, Mossadeq and his small group of friends and ministers climbed the back walls to the safety of a neighbor’s vacant house. Eventually, the party landed at the home of Dr. Abdullah Moazzami, also a neighbor and a close ally of Mossadeq’s.

After hiding in the basement of this house for twenty-four hours, Mossadeq decided that he should surrender. He was taken to the Officer’s Club, where General Zahedi had set up the headquarters of his new cabinet.
There was disagreement among members of the new government about what to do with Mossadeq. Some, including General Zahedi and a few of his advisors, were opposed to the idea of a trial and wanted to ensure that Mossadeq quietly disappeared into the sunset. The shah, on the other hand, insisted on holding a trial.

Mossadeq turned the trial into an indictment of the British, the shah, and all those who had helped topple his government. With his knowledge of law and his knack for the theatrical component of politics, Mossadeq at turns mocked the prosecutor, shocked the judges by the audacity of his defiant attacks against the shah, and endeared himself to many in the audience with his nimble political and judicial tactics. He was given a three-year sentence, after which he was forced to live in exile and isolation on his estate near Tehran. He might have lost the trial, but history proved that he won the war of legitimacy.

He spent the last twelve years of his life in near solitude at his Ahmad Abad property, cultivating not just his garden but his historic legacy. Only his closest relatives and a handful of friends were allowed to visit him. Mossadeq nevertheless kept up a lively correspondence with the outside world—offering advice or criticism to members of the National Front, particularly when they tried to regroup in the early 1960s.

During this period, he wrote his memoirs and arranged for them to be smuggled to safety. In the book, he laid out the general contours of his life, indicating his vision of politics and culture. Moreover, he rigorously responded to every allegation the shah had made about him and his tenure as a prime minister, particularly in the shah’s first book, Mission for My Country.

Throughout his trial, and during the appeal process, Mossadeq also talked with his attorney about a variety of personal and political issues—from his views on Reza Shah to his experiences in Europe. The attorney, Jalil Bozorgmehr, kept copious notes of these conversations, and eventually published them to great acclaim.[37] A two-volume collection of Mossadeq’s letters has also been published.

Mossadeq lived a simple life. He had an aversion to luxury and conspicuous consumption. He was, according to his son, frugal to a fault, once admonishing his son for spending too much money for oranges.38 All through his years as a prime minister, he never had more than one suit. “I had paid six hundred toomans for it,” he wrote.

An apparently benign sore in his mouth turned out to be the first sign that his end was near. When the pain and the burning sensation continued, Dr. Mossadeq was taken to a hospital, where tests showed that he was suffering from cancer.39 On March 5, 1967, he died in the Najmiyeh Hospital in Tehran. It had been endowed by his family and named Najmiyeh after his mother, Najmol Saltaneh. A few months earlier, his wife of almost seventy years had died of pneumonia in the same hospital. When Mossadeq died, AmirAbbas Hoveyda, the prime minister at the time, “suggested to the Shah that permission be granted for a modest funeral, in keeping with Mossadeq’s status as a former prime minister. The Shah reportedly was adamantly opposed to any such move, saying that he wished to erase every trace of Mossadeq in the land.”[40] In keeping with the shah’s order, no public funeral was allowed. Moreover, Mossadeq had written in his will that he wished to be buried in the plot in the public cemetery set aside for those killed in the June 1951 uprising that helped return him to power. This wish was denied by the shah. Instead, Mossadeq was buried beneath the first floor of the building that had been his home during his long years of exile. Only a handful of family and his closest friends participated in the funeral.

As it happened, on the day Dr. Mossadeq died, flags did fly at half-mast all around Tehran but not to mark the passing of the man the American ambassador at the time had called “one of the great personalities of Persian history.” Instead, the city was mourning the death of “Governor General of Canada, Georges Vanier.”[41]

After the revolution, on the first anniversary of his death, an estimated two million people traveled to the grave site to register their respect for the man who had dared defy England.

In politics, as in life, people are most often defined and remembered for their deeds—the constructive or destructive roles they played in the life of their communities or the world. A few are defined only by their unfulfilled dreams and ambitions—what they craved but never achieved. The shadow of the dreams obscures even the glare of their accomplishments. Hushang Nahavandi, a cultured man of much education, an educator of considerable accomplishments, a politician of savvy and subtlety, a man of amiable congeniality, is one such man. He is often defined less by any of his fine qualities than by his long cherished, almost attained, but never achieved dream of becoming Iran’s prime minister.[1] His memoir of his last days in power in Iran is as much a tale of how close he came to realizing that dream—and how he could have saved the shah and Iran from the claws of Ayatollah Khomeini—as about the shah’s last days on the Peacock Throne.[2]

Nahavandi was born near the city of Rasht in December 1932. His was a family steeped in politics and commerce. His father was a prominent merchant, a representative to the Constituent Assembly, and his mother was from an influential family, also prominent as merchants and active in politics. Nahavandi’s father did most of his trade with Russia, and as a result not only traveled there often but also mastered the language. For a while, he even taught Russian in Rasht. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, he remained in the Soviet Union for several years. With the rise of Stalinism, his Russian forays ended. The older Nahavandi died in 1951.

This mastery of the Russian language was, for the father, a ticket to observe first hand, as the translator, some of the pivotal discussions that took place in early 1920s between representatives of the Jangali movement and those of the Soviet government.[3] The Jangali movement, and the first albeit short-lived Iranian Soviet Republic it created,[4] had in its early phases attracted the sympathies of Rasht’s grandees, and it is likely that the elder Nahavandi shared those sympathies.

His father’s Soviet journeys and possible entanglement with the Jangali movement was not the young Nahavandi’s only connection to the radical circles of Iranian politics. Other relatives, in different stages of Nahavandi’s life, were also connected to oppositional politics. His uncle, Dr. Karim Keshavarz, was one of the founders of the Tudeh Party, and in later years one of the most eloquent critics of the party and its past. Nahavandi’s own brother, however, stayed out of politics and became one of Iran’s most eminent cardiologists.

After finishing his first two years of schooling in Rasht, Hushang was sent to Tehran, where he attended some of the city’s preeminent schools, including Firuz-Bahram, a school run by Iranian Zoroastrians, and the famed Dar al-Funun. While his general sympathies were with the Left and with Dr. Mossadeq, he did not join any party or group, nor did he engage in any action that would label him as a serious advocate of any ideology.

As soon as he finished high school, he set out for Paris.[5] After four years he received his law degree and then immediately enrolled in the doctoral program—doctor d’etat, an equivalent to a Ph.D.—in economics. Not long after finishing his bachelor’s degree, he had married his childhood sweetheart, Mokaram Abrishami, who also came from a prominent family from the city of Rasht. She was studying medicine in London at the time and gave up her career when she married. They now have two daughters, both successful professionals. In November 2004, Nahavandi and his wife celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding.

Early in 1958, Nahavandi finished his dissertation. Its focus was on economic theory, and it offered a criticism of some of Schumpeter’s theories on development and capitalism. The thesis won the university award as the best dissertation of the year.6 It was also the first lengthy discussion of Schumpeter’s ideas in French. Not long afterward, Nahavandi and his family returned to Iran. During his university days, he never fully joined any political club or party, so he returned to Iran with a clear record.

In July 1958, he met Hassan-Ali Mansur and not only joined his circle but through him began to work at the Economic High Council. He also was hired to work as an economist in the Bank of Credit. His academic qualifications, as well as his financial probity and his willingness to work long and hard, helped him climb the political ladder. He hitched his star to Mansur, and as Mansur experienced his meteoric rise to power, Nahavandi went along. In 1963, when Mansur was named prime minister, Nahavandi was appointed to his first ministerial portfolio, in charge of the newly minted Ministry of Housing and Development. The rising tide of urbanism in the country, particularly in Tehran, had by then turned affordable and ample housing into a pressing social problem, and the creation of the new ministry was part of the government’s attempt to cope with the problem.

Even before this appointment, Nahavandi had been, for some six months, meeting regularly with the shah as part of a de facto “shadow cabinet” led by Mansur. This group, consisting of some seven top members of the Mansur circle, met regularly with the king to talk about the country’s problems and ways of confronting them. Hoveyda was another key member of the “shadow cabinet.”[7]

But Nahavandi was not just a man of politics. He was also a man of ideas, with a decided affinity for intellectuals and for the rigors of scholarship and research. No sooner had he returned to Iran than he met a number of prominent professors at Tehran University—particularly Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi and Shapur Rasekh—and through them was hired to teach in the Economics Department. At the same time, he began to teach economics at the Officers Academy in Tehran. He also continued his scholarly endeavors, publishing books on different aspects of economics that he had translated or written. By the time he left Iran some twenty years later, he had written or translated fourteen books, all dealing with economics. But his eyes were on the political prize.
Even after the assassination of Mansur in 1965, Nahavandi continued to serve in the cabinet. He served in that capacity for almost five years. While he was a member of the cabinet, according to reports by SAVAK, he was also working behind the scenes to undermine it. In fact, he met regularly with Jamshid Amuzegar—every Wednesday, according to SAVAK reports—to coordinate their efforts to bring about the fall of Hoveyda and the rise of Amuzegar.[8] The same SAVAK reports indicate that Nahavandi had decided, “to join the American group”[9] and unite with officials like Amuzegar, Majidi, and Goudarzi. SAVAK was concerned enough about these reports that a special investigation was ordered, and every source of information, including the girlfriends of some members of this group, were mined for information.[10] Nahavandi categorically denies these reports and suggests they must all be traced to a personal clash between him and General Ne’matollah Nasiri, the powerful head of SAVAK.

It was tensions with Hoveyda—and not Nasiri’s machinations—that finally led to Nahavandi’s resignation. By then, he had also become an ally of Assadollah Alam, a formidable foe of Hoveyda, and with the latter’s support, he was, after a brief hiatus, named rector of Pahlavi University in Shiraz.

By the late 1960s, the universities in Iran—much like those in western Europe and the United States—had become hotbeds of radicalism, and the shah was growing increasingly impatient with the inability of university officials to eliminate oppositional activism on campuses. But supported by Alam, and eventually by the shah himself, Nahavandi worked hard to improve Pahlavi University not only in terms of its infrastructure, but in terms of its student life and academic standards. He inherited a university that was in financial shambles. “Some six million dollars were simply missing,”[11] he said with a sad smile on his face. But as Alam had been the rector before, making a big fuss about the missing funds would be political suicide, and Nahavandi was nothing if not pragmatic.

After Pahlavi University, Nahavandi was appointed the rector of Tehran University. Some consider his tenure at Tehran University a big boon for the institution, while others suggest that he only used the position as a stepping-stone. By his own reckoning, the key to his success and his longevity was that he was supported by the shah. In fact, part of Nahavandi’s understanding with the shah was that he would directly report to the king and accept only his orders. SAVAK, on more than one occasion, he says, tried to get rid of him, essentially asking that he submit his resignation, but Nahavandi survived because the shah told him to ignore the pressures and continue his work. Every night around six, he sent a handwritten confidential report of the day’s business directly to the shah, delivered by special envoys. He is still convinced, a quarter century after the revolution, that many of the most violent student demonstrations that marked his rocky tenure were actually instigated by SAVAK working in tandem with Hoveyda. If Nahavandi had successfully pacified the truculent, intransigent students at Tehran University, he suggests, his road to the premiership would have been easily paved.

Nahavandi, for his part, tried to turn the university into a source of power for himself. The shah had a complicated relationship with intellectuals. He was at once awed and appalled by them. Nevertheless, for those aspiring to high political position, having a larger number of intellectuals on their team was a big asset. In this arena, Nahavandi was probably more successful than any other politician, particularly after he created the “Group of Scholars for the Study of the Problems of Iran.” Hoveyda was threatened by the group and worked hard to dismiss it as a political tool and its findings as the propaganda of his foes.

A good example was a thirty-two page confidential report prepared by the group at the behest of the shah in 1975. The group’s mandate was to study the causes of discontent in the country. Eight people, including Nahavandi, undertook to write the report. They found that there were six main reasons behind the discontent. People were, according to Nahavandi and his colleagues, “angry at the corruption of a handful of politicians and members of the royal family; they were angry at unfulfilled promises and the lack of coordination in economic planning; they were unhappy with rising prices; they were distraught at the failure of the government to keep its contacts with the clergy, and finally the youth were angry at excessive policies—our euphemism for SAVAK.”[12] The report ended with the conclusion that unless something was done immediately about these problems, they would fester and become a serious crisis, leading to a victory for the clergy, and ultimately for the communists.[13] The queen also gives an account of the report in her memoirs, writing that the group found that “[p]eople said they were indeed aware that their living conditions had improved . . . but they spoke more about their disappointments . . . corruption was a large part of the cause of this disenchantment and gloom . . . every reform had given rise to new resentments . . . [and] young people demanded more freedom.”[14]

Although the report “should have been,” according to the queen, “worthy of the government’s attention” and should have alerted them to the people’s angst and anger, nothing was done. Hoveyda successfully dismissed much of its stinging criticism as grandstanding by his opponents.

In summer 1977, the shah summoned Nahavandi to his office. “The queen,” he said, “is gaining more and more power every day. It is important that her office be run efficiently. We have decided that you should go to that office.”[15] It was also, as Nahavandi has made amply clear, part of his new job to keep the shah abreast of all developments in the queen’s office. As Alam wrote in his memoirs, the shah was at times worried about the extent of the queen’s popularity and presence in the media,[16] and one aspect of Nahavandi’s job was to assuage his anxieties.

Some of Nahavandi’s friends, particularly among the university’s professors, were critical of his decision to accept the job. They told him it demeaned the university to have the rector become what the queen called her “chief secretary.” Nahavandi claims he accepted the job for three simple reasons. “There was no possibility of saying no to a job offer. If you said no once, you would never be offered another position.” He was also, he said, enticed into accepting when the shah referred to the education of the crown prince, and how the queen, and thus her office, is increasingly the center of decision making for that important task. Finally, he said, “Her Majesty’s office offered me a chance to learn about all aspects of Iranian politics and society.”[17]
As it began to be clear that the fall of Hoveyda was imminent, Tehran was abuzz with rumors of his successor. Although Hushang Ansary and Jamshid Amuzegar were clearly the favorites, Nahavandi was also mentioned as a dark-horse candidate. He would only have to wait another year before his name emerged again, that time as a serious contender for the post.[18] His second chance came sooner than he imagined because Amuzegar’s tenure was short-lived.

By 1975, Iran had become a one-party system, and Nahavandi had become one of the chief theorists of the party. In fact, the group he had created while he was rector of Tehran University—The Group of Scholars for the Study of the Problems of the Iran— had become a de facto wing of the party. He claimed Iran was not “a single-party system in the traditional sense of the word.” He referred to the party as a “national covenant . . . everyone should be free to say what they want.” At the same time, he talked of three sacred concepts that could not be questioned. Everything else, he said, was open to discussion. The three pillars of the party were the monarchy, national unity, and people’s “religious beliefs.”[19]

Only a few months after Nahavandi made these pronouncements, the political situation in the country deteriorated, and it became clear that Amuzegar was not the man for the hour. The survival of the monarchy was at risk, and the shah was, on the advice of his advisors, going to sack Amuzegar, name a new prime minister, and at the same time do “something spectacular”20 to stem the revolutionary tide. The queen suggested her “chief secretary,”21 Nahavandi, who was, in her words, “a convinced liberal, a man who could make decisions, a former rector of Tehran University with many friends among the intellectuals. Lastly, I had been told that he had always wanted to be prime minister.”[22]

The shah eventually chose Sharif-Emami. In his memoirs, Nahavandi offers a detailed account of an exploratory meeting he had with the shah in which he described the policies he would adopt as prime minister and the people he would invite to join him in the cabinet.[23] The program apparently did not appeal to the shah. Sharif-Emami was appointed prime minister. Nahavandi believes that “based on all I know now, I doubt that the queen seriously supported my candidacy—if she supported it at all.”[24]

Much to his dismay, and only at the urging of the shah and the queen, Nahavandi accepted the post of minister of higher education in the Sharif-Emami cabinet. “I was,” he writes, “one of the three ministers forced by the Shah on the new prime ministers.”25 He makes it clear that it was a “personal sacrifice.”[26]

Early on, he was at odds with the prime minister, who wanted to appease the opposition. Nahavandi claims he was among the handful of ministers who advocated the necessity of a show of force. “We must make the situation calm, and then from the position of strength and stability, make genuine and serious concessions to the demands of the opposition.”[27] Eventually, the increasing tensions led once again to his resignation. The cabinet, too, fell not much later. “Accepting to serve in that cabinet,” he now believes, “was the biggest mistake of my political life.”

The Sharif-Emami cabinet was replaced with an inefficient military government, and one of its ploys to appease the population was to arrest a large number of the leading officials of past governments. Nahavandi was one of them. In prison, he led an isolated life, as much avoiding others as avoided by them. Some of the prisoners harbored the notion that Nahavandi had been responsible for preparing the list of those to be detained as a “scapegoats.”[28] There is no evidence to support this claim, but in those days of rancor and doubt, anxious waiting and angry mobs, facts mattered little. On the day of the revolution, as the doors to the prison were opened where Nahavandi and most of his peers were held, he was among the lucky few who escaped the clutches of the angry demonstrators.

After a few weeks of tense hiding in Tehran, with the help of the French government he eventually succeeded in escaping Iran and settling in Paris, where he taught at the university. Eventually he retired to Brussels, where he lives near one of his daughters. He has published several books on the shah’s last days, the revolution,[29] and one on Shah Abbas, the sixteenth-century Safavid king.[30]

In Wagner’s Ring, Siegfried is the betrayed and betraying hero. He is the expected messiah who can slay the dragon and pave the way to Valhalla. But like all mythical heroes— from Esfandiyar and his eyes to Achilles and his heel—he is vulnerable. Those Siegfried betrayed used his vulnerability to kill him, and with his death, Valhalla was consumed in flames. Parviz Nikkhah had a life and fate not unlike Siegfried’s.

He was born in April 1939 (Ordibehesht 1318) to a middle-class family steeped in politics. His father, an avid reader, was an accountant for a private company. His mother was a woman of strong character, a warm heart, and no intellectual pretense. His older sister, Parvin, was a full-time member of the Tudeh Party. Under her influence, “the entire family developed something of a leftist tendency.”[1] The Nikkhah house was often not only the place where important party meetings were held, but also where some of the famous clandestine members of the party, including Khosrow Ruzbeh, occasionally sought refuge. Parviz joined the youth organization of the party and there learned his first lessons in Marxism, and in clandestine work.

As a student, Parviz was serious, organized, intelligent, and congenial. In spite of his political engagements, he always managed to do well in school. From early youth he was capable of combining activism and a sterling academic performance. His teachers remembered him fondly and talked of his unfailing politeness. To some he seemed aloof, if not arrogant, while others saw him as incorrigibly shy and timid.[2] He had an avid curiosity and kept his mother occupied with all manner of questions—from the origins of life to the size of stars.[3] He had a large number of close friends, many of who converged on the Nikkhah family home as their main “hangout.” Even in high school, Parviz was constantly occupied with politics. He was also a voracious reader of poetry and fiction, and in college he developed a particular affinity for Shakespeare. He even dabbled in poetry.[4]

He was in high school when his older sister and political mentor married a man named Gholam-Ali Seyf. He, too, was a member of the Tudeh Party and had spent some time in prison. He wooed not only Parviz but also Parviz’s sister with the stories of his prison exploits. They both loved him “for the troubles he’s had.” Seyf was well read in philosophy and history and around the Nikkhah household he was simply known as “Ostad”[5]—an honorific often used for university professors or maestros in any field. Seyf and his wife would later become crucial characters in the Nikkhah lore.

Parviz attended Adab High School, and early in the summer of 1958 he set out for Europe. The whole family had gathered at the TBT bus station. A new service to Europe had just begun. Hitherto, planes and trains had been the sole means of travel. Furthermore, sending a child to Europe had been until that time the prerogative of the higher classes. With the opening of TBT bus lines—where a person could reach the heart of Europe for a meager sum—a new breed of students, often from the lower classes, began to arrive in European cities. Before their arrival, Iranian students had been politically dormant, save for the occasional outburst of indignation about things that usually had to do with their well-being. The new arrivals brought with them new experiences and expectations, and their presence fundamentally reshaped the nature of the Iranian student movement in Europe and America. Nikkhah not only realized this crucial change was occurring but became one of the most important links in turning the increasing number of students studying abroad into a potent political force. The SAVAK was also cognizant of this change and tried to retool its effort to control the movement.[6]

Parviz registered at the University of Manchester and in about four years graduated with a degree in physics. By then he had emerged as one of the leading figures of the burgeoning student movement. More important, he was part of a clandestine group of radicals who had become disgruntled with the Tudeh Party and its leadership. The new group was under the ideological sway of Mao and had begun to criticize the Soviet Union for its “revisionism.” The new Iranian Maoists criticized the Tudeh Party leadership for its lack of revolutionary resolve, for its refusal to go back to Iran, the “real scene of the class struggle,” and for its blind obedience to the “Revisionist Soviet Union.”[7]

In their discussions, the new Iranian radicals concluded that the only path for revolution in Iran was an armed peasant uprising, along the model of China, and that the first step in the realization of that dream was for committed Marxists to go “among the masses” and not only learn from them but teach them the art and science of revolution. Parviz Nikkhah was one of the first in the group to volunteer to go back and start the struggle. Those who remained behind went on to force a split in the Tudeh Party and to create a new revolutionary group that called itself “The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party of Iran.”

Even before his return, Parviz’s activities had not remained hidden from the Iranian secret police. His father was called to the offices of SAVAK several times and asked to “bring some sense into his son’s mind.”8 At the same time, Parviz needed more time to finish his organizational chores in London, but he had already finished his undergraduate degree and needed a legitimate academic excuse to extend his student visa. He thus applied to and was accepted to the graduate program at the Imperial College of London. His thoughts and time were consumed not by physics but by revolution, however, and as soon as his preparations were complete in 1964, he returned to Iran filled with Promethean optimism. If recently published documents are to be believed, even before he returned home, SAVAK was on his trail, watching his every move.[9]

After a few weeks in Tehran, he was hired to work as an instructor in a physics laboratory at the Polytechnic College. He also began his clandestine revolutionary activities, recruiting new members and studying the dynamics of the changing Iranian society. The result of his study was a report he sent to his comrades in Europe. It offered fascinating insights into Parviz’s mind. Hints of his future controversial intellectual development can be seen in this early essay.

Nikkhah begins by underscoring the necessity of accepting the contingency of any belief. While we hold and defend our ideas, he wrote, we must also always entertain the possibility that they are wrong or in need of amendment or correction. Accepting the “contingency” of one’s thoughts, as Nikkhah advocated, has far more in common with American pragmatism than with orthodox Marxism or Maoism.[10] He then went on to use his knowledge of physics and the differences between Newton and Einstein to underscore the process of paradigm change in science. Marxism, too, he writes, must embrace such paradigm shifts, if they are needed.

He had been in Iran less than two years when on April 10, 1965, the shah was attacked by one of his guards. As the king was driving to his office, a short drive from his residence, a guard armed with a machine gun began firing at him. The shah miraculously escaped unscathed; a couple of his guards were killed and the assailant was shot dead by the king’s other bodyguards. Investigations into the background of the failed assassin showed him to have been a friend of a man named Ahmad Kamrani, who was himself remotely connected to the five or six people who by then made up the “Nikkhah group.” Although SAVAK, according to its own internal documents, knew at the time that “the relationship between this [Nikkhah] group and the assassination attempt at the Palace is ambiguous and has not been judicially proven,” and although the assailant was clearly far more connected to religious circles than those of the Left, the regime nevertheless decided not only to arrest Nikkhah and everyone in his group, but to announce with great orchestrated fanfare the discovery of a great “Maoist organization” and to blame the assassination attempt on them. The same SAVAK documents show that the police were waiting for an excuse to arrest the group, and the assassination attempt provided the excuse.[11]

This strange decision was no isolated incident or mere tactical error. It was part of a grave historic blunder by the shah and the secret police that assumed the Left to be their chief enemy and the religious forces, with the exception of the lunatic fringe, its allies. Ironically, the religious fanatics orchestrated both attempts on the life of the shah—the first, in the early years of his reign, was blamed on the Tudeh Party—and both were ultimately blamed on the Left.

At his trial, Nikkhah vehemently denied any role in the assassination attempt. Terrorism, he said, is not part of my creed. At the same time, he minced no words in declaring his opposition to the shah’s regime. “I am a Marxist-Leninist,” he said, “and it is from that prism that I am against the Shah.”[12]

His bravery, his eloquence, and his young and handsome face made him a national sensation overnight. A new generation of Iranian activists residing in the West needed a hero, and Nikkhah fit the bill. He had turned his court martial into an occasion to critique the regime and defend his ideas. To no small measure, the Confederation of Iranian Students, for the last two decades of the shah’s rule the bane of his regime, owed its emergence as a cogent and powerful voice to Nikkhah and his trial. A long litany of famous poets and writers were convinced to write letters to the shah and demand leniency for Nikkhah. This influential group—from Jean-Paul Sartre and Günter Grass to Harold Pinter and Noam Chomsky—became, in future years, a reliable reservoir of allies in the fight against the shah’s regime.[13]

Angered by Nikkhah’s defiance, the regime responded by imposing the death penalty—a stiff sentence for a crime he had not committed. In the appeal process, arguably in response to the mounting international outcry against the draconian judgments of the court, Nikkhah’s death sentence was reduced to ten years in prison. By then he had become a symbol of the opposition.

After serving four years of his term, Nikkhah suddenly had a change of heart and mind. He had spent the last few months isolated from other prisoners in a jail in the city of Boroujerd. At the time, most of his prison mates thought he had been sent there for punishment and exile. It was common for the police to send intransigent or troublemaking prisoners to outlying areas, away from daily contact with their comrades. Others, in retrospect, see his transfer as part of the careful plan to make Nikkhah into a turncoat. There is evidence that in Boroujerd he was provided with ample reading material—mostly extolling the virtues of the White Revolution. There is also no doubt that his family was allowed free access to him. Rumor had it that his sister and brother-in-law, erstwhile communists and by then both die-hard defenders of the shah, spent hours and weeks talking with him and convincing him of the virtues of the shah’s policies. SAVAK documents clearly show that Parviz’s brothers met with him in the weeks before the bombshell that was his conversion.[14]

He had been studying the Iranian situation, he told an incredulous television audience in 1969, and he had come to realize that his past calculations and theories, and those of the opposition have been grossly mistaken. Iran is now on a path to modernity and progress, he said. The land reform of early 1960s had transformed the face of Iranian society, uprooted feudalism, and put Iran on track to develop a viable, capitalist economy.
More important, in this new Iran, the shah was, according to Nikkhah, locked in a fierce battle with old and new colonialism, and particularly with the oil companies. The opposition must thus, in deference to the national importance of this struggle, give up, at least temporarily, its fight against the shah and instead join him in a broad united front. Nothing short of the independence and welfare of Iran was at stake.

Nikkhah’s first step toward making his new views public was to write a pleading letter to the shah. He first broached the idea with his brothers and his trusted brother-in-law. He read them the letter he had prepared and solicited their help in getting the letter to the shah. They approved the content and his intent, and through the good offices of Dr. Mohammad Baheri—himself a lapsed communist and by then an official of the court— the letter reached the shah.

In the letter, Nikkhah explained in detail the tenets of his new beliefs, apologizing for his past errors and asking for a pardon. He declared that he was not only willing to declare these views in private but was anxious to allow others to learn from his mistake.

The letter pleased the shah.15 All his political life he had a particular craving for the approval of leftist intellectuals. In fact, some of the centrists and more conservative defenders of his regime eventually grew to resent the meteoric rise to power of repentant communists. “It is a fast track to the top,” some joked. In due course, Nikkhah was to suffer his share of this kind of resentment.

Soon after the letter, Nikkhah was moved to a prison in Tehran, and before long he appeared on a now famous television program, recanting his past, professing his new views, offering profuse praise for the shah, and advocating a “united front” against the common enemies of progress. Within hours of his interview he was released from captivity and went in that short span of time from being the darling of the Left to its nemesis, from an icon of revolutionary dedication to a despised symbol of treason and betrayal. One “committed” artist wrote a poem damning him as a wandering “insistent beggar,” desperate to gain acceptance into people’s hearts and minds, but deservedly condemned to a “great loneliness.” He ends the poem by ominously suggesting “only death shall be your response.”[16] Bijan Jazani, the doyen of radical orthodoxy, excoriated Nikkhah for his change of heart, ridiculed him as something like an intellectual gigolo, and attributed his “weakness” to the errors of Maoism.[17]

Out of prison, Nikkhah’s first job was an entry-level one at the Ministry of Information. His salary was three thousand tooman a month (about $400 at the exchange rates of the time).[18] But he was not one to go quietly into the night. Instead, after a short hiatus, he reemerged as a spokesperson for the regime. Even more astounding was the fact that in at least two cases he is reported to have been the person who had to approve and correct speeches of other “recanters,” demonstrating his collaboration with SAVAK.[19]

He was unhappy with his work at the Ministry of Information. He tried to work at the Iranian National Oil Company and, though SAVAK gave its approval, Dr. Manuchehre Egbal, the director, refused to hire him.20 Eventually he ended up at the Iranian Radio and Television Organization. He rose in the ranks to become the head of the News Section, where his job was to select which items made it to the news program; he also wrote many of the commentaries in defense of different aspects of the regime’s policies.

While his detractors lost no opportunity to criticize him, his defenders talked of his humility, unfailing sense of discipline, and tireless work habits. When a Harvard Business School was started in Iran, Nikkhah soon enrolled and received a master’s degree. One of his professors talks of a paper—“one of the best of his class”—in which he had studied the number of seminarians in Iran and concluded that, contrary to expectations, there has been a sudden increase in their number in the 1970s. In times of prosperity, he wrote, the number of seminarians decreases, and he asked why they were then increasing in Iran. The same professor remembers Nikkhah suggesting as early of 1971 that the only viable alternative to the shah’s regime would be a dictatorship of the mullahs.[21]

By the mid-1970s, a new venue appeared for Nikkhah’s talents. The shah decided to make Iran a one-party system, and soon Nikkhah emerged as one of its most important theorists.[22]

By then, his private life had also changed. All through his youth, he was a heartthrob. His admirers included many of his comrades.23 But after prison, he was invariably consumed by work. In spite of his family’s repeated insistence, he had little time for matters of the heart. Finally, at the insistence of his sisters, he agreed to meet a young beautiful woman named Parand. After forty days of courtship, they were married. In her own words, she decided to “dedicate [her] life to making him happy.”[24] He spent all his time at work. His coterie of friends was limited to a small number of intellectuals who had followed the same path as he had—lapsed communists who were now working with the regime. At one time the group decided to suggest to the regime that they be allowed to form a “Social Democratic” party that would be the loyal opposition to the other parties or factions within the one-party structure. The idea was rejected.[25]

Nikkhah was so consumed with his work that with the consent of his wife he took no part in the management of the household. “I did everything to give him peace of mind to do his work,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. He even had little time to read or to see films—both had been favorite avocations in his youth. He continued to suffer from the snide remarks and contemptuous look of those who continued to harbor ill feelings toward his chosen path. Even with his wife he was reticent to talk about his suffering. His only indulgence, she said, were fancy dinners at the house, served on fancy dishes.[26]

As the situation in Iran began to deteriorate, Nikkhah’s family and friends began to worry about his safety. Some suggested that he should leave the country. Before long, he was informed that he, like hundreds of the shah’s regime’s key figures, could no longer leave. Escaping through one of the porous borders was by then his only choice. He refused to entertain the idea. Although he was vaguely worried about the future, he had no reason to believe that his own life or the lives of his close circle of friends were in any way in jeopardy. All that changed soon after the revolution.

On the day of the revolution, as he was naively still sitting in his office, a group of disgruntled employees, many armed with weapons taken from armories the night before, put him under arrest in one of the studios of the television headquarters. After a few days, he was released, only to be rearrested shortly afterward.[27] The second time, a group of about nine armed guards came to his house and took him away. His wife firmly believes that among the posse that came to arrest her husband was a disgruntled old leftist employee of the Television Organization. As fate would have it, this time, too, Nikkhah would be tried for a crime he had not committed; like his first trial, he valiantly defended himself and his beliefs. He told the court of his philosophical objection to religion in politics and finally tried to convince the infamous “hanging judge,” Sheikh Sadeq Khalkhali, that he had worked with the shah’s regime solely and simply out of conviction because of his belief that it was at the time the best government for Iran.[28]

But his most serious crime was one he had not committed. The court believed him to be the author of the infamous letter that attacked Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of Indian origin and dubious connections to the British. It was a tragic case of mistaken identity. The real author was someone else whose name closely resembled Nikkhah’s. Nevertheless, he was condemned to die, and minutes after the kangaroo trial and summary judgment, he was executed.

His last letter, written minutes before his death, was to his wife:
My dear Parand: Tonight, the court is likely to hand down the sentence of execution. The crimes of the Shah’s regime had reached such heights, and the anger of the people had such power that guilty and innocent are likely to be equally burnt by it. I kiss you, and also kiss [our sons] Cyrus and Alborz. Please make every effort in their upbringing. May god be with you. All my hope is now with you. I love you with all my heart. With greetings for everyone. Parviz.[29]

Parviz Nikkhah was executed on March 13, 1979. He was forty-six years old. His older son, now a dentist, was six years old; his younger son was four.

For many in a generation of scholars and social activists, the Qhashghai tribe embodied the romance of the noble nomad, untainted by the blemishes of modernity and urbanism, as defiant in the face of despotism as against the corrosive power of commerce. William Douglas, Justice of the United States Supreme Court and a close friend of the Qhashghai brothers, captured this romance when he wrote, “They are skilled, resourceful warriors. . . . They live in wildly rugged mountains, where dizzying cliffs and harsh defiles are barriers to all transport but mules.”[1]

The Qhashghais are considered one of the largest nomadic tribes of Iran. By the mid1950s, their population was estimated to be about four hundred thousand. During the early part of the twentieth century, they were often at the forefront of the battle for a new constitutional government in Iran. In those days, the leader of a tribe, or the khan, ruled it as a virtual fiefdom. Whether portrayed in the exuberant colors of a Kalantari ethnographically informed painting or in the adoring narratives of scholars, the Qhashghais had become the romanticized epitome of nomadic intransigence against the homogenizing gusto of modernity. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, Nasser Khan and Khosrow Khan were the most famous favorite sons of this storied tribe.

They were born into a family inseparably steeped in the political battles of the time. For both of them, a life in politics was less a calling than something “thrust upon them.” Their father, Solat al-Dowleh, was the chief of the Qhashghai tribe, and, as was customary at the time, he ruled it with the absolutism of an Oriental potentate. He had a “history of stormy relations” with the British. He had fought them often, and during the waning days of World War I he and his tribesmen had, for a while, occupied the city of Shiraz. Solat al-Dowleh had been an early proponent of Reza Shah and his nationalism. But one of the pillars of the king’s modernizing efforts was his decision to settle, forcefully if need be, all the nomads of Iran. The process was bloody and acrimonious, and the Qhashghai tribe was often at the heart of the nomads’ ongoing, quixotic battle with the increasingly authoritarian but modernizing central government. By the late 1920s, Solat al-Dowleh, along with other tribal chieftains, was disarmed. Most were forced to settle in Tehran. In Solat al-Dowleh’s case, he was “practically a hostage in Tehran as a member of the fifth Parliament.”[2]

Nasser Khan was born in 1895 (1274). He spent his childhood and early years among the tribe, where he learned to ride and shoot. Private tutors schooled him, and the experience later helped Mohammad Bahmanbeygi, the son of one of Solat al-Dowleh’s servants, to create the now famous special nomadic schools. Nasser was easily the son closest to his father. When the latter was chosen for the Parliament, Nasser was also given a seat in the Majlis, and when the fortunes of the father fell and he was arrested, the son, too, was incarcerated. The father did not survive his imprisonment, and the son emerged from the ordeal seasoned and embittered, as well as famous. He was the clear choice to lead the tribe after his father. Another candidate was the Khan’s other son, Khosrow. Both of them felt that the Pahlavi dynasty had their father’s blood on its hands, and, steeped in the nomadic tradition of retribution, this sin was not easily forgotten or forgiven.

Khosrow Khan was the fifth and last child of Solat al-Dowleh. He was born in 1917 (1296). Although his childhood was spent among the tribe, he went to school in Tehran, where he attended Alborz high school and Firouz Bahram, two of the city’s most accademically acclaimed schools. It was in the tumultuous days of World War II that Khosrow first emerged as a figure of national relevance. During the war, the Qhashghais became, according to many scholars, “the mightiest pro-German force in Iran and Nasser Khan became front runner for prime minister in the event of a German victory.”[3] In spring of 1942, the brothers invited the German superspy Berthold Schulze-Holthus to come to the tribal areas and hide among the Qhashghais. Another German, Franz Mayr, was also working with the Qhashghais, and with their help the two Germans created a group called Melliyune Iran, which was “laying the foundations of uprising in case the Germans came out as victors.”[4] At one point, the brothers even began to plan for a general uprising against the central government, but their German advisors convinced them to follow a more cautious path and await more victories from the German armies in the Soviet Union.[5]

In the meantime, the British, desperate to abort any successful pro-German movement in Iran, tried everything to stop the work of the spies. They even made an offer to give the brothers five million tooman and “recognition of the autonomy of the Qhashghai zone by the Tehran government” in return for the German spies. The brothers refused the offer because for them, in the words of Douglas, their word of honor meant a great deal.[6]

Before the end of the war, though the Eastern Front victories never came, and the power of the central government seemed to be dwindling; a more limited uprising, particularly among the Qhashghais, did break out. Several major battles between the Qhashghais and the Iranian army were fought, the most famous at Simitgou. The Iranian papers offered often sensationalist accounts of these battles. In some, Khosrow was afforded a near-mythical status. He was said to be brave, cunning, and ruthless in battle. There were even reports that he had beheaded a colonel of the Iranian army with his bare hands and a knife.[7] He was also said to be a bon vivant, a life-long reputation he shared with his brother Nasser. In fact, there were rumors during the war years of tension between Khosrow Khan and the shah as both were said to be romantically involved with the same girl, called Firouzeh.[8]

The Qhashghai uprising was put down by government forces led by General Fazlollah Zahedi. Instead of an acrimonious policy of pure punishment, the government opted for appeasement and stern discipline. At the end of the hostilities, both brothers were allowed, indeed invited, to enter the world of electoral politics. It has even been suggested that seats in the Parliament were part of the offer that convinced the brothers to end their armed battle with the central government. The British authorities certainly tried to give this impression when, in a meeting with the shah, they declared that in their most recent contact with the Qhashghai brothers, particularly Nasser Khan, they had made an “abortive attempt to persuade him to stand for the Majlis—a move which, if it had succeeded, would have greatly helped the Persian government by softening and emasculating this bumptious chieftain.”[9] Before the end of the decade, Nasser Khan was named a senator and Khosrow became a member of the Majlis.

In their foray into electoral politics, the brothers tried to carve out a niche of their own—at once independent, cautious, nationalist, and anticommunist. As coalition politics was the dominant pattern at the time, the brothers proved deft and nimble at the art of forming shifting alliances.
For a while, according to the British Embassy in Tehran, they joined forces with Gavam al Molk, a powerful figure in the city of Shiraz and long known as a close “friend” of the British. According to the agreement, “Nasir Qhashghai and his brother . . . have agreed . . . no action shall be taken against the interests of the Persian government or against the interests or wishes of the British government . . . the motive that inspired Nasser Qhashghai may have been nothing more than to prove his friendship for the British by becoming friend with their friends.”[10]

This newfound amity between the Qhashghais and the British worried the shah. All his life he had believed that nomadic tribes were used by foreign powers to exert pressure on the central government. He particularly distrusted the British in this regard. A few months after the agreement between Gavam al Molk and the Qhashghai brothers, the shah complained to the British authorities about these discussions. The embassy tried to reassure the monarch that in meeting with the Qhashghai brothers they had only hoped to appease them into a more peaceful, law-abiding posture. At the same time the embassy officials insisted that “in general . . . and in principle” they “had a perfect right to maintain contact with tribal leaders in zones of particular interests to us.”[11]

As it turned out, the shah had reason to worry about the Qhashghai brothers’ intentions. Before long, they aligned themselves with a serious foe of the king. When Ghavam-ol Saltaneh became prime minister and began to confront the shah on the extent of his powers, the Qhashghai brothers sided with Ghavam. The alliance broke only when Ghavam brought three communist ministers into the cabinet. Anticommunism was a near-constant element of the brothers’ political ideology.

As the oil nationalization battles heated up, and Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq became the focal point of Iranian politics, the brothers gingerly but clearly moved to side with him, and against the court and the shah. When on July 16, 1952 (25 Tir 1331) Mossadeq resigned his post as prime minister in a show of force, and his resignation brought about a mass uprising in Tehran, Khosrow, according to Baqa’i, met with him and said, “I have just sold my house and have a million tooman and will give you all, if you agree that we should get rid of not just Ghavam but the Shah as well.”[12] On another occasion, Khosrow Khan told American Embassy officials “he had a score to settle with the shah because the shah’s father had killed his father.”[13] To their credit, however, the brothers’ hatred for the shah had a limit.

During the events leading to the August 1953 attempt to depose Dr. Mossadeq, the Tudeh Party sent a high-level military delegation to meet with Khosrow Khan and Nasser Khan and asked the brothers to unite with the party in a joint effort against the shah. The brothers discussed the matter and eventually refused. They argued that if they succeeded in their effort, before long the country would fall into the hands of the Soviet Union, and history would judge the Qhashghais harshly. It would, they concluded, condemn them for turning the country over not just to foreigners but to communists.14 When the effort to depose Dr. Mossadeq succeeded and the shah returned to power, the brothers, helped by General Zahedi, were given amnesty. They received permission to leave Iran along with their famously assertive mother, Bibi Khanoum.[15]

The Qhashghai brothers spent much of the next five years in Europe, more or less marginalized from politics and from Iran. In 1957, the government of Iran introduced legislation that “would appropriate the land of the four [Qhashghai brothers].” Justice Douglas, long a friend of the brothers, moved into action and wrote a letter to the American Embassy in Tehran, acting as a mediator between the government of Iran and the Qhashghai brothers. He wrote that the brothers “pledge their honor . . . that they will keep hands off the government and support the Shah and the regime in every way.” In return, the attempt to foreclose their properties should come to a complete halt.[16]

The Douglas effort failed, and by the late 1950s the brothers had lost much of their wealth. The land reform of 1961–65 finished the process and deprived them of much of their patrimony. Nevertheless, with the election of John F. Kennedy, the brothers’ political star was on the rise again. Their old friend Justice Douglas was now considered one of the most influential confidants of the new administration. With him as their patron, the brothers began to lobby the Kennedy administration for a change in U.S. policy in Iran. Douglas, in fact, tried to convince the Kennedy White House that, in his words, the “Qhashghai are the true friends of the West,” and are also “irrevocably on the democratic side.”[17]
Obviously buoyed by these words of support, Nasser Khan resumed his work against the shah with new gusto. In January 15, 1963, he wrote a letter to President Kennedy giving a pledge of “wholehearted support in fighting communism” and offering himself, and the “25,000 Iranians who at this point of history prefer to live abroad . . . as the nucleus of a new leadership which we think will soon be needed in Iran.”[18] Kennedy did not answer the note himself but an officer of the White House rather dismissively told Nasser Khan that “a man of your sophistication will realize that the government of the United States must deal with the legitimate government of Iran,” and that “the rumors you have heard concerning breaches of confidence and other such activities are entirely false.”[19]

While Nasser was busy building his anticommunist bona fides with the American government, his brother Khosrow was helping Iranian leftists to organize in Europe. He was for years the chief supporter of Bakhtar-e Emrooz—a newspaper initially started by Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi and resurrected in the early 1960s as an organ of leftists within the National Front. Khosrow Khan even used his connections to send a small delegation of students to be trained in Egypt for military action against the Iranian government. In fact, in 1963–65 there was an uprising among the nomads, and the Qhashghai clan played a key role in it.[20] One of the iconic leaders of this rebellion was a nephew of Khosrow’s, a young man named Bahman Qhashghai. After fighting a hit-and-run war with the army for several years, Bahman was eventually killed, and with him the movement he had come to symbolize withered away.[21] By the late 1960s, the movement was altogether suppressed, and as the shah consolidated his power the Qhashghai brothers resignedly watched from afar. Indeed, by the early 1970s, convinced that the shah was there to stay and all plans to remove him had come to naught, the two brothers gingerly began, once again, a policy of rapprochement with the shah. By then they were under a great deal of financial strain. Even when they had little money left, they lived a life of aristocratic splendor. The fact that Khosrow enjoyed gambling and often was reported to lose big sums only added to their financial difficulties.

In 1967, Aredeshir Zahedi was instrumental in bringing about a temporary peace between the brothers and the shah. The shah set aside a monthly stipend of six thousand West German marks for the brothers and their mother, Bibi. By then, the three spent all their time between northern France, Germany, and Switzerland. But beginning in early 1978, events in Iran once again catapulted the brothers into the political limelight.

On January 4, 1979, Nasser Khan contacted the State Department in Washington to offer his views of the impending crisis in Iran. The shah must go, he said, and Ayatollah Khomeini is the only viable alternative.[22] When the revolution came, both brothers returned to Iran, full of hope. They were offered a hero’s welcome, particularly in the city of Shiraz, near their seat of power. In the next two years, the Qhashghais tried desperately to avoid a confrontation with the new Islamic regime. But they, too, had misjudged the ideological ferocity of the new Islamic victors.

Khosrow’s end was tragic. He died as he lived, consumed by politics and enveloped in a fog of mystery and intrigue. He was elected to the Parliament, but his credentials were challenged by Islamists who accused him of complicity with the CIA and with the ancien regime. Rogue elements of the Revolutionary Guards tried to arrest him, and he used the handgun he carried to force his way to freedom. But before long, he was arrested again; this time the objections of the president, Bani Sadre, brought about his release.

By then he decided that the capital was no longer safe for him. He stole away from the city and ended up among his clan in the mountains outside the city of Shiraz. His oldest son, Abdullah, and his brother, Nasser Khan, along with remnants of a Maoist group that had begun fighting the Islamic Republic, joined him at the camp.[23] They were out-gunned, out-manned, and out-moneyed by the regime, and only their romantic attachment to the grandeur of the times past, and their despondency, kept them together. Khosrow soon realized the absurdity and futility of his plight. He decided to flee Iran. He sent a trusted aide to Tehran to ask one of his sisters for the money he would need to escape. Unbeknownst to him, the aide was an agent of the Islamic Republic. He told Khosrow that the money was in a safe house in Shiraz, thus luring the seasoned old politician into a trap.

Once he left his lair and entered the city, he was arrested. He was forced to recant on television and to admit to all manner of perfidy. He was, he said, an agent of the CIA and had worked hard to overthrow the Islamic Republic.[24] Not surprisingly, he was condemned to death. He was publicly hung in the city of Shiraz. Nasser Khan escaped to another life of exile. He died in 1993 (1372). With his death, the era of nomadic romanticism came to an end.

Since the mid–nineteenth century, when Mohammad Ali Bab announced his new religion, his followers, called Bahai today, have become the bête noir of the Shiite religious zealots in Iran. The Shiite leadership has spared little effort in controlling the Bahais’ growth, infiltrating their ranks, and limiting their power and presence in Iran. One of the most powerful organizations in postrevolutionary Iran, called the Hojjatiye, is a continuation of the prerevolutionary organization whose job was to fight the Bahais. In Shapur Rasekh, and his wife, Mehri, they met more than their match.

The Rasekhs were by choice and faith, as well as by marriage, at the center of the Bahai hierarchy in Iran. Shapur was also one of the founders of modern sociology in Iran and played a crucial role in developing and implementing Iran’s often ambitious economic plans. As a scholar he is respected for his erudition and for the rich and varied quality of his writing; as a technocrat he is praised for his competence and impeccable honesty and probity; and as a leading member of the Bahai faith he is known as being firm of faith and tolerant of others, committed to his religious beliefs and willing to pay any price for them, yet respectful of the right of others to have different values and beliefs. Those who know or meet him are invariably impressed by his unfailing politeness, which borders on formality. He is as formal and kind in his letters as he is in his personal encounters.[1]

It is an ironic fact of Iranian history that during his reign, Mohammad Reza Shah tried to afford the Bahais a chance to enjoy more or less the same rights enjoyed by other Iranian citizenss. His efforts were angrily, albeit not surprisingly, opposed by the religious hierarchy, and provided the clerics with an emotionally charged issue—particularly as they added a dose of anti-Semitism to the mix by calling the Bahai religion a “Zionist creation.” The Iranian secular democrats as well as the Iranian Left, both opposed to the shah but both ostensibly in favor of freedom of faith and religion, not only failed to support the shah in this progressive effort, but joined the chorus led by the mullahs in complaining, though often indirectly, about gains made by the followers of the Bahai faith. Although a few members of the faith—like General Karim Ayadi and Hojabr Yazdani— gave ammunition to the opposition, the majority were model citizens. Many of them—like the Rasekhs, Habib Sabet, and the Arjomand brothers—were pioneers in their respective fields. Shapur and Mehri Rasekh were two of the most notable and impressive examples of eminent Persians of the Bahai faith.

He was born in Tehran on March 28, 1924 (8 Farvardin 1303). His father was a Bahai and his mother a Muslim. In those days, such interfaith marriages were not uncommon in Iran. Shapur was the fourth child in a family of middle-class comfort and affluence. His parents emphasized the value of education for their six children. All four boys had doctoral degrees. The first two became physicians; one of them was, in fact, the chief of psychiatry at Oregon State Mental Hospital in Salem, the hospital where the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed.[2]

All through his early education, Shapur was the top of his class. For some of his schooling, he went to the special institutions set up for children of Bahai families. Other times he attended public schools in Tehran. He also developed an avid interest in Iranian literature.

By the time he was eighteen, he had to decide his faith. Bahai parents do not force their own religion on their children. When children reach maturity, they are given a chance to choose their own religion. Banishment from Bahai gatherings and meetings is the price paid by those who choose not to become Bahai. Shapur chose to join his father’s faith. Since then, his religion has been one of the defining characteristics of his persona.
After finishing high school, Rasekh entered Tehran University. He again finished at the top of his class and received a bachelor’s degree in economics. He then entered the Faculty of Literature at Tehran University, at the time the top place for the study of Iranian culture and literature in the world, dominated by such luminaries as Badi’ozzaman Foruzanfar and Gholemhoseyn Sadiqi. By 1951, Rasekh had finished his course work for a doctoral degree in Iranian literature. All that remained was his dissertation. But the lure of Europe and of social science proved impossible to ignore or delay. Without getting his degree, he set out for Europe. His later writings reflect his early literary training.

Iran was about to be engulfed in a political storm, and Rasekh, as a practicing Bahai, tried all his life to avoid any entanglement in matters of politics. He first entered the Faculty of Social Science in Geneva, from which he received a master’s degree in sociology in 1954. Four years later, in 1958, he received a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Economy and Social Science of the University of Geneva. There he took classes with some of the best known scholars of the time. He took a class in developmental psychology from Piaget, the famous child psychologist. He wrote his dissertation on the subject of prejudice, and Piaget was one of the members of his doctoral committee.

He also took some courses at the Sorbonne in Paris, and there the professor who left an indelible mark on his mind and method was George Gurvitch. It was Gurvitch who as early as 1949 had predicted the rise of a new category of functionaries in developing economies. They are the technocrats, and according to Gurvitch they gain power and prominence not because they own the means of production, or inherit the levers of power,
but because of their acquired professional expertise. They are the new class that dominates every modern society.3 Before going back to Iran in 1958, Rasekh took some courses on statistics and empirical research. He also attended a seminar devoted to planning for development in third-world countries. Both proved particularly helpful in shaping the trajectory of his career.

Rasekh had chosen to continue his graduate studies in Switzerland because Mehri Ebneabhar, the woman he had married in 1946, wanted to go there. She came from one of the most prominent Bahai families in Iran. Her grandfather, Molla Mohammad Taghi, was one of the earliest converts to the new faith, and thus an eminent member of the community.4 Her uncle was General Karim Ayadi. Mehri is an eminent Persian in her own right.
She finished her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1951 at the top of her class. Like other such students, she was given a government scholarship to go to Europe for her graduate studies. She chose Geneva because she wanted to work with Piaget. By 1961, she had finished her doctoral program in developmental psychology. Her mentor and advisor was Piaget himself. Her dissertation was on the subject of “Problem Children and Their Education.” She had traveled extensively throughout Europe to do her research. She had met, among others, Anna Freud in London. Her prize-winning dissertation was soon translated into Italian and Portuguese. It was about a pioneer in the uses of painting and art in therapy.[5]

Soon after returning to Iran, she was accepted as a professor of clinical psychology and development theory at the Psychology and Education Departments of Tehran University. After a while, to the consternation of some of her colleagues, she was named the chair of the Department of Developmental Psychology. She not only started a private clinical practice, focusing on the problems of women, but she also was the first woman to host a highly popular radio program devoted to family affairs. Discussion of such matters had hitherto been strictly taboo in Iran. Family life, and relations between parents and children and husbands and wives, were deemed strictly private. In her program she bravely broke these barriers, knowing full well that the only way some of the more serious psychological problems will be alleviated is when they are candidly and openly discussed.6 What partially paved the way for such openness was the socioeconomic developments in which Shapur Rasekh played an important role.

Soon after his return to Iran in 1958, he too began to teach at Tehran University, where only recently a new Center for Social Research had been established. At the same time, he was asked to join the Economic Office at the Plan Organization. In those days, that office had become the heart of a major “stabilization program” meant to solve Iran’s chronic economic problems. It was also part of an attempt to bring some long-term planning to the Iranian economy. The program was underwritten by the Ford Foundation, the American government, and Harvard University.7 One aspect of the new program, particularly advocated by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, was that henceforth in Iran a new class of people, technocrats, must take power from the traditional aristocratic elites. Gurvitch’s theory was becoming reality, and Rasekh was himself the best embodiment of the new class of people whose rise Gurvitch had predicted.

At the Plan Organization, Rasekh also took an active part in developing the Third Plan (1962–67) and in appraising the results of the Second Plan. Before long, he was appointed first as the manager and then as the assistant director of social issues at the Plan Organization. In that capacity, he was intimately involved in development of the Fourth and Fifth Plans as well. While keeping his appointment as assistant director of the Plan Organization, he also headed the newly founded Center of Statistics of Iran for a time. It was during his tenure that attempts to portray a coherent statistical image of Iran were commenced.

Although he stayed at the Plan Organization for a decade, he never gave up his teaching and research. He introduced modern theories of sociology to the students. Before the arrival of newly trained sociologists like himself, ethnography, demography, and even anthropology were unknown territory for students studying social science in Iran.8 One aspect of his scholarly research was the study of the Iranian elite. Under his watch at the Center for Social Research, Zahra Shajii began her now-famous quantitative study of Iran’s political elite. Furthermore, Ahmad Ashraf, now the managing editor at Encyclopedia Iranica, also began a study of income distribution and how it correlates with class formation in Iran.[9]

Another pioneering aspect of Rasekh’s scholarship was the quantitative study of modernization and its impact on Iranian society. Everything from patterns of urban development,[10] statistics on marriage[11] and education,[12] and the sociology of the Iranian countryside[13] became subjects for his prolific study and writing. In some of his books and essays, he worked with Jamshid Behnam, another well-known sociologist. A constant theme of Rasekh’s writing was the role social science research must play in the social and economic development of a country like Iran.[14] He wanted to show the changes that societies experience when they embrace modernity and to underscore the salutary role social sciences can play in the process. His style of writing was always simple and free from jargon and obtuse terminology. At the same time, it was precise and offered succinct, numerical accounts of its subject of study.

In his crucial role at the Plan Organization, he was an advocate of more social spending and less military expenditure. Although he often lost the battles, he did not shirk the responsibility of pointing out the perils of underinvestment in education and other social programs. In a candid moment of self-criticism, he said, “Our generation failed to make our points strongly. We did not have a political sense.”[15] The price for this failure was, of course, the revolution.

About two years before the onset of the revolution, his family, which by then included two children, had a taste of the violence that was soon to consume the whole nation. On a day when the university was closed, Mehri Rasekh was working in her office when a mentally disturbed young man who was also a failing student entered and tried to stab her to death. She was saved only because of the unexpected arrival of the janitor’s wife, whose cries for help and daring intervention stopped the assailant from accomplishing his goal. Officials at the university, with the approval and assistance of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, then prime minister, arranged for Mehri Rasekh’s immediate transfer to one of the best hospitals in Zurich. The young assailant was apparently used by religious zealots to try to kill a woman whom they despised not only as a symbol of woman’s rise in society, but more important as a member of the Bahai faith.[16]

By then Shapur was playing an increasingly prominent role in managing the affairs of the Bahai faith in Iran. There is no official priesthood in the Bahai faith. Each community is led by a committee whose members are elected by the community at large. Local committees are led by national bodies, and national bodies in turn are guided by an international body. By the mid-1970s, Rasekh was chosen for the highest elected body in Iran. In exile, he was elected to the highest international body, becoming one of the nine leaders of Bahais around the world.

While he was a member of the leadership committee in Iran—whose responsibilities included managing all contacts with the government—the Bahai leadership, concerned that in the last census only a fraction of the 300,000 Bahais living in Iran had actually declared themselves to be Bahais, changed their policy. They decided that in the next census every member of the community must openly declare their true identity and allegiance. When the Islamic Revolution came, zealots thus had precise figures on the number of Bahais in Iran. Furthermore, the work of Hojjatiye and their attempt to infiltrate Bahai communities had by then born fruit. Nearly all the Bahais in the country were identified and eventually forced either to recant or to leave their jobs and have their property confiscated.[17] A handful opted for the first path, but the majority paid a heavy price for keeping their faith.

For the Rasekh family, the first warning about what was to come had taken place some two years earlier, when Mehri Rasekh was attacked. In October 1978, he left Iran for a conference at UNESCO in Paris. His wife joined him. After the conference, they went to visit their daughter, by then following in her mother’s footsteps and studying psychology in Switzerland. Family and friends suggested they delay their return. They agreed and have been in Geneva ever since. Both resumed their professional careers, albeit in a new context. Mehri Rasekh resumed her clinical work, while Shapur took up his scholarship with zest. He has since published, in cooperation with UNESCO, a number of monographs on some of the themes he had written about in Iran. At the same time, he spends more and more of his time and effort managing the affairs of the Bahai community around the world.

Fuad Ruhani was a founder of OPEC and its first secretary-general, as well as chairman of its Board of Governors. Professionally, he was an oilman, the deputy chairman and de facto policy chief of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). He was also a man of the law and of letters, as passionate about the world of ideas and philosophy, literature and music, as he was about the arcane minutiae of the oil economy and petroleum contracts. Above all, he was a man of high moral principle. In the culture of Middle Eastern oil, where ill-gotten fortunes and tarnished reputations are common, his reputation was impeccable: friend and foe alike praised him for his financial probity, economic wisdom, and judicial acumen. His thin, almost frail physique belied the searching soul and indomitable intellect that spurred him on to high achievement in a wide array of political and intellectual pursuits. He was a true Renaissance man.

Ruhani helped found OPEC at a time when many fellow officials in NIOC were against even the idea of such an organization. He was OPEC’s vocal champion and played a key role in convincing Mohammad Reza Shah that Iran must join.[1] The shah dispatched Ruhani as Iran’s chief delegate to the early discussions on OPEC’s creation. In later years, as the shah played an increasingly important role in OPEC, Ruhani remained a trusted advisor and the country’s preeminent legal expert on the question of oil.

There was talk of making Ruhani the permanent secretary-general of OPEC. The idea never materialized. The shah had insisted Ruhani keep his job at NIOC while working at OPEC, and many member countries, particularly Iraq, argued that such dual employment would make it impossible for Ruhani to represent OPEC’s collective wishes. On his retirement from OPEC in 1964, he was given the customary timepiece—in this case, a massive gold clock made by Patek Philippe inscribed with the names of all the representatives to OPEC.[2]

Ruhani never gained success at the expense of his principles. In the 1950s he was an advisor to Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq during his battle with Great Britain over the nationalization of Iranian oil. The British eventually left and NIOC was created, but Mossadeq’s success was short-lived. His fall, after the events of August 1953, brought about the demise of nearly everyone who had sided with him—but not Ruhani. Instead he became a senior advisor on oil and gas to the shah. What is truly fascinating about this aspect of his life is that Ruhani made the transition from Mossadeq to the shah without being branded a turncoat. It is a further measure of his high moral principles that despite his awareness of the shah’s deep antipathy toward Mossadeq, he never hesitated to praise the old man for his role in the struggle for nationalization. It has been suggested that even during his tenure at OPEC, Ruhani “continued to be a supporter of Mossadeq’s underlying objectives, although he recognized that Mossadeq made extremist errors toward the end.”[3] By temperament and intellectual training, Ruhani was averse to both hero worship and zealous nationalism. In his books and in private conversations, Ruhani would commend Mossadeq’s devotion to Iran’s national interests and then criticize his excessive zeal and his inability to make necessary compromises.

Fuad Ruhani was born in Tehran on the October 23, 1907 (1 Aban 1286). His father, Moheb-ol-Soltan, was a prosecutor and a leading and much respected member of the Bahai faith. Fuad finished his early education in Tehran, at the famous Tarbiyat School. Shortly after graduation, he married and began work in the oil industry, then under British control, by taking a job with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He had taught himself English and was soon recognized in the company for his mastery of the language. He made himself fluent in French, Arabic, and Italian. Indeed, he was a remarkably successful and indefatigable autodidact, not just in languages but in his many intellectual vocations and avocations. In the 1930s, the company was offering scholarships for graduate study in England to the best and brightest of its employees, and Ruhani was selected for one of these coveted positions, finally enabling him to pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer. He obtained his law degree (LLB), with honors, from London University in 1937. He returned for another three years to London University to receive, again with honors, the equivalent of his doctorate (LLM) in law. He later received another doctorate in law, from the Sorbonne in Paris, writing his dissertation on the nature and workings of new international institutions.

Even before Ruhani’s return to Iran upon the completion of his law degree, his company rehired him as a legal advisor.

As he pursued his career with Anglo-Iranian Oil, Ruhani continued his education. He rapidly developed a reputation among the Iranian intellectual elite of the time as a man of great erudition. He was, in the true sense of the word, the intellectuals’ intellectual. Sadeq Hedayat, Ebrahim Golestan, and Sadeq Chubak, all highly selective in the company they kept, deferred to Ruhani in matters of philosophy and language.[4] He was often seen walking to or from his office, deeply immersed in a book. So absorbed could he become, he once failed to notice a burning cigarette tossed out a window on him, until a surprised bystander pointed out to him that his hat was on fire.[5]

In 1951, Ruhani was named legal advisor and deputy chairman of the newly formed NIOC. He thus found himself present at most of the important oil discussions and decisions of the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah. His History of OPEC chronicles the organization, including his own role in it. Of course, Ruhani’s advice was not always heeded by the shah, or by OPEC. On the crucial question of oil pricing, for example, Ruhani’s strategy was geared toward maximizing revenue in the long term. He advocated moderate price increases, coupled with a controlled and limited flow of oil. Many oil-producing countries, by contrast—including Iran under the shah—favored rapid price increases that could generate immediate financial windfalls.

When his tenure as secretary-general of OPEC ended in 1964, Ruhani also left NIOC and changed careers. After spending a year at Columbia University teaching courses on Iranian history and culture, he returned to Iran to become Secretary General of the new Regional Corporation Development (RCD). This organization, comprising Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, was mandated to coordinate development efforts in the three countries. He established the organization’s headquarters in Tehran, from which he ran its operations.

During his years at RCD Ruhani resumed his involvement in Iran’s oil industry, acting as an advisor to Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. (Their friendship dated from Hoveyda’s days as a low-level diplomat in Iran’s embassy in Turkey. There Hoveyda had felt harassed by the militarism of the ambassador, General Hassan Arfa’, and he always credited Ruhani with getting him reassigned.)[6]

Throughout these years, under the auspices of the United Nations, Ruhani also provided advice to developing countries. He was instrumental in helping Malta, Liberia, Trinidad, Ghana, Haiti, Dahomey, and Morocco develop petroleum laws, regulations, and standard agreements.[7]

Ruhani was always more than a petroleum expert and lawyer. In every period of his illustrious career in oil and international development, he made equally valuable contributions to the world of ideas. Concurrent with his work in laying the foundations of OPEC and serving as the deputy chairman of NIOC, he published a scholarly edition of Elahi Nameh, one of Sufism’s most celebrated texts, based on his reading of twenty-one different manuscripts.[8]

Ruhani had a knack for finding just the right book to translate or edit at any point of his productive life, and his published works were impressively varied. He translated Plato’s Republic as well as Jung’s Answer to Job and Psychology of Religion. His lifelong interest in aesthetics led him to translate Benedetto Croce’s treatise Breviario di Estetica into Persian. He translated into French a collection of the quatrains of Omar Khayam and published them in a handsome volume illustrated with photographs by the celebrated Iranian artist Shahrokh Golestan.[9]

Ruhani was always proud of his identity as a Persian, even when the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had forced him into exile. In a situation in which Persian identity became for many a vexing and complicated question, he chose to translate into Persian the parts of Herodotus’s Histories that chronicle the Persians both in their hours of glory and in their losing battles with the Greeks. Lest Iranians become overly sentimental about their past, he also translated Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians, a reminder of the follies of certain Persian kings and their sycophantic courtiers.[10]

By birth and family association, Ruhani was a member of the Bahai faith, but he had no great affinity for organized religion and its rituals. More important, he despised what he considered the self-righteous bombast of all who claimed to have a monopoly on truth. Even where he had spiritual and political ties, Ruhani was driven by an unfailing sense of rational inquiry. His style of inquiry and exposition can best be seen in his little-known gem, A Guide to the Contents of the Quran. Instead of the kind of antiIslamic diatribe so common in émigré circles, he offered a sober, and sobering, account of Islam’s holy book. Cognizant of the long and sometimes violent reach of the Islamic Republic, Ruhani published the book under the pseudonym Farug Sherif. The book is remarkable for the impartiality of its point of view, the lucidity of its narrative, and the erudition of its content.

When he later translated and published the book in Persian as well, he used a different pseudonym, “Sadeq”—an Arabic word for “honest” that in this context conveyed a subtly nuanced meaning. The book’s point of view was that of an honest scholar; at the same time, this honest scholar was not honest—Sadeq—at all, but Fuad Ruhani.
A Guide is a highly readable, deeply informative introduction to the content of the Qur’an and its evolution as a narrative. He observes, with the precision of a first-rate legal mind, the striking contrast between verses, those belonging to the prophet’s early days in Mecca being poetic in style and tolerant in disposition, those from his late Medina period, when he was head of state, didactic in style and oppressive in vision. Ruhani discusses a litany of historical subjects, from Islam’s attitude toward other religions to the context for the evolution of Qur’anic narratives. We learn of Islam’s views on everything from prayer and fasting to sovereignty and the veil. In Islam, Ruhani writes, “sovereignty in the sense of unqualified and unreserved authority belongs to Allah.”[11]

Music, too, was a constant passion of Ruhani’s life. From an early age, he had studied the traditional modes of Persian music and learned how to play the tar. He had also delved deeply into Western classical music. He was himself an accomplished pianist. Even during the most hectic weeks of oil negotiations, he tried to set aside one or two hours each day for his piano. Music wafted constantly through the house he shared with his wife and two daughters—particularly the operas of Mozart, on whose life and work he was something of an expert. His daughters, Negar and Guity, remember him as a saintly figure, devoid of all domineering instinct, insisting upon their education yet allowing each to follow her own path. Negar became an accomplished curator and art connoisseur, while Guity decided to concentrate on raising a family. His daughters remembered his passion for music as contagious. When the family visited Vienna or Salzburg, he would point out with delight the neighborhoods where Mozart had lived or had composed a particular piece of music. Ruhani was the cofounder of the Tehran Philharmonic Society and played a pivotal role in introducing Western classical music to Persian audiences.

Ruhani had a prodigious memory and was a human encyclopedia not only of petroleum history and jurisprudence, Persian literature, and masters of music, particularly Mozart, but of Western literature as well. He was an avid fan of Dickens and Shakespeare and could recite from memory nearly all of Hamlet. All this knowledge he imparted with disarmingly quiet wit and verbal dexterity, in sharp contrast to his serious appearance and unfailingly polite demeanor. With the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ruhani felt compelled to leave his beloved homeland. After his departure from Tehran, his extensive library was ransacked, and his house was converted into a barbershop. Ruhani, with his wife of more than fifty years, lived for some years in Geneva, then settled in London, to spend his last productive years writing, reading, translating, and indulging his passion for music.

As cruel Nature would have it, this erudite man was overtaken in his final years by the debilitating loss of memory that comes with Alzheimer’s disease. When I met him in October 2002, at his small apartment in a middle-class London neighborhood, he was led into the living room with the help of his daughter Guity. An endearingly innocent smile seemed etched on his kindly, aging face. Never given to bombast or too much locution, he now sat quietly, gazing on the beyond. To my every question, he would politely say, “I don’t remember anything about that; I am sorry.” But then suddenly, in the course of my conversation with his daughter, a word would suddenly and inexplicably conjure up some memory. He would, with delight and determination, enter the conversation, only to withdraw into his melancholic silence moments later.

On the mantelpiece, also silent, sat the great gold Patek Philippe clock Ruhani had been given at the end of his tenure at OPEC. It had stopped working twenty years before, his daughter explained, and the cost of fixing it had been beyond his meager means in exile. Although now a shell, it was still magnificent. So with Ruhani. With honor he lived, and in honor he died, on January 30, 2004. He was 96 years old.

In his seminal work on the origins of Russian communism, Nicholas Berdayev uses a subtle genealogical method to uncover striking similarities between tenets of atheistic Leninist ideology and the dogmas and beliefs of Russian Orthodox Christianity. A similar kind of cultural genealogy would, I think, show crucial, hitherto overlooked similarities between orthodox Marxist ideology and the tenets of Shii Islam. In their epistemology; their vision of truth, logic, and style of textual exegesis; their organizational commitment to vanguards and hierarchy; their messianic sense of history and mechanistic aesthetics that places art completely in the service of dogma; their advocacy of “just war” and “revolutionary” violence; their belief in social engineering and the necessity of creating a “new man”; and their view of the individual and society as “instruments” of some higher purpose, they tap into the same craving for certainty, and for human agency, that is at once individual and collective. They are both equally dismissive of the kind of ambiguities about truth and human nature that are at the core of a democratic polity. Both claim the mantle of “true science”—one had Stalin’s infamous “dialectical materialism” in mind when it talked of science, and the other has long claimed access to nothing less than the infinite wisdom of God. No wonder, then, that while mullahs have long called themselves ulama, or men of science, in postwar Iran the “scientific method” became a non-toooblique metaphor for Marxism.

Aside from shedding light on obvious structural similarities between Islamist and Marxist ideologies in Iran, such a comparative and genealogical analysis will also help unravel two perplexing paradoxes of modern Iran: Why did only the most primitive form of Russian (or Chinese) Marxism thrive in Iran? And second, how could Marxists in Iran align themselves with Islamists, who disdained any hint of Marxism? Many in Iran, following the lead of the shah himself, have long attributed this alliance to some kind of conspiracy, or at best a Machiavellian political contrivance. But their strange unity can be explained from an entirely different perspective as well.

The two faiths, in fact, share crucial cultural and theoretical characteristics. They have been the two most organized and popular foes of democracy in Iran. One of the most fascinating points where the two converge and become almost indistinguishable from one another is their addiction to the cult of martyrs. They each measure their own, indeed any force’s “success,” by the number of martyrs they have offered the “cause.” The Tudeh Party—Party of the Masses—was the quintessential purveyor of dogmatic Marxism in Iran, and as expected, it was obsessed with the calculus of martyrdom. In its pantheon of heroes and martyrs, Khosrow Ruzbeh continues to occupy the loftiest place.

His execution at the hands of a firing squad in 1958 (1337) came at just the time the party was on the verge of total disintegration. Its leadership had, almost en masse, escaped Iran. In the doom and gloom of defeat, faced with the drudgeries of exile and caught in the web of incessant factional feuds, backbiting, and back-stabbing, the party was on the verge of tearing asunder, particularly under the weight of increasingly acerbic criticism from the ranks of younger, often more innocent, compadres. Ruzbeh’s execution provided the party with a ray of light. They worked hard to turn him into a veritable myth, knowing full well that utopian parties rely more on myth than reason. It also mattered little to the party leaders that in one of his last letters, Ruzbeh had lambasted them for what he called their corruption and cowardice. They had abandoned the “revolutionary struggle,” he declared, and tarnished the party’s image. Even today, more than fifty years after the letter of criticism was written, the party and its remnants have refused to publish his jeremiad text. We know of its existence and contents from the handful of people who have read it and are willing to talk about it.[1]

It also mattered little to the beleaguered party leaders that they had only received fragmentary reports of the words he had offered in his own defense during his courtmartial. It mattered even less that in the course of his interrogations, he had confessed to participation in at least two cold-blooded murders, one of an erstwhile comrade, and the other of a fiery journalist named Mohammad Mas’ud, known for his fearless and unrelenting attacks on the Tudeh Party and on the royal court, particularly the shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf. By murdering Mas’ud and then orchestrating a concert of whispers about the princess’s culpability, Ruzbeh had hoped to eliminate one foe and tarnish another. Although this kind of Machiavellian guile and brutal violence was clearly anathema to the Tudeh Party’s declared principles and policies, immediate political exigencies trumped inconvenient facts of history or points of principle. They needed a hero and a martyr, and out of the fragments of his words and selected facts of his unusually eventful life they created an enduring image of a selfless revolutionary, a masterful tactician, and an unrepentant Bolshevik.

Khosrow Ruzbeh was born in 1913 (1292) in the city of Malayar. His father was a lowranking officer of the military and from early on, the young son was bent on following in the paternal footsteps. For much of the twentieth century, a life in the military or success in the academic world were the only sure paths for upward social mobility for the lower stratum of Iranian society. With the Islamic Revolution, that pattern changed, and piety, feigned or sincere, became the main engine not just for social mobility, but for social climbing.
The young Ruzbeh entered a military high school in the city of Kermanshah in 1934 (1313), and two years later he moved to Tehran and was accepted into the Officers Academy, where he soon established a reputation as a math prodigy. For the next few years, math was his chief intellectual asset. Ultimately, it also proved to be a main source of his downfall. Because of his mathematical prowess, he enrolled concurrently in some classes at Tehran University’s prestigious Department of Engineering. At the academy, with his reputation already established, he was selected to serve in the coveted gunnery section, usually reserved for the more intellectually capable candidates. He also began to write texts on ballistics, heavy guns and their trajectories. Before his military career was aborted by his political activism, he had published ten books on different facets of military doctrine, weaponry, history of war, and ballistics. He was also a chess aficionado from early in his life and wrote at least one guide to the game. He probably had a role in making chess the favorite game of not just the revolutionaries but the radical chic in Iran.

Brilliant as his mathematical mind was, he made his name in politics. During his stay at the Officers Academy, his teacher and mentor in Marxism was Colonel Mohammad Ali Azar. Sent by the army to France to learn cartography, he had, unbeknownst to the authorities, returned a committed communist. It was Colonel Azar who got Ruzbeh—as well as a surprisingly large number of other young officers—trained in the rudiments of Marxism.[2] Azar escaped arrest, fleeing behind the Iron Curtain, to return only in the late 1960s when one of his classmates at the academy, General Nasiri, then the head of SAVAK, interceded on his behalf and arranged for his safe return home.3 As Ruzbeh began to dabble in the handful of Marxist texts available in Persian, he continued his prolific work in military matters, writing about ways of improving the accuracy of heavy guns and the operation of antiaircraft guns.

The occupation of Iran by Soviet and British forces in 1941 acted as a catalyst for Ruzbeh’s radicalism. One of the first consequences of the occupation was the creation of the Tudeh Party. It was for all practical purposes Iran’s communist party, but it tried to hide its true identity to escape prosecution, and, more important, to follow Stalin’s theory that communists must create an antifascist “united front” with as large a segment of each country’s population as possible. The Tudeh Party and its pandering to democracy was the perfect manifestation of this policy.

Of course, in spite of its “democratic” appearance, soon after its creation the Tudeh Party began actively and secretly to recruit in the army, hoping to create a network of disgruntled officers sympathetic to the party’s cause. Ruzbeh was one of the first officers to join the party and was, from the outset, anointed a member of its highly secretive leadership committee. Around the time he joined the party, he also met and befriended General Hadji Ali Razmara. Interestingly, about the same time, there is evidence of some ties between the ambitious general and the Russians. Bullard, the British ambassador to Iran, wrote in October 27, 1943, “not only is Razmara in the pockets of the Russians, but he is an incorrigible intriguer with a party of his own in the army.”4 Hints of complicity with the Russians haunted the general all his life but also left a blemish on at least one crucial aspect of Ruzbeh’s life.

By late 1945, as it was becoming clear that the Soviet occupation of Iran was about to end, the party, frightened of an imminent attack by the regime, ordered the clandestine military organization dismantled. Ruzbeh was by then already suspected of antigovernment activities and in 1945 had been forced to go into hiding. Still, he and a few of his more committed comrades disliked the party’s order to dismantle. In his own words, “the party politburo had panicked and made a mistake,” and he thus resolved to continue his activities. With the help of like-minded officers, he soon created a new, ostensibly independent group called “The Organization of Iran’s Free Officers.”5 The group considered itself independent of all political parties and willing to join any party in joint actions against the regime and its English backers.

Ruzbeh used this period of hiding to write a series of articles under a pseudonym composed of the first letters of the phrase Gunnery Lieutenant Khosrow Ruzbeh (SeTaKHR in Persian).[6] He also wrote what became his most widely read and controversial book. Called Blind Obedience,[7] the polemical monograph combines the story of Ruzbeh’s life and struggle with an critical overview of the Reza Shah era, or what he called the “The Age of Dictatorship and the Decline of the Iranian Nation.” It also offered a blistering critique of “British Colonial Policy.” Repeating Lenin’s views on war and capitalism, Ruzbeh wrote of “four hundred years of colonialism” as the root cause for not only the World War I, but also the misery, poverty, and despotism of the colonized nations. He went on to describe Reza Shah as a despot forced on Iran by the British. Even military hierarchy and the necessity of “blind obedience” were deemed part of the colonial scheme.[8] He marshaled at some length anecdotes about inhumanly stern military discipline and the corruption of the officers who, in his rendition, stole the pay of the conscripts under Reza Shah.[9] Before the fall of the last shah, he wrote, “I thought our people are just born miserable” but now, with his new consciousness, he suggested that every consequence had a cause, and colonialism and its handmaiden, despotism, were the causes of this misery. More important, misery thus understood could be cured and eliminated. What was needed, of course, was a revolution. He wrote of class differences, of poverty so dire that people of the southern city of Langeh “were forced to sell their young daughters” to Arabs. At the same time, he defended the Soviet Union and claimed that “those who say the Soviets have colonial designs on Iran are traitors.”[10] In attempting to get his point across, hyperbole became an often-used rhetorical tool. He astonishingly claimed that the Iranian “dictatorial regime has been far worse, far more dangerous than Hitler’s and Mussolini’s.”[11]

In another section of his book, he described his own life and his association with the other officers. He wrote of the eleven books he had published primarily about military subjects and described “more than two hundred scholarly presentations” he had given to different universities and at the Officers Academy.[12] He denied any links with the Tudeh Party on the grounds that the party was only a reformist party and that he and his comrades sought more radical solutions.[13] In the course of his unconvincing disavowal, he also denied any rumors of the party’s “connection” to the Soviet Union. “Any such accusation,” he claimed, “is the kind of injustice no reasonable and honorable human being will ever commit.”[14]

One of the most common themes of his attack on the Pahlavi regime was the idea that boys and girls had been “robbed of their honor” in this period. There are at least ten different references to sexual “honor,” three references to loose living, and many others to the fact that the ruling classes drank liquor, danced in cabarets, and gambled. In short, beneath the radical rhetoric, there lurks a kind of Puritanism that is hard to reconcile with Marxism, unless we keep in mind the structural similarities already enumerated between Stalinism and Shii Islam.

By the time the book was published, Ruzbeh’s reputation had reached beyond Iran’s borders. One English paper referred to him as Iran’s Lenin, while the Tudeh Party was soon desperate in its effort to bring him back to their fold. Ruzbeh, in the meantime, was disgruntled with the slow pace of political action in the organization he had created. He was in favor of more immediate, radical, and militant action. At the same time, he was by then fully convinced that only a Marxist group could save Iran. Armed with these two beliefs, he handpicked seven of his most reliable and ardent officers and friends, and together they formed a new organization whose main strategy was, in Ruzbeh’s own words, “[to] achieve our political goals more rapidly through political terrorism. . . . We further believed that the Tudeh Party was conservative, or at least its leaders were cowards and conservatives.”[15]

Two of this group of eight, Lieutenant Abolhassan Abbasi and a man named Hessam Lankarani, would play crucial roles in Ruzbeh’s future: the first caused his arrest and the latter was murdered by Ruzbeh in a scene reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s brilliant depiction of the dangers of revolutionary zeal in the appropriately titled novel The Devils. It has been suggested by some critics that the “group of eight” might have been a Soviet concoction from the outset. Others, more intimately informed about Ruzbeh’s life in this period, report his penchant for terrorism and his repeated attempts to convince the party leadership to allow him to rob a bank to collect much-needed funds or to assassinate the party’s political nemeses, like Ghavam.[16]

All of his clandestine activities came to a sudden halt in April 1947 (21 Farvardin 1326), when Ruzbeh was arrested. The authorities were more or less completely unaware of the extent and nature of his activities and had arrested him simply as an officer opposed to the regime. After less than a month, he succeeded in escaping from prison. Neither his arrest nor his escape would be his last such experience. He was, in the course of his life, arrested four times, and three times he succeeded in escaping. His second arrest came about a year later, in 1947 (Farvardin 1327). In his court-martial, he took the persona of a nationalist officer, concerned for the welfare of the nation and the crown. On more than one occasion, Ruzbeh appealed to the court to keep in mind the prestige of the shah, arguing that his arrest would damage that reputation.[17]

This time, he stayed in prison for about three years. In November 1950 (Azar 1329), he and nine prominent members of the Tudeh Party leadership were whisked away from prison in what remains one of the most daring prison rescue operations in twentiethcentury Iran. Members of the party, with Ruzbeh’s officers’ organization taking the lead, used forged court orders, hijacked trucks, and fake identity cards to free the ten prisoners. A lieutenant by the name of Hoseyn Gobadi played the key role in the escape. Tehran was immediately awash with rumors that the Soviet Union had a hand in the operation.[18] It was a sign of Ruzbeh’s importance that he was the only member of the freed group who did not belong to the central committee of the party. There was also the suspicion that Razmara, in coordination with the Soviet Union and with Ruzbeh, had a hand in facilitating the escape. Sensational as this episode was, Ruzbeh had at least two other close brushes with capture and the end of his political activity. Ironically, Gobadi was whisked away to “safety” in the Soviet Union. He soon became disgruntled with the party leadership and his life of exile. The Tudeh leaders responded by arranging his forced repatriation to Iran. He was arrested on the border and soon thereafter executed by the Iranian regime for his complicity in the famous escape.[19]

Ruzbeh’s next close encounter came in 1951, when the army’s “Second Unit” in charge of security received reports of suspicious activities in a house in one of Tehran’s poorer neighborhoods. Before the army investigators arrived there, local police officers took over the house as the scene of a crime. All efforts by the army to wrest control from the police failed. Several years later, when the officers’ organization was finally dismantled, authorities learned that the house had been a meeting place for the leadership of Ruzbeh’s organization. The police officer at the scene who insisted on remaining in charge of the investigation had been a member of the officers’ organization and had immediately hidden in his pockets some of the most sensitive documents that could have led investigators to the leadership of the organization, and possibly to Ruzbeh himself.[20]

The next encounter was even more incredible. This time, not long after August 1953, Ruzbeh was arrested in a raid on a house suspected of being used by the communists. Under interrogation, Ruzbeh gave a false name and refused to identify himself. In fact, all through his active years he went by the assumed name of Saidi.[21] In less than a week, his still active comrades whisked him away yet again, allowing him to continue his underground activities.

During the Mossadeq era, the officers’ organization, grown to about six hundred members, was, in the party’s own words, an “impenetrable shield” around the party. What was more crucial, it had become a tool in the hands of the Mossadeq government to thwart any effort by the shah or his supporters to move against Mossadeq. As it turned out, General Fazlollah Zahedi’s chief of staff, in the days Zahedi was preparing to oust Mossadeq, was a member of the Tudeh Party. He reported the plans for the coup on August 16 to the Tudeh Party, which then informed Dr. Mossadeq. It was eventually all for naught. The day belonged to General Zahedi. Mossadeq went into hiding, and Ruzbeh was entrusted with the task of organizing the logistical support for what the party hoped would be a prolonged “partisan struggle.”[22]

Such preparations, as well as the work of maintaining the party apparatus, since the police and the army were actively looking for members of the organization, was no easy task. It required money, and Ruzbeh volunteered to acquire some in a heist. With help from a couple of comrades, he managed to rob one of Tehran’s banks of about seven hundred thousand tooman (about $100,000) through an elaborate scheme that included forging checks.[23] By then Ruzbeh was in charge of the most crucial branch of the party, called its “Intelligence Bureau.” He was responsible for keeping the party free from infiltration and at same time was entrusted with the job of infiltrating other parties and governmental organizations.

But then the mathematics that had served him much of his life caused his demise. By a fluke, the police arrested one of Ruzbeh’s associates, and in his possession they found three notebooks filled with mathematical formulas. It turned out to be a code that included the name of every member of the organization. The noose was tightening around him. Party leaders, who had by then fled to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, tried to convince Ruzbeh to leave Iran and seek safe haven in exile. Angrily he refused, and in a harshly worded letter took the leaders to task for even entertaining the idea.

His place of hiding had been divulged to the police by one of his comrades. The military governor’s office, under the leadership of General Bakhtiyar, was in charge of fighting communists during this period and was notorious for the use of physical torture to extract information. Ruzbeh did not surrender peacefully, but only after he had been shot in the leg.[24]

Under interrogation, Ruzbeh confessed to killing at least two people—Hesam Lankarani and Mohammad Mas’ud. It is also likely that he was involved in the violent death of another member of the Tudeh Party who had begun cooperating with the police. The young man’s body was found on the outskirts of Tehran, bludgeoned to death.[25]

By all accounts, Ruzbeh bravely, even defiantly, defended his ideas in the court that condemned him to death. He refused to ask for a pardon and was executed in 1958 (21 Ordibehesth 1337). Of the more than six hundred officers arrested, he was one of the thirty-six to be executed. He had no children and had never married. Compared to his words to the first court that condemned him to prison—where he often conjured the names of Shiite imams and the necessity of preserving the dignity of monarchy in Iran—this time he was more intransigent, less accommodating, and more openly Marxist. His defiance and his willingness to die for the revolution made him a perfect candidate to become the quintessential martyr for the cause.

He was like a character from a le Carré novel. As his fame and reputation grew, his name and face disappeared from the public domain. To much of the population, he was simply known as “High Ranking Security Official.” To the political cognoscenti, he was one of the most powerful men in Iran during the last two decades of the Pahlavi era. To be summoned to his office was at once disquieting and a sign of importance. Ministers and generals, no less than dissident intellectuals and militant members of the opposition, listened attentively when he talked. And he talked with the calm and premeditation of a diplomat—choosing his words carefully, avoiding bombast, and invariably infusing a hint of menace into his discourse. Although to the opposition his name augured fear and loathing and was synonymous with torture and censorship, he was as much the theorist of the state as its enforcer. Not surprisingly, then, in his public demeanor, he was deliberate, soft-spoken, and usually polite. He had a true poker face, altogether bereft of public displays of affect. Neither anger nor anxiety, no more than pity or prevarication, changed his steely countenance. His name was Parviz Sabeti, and he was easily one of the most controversial figures in postwar Iran.

He joined SAVAK at its inception in 1957, and his rise in its ranks was rapid. In little more than a decade, he became the omnipotent head of the organization’s crucial Third Division, in charge of internal security. So powerful and pervasive—or in the eyes of the opposition, infamous—was his reputation and his shadow that SAVAK’s other necessary work, like its Eighth Division fighting Soviet espionage in Iran, was all but ignored. In his memoir of life in SAVAK, General Manuchehr Hashemi, for many years the head of the Eighth Division, complains that the success of his group in fighting Soviet spies was overshadowed by the reality or rumor of the Third Division’s tactics.[1] Furthermore, the wife of General Hassan Pakravan, the second chief of SAVAK, claims in an interview that during a gala dinner in the early 1970s, she refused to sit next to Sabeti in protest of what he had done to the organization’s reputation. The general himself, of course, had a far more sanguine view of Sabeti, telling his wife that, “each period had its own exigencies.”[2]

Regardless of his reputation, Sabeti was, by the mid-1970s, arguably one of the most informed men about Iranian politics. Furthermore, the shah by all accounts relied heavily on SAVAK for his survival and for intelligence. Nevertheless it is one of the most astonishing facts of Sabeti’s life, and a testimony to his controversial character and his complicated relationship with the shah, that all through his long career he was never granted a private audience with the king. Even when the shah was desperately searching for a solution to the crisis that threatened his throne, during the days that he sought out many antique political figures for advice, he still adamantly refused to meet with Sabeti. Eventually, at the insistence of the queen, he agreed to a meeting, under the condition that the queen should also be present. Sabeti demurred; in those days, as the power of the shah was fast waning, there were many who refused to heed his commands. Sabeti argued that only in a private audience could he tell the king all he needed to say. He knew well what many in the court had known for a long time. The shah was almost a different person in a private meeting than he was with more than one person present. Alone he was shy, attentive, agreeable, and willing to hear views different than his own; in company, he was stiff, intolerant of “saucy minions,” and unwilling to hear criticism.

Some have tried to suggest that the shah’s refusal to meet with Sabeti was the result of his unwillingness to circumvent the chain of command. He met regularly with Sabeti’s superior, General Ne’matollalh Nasiri, the head of SAVAK, and that obviated the need or the appropriateness of a meeting with someone like Sabeti. But this argument flies in the face of reality. The shah often broke the chain of command to meet with anyone he wanted to meet. Furthermore, when the throne was on the line, imagined chains of command must give way—as they in fact did—to the exigencies of the moment.

It was no less a measure of Sabeti’s power, and the complicated nature of his relationship with the shah, that when prominent figures of the government were arrested as a ploy to appease the opposition—forgetting that when the fever of revolution is at full pitch, feeding the frenzied appetite for revenge only “makes hungry when it most satisfies”— Sabeti, who would easily have been the opposition’s most cherished prey, was not only spared but was allowed to leave Iran. No sooner had he left Iran than Iran’s complicated conspiratorial cosmos was filled with rumors about his departure. Sabeti was spared, some said, because the CIA wanted him saved. General Fardust, for many years SAVAK’s deputy director, claimed in his vituperative memoir that Sabeti told him that the CIA was helping him leave Iran. It is interesting that in the same memoir, as Fardust hurled invective at nearly everyone in the political elite, he more or less spared Sabeti, writing that he was only “ambitious” and a “show boater.” Another conspiracy theory was that Mossad had saved Sabeti. In both theories, “he has had plastic surgery.” Some say he lives incognito in Israel; others have him active as “chief advisor” to Prince Reza Pahlavi.[3] In exile, no less than in his days of power, the “real” Sabeti is hidden under a heavy fog of rumor, gossip, innuendo, rightful criticism, and calculated disinformation.

Parviz Sabeti was born on March 25, 1936 (4 Farvardin 1315) in Sangesar, near the city of Semnan, a town perched on the lush mountains that skirt the arid desert in the geographic heart of Iran, known for its peculiar language, its unusual weather, and the disproportionately large number of Bahais who lived there.
Sabeti’s father was a sheep rancher of middle-class means. He was also a member of the Bahai faith. Later, as Sabeti’s reputation grew, his religion became the subject of considerable controversy. Parviz spent the first nine years of his education in his town of birth; for high school, he moved to Tehran, following his brother’s footsteps. He lived with his sister and brother-in-law and was registered at the famous Firouz Bahram high school—renowned for its academic excellence and for the fact that it had been set up by Zoroastrians.
His high school years coincided with the days when Iran was caught in a relentless battle among Mossadeq and his advocates, Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani and his followers, the Tudeh Party and its members, and finally the shah and his supporters. By all accounts Sabeti had no political engagement in this period. It is, after all, an article of faith for members of the Bahai religion not to engage in politics. At the same time, the young Sabeti had an avid curiosity about the world of politics, and thus, he read regularly about the news of the day. He had come to believe that of the four main forces in Iranian politics of the time, the Tudeh Party was the most potentially dangerous. In later years, his contempt for the communists helped shape his political views. Of the political figures of the time, he was one of the few who made no concessions—real or imaginary, theoretical or practical—to the communist point of view.

In 1954, he entered Tehran University’s Law School, which was modeled on the French system where students enter law school right out of high school and graduate in three or four years. In his last year of university, Sabeti sought employment as a teacher and was assigned to a small school in one of the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Tehran. In those days, the law school was lax in terms of its requirements for student attendance. Many students signed up for a class, showed up a couple of times to get a syllabus or the course reader, and then reappeared only during exam time. For his third year, Sabeti was among this group. He was teaching full time while enrolled as full-time student.

A degree in law usually led to a career in the judiciary or as a lawyer, and Sabeti chose the former, garnering an appointment as a judge. But before he could begin, he heard from a family friend that a new security organization was hiring. Sabeti changed his mind about the judgeship and applied for the new job. “It was,” he said, “a shortcut to a political future.”[4] By then his religious affiliations seemed to have changed and no longer posed a problem.

Sabeti was hired to work for the new organization, known by its acronym, SAVAK. His first job was as a political analyst. In the autobiography he submitted as part of his application, he wrote,

all through my education, I also helped my father with his sheep ranching and trade. I am competent in English and have also taken courses in judicial, economical, administrative and political fields. I have four brothers and a sister. All my life I have lived in a family that has been through my father a Bahai. Both my parents were Bahais. As for myself, I have been a Moslem from the time I reached maturity, and have received deferment from the military because I have been responsible for the livelihood of my family. My senior thesis has been on the subject of those immune from prosecution, namely juveniles and the mentally handicapped. As you can see, I am from the town of Sangesar.[5]

It is not clear how Sabeti managed to get his military deferment. His classification, as he indicates in his letter, implied that he was his family’s sole breadwinner, but considering the image he gave of his family’s economics, it is hard to imagine how that could have been the case. Nevertheless, Sabeti certainly impressed his recruiters and was hired to work as an analyst.

SAVAK, initially modeled on a combination of the CIA and the FBI at the time, had three different analytical sections—social, economic, and political—and before long Sabeti had become acting director of the important political section. The job consisted of preparing two types of reports. There were daily “top secret” intelligence briefs prepared in three copies. One was for the shah, the second for the prime minister, and the third for the head of SAVAK. The second type were special reports prepared on crucial and pending security topics, and usually for the shah’s “eyes only.” These were the reports that made Sabeti’s reputation, and in later years, some of the same reports, on the political situation as well as on corruption in men and women of power, got him repeatedly in trouble with the shah. Before long, Sabeti was chosen to head this department, lasting in the position for a little more than five years.

The first controversial report he wrote for the shah embodied his vision and method. It combined his hardheaded realism with an unabashed belief in the salutary use of force, even authoritarianism, in the early stages of economic and political development. He was a firm believer in the power and possibility of social engineering, while also condoning the use of extreme measures in achieving desired ends. The year of his first controversial report was 1962. Amini had come to power, and the United States had been pressuring the shah to have free and fair elections. The shah asked Pakravan, then head of SAVAK, to prepare a report on what would happen if there were free elections held in the country.

Sabeti was entrusted with the task of preparing the report. He first questioned the wisdom of the premise of the proposed policy. The source of unhappiness among the Iranian people, he claimed, was not the absence of democracy or free elections. In fact, people will support an authoritarian king so long as the regime is free from corruption and is moving the country in the right direction. Like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Sabeti believed that people prefer bread and security to freedom and want. Furthermore, he wrote, you cannot have free elections without first adequately preparing the people for such elections.

In the absence of such preparations, he concluded, free elections would bring nothing but chaos for the country and disaster for the shah. He then offered a district-by-district analysis of the probable results of a free election and concluded that at least a third of the elected members would be from the opposition. Because such members are organized and trained in the vagaries of politics, they would easily control the agenda and cripple the government’s ability to rule. “The shah hit the roof,” Sabeti remembered, “when he read the report.” He wanted to know who had written it. “This is all the nihilistic negativism of the opposition,” the shah reportedly declared. Furthermore, he ordered an investigation into the report’s methodology and conclusion. “If he can’t show how and why he arrived at these stark conclusions,” the shah ordered, “he should be put on trial.”[6]

A three-man commission was formed by Pakravan and after lengthy discussions and questioning, they concluded that no malice had been intended. The free elections were never held, but Sabeti’s basic philosophy remained the same. Before you could open the system, he believed, you had to reform it from inside and disarm the opposition by alleviating the social ills that provide them with propaganda material. For him, corruption was as much of a security problem as organized militancy. At the same time, he often argued that the ability and freedom of supporters of the system to criticize it must precede liberty for its opponents.

His views and prescriptions were very similar to those he advocated about fifteen years later, when the system was once again faced with a serious challenge. At that time, early in 1978, when the queen asked Sabeti why there was not more freedom in the country, he answered tartly, “Because there is no freedom for me to speak my mind. How can we allow the opponents to speak?”7 He went on to say that when he could openly and freely state his views about some of the men and women in power, then the opposition should also be given a free hand to articulate its views. As a “social engineer” he clearly did not seem to believe that freedom was an inalienable right of the people, but something leaders, more specifically enlightened despots, “give” to the people when they see fit. There is much evidence to suggest that he was, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a critic of corruption and nepotism not only in public figures, but also in members of the royal family. On more than one occasion, his reports on malfeasance by a member of the shah’s entourage—Hushang Davvalou Ghajar, for example—or members of the royal family, particularly the shah’s brothers and sisters, caused the ire of the shah. In one case, the shah told Hoseyn Fardust, SAVAK’s deputy director, to “find out what is wrong with this boy? He clearly has psychological problems.”[8]

In 1969, there was some restructuring in SAVAK, and Sabeti’s group was combined with the department responsible for fighting what were called subversive political groups. The groups were divided into five categories—communists, National Front, Kurds, secessionist movements, and Islamic radicals—with Sabeti in charge of dealing with communist groups. It was in this capacity that Sabeti first appeared on television and with
chilling efficiency described and lambasted the opposition groups outside Iran. He always appeared not under his own name, but under the title “High Ranking Security Official.” Another of his television appearances, in 1970, caused a serious diplomatic row between Iran, the United States, and England.

In a program describing General Bakhtiyar’s activities against the government of Iran, Sabeti declared that Iran has found clear evidence that the Western oil companies, in their effort to bring pressure on the shah to ease his demands for higher prices, had provided financial support for Bakhtiyar. In the same television program, Sabeti declared that student unrest inside and outside Iran had been associated with “imperialist sponsored extremist groups” and that they were “under strong influence of western imperialist policies which consider Iran’s industrial progress a threat to their market. [Earlier this year] the agent insinuated that HMG were supporting the Ba’thists, which you will remember, was a bee in the Shah’s bonnet.” England and the United States were not amused. The American Embassy contacted Alam, and the British issued a démarche and talked to the Foreign Ministry to register their views “fairly forcibly.” The British ambassador “pulled no punches in speaking with the Minister of Court, the Minister of Finance, and Dr. Egbal in the course of evening.”
Responding to this unusually strong reaction by the British and American governments, “the Iranians eventually put out an official statement . . . to the effect that the allegations against the oil companies were based on Bakhtiyar documents and statements and did not reflect the views of the Iranian government.”[9]

But whatever the diplomatic reaction, Sabeti’s several television appearances made him an overnight sensation. He did not fit the normal image of a SAVAK agent—faux leather jacket, gruff appearance, foul language, an innocuous pseudonym, invariably calling themselves “doctors.” Sabeti was a different breed. He was handsome, well dressed, well prepared, and combative though polite. In his work habits, he was dedicated and disciplined. He was unfailingly punctual. He arrived at work no later than seven in the morning. “The army officers seconded to SAVAK,” he said, “prided themselves in their ability to come to work according to the military hours. I too followed the same schedule.”

As his comments on thousands of documents since published by the Islamic Republic show, he was brief, firm, and clear when issuing orders. In conversation, as in his marginal notes, he went directly to the heart of matter. He spoke without any notes but seemed to have every fact at the tip of his fingers. “If you read from a text,” he had concluded, “then people do not believe you; they tend to think you are giving them propaganda.”10 He was then, as he is now, unabashed in his defense of the system. “The shah had his faults,” he says, “but considering what was before him, and what has come after him, and considering what there is in the area, he was the best system Iran could hope to have.”[11]

Gradually, as this image began to set in, as his power within the SAVAK bureaucracy grew, and as SAVAK’s power grew in Iran, he began to disappear from the public arena.

By 1970, as a new militancy began among some of the shah’s opponents in the form of armed guerrilla activities, what is today called terrorism, and as it became evident that interagency rivalries among the police, SAVAK, and the army’s intelligent unit was hurting the fight against the new militant groups, a new Joint Committee to Fight Terrorism was set up, and Sabeti was its de facto leader. The committee always had a nominal head from the ranks of the military, but Sabeti was its leader. He arrived at the infamous “Joint Committee” with the pomp and security of a head of state. Interrogators, who in the confines of their own offices often had delusions of divine power, vied with each other for a chance to be in the same room with him. The “Committee” developed a notorious reputation as a den of torture and brutality, and in the public imagination it was Sabeti’s name that was identified with the committee and its notoriety. There is no doubt that there was torture in the prisons at the time. But there is also much evidence to indicate that torture became a routine part of prison after the rise of terrorism in Iran. Before that time, there had been some torture and beatings, but systematic torture was a new phenomenon. SAVAK agents were faced with a new breed of militants who had cyanide pills under their tongues, ready to kill or die for the cause any minute.

By then Sabeti was the head of SAVAK’s Third Division, in charge of internal security. His power was such that even the long survival of Hoveyda as prime minister, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, was in no small measure the result of his close friendship with Sabeti. The two men met regularly for lunch. So close and intimate was the relationship that it was often assumed by Amir-Abbas Hoveyda’s foes that he used SAVAK to sabotage his enemies.

The rising tide of revolution put Sabeti even more than before at the center of Iranian politics. On the one hand, SAVAK and its practices had become a major bone of contention for the opposition. International media and jurists were also increasingly vocal in their criticism of torture in Iran. On the other hand, for years SAVAK had been a pillar of power in Iran, and now, in an effort to appease the opposition, its power was gradually reduced. General Nasiri was replaced by General Nasser Moghadam as the new head of SAVAK, and from the outset the latter’s liberalizing attitude put him at odds with Sabeti, who believed that such liberalization would jeopardize the system.

As it became clear that Carter was winning the elections in America, and that he would bring pressure on the shah to open up the system politically, Sabeti says he prepared another lengthy report like the controversial one he had written in 1961. The situation in 1976, he wrote, was far more fraught with danger than it had been in 1961. There were millions more living in urban centers; another few million had been added to the ranks of the country’s students. The opposition was more organized than before and some of them had training in armed battle. Liberalization, he concluded, could bring the system to a crashing fall.

Once again the shah hit the roof. “How can Sabeti be so negative,” he reportedly said. “Does he mean to say that our White Revolution has accomplished nothing?” Needless to say, in spite of Sabeti’s views, liberalization went on.

As the situation deteriorated, on more than one occasion Sabeti suggested the use of force to change the political dynamics in the country. As late as May 1978, he believed that his Third Division could turn back the tide. Through Hoveyda he sent a message to the shah asking for permission to arrest some three thousand people. “We can still control the situation,” he said, “if we are allowed to do our work.” Although the shah knew that at least part of his problem was in fact “the work” SAVAK had done in the past, he was by then sufficiently interested to ask for a specific plan of action. Sabeti worked on preparing the list of those to be arrested. The plan was submitted to the shah, who agreed to the arrest of only a small fraction of those on the list. SAVAK went to work, a few hundred leaders were arrested, and, in fact, the situation did, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, quiet down.

But then at the instigation of Amuzegar, many of the detainees were released. “What are we going to say to the human rights group?” he asked. “Hell with the human rights group,” Sabeti responded.[12]

As the situation deteriorated, Sabeti had one last plan of action. He wanted the shah to declare a state of emergency, dismiss the Parliament, and close the American and British Embassies to protest the BBC and Western media’s role in encouraging riots. The iron fist, he suggested, must replace the velvet revolution; only after reestablishing law and order could the shah begin to implement the necessary changes, but from a position of strength, not weakness. The shah dismissed the suggestion as childish. A few weeks later, Sabeti left Iran for a life of exile.

Easily the revelation most damaging to Sabeti’s career came after the revolution, from one of SAVAK’s star interrogators. During his trial, he revealed what the opposition had known for many years. At the height of terrorist activities, one of the groups had killed a prominent leader of SAVAK. Nine leading figures of the opposition—all already tried and convicted on different charges—were taken to the hills outside Tehran and shot in cold blood. The list included Bijan Jazani who had been a mastermind of one of these terrorist groups. Newspapers at the time reported that the nine had been killed while attempting to escape from prison.

As it turns out, three of the nine were, in fact, trying to escape. Their childish attempt had been thwarted in its first stage. But in retribution for the successful executions of SAVAK, government, and business leaders, the nine, who were thought to be chief theorists of the newly founded armed groups, were executed. In the course of the revelations, the interrogator made clear that while Sabeti did not directly participate in the act, he was not only informed but was the mastermind. For his turn, Sabeti categorically denies any role in the incident. “What happened in that case,” he claims, “is what the papers reported at the time. The Islamic Court’s revelations are propaganda.”

In exile, Sabeti has kept out of the limelight. He has, he says, written a two-thousand page, yet-to-be-published memoir. He lives with his wife of more than thirty years and has two children, both successful professionals. As reappraising the legacy of the Pahlavi era is now a subject of intense curiosity and shifting sensibilities inside and outside Iran, Sabeti, and his controversial role, is never far from the center of the debate.

For a whole generation of Iranian intellectuals and political figures, Gholanhoseyn Sadiqi had a near mythical reputation. He was known for his impressive erudition, his unfailing intellectual honesty, his particular affinity for the ideas of Aristotle, his indefatigable search for scholarly rigor and impartiality, his perfectionism in prose, his positivist bend as a sociologist, and, finally, his support for the rule of law and the idea of a representative democracy. He was also known for his deep devotion to Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. He had twice served time in prison during the shah’s rule—once after 1953 and then again in 1962—and was seen as one of his most intractable foes. For more than a decade, when his daughter studied outside Iran, he denied himself the chance to visit her because he said, “I refuse to ask for a passport from an illegitimate regime that came as a result of the August coup.”[1] All his adult life, he had cultivated and cherished his unblemished and esteemed reputation as a man of unbending, principled opposition to the shah. Yet to his friends’ and comrades’ consternation, when he saw Iran in a moment of crisis in 1978, he showed himself willing to risk that reputation, if he could save the country from clerical despotism.

His comrades of three decades in the leadership of the National Front immediately went on a rampage against him. They seemed to have a variety of reasons for their rancor and anger—some could simply not forgive the shah for what he had done to their leader, Dr. Mossadeq; others were apparently jealous as their own ambitions had been thus thwarted; and a third group preferred second fiddle to Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution to a secular democratic alternative. When their private attempts to dissuade Dr. Sadiqi failed, they published public rebukes. One of the leaders warned him that the reputation he had worked thirty years to develop would be destroyed if he agreed to work with the shah. Dr. Sadiqi, unfailingly polite in all his dealings, told the man, “Sir, I have not developed a reputation for the grave, but for my country and I am more than willing to forfeit my reputation if I can save my country.”

A quarter of century earlier, even in the days when he worked with Dr. Mossadeq as the minister of the interior, he was never afraid to do or say what he thought was the morally and legally right course of action. For example, when Dr. Mossadeq decided to hold a referendum in 1953 to dismiss the Parliament, Dr. Sadiqi was among a handful of advisors who spoke out, telling “my leader”—as he called Mossadeq—that the action was constitutionally dubious and doubtful in its political merits, and that it would certainly send the wrong message.[2] Moreover, his account of the events of the August 19, 1953, are truly exemplary in their honesty, attention to details, and aversion to sycophancy.[3] In the years after the coup of 1953, he continued to support Mossadeq and paid a high price for his continued allegiance.

Nevertheless, in 1978, he was willing to forget the acrimonies and bitter experiences of the past and, with searing honesty, appraise the dangers facing the country, and then prove willing to come to the rescue of the very regime he had fought for three decades. In 1973, in a talk he gave upon his appointment as university professor, he said, “Science and ethics are the two essential elements of power and privilege, and those who have both have in reality everything.” Few men of his generation had more of these two essential elements than Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi. His is a true profile in courage and erudition.

Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi was born in Tehran on December 4, 1905 (Azar 1284) to a middle-class family, and in the traditional and unmistakably middle-class neighborhood of Sarcheshmeh.[4] He was a child prodigy; the frailty of his physique stood in sharp contrast to the intensity of his intelligence. He went to “modern” schools, instead of the traditional maktab, finishing at Dar al-Funun. After high school, he took the national exam that determined who would win the government scholarships to study abroad. He was among those chosen and went to Paris, where he first enrolled in l’Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud. He received his doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne in 1937. He was the first Iranian to have completed a doctoral degree in sociology and is by consensus considered the “father of modern sociology in Iran.”[5] In fact, he coined the Persian term for sociology—Jame’ Shenasi. His dissertation, on the nature of religious movements in the first two centuries after the Arab invasion of Iran, was published first in French and eventually, after many years and many revisions, in Persian as well. In the book, he talked of the two centuries as “a purgatory” where the old habits and beliefs of pre-Islamic Iran came into conflict with the new Arab ethos of Islam.[6] In subsequent years, he focused his scholarly attention on modern Iranian history, particularly the period of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905.

Immediately after his return home, he began to teach in the newly created Tehran University. He helped create the Sociology Department in the Faculty of Letters. He remained a teacher until the day he retired and was made a university professor at Tehran University in 1973. It was part of the Sadiqi lore around academic circles that he never missed a class or left his job as a professor. Even when he joined the cabinet as a minister during the tumult of the Mossadeq era, he kept teaching his class and was always on time.[7] Another element of his lore was his unique behavior.

The Mossadeq era was when Sadiqi entered the world of politics. He joined the National Front as soon as it was created. When Mossadeq was named prime minister, he asked Sadiqi to join him, first as minister of post and telegraph, and then as the all-important minister of the interior, in charge of all security forces. More important, he became one of the closest and most trusted advisors to Dr. Mossadeq.

But power had no corrupting influence on Sadiqi’s character and behavior. His attitude and his treatment of others—from peers to students, from political allies to foes—was the epitome of dignity and respect, fairness and impartiality. In one of his many moments of cultural self-introspection, he said, “Our biggest problem, as Iranians, is unfairness, particularly unfairness in our judgment of others.”[8] His discourse and demeanor exuded his aversion “to kitsch and crude behavior.”[9] More than anything, he valued erudition. “There is no sin,” he wrote, “bigger than ignorance.”[10] He was unfailingly polite; that is why the story of the one time he apparently slapped Aredeshir Zahedi, when the latter was arrested for conspiring against the government of Mossadeq, was seen as an exception to the rule. But even Zahedi, like nearly everyone else in the country, had such respect for Sadiqi that each of the two other times he met Sadiqi—once when Sadiqi and Mossadeq surrendered after the August 1953 coup, and then again a quarter century later, when they met at court to discuss the possibility of forming a government of national reconciliation—Zahedi treated “the professor” with outmost deference and respect.

This respect did not save Sadiqi from the agony of prison. In his trial after the August coup, he bravely and defiantly defended Mossadeq’s leadership and his own actions as minister. Some feared that because of his important role in organizing the referendum that figured prominently in the Mossadeq trial, Sadiqi might even be condemned to death.[11] But he was given a jail sentence. There was much pressure from inside and outside the country for the Iranian government to release Sadiqi and the other National Front leaders who had been university professors before the August 1953 events. When he was finally released, Sadiqi wanted to go back to teaching sociology at the university. The shah initially opposed the idea, but eventually he agreed, particularly after Dr. Aliakbar Siyasi, the new rector of the university and a close friend of Sadiqi’s, insisted on the latter’s return.

In 1959, when Ehsan Naragi launched the Institute for Social Research, connected to Tehran University, he asked Sadiqi to be its director. “Only his name,” Naragi said, “was enough to afford our new institution legitimacy.”[12] Sadiqi agreed. Moreover, almost exactly a decade after helping launch the National Front, when the Second National Front was formed, in 1960, Sadiqi was one of the founders. At the famous mass rally of the new National Front held in Jalaliye—a vast open space used for horse racing—while everyone delivered fiery speeches, his was pithy, parsimonious, and prudent. The speech, which began with a quote from Aristotle, lasted only a few minutes and was about the corruption of the elections and the necessity of reforming the situation.[13]

Not long after that Jalaliye meeting, a large caucus of the National Front members was convened and new leadership was elected. Of the 35 people chosen for the central committee, Sadiqi received 121 votes, with only 7 others receiving more.[14] The electoral success soon cost him his freedom, as SAVAK decided to arrest the entire leadership. But even SAVAK reports of his actions during that period repeatedly refer to Sadiqi’s prudence and his aversion to bombast and belligerence.

After returning to the university, Sadiqi resumed his scholarship. Aside from his dissertation, which he translated and published in Persian himself, his other two published books were about Aristotle and his place in ancient Greek philosophy. But his introduction to the Persian translation of Aristotle’s Athenian Democracy, written about the time of the Jalaliye speech, is a perfect example of the style of his work and the structure of his thought. Sadiqi was devoted to Aristotle, but his disdain for dogma, absolutes, and abstractions extended to the philosopher he calls the “first teacher,” following a long tradition among Iranian thinkers and philosophers. Sadiqi criticizes the “first teacher” for his defense of slavery and his position on the question of women.

The history of political philosophy can, in one sense, be divided into two tendencies. Some see political philosophy as an instrument of “soulcraft.” They have no tolerance for the imperfections of the human soul and seek to build a utopia where the custodians of an absolute truth rule. The origins of totalitarianism and varieties of theocratic despotism can be found in this tradition. Plato is often thought to be the first and foremost proponent of this tendency.[15]

Others see the goal of political philosophy as “statecraft.” They are cognizant of human imperfections and want to create not a utopia, but the most pragmatic, workable system. Citizens are not the tools of politics but its goal, and governments are not masters or shepherds of the people but their servants. They believe that the best form of government is based on the rule of law. As Sadiqi’s life and writings clearly show, he belongs squarely to this tradition, advocating elements of the Aristotelian philosophy, along with the theory of modern representative democracy.

The first important point concerning the pithy introduction he wrote to Aristotle’s Athenian Democracy was the time of its publication: 1964, precisely at the time of the rise of radical Islam and its demand for theocracy. It also coincided with the rise of radicals of the Left such as Hamid Ashraf,[16] who had become disgruntled with traditional politics and were beginning to advocate “guerrilla warfare” or what is today called terrorism. Finally, it was the period when the shah’s personal and increasingly authoritarian rule was eroding the foundations of the Iranian constitution. It is tempting to see the introduction as Sadiqi’s political intervention in the ongoing debate. It can also be seen as the dress rehearsal for the truly brave political position he took on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. Sadiqi’s aversion to radicalism and to the false certitudes of ideology convinced him, in 1978, to break with his comrades of three decades and try to avert a revolution.

Late in 1978, soon after the shah appointed General Azhari as head of a “military cabinet,” ostensibly to bring back law and order, in his own words, he “resumed discussions with opposition figures.”[17] The shah contacted Sadiqi through Huchang Nahavandi,[18] a one-time rector of Tehran University, and Mohiodine Nabavi Nouri, a professor of law at the same university.[19] Of all the leaders of the National Front, Sadiqi was the one to whom the shah seemed most favorably disposed; he considered Sadiqi “a patriot. [Sadiqi] agreed without condition to try to form a coalition but asked for a week of reflection to which I agreed.”

But Sadiqi did have in fact one condition, and it was that the shah should not leave Iran but instead go to a military base somewhere in the south of Iran, remain there for a few weeks, and appoint a regency council in the meantime. Sadiqi wanted to use the time to calm the situation down, and he knew that he needed the army if he was to survive. He also knew that only the presence of the shah could guarantee the army’s loyalty to a Sadiqi government. As the shah admits, “Dr. Sadiqi was the only political leader who begged me not to leave Iran.” The shah, however, incredibly refused to accept the deal because, in his words, “appointing a Regency Council while remaining in the country was unacceptable because it implied that I was incompetent to perform my duties as sovereign.”[20] Ultimately, the idea of a Sadiqi government failed to materialize, and today many concur that he might have been the one chance the shah had for survival. During the last days before the shah’s departure, Sadiqi made one more effort to dissuade him from leaving the country. “With the shah gone, Iran will be lost,” he had said.[21]

It was a measure of Sadiqi’s stature as a public intellectual that in spite of the fact that he had taken steps to avert the revolution, when the Islamic revolutionaries seized power, they never arrested him or attacked him directly in the media. He died on April 29, 1991 (9 Ordibehesht 1371) in Tehran. He left behind thousands of cards on which he had taken carefully detailed notes on different issues of interest to him throughout his life. He also kept a daily journal, simple but precise jottings of every day’s important events. Neither the notes nor the journal have yet been published.

Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman[1] was a man of many talents and discordant desires. Behind the stern solemnities of his always-decorous demeanor, there raged an unrelenting battle between the sedate intellectual passions of a life of letters and the exhilarating traumas and tensions of a life in politics. He had held often-powerful ministerial positions in some of the most troubled moments in modern Iranian history, yet he always seemed ready to leave the world of power and return to the quiet contemplations of academia. He wrote some seminal essays and books on the question of modernity and Iran’s encounter with the West; indeed, Jalal Al Ahmad’s controversial book Westoxication—arguably the most influential book on the subject for a whole generation of Iranian intellectuals—was deeply indebted to Shadman.[2] His prose was often praised for its pristine quality, rich vocabulary, and creative use of Persian poetry.[3] Despite all that, his fame as a writer and intellectual came posthumously.

Not has much has been written about his political role, either. He never sought the limelight himself, and in the often-partisan field of Persian political historiography he had no patron saints. The opposition never forgave him for accepting a post in the controversial cabinet formed by General Fazlollah Zahedi just after the ousting of Mossadeq, and the royalists saw him as a difficult and diffident man.

Shadman was born in Tehran in 1907 (1286) in Pamenar, the fascinating neighborhood in old Tehran where many of the city’s political and economic elite lived. In fact the street he lived on—Hayat Shahi—was named after a cleric of renown who happened to be both a neighbor and one of Shadman’s early tutors in Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence. Fakhroddin’s father, Hajdi Abu Torab, was himself a cleric—less a man of learning than a master of mourning. His elegiac voice and his kind demeanor made him a popular figure around the neighborhood. Shadman’s mother, Masoume, an enlightened woman well versed in Persian classics and the Qur’an, was from the family of Khaleogli in Tabriz. They were a merchant family of affluence, and it was more her inherited wealth than Abu Torab’s often meager earnings that allowed the family to live a life of relative comfort. Commensurate with her economic independence was her powerful presence as the matriarch of the family.[4]

Fakhroddin was the eldest child of a large family of six brothers and one sister. Save one, who was something of an autistic savant, and another who entered the army and never went beyond the rank of lieutenant general, the other four brothers all entered the arena of politics and reached the pinnacles of power.[5] On one occasion, the shah gave an audience to five of the brothers and praised them for their devotion to the crown and their services to the country.

Like nearly everyone else of his generation, Shadman began his student life in a traditional madrese dressed in the garb of a mullah. Soon however he enrolled in a more secular school, Dar al-Funun, and then at Tehran’s Teachers’ Training College. Secular attire followed fast on the heels of secular schools. He shed the turban and the robe and began to dress, as he did for the rest of his life, in dapper suits and conservative ties.
No sooner had he begun his schooling than his lifelong passion for learning, his insatiable curiosity about traditional Persian letters and Islamic theology, as well as new Western ideas and theories, earned him a reputation as a young man of unseasonable erudition. He was still a student at the Teachers’ Training College when in 1926 he published his first essay under the pseudonym of Amuzegar, or “Teacher.” His second essay was part of the inaugural issue of a journal called Toufane Hafetegi. By 1928, he rose to the position of the journal’s editor.

When Ali Akbar Davar was given the task of reforming and secularizing the Iranian judiciary, he invited Shadman to join him in the new ministry. His probity in financial matters, his strict adherence to the letter of the law, and his impressive command of Persian letters had endeared him to Davar. Shadman was appointed the lead prosecutor in the famous Lindenblat case, in which the German financial advisor to the Iranian government was accused of fraud. Shadman’s successful prosecution of the high profile case brought him temporarily into the limelight. Even more important was the fact that his performance had so impressed Davar that, at his behest, Shadman was sent to London to become Iran’s vice commissar in the British Petroleum Company.

The assignment lasted until 1946 and proved formative in Shadman’s subsequent intellectual and emotional life. Some of the most enduring friendships of his life, particularly with Allame Qazvini and Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, had their genesis in this period. In London, he also found a woman he loved. Her name was Farangis. A scion of the Nemazi family, renowned in Iran for their wealth and their acts of philanthropy, she was erudite, elegant, and fiercely independent. Her Persian renditions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire established her reputation as a translator of considerable talent. Theirs was for its time an unusual marriage, based not on family or economic expedience but on enduring love and mutual intellectual cooperation. They married in 1941, in a simple ceremony in war-torn London.
Shadman also used his years in Europe to pursue his pedagogical goals. He earned two doctoral degrees, one in law from the Sorbonne in 1935, the other in political science from the London School of Economics in 1938. Soon after receiving his second degree, he began to teach in London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He also was a key member of the “Iran House,” an important cultural group organized by prominent British scholars such as Basil Grey and Reinhardt Nicholson. Their goal was to promote the study of Persian culture. Shadman himself gave a couple of talks at the institute. At the same time, he published a few articles in English in scholarly journals of the time.

Upon his return, he set out on a tremulous course bent on satisfying his two discordant desires. On the one hand politics beckoned. The country was in the throes of a serious crisis and no Persian nationalist, he argued, could remain a mere spectator. On the other hand, the life of an intellectual was no less appealing. His first appointment was far from such a life. He was to head Iran’s state-run insurance company.

About the same time, he published what turned out to be, in his mind, the most important book of his life. It was called Conquering the Culture of the West. By this time he had shown himself to be a fair novelist, a masterful essayist, and a deft translator. His most important work of translation was Albert Malle and Jule Isak’s History of the Modern World. His three novels were widely different and uneven in terms of their formal cohesion and sophistication. The longest, called Darkness and Light, was his most widely read book. It was serialized in one of Tehran’s most popular dailies. The two other novels—On the Road to India and The Nameless Book—were more enigmatic in form and content. His last published book was a collection of essays called The Tragedy of Farang.

If we accept Steiner’s notion that to “read is to compare,” and that the core of the hermeneutic exercise is “linguistic critical comparison,” then Shadman was a singularly competent reader. He rejoiced in his Persian heritage. He was at home in English, French, and Arabic. Echoes of Hafez and Sai’di, Shakespeare and Browning, Homer and Ferdowsi can be heard equally in his narrative. He was that rare embodiment of the Goethean ideal of “world literature” that seeks to articulate “ideals, attitudes of sensibility which belong to universalizing civilities . . . of Enlightenment.”[6]

Beneath the formal diversity of his opus, one can discern a few important thematic unities and common threads. His politics, too, were often inseparably linked to the ideas he expounded in his books. In the dreamy cosmos of his novels, and in the somber space of his essays, the refrain is the question that Montesquieu had presciently asked in the eighteenth century. How, he wanted to know, can one be a Persian in the modern world and fashion an identity amenable to new and fast-changing realities?

Shadman insisted that in refashioning such a self, Persians must not relinquish their past. Nor can they cling to it in some quixotic delusion of grandeur. As with the West, which recaptured its Greco-Roman heritage in the Renaissance, for Shadman an Iranian renaissance must rely on reclaiming the Persian past rather than on an impotent emulation of the European experience.

A crucial component of this liberating identity was, for Shadman, the Persian language. He believed that language was not merely a tool of thought but a concomitant part of the cognitive process itself. A nation of sound mind and self-assured identity will have a language that is equally lucent and cogent. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, enfeebled Iran’s encounter with a newly empowered West shattered the Iranian sense of self, and the Persian language went into a period of crisis. Iran, Shadman argued, had survived many past historical calamities. But of all the challenges the country had met in its long history—from the invasion of Greek and Roman armies to the Arab and Mongolian invasions—none could compare with the challenge offered by the West.

The danger was only augmented by the presence of what Shadman pejoratively called the fokolis, or literally “the bow-tied ones.” They are pseudointellectuals, dangerous harbingers of doom and degradation. They know nothing about the true cultural accomplishments of the West yet consider themselves experts on the Occident; they are equally in the dark about the cultural heritage of their own country. In fact, they disdain all that is Persian and cherish nothing more than becoming farangi. Aside from a few foreign words they use to intimidate their listeners, they know no European languages, yet they consistently make fun of the Persian language and chastise it for its inability to cope with the exigencies of the modern world. By the last years of his life, Shadman had grown so disgruntled with the pattern of change in Iran that in a hitherto unpublished work, he decried the fact that just this kind of fokoli seemed to have gained the upper hand in Iranian politics.

The concept of fokoli was not limited to westophile intellectuals. Equally sinister and dangerous were, in his mind, the reactionary mullahs “who misconstrue the words of the prophet” and are obsessed with finding a widow to abuse or milk for their own illegitimate gain. They also disdain the Persian language, and by their insistence on using Arabic words and even Arabic language they help the linguistic and cultural crisis that has befallen Iran.

Shadman had in fact a nuanced approach to religion; he was a secularist who nevertheless believed in the ontological necessity of religion. Contrary to many of Iran’s radical modernists, he was not a foe of religion as an institution. Dogmatism and religious obscurantism were his bane. He was himself deeply religious, but true to his ideas, he never forced his views and preferences on other people. Long before the Islamic Republic mandated that all public discursive acts must begin by reciting certain Qur’anic verses, Shadman would began all his official speeches by first invoking the name of God. At the same time, he advocated nothing short of a cultural revolution whose purpose would be to cultivate rationalism and skepticism in thought, reformation in religion, and secularism in politics.

In attempting this revolution, Shadman cautioned Persians to avoid trying to repeat the European experience. On the one hand, he suggested that Persians must “doubt nearly every claim made by the farangis,” particularly their claim to “support freedom.” He wrote of the days when Europe used its power “at every turn to oppress others and in non-European societies fostered corruption, bribery and treason.” They degraded “anyone who was not of European stock.” He admonished Europeans for becoming “supporters and allies of traitors, and corrupt rulers, and an enemy of every patriot.” In Shadman’s vision of colonial history, “the West, in collusion with ignoble noblemen, illegitimate entrepreneurs and contractors more corrupt than bandits” have ruined the Iranian economy and saturated it with “useless commodities.”[7]

Other than this colonial heritage, there are other reasons he thought Iran should not simply emulate farang. The dawn of the West, he declared, had ended and the dusk had begun. In a language reminiscent of and most likely influenced by Spangler and Grosse, he wrote, “the West is sick, and badly troubled.”8 Furthermore, the West was, in his view, no longer a unified entity. He cautioned Iranian politicians not to put all their eggs in the American basket. England will still matter, he insisted.

All these ideas, of course, were not just an intellectual exercise for him. His increasingly prominent political positions, and his entry in the cabinet in 1947 first as minister of the national economy and then of agriculture allowed him to put some of his ideas into practice. When in 1953 he was named minister of the national economy in General Zahedi’s cabinet, one of his first policy initiatives was to establish a College of Petroleum for the specific purpose of training Iranian technicians and engineers and ridding the country of its dependence on foreign advisors.

After the Ministry of National Economy came an appointment as minister of justice, where his governmental services had begun. In 1955 he was named the virtual head of an endowment fund in Meshed that handled the vast holdings of Imam Reza, the Shiites’ Eighth Imam. By then Shadman’s financial probity had become an important part of his political capital. He also had an unbending commitment to preserving the letter and spirit of the law. As he had often argued in his books and essays, the rule of the law was the key to the success of the West. His own demeanor and discourse was always courteous and formal. In talking to everyone, regardless of age or social status, he used the plural, polite shoma (you). These qualities of honesty, candor, and unbending legalism had hitherto served him well. They now threatened to end his political career. A report by the British Embassy entitled “Notes on Meshed, June 1957” is a pithy account of Shadman’s experience in Meshed:

The thing that struck me in Meshed this time was the extreme nervousness of the authorities. . . . A month or so ago, a cleaner in the washroom of the shrine found a number of Korans in the cesspit. . . . He dashed off and told the louder-mouthed Mullahs. . . . They proceeded to belabor the unfortunate Dr. Shadman. . . . The titular administrator is the Shah and Shadman, his representative. When he took the job two years ago, he found a scandalous state of affairs, the shrine heavily in debt, its vast capital largely idle, its revenues squandered and embezzled by a horde of grafting priests. Shadman has slowly but persistently cleaned this Augean stable, until this year for the first time in living memory, the shrine’s finances were actually in the black. And the Mullahs, their racket liquidated, are sharpening their knives for him. Dr. Shadman accused the Mullahs of a sacrilegious plot. And the Mullahs, with one voice, accused Dr. Shadman. . . . Reza Shah must have been spinning in his grave at this. To see the arrogance and the effrontery of the Mullahs. . . . How the old tyrant must despise the weakness of his son, who has allowed these turbulent priests to regain so much of their reactionary influence.[9]

Ultimately Shadman did not survive the crisis. The conditions of his resignation are not altogether clear. Family rumor had it that his demise also had to do with a financial row with the shah himself. One thing is sure, however. That was the last political appointment he ever had.

He resumed full-time teaching at Tehran University, where he had long held the chair for History of Civilizations. He also began to work on what he hoped would be his magnum opus. It borrowed its title from Nezamal Mulk’s Siyasatnameh—one of the greatest works of Persian literature and political thought—and was to be called Siyasatnameh Dar Iran. From the small fragments that were published, it became abundantly clear that he took an increasingly critical attitude toward the Pahlavi regime. He lamented the rise of a new species of politicians who were, in his words, “alien to all that is genuinely Persian” and know nothing other than “mere mimicry of the West.” The harsh tone of these published words—repeated with equal zeal in his oral pronouncements to anyone who would listen—brought about the ire of the regime. He was given a friendly warning through his brothers, but it was to no avail.

He spent the last years of his life reading and writing. He loved Persian poetry and could spend endless hours reading the masters. “One of my reasons for wanting to live,” he once declared, “is to read more Persian poetry.” Persian, he said, is the language of poetry. With no hint of hyperbole, he declared, “the best poetry in the world is in Persian.”[10] He also loved the literature of Europe, particularly Shakespeare. He had developed late in life a deep curiosity about the American experience. He traveled a great deal in the last years of his life, including a long trip to the United States. His circle of friends included some of the luminaries of the literary world. But his eclectic habits of mind included an affinity for American-style wrestling, which had just become a fad with the advent of television in Iran.

While his love of Persian poetry and his devotion to Sufi poets indicated his spiritual side, there was in him an equally strong cerebral side. He saw everything through a scholarly prism. When he fell sick early in 1967, he read voraciously in Avicenna, and in his encyclopedia of medicine, and correctly diagnosed his own disease as deadly. He had cancer, and when the seriousness of the disease was discovered, he was immediately sent to London. But it was too late. He died in 1967 in a London hospital. As he wished, his body was returned to Iran, where it was interred near the shrine of Imam Reza in Meshed.

He was a man of many faces and enigmas. Inspite of a damaged reputation, he survived at the pinnacle of power for almost thirty years. He was sometimes called “Mr. Five Percent” for his alleged habit of eliciting a payoff from major government contracts. One journalist, when free to write his opinion, described him as “materialistic, vulgar, opportunistic . . . as greedy in accumulating wealth as he was miserly in spending it.”[1] In 1961, the American Embassy in Tehran, writing in the days when Sharif-Emami’s tenure as the prime minister had just ended, referred to “some of the plunders which had gone on” during his tenure.[2] To his son, Ali, however, his father’s tarnished image was simply the result of a “failure to communicate” and a victory for his many foes. Ali also believed that much of his father’s troubles were rooted in the fact that “he was opposed to the Americans.”[3]

More than any other public figure of his generation, Sharif-Emami embodied Freemasonry in Iran, and Freemasons have been the obsession of modern Iranian politics. Sharif-Emami was known to be the Grand Master of all the lodges in Iran. In public perception, the fact that he was among the handful of people who never kissed the shah’s hands was the direct result of his high rank in the Masonic Order.[4]

He served as prime minister twice; both tenures were short-lived. The first lasted a little more than seven months; the second under seventy days. On both occasions, the shah and his regime faced serious crises: in 1961, Sharif-Emami’s tenure almost ended in the shah’s exile; in 1978, his premiership facilitated the fall of monarchy in Iran.

In spite of his role as a Grand Master of the Masonic Order and common whispers about financial malfeasance, Sharif-Emami was for almost fifteen years the head of the Pahlavi Foundation, a charitable organization created with some of the shah’s wealth. Under Emami’s aggressive leadership, the foundation vastly expanded its operations.

It invested in everything from factories to hotels and built and operated all of Iran’s casinos. His own daughter was famous in Tehran as a bon vivante and member of the “jet set,” yet on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, when the clergy in Iran—particularly Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari—were asked to offer candidates to replace Amuzegar as prime minister, Sharif-Emami’s name was one of the two proffered.[5] It was suggested that he had “close ties” with the clergy.

Ironically, in spite of all the rumors about him, the shah chose him to create a “government of national reconciliation” only months before the revolution. In this capacity, Sharif-Emami’s strategy for fighting the revolution seemed to consist only of caving in to the revolutionaries’ demands even before they made them. But in times of revolution, feeding the appetite for blood and revenge simply leaves the masses hungry for more. A key element of his appeasement policy was his plan to arrest some of the pillars of the shah’s regime, including Hoveyda and many of his ministers. When this policy failed, and when his government was faced with increasingly violent demonstrations, he abruptly changed course and declared martial law. The sudden change led to “Black Friday,” the bloodiest confrontation between the army and the demonstrators and surely one of the catalysts for the revolution.

For those who subscribe to a conspiracy theory of the Islamic Revolution, the Freemasons naturally top the list of the “usual suspects.” In this view, Sharif-Emami’s tactics were not just errors and miscalculations but were part of a clever design to stoke the fires of discontent. When by design or default, the fires raged into a full revolution, SharifEmami quietly left Iran and spent the rest of his life in exile. Sometimes he was busy investing some of his money with his son on the Internet bandwagon, at other times he tried to learn Spanish, but he was always fighting the demons of his past. Controversy remained his constant companion.

Ja’far Sharif-Emami was born in Tehran on September 9, 1910 (17 Shahrivar 1289). His humble origins certainly bore no hint of the life he would lead. His father was a mullah, and the de facto chief of staff to one of Tehran’s leading clergymen. He went to school in Tehran, and after high school he was chosen by Iran’s state-run railroad company to go on scholarship to Germany. He enrolled in a professional school called Brandenburger Zentraschule[6] and spent eighteen months there before returning to Iran to work as a foreman at the railroad company. He was about twenty years old and his salary was forty tooman ($20) a month. According to a special order of Reza Shah, those working on the railroad were partially exempt from the military service; Sharif-Emami was a beneficiaries of this law. He spent half a day at boot camp, the other half at his work site.[7]

Sharif-Emami was nothing if not ambitious. During his days at the railroad, he began to pursue a degree in electrical engineering from a correspondence college in Germany. Before he could finish, he was once again chosen by the railroad company for a scholarship, this time in Sweden. After more than three years, he graduated in engineering, returned to Iran in 1939, and resumed his work at the railroad. The advent of World War II had unusual consequences in Sharif-Emami’s life. On the one hand, the Iranian railroad took on enormous strategic value for the Allies, particularly as a key supply route for the Soviet army. But the significance of the route also put Sharif-Emami’s career in jeopardy.

By September 1943, the Anglo-Soviet forces occupying Iran had arrested about two hundred Iranians on charges of sympathizing with the Nazi regime. Sharif-Emami was one of them. He spent a year and five days in prison. After prison, he did not go back to the railroad but instead took a number of odd jobs. Finally, in 1950, when Hadji Ali Razmara was named prime minister, he chose Sharif-Emami first as undersecretary and then as the minister of roads. By then Sharif-Emami had married. His wife was from the Moazzami family, nobility in the ranks of the National Front and known for their close ties to Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. It was a measure of this closeness that on August 19, when Mossadeq, fearing for his life, fled his house, he took refuge in one of the Moazzami houses. In fact, Sharif-Emami was one of the people used by Dr. Mossadeq as a liaison to General Zahedi to arrange his surrender.

In spite of this close family relationship, Sharif-Emami himself was no friend of the Mossadeq government. In fact, he had been close to those working against the government. His own brother-in-law, Ahmad Aramesh, was a close confidant of Ghavam. After the fall of Mossadeq, Sharif-Emami accepted the post of director of the Plan Organization. For reasons that are still not clear, his tenure did not last long. He was out of a job for a while, but then in 1955 he was chosen to serve in the Senate, and only left it on occasions when he was offered a ministerial portfolio in the government. His first such change of job came late in 1957, when he joined the cabinet of Egbal.

One of the main problems facing the Egbal government was the economy. By 1958 the United States was growing increasingly concerned about the future stability of Iran. A program of economic stability suggested by the American government and international agencies such as the Development Loan Fund was seen as the panacea. But as minister of industries, Sharif-Emami was adamant in his opposition to the program. According to the American Embassy in Tehran, his opposition was rooted partly in self-interest and partly in his nationalism. The proposed plan undermined some of his pet projects.[8] Some of his critics, like Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, have even suggested that in 1959, Sharif-Emami allegedly received a bribe of three million tooman ($400,000) to push for the creation of a chemical fertilizer plant in Shiraz.[9] Moreover, according to the American Embassy, Sharif-Emami was by then “a spokesman for the old guard element in Iranian political life,” and was “undoubtedly opposed to the emergence in the cabinet of the so-called ‘Americans’ such as Commerce Minister Mansur, Agriculture Minister Jamshid Amuzegar, and Labor Minister Reza Ansari.”10 Sharif-Emami’s premonition about an end to the days of his generation of politicians turned out to be partly true.

The purge of the old guard came in the early 1960s. One of the events that acted as a catalyst was the meeting at Hoseyn Ala’s house on the afternoon of June 5, 1963. SharifEmami was one of the five people invited. One of the five called the shah and told him about the meeting. Sharif-Emami is often supposed to be one of the two people most likely to have made that call. Sharif-Emami’s tenacity and survival skills can be seen in the fact that although within months of the June meeting the shah had dismissed nearly all of the “old guard” (including those who attended the meeting in Ala’s house and were replaced with the new breed of technocrats), Sharif-Emami not only survived but eventually amassed even more power. Even his opposition to the American-sponsored stabilization and recovery program could not sideline him. In fact, within months of his squabble over the stabilization program, Sharif-Emami was named prime minister by the shah.

His tenure, brief and tumultuous, turned out to be a dress rehearsal for his second tenure as prime minister on the eve of the Islamic revolution of 1979. There was a serious economic crisis in 1961, and the opposition, particularly the National Front, had become active again after seven years of hibernation. The election of John F. Kennedy invigorated the opposition and enfeebled the shah.

Early in 1960, when Egbal was still the prime minister, the shah, in anticipation of pressure for liberalization by Kennedy, promised free elections for the Majlis. They were instead, even by Iranian standards, “a fiasco.” They were characterized by “blatant rigging . . . in order to retrieve some of his lost prestige the shah was forced to take steps”11 to nullify the election. As there was no legal basis for such nullification, he convinced the “elected” members to resign collectively. On August 31, he accepted the resignation of Egbal as prime minister and appointed Sharif-Emami in his place.

From the outset, the Sharif-Emami cabinet showed a great propensity for fanning the incipient crisis. Whereas the fall of Egbal had been the result of an openly rigged election, Sharif-Emami held a new round of elections in January-February 1961 that were, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, “as thoroughly controlled as those” held in August 1960. Moreover, the opposition, encouraged by the Kennedy administration’s democratic rhetoric, protested the results in “popular demonstrations in some provincial centers and in Tehran.”[12]

On May 2, the teachers announced a national strike. Their chief demand was for higher pay. In the course of one of their demonstrations, “a teacher was killed and several others were wounded by the police.” Suddenly the strike spread to other social strata. On May 4, a “similar demonstration was joined by workers. National Front groups were scheduled to join the demonstrations on 5 May. . . . Reportedly extremely upset and ready to flee the country, the Shah” asked for Sharif-Emami’s resignation.[13]

On May 4 and 5, Sharif-Emami faced angry members of the Majlis. The heated discussions were focused on what some members called police brutality against defenseless teachers. Sharif-Emami told the Parliament that violence against the demonstrations was no fault of his. He even told the shah that the unrest was instigated by the American government in order to get rid of him. On the other hand, he told his closest friends, “If His Majesty was favorably disposed towards him, no unrest would take place. The role played by the parliament against him, and the fact that security forces shot at teachers without his permission, shows that there were secret hands working behind the scene to bring about his resignation.”[14] When, on the afternoon of May 5, he went to the court to tender his resignation, he is reported to have shouted angrily at the shah, telling him that he had

been willing to resign, and that the verbal assaults on him in the Majlis had been beyond the pale.15
In private, he often claimed that his fall from power was the result of machinations by the United States. Although he waxed eloquent about his confrontations with the United States, the actual records of some of his meetings with Americans tell a different story. For example, in October 1960, when Sharif-Emami was invited to go on a goodwill mission to the Soviet Union, the United States was opposed to the trip. But Sharif-Emami reassured U.S. Embassy officials “that he will refuse to discuss political matters. He also asked Rockwell [U.S. Charge in Iran] for suggestions on what line he should take in Moscow.”16 Not long after the journey, his first tenure as prime minister came to an end.

Sharif-Emami’s fall from political grace did not last long. After a few months, he was elected to the Senate and chosen its president—a position he held until a few months before the revolution, when he was, ironically, once again picked to lead the country out of crisis. He also had a number of other jobs, from the head of the Pahlavi Foundation to membership on a large number of boards.

The only open blow to his reputation came with the 1968 publication of Esmail Ra’in’s book on the history of Freemasons in Iran. What had been until then a campaign of hints and guesses had now the authority of print. Immediately after the book’s publication, Sharif-Emami asked an aide to secure him a copy. When he saw the actual text, he was not only angry but convinced—rightly, as it turned out—that “the book was published with the support and approval of SAVAK.”[17] He promised that the next time he met with the shah, he would raise his objections.

At his regular Tuesday morning meeting with the shah, he did make his complaint, but it was “to no avail.” He was convinced that the “system wanted to embarrass us with this book.”[18] For Sharif-Emami’s critics, on the other hand, Freemasonry was connected to things British and was therefore another sign of his “treason.” When in February 1960 he was made Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael, it had been seen as yet another “sign of his connection and services to” the British government.[19]

Of the many boards on which he served, the one overseeing a publishing company bore cultural and literary fruit of enormous value. The company, created under the umbrella of the Pahlavi Foundation, was called the Bongah-e Tarjome va Nashre Ketab (Publishing and Translating Company) and in the course of almost three decades it published several hundred masterpieces of both the Iranian and Western canons. Sharif-Emami became, as a result of this involvement, a bibliophile with a personal library of about eleven thousand books. On the eve of the revolution, he donated it to the new Islamic government.[20]

By 1978, as the political crisis deepened, the shah once again chose Sharif-Emami as prime minister. Not only was he an odd choice to form a government of “national reconciliation,” but the cabinet he picked and the tactics he pursued were ill-suited to the exigencies of the time. He closed the casinos and bars, changed the calendar,[21] freed political prisoners, and jailed regime stalwarts; he did little else. He gave all government employees pay raises the government could ill afford, and, not surprisingly, the results were catastrophic. By the end of his brief tenure, the opposition was stronger and more emboldened, the regime was weaker and more demoralized, and the army and the secret police were in disarray. Resigning under an avalanche of protests, he soon left Iran. He died on June 16, 1998 (26 Khordad 1377), and was buried in a cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

In death as in life Sharif-Emami has been surrounded by a swirl of controversy and rumor. He was a member of the board of directors of the Pahlavi Foundation and had the right to sign documents on its behalf. The foundation had two large properties in the United States. The first was a high-rise building in New York, valued in 1981 at $60–$70 million.[22] The other was a waterfront property in New Orleans worth about $50 million.[23] Both buildings were eventually turned over to the Islamic Republic. Members of the royal family, particularly Princess Ashraf, tried to convince Sharif-Emami that the Pahlavi Foundation properties were family-owned and should revert to them, not to the Islamic government in Iran.[24] But Sharif-Emami, it is claimed, signed over the deeds to the Islamic Republic in return for various favors (including an exit visa for his wife). It is hard to find the truth in the cacophony of rancorous rumors and gossip, a clouded end to a life often shrouded with hints of corruption and conspiracy.

The famous “leading personalities” files of the British Foreign Office describes him as

a man of outstanding singleness of purpose and courage. Personally attractive, religious without being fanatical or obscurantist . . . appointed prime minister with full powers by Ahmad Shah on the 1st of March 1921 and affected numerous arrests. His reforms were too radical for the country and the time, and he fell from power in June. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that [in the postwar years, he] rallied the AntiTudeh forces in Persian and thus made it possible to resist intensive Soviet Pressure when it came. Alone among Persians he has never allowed personal or even party interest to interfere with his policy. By his uncompromising resistance to Russian encroachments he became the symbol of Persia’s will to resist. . . . He is both honest and energetic—a very rare combination in Persia. . . . The comparative lack of success of his party was due [among other things to his inability to] reconcil[e] his progressive ideas with the conservatism of many of his followers. Has something of a mystic in him.[1]

Mehdi Bamdad, in his biographical history of modern Iranian politicians, calls Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i the most obviously and openly Anglophile politician in modern Iran. He goes on to claim that most of the articles Seyyed Zia published in his newspapers “were given to him by the British embassy.”[2] He was, in short, a lightning rod, and inspired extreme devotion in some and militant opposition in others. He never denied being “a friend of the British” but insisted that friendship was different from servitude. He argued that fear was the sole motive for this politically costly decision to become a friend of the British. “I was a friend of the British,” he declared, “because being their friend, you only pay a price . . . but being their enemy guarantees your destruction. All my life I have paid the price for this friendship, but as a rational man, I was never ready to be destroyed.”[3]

Seyyed Zia was born in the city of Shiraz, probably in 1889 (1268, or possibly 1278). He was one of four children. His father took the family to Tabriz when Seyyed Zia was two years old. He spent most of his early years in that city, where his father was an influential cleric. His father was for a while an opponent of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, but he eventually changed sides and joined the revolutionaries. Seyyed, on the other hand, claimed to have been for the constitutionalists all along. He was twelve when he went to Tehran and fifteen when he moved back to Shiraz[4] in the company of his grandmother—in his reckoning a woman of unusual erudition and independence.[5] He was sixteen when he started his first newspaper, called Nedaye Islam, printed in green, the color of Islam. Throughout his life, he remained a firm believer in Islam, and his politics invariably entailed some accommodation with the mullahs. This social conservatism, and his aversion to phenomena like cinema and theater, bars and casinos, in the assessment of the British Embassy cost Seyyed Zia the support of the middle classes.[6]

The actual extent of Seyyed Zia’s involvement in the Constitutional Revolution is not clear. He boasted about his membership in an underground terrorist group that fought for the revolution, and in 1908 he was involved in at least one bomb-throwing incident.[7] Hoping to escape prosecution and harm, he took refuge in a foreign embassy—Austrian or Belgian8—in Tehran.

With the defeat of Mohammad-Ali Shah, Seyyed returned to his journalism and established first the paper called Sharg (East) and then Barg (Light). Apparently a group of Iranian Zoroastrians bankrolled Seyyed Zia’s first paper.

The victory of the revolution had not brought peace and security to the country. Instead there was chaos, hunger, and cholera. Soon the war arrived and in its wake came the Spanish flu. It is estimated that these diseases took the lives of anywhere from 11 to 25 percent of the population.

Seyyed Zia’s papers usually bordered on what could be called “yellow journalism.” His blistering attacks on prominent politicians caused the paper to be closed several times. The first time, the ostensible reason given for the closure was that he was only nineteen and the law required an editor to be at least thirty. After a couple of other closures, he left for Europe and spent fourteen months primarily in France. By the time he returned, Iran was, in spite of its declared neutrality, occupied by Russian, British, and Ottoman forces. Seyyed Zia resumed his journalism, this time focusing on his famous paper, Ra’ad (Thunder). To the surprise of his erstwhile allies, he came out in strong support of the British in the war. Germany had by then made great inroads in Iranian public opinion. The fact that Germany offered a “third way,” away from the British and the Russians, the two colonial nemeses of modern Iranian politics, made the Germans more attractive and Seyyed Zia’s job more difficult. One of Seyyed’s colleagues in the paper was Ayn-al Molk, the father of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who later became Iran’s prime minister.

In 1917, fearing harm from the advancing Ottoman armies, Seyyed Zia took a trip to Russia and landed in St. Petersburg. He witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik revolution. In fact, he claims to have been present in St. Petersburg when Lenin first arrived and made his famous speech about “seizing power” in the name of the proletariat.[9] Witnessing the revolution, he says, shaped two pillars of his political creed: first, that individuals can change history and must act, and second, that Iran must be on friendly terms with communist Russia. He claims to have sent a telegram to the Iranian government in 1917 suggesting immediate recognition of the new Bolshevik government.10 The government dragged its feet, and it fell on Seyyed Zia’s shoulders, four years later, to establish ties with the Soviet government. It is one of the many paradoxes of Seyyed Zia’s life that he was, all his political life, lambasted by the Left and praised by the Right for his anticommunism, yet he was also one of the chief architects and persistent advocates of the policy of rapprochement with the big northern neighbor.

But the revolution did not just leave an indelible mark on Seyyed Zia’s ideas; it changed the political dynamics in Iran as well. With Russia temporarily out of the picture, Britain, in a policy championed by Lord Curzon, opted to make Iran a virtual protectorate. By bribing the king, the prime minister, and two other key members of the cabinet, the British government tried to pass what came to be known as the 1919 Agreement. It would place British “advisors” at the helm of most of the important ministries as well as the army. A strong nationalist movement developed in opposition to the agreement. The United States, the new Soviet government, and France were also actively campaigning against the Agreement on the international scene.[11] Seyyed Zia came out in full support of the agreement, and with it he was irrevocably marked with the infamy of being a British stooge.

By then Seyyed Zia was also deeply involved in what was known as “Committee of the Iron” (Committee-e Ahan). The committee had begun in Isfahan “with the support of the British consulate” and was intended as “an organizational base for a modern political movement.”[12] After a while, the committee’s center of activity moved to Tehran, and Seyyed Zia was one of “its leading figures.” Some of the most powerful men during the reign of Reza Shah—from Mahmoud Jam, the prime minister, to Hoseyn Dadgar, Speaker of the Majlis—were members of the Committee-e Ahan.[13]

In the heat of the battle to ratify the infamous agreement, the Iranian government, headed at the time by Vosug al-Dowleh, sent Seyyed Zia back to Russia in 1919, this time to negotiate an agreement of friendship and alliance with the newly formed, ultimately short-lived Republic of Azerbaijan.[14]

By 1921, Iran was on the verge of disintegration. In each corner of the country, a warlord or a revolutionary leader was staking his claim to parts of the territory. In the northern provinces, the Gilan Soviet Socialist Republic was created as a result of an alliance between Iranian communists, Bolshevik forces who had landed in Iran, and a nationalist figure called Mirza Kuchek Khan Jangali. On the other hand, the British were bent on taking their four-thousand-strong force—and veritably the last obstacle to the Bolshevik takeover of Tehran—out of Iran. General William Edmund Ironside was the new commander of the British forces and had come with complete authority to arrange for the British withdrawal. Gradually and inexorably, the British accepted defeat in their ill-fated attempt to push for the ratification of the 1919 Agreement. As a result of these circumstances, British policy in Iran suddenly changed. Hitherto they had been bent on destabilizing the central government and thus forcing the ratification of their treaty. Now they were in favor of the creation of a strong central government that could withstand the Bolshevik onslaught and keep the country together. And thus the idea of the 1921 coup took shape.

In Ironside’s famous phrase, “what we need now is a military dictatorship.” While the military muscle was to be provided by Reza Khan, the charismatic leader of the Cossack Brigade, the political savvy and connections would come from Seyyed Zia. How the two came together is still mired in mystery. Cyrus Ghani, using hundreds of documents from the British archives, has done much to unravel the mysteries of the coup and dispel the simplistic notion that Reza Khan was nothing but a British stooge.[15]

In the early hours of the morning of February 22, 1921 (3 Esfand 1299) the famous Cossack Brigade, led by Reza Khan, moved to take control of Tehran. They met virtually no resistance. Of the existing state machinery, only the weak, vacillating, and corrupt king was to be left in power. Of course hearing of the movement of the troops toward the capital, the king had become “very agitated . . . and talked of immediate flight, but Mr. Smart [of the British Legation] was able to calm him sufficiently to make him abandon his intention.”[16]
No sooner had the Cossacks entered the city than the shah sent for the British ambassador and “asked my opinion regarding the line which he should follow. He was nervous. . . . I was able to reassure him regarding the intentions of the leaders of the movement . . . and advised him to put himself in communication with them, ascertain their wishes and grant whatever they might adopt.”[17] His Majesty of course followed the “advice” and next day called Seyyed Zia to the court and “entrusted him with the task of forming a government. . . . Seyyed at first proposed to the shah that the title of dictator should be given to him, but His Majesty demurred on the ground that this would constitute a humiliation to the person and dignity of the Sovereign.”[18] From their first encounter, it was clear that Seyyed Zia, with his “revolutionary” disregard for the cordialities of the court, and Ahmad Shah, who had nothing other than these cordialities left of his power, despised one another.

Within hours of taking power, Seyyed Zia and his ally, Reza Khan, arrested some four hundred of the country’s “grandees.” According to the British Embassy, one of the “embarrassing features” of these arrests was the “imprisonment of prominent Persians universally known as friends” of the British—foremost among them Farmanfarma’ian and his son Nosrat al-Dowleh.[19]

The purpose of the arrests was, according to Seyyed Zia, merely economic and a way to fill the empty state coffers. “In spite of the emptiness of the treasury,” he told the British Embassy, “there is plenty of money in the country,” and he knew “where to look for it.”[20] The embassy tended to agree with Seyyed that these princes—referring to the likes of Farmanfarma’ians—“owe large sums to the Government on various accounts.”21
The new cabinet’s more sinister purpose had to do with the infamous 1919 Agreement. In the words of Seyyed Zia himself, he wanted to “scrap the agreement but carry out its vital portions.” He told the British that he publically denounced the agreement because, again in his words, “without such denunciation new government cannot get to work.” At the same time, as he had promised, steps were taken, quietly and without public notice, to introduce, as the 1919 Agreement had stipulated, British advisors in key positions in government and the military.[22]

Seyyed set out to change the fabric of social life in Iran. As he never tired of reminding anyone who cared to listen, his two political heroes were Lenin and Mussolini.[23] His cabinet consisted of “men of unusual honesty, of rather effaced personality . . . they are permanent officials rather than politicians.”[24] The new government immediately declared martial law, banned all gatherings, and closed all papers. Seyyed Zia’s declared that his cabinet’s program included such far-reaching measures as “formation of an army . . . eventual abolition of the capitulations . . . establishment of friendly ties with the Soviet Union.” At the same time, he tried to implement a truly impressive number of changes in the capital itself—from ordering new rules of hygiene for stores that dealt with foodstuffs to attempts to bring light to city streets. He talked of a land reform, making him one of the early champions of the idea in modern Iran. He talked of making education available to every Iranian. Of course, his clerical past reared its head when he ordered all bars and theaters closed.[25]

From the outset, however, there was something amiss in his attempt to don the mantle of dictator. It had soon become clear that nearly all actual power was in the hands of Reza Khan, and every new sign of his weakness further emboldened the increasing ranks of his enemies. One of his most embittered foes was the king himself. Seyyed Zia’s attitude, defiant, filled with self-importance, and unabashed in the use of the rhetorical devices of revolutionaries, was evident in his treatment of the king as well as in his first pronouncement as the head of the coup cabinet. He wrote in what was a long, meandering text of how “fate has designated me to take in hand the destinies of my people in this dangerous crisis and to save it from the abyss to the edge of which indecisive and unworthy governments have brought it.” He attacked the “few hundred nobles, who hold the reins of power by inheritance, sucked, leechlike, the blood of the people.”[26]

When Seyyed Zia sent a telegram to all governors announcing his appointment to the post of prime minister, at least three refused to heed his commands. Of these, two turned out to be his lifelong adversaries and figured prominently in the rest of his political life. One was Ghavam-ol Saltaneh, the governor of Khorasan, who was ordered arrested by Seyyed Zia and brought to Tehran. The second was Mohammad Mossadeq, the governor of Pars, who eventually quit his post and spent the next few months hiding among the nomadic tribes.

There was nothing short of hubris in Seyyed Zia’s behavior. With every passing day, the rank of his enemies swelled and his days in office seemed numbered. Foremost among his enemies was the king himself. His last meeting with Ahmad Shah took place only hours before his dismissal and days before his exile. He had always been defiantly oblivious to the court’s solemnities and the rules of etiquette for a royal audience. He was even known to have spent one whole meeting sitting on a windowsill, as the king had refused to put chairs in the room. That day, he walked into the king’s office, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and continued to walk around as he talked. Ahmad Shah was incensed and practically threw Seyyed Zia out of the office; hours later he arranged for his dismissal. Reza Khan was only too happy to comply.[27] The British, in the words of the ambassador, had done everything in their power “to dissuade the conspirators from this disastrous intrigue”[28] and failed. When Seyyed was on his way out of the country, his enemies conspired to have him arrested and returned for trial. But the British Embassy insisted and received guarantees for his safe passage through Iran. Reza Khan offered him any sum he deemed necessary from the treasury. He took twenty-five thousand tooman— by no measure a large sum—and left the country.[29]

He spent the next few years traveling throughout Europe. For a while he sold Persian carpets on the streets of Berlin; then he moved to Geneva, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to write a book with the help of Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, the famous exiled Iranian writer. He then settled in Montreux, where he continued his carpet business. At the time, he was both extremely angry and persistently optimistic that the Iranians would call him back to power. In an interview, he confessed that in the first weeks of exile, even in the cold Berlin winters, “I took cold showers, where I screamed my anger away.”[30]

After about seventeen years of a nomadic life in Europe, he went to Palestine and spent the next six years as a farmer. Although his life witnessed many more upheavals in the years ahead, being a gentleman farmer remained a permanent fixture of his persona. He developed a special affinity for alfalfa and became notorious for his belief that it was the panacea for everything. He developed a veritable alfalfa cookbook. Indeed, in everything he did, he was something of an eccentric. From the famous fur hats he wore all his life, to his mint teas, he had a touch of the unusual about him. He loved cooking and considered it one of his favorite avocations. Cooking and politics have much in common, he said, as in both you have to know how to combine the right ingredients. Good politicians are invariably good cooks, he opined.[31] He was a shrewd entrepreneur and innovator. Among his contributions to Iranian agriculture was the introduction of strawberries to the country. He was a great orator, but he stuttered when he became angry.

His life of exile ended in 1943 when he was encouraged by the British to return to Iran. Talk of his return began around October 1942. The British Embassy in Tehran, aware of the shah’s and the Russian’s opposition to his return, advised caution. Ghavam was then prime minister, and, while in the words of the embassy he was “working with [them] satisfactorily,” they wanted him to know that in Seyyad Zia the British now “have a possible alternative.”[32] The British Embassy eventually succeeded in convincing the shah to allow Seyyed Zia’s return. Compared to Ghavam, the shah obviously considered Seyyed Zia to lesser of two evils. But by then Seyyed was playing hardball. He told an emissary of the embassy that he would not return unless he was already named prime minister.[33]

As the biographical entry prepared by the embassy in Tehran shows, the British held him in unusual esteem. In fact, every step in his rehabilitation was carefully orchestrated by the embassy and reported to London. From the time of his return in 1943 until around 1960, when the British felt they could no longer offer “advice” to the shah on who should be the prime minister, every time there was a crisis in Iran, Seyyed Zia seemed to be the candidate of the British Embassy to lead Iran out of trouble. Even before his return from exile, when the British occupied Iran, they told Reza Shah that Seyyed Zia was one of the three men with whom they would negotiate.34 Reza Shah opted for another from the list. His dislike and distrust of Seyyed Zia was no less strong in his son, Mohammad Reza Shah.

As the British Embassy reports, “Seyyed Zia [was] ‘elected’ deputy from Yazd.” Although they put meaningful quotation marks around the word “elected,” they failed to mention that this “election” took place even before his arrival in Iran. Once in Tehran, eventually something of a truce was reached between the shah and Seyyed Zia, who had begun his new political life as a stalwart enemy of the communists in Iran. He became locked in a decade-long battle with the Tudeh Party and was a near constant subject of their vitriol. Sometimes even Pravda and Radio Moscow joined in attacking Seyyed Zia as a lackey of the British and a dictator by temperament. Within months of his return, the British Embassy was reporting that “Seyyed Zia has attained central position on the political stage. Everyone is either for or against him. . . . Wealthy friends from Yazd have paid over thirty thousand pound Sterling for premises [for a party] . . . rich manufacturers in Isfahan, who fear the violence of the Tudeh Party” had also contributed money to his campaign to strengthen his party and fight the communists. During those years, he was on more than one occasion the object of an assassination attempt, and thus he hired a group of armed bodyguards.[35]

The truce with the shah broke when Seyyed Zia tried to take his seat in the Parliament. Dr. Mossadeq, by then already emerging as the leader of the nascent nationalist movement, attacked Seyyed for treason and breach of the constitution in his role in the coup. No sooner had Mossadeq’s attack begun than Seyyed Zia’s paper wrote in surprisingly harsh terms about the shah’s breach of his constitutional powers and about the money Reza Shah had in his account upon his abdication. A few days after the commencement of these attacks the shah sent Hoseyn Ala, his minister of court, to the British Embassy to complain about the personal nature of the attack. “Ala suggested that the Shah should be immune from attack.” The ambassador answered, “Attacks had begun after the attempt by Dr. Mussadeq . . . [and this attempt to unseat him] was a breach of the truce between the Shah and Seyyed Zia. . . . Mussadeq is one of his [the shah’s] men.”[36] The shah’s decision to negotiate with the embassy when he had a complaint against Seyyed Zia, and the embassy’s willingness to indulge him in the matter, speak much about the nature of politics in postwar Iran. In spite of Dr. Mossadeq’s attacks, in a secret vote Seyyed Zia was handily seated. But that was not the end of his troubles with Mossadeq or with Ghavam, the other defiant governor he had ordered arrested.

When Ghavam became prime minister in 1945, one of his first decisions was to order the arrest of Seyyed Zia. He spent almost three months in prison, where, in his words, he developed some thirty new recipes for soup and wrote a commentary on the Qur’an.[37] Ghavam also used his influence to prevent Seyyed from returning to the Majlis.

After the fall of Ghavam, Seyyed Zia was constantly on the minds of not just the British Embassy but many Iranians as a serious candidate for the job of the prime minister. This intense interest in Seyyed Zia in fact continued until the fall of Dr. Mossadeq. In a sense, as the power of the Tudeh Party increased, so did Seyyed Zia’s political star as the most stalwart anticommunist of his generation. His party, Eradeye Mardom, tried to fight the spread of Tudeh influence everywhere. At the same time, Seyyed Zia’s relationship with the shah was beginning to become more normal. He was “violently opposed to the shah’s measures of constitutional reform,”[38] in which the king’s powers, in comparison to the other branches of government, increased.

In December 1949, as the shah was returning from America and the country was on the verge of the abyss, the British Foreign Office believed that they should back Seyyed Zia over Ali Mansur, who, according to the embassy, “had a badly tarnished reputation and was far too weak to face the crisis.”[39] Ultimately, Mansur was named prime minister, and Seyyed Zia joined the small circle of people who regularly met with the shah and offered him advice and tried to buck up his nerves against his critics and foes. By the time Mossadeq came to power, Seyyed Zia had “weekly audiences with the Shah,” and on September 27, 1951, he “advised [the shah that the] time had come for replacement of Mossadeq. He [Seyyed Zia] had no desire for political office just now. He would however give support to Ghavam.”[40]

In the months leading to the final confrontation with Mossadeq, Seyyed Zia’s role was no more than that of a regular advisor to the badly shaken king. All efforts by the British to bring Seyyed Zia back to power had come to naught, and both he and the embassy were beginning to resign themselves to the fact that his time had passed and that neither the shah nor the Americans were ever going to allow the man they both presumed to be a creation of the British to take over the government. Seyyed Zia refashioned yet another persona for himself in these last fifteen years of his life. He was now happy in the role of a kingmaker past his prime, an advisor and a conduit to the king, and a successful farmer of everything from alfalfa to strawberries. He would meet regularly with the shah and by all accounts talked to him frankly and honestly.

His efforts against the government of Mossadeq were not unknown to the government and its allies. As a result, Seyyed Zia was regularly and ferociously attacked by papers allied with Dr. Mossadeq, making him the anomalous case of someone equally attacked by the left and the center of Iranian politics.

In the last years of his life, there was something of a political salon in his house, where on the designated afternoons up to fifty people gathered, chatted about politics, and on occasions asked Seyyed Zia to take a letter or request to the king. He would bundle all such notes in a handkerchief and take it to his weekly audience with the shah. He had resigned himself to the fact that he was under constant surveillance and refused to engage in subversive talk.[41]

Occasionally, toward the end of the 1950s, rumors about his rise to power again spread through the city, but it never became a reality. In a sense, his job in those years was to bring a dose of reality to the shah, who was, with every passing day, more and more surrounded by sycophants. On the afternoon of April 10, 1965 (21 Farvardin 1344), when the shah was the subject of an assassination attempt, Seyyed Zia went to the court and insisted on taking the shah on a tour of the city. Everywhere they went people showed their enthusiastic support for the monarch. The excursion, according to Seyyed Zia, did much to improve the mood of the understandably shattered shah. Seyyed Zia also claimed to have told the shah that a king can’t fly around his capital in a helicopter but must mingle with the masses.[42]

Seyyed Zia’s last years were fairly eventless, save for the fact that in 1966 he was, according to SAVAK, implicated in an attempt by the Iranian fascists, led by Dr. David Monshizadeh, to organize a coup in Iran. After further investigation, the whole alleged coup was found to be nothing but a hoax.[43]

Seyyed Zia was a deeply political man, who was also seriously intent on keeping his private life out of the limelight. He married three times. He had spent much of his life with a wife with whom he seemed to have little in common. His second wife died in childbirth, along with their baby.[44] In the last decade of his life, he married again, this time to one of the servants on his farm. With her he had three babies, though he was by then more than seventy years old. As he readily admitted in an interview, “I have been so involved with myself that I have never had time for others. . . . I have been so selfish that I have never been interested in anyone else. Love. . . . I have never experienced.”[45] His life with his third wife was no exception to this pattern of a loveless existence.

After a long life of ups and downs, in which he reinvented himself no less than six times—as a revolutionary, a journalist, a dictator, a carpet seller, a farmer, and an eminence grise—he died in his house on August 29, 1969. Soon after his death, his third wife married Seyyed Zia’s driver. His rumored journals—“a book I have hidden in a Swiss bank,” he told Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi—and hundreds of pages of documents did not survive him.[46] His third wife and her new husband were suspected of removing the documents in the dark of the night.[47] Like their author, an air of mystery and intrigue continues to surround both the documents and the husband and wife who allegedly took them.

It is hard to wax hyperbolic about Taqizadeh. His real life and accomplishments, the pathos and passion he created in his friends and foes, the long and varied span of his political life, his role in some of the most contested decisions of Iranian politics—from the oil negotiations of 1933 to Iran’s decision, in 1946, to take its case against the Soviet Union to the United Nation—his truly impressive scholarly contributions, his honesty and financial probity, and his membership in the Freemasons make him one of the most influential as well as controversial cultural and political figures of twentieth-century Iran.

Although he was from the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, and clearly proud of his early life in the region, he remained all his life a fierce and powerful foe of movements advocating autonomy for the Turkic speaking people of Iran. While his popular fame was based on politics, his reputation among his peers was founded on his scholarship. No less a figure than Allame Qazvini, a man constitutionally averse to sycophancy, rates Taqizadeh as one of the most important scholars of Iran in the last millennium. A fascinating volume of his memoirs chronicling the contours of his early years has been published.[1] His other writings, collected in a thirteen-volume edition, range from a seminal treatise on Shahnameh to essays about old Persian calendars. Several collections of his letters have also been published.[2]

He was born in 1878 (1256) in the city of Tabriz. His father was a cleric of some repute, deeply devout and seriously bent on forging in his son a similar religious cast of mind. The father had eight children—six of whom were twins—and it was a measure of the disastrous public health of the time that half of these children died not long after birth.[3] Three years after Hassan’s birth, his mother became sick while giving birth to another set of twins. She never fully recovered her health, and his father married another woman “to help him in his daily household chores.”[4]

By the time Hassan was five, he had, under the strict tutelage of his father, learned to read and recite the whole of the Qur’an. The young boy was eight when he began to master the traditional curriculum for a Shiite seminarian—from Quranic exegesis to astronomy and Arabic. He also delved into Islamic theology and philosophy. Like many students of his generation, he even dabbled in traditional medicine.5 While his tutors were some of the city’s luminaries, his training as well as his devotional practices were all under the stern and watchful eye of his father.

In spite of this strict fatherly regime of surveillance, Hassan began covertly to learn French and through it a whole new continent of thought was opened to him. For four years, beginning in 1892 (1271), he lived a double life. Ostensibly he was a hard-working seminarian. In reality, with the help of a friend, Mohammad Ali Tarbiyat—who later founded one of the first secular schools in Iran—he began to read voraciously into the burgeoning literature advocating modernity and change in Iran.

Iranian exiles in Ottoman Turkey and oil-rich Russian Caucusus—two places themselves seething with revolutionary fervor—were bringing back to Iran books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, and ideas that criticized political despotism and religious dogmatism. A common theme of these geographically and ideologically disparate voices was the demand for democracy and the rule of law. They all lamented Iran’s backwardness, particularly when compared to the rapidly progressing West—or Farang. As in Russia, where a fierce battle was joined between Westophiles—advocating rapid adaptation of Western values and ways in the country—and Slavophiles—championing the cause of preserving the authentic and superior “Slavic” soul of Russia—in Iran, too, a similar struggle began to emerge in the first stages of Taqizadeh’s life. Traditionalists, lead by intransigent religious forces, advocated cultural autarky, while the Westophiles wanted Iran to become more and more Western.

Taqizadeh became the quintessential advocate of the pro-Western camp. He lived to rue the day when in 1920 he wrote in an editorial that Iranians must shed, in their blood and bone, all that is Persian. They should, instead, adopt Western modes and morals.[6] Although even in this often-quoted editorial his position was far more nuanced than its often criticized caricature, and although later in life he often tried to correct his illbegotten reputation as a self-loathing Iranian unreservedly enamored of the West,[7] the die was cast. He could never shed the stigma of being an agent of total, self-obliterating assimilation of Western values. Some went so far as to call him an “agent,” even a “lackey,” of colonialism.

His first concrete steps toward implementing his vision, as well as his first taste of the price he would pay for such advocacy, came when he was but twenty. With the help of his friend Mohammad Ali Tarbiyat, he tried to establish a secular school in the city of Tabriz. The mullahs created such a ruckus that Taqizadeh and his cohorts abandoned the plan. Had it not been for his father’s reputation, he would have been run out of town.
At about the same time, when he was nineteen, he lost his father to typhus. He spent the next years teaching and reading, as well as translating a book on astronomy.[8] After a while, he and his friends established a bookstore that specialized in distributing books with a revolutionary message. Eventually, in the tumult of the Constitutional Revolution, his enemies burned the bookstore to the ground.[9] That revolution, of course, changed Taqizadeh’s life in many more profound ways. But before fully immersing himself in the affairs of this revolution, he had spent some years teaching, another couple managing a drugstore he founded with his friends, and even a few months practicing the little medicine he had learned.[10] He also learned English—the first step in his eventual emergence, in the public perception, as the Persian Anglophile par excellence. Beginning on January 30, 1902, he published, on a biweekly basis, what turned out to be his first magazine. It lasted for a year. It was called Majmou-eye Fonoun (Almanac of Sciences) and consisted not only of essays on new scientific developments, but translations of such literary works as Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.[11]

Not long after the closure of the magazine, Taqizadeh left Tabriz for a year-long tour of some of the intellectual hot spots of the Middle East—from Istanbul to Damascus and from Cairo to the Caucusus. He met with a number of prominent writers and thinkers and returned to Iran ready to join the battle that was brewing between advocates of a Constitutional Revolution and defenders of the status quo. Tabriz was in fact fast becoming the spiritual center of the revolutionary movement, and Taqizadeh joined one of the secret societies and soon rose to become one of the most respected leaders of the incipient revolution. When victory was won, and a parliament was elected, Taqizadeh was chosen as the city’s representative.

In the new Majlis, Taqizadeh soon established his reputation as the leader of the most radical faction. At the same time, his erudition and fiery speeches landed him the job of drafting the amendments to the constitution, where questions of separation of powers, and limits of each branch’s power, were described and delineated. His description of the proceedings of the first sessions of the newly established Majlis is a fascinating window into the anxieties of an elite learning the practical complexities of democracy.[12]

In the next few years, as Iran was caught in a fierce fight between advocates of the new constitution and champions of the status quo ante, Taqizadeh was easily identified, and thus targeted, as one of the most effective, unbending, and popular leaders of the constitutionalist camp. Eventually, as the wrath of his enemies was about to catch up with him, he and about seventy of his comrades took refuge in the British Embassy.[13] The decision was to haunt him for the rest of his life.[14]

Eventually, at the behest of the British Embassy, Taqizadeh was granted a reprieve— conditional on his promise to leave Iran. Guarded by agents of the embassy, he left Iran. He was heading for Europe, and, as was the custom at the time, he traveled through Russia, ending up in London, where he met the famous British orientalist E. G. Browne. Browne was to become a lifelong friend and a tireless advocate. With Browne’s help, a penniless Taqizadeh was given a job at Cambridge. He had hitherto refused to accept any offer of financial help, but as it turned out, his job at Cambridge had been Browne’s subtle way of helping Taqizadeh survive in England. In the meantime, the two new friends worked hard to try and help save the Constitutional Revolution in Iran.

After a few months, Taqizadeh was called back to Iran. The revolutionary forces were once again on the march; the counter-revolutionary Mohammad-Ali Shah was on the verge of defeat, and Taqizadeh, now more cautious than in the past, returned to Iran under an assumed name. He first went to Tabriz, where he joined forces with the new leaders of the revolution—Sattar Khan and Bagher Khan—and took it upon himself to advocate, even in the heat of battle, the rule of law and the necessity to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and violence. Once the despotic new king, Mohammad-Ali Shah, was defeated, and Taqizadeh returned to Tehran, he was part of the directorate that actually led the country as the de facto government in the chaos of transition to a new king. He was again elected to the Majlis, but controversy followed him there as well. When one of the leading clerics— who had sided with the constitutionalists—was assassinated, Taqizadeh was, in spite of his vehement denials, accused of complicity in the act. This time the clergy demanded his expulsion from Iran and his banishment from all political arenas in the country. In early 1910, he once again left Iran for a life of exile.

This time his westward journey lasted longer. After about a year in London, in May 1913, he left for the United States, where he stayed for the next two years. With the advent of World War I, German agents contacted him in the United States, asking him to go to Germany to launch a magazine that would defend the cause of the kaiser. He accepted the offer, and after returning to Berlin, once again under a false name, and using a Dutch passport, he gathered around him some of the most reputable Iranian scholars living in exile and, with German funds, founded the magazine Kaveh.

It was easily the most thoughtful, solidly scholarly, and aesthetically astute and pleasing magazine the Iranian exiles had ever produced. It advocated modernity along Western lines. Iran’s first novel—Jamal Zadeh’s famous Farsi Shekar Ast—and Iran’s first scholarly text in economics—Jamal Zadeh’s Ganj Shaygan—were both published as supplements of the Kaveh. Most of the editorials were written by Taqizadeh himself. It was in one of the editorials that he wrote the controversial lines about how Iranians must become “in body and spirit” Western. In spite of this faux pas, and in spite of the journal’s unabashed defense of the German cause, Kaveh still ranks as one of the most erudite, rich, and elegantly produced journals the Iranian diaspora has ever produced.[15]

By 1920, with the end of Germany’s support of the journal, it ceased to operate. In the meantime, back in Iran the situation was rapidly changing, and those changes meant a new life for Taqizadeh. For a while, in 1922, he was sent as Iran’s representative to the Soviet Union for negotiations on a new trade treaty. No sooner had the negotiations ended than he decided to return to Iran. He was a fierce advocate of the man who had by then clearly emerged as Iran’s most powerful political figure. His name was Reza Khan, and he invited Taqizadeh to join him in his efforts. When Reza Khan became the new shah of Iran, Taqizadeh became one of his closest and most trusted advisors and ministers, in spite of the fact that in the Parliament he had opposed the law that ended the Qajar dynasty and installed Reza Shah as the new king.

He was soon given the important post of minister of the treasury. In that capacity, he was engaged in two of Reza Shah’s most controversial decisions. In the first, when the shah found that three of Iran’s eminent politicians—Vosug al-Dowleh, Nosrat al-Dowleh, and Sarem al-Dowleh—had accepted a two-hundred-thousand-pound bribe from the British government, he entrusted Taqizadeh with the task of getting the money back from what the king called “these bastards.”[16]

The second and far more controversial decision was the oil negotiations of 1933. Reza Shah annulled the existing oil agreement and, after much tension and fanfare, signed a new deal that increased Iran’s revenues and extended the life of the contract. When, in the postwar years, the king’s enemies and critics used their newfound freedom to attack the 1933 agreement as an act of treason, Taqizadeh was also attacked as the minister responsible for the act. His claim that he was “but an instrument” of the king’s will became, in the discourse of Iranian politics, the epitome of shirking one’s legal and moral responsibilities. Like his earlier statement about the necessity of becoming in body and spirit a Westerner, this claim, too, came to define and defile his political life. It gave his many enemies the ammunition to reduce the complexities of his character and role to a caricature and, in the process, also cast a shadow on even his scholarly accomplishments.

Ironically, not long after the end of the oil agreement, Taqizadeh fell from grace. Some have even claimed that the cause of his fall was his disagreement with the king over the conduct of the negotiations.[17] For about a year, he served as Iran’s representative to France, and he was dismissed from that post as well. He went back to London, where he was given a job teaching Iranian history and culture at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.

The advent of World War II and the abdication of Reza Shah changed Taqizadeh’s life. He was soon appointed Iran’s ambassador to England. He remained in that post for some six years. His letters and telegrams from this period reflect not only his intimate knowledge of the evolving political scene in Europe, but also the essential elements of his more conservative political philosophy. He warned of the “curse and cholera” of conspiracy theories in Iranian politics and considered them a sign of political backwardness.[18] He was particularly critical of the belief in the “pervasive power of the British.”[19] While the Soviet threat, as the “worst of all possible worlds,” was never far from his mind, he also assiduously warned against the encroaching danger of too much American influence and offered at least four reasons that “we must not exaggerate the benefits of such influence.”[20] Many in the political establishment were, in those days, advocating that the shah must refrain from interfering in politics and “reign but not rule”; he, on the other hand, believed that Iran needed a strong central government, and that in Iran, the shah can never be a “mere spectator.”[21]

One of the most important decisions of his ambassadorial days in London was his advice to his friend, Hoseyn Ala, by then Iran’s representative to the United Nations, to ignore an order he had received from the prime minister in Tehran to withdraw the complaint Iran had lodged against the Soviet Union in the Security Council. Iran was objecting to the continued occupation of Iran by the Red Army. Ala followed Taqizadeh’s advice, only to find out later that the Iranian government, too, had changed its mind and now wanted the complaint vigorously pursued.

With the end of this crisis in 1946, Taqizadeh returned to Iran and was again elected to the Parliament. It was during this period that his enemies and critics leveled the most serious and sustained attacks on him and his reputation. Three years later, when the Iranian Senate was convened for the first time, he was elected to the new body. He remained a senator for the rest of his life. In the new era of Iranian politics—whether in the tumult of the years leading to Dr. Mossadeq’s tenure as prime minister, or the post–August 1953 period, when the shah was consolidating his hold on power—there was little room for Taqizadeh. Instead, he reverted to his old avocation of scholarship. He began teaching at Tehran University, in the newly created Faculty of Theology. He contributed enormously to the cultural life of Iran by his membership in various educational, publishing, and research foundations. He was instrumental in creating the Senate Library and turning it into a premier center for research on Iran. He helped create Iran’s first modern printing company—Sherkate Offset—and most important of all, he vigorously continued his writing and research on different aspects of Iranian history and culture.

In the last years of his life, after suffering a stroke, he moved around in a wheelchair. His constant companion was his loving wife, who carefully attended to his needs and seems never to have complained about the fact that in all their sixty years together, they had never had much more than what was needed for their own simple sustenance. On January 28, 1970 (8 Bahman 1348), he died a relatively poor man. He was ninety-two years old. He had no children.

Iran’s last king was his father-in-law. Egypt’s last king was his mother-in-law’s elder brother. A third king was his maternal grandfather; his own father might have become a king in August of 1953 but instead opted for the role of kingmaker. He personally knew eight American presidents—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Bush senior—and for about a decade, ending with the Islamic Revolution, he was Iran’s storied ambassador to the United States. Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis, Liza Minelli and Barbara Walters were in the litany of notable women whose names were linked romantically with his. He was also one of the figures most reviled by the Iranian opposition as a participant in the “CIA coup” that toppled the government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. That he was Iran’s ambassador to London and Washington precisely at the time when the Iranian student movement opposed to the shah was reaching the zenith of its power and the fact that he used all the instruments at his disposal— from tough talk and action to generous rewards—to disarm, or “co-opt,” the opposition, made him one of their favorite targets.

He is Aredeshir Zahedi, surely one of the most remarkable, and controversial, characters in modern Iranian politics.

I once saw him work a room. His performance was a work of art, with an infinite variety of nuanced gestures, nods, smiles, embraces, and mots justes. To some ladies, he offered a nod; others got a handshake; a few received a perfunctory, but discernable, bow toward their slightly raised hands; still fewer had their fingertips kissed. Equally noticeable was his behavior with the waiters and others who served the guests. He sought them out, affably shook their hands and treated them with lavish tips and an endearing dignity. At the same time, rumors were widespread of his rough treatment of errant employees in his embassy or at the Iranian Foreign Ministry.[1] When angry, it was said, he was capable of quite foul language.

Zahedi’s current home, the Villa Les Roses in the lakeside town of Montreux, near Lausanne in Switzerland, is a treasure house of his past vocations, present avocations, and the nostalgia of exile. It is replete with reminders of Persia—rugs and photographs in the house, jasmine and roses in the garden. Pictures of kings and presidents sit side by side with those of family and friends and a bevy of beautiful, often famous, women, but though his love life was for years the subject of the media’s obsessive curiosity, he refuses to divulge any details of his amours, maintaining a chivalrous silence that adds allure and mystery to his already storied affairs.

The largest image at Villa Les Roses is devoted to his father—an oil painting of General Fazlollah Zahedi in full military regalia. It was the general who purchased the villa not long after he had been forced out of power and out of Iran. On entering the villa, visitors encounter a simple glass case filled with the medals and honors Aredeshir has received. They include everything from an oversized red medal of the Soviet Union to the soft blue Taj, the highest honor of the Pahlavi era.

All around the house, even in its handsome stone-finished cellar, are documents and newspaper clippings, some neatly filed, others stacked in orderly piles. Zahedi is something of an archivist. Beneath the façade of a flippant playboy who, according to his critics, rose to power on his handsome looks, his family connections, his marriage to the shah’s daughter, and his ties to the Americans, there thrives a serious, disciplined retired diplomat, with a penchant for politics, a clear understanding of the his “beloved monarch’s”[2] weaknesses and strengths, an unbending resolution not to criticize the shah openly “since he is dead,” and yet an uncompromising and often harsh disposition toward many others in the royal family. Above all, he maintains a global network of loyal, often still powerful, sometimes colorful friends. In his salad days, some of these friends were more a liability than an asset, but like his father, he is famous for fidelity to a legion of past associates and present admirers.

During his tenure as Iran’s ambassador to the United States, the monthly Washington Dossier, a “glossy magazine that circulates among socialites,” had at least one reference to Zahedi in each of its issues. In November 1970, he was profiled as “one of Washington’s ten perfect gentlemen.” In June 1978, he was on the cover of the magazine, “with Beverly Sills at his side.”[3] Sally Quinn, the doyenne of the Washington social scene, called him the city’s most gracious host and most eligible bachelor.[4]

Even writers of pulp fiction and cheap airport romance novels have taken an interest in his life. One made him an unenviable central character in a paperback novel that is comically callous in both style and content. Called Power-Eaters, the novel, which claimed to be “the most erotic novel you will read,” chronicled the life of the shah, who wants to rule the world by first taking down Air Force One! One of the leading characters in the novel is “Razedi,” clearly modeled after Zahedi, with many references to the actual media stories of his life.[5]

The actual Aredeshir Zahedi was born in Tehran in October 1927 (1307) or 1928 (1308). His maternal grandfather, Motamen-al Molk Pirnia, was one of his generation’s most venerable statesman and arguably one of the most authoritative Speakers in the history of Iran’s Majlis.[6] Pirnia was also an unusually modern man. He sent his daughters, including Aredeshir’s mother, Khadijeh, to Europe for their education. That was where Khadijeh learned to play the piano.[7]

On his paternal side, Zahedi’s family were landlords in the city of Hamadan. A generation earlier, there had been some clerics in the family, and thus the surname of Zahedi, or “man of piety.” Aredeshir’s father, General Fazlollah Zahedi, was surely one of the more charismatic army officers of his time. He was already famous as a flamboyant officer, with a penchant for womanizing, when he married Aredeshir’s fiercely independent mother, Khadijeh.

The inherently fragile marriage of these two assertive individuals was made more complicated by the fact that the general was often away on military missions. On such occasions, his bride lived with her father. It was during one of these absences that Aredeshir was born. It was a complicated birth, but mother and child both survived. Three years later, Aredeshir’s younger sister, Homa, was born.

Their father was stern but kind, a disciplinarian, but averse to physical punishment. A mere angry look was all it took to silence the children. He was also keen on teaching his son the “manly arts.” No sooner could Aredeshir get on a horse than he was taught to ride; every morning he would be awakened at four in the morning for his lessons in riding and hunting.

Aredeshir was only about seven years old when, to his great agony, his parents decided to divorce. He lived the next few years in his parents’ joint custody, spending time intermittently with his mother and father. While his mother’s house offered the serenity and security of doting and deeply cultured grandparents, his father lived a more eventful life and became, before long, “the true hero” of the young boy’s life. And as is often the case, admiration easily turned into emulation, or more accurately, emulation became a form of registering admiration.

Never fully at peace with his parents’ divorce, Aredeshir found it even harder to accept the decision of both to remarry. It took him many years to warm to his father’s new bride, while his reaction to his mother’s second marriage was even angrier.[8] In a letter written sometime in 1955, General Zahedi complains about Aredeshir’s “interference” in his “private life.” “Did I ever interfere in your private life,” he writes plaintively, “that you now see fit to interfere in mine?”[9]

Aredeshir completed most of his early schooling in Iran. He was by no means a natural scholar; indeed his aversion to academic study would later become something of a political liability for him. When he was serving as foreign minister, for example, he was reported to have written “this pimp will not go to this embassy; send another pimp,” misspelling the word “pimp” (dayouth).[10] His enemies made the error into a cause célèbre and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the shah that Zahedi was too illiterate to be foreign minister. His handwriting, too, was—and remains—all but indecipherable, and the syntax of his letters often left much to be desired. But the clarity of his purpose, and the surprising honesty and fearlessness of his utterances—which often, according to his father, turned into a cascade of rash words—more than compensated for any shortcomings in his orthography and penmanship.[11]

Zahedi’s ability to communicate would be amply demonstrated in 1971 when the monarchy celebrated its twenty-five hundred years of rule in Iran with an extravagant desert party. Ministers and the media showered the shah with panegyrics about the magnificence and sublime wisdom of the celebration. Zahedi wrote a letter, harsh in tone, uncompromising in honesty, protesting to the shah that to keep things quiet during the festivities, hundreds of youths had been rounded up by SAVAK in all major cities, on the pretext that they were communists, and herded into makeshift jails. Only a few, he wrote, were known communists, while many were innocent kids.
He also criticized the ceremonies for the extravagance of their cost, and for the decision to have the food served by Maxim’s of Paris. If we are such an old country, he asked, why then could we not serve some traditional Iranian dishes like kabab?[12] Of course Zahedi began this letter, as he did all his correspondence to the shah, with profuse praise, calling the shah “The Shadow of my God,” and ended by offering “to kiss Your Royal Feet a thousand times.”[13] The shah, perhaps understandably, did not respond to the letter. But there was no doubt of Zahedi’s loyalty or respect. Ironically, while in the letter Zahedi opposed the ostentatious celebrations and called for more simplicity, he is believed to be the person who tried (and failed) to make it a requirement for Iranians meeting the shah to kneel while kissing the king’s hands.

Shortly after the beginning of World War II in Europe, Aredeshir’s father was named commander of an Iranian army division stationed in the vicinity of Isfahan. Soon the British, who had occupied Iran after Reza Shah had failed to expel German nationals from the country, arrested General Zahedi as a Nazi sympathizer. The general’s arrest left an indelible mark on the young Aredeshir. All through his later life as a diplomat, hints of a lingering tension with the British could be discerned in his behavior. The attitude of the British Embassy and Foreign Office toward him was equally rancorous. When given a choice in 1963 to become ambassador to either Rome or London, he chose the latter at least partly in the hope of “clearing the air between his father” and the British.[14]

In 1942, with his father in prison, Aredeshir and his younger sister, Homa, were sent to Tehran, where they spent the next three years. No sooner was Aredeshir registered at the Adab School than he began agitating against the British. In fact, he and a couple of his friends started a pro-German “party” that had its own Nazi insignia.[15]

In 1945, Aredeshir was sent to Beirut to continue his education. He enrolled in the Eslamiye high school, and it was there that he organized a political rally against the Soviet occupation of parts of Iran. Anticommunism would henceforth remain an essential element of his political vision.

In 1946, he set out for the United States, where he ended up at Utah State University. He received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering (the origin of his often-used title of Muhandess, or engineer). In one biographical document, he would later declare his specialty as “dairy farming.”[16] His grades were mediocre, but the experience was formative. During the summers, he traveled around the United States all the way to Alaska, often working at menial jobs—from factory labor at canneries to busing at restaurants.[17] To his father’s nagging annoyance, by then another of Aredeshir’s character traits had become clear. He was a spendthrift and generous to a fault. Having tried constant pleas, complaints, and advice on the value of money and the dangers of sycophantic fair-weather friends, the general put his wayward son on a tight budget.

Aredeshir’s stay in the United States had another, crucial consequence. In 1949, when the shah traveled there, he visited Utah; Aredeshir for the first time spent some time with the monarch. It was the beginning of an enduring relationship, one that would last until the final days of the shah’s life. Through thick and thin, Zahedi would remain loyal to the shah.

In 1950, Aredeshir returned to Iran and soon began to work for Point Four, an American aid program helping Iran develop its infrastructure. Point Four also sponsored programs to fight malaria and malnutrition. A year later, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq became prime minister and was soon embroiled in a bitter battle with the shah and his supporters, particularly Aredeshir’s father, General Zahedi. Aredeshir became at first a pawn, and then an active participant, in this struggle. In an apparent attempt to put pressure on General Zahedi, his chief rival, Dr. Mossadeq arranged for the dismissal of Aredeshir from his job at Point-IV. Aredeshir was eventually arrested, on the charge of conspiring against the government.

Aredeshir spent a few eventful weeks in prison. On one occasion he was slapped by Dr. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi—Mossadeq’s erudite and otherwise prudent minister. Another time he was beaten by a soldier. Ultimately, he succeeded in escaping from prison. The physical scars and pain of the prison experience continue to live with him in the form of a disc badly damaged by the blow of a rifle butt.

The events of August 1953 brought these simmering tensions to a boil. They catapulted Aredeshir to the center of Iranian politics and endeared him to the shah. At the same time, his role in these events made him, for the rest of his life, the bane of the opposition.

According to a CIA report, during the events of August 1953, Aredeshir “served as a liaison between the groups of the Shah’s supporters and his father.”[18] His own memoir of those fateful days, called Five Days of Crisis, offers a detailed but different account of events.[19] On some points, the two narratives agree. On August 16, at around two o’clock in the morning, the shah’s supporters had realized that Mossadeq was not going to accept the shah’s decree dismissing him and appointing General Zahedi prime minister. Aredeshir, in full coordination with his father and their other allies, set out to make and distribute copies of the royal decree appointing the general prime minister. While the CIA’s account claims they masterminded every move, Zahedi maintains that he and the Iranian supporters of his father and the shah were in charge.

Either way, it was a dangerous task. Mossadeq had declared martial law and a dawnto-dusk curfew throughout Tehran. Zahedi hid the original of the decree under the battery of the military jeep he was driving, in case he encountered an inspection post.[20] In fact, he was not only stopped, but the officer in charge recognized Zahedi’s face. There was at the time a reward of one hundred thousand tooman (about $33,000) for his arrest.[21] The officer told Zahedi not to move; unbeknownst to the officer, not just Zahedi’s life but the fate of the shah hung in the balance. The officer took a few steps in the direction of his commander, then hesitated. He returned and told Zahedi to move on. According to Zahedi, it took him several years to find that officer and return the favor.[22] Historians, obsessed with the roles of heroes and villains, often overlook anonymous participants like that officer whose actions, unassumingly, change the course of events.

After copies of the royal decree were made at the famous Sacco photo shop in Tehran, they were given to several journalists who had been invited to the hills in the outskirts of Tehran. Zahedi explained that his father was now the “legal prime minister” of the country. The American Embassy reports the events this way: “Late morning August 16, Correspondents Donald Scwhind, Associated Press, and Kenneth Love, New York Times, went to hills north of Tehran. . . . [General] Zahedi not present but son showed signed decree from Shah and gave Photostats of it to newsmen. Decree signed by the Shah. . . . Zahedi’s son said father naturally in hiding; that coup not intended.”[23]

By the next day, August 17, Zahedi had a meeting—his first meeting, in his reckoning—with Kermit Roosevelt, who had been dispatched to Iran to help topple the government of Mossadeq. Roosevelt provided Zahedi with a pass, allowing him to move around Tehran after curfew.[24]

During the next forty-eight hours, Zahedi was constantly at work, trying to round up support for his father and for the shah, whose unexpected and precipitous departure from the country had badly damaged the cause of the attempt to remove Mossadeq. Nevertheless, the shah’s supporters, some driven by nationalist sentiments, others frightened by the specter of communism, and still a third group “encouraged” by generous cash payments from CIA operatives and their Iranian allies, were not altogether deterred.

By the end of the day on August 18, both the American and British organizers of the anti-Mossadeq coup had decided that the attempt had failed. They must, they decided, “take a whole new look at the Iranian situation” and would “probably have to snuggle up to Mossadeq if we are going to have anything there.”[25]

But Zahedi and his allies had not given up. According to Kermit Roosevelt, he too did not give up. On August 19, the tide turned. As Aredeshir has never tired of emphasizing, what happened on that morning was nothing less than a heroic national uprising in favor of the shah. The opposition, on the other hand, as well as many scholars in subsequent years, denigrate the events of the day as nothing more than a cynical coup by British and American intelligence agencies and their mercenaries. The fact that the clergy, led by Ayatollah Kashani, joined the ranks of Massadeq’s opponents helped seal his fate. What is clear is that by the end of the night, General Zahedi was the new prime minister, and Aredeshir was his indefatigable aide-de-camp, advisor, and emissary.

When the shah returned five days later, Aredeshir acted as a trusted courier between his father and the monarch. Each day, often more than once, he would travel between the court and the offices where his father was established, taking some of the more sensitive messages between the shah and his prime minister.[26] He also acted as his father’s translator when the general was meeting with important English-speaking diplomats or dignitaries.[27] He was eventually named a special advisor to the prime minister and civil adjutant to the shah.

During the next two years, while his father served as a powerful and controversial prime minister, Aredeshir was almost always at his side, serving as his special emissary for many important and sensitive discussions. At the same time he wrote, in Persian, his version of the events surrounding the August event, Five Days of Crisis. For the rest of his life, he has remained uncompromising in his belief that his report—often at odds with much of what his opponents, and sometimes even the shah’s supporters, claim—is the truth, and that other narratives are marred either by ignorance or by deliberate disinformation.

Zahedi’s allegiance to his father, and his own growing closeness to the shah, came into heart-wrenching conflict in 1955 when his father was forced by the shah to resign and leave the country. After some brooding, and contemplating leaving Iran altogether, Zahedi decided to remain and work with the shah. His father had been a strong advocate of this decision. Aredeshir began to work, initially ad hoc, on the problem of helping the growing number of Iranian students studying abroad. A major change occurred in his life in those years when he married the shah’s daughter, Shahnaz. The two had first met when the shah traveled to Europe in 1955. There, in spite of objections from his wife, Queen Soraya, who disliked Shahnaz, the shah had met with his daughter. As Zahedi was part of his entourage, he was introduced to the young princess. Before long, the two were in love and decided to marry. But love in courts is never just a matter of hearts. There were many around the shah and in the royal family who were adamantly opposed to this union. In the tense weeks after the young couple announced their intention, a roadside bomb almost killed Zahedi. He came to believe that it was someone from the inner circle of the court, and opposed to the marriage, who had organized or paid for the plot.[28]

Among the objections raised against him, one was the charge that he consorted with “riffraff.” Zahedi told the shah about his circle of high school friends, among them a mechanic, and insisted that he would not give up his friends. The whisper on the street was that the shah wanted to endear himself to the Americans by having America’s “good boy”29 marry his daughter.[30] Others suggested that the marriage was a gesture by the shah intended to make up for the way he had treated General Zahedi. But Aredeshir believes that, aside from the love he and his future wife had for one another, the support of the shah’s powerful mother was a determining force that enabled him to surmount the fierce opposition. In October of 1957, in a relatively simple ceremony, Aredeshir and Princess Shahnaz were married. Since relations between Soraya, then the queen, and Shahnaz had been tense and full of rancor, the shah had earlier attended the engagement ceremony only for a few minutes. For the wedding, however, he showed up and stayed longer.

During the first years of their marriage, a comment by Princess Shahnaz raised eyebrows in the court, and put Zahedi in line to be the father of Iran’s future king. She claimed that absent a son for the shah, if she had a child, and it was a boy, he would be the legitimate heir to the Pahlavi throne. It was also the view of the American State Department at the time that “with the betrothal of Princess Shahnaz to Aredeshir Zahedi, it is now considered likely that any son of theirs would be the most promising claimant to the throne.”[31]

Queen Soraya could not, in spite of repeated medical efforts, bear a child. Ultimately the shah divorced her and began a search for a new queen who, it was hoped, might bear him a son. As the shah’s son-in-law, one of Zahedi’s most consequential actions was his role in finding a new queen for Iran. It was Zahedi and Shahnaz who found a tall young Iranian girl, then studying architecture in Paris, whom they introduced to the shah. Her name was Farah. It was in Zahedi’s home that the original meeting between the shah and his future queen took place.[32]

In 1959, Zahedi was named Iran’s ambassador to the United States. This would be the first of the two terms he served in Washington. Ever since Nixon’s trip to Iran in 1953, the shah, as well as Zahedi, had had close ties to Richard Nixon. Zahedi’s tenure in Washington was tumultuous and controversial. On the one hand, a rumor began that haunted him and the shah for the next two decades. It was said the shah illegally made a substantial contribution to the 1960 Nixon presidential campaign. Assadollah Alam, the shah’s trusted court minister, refers to these payments more than once in his Diaries. Zahedi, on the other hand, has repeatedly and emphatically denied any payment of money to any of the three Nixon presidential campaigns.

There were other reasons that Zahedi’s first tenure in Washington was brief and troubled. The Kennedy brothers, particularly Robert Kennedy, despised the shah and on more than one occasion sheltered members of the Iranian student opposition. One such figure was Sadeq Gotbzadeh, who twenty years later would become Iran’s foreign minister under the Islamic Republic (and would then be executed on the charge on attempting a coup). Zahedi clashed with the Kennedy administration over the fate of these students. He insisted that because they were not attending school, they must be sent home to Iran, but the White House, strongly backed by Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department, refused.

Eventually these tensions and changes in Iran, particularly the appointment of Ali Amini to the post of prime minister, led to Zahedi’s decision to return home.

Before long, Zahedi had his next ambassadorial appointment, this time to London. It was, for many reasons, a tough assignment. His wife had wanted to go to Rome, preferring its sunny climate to London’s dark, damp weather. But London and Washington were the most important ambassadorial posts in Iran’s foreign service.
Arriving in London, Zahedi set out quickly to “open a new chapter of cordiality between Britain and Iran.”[33] He opened the Iranian Embassy in London to a wide array of political, cultural, and social figures. He paved the way for British firms—vehicle makers, for example, of everything from heavy tanks to automobiles—to return to Iran and expand the British share of the Iranian market. Members of Parliament, painters and writers, journalists and scholars were lavishly entertained either at the embassy or at glittering receptions in West End galleries and theaters. The British Foreign Office found his work in London surprisingly successful: “He did a remarkable job in London in his fashion. Inexperienced, not a profound thinker, and apt to be impetuous, his strictly professional performance at times left something to be desired. But he entertained incessantly and lavishly, was extremely generous, and had a remarkably wide circle of friends and acquaintances. He was better known in London than any of his predecessors. . . . He did a lot single-handed towards putting Iran on the map.”[34]

Zahedi’s success as an ambassador came at a heavy price: his marriage to Shahnaz was on the verge of dissolution. Much has been written, from gossip columns to embassy reports, about the reasons for the breakup. But the truth has yet to be discovered; neither Aredeshir nor his estranged wife has provided details.
It is a measure of Zahedi’s political resilience that his power grew, rather than diminished, after the divorce. After three years in London, he received a call from the shah telling him that he would be soon named foreign minister.

Zahedi showed his true mettle once he was appointed Iran’s foreign minister on January 5, 1967. To some, it was an occasion “to live down the playboy reputation of his youth and the ‘glittering’ reputation gained as ambassador to the United States between 1960 and 1962.”[36] A report of the American Embassy in Tehran praised him for introducing “a completely new style, a new spirit of activism, and even flamboyance into the conduct of the foreign ministry. . . . During the first few weeks of his tenure . . . [he] spent not only his days, but most of his nights there . . . [his] metallic blue Rolls Royce is still seen parked in front of the ministry at two o’clock or even later in the morning.”[37] His only daughter, Mahnaz, was by then nine years old, and Zahedi had “disclosed that his only opportunity to be with his . . . daughter is at breakfast at 7 o’clock.”[38] In the same report, the embassy officials indicated that the shah had been working to bring about a “possible reconciliation between Zahedi and . . . Princess Shahnaz.”[39]

The British, on the other hand, offered a starkly different assessment of Zahedi’s first ministerial portfolio. They wrote that “since becoming Foreign Minister his inexperience and impetuosity added to his growing nationalism have made for difficulties in our dealings with the Iranians. In recent months his extreme nationalism particularly on Persian Gulf affairs have at moments seemed likely to do considerable harm to the Anglo-Iranian relations.”[40]

Zahedi brought about a number of policy and personal changes in the Foreign Ministry. “He instituted a system of night duty officers,” requiring every “division to take turns at the vigils.” For the first time, he required “note takers present during talks with foreign diplomats.”[41]

Of course not all was smooth sailing. His relationship with the prime minister, AmirAbbas Hoveyda, was marked by tension bordering on animosity. From the first day of his appointment as foreign minister, Zahedi had made it clear that he would not take part in cabinet meetings, “as nothing important ever happens there.” Instead he regularly sent his undersecretary. Zahedi also quarreled with Hoveyda over the budget for the Foreign Ministry. When Hoveyda refused a request for more funds, Zahedi “won hands-down by appealing to the Shah over the head of the prime minister.”[42]

Another facet of Zahedi’s tenure as foreign minister was his investment in attractive buildings for Iran’s embassies abroad. He clearly understood that architecture denotes power, and he used his personal influence with the shah to secure the requisite budget for these new symbols of Iran’s power and importance. In Tehran, he built a luxurious social club for the ministry, as well as a housing complex for employees.

Those who worked with him in those years and took part in meetings write of his “unfailing pride,” and of his “no nonsense” attitude in his dealings with diplomats from other countries. “He was never intimidated.” He was known to eschew the decorous rules of diplomatic discourse when he was angry. After one meeting with Zahedi, the British foreign minister recorded that “he had been much disturbed by the tone of some of [Zahedi’s] remarks yesterday.”43On another occasion, Zahedi received the ruler of a newly founded sheikhdom that had claimed ownership of one of three small islands to which Iran also had a claim. With ceremony, the new “sheikh” formally presented his written claim to Zahedi. “I will wipe my ass with this paper,” Zahedi responded, “and then flush it down the toilet.”[44]

Zahedi was particularly critical of the British and their policy in the Persian Gulf. The “extreme nationalist” position he took on the question of Bahrain led to some confrontations between Iran and England. On March 12, 1968, for example, in a meeting with George Brown, Zahedi angrily complained of an incident in which British planes had flown threateningly close to Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf and stated that the next time Iranian ships would shoot down any threatening planes. Brown responded that “he understood the position that [Iran had a] historic claim [over Bahrain] which was on the table. He would however be surprised and disappointed if Iran thought of going to war to enforce her claim. If she did, many consequences would follow. Our position, and Mr. Brown said that he would wish to emphasize this, was that so long as our treaties remained in force and our forces were in the area, we would fulfill our obligations.”[45]

It is not clear to what extent Zahedi’s occasional outbursts were at the behest of the shah, who wanted to play the traditional game of brinkmanship with the West, or resulted from his own impetuosity and nationalism. He would walk out of official ceremonies— once even when Queen Elizabeth was present—as soon as any British official used the word “Gulf” instead of “Persian Gulf,” or invited members of Bahrain’s ruling family to an official ceremony. On one occasion, he declared the British ambassador to Iran, Sir Denis Wright, persona non grata at the Foreign Ministry. The ambassador managed to reach Assadollah Alam, the minister of court, who appealed to the shah; the order was rescinded. In the meantime, when Wright tried to visit the Foreign Ministry office, no one was willing to meet with him.[46]

Zahedi repeatedly complained to the Americans about the behavior of the British. His trip to Washington in March 1968, shortly after his heated encounter with Brown, was an example of this pattern. In his meeting with Dean Rusk, he asserted that “Iran [is] hurt by UK’s recent actions. . . . He then mentioned formation of FAA [The Federation of Arab Emirates, consisting of nine Persian Gulf mini-states, like Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai and Fujairah] accusing the British of double-cross.”[47] Rusk was taken off-guard by the vehemence of Zahedi’s attacks and “hesitated to give off-the-cuff-response to such serious and far-reaching problems,” but the Americans concluded they “would be disturbed if Iran and UK at odds.”[48]

While insisting on a nationalist policy on the question of Bahrain, Zahedi pushed for a more moderate policy toward Egypt, and toward the rest of the Arab world. He often insisted, in his private pronouncements and public statements, that in the context of ArabIsraeli relations, Iran should be less identified with Israel. Indeed, the Israeli embassy in Tehran at the time considered Zahedi one of the chief opponents of full diplomatic relations between Iran and Israel.[49]

In March 1968, Tehran was awash with rumors of the imminent appointment of Zahedi as the prime minister. A report from the British embassy claimed they had “heard from a reliable source that Aredeshir Zahedi had let it be known to at least two prominent Iranians that he was going to become Prime Minister in the near future. Needless to say, we were thunder-struck by this item of information and could only speculate that—if it were really true—the Shah had decided on a thoroughly hard line on the Persian Gulf (which he could later jettison, together with Zahedi, if it proved a failure).”[50]

The rumors were false. Zahedi’s continuous clashes with Hoveyda, and his occasional confrontations with Alam, finally led in 1971 to Zahedi’s forced resignation. He had, on more than one occasion, written tartly worded letters to the prime minister, who had in turn shown them to the shah. The break came over a particularly harsh letter Zahedi wrote Hoveyda. Or, as he readily admits, “I had someone with good prose on my staff write it.” When the shah was shown the letter, he had his chief of staff call Zahedi to the court and ask him either to take back the offending letter or to resign. Zahedi was in no mood to compromise. He had been provoked by other attacks on him as well: SAVAK, for example, had reported rumors to the shah, not only about Zahedi’s part ownership of the Iran National Bank—it was said that he owned 50 percent of the shares, and that his interest was represented by his friend, Reza Daneshvar—but even about the routine loans he was receiving from banks.51 Zahedi refused to take back the letter. Instead he resigned, and as was his wont on such occasions, left Iran for Villa Les Roses.

Indeed, this incident was not the first or last such occasion. But the shah arguably tolerated more from Zahedi than from anyone else. Zahedi’s outbursts, his many letters of resignation, his repeated angry and defiant journeys to Switzerland were invariably forgiven. For his part, despite these seeming fallings-out, Zahedi remained faithful to the shah until the shah’s death. The only exception to this tradition of royal tolerance, even affection, can be seen in the shah’s Answer to History, where he claims, “I was ill-served by Aredeshir Zahedi’s inaccurate reporting. He had been in Washington too long and was closely identified with the Nixon and Ford administration. He pretended to have access to the highest authorities [in the Ford and Carter administrations] but his reports could never be confirmed. His outgoing temperament was unsuited to the straight-laced Carter White House and I should have replaced him.”[52]

But in 1971, if more evidence of his special relationship with the shah was needed, it came when a few months after his resignation Zahedi was, for the second time, named Iran’s ambassador to the United States. Zahedi had been appointed, people whispered, because of his close ties to Nixon.[53]

Zahedi’s second term in office as Iran’s ambassador coincided with a further large rise in Iran’s oil revenue and with the shah’s growing dissatisfaction with the Americans. Zahedi, using his private access to the shah, succeeded in increasing the “special budget” of the embassy, allowing him to shower the Washington establishment with heavy tins of beluga caviar, fine Persian rugs, and parties that became famous, or infamous, for the splendor of their hospitality and the glamour of their star-studded guest lists. Zahedi’s correspondence in this period shows his extensive contacts among the members of Congress, and in the Departments of State and Defense. At the same time, Zahedi and the embassy were locked into an increasingly brutal battle with the growing ranks of Iranian students studying in the United States and opposed to the shah.
As the dark clouds of Watergate began to gather on the horizon, the embassy began reporting on developments to the shah. In the first few months, Zahedi, like many in Washington, insisted that the whole question was a mere nuisance and would soon go away. But to Zahedi’s consternation, it did not go away and when Nixon was finally forced to resign in 1974, the ambassador wrote a note of profuse praise to the former president and characteristically included with it a large supply of caviar. Nixon was genuinely touched. In letters to Zahedi he thanked him for his “thoughtfulness.” Less than six years later, Nixon had a chance to repay the favor when he went to Egypt to participate in the funeral of the exiled shah. Other than Anwar Sadat, Nixon was the only head of state to attend the somber ceremonies.

Nixon’s fall and the 1976 U.S. presidential elections posed a particularly difficult challenge for Zahedi and the embassy. Ever since the Kennedy years, the shah had been distrustful of the Democrats. Furthermore, Carter had made several critical remarks about Iran and the abuses of human rights in his election campaign. Once again there were rumors of the Iranian Embassy spending money on a U.S. election, this time on the Ford campaign.54 A Jack Anderson column had reported massive illegal payments to the Nixon reelection effort in 1972. Assadollah Alam, in his Diaries, and Fereydun Hoveyda, in interviews, affirmed that some contributions were in fact made to that campaign. But Zahedi fervently denies that he was ever a party or witness to such a transaction. In 1976, the efforts of a pair of American journalists to trace the Persian connection also came to naught. By then William Rogers, formerly Nixon’s secretary of state, was the embassy’s attorney. He, too, forcefully denied any wrongdoing by Zahedi or the Iranian government.

The election of Jimmy Carter made the shah nervous. When Carter traveled to Iran in 1978, however, he declared, in a profusely praiseful tone, that Iran was an island of stability and the shah one of the most important allies of the United States. The shah’s anxieties did not go away. The fact that Carter had appointed William Sullivan as America’s new ambassador to Iran, and that Sullivan had a reputation of going to hot-spots in Indochina and fomenting trouble, only added to these anxieties. Zahedi suggested to the shah that Iran should refuse to accept the Sullivan appointment, but the shah did not heed the advice.[55]

Beginning in 1978, with early signs of turmoil in Tehran, Zahedi was once again back in the center of Iranian domestic politics. As the shah became increasingly dependent on signs of support from the United States, Zahedi’s role in Washington took on more crucial dimensions. At the same time, he was needed in Iran to help give the shah confidence. When the situation deteriorated late in 1978, Zahedi made a now famous trip back to Iran. He met with the despondent and depressed shah and tried unsuccessfully to bolster the king’s courage.
It was then that Zahedi learned for the first time the seriousness of the shah’s health condition. He insisted that the shah should immediately tell the nation about his cancer. “Iranian people are decent and forgiving,” he said. Increasingly he found himself at odds with the queen and her entourage. She had by then become the de facto center of power. He met with key officers in the armed forces and some of the shah’s most trusted guards, asking them, “the country needs you; are you ready to sacrifice for the country?” The officers all indicated their willingness even to die and lamented the utter “lack of leadership.”[56]

Zahedi was apparently contemplating a pro-shah coup—a repeat of the 1953 events. But the times had changed, and the West was already trying to come to terms with Ayatollah Khomeini. The press wrote about Zahedi’s belated attempt to “save the throne.” When the Carter administration sent General Robert E. Huyser to Iran, without even informing the shah and the government of his arrival, Zahedi suggested the general be arrested and put on a plane out of Iran. He recommended that the British and American Embassies, “as hotbeds of incitement,” be closed. The shah dismissed all these ideas as “naïve and childish.”[57] At the same time, Zahedi met with different political figures and tried to coax them into forming some kind of coalition that could save the crown.

It was all too little too late. Zahedi left Tehran for the last time in January 1979. When early in February the Iranian Embassy in Washington was taken over by new representatives of the Islamic regime, Zahedi quietly slipped away to his favorite hideaway in Montreux. He spent the next few months shuttling between Villa Les Roses and wherever the exiled shah happened to be. He visited him in Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, Panama, and then Egypt again. He tried to use his extensive contacts around the world to find an entry visa for the shah and his family to some safe country.

In the meantime, he was beginning to have legal problems of his own. Ruhani, the new acting representative of Iran to the United States, declared in a news interview that documents in the embassy showed a pattern of expensive gifts, bribes, and even call girls provided by Zahedi to members of Congress. The FBI was called in to investigate, and on one of Zahedi’s trips to the States, he was served with a subpoena. “At six in the morning they came to my room at the Waldorf,” he says angrily. Once again, William Rogers came to the rescue. After a lengthy investigation, during which all florists, restaurants, and even houses providing “escorts” in the greater District of Columbia were searched, and all the bank accounts of the embassy, and of Zahedi personally, were scrutinized, the FBI concluded that while gifts were given, none broke the law.[58] But something changed in Zahedi. “I never thought America could do this kind of thing to me, or to anybody.”

Zahedi’s troubles were not limited to the United States. About this time, he also had his last big row with members of the royal family, particularly the queen. It came immediately after the death of the shah. The queen, as she readily admits in her Enduring Love, wrote down what she called “the King’s deepest thoughts” and offered the resulting manuscript to the press as the king’s “last wish.”[59] Zahedi was adamantly opposed to writing or advertising such a document. He even threatened to go to court. The court challenge never came; Zahedi was convinced of its futility. He returned to Montreux, to tend to his gardens and continue a life that is as generous as it is lavish.

Ali Shari’ati was an enigma. His dark brooding eyes, his haunted look,his chain smoking, hurried demeanor, and his invariably ill-fitting dark suits gave him the look of an Algerian “stranger,” like the character from the Albert Camus novel. Some felt he was Islam’s Luther, a revolutionary advocate of reason and reformation. Others considered him one of the chief architects of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a utopian thinker who liberally borrowed from a variety of disparate sources to create out of Shiism a system amenable to the demands of modernity. To them, he is a “teacher, preacher, rebel,” and a pioneer of Islamic revival.[1] Out of the filaments of traditional theology, they say, he fashioned a militant Islamic ideology that was “anti-imperialist.” To still others, he was nothing but an imposter, a shallow man with the gift of gab. His sermons, they say, were superficial in content, inconsistent in logic, and dangerous in consequence. A fourth group sees in him the grand theorist of Islamic terrorism. He provided the ideological foundation for a group that called itself the Mujaheddin Khalg2 (The Mujjaheds for the Masses). Finally, a last, and small, group considers him a tool, if not an agent, of SAVAK, the shah’s secret police. His revolutionary stance, they say, was a pretense behind which he was used by the shah’s regime to fight the cultural influence of the Left. What he said in public, they claim, is often at odds with what he wrote and said in private. The reality of his life and character has thus been mired in these and still other conflicting narratives.

Ali Shari’ati was born on the November 24, 1933 (3 Azar 1312) in Mazinan, a small village near the city of Sabzevar. The town is in the province of Khorasan, a region known in Iranian history for the power of its Persian nationalism and the richness of its literary tradition. Sabke Khorasani, or the Khorasani style, is arguably the most cherished and studied, as well as the most influential, school of poetry and prose in Iran. Khorasan is also the land of Ferdowsi and Shahnameh, maybe the most enduring statement of Persian nationalism, and the bastion of the Persian language. It is the land where the first uprisings against the Arab invaders took place in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Khorasan is, on the other hand, where Imam Reza—Shiism’s Eight Imam—is buried. In fact, the capital of the province, Meshed, owes its name—“Place of Martyrdom”—to the fact that Imam Reza is buried there.

Finally, Mazinan and parts of Khorasan lie on the margins of a great desert, and the desert’s robust desolation plays a key role in the writings and sermons of Shari’ati. Along with the theme of martyrdom, this inspiring desolation is the most often repeated metaphoric image in his discourse. Other themes of the region’s discordant history—its unusual combination of nationalism, religious zealotry, martyrdom, the Dionysian celebration of nature, and the cult of Sufi mysticism—can all be seen in Shari’ati’s character and eclectic ideas.

Shari’ati was the only son in a devout lower-middle-class family that was deeply immersed in almost every Shiite religious movement of its time. His father, Mohammad Taghi, had once been a cleric, but after completing only the first two parts of his traditional clerical education—Moghadamat and Sath—he opted out of the graduate program, or the Kharej.[3] He dropped the turban, picked up the chapeau, kept the closely trimmed beard, and became known in the region as a committed religious teacher.

Ali was in the first grade when Russian and British forces occupied Iran. Islam in Iran was facing its greatest challenge in modern times. On the one hand, it had just experience the reign of Reza Shah; more important, Marxism was on the rise, and to the religious establishment, that equaled dangerous heresy and atheism. On the other hand, Ahmad Kasravi, an iconoclast historian with deeply anti-Shiite sentiments, was capturing the imagination of many Iranian youth. It was in this context that Shari’ati’s political education took shape.
As a student, he was never more than mediocre. He was a loner, often sitting in a corner by himself, and a truant, using every occasion he could find to escape the drudgeries of class. This lack of discipline, this aversion to the structured routine of a class, was to haunt him for the rest of his life, even as a teacher. He was far more interested in his father’s two-thousand-volume library of predominantly religious books. Ironically, both the father and the son, though devoutly religious, were also influenced by some of Kasravi’s ideas. Specifically, Kasravi suggested ridding religion of all its irrational elements, all sado-masochistic rituals like self-flagellation, and all superstitious beliefs in miracles.[4] Shari’ati would, later in life, repeat many of these ideas, and like Kasravi he would attract much attention from the educated classes; like him, he would cause the ire of the more traditional and truculent Islamic clergy.

Reading the likes of Kasravi and Sadeq Hedayat, as well as a handful of Western philosophers and writers like Kafka, led to what Shari’ati describes as the first existential crisis of his life. He was about fourteen years old when he lost his faith in God. He writes of the angst and solitude he felt, and of the temptation to suicide. His salvation came in the form of Rumi’s poetry.[5] Henceforth in his life, not just Rumi but the whole tradition of Sufism was to become a pillar of his ontology. Humanity, he said, cannot attain salvation unless it embraces the mystics’ message of striving to regain unity with God and to transcend the alienation that has come from the estrangement of the Fall. He was, in a sense, a Gnostic, believing that true divinity lies in us all, and that all organized religions and their rituals have become tools of estrangement and alienation instead of avenues to unity with the divine. Any time he came close to clearly articulating these views, the clerical hierarchy threatened him with the Shiite equivalent of excommunication, and thus he equivocated.

Shari’ati spent his high school years in Meshed, where his family had moved. His father had become an itinerant teacher and activist. Dictates of the movement also dictated his home. With the abdication of Reza Shah, the father single-handedly started something he quixotically called the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth. The center officially began its work in 1944.[6]

As Iranian politics entered the radical phase of the nationalist movement, the Shari’atis, particularly the father, also became more directly involved in the political battles of the time. The father and son gradually became involved with a new group that combined some of Kasravi’s ideas with crude forms of socialism and called themselves “The Movement of God-Worshiping Socialists.” A charismatic figure by the name of Mohammad Nakshab led the group. Shari’ati was deeply influenced by this movement and its ideas. It was, for example, Abolqassem Shakibnia, one of the group’s theorists, who suggested that socialism was first created by Mohammad in the Arabian Peninsula thirteen hundred years ago. Shari’ati would later repeat that theory.[7] Shakibnia’s influence on Shari’ati and his world-view would far exceed the simple, but strange idea of Mohammad as a precocious socialist.

After finishing three years of his six-year high school program, Shari’ati entered the Teachers College of Meshed as boarder.[8] He completed a two-year program, then got a job teaching in one of the outlying villages, near Meshed. In recollections of his youth, and in writing about life in general, Shari’ati went out of his way to portray his life in starkly melancholic terms. He often wrote about his sufferings. Moments of joy invariably inspired in him a sense of guilt and failure. Implicit in his narrative is a combination of the nineteenth century romantic notion that a genuine intellectual must suffer and the Shiite notion that weeping and mourning are gateways to salvation. So strong was his tendency to embrace grief that a close friend “a psychiatrist . . . believed that he and his father suffered from a type of masochism.”[9]

The first Western writer to leave an indelible mark on Shari’ati’s mind was Maurice Maeterlinck. He also read Anatole France. He had, all along, been an avid reader of Persian poetry. He fancied himself a poet and wrote under the pen name of “Shame’,” or “The Candle,” once again rekindling the romantic theme of suffering and burning from grief and the burdens of the world.

The early 1950s and the rise of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq brought about the radicalization of politics in Meshed. Shari’ati was involved in this movement through his active participation in one of the religious groups that joined the National Front—a loose coalition of forces and personalities united around their common goal of defending Mossadeq. At the same time, since 1948 Shariati had been working on a translation of a text called Abu-Zar, by the Arab author Abd-al-Hamid Jowdat-al Sahar.[10] He had first heard about the book from his father. Abu Zar and his defiant, revolutionary version of Islam— or at least this was Shari’ati’s rendition of Abu Zar—was, for the rest of Shariati’s life, a recurring motif in his sermons and writings. Shari’ati’s slapdash style of translation in this book was emblematic of his mode of operation in his other writings as well. He freely added to or subtracted from the original text, feeling little compunction about straying far away from the original. The final product was neither a work of translation nor an original work. (In the later stages of his life, Shari’ati went so far as to invent an author whose work he allegedly translated.)[11] He also translated the work of Alexis Carrel, a scientist turned metaphysician and one of Shari’ati’s favorite writers. He learned that late in life Carrel had been a Nazi collaborator. Ultimately, Shari’ati decided to hide this fact from readers.[12]

Shari’ati’s first major published essay was also not without controversy. Beginning in December 1950, Abolqassem Shakibnia—whose ideas about Mohammad as an early harbinger of socialism had influenced Shari’ati—published a series of articles in two journals in the city of Meshad. The articles were called “The Median School of Islam” (Maktabe Vasete Islam). One of the articles was accompanied by a map of “The North African countries, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, the Southern Republics of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan” and they were labeled as “the Median bloc, the base for global transfiguration.”[13] In the polarized world of the cold war, in which the world was divided between two warring camps, affording no one a middle ground, the “median bloc countries” were to offer an alternative “third way” that was neither socialist nor capitalist. It was a world guided by Islam and geared more toward the salvation of the soul than the materialism of the two cold-war camps.

Beginning on November 25, 1954, and running for ten weeks, the journal Khorasan published a front-page series called the “Median School of Islam.” A similar map of the countries caught between communism on the one hand and capitalism on the other accompanied it. This time the author was Ali Shari’ati. There was no mention of the earlier essays by Shakibnia. While Shari’ati’s stalwart supporters claim that he had developed these ideas independently, the similarities between the two articles, and the strong likelihood that Shari’ati had read the earlier articles, makes it probable that he was freely and unfairly using Shakibnia’s ideas and concepts. Whatever its source, the notion that Islam could offer a third way, free from the crude materialism of Marxism and the greedy possessiveness of capitalism, was to remain one of the central tenets of Shari’ati’s thought throughout his life. The article immediately made Shari’ati famous in the religious circles of Meshed. By then he also had a weekly radio program where he recited poetry and read religious texts. In 1955, he enrolled in the newly established University of Meshed. His father, as well as the religious grandees of the city, particularly Ayatollah Hadi Milani, had been opposed to the opening of the university. Mixing boys and girls, they worried, would undermine the students’ religious faith.[14] Women were a third of the first incoming class of about twenty-four students.

While continuing to work as a teacher, Shari’ati signed up for the undergraduate program in Iranian literature. His political activities, his outside teaching responsibilities, and his constitutional aversion to the disciplines of class, made him a less than exemplary student. At the same time, he was far better read than his peers, and for that he gained the trust and respect of some of his professors and fellow students.
At the end of his first year at the university, Shari’ati wrote a letter of lament to his erstwhile political comrades. Describing himself as “a sick, mad, insane, and dejected” person, he admits defeat in fighting “red, green, purple, violet, maroon, and grey imperialism.” He declares that in his current dejected state, he is contemplating only two alternatives: “to free myself from this world, or to free myself from this country.”[15]
During this period, Shari’ati was frequenting several literary societies in Meshed. Through a friend, he met Mehdi Akhavan Sales and became interested in modern Persian poetry. His turn toward literature had made him even more melancholy, solitary, and lonely. Family and friends began to worry about him. Some thought he had given up worldly worries and become a Sufi. His own mother confided to a friend that “Ali has gone mad, he constantly sits alone in a corner and talks to himself.”[16]

In fact he was, as events showed, far from an “otherworldly” Sufi. Furthermore, some political chickens came home to roost on September 16, 1957, when he, along with sixteen others, including his father, were arrested. Their charge was writing and distributing a pamphlet critical of the new agreement Iran had signed with an Italian company for the sale of oil. Shari’ati, like the other prisoners, was immediately sent to Tehran for interrogation. In less than a month, he was released. More important, SAVAK informed the Ministry of Education that Shari’ati’s continued employment as a teacher was not, from the police’s perspective, problematic. His speedy release from prison and his resumption of teaching, as well as rumors about his behavior in prison, began to cast a shadow on his political reliability.

But all was not bleak in 1958. At the university, he met and married, on July 15, a fellow-student named Puran Razavi. Born to a middle-class family of merchants, she was among the Iranian opposition, already a political celebrity. One of her brothers had been killed fighting the Soviets in 1941, while the other, a student at Tehran University’s Faculty of Engineering, was killed in 1954 during demonstrations protesting Vice President Nixon’s visit to Iran.[17]

The other event that drastically changed Shari’ati’s life is bizarre by any standard. Shari’ati was hardly a student of sterling academic record—Arabic was the only class he truly excelled in. The government had a policy at the time of sending the top student from each college for graduate studies abroad on scholarship. For reasons that defy any rational explanation, in his last semester at Meshed University, his Arabic teacher asked Shari’ati and another student to grade the exams for the class. The scholarship laws had one stipulation: if anyone had a failing grade in any class, he or she was automatically disqualified from winning the scholarship. The passing grade was ten on a scale of twenty, and Shari’ati failed every student in the class except himself and his accomplice. He gave the student who had been at the top of his class for three consecutive years a 9.75. Ali Shari’ati thus became the only “qualified” candidate to receive a government scholarship. He arrived in Paris in May 1959.[18] His wife and newborn son accompanied him.

Much of his time in France was spent on political activism. The students who were in the early days of forming what came to be known as the Confederation of Iranian Students did not in the beginning want to work with Shari’ati. They did not trust him. Rumors of his behavior in prison had reached them in Paris. Gradually, however, he won them over, and soon he began writing for the organs of the student movement as well as for the National Front. He began to part ways with ideas of traditional democracy and became convinced that “guided democracy” was what was needed in countries like Iran. Needless to say, in his vision, he and his cohorts were the only legitimate “guides” for this democracy. In fact, the shah’s claim to be leading precisely such a “guided democratic” revolution was met with Shari’ati’s derision and dismissive criticism. Iran had a corrupt, despotic government, he declaimed in the editorials he wrote in this period.

Gradually, his radicalism took a further, more violent turn as he became infatuated with the Algerian and Cuban models of revolution. He even helped draw plans to send a group of Iranians to Egypt for terrorism training, or what was called “guerilla” activities in those days. He was supposed to go with the team, but at the last moment, he changed his mind. Instead of making bombs, he said, he wanted to learn how to change people’s minds with simple but subversive ideas.19 He had met Frantz Fanon in France and wanted to become a champion of his ideas in Iran.

At the same time, there was a scholarship to worry about. He hurriedly put together a 115-page doctoral thesis that consisted of the Persian text of an old manuscript called Fazaele Balkh (The Virtues of Balkh) and its Persian translation. He was only receiving what the French call a Doctor d’universite—hardly the equivalent of a serious doctoral program anywhere else in the world. Filled with the fervor of a self-assured revolutionary, Shari’ati returned to Iran on June 2, 1964, only to be arrested at the border. He was incarcerated for six weeks, and when he was released he entered the political and ideological fray.

Shari’ati first tried to get a job at Tehran University and was rejected outright. The university had a policy of not accepting applications from those who had only received a Doctor d’universite in France. For reasons that remain obscure, SAVAK apparently brought pressure on the university to hire Shari’ati. The Department of History agreed to give him the requisite “test” that was given to all applicants and Shari’ati failed it.20 He then tried to be hired at the Meshed University, where he was required to teach for a number of years under the terms of his scholarship. But there, too, he did not qualify because of the nature of his doctoral degree. This time SAVAK’s pressure was effective, and Shari’ati was hired as an assistant professor of history.[21]
There is more than ample evidence to indicate that the regime wanted to use Shari’ati as a tool against communists. SAVAK saw the rising tide of leftist organizations, particularly those that engaged in terrorist acts, as the main threat on the horizon. Shari’ati was supposed to fight that tendency. The regime’s calculations backfired.

At the same time, some of the clerics close to Ayatollah Khomeini, all future leaders of the Islamic revolution—Mahmood Talegani, Morteza Motahari, Mohammad Beheshti—decided that the political future of Islam depended on its ability to attract the attention of a large segment of the growing educated middle class. Ironically, the American advisors to the shah also knew that the future of his throne, and the stability of his regime, rested with this burgeoning new class.[22] Whoever can unite with them, they told the shah, holds the political future of Iran. In attempting to forge just such an alliance, the mullahs, with backing from the merchants of the bazaar, created in the late 1960s what came to be known as Hosseiniye Ershad—a veritable mosque without the traditional trappings of a mosque, where the audience could sit on chairs rather than the floor and speakers used a podium instead of a pulpit. Shari’ati was invited to teach and soon emerged as the star of the program, drawing hundreds of listeners to his talks. People would line the streets to hear his sermons on the microphones that were set up for the occasion.

The battle between tradition and modernity can be singled out as the formative social struggle of modern Iran. In this battle, Shari’ati tried to carve out for himself a new paradigm that was at once critical of tradition—both secular and Islamic—and of modernity, as part of a Western colonial hegemonic plan.[23] In a sense, Shari’ati combined Lenin’s theories about the “liberating” role of avant-garde intellectuals with Shiism’s cult of martyrdom. From the combination, he produced a potion that was as self-affirming as Leninism and no less brutal and violent than any Jacobin theory of “elite” rule.[24] For the violent ingredient of this deadly potion, he used Frantz Fanon.

Mixing Fanon’s cult of purgative and curative violence—the colonized must “kill” the inner “white masters” before they can be liberated, Fanon had said in his brutally violent Wretched of the Earth—with Shiism’s cult of worshiping Imam Hussein as the quintessential martyr, Shari’ati concocted his own cult of martyrdom that bordered on necrophilic. He said, “In an age when reason does not and cannot prevail, a man’s death is the guarantor of a nation’s life. One’s martyrdom is the source of survival of faith . . . it raises the standard of truth . . . martyrdom is a red condemnation of a black rule. It is the cry of wrath above the silent throats . . . it is the only road remaining for the establishment of truth and justice . . . martyrdom is an invitation for all generations, at all stages of history: Kill (the tyrants) if you can or else die.”[25]

In offering his critique of tradition, Shari’ati became increasingly radical in his rejection of the role of the clergy in the history of Islam. He developed the theory that there had been two kinds of Islam: one is genuine and authentic and revolutionary and goes back to Ali; it is a tool for salvation and for creating a utopian polity. The other, “Safavid Islam,” is the Islam of the ruling classes, of oppression and exploitation, and of a clergy who had forfeited the message of Islam in favor of a self-serving ideology of greed and corruption. No sooner had Shari’ati begun his anticlerical rhetoric than the mullahs went into a frenzied attack on him. From Khomeini to the ayatollahs in Iran, they issued fatwas accusing Shari’ati of everything from heresy to advocating a Wahabi brand of Islam. The mullahs forced him to stop his lectures at Hosseiniye Ershad.

Of course, SAVAK, too, had realized that Shari’ati had taken them for a ride. His invariably conciliatory attitude during his interrogations, his promises to “serve the system,” his private and repeated praise of the shah, had proven ephemeral. In fact, it was becoming clear that instead of containing radicalism, he was fanning its flames. He had developed what one observer called “insurrectionary discourse.”[26] In late September 1973, he was arrested. Once again the story of his arrest and the conditions of his release are mired in controversy. He was released on March 21, 1975. Soon thereafter, a series of essays attacking Marxism and often obliquely praising the shah’s accomplishments appeared in Tehran’s daily papers. They bore Shari’ati’s name. His defenders claimed that the essays had nothing to do with his release, that they had been written long before. His release, they claimed, was the result of international pressure, particularly from the Algerians, on the shah. But others saw the essays as the price he had to pay for his freedom, his form of “recantation.”

Whatever the truth, he was a broken man after the publication of the essays. On May 16, 1977, Shari’ati left Iran using the last name Mazinani—the name of the village in which he was born. He claimed to have fooled SAVAK. Officials of the police scoff at the idea and suggest that they had been hoping to find a way to get rid of Shari’ati.[27] In either case, he arrived in London alone and deeply melancholy. On June 21, 1977, he died of a heart attack. Although the coroner’s report “identified cardiac failure as the cause of his sudden death,” his supporters immediately began an orchestrated campaign to suggest that he had been “martyred” by the police. “It is commonly known,” they typically say, “that he was poisoned by SAVAK agents.”[28] In a sense, he had been ensnared in the logic of his own rhetoric. It was unlikely that a lifelong champion of martyrdom could be allowed to die a natural death—particularly at a time when a society was in desperate need of heroes and icons, as Iran of 1977 seems to have been.

He was, in his theology as well as his political demeanor and discourse, uncannily similar to today’s Ayatollah Sistani. His grandfather had been a mullah, known reverently in Boroujerd as the “shah-killer.” Rumor had it that one morning the grandfather had put a curse on the town’s ruler; by nightfall the man was dead. Some fifty years later, the shah-killer’s grandson, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari, could well have been called the “shah-keeper.” No other grand ayatollah in the postwar years worked so tirelessly to preserve the crumbling throne of Mohammad Reza Shah. He also became the spiritual and political leader of the most massive movement of resistance to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic despotism.
Although Khomeini and his followers on the right, and many opponents on the left, worked hard to label Shari’atmadari as a cleric beholden to the court—an akhund-e darbari—Ayatollah Shari’atmadari was in fact a complicated man, a patriot with a clear political vision, by turns staunchly traditionalist and surprisingly liberal. His defense of the shah was driven as much by his fear of Ayatollah Khomeini and his radicalism as by any love of monarchy. In the early 1950s, he had been a friend of Mohammad Mossadeq and, according to Mossadeq’s son, only two days before the coup of August 19, 1953, had prepared a statement supporting Mossadeq and calling on the people to come to his defense. This statement was never broadcast. With the return of the shah, Ayatollah Shari’atmadari gradually became one of the most trusted allies of the court.[1]

Shari’atmadari’s staunch defense of monarchy was based on multiple philosophical premises: his aversion to radicalism, his tempering of Shiite passion—expressed in his resonant and now famous exclamations that Shiism was “not all about martyrdom,” and that the Shiites’ preeminent martyr, Imam Hossein, “was not a Che Guevara”—and finally, his strategic vision that the clergy should support the shah as the sole Shiite ruler in the world. His mild manner and prudent policies made him the perfect embodiment of a “moderate mullah.” But he lived the last years of his life in revolutionary times, when moderation was a liability and insistence on the rule of law and reason was tantamount to treason. He paid dearly for his moderation.

Kazem Shari’atmadari was born in 1905 (1284) in the city of Tabriz, the oldest son of a comfortable middle-class family. His father was a tobacco merchant. When young Kazem turned eleven, he began working in his father’s store. He worked there for only two years before setting out for Qom and a life of the cloth. By then, he had already learned Arabic and a smattering of French. (Later in life, he would learn some English through the use of “Linguaphone tapes” then popular in Iran. His own avid curiosity about the West and its culture and language would eventually lead him to modernize the curriculum of the seminary he established.)

Shari’atmadari arrived in Qom in 1915 (1292) and was one of the first students to join the newly founded Shiite seminary Hozey-e Elmiye. One of his fellow seminarians was a young man named Ruhollah Khomeini, with whom his life would become inseparably tangled. The seminary in those days was under the spiritual tutelage of Sheikh Abdul Karim Hairi. Hairi was the chief advocate of the “quietest” school of Shiism, in which the role of the clergy is limited to attending to the spiritual life of the flock. Politics, it taught, is a profanity best left to politicians. Years later, when Hairi and the other powerful advocate of the “quietest” school, Ayatollah Muhammad Hoseyn Boroujerdi, passed away, Shari’atmadari became the most influential advocate of this vision.

Hairi granted Shari’atmadari permission to become a mujtahed, or ayatollah, when he was only nineteen. Thus he left the vast multitude who in Shiism must emulate the teachings of a guide, or ayatollah, and joined the small cadre of ayatollahs who interpret and preach the scriptures and rules of the Qur’an.

In 1921, after receiving his permission from Hairi at Qom, Shari’atmadari went to Najaf. There he spent six years in further study. In 1927, he returned to Tabriz and married.

Very early in his career as a mullah, Shari’atmadari began to differ in discourse, demeanor, and political inclination from more typical, rigidly tradition-bound members of the clergy. One common characteristic of traditional Shiite madrases (schools) and their mullahs, for example, has been their self-referential sensibility: an exclusive preoccupation with a few sacred texts and dismissal of all other narratives. Similarly, although they have long insisted on being called uluma, or “men of science,” the mullahs consider what they already know as the only valid science. Everything else—any new discovery—is superfluous.
Concomitantly, the traditional clergy show a devotion to the Arabic language and a disdain for Persian. They consider Arabic the language of God. It is the language He used when communicating with all the prophets, including Adam and Eve. Beginning with the twelfth-century Persian theologian Mohammad Gazzali, Iranian clergy have generally considered Persian an inferior language, incapable of handling the “intricacies of theology.”[2]
Shari’atmadari broke with nearly all of these traditions. In his earliest days as a mullah, he paid particular attention to mastering not only the Turkic language of his native Azerbaijan, but Persian as well. And later, as a grand ayatollah and the head of his own seminary, he would insist that seminarians learn not only Persian, but a foreign language. Shari’atmadari was a voracious reader and in these early years began to amass an impressively eclectic library. Breaking with the common clerical practice of dismissing nontheological texts, Shari’atmadari delved into such secular works as Muhammad Ali Forughi’s History of Western Philosophy, and such polemical anti-Shiite texts as the writings of Ahmad Kasravi. Reading Persian translations of La Fontaine’s poems was one of his favorite pastimes.

He was also a man given to athleticism. Typical notions of clerical piety demanded a lean, even emaciated physique. Shari’atmadari, on the other hand, loved to keep fit. Unable to exercise in public without damaging his reputation, he practiced a strict regimen of exercise at home. Every day, for three to four hours, he walked around the small pond in his yard.

He was an early riser, usually up before sunrise. He would attend to his classes, and meet with his followers throughout the day. From twelve to three in the afternoon, he returned to his inner sanctum. This time was devoted to lunch, an afternoon nap, and reading. All his life, he insisted on having meals with his family. He allowed his family unusual freedom. He was tolerant of his children’s choices of career and never insisted that his daughters abide by the rules of Islamic veiling. His son remembers a household surprisingly free from the traditional hierarchies of an Iranian family. “There was only discussion and never coercion,” he remembers, adding that his father even tried to convince him, with arguments and not threats, that Marxism and its materialism had no legitimate basis in philosophy.[3]

Shari’atmadari’s moderate perspective in politics, too, was evident from his earliest days as an ayatollah in the city of Tabriz. In the postwar years, the Tabriz city government was run by the Soviet-backed local communist party, Fergey-e Democrat. Shari’atmadari unambiguously opposed their regime, though he never publicly confronted them, lest they ban him from the city altogether. When the Fergey-e Democrat was defeated in 1946, and the shah came to visit Tabriz, Shari’atmadari offered the monarch a hearty welcome to the city’s seminary. For the rest of his life, radical mullahs hounded him for showing too much hospitality to a king they despised. Nonetheless, Shari’atmadari’s tenure in Tabriz created for him a solid base of support among the large Turkish-speaking population of not just the region but of the entire country. Much later, in the months after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, Shari’atmadari would call on this support to mount the most serious, mass-based challenge to the establishment of clerical autocracy in Iran.

In 1950, Shari’atmadari left Tabriz again and returned to Qom, where he soon established himself as a popular teacher. By then, Qom had become the most important center of Shiite learning in the world. The arrival of Ayatollah Boroujerdi in the city in 1946 had given the hitherto sleepy town a new gravitas and importance. Like nearly every other ayatollah, Shari’atmadari was willing to accept Boroujerdi’s leadership. But from 1951 to 1953, as the country was hurled into the convulsions of a nationalist movement, Boroujerdi’s attempt to keep the clergy out of oppositional politics was not altogether successful. Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, one of the most important political leaders of the nationalist movement, and Shari’atmadari both decided to support Mossadeq openly. Eventually, Boroujerdi won the day: the clergy sided with the shah. After the shah’s return from his temporary exile, they were, in recompense, afforded many concessions. The 1950s thus became, for the clergy, a period of quiet ascendancy. But Shari’atmadari’s private life was anything but quiet.

In the mid-1950s, despite the importance it had gained as a learning center since Ayatollah Boroujerdi’s arrival, Qom was still a small town of less than a hundred thousand people. Largely dependent on tourists—albeit poor pilgrims to the shrine of the sister of the Imam Reza, the Eighth Imam of Shiism—Qom was notorious for the chicanery of its merchants. It was also a claustrophobically close-knit community, where the intrusive gaze of one’s neighbors afforded privacy to none. In this context, the life of a man of Shari’atmadari’s stature— of one of the three or four religious “grandees” of the town—was an open book.

Or so it was thought. But Shari’atmadari succeeded in keeping secrets in his private life. In 1954, after twenty-seven years of marriage and two children, Shari’atmadari decided to take a second wife. His ostensible reason for this decision was his desire to have more children. This decision was not in itself surprising; polygamy was not uncommon among clerics. But Shari’atmadari decided to keep his second marriage, and the two children he had with his new wife, a secret, not only from the public, but from his first wife.
Incredibly, for five years he succeeded. Then, half a decade after this second marriage took place, a bathhouse attendant—the perennial spies of traditional Iranian society, particularly in erotic matters—found out about the ayatollah’s “secret life” and informed the first wife. Angrily, and altogether unlike the “traditional” mullah’s wife—who usually submits to polygamy—she refused to accept it. Under the threat of divorce, Shari’atmadari agreed to leave his younger wife.

Shari’atmadari’s strange attempt to keep a marriage secret in Qom—a hothouse of vicious gossip, where he had many enemies—his astonishing five-year success, and his eventual acceptance of his first wife’s reasonable ultimatum, all speak to the manner of man he was. The tale exhibits the passion and the guile, the penchant for secrecy, and the rational resilience that defined him as a public figure.

The early 1960s brought other changes to Shari’atmadari’s life. When Ayatollah Boroujerdi died in 1961, Shari’atmadari was clearly in the line of succession. For a while, he tried to muster support for being anointed as the legitimate heir to Boroujerdi’s position as the grand ayatollah. But to Shari’atmadari’s consternation, the shah—wary of the political power of the clergy and hoping to make the city of Najaf in Iraq the new center of Shiism—sent the traditional telegram of condolence, the one sent to the most senior
ayatollah, to Ayatollah Hakim in Iraq. Furthermore, Ayatollah Khomeini had by then become a political force in Qom, particularly among the younger seminarians. In the end, no one took the singular place Boroujerdi had held as grand ayatollah.

The death of Boroujerdi occurred at a time when Iran was undergoing radical changes. Ali Amini had become the prime minister and had launched a wide-ranging series of reforms. He considered himself an expert on how to handle the clergy. In a characteristic gesture, blending his desire to appease the clergy with his penchant for self-promotion, he visited Qom’s religious grandees. For reasons that are still unclear, Ayatollah Khomeini was among the grandees he decided to meet. This visit was the first important public acknowledgment that Khomeini had become a force to be reckoned with. Shari’atmadari was against Amini’s visit to Khomeini’s house, but he could not forestall it.[4]

Many of the changes proposed by Amini’s government—from granting women the vote to land reform—were opposed by the clergy. For the next three years, ending with the uprising of June 1963, the ayatollahs engaged the shah and his prime ministers in a test of power and will. Khomeini proposed that the grandees meet regularly to coordinate their strategies. For the clergy, therefore, ever watchful of hierarchies and the rituals of meeting and greeting, it was particularly significant that although Khomeini’s idea was accepted, the meetings took place in the house of Shari’atmadari. It indicated that, in Qom, he was the highest-ranking cleric.

While Shari’atmadari was advocating a moderate policy, Khomeini urged more radical and confrontational tactics. The two were clearly poised for clashes. In one meeting, Shari’atmadari chastised Khomeini for putting political goals over religious ideals by attacking the government. Iran, he pointed out, was becoming an important player in the Middle East, and any attack on the government undermined the shah and weakened both Islam and Iran.
Khomeini’s radicalism, Shari’atmadari believed, was more than just bravado. He suspected it resulted from contacts between Khomeini and Nasser Qhashghai, a leader of the nomadic tribes then fighting the shah. Qhashghai had apparently contacted Khomeini with promises of support, claiming that he had amassed twelve thousand armed men near Qom. Qhashghai also claimed to be in close contact with the Americans and to have been assured that the Kennedy administration wanted to depose the shah. Shari’atmadari believed that Khomeni’s attacks against the shah were the result of these promises of support. (No documentary evidence has yet verified the truth of such a concordance between Khomeini and the Qhashghai brothers; there is evidence, however, to indicate that the Qhashghai brothers were in contact in the U.S. and that the Kennedy brothers might have been contemplating replacing the shah.)[5]

The government finally had had enough and put Khomeini under arrest. As the country was suddenly flooded with rumors that the fiery mullah would soon face a firing squad, Shari’atmadari and other grandees issued a fatwa declaring simply that Khomeini was an ayatollah. This declaration was tantamount to a demand that Khomeini’s life must be spared: Iran’s constitution forbade the execution of any ayatollah. One of those who encouraged Shari’atmadari in his action, Seyyed Zia Tababata’i, had opposed the regime’s suppression of the clergy.[6] As the result of the fatwa, and public and international pressure, Khomeini’s life was spared.

Shari’atmadari was convinced that the clergy had lost this battle of the “culture wars” and must change their focus. He turned to reforming the seminaries, which he had long believed were in desperate need of modernization. There were no entrance exams, no yearly examinations to measure students’ progress. For many poor families, sending a son to the seminary had long been an easy way to have one less mouth to feed. Each seminarian received a stipend; sometimes he was also given a small room to live in. All past attempts to change this traditional system had met with stiff student resistance.

Shari’atmadari set out to establish a new seminary in Qom, stamped with his own unique style of curriculum and pedagogy. In 1964, he opened what came to be known as Dar Al-Tablighe, or the House of Propagation. As a stipend, he offered 450 tooman in cash (about $65) to each student. He only accepted students who successfully passed an entrance exam, and he established yearly examinations. He introduced computers to the seminary, and in later years he was the pioneer in the effort to translate into digital form works of canonical significance for Shiism. Shari’atmadari introduced many other innovations in the curriculum as well. These changes ranged from requiring students to learn a foreign language to insisting that the young mullahs master the Persian language.

Shari’atmadari’s new seminary also held a yearly book fair in Qom. His seminary published numerous books itself. It also published weekly magazines that focused on teaching the tenets of Shiism, even a weekly children’s magazine with a regular circulation of almost eighty thousand.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war provided an occasion for Shari’atmadari to demonstrate his wisdom and prudent moderation. In an interview with a group of Arab journalists clearly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, he refused to join the chorus calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Iran. “Jews are our countrymen,” he said, “and must not be singled out.” Nor did he engage in the anti-Israel, pro-Arab rhetoric common in those days. The cause of Arab defeat, he suggested, must be sought in the nature of Arab societies. He criticized Nasser—in those days the leader of Arab nationalism—for his empty bombast and his hegemonic designs on the oil-rich provinces of Iran.

For the next decade, from 1967 to 1978, Shari’atmadari lived in Qom. During that time he further consolidated his influence among the Turkish-speaking population of Iran. He had a particularly strong following among the Turkic entrepreneurs of the bazaar, everywhere from Tehran to Tabriz and beyond.

In 1978, the now infamous government letter was published accusing Ayatollah Khomeini of Indian origins and British allegiance. It caused Qom to erupt as demonstrators protested the government’s hubris. And it hurled Shari’atmadari into the center of political turmoil: as the most eminent cleric in town, he was expected to act.

He took the pulpit and delivered a powerful sermon, lamenting the government’s utter disregard for the clergy. “Why,” he asked tearfully, “are we treated this way?” Tapes of the sermon were immediately distributed by the government’s opponents. (This tactic marked the emergence of a new form of samizdat, or underground propaganda. Tapes of sermons, particularly those smuggled from Iraq and France—Ayatollah Khomeini’s country of exile—became important tools of subversion and agitation.) Along with his public pronouncement, Shari’atmadari sent a secret message to the government, pleading for a quick apology before the sporadic demonstrations could cohere into a dangerous movement.

The shah’s government, confident of its power, ignored Shari’atmadari’s pleas. Instead, the day after the sermon, units of the army attacked his house and seminary. Seminarians were beaten; two were killed. Michel Foucault, the famous French social scientist and an early, avid supporter of the Islamic Revolution, was visiting Shari’atmadari at the time, accompanied by his lover. The two men took refuge in the ayatollah’s inner sanctum. As a result of this attack, Shari’atmadari was forced to assume publicly a more radical posture, although he continued to communicate secretly with the shah’s government, in an effort to oppose Khomeini’s ascent to power.

As early as June 1978, according to a report of the American Embassy in Tehran, Shari’atmadari informed the shah, through an emissary, that he had “sent a message to Ayatollah Khomeini telling him that he would no longer cooperate with him because Khomeini is against the Shah.” The same emissary reiterated to the shah Shari’atmadari’s “demand that some religious people be allowed to run in the Majlis,” and “repeated an earlier demand that Princess Ashraf stop making speeches about religion.”[7] Finally, in the same message to the shah, Shari’atmadari “let slip that he would like to have a connection with the Americans.”

Shari’atmadari had several more or less official representatives who spoke for him. One was his son, Hassan; the second was his son-in-law, Mohammad Abbasi; and the third was Hedayat Eslaminia. Eslaminia owed much of his rise to power, particularly among Amir-Abbas Hoveyda’s friends, to his ties to the clergy in general and Shari’atmadari in particular. He was a strange choice as a representative: he was by then already notorious in Tehran for his alleged involvement in questionable financial deals. (After the revolution, his notoriety would catch up with him. His own son, along with other members of the “Billionaire Boys Club,” allegedly kidnapped the old man, hoping to get out of him the numbers of the secret Swiss accounts in which he had supposedly stashed his money. He died in the trunk of a car in the process of “transportation.”)

The shah rejected all of these demands. It is unclear why the shah would have ignored Shari’atmadari’s requests or doubted his intentions. In an earlier message, again sent through an emissary, Shari’atmadari had tried to reassure the shah of his own monarchist inclinations and had complained about “Khomeini’s crazy followers who kill with guns and grenades with impunity.”[8]

Shari’atmadari also made every effort to thwart Khomeini’s return to Iran. During the weeks Khomeini was in Paris, Shari’atmadari had sent a message to the shah suggesting that the government change its policy of forbidding Khomeini’s return and instead declare that “according to the wishes of His Majesty . . . there is no longer any obstacle in the way to Khomeini’s return.” Khomeini, he noted, “is a stubborn man, and will not return, but the offer has the advantage of showing His Majesty’s magnanimity.”[9]

Arguably, Shari’atmadari’s most significant effort to help the monarchy and block Khomeini’s rise to power was an agreement he masterminded between the government of Prime Minister Sharif-Emami (a self-declared follower of Shari’atmadari in religious matters) and Bazurgan, the head of the moderate religious forces. According to a report by the American Embassy in Tehran, Sharif-Emami agreed to “nine of the twelve opposition demands” made by Bazorgan, in return for the promise that Bazorgan would travel to Paris, to discover “if Khomeini will agree to return to Iran in 9–10 months on the basis of respecting the constitution.”10 By the time Bazorgan arrived in Paris, he had already changed his mind and refused to propose the compromise to Khomeini. In the end, it mattered little: Khomeini adamantly rejected any compromise with the regime. Nothing short of the shah’s departure would satisfy him.

Shari’atmadari, perhaps better than anyone else in the religious establishment, understood the dangers inherent in Khomeini’s efforts. He also did more than anyone else to try to abort those efforts. His own efforts to thwart Khomeini would ultimately come to naught, and he would pay a heavy price for his brave opposition.
Shari’atmadari’s last attempt to block Khomeini’s ascent came in the form of a suggestion to the shah that he orchestrate a peaceful transfer of power through the docile Parliament. A regency council, with a teenage crown prince, or even a republic could then be legally mandated into existence. Shari’atmadari was rightly worried that if power were transferred in the streets, Khomeini’s radicalism would be the only winner, and the country the sole loser. For the sake of this plan, Shari’atmadari abandoned his usual caution and met openly with Hushang Nahavandi, the direct emissary of the court. His purpose in meeting with Nahavandi was to bolster the shah’s spirits and explore ways of managing a peaceful transition of power.

Ultimately, Shari’atmadari failed in his mission. The shah had by then lost his nerve and had no desire to fight. As a result, he rejected all Shari’atmadari’s suggestions, and Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran. On the day Khomeini came back to Qom, Shari’atmadari, in a gesture of reconciliation, drove to the outskirts of the town to welcome the returning leader of the revolution he had worked so hard to avoid.

In spite of this and other overt gestures of friendship, the relationship between Khomeini and Shari’atmadari was tense, even acrimonious, from the moment of Khomeini’s return. Memories of their troubled past poisoned it; more important, Shari’atmadari simply opposed Khomeini more than the latter could tolerate.

In numerous interviews and sermons, Shari’atmadari openly declared that in his opinion, Khomeini’s notion of the rule of the juriscouncil—velayat-e fagih—had no basis in Shiite theology or jurisprudence. As he never tired of telling his audiences, Khomeini’s self-serving and self-concocted concept was tantamount to despotism of the most dangerous kind. Furthermore, Shari’atmadari ordered his followers to boycott the referendum that was meant to anoint the Islamic Republic. He came out openly against the republic’s new constitution as despotic and undemocratic. When radical students took over the American Embassy, Shari’atmadari was one of the lone voices that dared speak against the action. Occupying an embassy, he said, and repeated, was against international law, and Iran would end up paying a heavy price for this brazen act.

Khomeini had no intention of allowing Shari’atmadari to continue his protests, and ominous signs soon indicated that Khomeini’s noose was tightening around the throat of his old nemesis. One of the leaders of the students occupying the American Embassy had in fact declared that part of the reason for the attack was that the embassy had been complicit with Shari’atmadari in a coup attempt against the Islamic regime. Shari’atmadari’s private secretary was assassinated right outside his house. Then, when one of his guards was gunned down, the assassin was asked to pay a small fine and was then released. Clearly, Khomeini was preparing the ground for an arrest.
He did not have to wait long. The excuse he sought came a few months later, when Sadeq Gotbzadeh—for a while one of Khomeini’s favorite allies, and Iran’s foreign minister—was implicated in a coup attempt. Before making his ill-fated attempt, Gotbzadeh, through an emissary, had solicited Shari’atmadari’s help and his promise of support. The ayatollah had apparently counseled against the idea. It was doomed to fail, he suggested. At the same time, he did not betray Gotbzadeh by reporting this conversation to the authorities. That was enough to seal his fate.

Newspapers, radio, and television began an orchestrated and vicious attack on Ayatollah Shari’atmadari. His bank accounts were frozen, his properties confiscated. His eldest son went into hiding, eventually escaping to Europe. There was to be no escape for Shari’atmadari. He was put under house arrest and subjected to eight hours of intense interrogation. Rumor had it that the seventy-year-old man was slapped by one of his interrogators. Finally, in a program eerily reminiscent of Stalin’s “show trials,” the old ayatollah was forced to appear on television. Gaunt in appearance and seemingly broken in voice and spirit, he dutifully “asked for forgiveness” for any sin he might have committed. Yet despite the contrite words, the old man created an impression quite different from the one his captors intended. He left no doubt the “confession” was forced. Nor did he offer any admission of wrongdoing on his part. His “confession” was, in a sobering manner, the last example of Shari’atmadari’s resilience and resourcefulness.

It was his last appearance. He spent the final months of his life a broken man, under house arrest. The regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, out of cruel indifference or a desire for further vengeance, refused to provide Shari’atmadari with adequate medical attention. He was finally transferred to a hospital, where he died of prostate cancer in 1986.

Even in death, the Islamic regime was afraid of him. They allowed no public ceremony, nor did they heed his request to be interred either in his house or near the shrine. Instead, as a last gesture of humiliation, they buried him, in the dark of night, near the toilets of the hospital in which he had died. There is no stone to mark his grave.

Aliasqar Amirani was one the most controversial journalists of his time. His big house in the fashionable part of the city, his expensive cars—for many years, Cadillacs were his favorite, while in the years before the revolution he drove around in an expensive model Mercedes Benz, “just like the one the shah was using at the time,” his son said1— his lavish lifestyle, his storied gambling habit, the four-floor building in the center of the city that housed his magazine with its fully equipped modern printing center, and finally his role in founding and editing Khandaniha made him easily one of the most influential journalists of the postwar era. He published Iran’s version of the Reader’s Digest—more hard-hitting than the American original. His unusual prose, full of neologisms yet easily readable and fast-paced, his habit of name-dropping, and his occasional candid criticism of some of the most powerful political figures of the time, had all contributed in making him a household name that conjured all that was good and bad about postwar journalism in Iran.

He was born in 1916 (1294) in the city of Garrus, in Kurdistan. Although the majority of the Iranian Kurds belong to the Sunni school of Islam, Amirani’s family was Shiite. His father was an attorney and keen on educating his children. He was particularly interested in ensuring that they master the Arabic language. Aliasqar had not even started elementary school when he lost his mother; his father soon married his deceased wife’s sister. The stepmother, according to Amirani, was even more vicious than the stepmothers of fairly tales. Physical punishment and emotional cruelty became a permanent part of Amirani’s young life.

When he saw his cousins go to school, he, too, unbeknownst to his parents, went along with them. The town had only a tradition school, or mektab, and the teacher was also the town’s mortician, healer, de facto judge, and seer. When the teacher saw the young boy wander in with his cousins, and learned of his hardships at home, he tried to convince Amirani’s father to be more attentive to his son’s education and emotional life. But it was to no avail. Home was, for the young boy, a hard prison. When he realized that his stepmother was adamantly opposed to his education, he decided to escape. He was thirteen[2] when he left his hometown and settled in Tehran. In the traditional Iran of the time, where the family was invariably the emotional and financial center of each child’s life, the deprivation he experienced, and the bravery he showed, were rare.

In Tehran, he worked as a houseboy in a family in return for a room. At the same time he did odd jobs in the neighborhood to make enough money for food and his other expenses.3 He also went to school. But he stood out in class, as he was several years older than his peers. He had, after all, started regular classes when he was at least four years older than an average student. Eventually, through the kindness of a classmate and his family, he moved to their home, where he was treated with dignity and kindness. In later years, when his magazine was on a sound financial footing, he repaid the family’s favor by hiring the kind father of his surrogate family—who was by then a retired officer—as the office manager.[4]

During his school years, he worked summers at odd jobs. For a while he was an assistant to a watchmaker and then to a bookbinder5—his first brush with the world of books and publishing. Of these odd jobs, he probably enjoyed working at a bicycle shop the most, as cycling was easily his most loved youthful avocation.

Eventually, searching for a way to make more money, he came up with an idea that turned out to be his entry into the world of journalism. In the mid-1930s, there was a paper published called Iran-e Bastan (Ancient Persia). The paper’s first issues stood out not only for the fineness of its production, but for the expensive paper used. It began ostensibly as a journal given to celebrating ancient Persia’s grandeur. Gradually it began to tout Iran’s Aryan heritage; finally it exposed its Nazi sympathies, hailing Hitler as the great ally of Iran and attacking Jews and other “enemies” of the Third Reich in the language of the Nazis.[6]

Amirani, who was by then an avid cyclist, made an offer to the paper to deliver papers to all its subscribers, in one day and at a cost much less than the city postal service. His offer was accepted, and he became the delivery service for the Nazi rag. His use of the economic opportunity he saw in combining his passion for cycling and the need for delivering the paper was an early sign of his entrepreneurship; it was also a symptom of his political persona for the rest of his life. To him, the end was all that mattered; the means, and their moral nature or consequence, were of little import. By the time he began his delivery service, he had already graduated from Dar al-Funun high school.[7]

After a while, he decided to find a new job, and with his characteristic zeal and perseverance, he succeeded in landing one as a reporter for the daily paper Etela’at. His beat was the city’s racetrack, Jalaliyeh Park. He mingled commerce and leisure, combining gambling and journalism, the two passions that shaped and animated him, for the rest of his life. After a time on the beat, he had an idea that had unintended consequences and that led him to the magazine that became coupled with his name in the public mind. Knowing that a true gambling itch is insatiable and that serious gamblers are usually willing to wager on anything, he came up with the idea of allowing people to gamble on the price of their entry tickets. He bought a couple of hundred tickets and placed them, along with some cash, in envelopes, which he then sold to gamblers. Depending on their luck, those who bought the envelopes could either win up to twice the price of a ticket or end up paying much more than its face value.

His gimmick worked; soon it had become a veritable lottery with a large following. To accommodate the rising demand, Amirani created a name for his one-man operation— Zarbakhsh (Gold Giver)—and before long it became quite lucrative. Races were held on Fridays, and the results were announced on Saturday afternoon in Etela’at. He knew from his own experience that gamblers were anxious to learn the results as soon as possible, so he decided to start a racing page that would be published on Saturday mornings. He needed a publishing permit, but there were a few serious obstacles in the way of his receiving one. First and foremost, he was not yet of the legal minimum age for a publisher. Second, those were the days of Reza Shah, and the government had tight control of all publishing activities in the country. But Amirani was good at circumventing cumbersome laws. (In some biographical notes, he even claimed to have finished the four years of law school, though official accounts of his life dismiss the claim.)8 He found a way to circumvent the age requirement. He realized that it was legal to republish, without a new permit, articles or stories that had already been published. He thus began putting together a weekly magazine that had a collection of already-published pieces; in reality, however, they were mere decorations for the racing results.9 He called this unusual collection Khandaniha. The first issue was published in August 1940.

Events of the next year changed the intellectual lay of the land in Iran. The fall of Reza Shah in 1941 allowed Iran to have a decade-long experience with democracy that brought with it a sudden surge of new papers and magazines. The populace, confused by the plethora of new papers, began to rely more and more on Khandaniha as a smorgasbord of opinions and news from other papers. Amirani made every effort to reflect the views and news of the leftist as well as the rightist magazines. But it was hard, even impossible, for a journalist to remain above the political fray. As the lines became more and more clearly drawn between the shah and the groups gathered around Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, Amirani, attempted to appear impartial. For example, around the time of the August 1953 coup, Amirani published poems about the shah and his nemesis, Mossadeq.[10]

In spite of his public posture, rumors of his close ties to General Fazlollah Zahedi, of his complicity with the court, and in particularly of his close ties with the shah constantly dogged him in those days—and for the rest of his life. Evidence now shows that the rumors were not, as he claimed, the work of his jealous enemies. He was, in fact, in close contact with the court—at times through Soleiman Behboodi,[11] Reza Shah’s chief of staff and an early advisor to the shah, at other times through General and Aredeshir Zahedi—and always made a conscious effort never to write against the shah and the royal family, and to make sure that the shah knew of this support. Indeed, a review of his many editorials and essays confirms what SAVAK had concluded about him. He has, they wrote, “fought against Mossadeq, in domestic politics, he offers mild criticism of the government, in foreign policy he supports the government and he is a supporter of the esteemed power of His Majesty.”[12]
The only exception to this rule came when, in the early 1960s, he wrote a scathing attack on the financial affairs of Princess Ashraf.[13] But there was more to the story than mere journalistic bravura. The first article criticized the princess for her extensive financial activities. The shah was angered by the article and ordered SAVAK to summon him and remind him “my sister has, just like everyone else in the country, the right to engage in business.” General Hassan Alavi Kia, at the time Deputy Director of SAVAK, called Amirani to his office and told him of the shah’s dissatisfaction.14 It was, in those days, rumored that Aredeshir Zahedi, who was even then no friend of the princess, had encouraged the article, particularly as payback for the efforts of the princess against Zahedi and his marriage to the shah’s daughter, Princess Shahnaz. Zahedi categorically denies the story, or any role in the publication of the article, saying, “When I fight someone, I do it to their face, not in their back.”[15]

A few weeks after the first article was published, to General Alavi Kia’s surprise, the shah told him to tell Amirani to publish another piece on the princess, this time critical of some of her social activities. Amirani was only too happy to comply.[16]

The article on the princess was not the only time that Amirani had done the shah’s bidding. As he later wrote in a letter to Aredeshir Zahedi, when he asked Zahedi to intercede on his behalf and ask the shah to give him a free, late-model car, he reminded Zahedi that all his life he had been an obedient servant of the king and never veered from his support. If I am not given the car, he wrote, my enemies will think I am no longer in favor with the king, and they will destroy me. In the same letter, he offered his gratitude to the shah for helping him rescind an order that had banned Khandaniha in 1959. The shah ordered that the car be given to Amirani. In a subsequent letter, he wrote at great length about a long litany of financial problems, clearly asking for help.[17] In another letter, this time to ask Zahedi to give his son a job at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, Amirani went to great lengths underscoring his service to the throne. These secret dealings eventually came back to haunt him after the fall of the shah.

Although he was faithful to the shah and careful never to cross the line, he was often defiantly critical of other government officials. From prime ministers and ministers to generals and bureaucrats, everyone was grist for his critical mill. Some of his most acerbic comments were saved for Ali Amini, the shah’s nemesis and the prime minister in 1961. Another of his favorite targets was Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the prime minister for thirteen years, and for much of the period the subject of often implicit, sometimes explicit criticism by Amirani. In the early 1970s, when in an attempt to further muzzle the press the government forced new editors on a number of magazines and papers, Khandaniha was not spared. As he never tired of repeating, he had put his life into the magazine—“Khandaniha is my true family,” he wrote in his will—and the idea of sharing it with a governmentappointed editor was particularly hard for him to bear. He felt he had been singled out by Hoveyda as retribution for his criticism. Amirani bided his time, and when he had a chance, he took his revenge on Hoveyda. Of course, his peers considered his paper the most politically influential publication of the times.18 The popularity of the magazine at times reached such heights that instead of publishing one issue each week he went up to three weekly issues. By that time, Khandaniha had come a long way from being a racing form.

One of the most important sources of the magazine’s popularity had nothing to do with Amirani’s writing. Early in the life of the magazine, Amirani had hired a man named Zabihollah Mansuri as staff writer. He was a veritable literary factory and claims to have written eleven hundred books. His writings are easily the most widely read of any modern author in Iran. Many of his most popular novels and books were first published as serials in Khandaniha. He wrote on everything from esoteric aspects of Islamic theology and the Iranian “Hashashins” to the wonders of science fiction and flying saucers. When the serialized articles, or novels, were put together in book form, they sold hundreds of thousands of copies. To the great dismay of Mansuri, he got no royalties from these books; Amirani claimed ownership of the books because Mansuri had been in his employ when he wrote them. In strict legal terms, Amirani might have been right. But the fact that Mansuri lived a life of poverty and need while Amirani cavorted around town in expensive cars made him the bête noire of a whole class of intellectuals and critics, who accused him of greed and moral bankruptcy.

The rise of the political movement of protest in 1977 allowed Amirani to regain the helm at his magazine and exact his revenge on Hoveyda. Using the new atmosphere of liberalization, his magazine became a relentless source of attacks on Hoveyda and his tenure as prime minister. Everything from financial corruption and despotism to the one-party system and the abuse of power by the state were blamed on Hoveyda. The vehemence of the attacks were such that Hoveyda had come to believe that Amirani was taking orders from someone else, who was preparing the ground for Hoveyda’s arrest.[19] The idea, Hoveyda believed, was to blame everything on him and thus, by implication, exonerate the shah. The arrest of Hoveyda and a number of his ministers was one more step in the attempt to save the shah and the monarchy. The attempt failed, and when the revolution came, the fires Amirani had helped fan consumed him as well.

When the shah’s regime fell, Amirani and his magazine moved to the side of the revolution. In an unconvincing attempt to save himself and his magazine, he became one of the most acerbic critics of the ancien régime. But it was too little and too blatant. He had a forty-year reputation as a wheeler-dealer, as a “connected” journalist, and almost thirtyfive hundred issues of his magazine haunted him. Less than a month after the revolution, in March 1979, he was arrested. He was accused of complicity in the August 1953 coup, and of having covert ties to the shah’s fallen regime. He spent his time in jail reading the poetry of Rumi and writing biographical profiles of Iran’s political elite. He was, according to his son, taken not to the regular prison but to a “safe-house.”[20] After four months, he was released without a trial or an explanation for his arrest.

His freedom was, however, short-lived. He spent his days writing his memoirs. He worked, according to his son, “sixteen hours a day. He squatted on the floor, just like mullahs, and wrote with a pen.” Years of experience had made him an effortless writer. Everything he wrote was, at least in his mind, ready for print. There are almost no crossed-out words or sentences added to the original. Paragraphs and chapters seemed to flow out of him fully formed, with no necessity for revision. After six months, he was arrested again. All his papers, and the memoirs he had been writing feverishly after his release, were taken. In the early hours of the morning of June 22, 1981 (Tir 1360), after a kangaroo court that lasted less than an hour, where he was accused of working to consolidate the ancien régime, of “spreading corruption on earth,” and finally of complicity in the overthrow of Dr. Mossadeq’s government, he was condemned to death, and all his properties ordered confiscated. Shortly after the trial, he was ordered to write his last will. He wrote a three-page document—two of them to “his readers,” who were, in his often-repeated words, his first and true family, and the third page to his wife, Agdas Amirani. He asks his “thoughtful readers who avidly read my magazine for forty years and know the depth of my writing” for their forgiveness. He waxes eloquent about his dedication to the paper and to the cause of keeping the readers informed.

From his wife, whom he had married in November 1941, he begged forgiveness for all the hardships he had caused her. By all accounts, he was an incorrigibly self-centered husband, while she was a wife who was relentlessly tolerant of his eccentricities. He said good-bye to her and to their daughter, Farideh, adding, “please believe me when I say that I shall never forget your services and your efforts . . . bury my ostensible body anywhere you want, but my real self is my soul, and my thoughts, and they are both buried in the pages of Khandaniha. . . . Anytime you want to talk to me, read them.”[21]

Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani
Ruhollah Khomeini
Ali Shari’ati
Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari

Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani was one of the most influential and controversial politicians in modern Iran. He was certainly one of the most powerful Speakers of the Majlis in the seventy-year history of that institution. He was a pivotal political figure during the Mohammad Mossadeq era and provided that government with a fair portion of its public support. His public break with Mossadeq in early 1953 was a key reason Western powers declared Mossadeq vulnerable and decided that he could be toppled by a coup. Kashani was also the one Shiite clergy member who had openly and successfully held national office before Ayatollah Khomeini did so. Finally, he was in no small measure the spiritual father of Shiite terrorism in Iran.

Seyyed Abolqasem was born in Tehran in 1882 (1261). A couple of sources have suggested that he was actually born in 1885 in the city of Najaf. His father and grandfather were both from the top ranks of the clergy. He was said to be linked by blood to Yahya—a descendent of Shiism’s Fourth Imam, Zeynal-abedin—who is buried in one of Tehran’s most famous religious shrines.[1] He finished elementary education in the traditional maktabs of Tehran. Kashani was about sixteen when he went with his father first to a Hadj pilgrimage in the city of Mecca and then on to Najaf—the center of Shiite learning at the time. His teachers included his father and the famed Mullah Kazem Khorasani.

Seyyed Abolqasem was twenty-five when he was given the title mujtahed. His teacher and mentor, and the man who gave him his ejazeh—permission to exercise the right to issue fatwa and collect tithes, considered by scholars as the origin of the doctoral dissertation and exam in Western universities[2]—was Ayatollah Zia-al-din Aragi, a cleric of considerable renown for his piety and erudition.

World War I precipitated the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, and Iraq, an absurd colonial creation of the “great game,” was given to Britain as a “mandate.” Kashani, as well as his father, were involved in the now famous Shiite uprising against the British. It has even been suggested that his father was killed while fighting the British.[3] There is, however, no doubt that the involvement cast a shadow over the rest of the young Kashani’s political life, often putting him on a collision course with the British. Eventually, fearing arrest, the young Kashani left Iraq. Three days before Reza Khan and Seyyed Zia organized their coup in 1921, Kashani returned to Tehran. Some sources have offered heroic accounts of his escape from Iraq, suggesting that he jumped a ship that was under British attack and swam to safety under a barrage of fire.[4] In Tehran he took residence first in his uncle’s home, and eventually in a house of his own in Pamenar neighborhood, one of the oldest in the city. He began teaching and delivering sermons, and before long he established his reputation as one of the city’s most influential clerics.

The rise of Reza Shah in 1925, and the eventual onset of his policy of curtailing clerical influence, changed Kashani’s fortune. He turned his attention to theological matters and stayed clear of politics for much of the Reza Shah period.

All this changed with the advent of World War II. Britain occupied Iran and ordered the arrest of Kashani as a Nazi sympathizer. Instead of turning himself in as ordered by the government, Kashani escaped. Eventually the British soldiers caught up with him in Golab Dareh, a suburb of Tehran, and arrested him. In an indictment against him, the government of Iran accused him of working in tandem with the famous Nazi spy Franz Meyer.[5]
For much of the war, Kashani was kept in a British military camp near the city of Kermanshah. He was allowed to have a cook and a translator. He spent his time in a two-room suite set aside for him.[6] So distrustful of the British was he that when he got sick, he asked for and eventually received permission to have an Iranian physician take over his care. He also insisted that any medications prescribed be provided by the Persian doctor, and not by the camp’s British pharmacy.[7]

It was a measure of Kashani’s popularity that he was elected to the Parliament in absentia. The British authorities, however, forced annulment of the vote. They clearly despised and distrusted him as “an intriguing and unscrupulous reactionary.”[8] He regained his full freedom only after serving about fourteen months in prison and exile. By then, British forces had finally left Iran. He was released early in 1945 and set out for Tehran.

His proclamations in this period are a discordant and disturbing combination of nationalist fervor and religious zealotry. They foreshadow the kind of policies pursued by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In an election pamphlet, for example, he warns against the “danger of schools where boys and girls sit together” and asks, “are you aware of the danger of such schools to our faith and are the bars that are open everywhere commensurate with god’s wishes? . . . Is it right to hire, in government offices ladies with makeup?”[9]

Less than a year after his release, he was arrested again, this time by the government of Ghavam. His charge was incitement to riot. In spite of many letters of protest to the government, and his own denial of any role in the riots, Seyyed was exiled to a village near the town of Khomein.

When he was finally released, he ran for the Parliament and was once again readily elected. By then the issue of the possible creation of the state of Israel had appeared on the horizon, and Kashani was among the earliest Shiite clerics to issue harshly worded condemnations of the new Jewish state. At the same time, he was cultivating a bevy of supporters and allies from all walks of life. He was a jovial man, given to jocundity and gay banter. His term of endearment for his friends and relatives was bisavad, or illiterate. He lived a simple life, and while he was politically united with some of the most strident religious forces of the time—like Navvab Safavi—he also cultivated protégés and allies among secular political figures like Ehsan Naragi and Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani. At that time, one of Kashani’s closest allies was an unknown cleric called Ruhollah Khomeini. Among his other friends were the Zahedi father-and-son team.

In January 1949 there was an attempt on the life of the shah. The culprit turned out to have ties to religious circles close to Kashani. He was supposedly a photojournalist for an Islamic paper (Parcham-e Islam) that was published by a relative of Kashani.[10] By this time, the Islamic terrorist group Feda’yan-e Islam had also committed a number of terrorist acts—including killing the historian Ahmad Kasravi—and it was common knowledge that Kashani was their spiritual leader and guru. The two connections were enough to convince the Iranian government to send Kashani into exile, this time to Lebanon.

This exile lasted about a year and four months. Kashani was again elected in absentia to the Parliament. At the behest of Mossadeq, who was himself emerging as one of the most powerful men of the hour, the shah agreed to allow Kashani’s return.

On his return in June 1950, Kashani received a hero’s welcome. Members of the Feda’yan group, political luminaries including Dr. Mossadeq, and a large number of people went to the airport to welcome Kashani back. By then, nationalism and radical Islam were on the rise and Kashani cleverly situated himself at the head of both. In fact, in spite of the clearly reactionary nature of many of his demands and pronouncements, he was elected to the Parliament as part of the National Front slate of candidates. His power and charisma were, in those days, matched only by those of Mossadeq himself. Before long, Kashani was elected Speaker of the Parliament, and, lest the world think of him as a mere member of the Majlis, he refused to participate in or chair any meetings. Instead he had his two deputies chair the sessions, and demanded that the leadership committee meet in his house.

The shah distrusted Kashani and saw him as the ideological source of Islamic terrorism. On the day after a member of the Islamic terrorist group assassinated the prime minister, General Hadji Ali Razmara, Kashani publicly defended the terrorist as a savior. At the same time, the radicalism of the Feda’yan, their desire to establish an Islamic state, and their demand that Islamic rules—like gender separation in schools and in the workplace—be put into practice immediately, had put Kashani on a collision course with the group and its fiery leader, Navvab Safavi.[11] Before long, public pronouncements from the group were redolent with harshly worded attacks on Kashani and Mossadeq. At one point, Navvab grew so disgruntled at Kashani that, according to a secret police report, he made up his mind to arrange for his assassination.[12] But for the shah, Kashani’s ambitions knew no limits and were certainly not constrained by the dictates of faith or ideology. As the shah confided to an American diplomat in 1951, he saw the “Mullah Kashani as a dangerous element . . . adding that his government had intercepted communications between Kashani and the Russians which indicated that Kashani might be looking in the direction of collaboration with the Soviets.”[13] On another occasion, the shah accused “Kashani and his friends” of rigging the elections and using terror “in order to bring about the defeat of candidates whom they disliked.”14 If the odd combination of Islamic terrorists and Soviet communists were not enough, there was also, for the shah, the dangerous sign of increasing intimacy between Kashani and Mossadeq.
In the history of Kashani’s troubled relationship with Mossadeq, the events of June 1952 were a turning point. Late in June, the shah dismissed Mossadeq and appointed Ghavam as his replacement. Ghavam first tried to have Kashani arrested, but he found the shah and some of Ghavam’s own advisors opposed to the idea. Ghavam then changed tactics and tried to forge an alliance with Kashani. He offered Kashani the right to name his candidates to six of the most important portfolios in return for the ayatollah’s support of the new government. Kashani refused the deal. Instead he wrote a letter to the minister of court, Hoseyn Ala, delivering an ultimatum to the shah. “Unless Mossadeq is reappointed in twenty-four hours,” he wrote, “I will personally aim the sharp edge of the revolution towards the court itself.”[15]

Mossadeq was reappointed that night, and afterward Kashani felt even more powerful and important. When he was unhappy with the composition of the new cabinet, he forced Mossadeq to dismiss the unacceptable ministers. Even more troubling was the fact that soon fans and supporters of Kashani converged on government offices, each with a handwritten note from him, and each expecting special treatment.[16]

A growing rift developed between Mossadeq and Kashani. Enemies of both men, as expected, helped fan the flames of these tensions. Although Kashani’s supporters claimed that the origins of the tension went back only to the last months of Mossadeq’s rule, new archival evidence indicates Kashani had been working behind the scenes against his supposed ally long before that time.

The first signs of tension between the two leaders of the Nationalist movement were reported in February 1952, as the American Embassy in Tehran wrote of dissension between Mossadeq and Kashani “arising primarily from deteriorating financial situation but . . . also connected with efforts Kashani faction to secure disproportionate government support for its candidates.”17 Kashani had apparently asked Mossadeq to ensure that four of his five sons be elected to the Majlis from different districts.18 Mossadeq had refused to comply. By June 1952, Kashani had already begun looking for a replacement for Mossadeq, and, in a conversation with the minister of court, Hoseyn Ala, he talked of some possible replacements.19 About the same time, Kashani began to get “worried about [Mossadeq’s] weakness to the Tudeh. . . . As a result . . . Mossadeq now finds himself at loggerheads with Kashani.”[20]

Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. According to the American Embassy in Tehran, both Mossadeq and Kashani were “inflicted with megalomania,” and the rift between them increased as Kashani exerted increasing “pressure on Mossadeq simply to show later powerless . . . [and] openly strives for power to political leadership of the country.” As a result “the Shah and Mossadeq [began] cooperating endeavor to frustrate Kashani’s aggressive ambitions.”[21] Both the shah and Mossadeq feared that Kashani might be planning to create an Islamic state in Iran, supplanting not just Mossadeq but the monarchy itself. One of his most brazen acts on this road was to push through the Parliament a bill that not only pardoned the assassin of Razmara, the slain prime minister, but praised him as a hero and blasted the victim as a heretic who deserved to die (mah-doural dam).

In less than a year, this de facto alliance was again changed, and by early 1953, Kashani had joined forces with the shah against their common enemy, Mossadeq. On February 24, 1953, when Mossadeq came close to forcing the shah out of Iran, it was primarily Kashani’s intervention—in the form of convening an emergency session of the parliament and sending a solid message of support to the shah—that changed the king’s mind and convinced him to stay.

In response, Mossadeq began to chip away at the power of Kashani. In the next parliamentary election, in June 1953, he managed to replace Kashani as Speaker with an ally, Dr. Abdullah Moazzami. It was ultimately this rift that made the coup against Mossadeq possible. When in April 1953 the American Embassy was appraising the Iranian political landscape and analyzing the chances for a successful coup by General Fazlollah Zahedi, it was assumed that Kashani would support the general in such an endeavor. Events in the subsequent months confirmed the embassy’s hunch. Some sources since that time have claimed that Kashani in fact received a flat ten-thousand-dollar bribe from the CIA for his change of heart. Kashani and his supporters have denied the allegation.22 The fact that in those days Kashani had ready access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in religious donations makes the ten-thousand-dollar bribe seem rather absurd.

In recent years, one of Kashani’s sons has engaged in a crusade to prove that his father never cooperated with the coup but in fact tried to save Mossadeq by writing a letter to him on August 17 suggesting that a united front, composed of Mossadeq, Kashani, and the forces of Qhashghai brothers among the nomads, could be formed to defeat the coup. Mossadeq, the son claims, refused to take the letter seriously. Historians have since questioned the veracity of this claim, or even the existence of the letter.[23] Moreover, archival material shows a long simmering history of bad blood between Kashani and Mossadeq not just before the coup but long after it as well. In the last years of his life, Kashani seems to have talked with increasing bitterness about Mossadeq, for his inability to steer the ship of state away from calamity.[24]

During the days leading to the attempt to topple the government of Mossadeq, Kashani was in close contact with General Zahedi and his supporters. For a while Aredeshir Zahedi, wanted by the Mossadeq government, and with a price on his head, hid in Kashani’s house.[25] By then, Kashani had formed alliances with figures such as Baqa’iKermani and Hoseyn Makki, who had once been stalwart supporters of Mossadeq.

Two days after the new Zahedi cabinet came to power, Kashani met publicly with the general and encouraged the government not to give in to the British. The meeting was surely a vote of confidence and confirmation for the new cabinet. Moreover, the ayatollah covertly pressured the new cabinet to have his son, Mostafa, elected to the Parliament. General Zahedi reluctantly agreed, telling the American ambassador that the list of candidates approved by him and the shah included figures like Mostafa Kashani, whom “he felt forced [to] accept despite his lack full confidence in them. He said . . . they had displayed loyalty to him and his government in extremely difficult times.”[26]

At the same time, Kashani was opposed to the proposed new oil agreement that gave control of Iran’s ersatz nationalized oil to a consortium of Western oil companies. When he began to campaign against the oil agreement, Kashani was arrested and spent a few weeks in jail. Not long after his release, his son Mostafa died in an accident. On the day of the funeral, the new prime minister, Hoseyn Ala, was about to enter the mosque when a member of the Feda’yan-i Islam, the Islamic terrorist group, tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him. The government used the attempt as an occasion to go after the group. Many of its leaders and members were arrested. Four of them, including the group’s founder, Navvab Safavi, were sent to the firing squad.

Kashani, too, was arrested on the charge of complicity with the group. Furthermore, the government wanted to question Kashani about his alleged role in the assassination of Razmara. In the course of the interrogations, Kashani is said to have confessed that indeed he had issued the fatwa that led to the assassination of Razmara. Rumors spread that Kashani’s life might be in jeopardy. Complicity in murder was, after all, a capital crime. This time the clergy, particularly Ayatollah Muhammad Hoseyn Boroujerdi, came to Kashani’s aid and asked for clemency. The shah pardoned Kashani, and in March 1955 he was released from prison.[27] He spent the rest of his life not so much out of the political arena as at its fringes.

Not long before his death, Kashani met with an official of SAVAK who had come to warn the aging cleric about his son’s political activism. The latter had been found distributing antigovernment leaflets, and in deference to his father, the police had not arrested him. Kashani used this occasion—and another one some weeks later—to send a message to the shah. He complained that his “defense of the shah, and [his] opposition to Mossadeq has only gotten me a prison sentence.” He warned of increasing dissatisfaction among the people, and about an incipient revolution. The “foundation of monarchy should be the people’s hearts,” he said, “not on the tip of bayonets.” He talked of “millions of dollars” of bribes that the British had offered him to oppose the government of Mossadeq and claimed that he had refused them and was now on the verge of poverty. “I want nothing but the independence and greatness of Iran and of monarchy,” he said.[28]

In October 1961, Kashani was diagnosed with a prostate problem and hospitalized. His family, in consultation with the government, decided to send him to Germany. Ultimately, it was decided to bring one of the top French physicians to Tehran instead. After examining the patient, the doctor decided that no operation was necessary.
A few months later, Kashani was taken sick again, this time with acute bronchitis. The shah visited him in his house—affording him the ultimate royal favor. In March 1962 (23 Esfand 1340), Kashani died.[29] It was a measure of his international stature that not only in Iran, but in other Islamic countries around the world, particularly in Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, official days of mourning were announced. In a funeral attended by many political and religious luminaries, the body was carried to the city of Rey, near Tehran, and buried near the shrine. Controversies about his character and role have not died with him.

Aboard a flight called Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini triumphantly returned home after fifteen years of exile. Next to him sat a young man, a close confidant, smartly dressed, the smile of victory on his lips. While the nation anxiously watched, a reporter approached His Holiness and asked what he felt at this momentous moment. The grim look on the bearded face of the septuagenarian did not change. Oblivious to the gaze of the camera or of the awaiting nation, he said courtly, “Nothing.” The year was 1979. Not long after this moment, the young man, Sadeq Gotbzadeh, along with thousands of others, was shot by a firing squad.

Before his return, on a cold and clear night, a rumor of unknown origin totally encompassed Tehran. A silhouette of Khomeini’s image was purported to have appeared on the moon. All too many of the inhabitants of this ostensibly modern metropolis beseechingly looked up to the heavens for an image of the awaited Messiah.
While in exile for more than a decade, the old man lived in a simple house a couple of blocks from where he prayed and lectured on theology and the evils of the regime that had exiled him in 1964. Two blocks away flowed a river. Not once did he walk these two blocks to see the river.

When in his youth he went on a pilgrimage—the only voluntary trip he ever took outside Iran—the one novelty he brought back from the foreign land was a transistor radio. Although he remained frighteningly self-referential all his life and seemed obsessed with reading and rereading a few texts as the only source of wisdom and knowledge, the radio remained his close companion for the rest of his life. With it he faithfully listened to the news, particularly Persian programs on the BBC, Radio Israel, and the Voice of America. Sapping the sacred texts to create a self-righteous and unbending inner vision, he apparently needed the news to chart a course in the labyrinth of an outer reality that was becoming increasingly foreign and dangerous to him.

Such are a few glimpses into the life of Ayatollah Khomeini. Not much is known about his early days.[1] In fact, an orchestrated ambiguity surrounds Khomeini’s past, and ambiguity is surely the fabric from which legends and myth are woven. In him an individual hermeticism cohabited with an extreme sense of social activism. What united the two things were his frightening self-righteousness and his insistence on regimentation. Everything in his individual private life—from his nocturnal meditations to the time he took his daily meals—followed a rigorously punctual pattern. On the social plane, the affairs of politics, inseparably linked with the affairs of theology, were also to be regimented by a leader-cum-shepherd who attended to every detail of the life of the “flock.”

Much too often, what has been written about him is either hagiographic in tone and texture, or demonological in spirit and substance. Some call him the incarnate Messiah, a divinely guided architect of the promised millennium. Others denigrate him as a near illiterate demagogue who lacked any and all moral scruples and was driven only by envy and an insatiable lust for power. For some, he personified the courage of a small nation to stand against superpower hegemony. For others, he was a fanatical anachronism, at best a benign Savonarola who laundered reactionary xenophobia and exegetic dogmatism as the politics of national liberation and religious revivalism.

Ruhollah Khomeini was born on September 24, 1902,[2] in the small sleepy town of Khomein. Khomeini was the youngest child of the family, which had come originally from Nishapour and somehow, in the early eighteenth century, migrated to India and settled in the town of Kintar, in a province ruled by a Shiite family. Khomeini’s grandfather, Seyyed Ahmad Moussavi, was born in India and thus had Hindi, meaning “of India,” added to his name. Around 1830, the family had left India and by 1839 had settled in the spacious house in the town of Khomein. They had purchased a fairly large four-thousandsquare-meter farm and became rich members of the community. The source of the family’s wealth before their arrival in Khomein is not clear.[3]

When 139 years later, on January 7, 1978, Etela’at, one of Tehran’s two daily papers, published a pseudonymous article by “Khalegi Motlag” accusing Khomeini’s family of having Indian roots, and of having been servants of the British Empire, angry mobs took to the street to protest what they alleged was a sacrilegious attack on their exiled leader. Before the government realized the magnitude of the movement, it had a revolution on its hands. Months later, after that revolution had swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power, his brother, Ayatollah Morteza Pasandideh, admitted in passing the veracity of the article.

Ruhollah was only six months old when his father was killed. The circumstances of his death are mired in mystery. Some of Ayatollah Khomeini’s more staunch supporters claimed that his father was killed by Reza Shah’s henchmen. The claim makes for interesting political drama but fails to take into account the fact that Reza Shah did not become a king until 1925—twenty-two years after the death of the father. In another fascinating twist in the tale of murder and love, Khomeini’s aunt, the sister of the deceased father, fell madly in love with one of the bandits who had killed her brother. Several times she helped him escape capture, and, when he was finally hung for the crime, she wore black for six months.[4]

In a pattern that is found in the lives of many important men of the twentieth century, Khomeini was raised by three women: a nanny called Khavar, his mother, and his aunt. Both mother and aunt are among the tens of thousands of Iranians who died in 1918 as a result of either the Spanish flu or the cholera epidemics that hit Iran.[5] Little else of substance is known about his childhood, except that, in the worshipful words of his son, Ahmad, “even as a youngster, my father always wanted to be the shah in the games he played.”[6]

From early on, there was no doubt that the young Ruhullah was headed for the life of a cleric. Both his father and the father of his mother, Hajar, were from clerical families. By the time he was fifteen, he had entered his first seminary, in the city of Arak, near the city of his birth. One of his first teachers there was a mullah by the name of Masjed-Shahi, who was adamant in his opposition to Darwin and evolution. There was all his life an often faint but always discernable hint of antirationalism in Khomeini’s thoughts. MasjedShahi’s influence accounts for part of this antirational tendency. Another part could have come from his early and lifelong interest in Islamic mysticism, or erfan. Although the clerical establishment had historically dismissed Sufis and mystics as infidels and had forbidden the reading or teaching of their books and poems in seminaries, Khomeini remained an avid reader and eventually a teacher of such mystics as Mullah Sadra.

After three years in Iraq, one of Khomeini’s favorite teachers, Ayatollah Abdulkarim Hairi, moved west, to the city of Qom, to create the now famous Feyziye, and the young cleric moved with his mentor to the epicenter of Shiism. It has been suggested that an important event in shaping Khomeini’s political vision was the fact that in the second year after his arrival in Qom, the city witnessed a sudden influx of top Shiite clerics who had fled Iraq after the defeat of the Shiite uprising against the British mandate there. Many of these clerics had been deeply involved in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 as well, and hearing their stories cemented his belief never to trust secular intellectuals. He was bent on avenging what he felt was the injustice of the 1905 revolution. The clerics had fought hard for the revolution but were denied its fruits. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 can be seen as payback or retribution for the setback suffered in 1905.
The Reza Shah period was one of retreat for the clergy. Khomeini, along with the other clerics, fought simply to survive. Movements of reform that criticized some of the obscurantist aspects of Shiism began to grow. Even in Qom, a reformer named Ali Akbar Hakamizadeh began publishing a magazine in which he fundamentally advocated nothing short of a reformation in Islam.[7]

World War II changed the political dynamics in Iran, affording the mullahs a chance to reorganize and try to reestablish their authority. Soon, Qom and its seminaries were dominated by Ayatollah Muhammad Hoseyn Boroujerdi and his “quietist” interpretation of Islam, which said that the clergy should attend to the spiritual needs of the flock and leave the profane world of politics to politicians. The young Khomeini deeply disagreed. In defiance of Boroujerdi, who had forbidden teaching erfan, Khomeini read and secretly taught the mystical texts.[8] In the same period, he began, also secretly, supporting Navvab Safavi, the young agitator who went on to create the most successful Islamic terrorist group in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini eventually became the group’s spiritual guide. In the words of one biographer, while seminaries were well steeped in an old tradition of fierce argumentation between young talabehs, or students, Khomeini had no toleration for it. In fact, “The qualities of autocracy, decisiveness and self-righteousness that were to stand him in such good stead in his late political career were already” well evident in Khomeini, the young teacher.[9]

The young Khomeini’s political aspirations were clearly evident in his first published book in Persian, Kashef-al-Asrar. It was an impassioned call to preserve traditional Islam and reject the modernist calls of such reform-minded clerics as Reza Qoli Shariat-Sangalaji and Ali Akbar Hakamizadeh, who published a controversial but enlightened magazine in Qom that advocated shedding some of the more obscurantist aspects of Shiism, like weeping and wailing and flagellating on the occasion of the death of the Third Imam, Hossein. Khomeini instead argued that Islam survives precisely on the tears shed for Imam Hossein. He further emphasized the role of the clergy as the kernels of the faith. All his subsequent ideas can be found in embryonic form in this juvenilia.
In the political tumult of the postwar years, Khomeini played a minor role. By then, of course, he was also married. After much persistence, he finally convinced Batul Sagafi, a girl of fifteen, to marry him. Although multiple wives and concubines were a well-established tradition among the clergy, Khomeini never took a second wife or a concubine. Indeed, his wife remembers him as a kind father who, contrary to the tradition of the time, even helped with the work of the house.

During the Mohammad Mossadeq era, Khomeini’s sole political activity was to act as an advisor or assistant to Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, once a great ally of Mossadeq but at the end his sworn enemy. In the 1950s Khomeini occasionally appeared on the political stage. He was, for example, part of a delegation sent by Ayatollah Boroujerdi to talk to the shah and make a few demands, particularly regarding the fate of the Bahais in Iran.

Khomeini’s rise to prominence began with the death of Ayatollah Boroujerdi on March 30, 1961. By then, Khomeini was recognized as an ayatollah, although in the world of Shiite clerics, obsessive about hierarchy and seniority, he was certainly considered a junior ayatollah. The shah’s decision to begin a series of reforms, called the White Revolution, and more important, his decision to allow American personnel in Iran to enjoy immunity from prosecution, catapulted the hitherto little-known ayatollah into the center of the political arena. Some of his sermons of this period were unusual for the harsh tone he used, even when talking about the shah. When he was arrested, one of the biggest uprisings in postwar Iran took place, on June 5, 1963. The government declared martial law in Tehran and a few other big cities. A few weeks later, Khomeini was released; he returned to Qom to a hero’s welcome.

A group of militant mullahs, many past students of Khomeini, organized a welcoming ceremony in which they laid out what they hoped would be the goals of the Islamic movement. Their manifesto, calling for “a ban on alcohol and drugs, control of the media, a halt to spread of corruption through theater and cinema,” and the need to once again begin “the amputation of hands,” reads, in retrospect, like a prescient platform of the Islamic Republic.
Khomeini’s continued agitation against the government finally led to his exile, first in Turkey, and eventually in Iraq. In Turkey he was a “guest” in the house of Ali Cetiner, a Turkish intelligence officer, who has since published his memoirs of the ayatollah as a guest. In his rendition, with every passing day the stern and strident mullah became softer in demeanor, more tolerant in behavior. It is tempting to ask what would have happened had Khomeini been forced to stay in Turkey. But after a few months, he was sent to Najaf, where he began to teach and to foment opposition to the shah.

For the next fourteen years, he quietly organized his forces from afar and continued to write and lecture. Toward the end of the 1960s, he gave a series of lectures that were a blueprint for the Islamic Republic. He called for the creation of an Islamic state and considered all other forms of government usurpers.[10]
His Najaf days ended when the protest movement in Iran, triggered by the article against Ayatollah Khomeini, continued unabated. Saddam Hussein decided to throw Khomeini out of Iraq, and, apparently at the behest of the shah, he was sent to Paris. The Iranian government had hoped that the glare of the media, the scrutinizing gaze of journalists, would help undermine Khomeini’s authority and aura. They badly miscalculated.

Cleverly Khomeini took on the mantle of a liberal in his Paris days. He often opined that once back in Iran, he and the rest of the clergy would have no share in power. He promised to go to Qom and attend to the spiritual demands of his flock. Contrary to the advice of many of his supporters, he refused all suggestions of compromise. Nothing short of the fall of the shah was acceptable, and that desire became a reality when on January 21, 1979, a tearful shah left Iran and began his life as a pariah. Less than a week later, Khomeini returned to a hero’s welcome and established his headquarters in the Refah School in Tehran. On February 11, 1979, the hitherto staunchly royalist army declared itself “neutral.” The day was Khomeini’s. He was now the leader of a revolution and a nation.

In the span of his long life, Khomeini wrote and lectured on a wide variety of theological, political, philosophical, and jurisprudential topics. In them, he emerges as a prolific pundit and a rigorous thinker with a relentless commitment to a theocentric vision. In fact, beneath the apparently disjointed structure of his books, proclamations, speeches, and interviews, there seems to exist a fairly consistent core of ideas and dogmas that he carefully articulated throughout his life. Of course, he was, both in temperament and in the socially active nature of his theology, a passionately political man. Hence, depending on social circumstances, at different moments, he emphasized different aspects of his core. In other words, the core was his maximalist program. It includes, first and foremost, the establishment of a clerical theocracy as the sole institution that could actualize his goals and offer salvation and social justice. His specific agenda at different historical junctures was a minimalist version of that same core, dictated by historical and pragmatic, if not opportunistic, exigencies. For him, the sacred value of the ends for which he struggled legitimized occasional acts of “expedient dissimulation.”11 The most notorious case of such expedient dissimulation by Khomeini can be found in some of the more or less liberal pronouncements he made while in Paris in the period immediately preceding his return to Iran. While to his diehard followers these acts of dissimulation were a sign of his political genius, opponents see them as acts of brazen opportunism.

Khomeini was in no sense a popular writer. Few of his books were widely read. Their reputation was a result not of the intrinsic authority of the writings but of the force and notoriety of the movement with which he was associated. He was a publicist of genius who well understood the sentiments of the masses. He moved and manipulated them with a mastery unmatched in Iran’s contemporary history. But his narrative styles were as varied as the topics on which he wrote. In sermons and talks targeted for mass consumption, he toned his language down to the lowest common denominator of the vernacular. On such occasions, he spoke like a prophet: in the name of universal laws emanating from a heavenly source. Often he did not seek to argue but offered what purported to be simple but absolute truths. It was judgmental language. It bore no introspection, fostered no ambiguity, and was unequivocal. It had the façade of nonchalance, yet there was precision in its every proclamation. Infusing his own peculiar, often Arabicized, lexicon with the syntax of provincial “street talk,” he forged a populist language devoid of conceptual contraptions, appealing and easily understandable to the “common folks” and their common sense. He was a master of “pious populism.”

In his philosophical treaties, obviously intended for a more select audience, he used a completely different narrative style. There his language was prosaic, humble in disposition, replete with conceptualizations, and avowedly rigorous in its message. It consciously sought to create an aura of erudition, occasionally lapsing into mystical imagery that seems all but impossible to reconcile with his harsh, ogreish political persona. “A name is a sign . . . everything is a name of God . . . all things are light, the light of God. . . . We are captives in the pit of attachment to the world, to nature, and worst of all, to our egos. Your self is worse than all your enemies, worse than all idols . . . all the problems besetting the world, including wars, arise from this egoism.”[12]

Interestingly enough, while in his life his vernacular style and rhetorical discourse was aggrandized, upon his death a collection of his mystical poetry was published to great fanfare. In one poem, from the collection called Wine of Love, he beckoned the Sage to “open the door of the wine-shop for me; make me heedless of lessons, discussions, asceticism, and hypocrisy,” and bemoaned a “cup of wine that will relieve my longing.”[13]

many favorable commentaries, particularly by his supporters, seemed to be pandering to history for a more humane image of the man, an attempt to soften an ogre image through the mitigation of mysticism. His opponents, of course, either doubted the veracity of his claim to authorship or saw the poems as yet another sign of his hypocrisy. The fact that the poems were nearly all dedicated to his daughter-in-law also allowed the critics to poke fun at what they alleged was his feigned piety.

On yet another level, when expounding on esoteric subjects of Shii jurisprudence, Khomeini’s language became sober and somber: its tone was cold, dry, distant, and gray. In a sense, it lacked individuality and only repeated the style of a long tradition of clerical discourse. It was a jargon of authority that claimed divine authenticity. Every one of its verbs was in the imperative. Devoid of all imagery, it was full of commandments, laid out with rigor and surgical precision. The author and the word became the Imago Dei, the moral incarnation of an immortal truth.

A prime example of this style can be found in Clarification of Questions,[14] easily Khomeini’s most widely read book. In the tradition of such catechisms, it contains a whole set of questions and answers covering all facets of life, from modern banking and partnership to precepts on ejaculation and menstruation. A closer textual interrogation of this “routine”[15] text can lead us into one of the central structures in Khomeini’s theocentric thought. The voice that seems to be posing these questions is present in the text only as an amorphous, anonymous entity. This passive presence, in contrast to the “activist” nature of the writer that offers clear commandments, is a theoretical embryo of the docility Khomeini expected in his followers and the finality he afforded to “divinely ordained” ideas.

While to an outside observer the nature of these precepts might indicate an amusing or anachronistic obsession with mundane minutiae, they are nevertheless manifestations of some key elements of Khomeini’s ideas about truth, the nature of existence, and political philosophy. To him, man is essentially a homo aemulator. The saint and the select (or the Imams and the juriscouncil) emulate the infinite, infallible wisdom of God. The common stock of humanity then emulates what the saint and the select, the earthly viceroys of heavenly wisdom, command. While for the select the key to the kingdom of knowledge is piety and purity of heart, for the mortal emulators the path to salvation is submission.

For Khomeini, truth is not a quest; it is a bequest. If in the Socratic tradition philosophy was in the last analysis knowledge of ignorance and skepsis was coterminous with inquiry, in Khomeini’s vision skepsis is sacrilege and philosophy is a dispensable instrument. “The leg of rational proof is wooden, while the leg that conveys man and actually enables him to walk is the knowledge of himself as a manifestation of God . . . it is faith that enters his heart and conscience.”[16]

If truth is a bequest, if its legitimacy does not rest in its “truth value,” but rather emanates from its divine origin, and if only this truth is capable of providing solace and salvation to man, it becomes evident that those who are privy to this truth should have power over man—and thus arises his theory of “the guardianship of the juriscouncil.” The legitimacy of this guardianship does not rest on popular consensus. In fact, irrespective of popular consciousness, it was and will be, until the apocalyptic return of Mehdi (the Messiah), the only genuinely legitimate power. All other forms of power are and will be illegitimate usurpations. “Then all non-Islamic systems of government are the systems of Kufr (or rejection of divine guidance), since the ruler in each case is an instance of Taghut (or one who claims the prerogatives of divinity for himself).[17]

At times Khomeini’s theory has been compared to the Platonic notion of the “philosopher king.”[18] This comparison is only partially accurate. For the Platonic philosopher, the path out of the cave of ignorance to the light of truth is through rational inquiry, inspired by Socratic wonder. The “philosopher king”—or queen, for Plato considered women as capable as men in this quest—will build the just polis by the toil of his rational human mind. The juriscouncil, on the other hand, must only embrace divine guidance and sacred laws to create justice on earth. “The glorious Qur’an and the Sunna contain all the laws and ordinances man needs in order to obtain happiness and the perfection of his state.”19 In fact, according to Khomeini, the tampering of man in social legislation and social engineering are a sure road to calamity. And as is clear from his pronouncements, only men—not women—can become a juriscouncil. If we remember and accept the Kantian notion that “human freedom of thought and action is possible only under conditions of insecure and limited knowledge,”[20] then it becomes evident how Khomeini’s notion of truth and authority is inimical to freedom and democracy.

Furthermore, once this guardianship, or what Khomeini called “the government of God on earth,” is established, then its preservation becomes the ultimate sacred goal to which all else, even religious rules and rites, must succumb. It is easy then to see how every kind of expedient political maneuvering and even acts of terrorism in the service of this “divine power” can be justified. That is how Khomeini legitimized his request that husbands and children have a duty to “report” their beloved’s “anti-governmental” activities. Spying for the Islamic regime, he said, is every Muslim’s duty.

In spite of his stoic lifestyle and his avowed affinity for the “humble” and distaste for the “haughty,” Khomeini, who like other clerics was adept at the art of symbolic politics, in many ways reproduced this hierarchy of knowledge and power in some of the apparently mundane details of his leadership style.
He gave his public audiences in a big barren hall, where high on the wall protruded a railed balcony. Out of the enigmatic inner sanctum he would emerge onto the loft, invariably accompanied by ritualistic cants, and descend to the only chair in the hall. The subdued audience, as well as the TV cameras, would have to look up to him. At the end of the audience, again accompanied by the chorus of cants, he would return to his inner world through the mysterious door.

On several official occasions, when giving audiences to the top leaders of the Islamic Republic, he met them in the pajama-like garment that is often worn by clerics under their official robes. Instead of his ceremonial turban, a small skullcap covered his head. On his shoulders rested a folded, checkered sheet of linen. He sat in a heavy chair. Those present flocked around him, humbly sitting on the floor, thus graphically mindful of who the shepherd was and where the flock belonged.

Popular sovereignty and rationalism are not the only aspects of modernity that Khomeini criticized. His true nemesis was secularism. In his view, secularism has disenchanted the world. A world devoid of divinity cannot be anything but a world of destitution and despair. Modernity ushered in the era of revolution and possessive individualism. Khomeini advocated a politics of redemption. To him, revolution was more a matter of “soul-craft” than of the social reallocation of resources. One time he admonished his people for their concerns over worldly comforts, reminding them that concern for economy only befitted donkeys. Occasionally he even eschewed secular technologies[21], fearing that they would ultimately secularize those who use them. “Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way, they will still be deprived of true happiness . . . the solution of social problems and the relief of human miseries requires foundations in faith and morals . . . [material gains] must be supplemented by and balanced with the faith, the conviction and the morality of Islam in order to serve humanity instead of endangering it.”[22]

The same strangely self-assured spirit can be seen in the advice he volunteered to Gorbachev, suggesting that if he was seriously interested in solving the problems of socialism, he should seek recourse in Islamic philosophy, and in particular the works of the masters of Islamic classicism (Farabi and Avicenna) and champions of Islamic illuminationist mysticism (Mulla Sadra and Suhraverdi).

If the chilling retort to the reporter’s question was a revealing metaphor for Khomeini’s cold, emotional detachment and self-indulgence, the frenzy of the mulling crowd at his funeral symbolized the passions he fueled among his followers. He invited boundless emotion from his disciples, yet he showed no attachment to any of them. Maybe the muse of history will remember public men for the kind of sentiments they helped awaken in their followers. If so, the image of young boys running to their deaths over minefields, and a frenzied, flagellating mob on the day after his death, on June 3, 1989, desperately seeking a piece of his shroud as a sacramental relic will shape the legacy by which Ayatollah Khomeini will be remembered.

Aliasqar Amirani
Darius Homayun
Abbas Masudi
Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh
The Towfiq Brothers

Darius Homayun is a man of towering ambitions and diverse talents. For much of his life, politics has been his vocation and his avocation. Although born to a lower-middle-class family, he has, through discipline, hard work, and careful planning, succeeded in fashioning for himself a polished persona of considerable erudition and impressive accomplishments. The world of ideas and letters, of fine poetry and prose, no less than the machinations of politics and the exigencies of political development, have been the passion of his life.

He was little daunted by apparently insurmountable odds and obstacles. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, in spite of a ceaseless barrage of insidious attacks on his integrity and never-ending accusations of suspicious ties with Israel and the United States, he succeeded in establishing, with the help of the shah’s government and SAVAK, the Ayandegan paper that was brazenly pro-American, pro-Israel, and anticommunist. While much of the Iranian intelligentsia reveled in opposing the Vietnam war and lionizing the Palestinian movement, Homayun and his Ayandegan were unabashed in their support of the war and in openly and publicly arguing that Israel—not the Arabs, and certainly not the Palestinians—was Iran’s strategic ally. The paper changed the journalistic discourse of the time by infusing it with more sober and sophisticated analysis of the cultural and political scenes.

To the extent that the shah and his government were interested in developing a theory legitimizing their actions and rule, Homayun was surely one of the “theorists” of the ancien régime. On the strength of this role, and his management of Ayandegan, in 1977 he rose to become minister of information in the Amuzegar cabinet. Unfortunately, though in the 1960s he had partly made his name and reputation by arguing for the necessity of political development and some measure of pluralism as key components in any modernizing plan, in 1977 he proved no less willing to defend the inherently undemocratic idea of Iran as a “one-party” system. He was, indeed, generally regarded as one of the chief theorists of the ill-fated Rastakhiz Party.

His passion for politics began when he was but a young man. Homayun was born in 1928 (1307) in Tehran. His father was a government employee and his mother was a housewife with a small income from inherited property. His childhood was defined by continual tension between his parents. He was only three when they divorced. He went on to live with his father; when his father remarried, his new wife made every effort to make life difficult for the young Darius. His mother also married again, but her second marriage did not last long. After more than a decade of separation and turmoil, his parents decided to remarry in 1936. The second time was no charm. Life at home was less than pleasant for the young boy. “My childhood was,” he said with palpable melancholy in his voice, “steeped in unhappiness and deprivation.”[1]

From early childhood, he took refuge in the world of books. His father was a poetry aficionado; he knew thousands of lines of Persian poetry by heart and could recite them at will.2 Partly in emulation of his father, and partially as an attempt to escape the drudgeries of his unhappy childhood, Darius became a voracious reader of everything—particularly books on history and politics. He was nine years old when a calamity of a different sort changed his life. He developed polio, losing mobility in part of his leg. The handicap remained with him for the rest of his life. A couple of operations later in life to remedy the damage availed little.

He went to school in Tehran. He was never better than a mediocre student. His mind often strayed from the boredom of school assignments to his natural affinities with the world of history and the dynamic realities of Iranian politics.

The advent of World War II changed Homayun’s life. Like most young people, he gravitated toward politics, but unlike them, he took the road less traveled. He was always anticommunist. He joined a small group of high school comrades, all committed to fighting the communists as well as the “foreign forces occupying Iran.”[3] Terrorism was their chosen method of struggle. But as is often the case with such youthful folly, theirs invariably turned tragic. In one of their “armed actions,” a hand grenade killed a friend. In another action, they tried to “liberate” some arms from an ammunition store on an American military base, only to walk over mines. Homayun was among those injured.

His right-wing nationalist tendencies eventually took him to the burgeoning Sumka Party—an Iranian version of the Nazi party, with their own mustached führer, their brown shirts, and a thugish disposition in politics. The Sumka was, through the army intelligence, directly related to the shah and often received help from him.[4] Homayun soon climbed up the party ranks and became, in his own sardonic terms, “something of a Gauleiter.”[5]
His political activities and his aversion to the disciplined rigors of school meant that graduation from high school was not high on his list of priorities. Eventually in 1949, with a delay of at least five years, he finally graduated. The next academic year, he enrolled at Tehran University’s law school and four years later, in 1955, he received his bachelor’s degree. “I never attended a single class,” he said with a mischievous glint in his eyes, “and nevertheless I passed with flying colors.”[6]

Through the years, his political activism was invariably entangled with his love of journalism. He edited the school paper in high school and later, when his small group of terrorist brothers had disbanded, he began editing an art and culture magazine called Jame Jam (Jamshid’s Cup). Finally, when he joined the Sumka Party, he was made editor of the group’s magazine. From the early juvenilia to his mature writings of recent years, he has developed a signature style, a prose that is well ensconced in the classics of Persian prose, is rigorously precise and bereft of bombast and circumlocution, and has a tendency to avoid Arabic words.

During the tense years of the Mohammad Mossadeq era, on two occasions, Homayun was briefly incarcerated. Sumka was known for its bullying tactics and its use of musclemen to disrupt the meetings and gatherings of the Left. But all his life Homayun has been more an intellectual and a politician than the kind of man who projects physical power or intimidation. In his own words, the party was something of a “surrealist mix of incongruent elements.” There was, for example, David Monshizadeh, who was an erudite and brilliant linguist and the führer of the party.

With the fall of Dr. Mossadeq and the suppression of the Tudeh Party, Homayun decided not only to follow his education and try to pursue a doctorate in political science, but also, for the first time in his life, to look for a job. He has been almost defiantly free from monetary need and greed his entire life. For many years he lived happily with a small one thousand tooman ($140) a month salary he received as a journalist. Among journalists of his generation, it was something of a legend that he relished his simple lunch of yogurt and bread every day.7 In choosing his career, he forfeited his chance at a relatively high-paying job as a lawyer and opted instead for the job of proofreader in Etela’at, one of Tehran’s two daily papers. “I had no doubt,” he said with characteristic self-assurance, “that before long I would get the job I wanted in the organization.”[8]

As he began his numbingly mundane job, he also set out to translate his first book. By then he had mastered English—a fact that was crucial to his future career—and decided to translate William Montgomery McGovern’s book From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy. He would, in later years, translate another book, this one the highly influential antitotalitarian treatise by Milvon Djilas called The New Class. In the last years of the 1950s, both the British and American Embassies in Tehran were avidly attempting to fight communism through the spread of critical narratives like The God That Failed, Dr. Zhivago, and Djilas’s instant new classic. In The New Class, Djilas argued that in supposedly classless Soviet-type societies, a new class has emerged, and this new class had all the prerogatives and powers historically enjoyed by ruling classes of class-based societies.

As he anticipated, Homayun rose rapidly in the ranks of the paper, becoming a translator within a year and then, after another two years, the editor of the foreign news section for Etela’at. By 1961, his reputation had grown so much that he was chosen as one of a group of five “outstanding journalists of Iran” and was sent to the United States for a two-month training course. Four years later, he won another scholarship, this time to a seminar at Harvard University, where he stayed for a year. The paper he wrote at the end of that year caused a considerable ripple back in Iran. Not only did Hoveyda, then prime minister, and Assadollah Alam, the powerful minister of court, read the fifty-page long essay, but SAVAK also took an interest in the piece and ordered one of their “experts” to parse out the paper for its potential “anti-governmental material.” The “expert” found sixteen objectionable points, including a reference to a nineteenth-century figure called Seyyed Jamal-al-din Afghani, a criticism of Reza Shah for his failure to “create popular institutions,” and allusions to the necessity of political reforms and the necessity for the government to tolerate “journalistic and parliamentarian criticism.”[9]

Of course, even before going to the United States, Homayun had been advocating similar points of views in some of his lead editorials for the Etela’at. Indeed, once the Kennedy administration came to power and began to bring pressure on the shah to accept the National Front as a partner in a coalition government, Homayun was among those trying to convince the Front to accept the invitation. He tried to create a more favorable atmosphere for such cooperation through his writing.10 In one editorial, called “The Responsibilities of an Opposition Group,” he criticizes, by inference, Iranian opposition figures like the National Front for engaging only in destructive negativism. He admonishes them for their puritanical disposition and their unwillingness to join forces with the shah. In a country like Iran, he says, “it is the work that is being done that matters, and not the identity of the person who is doing the work.”11 A couple of years earlier, in another combative editorial, he took aim at the government by declaring that if a government wants to deny its people some of their basic human rights under the guise of modernization’s temporary exigency, then the government must be clear of even a hint of corruption. A corrupt government, he declared, is unfit to put on the mantle of modernization.[12]

When he was writing these lines, he was also an editor and a prominent member of the team that managed the Iranian offices of what was then called the Franklin Book Program. The program, supported by the American government and the American private sector, was instrumental in promoting a new culture of publishing in countries like Iran. Classics of political theory and Western literature were ably translated, handsomely produced, and cheaply distributed among the ever-hungry population. Publishing paperbacks was another innovation of this program.

On his return from the United States, the impact his essay had opened many new doors to him. By then, he had come to believe that what Iran needed was a new newspaper that would compete with the two tired old dailies—Etela’at and Keyhan, both of which were evening papers. Homayun wanted to launch a morning paper that would be “different” in terms of its point of view and journalistic style. But Homayun had no money to carry out his vision.

After lengthy negotiations with Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the prime minister, and General Ne’matollah Nasiri, the head of SAVAK, it was decided that the government would provide 51 percent of the needed capital. To oversee its investment and its interests, SAVAK would have the right to have an “in-house” censor who could pass judgment on sensitive topics.

Many journalists criticized Homayun for accepting such a deal. He had been the head of the journalist’s union for several years, and in that capacity he had fought for journalists and their professional and financial gains.13 The new agreement, his critics suggested, forfeited all pretense of journalistic impartiality.
On the eve of the revolution, when the Islamic regime was out to ban Ayandegan, it was claimed that the paper had been an Israeli creation to begin with. The front page of Keyhan carried what purported to be a copy of a document prepared by SAVAK on the occasion of the creation of the paper. According to the document, during the Six Days’ War Homayun had traveled to Israel and asked for help in purchasing a modern printing machine. After consultation with government authorities, it was decided to give him the machine on the condition that the paper would take Israel’s side in fights with Arabs.14 Another document claimed that Homayun had asked Meir Ezry—Israel’s de facto ambassador to Tehran—for a two-million-tooman loan, and as evidence of his support for Israel, he had given him eleven copies of Bamshad, in which he had written articles defending Israel.[15] Whether these claims are true or not, there is surely good evidence to suggest that what clearly mattered most to Homayun was getting the paper started. What is important, he had written earlier, is the job and not who does it.[16]

As he was busy running the new paper, in 1968 the Ministry of Health invited a number of journalists to become part of a team of parliamentarians, scholars, and journalists who were to travel around the world and observe different programs to control population and bring down the birthrate. As it happened, he and another member of the team started the journey late, and it was the beginning of an enduring relationship that continues today. The other member was Homa Zahedi—daughter of the famous General Fazlollah Zahedi, sister of Aredeshir Zahedi, at the time Iran’s foreign minister—an heiress, an intimate friend of the queen and of Princesses Ashraf and Shams, and a member of the Majlis. She had been married, but the marriage was by then on its deathbed. After a courtship of three years, they were married at the end of 1972. While cynics and critics accused him of social climbing, both he and Homa talk about their relationship, now more than three decades old, in affectionate terms.

Almost four years after the marriage, Homayun was named minister of information and tourism in the new cabinet formed by Amuzegar in 1977. What helped Homayun’s rise—other than the at least inadvertent benefit of marriage into one of the most politically powerful families in the country—was the shah’s decision to clean the two-party slate and declare Iran, by royal fiat, a one-party system. The long years of working in different political organizations, his decades-old battle with the communists, had honed and hardened Homayun’s organizational skills. He was also something of an orator. The new one-party system was grist for his ideological mill. Before long, he emerged as one of the new organization’s most eloquent defenders, even apologists. As the party became increasingly entangled with the government, and Hoveyda finally fell and a new cabinet was named, Homayun’s ascendancy to a ministerial portfolio seemed inevitable.

His days as a minister were less than eventful until the beginning of 1978. Early in that year, Homayun received a phone call from Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, then court minister. An article was on its way urgently, Hoveyda said, and “it was His Majesty’s order to get the article published immediately.”[17] This call not only changed Homayun’s life but was the trigger of the revolution that ended the Pahlavi era in Iran.

Unbeknownst to Homayun, a couple of days earlier, the shah had met with Hoveyda and General Nasiri, the head of SAVAK. In anger at the recent diatribe published against him by Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah ordered both SAVAK and Hoveyda to prepare an article attacking Ayatollah Khomeini as an Indian-born agent of British imperialism. Fifteen years earlier, in 1963, when the same ayatollah was arrested and Tehran was awash with rumors that he would be soon executed, a hastily convened congregation of ayatollahs had sent their emissary to the shah, pleading for Khomeini’s life. “Why would we want to kill him and turn him into a martyr?” the shah reportedly asked the emissary.[18] Instead, he hinted that the government would expose him as an agent of foreign powers. “We will destroy his name,” the king had threatened. The threat never materialized; the ayatollah was exiled instead. But in 1978 he was back in the picture; the shah had decided to revert to his earlier tactic and ordered the preparation of an article attacking Khomeini.

Not long after Hoveyda’s call to Homayun, the latter received a “large white envelope” embossed with the royal insignia of the court. He opened the envelope and saw the article, but never bothered to read it. When asked why he did not read the brief article, he said, “I simply knew that if the Shah wanted something published, it would be published.”[19] The article was sent to the editors of Keyhan and Etela’at.

Keyhan basically refused to publish the essay. Even Etela’at had doubts about the wisdom of publishing it. On the next day, Homayun received a panicked call from Etela’at’s editor. “Do you know the content of the article you sent me?” he was asked.[20] Homayun confessed to having never read the piece. But when he was informed that it was an attack on Ayatollah Khomeini, he simply retorted, “It does not matter. It was an order from higher up and has to be published.”[21] The editor insisted that the article’s publication was sure to result in an attack on the paper and its offices, but Homayun was not deterred. He reminded the hapless editor “where the order came from,” and told him that since Etela’at had benefitted most from the regime in the past, it must now also carry the burden.[22]

Behind the scenes, the wheels of power were turning, and a couple of hours after his conversation with the editor, the prime minister, Jamshid Amuzegar, called. The paper’s publisher had called Amuzegar and pleaded their case for not publishing the potentially incendiary piece. When Amuzegar asked about the “story regarding the article . . . [Homayun] simply answered that it was the shah’s order that it be published. Amuzegar agreed by saying that of course it must be published.”[23] Incredibly, in spite of the dire warning and objections of the editor and the publisher of the paper, neither the prime minister nor his minister of information, Darius Homayun, had any desire to read the article themselves. Long years of docility, particularly toward royal decrees, had made obedience second nature. Two days later, the now infamous article was published, and no sooner had the paper hit the stands than riots began in the city of Qom. Six people were killed. The revolution had begun. Amuzegar’s cabinet, including Homayun’s ministerial portfolio, was one of its first casualties.
His unpopularity with the people became starkly evident as soon as he fell from power. Only a couple of days after his resignation, the Tehran papers, including Etela’at, began scathing attacks on Homayun and his tenure. At the same time, he became a favorite subject of attack in the Majlis, which had become more openly critical of the government. In late 1977, for example, a leaflet, apparently published by a group of writers and poets, attacked some of the most well known pro-government journalists. Prominent on the list was Homayun.24 Finally, when the shah decided to arrest a few of the old ministers and generals in the hope of turning back the tide of revolution, Homayun was an obvious choice for the role of sacrificial lamb.

As the attacks mounted and their ferocity increased, friends and family suggested that Homayun leave Iran. By then, of course, his name was on the list of those to be arrested, and he was thus barred from leaving the country. He has suggested that he refused to “take flight. In spite of threatening remarks and calls, I stayed home.”25 He paid heavily for this decision.

In October 1978, a military government was installed and one of its first acts was to order the arrest of a number of ancien régime’s most faithful servants and officials. Homayun was in the first group of those arrested. At one in the morning on a cold October night, he was awakened and taken to Jamshidabad military garrison, which was fast becoming the Bastille for members of the old regime.

Guards tried their best to make the prison experience less painful for these once powerful men. Their attitude toward their new wards “was a mixture of prisoner and excabinet minister.”26 Many were allowed to have food brought from home. Nearly everyone refused to wear the prison garb issued by the guards. “I was the only person,” Homayun declares, “who wore the prison uniform.”[27]

He spent his time in prison chatting with others, analyzing the unfolding events— “ears tuned to the news and . . . eyes fixed on any newspaper we could lay our hands on”[28]—and observing the frailties and braveries of his friends. And, of course, as he had done all his life, he spent the remaining hours of each day reading. He had, for example, a chance to revisit Moby-Dick, and it was, he said, a “great experience.”[29]

As the situation worsened, and it became evident that the regime could not survive, Homayun, with much consternation, convinced his wife to leave the country. Hitherto she had been his most vocal, forceful, and constant advocate. The fact that she was, in her own right, a woman of considerable power and impressive pedigree—her brother was, after all Aredeshir Zahedi, the shah’s closest confidant—helped him in the early days in prison. But as hope waned and it became clear that the end was in sight, Homayun figured that his wife’s continuous presence in Iran would become a liability for the family. She left for Switzerland in the company of her daughter and son-in-law.

The anticipated end came on February 11, 1979. Around three in the afternoon, Homayun and other prisoners “heard the noise and movement of a large crowd outside.”[30] Someone climbed atop the heater and peered at what awaited them. A small angry crowd carrying a sign declaring the barracks an “Islamic” garrison, was milling around the entrance. Most of the prison guards had escaped. By six o’clock, the few remaining ones, fearing retribution from the angry crowd, abandoned their arms and their posts and left the frightened prisoners to the mercy of the angry, swelling crowd. The early dark of the winter was the prisoners’ friend. In the case of Homayun, the beard he had grown hid his well-known face. In the chaos of fleeing soldiers and the advancing mob, of bullets flying in the air, of shouts of “God is Great,” Homayun, walking with considered calm and head bowed, threaded his way out of the prison to the safety of the streets and eventually into a taxi.

He spent the next fifteen months in hiding in Tehran, going from one house to the next. When the offices of Ayandegan were attacked and his father, who was the treasurer of the paper, was arrested, Homayun, fearing for his safety, was forced to move. During this long period, he avoided contact with nearly everyone. He did not even get in touch with his own siblings. He wrote one letter to his wife, informing her of his safety, and then there was silence. The prison experience had a profound impact on him. He felt that a new lease on life had been granted him. “Hundreds of thousands of people would have loved to see me dead,” he says, “and I made the resolution to begin a new life built in the depth of where fear and death had once invaded me. I decided to forget the past and avoid being handicapped by it.”[31] At the same time, none of the people on whose help he had counted in his hard days of captivity failed or betrayed him. With the help of a friend and some Kurdish smugglers, he left Iran around the time of the Persian New Year. It was a long, hard trek across snow-capped mountains and bandit-infested valleys of Iran and Turkey. When he finally arrived at the Geneva airport, his wife did not at first recognize him.

In exile, Homayun has not allowed his passion for politics to dissipate. He is now the leading figure of a small group of constitutional royalists who advocate a return to the democratic constitution of 1905 (where the king has little political power). At the same time, he has been indefatigable in his efforts to bring about the unity of all opposition forces. He has a contagious optimism about the future. He spends his time in exile feeding his lifelong appetite for the world of ideas and words, poetry and prose. He has published books on the origins of the revolution as well as the promises of tomorrow and Iran’s encounter with modernity. He has continued his work as a journalist and political activist, writing essays and book reviews, and traveling throughout the lands of the diaspora, offering hope for a happy future. He lives with his wife in Geneva.

O N T H E E V E of the Soviet-British invasion of Iran in 1941, an editorial in Tehran’s only daily paper raised the ire of the already anxious and distrustful British and Soviet embassies. Both countries had served notice on the Iranian government that it must get rid of all German nationals—a potential “fifth column” of Nazis. The editorial was defiantly proNazi. Some embassies assumed that the crown prince had written it. It helped seal Reza Shah’s fate. Before long, he was forced to abdicate, leaving the throne to his young son.
Thirty-seven years later, a daily paper in Tehran again published an incendiary essay: “Iran and Red and Black Imperialism.” This time the article was certainly written on the direct orders of the shah, who was angered by a diatribe against the Pahlavi dynasty written by Ayatollah Khomeini.[1] The essay claimed that Ayatollah Khomeini was “known as the ‘Indian Seyyed’” and had been an agent of British imperialism. Its publication led to angry protests in the city of Qom, and then around the country. A few months later, the shah left Iran, never to return. The two essays that framed the reign of Mohammed Reza Shah were published in Etela’at, a paper founded and, for more than four decades, edited by Abbas Masudi.

In 1941, the British Embassy described Masudi as a “journalist by profession and by nature,” adding in a biting tone that a “career in Persian journalism is a poor recommendation.” The embassy said that his rise to prominence was the result of his accompanying the shah, then the crown prince, “to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt on his wedding tour as press representative, and kept the Tehran press supplied with a stream of accounts of the Prince’s doing, in that quasi-religious style that alone is permitted to Iranians when speaking of their monarchy.”[2]

During most of the reign of Reza Shah, Etela’at was the capital’s preeminent daily paper. Because Masudi invariably reported the official view, Etela’at was considered the semiofficial voice of the government. This identification was strong enough in the public imagination that in December 1942, when mobs wanted to vent their anger against the shah, it was Masudi who was “severely beaten.”[3] But Masudi also developed a reputation as an unreliable ally, an opportunist who fashioned his editorial policies to fit the exigencies of the moment.

Abbas Masudi was born in 1895 (1274) to a middle-class family in Tehran. His father, Hadj Mohammad Ali, owned a butcher shop and was the leader of the butcher’s guild. For years his business was responsible for the distribution of meat to the capital. He was married twice, and Abbas was the third child of seven of his second marriage.[4]

Abbas was a disciplined and studious young boy. He graduated from Dar al-Funun high school in Tehran, but he was still in school when his father’s death forced him to begin working. The experience had a lifelong impact on his character. Even when he had great wealth and considerable political capital as a member of the Iranian Parliament, he still worked fourteen-hour days. He kept the habit until the last day of his life.

He stayed in the family business until 1921 (1300), when he set out on a different path. He had always been an avid reader and was keenly interested in political matters. He set his mind on a career in journalism. A neighbor and friend found him work at one of the papers run by Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i. Abbas began as a typesetter in a printing shop that published Seyyed’s famous paper, Ra’ad. After a time, Masudi graduated to the cerebral aspects of publishing when he became a copy editor for one of Tehran’s daily papers.

In the 1920s, his personal and professional life changed. Within two years of commencing his work in newspapers, Abbas married a woman named Eftekhar. Then with the help of a couple of friends, he launched the first private news agency in Iran.5 He called it Markaze Etela’at, or the Center for Information. He picked up news items from foreign embassies in Tehran and translated them into Persian. He mastered English and French. Before long, he was ready to take the next step, and for the rest of his public life, his name was inseparable from Etela’at.

In November 1925, Abbas Masudi asked the Iranian authorities for permission to launch two new papers. One was to be called Nehzate Meli (National Movement) and was to concentrate on “economical, literary, political and current affairs news.” The other was Etela’at (Information).6 Permission for the publication of Etela’at was issued a year later. The other request was denied. His critics have suggested that he coerced and cajoled another journalist who had already received a license for a paper to be called Etela’at, to give up the name and allow Masudi to use it.[7]

The first Iranian newspapers were launched in the mid-nineteenth century during the reign of Nasir al-din Shah. They were official government chronicles of political life in the court and in government offices. During the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, papers propagating democratic and modern ideas began to proliferate. By the end of World War I, dozens of papers were being published in Iran, reflecting a variety of viewpoints. During the days of Reza Shah opposition papers were banned. Newspapers at the time had to contend with government censors who controlled every word of every article, as well as a number of de facto taboos and limitations. On the margins of the application for the new paper, Masudi was required to write, “I hereby promise that before publishing any articles dealing with Islam, I will submit the said articles to the person in charge of supervising theological matters, otherwise I will pay a fine.”[8]

For much of its early years, Etela’at was an unofficial chronicle of what took place in the government. The early subscription was about seven hundred copies per day. According to the “official” history of the paper, prepared by Masudi’s son, Farhad, Masudi’s decision to cover the oppositions’ actions in the Parliament added to the paper’s prestige and readership.

On the paper’s first anniversary, a milestone was passed when Etela’at was published with four pages instead of one. Gradually, photographs were added, and, as expected, the first picture ever published in their pages was of Reza Shah, along with a brief account of the king’s daily program and his “progressive vision for the country.” From its inception, the paper had the reputation of being more dedicated to panegyrics than to investigative journalism.

In Etela’at’s second year, Masudi solicited the help of his nephew, Mohammad Ali Masudi. Mohammad Ali was a respected journalist of humble origins who had accumulated an enormous fortune, giving rise to rumors about the source of his wealth. He was said to own a large collection of exquisite antiques and vast holdings in real estate in Iran and outside.9 Abbas directed the financial and public relations aspects of the business, and Mohammad Ali managed the editorial side. The partnership between the two cousins lasted only for a few years before Abbas was once again at the helm himself.

By then, Masudi was publishing a French daily paper called Journal de Tehran, the first foreign-language paper in Iran. His company also began publishing books. A collection of articles by Habib Amuzegar, the father of Jamshid, who became the prime minister in 1977, was the first book published by the rapidly growing company.[10] (Habib had also published a paper called Etela’at during World War I.)[11] As readership grew in Tehran, Masudi developed plans to make Etela’at a national paper.

In 1930, he traveled to the Soviet Union and Europe, and he returned several times to the Soviet Union through the years. Eventually he wrote a memoir of his Moscow trips, in which he noted that the country’s discipline, “its incredibly rapid progress” and the people’s “unfailing obedience” impressed him.[12] He said it was, “a country where everyone works for the state,” and there are no signs of unemployment or sloth, but he also noted that “no one is happy.”[13] The misery and the obedience seemed to Masudi to be related.

His interest in “obedience” was rooted in his own journalism career. Obedience to power had been a key to his progress and an essential part of his reputation. In 1933, he wrote a series of articles harshly critical of the British Oil Company, and it was generally believed that he was writing on behalf of Reza Shah. In later years, as controversy swirled around the 1933 oil negotiations between the British Oil Company and Reza Shah, opponents suggested that the whole scenario had been masterminded by the British to extend the duration of their control of Iranian oil. They referred to the defiant Masudi essays as proof: Masudi was a Freemason, and to the Iranians, this was tantamount to being an agent of the British; if Masudi started the attacks on the British, the whole thing must have been a British ploy!

Later in that decade, Masudi’s position as one of the regime’s trusted journalists was underscored when he was chosen to accompany the young crown prince to his wedding in Egypt. Masudi’s romantic accounts of the journey and the marriage helped create a favorable image for the young Mohammad Reza.

Masudi’s own private life was anything but a fairy tale in those days. He lost his first wife to pneumonia in 1935, and two years later he married again, this time to a woman named Godsi Amir-Arjomand. She was young and had been educated in Tehran’s famous all-girl French school. The fact that Masudi had been married before and had children would have made it difficult for him to convince a “good family” to allow their daughter to marry him. But he was a famous and powerful man and surely on his way to fortune. He was also charming and convivial. Their first son, Farhad, was born within the year. He was to take over the Etela’at empire.

Masudi played an important role in Iranian politics on the eve of World War II. He published the pro-Nazi essay and joined the chorus of attacks on Reza Shah after his abdication. He referred to Reza Shah’s sons as “silly Princes.” His flippancy so angered the new shah that he decided to help launch a reliable paper that would defend the views of the court.14 The new paper was Keyhan.15 A bitter breakup between Masudi and his cousin Mohammad Ali after the war fanned the attacks against Masudi and his family.[16]

But he was a political survivor. He mended fences with the new shah, and before long, Etela’at was once again the voice of the government. His persistent attacks on Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh, a foe of the shah, endeared him to the court. He was even more forceful in defense of the shah during the days of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. But Masudi did not burn all his bridges with the prime minister. When Mossadeq went to the United Nations in New York for his famous confrontation with the British, Masudi accompanied him. And in the days from August 15 to August 18, when it appeared that the shah had lost the battle to Mossadeq, Masudi allowed some scathing attacks on the court to appear in his paper. Some have even suggested that during this period Masudi received generous stipends from the British and American intelligence agencies to help undermine the government.[17]

During those tense days, Masudi was consulted by British and American officials about what to do with Mossadeq. Surprisingly, he advised the British government to resolve peacefully their differences with his government.18 Since 1935, Masudi had been a powerful member of the Iranian Parliament; he was first chosen to a two-year term as a member of the Majlis from Tehran and served six consecutive terms. In 1949, when for the first time in the modern history of the country the Senate was launched, he was made a senator; he kept that post for the rest of his public life.

After the fall of Mossadeq, Masudi again reconciled with the shah, and his political star began to climb. His media empire rapidly expanded and included numerous new publications including children’s, sports, and women’s magazines. In 1970, he built an eight-story building in the heart of Tehran’s business district to house his empire. During the 1960s and 1970s, Etela’at competed for circulation with the other major daily, Keyhan; both were afternoon papers, and both were loyal supporters of the regime. Etela’at, though, was the more conservative. Masudi also used his power to limit the competition. When, for example, Darius Homayun, an Etela’at journalist, tried to launch a new daily, Ayandegan, Masudi tried to use his power and influence to stop it. His efforts were unsuccessful. He was also unable to prevent Homayun from creating a union for Iranian journalists.[19]

Masudi was a fervent supporter of the shah. From the White Revolution to the policies pursued in OPEC, the regime could always count on Etela’at. This docility ultimately came to haunt the regime when Etela’at published the attack on Khomeini that led to the shah’s fall. It was profitable for Masudi, However. He was one of the wealthiest men in Iran.

He died at work in his office on August 19, 1973.

MOSTAFA MESBAHZADEH WAS THE MOST successfulnewspaperpublisherofhisgeneration. His careers as a scholar, a professor and a jurist trained in France were shortlived, and he became a publisher in 1942. By the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was seen by friends and foes as a consummate but cautious politician, a master of the art of survival, and a shrewd entrepreneur with a brilliant ability to judge and nurture talent in others.

His was a veritable rags-to-riches story, yet he remained, all his life, self-effacing and averse to the gaudy exhibitions of wealth so popular among many of Iran’s nouveau riche in the 1970s. Although he hobnobbed with the pillars of power in Iran, regularly met with the shah, and was seen as a close confidant of figures such as Assadollah Alam, he was also singularly successful in maintaining close ties with intellectuals, writers, and poets of the opposition. It was an indication of his political agility that by the early 1960s, his paper, Keyhan, was a haven for blacklisted intellectuals and journalists. If journalists were forbidden to write by SAVAK, Mesbahzadeh made sure they continued to receive their full pay. In some cases, such blacklisted writers were sent on educational sabbaticals, with full pay.[1]

Keyhan’s reputation as a place for disgruntled journalists was particularly incredible in light of the fact that the paper had been established by seed money provided by the shah. Soon after coming to the throne, the shah grew increasingly impatient with what he considered fickle journalists who were supposed to be friends of the court. When the age of Reza Shah ended, there was a veritable “Tehran Spring,” when not only did the opposition publish a variety of papers harshly critical of the fallen king, but even loyal papers like Etela’at became surprisingly critical of the man they once apotheosized. In this context, the shah gave Mesbahzadeh the capital needed to launch the paper that eventually came to be called Keyhan.

The idea came from Mesbahzadeh himself. It was, for him, a surprising suggestion. Before then, in his own words, he had never been “inside a print shop . . . nor had I written anything.”[2] He used intermediaries to meet with the shah and pitched the idea of establishing a serious paper, including professors at Tehran University, who would support the shah and the court. According to Mesbahzadeh, he used his friend, Ali Ghavam, as a conduit.[3] Hoseyn Fardust, the shah’s confidant at the time, claims in his memoirs that he was the intermediary. Mesbahzadeh himself met the shah on a few occasions to discuss the project. The first time the two met, the shah picked up Mesbahzadeh in a car, with the king behind the wheel and no guards on hand. They drove around the city and discussed the new paper. Outside Tehran, the car was stopped by the Soviet forces that were occupying the country at the time. The soldiers did not recognize the shah and he made no effort to tell them who he was. He simply turned the car around, and he and Mesbahzadeh returned to the city.
After their first eventful meeting, they had others, all in secret. The shah, according to Mesbahzadeh, wanted no public part in the new paper. Of course, the British Embassy at the time was fully cognizant of these developments, and on at least one occasion cautioned the shah against entangling himself too deeply into the murky affairs of journalism.

Not long after their first meeting, Mesbahzadeh received two hundred thousand tooman (about $70,000 at the time). One hundred fifty thousand tooman of it was given to Mesbahzadeh in cash. There is no doubt that Fardust was the conduit for the money (although he claims the payment was made by check). In return, the shah received two hundred thousand tooman worth of stock in the new company. He never tried to sell the stock. Fardust claims the shah gave him the stocks as a gift. In fact, in the waning days of his power, not long before the revolution, the shah, for reasons that are not clear, tried to make a gift of the stock to a member of the opposition, Karim Sanjabi, who refused to accept it.[4]

The first issue of the paper, initially called Ayandaye Iran (Future of Iran) came nine months later, on Nov. 13, 1941 (22 Aban 1320). After a few months, the name was changed to Keyhan. The first issue of it came out on May 27, 1942 (6 Khordad 6 1321).

In a pattern that repeated itself often in his life, Mesbahzadeh, himself no journalist or writer of any talent, recruited one of modern Iran’s most able journalists to be his partner and the new paper’s managing editor. His name was Abdolrahman Faramarzi. He had been Mesbahzadeh’s teacher in high school. Both their names appeared on the paper’s masthead; Faramarzi was surprisingly listed as the publisher and Mesbahzadeh as the editor. The name Keyhan was suggested by Faramarzi. It was in no small measure the result of this partnership that by the 1950s the paper created by the shah’s seed money grew into a semiofficial journal and a left-of-center progressive newspaper. By the time of the revolution, Keyhan was easily the most popular paper in the country and was often the voice of the opposition. In those days the day-to-day running of the paper was in the hands of a journalist named Rahman Hatefi, who turned out to have been a covert and high-ranking member of the Tudeh Party, and the reality of his presence played a crucial role in affording Keyhan its reputation. Along the way, Mesbahzadeh built a vast fortune in publishing and sponsored many journalistic innovations. He even built the College of Mass Media, which trained not just journalists but those working in radio and television
as well. He had plans to start a university with programs in every major field of science and letters. Not just his wealth but his education was as much the result of his own brilliance and indefatigable energy as of serendipity.

Mostafa Mesbahzadeh was born in the city of Shiraz on November 18, 1908 (27 Aban 1287). His father, once a government functionary, had by the time of his son’s birth become one of the property managers for Ghavam Shirazi, one of the city’s grandees, and famous—or infamous—as an Anglophile. When Ghavam decided to send his two sons to be educated in Beirut—a popular destination for children of the Iranian elite in the years before the World War I—he chose the young Mostafa to accompany them. Mostafa was a friend, a guardian, a tutor, and maybe a role model.

After Beirut, Mostafa went to France to receive his doctoral degree, while the two Ghavam children went to England. In France, Mostafa enrolled in the university in the city of Aix-en-Provence, concentrating on international law and political science. But when he arrived in France, Ghavam stopped providing him financial support. Here his teacher and mentor from his days in high school, Faramarzi, came to his aid. In a letter to his friend Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Faramarzi wrote of “Mr. Mostafa Khan Mesbahzadeh . . . studying in France, and I had earlier introduced him to you, has been going to school there with the Ghavam family defraying the cost, but now Ghavam has stopped his support, and [Mostafa] is deeply worried and anxious. I implore you to offer any help you can to this young man who is studying hard and has an enormous love of learning and is singularly talented and full of potentials, and in Tehran often passed two grades in one year.”[5]

In spite of the hardships of losing his source of support, Mesbahzadeh finally finished his thesis in 1936 and returned to Iran. He had written his dissertation on the Iranian conception of international organizations.[6] Upon his return he began to teach at the newly established Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science. But clearly his ambitions could not be satisfied with a teaching appointment. Moreover, Iran was inexorably being drawn into World War II and politics was becoming all consuming for most of the country’s intellectuals.

His youthful friendship with Ali Ghavam came in handy for Mesbahzadeh at this time. Ali had been chosen by Reza Shah to marry one of his two daughters, Princess Ashraf. Although the marriage was, according to the princess, an unmitigated loveless disaster,[7] it afforded Mesbahzadeh access not only to Princess Ashraf—with whom he remained a close friend for the rest of his life—but to her twin brother, Mohammad Reza Shah. This connection was parlayed into the creation of the paper Keyhan.

The paper began with a circulation of about two hundred; its main competitor at the time, Etela’at, had a circulation of thirteen thousand.[8] On the eve of the revolution, thirtyseven years later, Keyhan had a circulation of almost a million. In its first issue, it set out its goals in a lead editorial. It talked about the fall of Reza Shah and the chaos in Iran and said that a few “educated, clear thinking young men” began to worry about the future of the country they loved and decided to publish the paper. “We are,” they wrote, for a strong central government and maintaining our national unity, and modernity and the reforms that have been made possible in our country at the price of great suffering. . . . We want a nation of free spirited, free thinking citizens, averse to dogma and able to discern the difference between superstitions and religion. [The nation] must know that religions have come to do away with superstition, and not to promote it. The development of industry and agriculture is our dream, and we believe the government must give the people as much a free hand in developing these areas as possible. . . . We want the future of our country placed in the hands of our educated, experienced, honest and learned youth.[9]

In the first days of its publication, Keyhan had to rely on the help of some of Mesbahzadeh’s colleagues and students at the Faculty of Law and Political Science. His peers joined the paper as contributing editors, while his students came to his help in selling copies of the paper on street corners. To augment the paper’s income, Mesbahzadeh hired students and entrusted them with the task of spending their days at Tehran’s cemetery; after offering condolences to families that were about to bury their loved ones, they suggested writing a few lines in the next day’s paper by way of an obituary. Before long, Keyhan had cornered the market on obituaries. The paper also began accepting advertisements in a special section, equivalent to the “classifieds” in an American paper. The first classified ad to appear in the paper was from a man who specialized in finding servants for families.[10]

Mesbahzadeh was, among other things, known for his astute political instincts. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he sided with the movement to nationalize Iranian oil. “Keyhan was a supporter of Dr. Mossadeq,” he declared later.[11] At the same time, his partner and the chief editor of Keyhan, Faramarzi, wrote some of the most fiery attacks on Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, but he published them not in Keyhan but in another newspaper called Atash. Some have even suggested that Faramarzi’s essays, particularly the one on August 15 about the tragic death of the monarchy in Iran, played a role in bringing people into the streets and ensuring the success of the forces loyal to the shah on August 19.[12] Some of Mesbahzadeh’s critics, on the other hand, claim that he and a handful of other journalists were in those days in the pay of the CIA, entrusted with the task of destabilizing the Mossadeq cabinet.[13] It was a measure of his ability to survive and avoid polarizing positions that in spite of his public support for the nationalist movement, Mesbahzadeh’s power grew even more after the fall of Mossadeq.

By then, Mesbahzadeh’s power and wealth had increased not just through politics and Keyhan, but also through marriage. He had married Foroug Etahadiye, whose father, Ja’far, was a man of enormous wealth and social power. He had donated, at Reza Shah’s behest, the land upon which Tehran University was built. Moreover, he owned the Iran Javan Club, one of the most prestigious social clubs in Iran during the postwar years.[14]

Mesbahzadeh had an uncanny ability to detect changes in public sentiments, or in the mood of the shah. He had his finger to the wind and his ear to the wall, and the knowledge he gained he used in his own interest or that of the shah. For example, late in the 1950s, he noticed a growing mood of malaise and disgruntlement in the people. At the same time, the whispers among the cognoscenti were that the United States and Great Britain were also increasingly concerned about the survival of the shah. He launched a new political movement he called Rastakhiz (resurgence). It had clearly tapped into something serious. Within months, the movement spread like wildfire. The genius of the idea was its simplicity. Mesbahzadeh’s “resurgence” was not unlike the American idea of the twelve-step program. At designated hours, people gathered in the movements’ offices—usually an abandoned storefront or storage area with nothing but a few chairs and a podium. The atmosphere was bereft of pomp and ceremony and was noticeably devoid of a picture of the shah. By then royal portraits were the mandatory staple of every room and every office in the country. The portrait’s absence, a conscious decision by Mesbahzadeh, was a brilliant stoke of public relations. It gave the meetings an edge, a hint of opposition to the government, while the discourse of the meetings were by design free from revolutionary bombast.

As the number of Rastakhiz offices grew around the country, so did Mesbahzadeh’s power. The movement began to develop an anthem of its own, inviting men and women, workers and peasants, “to rise up in this Resurrection” to help develop the country. It had also developed a set of twenty-four principles—everything from “respect for freedom . . . respect for human dignity. . . . Respect for the social and national role of women”[15] to the dire necessity of developing the economy. Glaringly absent was any mention of the shah. Mesbahzadeh’s name was now increasingly mentioned as the next candidate to become prime minister. But despite his wily and wise calculations, he and his advocates had failed to take into account one crucial factor. The experience of August 1953 had convinced the shah never to allow another populist prime minister with a social base of his own, even though in Mesbahzadeh’s case his temperament and his aversion to adventurism made it all but impossible that he would seriously challenge the role of the shah. Nevertheless, Rastakhiz’s popularity, and its hubris in bypassing royal portraits sealed the movement’s fate and shaped Mesbahzadeh’s political future. The shah let his disfavor be known, and that was all that was needed for Mesbahzadeh to pull the plug on the movement.

The name Rastakhiz, with its messianic overtone and its clear allusion to the dead coming to life, would reappear almost a quarter century later when the shah, at least partially convinced by the arguments of a group of technocrats who suggested the creation of a single party as a tool for mobilization, dismantled the existing party system and willed into existence a new one-party system and called it Rastakhiz. After the demise of his movement, Mesbahzadeh would henceforth invariably wield much power, but only as part of the inner circle of power, never at the center. Throughout the years he ran Keyhan and its growing publishing empire, he was also either a member of the Majlis or of the Senate.

By the early 1970s, Keyhan was one of the biggest publishing companies in the Middle East. It had specialty magazines for children, women, and sports. It published a variety of yearbooks and books-of-the-month. Its Keyhan Varzeshi, initially edited by Sadrealdin Elahi, was a pioneer in the field of serious, sometimes scholarly, coverage of sports.16 At the same time, its Zane Rooz (Women Today) became, according to some scholars, the criticized purveyor of “beauty culture” as well as a “fascinating window on the debates between the Pahlavi modernist feminism and what became Islamic Republic feminism.”[17] As part of the coverage of the 1967 Family Protection Law, the magazine published a series of forty articles by Morteza Motahari on the subject of women. Motahari later emerged as one of the most important ideologues of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and his articles in the magazine were published in a book that became one of the regime’s canonical texts on the issue of women. Their publication was an example of the kind of platform created by magazines controlled by Mesbahzadeh. Of course, not all of these developments were in Mesbahzadeh’s hands.
According to Mesbahzadeh,

midway through his tenure, Mr. Hoveyda decided to increase his own influence in the media. One day, Nikoukhah [an advisor to Hoveyda] told me that the prime minister wants you to appoint Amir Taheri as Keyhan’s editor. I told him the current editor had been in that post for almost twenty years and that I [am] perfectly satisfied with his performance. I added that he was my relative. . . . A few years later, the prime minister himself called and indicated that he wanted to see me. When I arrived, he brought up Taheri’s editorship, and indicated that he really wanted this thing done. I repeated what I had said earlier. Hoveyda thought for a minute and then changed the topic. . . . A few days passed and then he called again and invited me to lunch. During the lunch, he asked me what happened to the question of editor. As I began to make my excuses, he raised his head, pointed to the picture of the Shah, and said, ‘This is not my request, the boss wants it done.’ I said, ‘If it is by order of His Majesty, I will oblige.’ I was put in a tough situation. So I decided to consult Alam. . . . I asked him to figure out what was really going on and let me know. He told me not to hurry, and said he would meet the shah and tell me the outcome of his inquiry. Two weeks later, [Alam] asked me to breakfast, at which time he told me that [the Taheri appointment] is indeed the wish of the boss and you have no choice.[18]

The episode poignantly captures Mesbahzadeh’s style of work, his ability to creatively combine resistance with submission. The political acuity in sensing the public mood helped him create the populist party in the late 1950s and almost helped him save the throne from the people’s wrath and anger, while his willingness to compromise ultimately forced him to succumb to pressure on some of the key issues.[19] Not long before the victory of the revolution, he and his family were forced to flee Iran, leaving the company he had nurtured in the hands of Islamic zealots who eventually made it into the mouthpiece of the most reactionary elements of the regime. Today, Keyhan is but an empty shell of its once glorious past.

In exile where, in the nature of the exile experience, he had to overcome the shock of losing his financial, political, and intellectual capital, and where overnight he went from being one of the most powerful men in the country to being merely another exile, Mesbahzadeh was not a man who accepted defeat. He set out to work on the resurrection of Keyhan. Defying the drudgeries of old age and unwilling to succumb to the political atmosphere of distrust and apathy that defined the early Iranian diaspora, he dedicated his considerable energies to restarting the paper. There was some early discussion about whether the paper should be based in Los Angeles, where the bulk of the exiled Iranian community lived, or somewhere in Europe, where large numbers of Iranians also lived and where proximity to Iran and cheaper living conditions worked in favor of a successful paper.[20] Surely the name Keyhan had accrued over the years a considerable capital among the Iranians of its time. The disparate opposition in Europe and America certainly needed a platform, a paper that could carry its message to the world.

A powerful element of the exile experience is nostalgia, a craving for everything that re-creates the sounds and smells and the memories of home. For many Iranians, Keyhan and its masthead were as Persian as any dish or delicacy. In spite of all these factors working in favor of his dream, there were some obstacles. The exile community was spread all over the world, and the local setting and news were different from each other. Sending the paper to different corners of the world would be an expensive proposition. The new Keyhan would also have to compete with the Internet and the new cable programs that spread the news far faster and cheaper than anything Keyhan could hope to do. The fact that Mesbahzadeh succeeded again in recruiting some of Iran’s best-known journalists— from Ahmad Ahrar and Hushang Vaziri to Sadrealdin Elahi and Ali Reza Nourizadeh—to work for the paper improved its chances of survival.

Of course, the most serious obstacle of all was financial. For Mesbahzadeh, in his “beginning was his end.” Once again he sought the financial help of a member of the Pahlavi dynasty to make his dream a reality. This time, Princess Ashraf came to his rescue and provided the seed money needed to launch and sustain the paper. The jury is still out on whether the new reincarnation of the old Keyhan can overcome the many adversities it faces. On November 25, 2006, not long before reaching his hundredth birthday, the man who created the Keyhan mystique died after a long illness. He had been living in Southern California.

Satire has been, since the time of Obeid Zakani (d. 749/1370), a staple of Iranian culture and literature. After the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, it became a powerful weapon of politics. Since then, a number of newspapers and journalists have used satire to attack despotism, obscurantism, and colonial domination. Foremost among them was Allame Dehkhoda, the most influential journalist-satirist of modern Iran. In the years after World War II, the Towfiq brothers and their singularly successful weekly magazine, Towfiq, continued in the Dehkhoda path and successfully wore the mantle of political satire.

In 1923 (1302), a man named Hoseyn Towfiq received permission to publish a magazine of satire under his own name—Towfiq. It continued publication until 1939, when the founder died. After the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, and the political opening that ensued, Hoseyn’s son, Mohammad Ali, inherited the magazine and decided to resume publication. During the early days after Reza Shah’s abdication, Towfiq was among the more radical voices of opposition to the Pahlavi dynasty. But Mohammad Ali was not a writer or poet himself. He was an employee of a bank and fixed phones and radios as a hobby.[1] Thus he solicited the help of his three cousins, Hassan, Hoseyn, and Abbas Towfiq. They shared a last name only because their fathers had been close friends. When choosing a surname became mandatory in the early 1920s, Hoseyn’s father and the Towfiq brothers’ father picked the same last name. Marriage later consolidated the friendship.[2]

In the late 1940s, during the politically dynamic years of the Mossadeq era, though Mohammad Ali was nominally the editor of the magazine, the three Towfiq brothers were becoming more powerful in shaping the magazine’s content and editorial policy. All three brothers were supporters of Mossadeq, while others on the magazine’s writing staff were members of the Tudeh Party. Because of this combination, Towfiq’s reputation as being opposed to the shah’s regime was reaffirmed and remained unchanged as long as the magazine was published.

“During the Mossadeq years,” Abbas recalled, “the editorial meetings were often a scene of intense battles between the communists and defenders of Mossadeq. Finding compromise cartoons and themes of satire was not always easy.”3 Both factions, of course, had a consensus on criticizing the shah, and it was this common enmity that ended up bringing the magazine to its demise on August 19, 1953, when supporters of the shah ransacked the offices of Towfiq. Mohammad Ali was arrested, his house was also ransacked, and he was accused of publishing incendiary material. The three brothers went into hiding for a few days, and when they were sure they were not targets of arrest, they returned home, but not to their beloved magazine. “The issue about to be published on the day of the August coup,” Abbas remembers, “was fortunately destroyed by the workers. Had they fallen into the hands of the regime, it would have cost us considerable trouble.”[4] Although Mohammad Ali had little to do with the contents of the magazine, he ended up paying the price for the radicalism of the Towfiq brothers.
After about four years, the three brothers decided to launch a satirical magazine of their own. Knowing that the name Towfiq was probably anathema to the officials, they decided to seek a license for a magazine simply called Majaley-e Fokahi (Magazine of Satire). Only after guaranteeing to government officials that they would never use the name Towfiq, and would never offer a role to Mohammad Ali Towfiq, the publisher of Towfiq magazine, the brothers received permission to launch their new magazine. It did not take long for Majaley-e Fokai to find a large readership and thus ensure that the brothers’ new venture would be both a political and financial success. They had come a long way since their childhood in a poor neighborhood of Tehran.

Hassan was born in 1926 (1305), Hoseyn in 1928 (1307), and Abbas in 1934 (1313). They were children of a lower-middle-class family, raised in Pamenar, one of the more traditional and colorful neighborhoods in old Tehran. Their father was an autodidact paralegal—a unique fixture of the Iranian justice system in which self-declared lawyers hung around the Ministry of Justice and acted as a fixer for some, a writer of briefs for others, and a legal adviser for still others.

All three of the Towfiq brothers went to school in Tehran and then to Tehran University, two of them graduating from the law school and the third from school of theology. All three found government jobs—the two older brothers in the Ministry of Treasury and Abbas eventually at the Plan Organization.5 When they received permission to launch their Magazine of Satire, all three continued their work at their day jobs and began to write, edit, draw, and manage the distribution of their new creation in the evening. It did not take long before Majaley-e Fokai became known as the substitute for the defunct Towfiq magazine. Eventually, their cousin Mohammad Ali, by then free from prison and internal exile, decided to allow the three brothers to use the Towfiq name for a monthly fee. Thus began the third period in the history of Towfiq magazine. In this period, it was even more popular than in its two earlier incarnations. Its circulation was around thirtyfive thousand, but special issues sometimes sold as many as a hundred thousand—a staggering figure in Iran at that time.
The characters created by the magazine were iconoclastic. The central figure, Kaka, was a Shakespearean wise fool, and of dark complexion. Kaka conjured the image of Hadji Firuz, a character who wears a black mask and is a harbinger of spring and the Persian new year. His wife, Geshniz Khanoum (Mrs. Parsley), was young, coquettish, overly coifed and powdered, but covered in a traditional hejab. Instead of a car, Kaka had a donkey, and for his son he had a little monkey called Mamouli.

In its rare moments of seriousness, the magazine defined its platform in three simple principles: “Towfiq is a nationalist, independent magazine, unattached to any political party or group. It strives for the salvation of the Iranian people by 1) spreading the truth and enlightening public opinion; 2) fighting against limits on freedom, and against injustice, inequity, and despotism; and 3) defending liberty, justice, right and truth.”[6]

The contents of each issue—the cartoons to be drawn, poems to be used or written, and the subjects to be discussed—were decided at weekly editorial meetings.7 Then, different writers, poets, or cartoonists were assigned the work. Often work submitted by aspiring writers and cartoonists was also accepted for publication.
One of the magazine’s most brilliant inventions was the Party of Donkeys. In Persian, as in English, donkeys are epitome of docile imbecility. In 1963, just as the shah was about to put his stamp of approval on a new party created by Hassan-Ali Mansur and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the brothers launched their own party and published its platform. Among the party’s principles were, “Donkeys of Iran and the World Unite! Create a world in which donkeys can live in comfort. Support the creation of a Bank of Hay. Oppose and end all donkey-like despotism. Create an atmosphere in which every donkey can freely bray.”[8]

The magazine was in its period of growth when Abbas, the youngest of the three brother, decided to go to Europe to continue his education. He landed in Paris and, after about two years, received the degree that in France was called Doctor d’universite. Its purpose was less academic than titular. Abbas wrote a thesis on the political influence of magazines of satire in modern Iran9—an issue he clearly knew something about.

In 1971, when the magazine was at the height of its popularity, it was shut down. Towfiq’s closure was, as expected, highly controversial. Figuring out why it was closed and who ordered its closure has become a parlor game, with different rumors and gossip claiming the authenticity and veracity for their claims. Some say the shah had ordered it closed because he took umbrage at a cartoon showing Iran as a cemetery. Assadolah Alam, in his Diaries, suggested that the magazine was closed for its alleged ties to a foreign country, but in the published version of the journal, the name of the country has been replaced by an ellipsis. Abbas Towfiq adamantly denied these allegations, suggesting, convincingly, that if such an allegation had a base a reality, the magazine’s foes in the regime would have ensured that the brothers were severely punished.[10]

Most people believed that the closure was the consequence of a cartoon making fun of Hoveyda’s sexuality. Although the rumor was altogether baseless, the brothers made no effort to dissuade people from believing and spreading it.[11] The brothers believe that it was Hoveyda who, after several tries, finally succeeded in closing Towfiq down. The magazine,they suggest, had been the most consistent voice of criticism against him. They believe that the shah, as well as his queen, were fans of the magazine and read it regularly. They say Hoveyda had been planning the demise of Towfiq long before he accomplished it. They claim that, through an intermediary, Hoveyda offered the brothers a large sum of money to buy a 51 percent share of the Towfiq Corporation that would give him control of the magazine. Moreover, he reassured the brothers that he wanted none of the profits.[12] When the brothers refused the offer, Hoveyda moved to eliminate the magazine. The first step, according to Abbas Towfiq, was to subsidize a paper that could compete with Towfiq and take away some of its readers. The government-sponsored magazine, Abbas says, recruited many of Towfiq’s staff by offering them lucrative new contracts.[13]

One of the journalists who worked for Towfiq at the time offers a different story. Hadi Khorsandi is a brilliant satirist, a tireless journalist and editor, and a comic genius who adapted the genre of stand-up comedy to the situation in Iran. His Asghar Agha has been the most successful and daring anti-Islamic journal of satire in the postrevolutionary era. He argues that the Towfiq brothers mistreated their employees, paid them meager salaries, and never allowed bylines. As a result, when the alternative new magazine emerged, some of the most disgruntled satirists were more than willing to leave the paper and join the competition.[14]

Either way, the timing of the closure was particularly painful for the brothers, as they had already begun plans to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Towfiq. They had envisioned special events and special issues, and even some merchandise commemorating Kaka Towfiq.[15] The government’s decision to close the magazine put an end to all of these plans. Even in the months before the Islamic Revolution, when censorship had virtually ended in Iran, the brothers did not relaunch their magazine. There was some talk among them about beginning publication, but the declaration of martial law and the death of a large number of demonstrators made the idea of publishing a journal of satire unpalatable. Even after the revolution, the brothers never succeeded in reviving Towfiq. Several attempts at cannibalizing the Towfiq name came to naught. In the golden days of the magazine, there was an ineffable magic to its voice, a refreshing honesty in its disposition, and an unrelenting iconoclasm in its discourse that afforded it a rare, even rarefied place in the pantheon of satire in twentieth-century Iran. There is little doubt that had they been willing to compromise their principles, or to forfeit their reputation as a voice of opposition, they could have reaped great financial rewards.

The years after the revolution have done little to enhance the image of the magazine. Instead, sibling rivalries about ownership of the magazine’s intellectual and material property and about the role they each played in the management have unfortunately spilled into the pages of newspapers.16 But even these sad squabbles have not tarnished the image of Towfiq as the quintessence of wit and wisdom, of aesthetic taste in words and images, and of the ability to turn them into tools of subversive satire that were used to break the silence so beloved of censors.

Shahin Agayan
Mohammad Baheri

In the heart of Paris’s most fashionable street, not far away from the lapsed grandeur of the Elysée Palace, with guards dressed to conjure the glory days of Napoleon, lurks a club, hidden inside a high-walled cobblestone courtyard. Fancy boutiques, quaint cafés, and storefronts displaying graceful leather-bound rare books abound in the neighborhood. The façade of the club betrays the nineteenth-century haut-bourgeois style of architecture. It is where Shahin Agayan lunches frequently. “This is France’s most prestigious club,” he said. “You cannot apply to join,” he said, adding that membership is passed down in families like an heirloom. It is part athletic and part social club.

Like France, and like Shahin Agayan himself, the décor incongruously combines the ostentatious aristocratic opulence best described by Marcel Proust with the minimalism of an ultramodern American club. Agayan’s law office is not far from the club, in a cobblestone yard grouchily ruled by a concierge. His two-room office has nothing of the club’s ostentation, or of the renowned affluence of the Agayan family or the great success of his own law firm. His handsomely tailored jacket and pants, and his impeccably fitted and discreetly colorful shirt were the only hints of his past. For Shahin Agayan, his family name was both a blessing and a curse—a blessing for the many doors it opened for him, and a curse for the lingering rumors about the alleged corruption of some other members of his family.

Shahin was born in 1918 (1296) into one of the most prominent Armenian families in Iran. Armenians have lived in Iran for as long as Iran has existed as a nation. Even in the famous inscription of Darius the Great (521–486 BCE), Armenians, though one of the “conquered people,” are referred to not as aniran—the realm of non-Aryans—but as part of Eran.[1] In Iran’s rich legacy of love poetry, Armenian women have often been written of as the epitome of beauty and grace.

The nature of Iran’s relationship with Armenians changed drastically during the reign of Shah Abbas (1587–1629), when in the aftermath of one of his wars with the Ottomans he forcefully transferred one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Armenians to the city of Isfahan. There he allowed them to live in relative autonomy. They built a new Jolfa—the namesake of the prosperous town on the border of Iran and the Ottoman territories that they had left behind. Old Jolfa was the hub of Iran’s silk trade with the world in the sixteenth century. Before much of the new Jolfa was razed and ransacked by Afghan tribes, it had become a bastion of Armenian art and architecture. Some of these architectural masterpieces have survived the ravages of time and of marauding tribes and still exist in what is now the Jolfa neighborhood of Isfahan.

During the late nineteenth century, Armenians began to play a more prominent role in Iran’s emerging social and cultural movements. Many Armenians took part in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905.[2] Yaprim Khan, an Armenian of considerable fame, was the country’s first police chief after the victory of the revolution. In the twentieth century, Armenians played crucial roles in Iran’s culture and economy. They pioneered “fast food,” photography, theater, and the film industry. The first theater to open in Iran belonged to an Armenian in the city of Tabriz. In Tehran, Armenians congregated in the neighborhood around Naderi Street. Their main church was also located in that vicinity. Some of the city’s most famous cafés, delicatessens, and bookstores were owned by Armenians and located in that neighborhood. They had become favorite hangouts for Tehran’s intellectual community. Some of Iran’s brightest Marxists were also Armenian—foremost among them Eshaq Eprim, who left the Stalinist Tudeh Party early on and became a professor of economics at Oxford.[3]

Among these pioneering Armenians, one of the most influential was a recent graduate of Geneva’s law school. He was, in fact, one of Iran’s first foreign-trained jurists, and his name was Alexander Agayan, Shahin’s father. Before long, Alex joined Ali-Akbar Davar—Reza Shah’s powerful minister of justice and the true architect of Iran’s modern judiciary—and helped write new secular criminal laws and civil codes for Iran. Agayan also emerged as one of the leaders of the Iranian Armenian community. He was chosen to represent them in the Parliament. For much of the Pahlavi reign, one of the two Armenian seats in the Parliament—representing close to 270,000 Armenians who lived in the country by the mid-1970s—became something of an Agayan family tradition, going from Alexander to his son.

His oldest son, Felix, who was born in 1914, had a reputation altogether different from his father’s. If Alexander was praised for his probity, tolerance, liberal views, and intellectual proclivities,[4] Felix was a notorious bon vivant. He was known as an intimate friend of the shah and played cards with him. He was also alleged to be a financial partner of the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf.[5] It has been claimed that Felix used his well-publicized proximity to the court and his nominal position as the head of Iran’s Ski Federation to promote his own financial gain.

An often-cited example of this is the famous story about contracts to buy sugar. For years Iran had bought substantial amounts of sugar from the West. Felix Agayan and his partner, often said to be Princess Ashraf, had enjoyed a profit as the sole representative of a French company that, with Agayan’s help, had cornered the market. But in 1974, the shah ordered the government to buy vast quantities of sugar, and the men in charge of the purchase, Fereydun Mahdavi and two of his undersecretaries, opened the bidding process to companies other than the French. Eventually a British company called Tate and Lyle won the competition.

According to several sources—from General Hoseyn Fardust to Fereydun Mahdavi— Agayan, angry at the loss, complained to the shah that bribes had been paid in the process of choosing the winner of the bid, and that the Iranian authorities had, in fact, bought the sugar at inflated prices. The men in charge of the purchase were put on trial, and though the main alleged culprits were ultimately found innocent, the public trial opened a floodgate of allegations of corruption in the system.[6] Moreover, Felix Agayan’s reputation was further tarnished by other rumors and innuendo. He was known as a dandy, with an appetite for exotic cabaret dancers and high-stakes poker games. His enemies accused him of all manner of malfeasance. In their minds, he had come to embody all that was wrong with the ancien régime. General Fardust, for example, alleged that Felix Agayan was a genius of a crook, his politics had “one aim only and that was his own profit,” and that he was involved in drug trafficking, with “close ties with FBI and CIA.” He was, Fardust alleged, also a high-ranking member of the Mafia![7] Sources in the Islamic Republic have been busy repeating all these allegations against Felix.[8]
But Shahin was of a different mettle, and he has gone out of his way to make this point. “I was a lawyer,” he has said more than once, “and that is all I did in Iran.”[9] He went to high school in Tehran, and for his university education he went to Belgium. He took courses in economics and law. He graduated in 1940, and after spending a couple of years in Lebanon, he returned to Iran.

In Belgium, he had met and befriended a young man named Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. They remained close friends all their lives. Even after Hoveyda became prime minister, Shahin remained among his closest companions and friends. “He was as close to me as my brother,” Shahin said.[10] He was also a friend of Fereydun Hoveyda, like Shahin a Francophile, more at home in Paris than in Tehran.

When Shahin returned to Iran, he began to work in his father’s law offices. But his father was a trial lawyer and had proved willing to take on controversial cases. For example, not long after Shahin’s return, his father had agreed to defend Sar Pas Mokhtari—the chief of police during the reign of Reza Shah, who stood accused of killing the regime’s opponents by giving them injections of air. Those were the years of a democratic interlude in Iran, and criticizing and exposing the despotism of the Reza Shah period had become something of a national sport. Mokhtari had come to symbolize the excesses of the ancien régime. Nevertheless, the elder Agayan swam against the tide and defended the erstwhile police chief in court. His Swiss training had taught him that “everyone is entitled to a trial.”[11] Ten years earlier, he had been also willing to be among the attorneys who defended the famous “Group of Fifty-Three”—communist intellectuals arrested during the days of Reza Shah. In fact, in that trial, he was one of only two attorneys—the other was Ahmad Kasravi—who actually mounted a legal defense of their clients, rather than simply asking for the court’s leniency.[12]

After a few years in Tehran, Shahin’s life changed. In 1948, he married Emma Ordukhani, and two years later he took the unusual step of traveling to Brazil and entering into a partnership with Brazil’s well-known ambassador to Iran13 who, upon his return home, had begun a coffee plantation. Shahin spent almost a whole decade in Latin America, but by 1960 his father was growing old and frail and beseeched his son to return home to take over the law office. Shahin complied, and four years after his return, his father died. Shahin took over the firm but gradually changed the nature of the practice.

His return to Iran coincided with the period when the Iranian government had begun an ambitious policy of attracting foreign investments. Increased oil revenues had also made Iran an increasingly appealing market. By the mid-1960s a flood of Western companies began arriving in Iran. They all needed lawyers to represent them, and there were no more than two or three firms in Iran who could provide the kind of corporate legal services in English, German, and French needed by these mushrooming companies. Agayan’s law firm was one of them.[14] He was known to be a close friend of Hoveyda, the prime minister, and his brother was said to be close friend of the shah, which made the Agayan firm particularly attractive to foreign companies. Some of the biggest companies doing business in Iran at the time were among Agayan’s clients—including Northrop, Merck, and General Electric. Two of these, Northrop and General Electric, were, according to the American Embassy’s “certain knowledge, buying” the services of “influence peddlers” in Iran. For both companies, the person mentioned as their “influence peddler” is Fatolah Mahvi. As the companies’ lawyer, Agayan denies any knowledge of these shenanigans.[15]

In 1977, Agayan and his wife accompanied Amir-Abbas Hoveyda on vacation in Cyprus. It was the last trip Hoveyda would take as prime minister. A week after their return, he was no longer the prime minister. Less than two years later, in December 1978, Shahin Agayan and his wife went to see their son—today a Harvard Law School graduate practicing in New York—and they decided that it was unwise to return to Iran. They settled in Paris, where Shahin began a small law practice. There are no signs of his past grandeur or of Iran in the two-room office he now occupies. Law books and files are the room’s only decoration. Dressed impeccably, like a French gentleman, he talked of Iran, and his father, of his Armenian ancestors and his friendship with the Hoveyda brothers with a wistful melancholy and a sad resignation. “Those were great days,” he said, “and some of us just didn’t appreciate what we had.”

Members of the Tudeh party who came to believe that their “god had failed” and that their utopian ideals had in practice been totalitarian infernos were usually of two kinds. Some lost their moral compass suddenly and became everything they had once despised. Their greed knew no bounds, as they were bent on making up for their “lost years.” Others lost none of the dedication, discipline, and sense of responsibility that had once led them to the ranks of the party and to Marxism. The ends and the means had changed, but their character and moral anchor remained unchanged. Mohammad Baheri was one of the latter. His early dedication to the communist cause was later replaced with unwavering dedication to one man, Assadollah Alam.

Nevertheless, he kept many of his friends from his erstwhile communist days1 and tried to avoid the appearance of being a “turncoat.” His old comrades, as was their wont, made every effort to blacken his name and cast aspersions on his character. He stole the Tudeh Party funds from Shiraz and escaped to Paris, they said.[2] He seemed undeterred by their allegations, dismissing them with a shrug and a smile, adding sardonically, “When did the party ever have money in its coffers?” In the meantime, on a corner table in his small living room, made smaller by the oversized Louis XIV furniture, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., a picture of Alam looms large and overshadows all others. “I believed in him,” he declared defiantly.[3] Glaringly absent from the table was any portrait of the shah.

Mohammad Baheri was born in the city of Shiraz in 1918 (1297). His father was a lawyer; he died when Mohammad was a small boy. Mohammad was one of seven children and had three brothers and three sisters. His mother was a forceful and confident woman, keen on educating his children. Shiraz was in those days undergoing radical changes. The early signs of modernity were in the air, and Mohammad had the choice of going to a traditional school, a maktab, or to one of the city’s new modern educational institutions. At the insistence of his mother, he was enrolled in the modern school. At the same time, his uncle tutored him in Arabic and the kind of rudimentary theology that was the normal curriculum of the traditional maktabs. In high school, he was at the top of his class. He was also beginning to get interested in the world of politics. In 1937, after finishing high school, he left Shiraz for Tehran, where he gain admittance to Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science. At the same time, he pursued the intellectual curiosities aroused by his uncle’s tutorials by taking courses in theology. He was invariably among the top two or three students in his classes.

In 1941, not long after he finished law school, he returned to his city of birth, Shiraz. But it was a different city. The fever of politics, of anticolonialism, of tribal autonomy, and of Marxism had conquered the city.4 He opened a law office and joined the city’s intellectual circles, which included luminaries such as Fereydon Tavallali, a pioneering poet and writer, Rasul Parvizi, a masterful short story writer, and Ebrahim Golestan. Baheri befriended all three and maintained lifelong friendships with all of them.

Clearly the ascendant ideology of the day was Marxism, and soon Baheri, like most of his friends, joined the Tudeh Party. He was put in charge of the party’s committee on the peasantry and entrusted with the task of expanding the party base in the countryside. He grew disgruntled with the party sooner than most of his fellow travelers. In early 1946, he escaped the city under the threat of arrest. His meetings with the party leadership in Tehran were deeply disturbing. He was convinced that the party owed more allegiance to the Soviet Union than to the interests of the Iranian people.5 Disillusioned with the party, he left Iran in the fall of 1946, heading to Paris.

He enrolled in law school, and refused to have anything to do with the Tudeh Party in Europe. He spent about seven years in Paris, receiving his doctorate in law—the academically rigorous d’etat degree—from the Sorbonne, writing a dissertation on the concept of freedom and contracts in Iranian law. By mid-1953, he was back in Iran, and before long he had several jobs. He began teaching at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, and was also hired as legal advisor to a couple of government bureaucracies.

He had not given up his avocation as an intellectual and began to participate in the meetings in the office of the literary journal Sokhan, edited by Parviz Natel Khanlari. In the course of these meetings, he met Assadolah Alam, who had a knack for finding talented intellectuals and convincing them to join his team and support the regime. Alam could certainly be charming, and Baheri was charmed. Moreover, he was encouraged by his friend Rasul Parvizi, who had earlier decided that he and intellectuals like him must join the shah’s regime and “fix it from within.”[6] From around 1956 until the day Alam died, Baheri was one of his closest, most reliable, and most faithful aides.

Baheri’s first political work with Alam was the creation of the Mardom Party. The shah had by the mid-1950s decided that Iran needed a period of “guided democracy” and that the American two-party system was to be the form for this experiment. Alam was to lead one of the two parties and the organizational work was left in the experienced hands of Baheri. Helped by another erstwhile comrade from the Tudeh Party—a man named Jahan Mir, who worked in the Ministry of Trade—Baheri “had the party structure set up and running within a week.”[7] Using his party experience to further the political cause of Alam and of the regime became a Baheri forte. Twenty years later, when the shah decided to dismantle the two parties and launch a one-party system, Baheri was again a key organizer and ideologue of the new party. Many of the people who were most instrumental in establishing all of these semiofficial parties were in fact lapsed communists.

During this period, Baheri continued to practice law and to teach at the law school. At the same time, he used his increasing influence to help worthy causes and friends in need of legal representation. Easily his most important contribution in this arena was to help Mohammad Bahman Beyqi launch his revolutionary new project to educate the children of the nomadic tribes of Iran. He even published a major scholarly work on criminal law, and it became the standard text for the university for years to come. When in the early 1960s the shah started the Pahlavi Foundation, at Alam’s insistance Baheri was named its legal council.

In 1962, the shah named Assadollah Alam prime minister, who in turn chose Baheri as his deputy prime minister. Within months, Baheri received his first ministerial portfolio when he was named minister of justice. He was a little over forty years old and had no experience in the ministry. Judges and prosecutors, notoriously independent in Iran at the time, were initially dismayed with the appointment. But Baheri won them over by listening to their complaints and improving their pay and working conditions. Even his critics agree that after a while he won the hearts of the bureaucracy at the ministry.[8]

His tenure coincided with some of the most historic decisions made by the shah’s regime, as well as the more mundane vagaries of politics. It was, for example, under Baheri’s watch that legal proceedings against Ali Amini, the prime minister whom Alam had replaced, were begun. It was clear that the proceedings—actually against Amini’s wife—were politically motivated, and Amini went so far as to threaten Baheri with revenge.9 Baheri, on the other hand, denied any wrongdoing, claiming unconvincingly that the complaint had actually been brought before his appointment as minister.

Baheri was the minister of justice during the eventful days of June 5, 1963, when the regime faced the most serious challenge it had faced since Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. In the cabinet meeting during the days of the uprising he advocated an iron-fist policy. He said, “If some who are disturbing the peace are wasted, we must not hesitate. I think martial law is necessary . . . in military tribunals we can more quickly adjudicate their guilt. Our international prestige will not be damaged. We declare martial law to put reaction in its place.” Later, in the course of the same meeting, he suggested “starting big trials. . . . The organizers must be exposed . . . people must know we are not guilty.”10 At the same time, when the government was unable to put down the uprising on the first day, in another cabinet meeting Baheri showed both his political naïveté and his disposition as a lawyer when he said, “It was our responsibility to keep the peace, and since we failed, if there has been damages [to houses and businesses] we must pay for it . . . declaring that we will pay damages is greatly helpful.”11 Blood had been shed and paying for damages was hardly like a balm.

Baheri played a key role in another major issue facing the Alam cabinet. In early 1962, as the question of American advisors in Iran became more serious, the United States government demanded that before any advisors would come to Iran, a Status-of-Forces Agreement (SOFA) must be signed between the two countries. The United States had insisted on such agreements with all countries where American forces had been based. In all other cases, however, the agreements’ immunity covered only crimes committed by the Americans in the course of the performance of their duties. In the case of Iran, not only were the American forces to be immune from prosecution in Iranian courts at all times—not just during working hours—but their dependents, too, would be covered by the same law. These rights had a long, bitter history in Iran and smacked of colonialism. They were reminiscent of what in colonial days were called “capitulation rights,” and all such rights were, with much fanfare, ended in Iran by Reza Shah on May 11, 1928. Some officials in the State Department and in the Iranian government were opposed to the idea of such an agreement in Iran, wary of its consequences, and displeased by its implications. Baheri was of the latter group. He was minister of justice at the time and the question landed on his desk.

In the course of a regular meeting of the cabinet, Alam, the prime minister, casually asked the foreign minister, Abbas Aram, to give a report on developments in the negotiations on the Status-of-Forces Agreement with the United States. No sooner had Aram begun than some members of the cabinet, including Baheri strenuously objected. This agreement would be seen as a revival of colonialism, Baheri told his colleagues, and moreover it is, he argued, against the letter and spirit of the constitution. Sensing the seriousness of the objections, Alam ended the discussion without any resolution.

A few months later a couple of American officials asked to see Baheri. When they arrived, they outlined the problem they faced: The shah wants American advisors, and the Defense Department would not allow them to come to Iran unless a SOFA could be signed with Iran. Baheri tried to dissuade them from insisting on such an agreement, offering instead a lawyerly solution that would achieve de facto immunity from prosecution without causing political damage. According to Baheri’s scheme, a fund would be held in an escrow account at the Ministry of Justice, and any time an American official committed a crime, money from that escrow would automatically be used as bail. Clearly the idea was not satisfactory, and the American officials left without a decision.

In March 1964, a few days before Alam’s cabinet was forced to resign and Baheri’s tenure at the Ministry of Justice came to an end, Alam sent a letter to the Parliament, claiming that the draft legislation granting Americans immunity had in fact been discussed and ratified by the cabinet. In reality, after the initial aborted meeting of the cabinet, no other discussion had ever taken place. Alam, in his effort to satisfy the shah, falsely claimed to have the approval of his ministers. Moreover, the letter to the Majlis bore only three signatures—Alam’s, along with those of the ministers of war and foreign affairs. According to Baheri, the letter should have had Baheri’s signature as well, but it was clearly drafted without his knowledge.12 The bill eventually passed, and though it cost the life of a prime minister, the constitutional responsibility for it was at least partially shared by Baheri as a member of the cabinet.

After Alam was forced to resign, Baheri worked closely with him everywhere he went. Their longest cooperation was in the Court Ministry where Alam served from 1965 to his death in 1977. Baheri was named deputy minister of cultural affairs. Baheri entered national politics again when the single-party system was launched. Initially, he was in charge of a group of intellectuals, all close to Alam, who drafted their version of the party platform. Alam’s nemesis, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, had his own group of intellectuals drafting their version of the platform. It is ironic that both groups were dominated by lapsed communists; their domination was at least partially the result of the fact that the shah had strangely ordered the one-party ideology to be “developed based on principles of dialectics.” Marxists were supposedly well versed in “principles of dialectics.” The tensions between these two camps, rooted as much in a clash of ideas as in competing claims to power, became irreconcilable, and ultimately the shah was asked to deliver a judgment. He listened to both reports and ordered a compromise solution, an eclectic mix of the two differing “dialectical” platforms.13 Toward the end of the party’s short life, Baheri was appointed secretary general of the party—a position earlier held by Hoveyda and Jamshid Amuzegar. In any case, by then the end of the regime was already in sight. The party was, even according to its leaders, a charade.

Baheri had one more chance at a ministerial portfolio when he accepted the post of minister of justice in the Sharif-Emami cabinet. He was one of the three ministers who were forced on Sharif-Emami by the shah. Baheri was in Europe at the time. He had just published a letter in Le Monde defending the shah and defaming his opponents. The shah insisted on his membership in the cabinet of “national reconciliation.”14 Baheri was among those who advocated arresting past ministers and prime ministers and trying them publicly. He of course insisted that the letter of the law be followed in carrying out such arrests. The idea was eventually put into practice, but by that time, going through the rigors of the law seemed rather quaint. Even before the cabinet ended its brief life Baheri resigned his post in protest.15 This time, his tenure coincided with the dastardly fire in the Rex Cinema. He wanted to act with dispatch, find a culprit, and blame the opposition. When the cabinet resisted, he resigned, and soon thereafter left Iran, never to return. He lived with his wife in Washington, D.C. In 2007, after a long ailment, he died. The last few years of his life were made a bit more bitter by the fact that, much to his dismay, he was not chosen to edit the diaries of his mentor and friend, Assadolah Alam.

Abolfath Ardalan
Teymur Bakhtiyar
Hoseyn Fardust
Valiollah Gharani
Alimohammad Khademi
Mohammad Khatam
Ahmad Moggarrebi
Ne’matollah Nasiri
Hassan Pakravan
Hadji Ali Razmara
Hassan Toufanian
Fazlollah Zahedi

Of the old Iranian families —the thousand-year-old-version of America’s Mayflower descendants—few have more pride in their past and their once royal pedigree than the Ardalans. They are the largest tribe among the Kurdish[1] people of Iran. The name comes from the words ard, which means “honesty, probity and piety,” and lan, a suffix used for emphasis. The Persian dictionary writes that members of the Ardalan clan are “known for their congeniality and bravery.”[2]

The Ardalans trace their ancestry as far back as the Sassani kings who ruled Iran almost fifteen hundred years ago. They ruled the Kurdistan region for centuries and proudly state that they have been the guardians of Iran’s borders. For a thousand years, every ruling dynasty in Iran had an interest in good relations with the family. There is a long litany of strategic marriages between the Aradalan tribe and princes and princesses of ruling families.

Ardalans still ruled the Kurdistan province as late as the Nasir al-din Shah era (1848– 1896). A letter of appointment from 1916, signed by Abolhassan Ardalan—Abolfath’s grandfather—to one of his sons reveals the old man’s ruling philosophy. After the elder Ardalan commended his son for “educating himself for the last few years in foreign sciences” and urged him to “spend some time in governmental service,” he put the son in charge of the Armenian and Jewish populations in the Kurdistan province and demanded that in his dealing with these minorities, he “ensure that they are given what they justly deserve, and that they can live in security and comfort.”[3]

In the history of modern Iran, too, there is no dearth of Ardalans in the upper echelons of politics, commerce, and science. Their family tree, painstakingly drawn by the new generation of Ardalans, has more than ten thousand names. Ministers and professors, governors and physicians, senators and soldiers, architects and physicists, many of them among the most eminent of their time, appear on that extensive tree. One of the leaders of the National Front, as well as the shah’s last minister of court, were part of the Ardalan clan. There is even a scholar of Sufism.[4]

Abolfath Ardalan has lived a heroic and tragic life. Of the hundreds of exiled generals and admirals of the Pahlavi army, it is hard to find one whose Horatio Alger exilic story—as he started a new career from scratch—is more inspiring. As an admiral in the Iranian navy, he worked in the part of the burgeoning Iranian military-industrial complex that had developed a reputation for corruption. For years Abolfath worked for a general whose bad reputation was legendary. Nevertheless, Admiral Ardalan himself emerged from this trial by fire with his impeccable reputation unsullied.

Abolfath was born on October 21, 1929 (1308) in the city of Astarabad. He was the sixth child in a family of eight—four boys and four girls. His mother, Roshanak Salour, was a member of the Qajar clan. His father, Amanollah Khan, was a seasoned politician who had served as a member of the cabinet when Reza Khan was prime minister. Even earlier, when the constitutionalists of Iran, in defiance of the central government, decided to create a government in exile, Amanollah Khan was a member of the cabinet. In later years, he served as a deputy in the Majlis, then as a senator. He lived to be 105. After the Islamic Revolution, the old man was arrested and spent a few months in prison, but it did not break his spirit. Not long after his release, he published his memoirs, recounting his long political life.[5]

The Ardalan family lived a life of aristocratic comfort—summers in Shemiran, winters in Tehran. The parents placed special emphasis on their children’s education. Two of the boys were sent to boarding schools in Europe, and the girls were enrolled in one of Tehran’s better schools for girls.[6] Abolfath studied in Iran, moving with his family from city to city and school to school. His last three years of high school were spent at two of the most academically excellent schools in the country—two at Firouz Bahram, founded by the Zoroastrian community, and one at Alborz, also known as the American school.

After high school, Ardalan entered the Engineering Faculty at Tehran University. The year was 1948, and Iranian universities were inescapably steeped in politics. In spite of his father’s long years of service to the “establishment,” Ardalan soon joined the opposition. He befriended Ahmad Zirak-Zadeh, one of the young activists of the Iran Party, which was the kernel of Mohammad Mossadeq’s National Front.

After only a year, Ardalan dropped out and joined the Iranian navy. Among naval officers there existed more friendly camaraderie and a less formal command structure than in the other services. Furthermore, because the navy did not have a war college of its own, it sent its officers to the United States or to Great Britain for training.

In his early years, the shah had a particular affinity for the air force. He was himself a pilot, and it was an open secret that the air force got the lion’s share of the military budget. The fact that the shah’s brother-in-law, General Mohammad Khatam, led the air force placed it in an even more privileged position. But by the mid-1960s, the situation began to change. The shah concluded that the main security threat to Iran came not from the Soviet Union but from Iraq. In this new strategic landscape, the navy would play a far more important role. Ardalan’s career was directly and favorably influenced by these developments.

Ardalan was sent to England, where he stayed for four years and took a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He returned to Iran and served in Tehran and then the port city of Khoramshar, where one of Iran’s most important naval bases was located. After only a year, he was again sent abroad, this time to the United States. He studied at different naval bases and colleges for two years. After his return to Iran in 1955, he married his second cousin, Mahuash. Fifty years later, there is still a pleasant mood of affection and mutual respect in the air when they are together. Their first child was born in 1957. They have two sons and a daughter.

His son was only two years old when Ardalan was sent on another mission. Iran had bought a decommissioned minesweeper from the United States, and he was sent at the head of the crew entrusted with bringing the ship home and mastering its sophisticated equipment. The journey took a year.

Ardalan’s next trip was his longest and, for his career, his most important. In 1963, he was sent to the United States to complete his naval training in the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. At the same time, he enrolled in a graduate program in electrical engineering. By the time he returned to Iran in 1967, he had completed his master’s degree. He returned to a rapidly changing Iran.

As early as 1965, when the shah first heard that the British were planning to leave the Persian Gulf, he made it clear that he hoped to make Iran the dominant force in the region. Britain was opposed to the idea and was siding with the Arab lateral states. There was, according to the U.S. Department of State, “a crisis brewing” between Iran and England.[7] Another State Department report lays out the reasons for the rising tension. “UK does not give as much importance to Iran’s role in Gulf future as Shah does, or as we do, and if necessary, in resolving current problems will continue to support Arab position even at cost of antagonizing Iran.”[8] The shah was, according to Dean Rusk, trying to convince the United States to “pick Iran as its ‘chosen instrument’ in the Middle East.”[9] Essential to domination of the Persian Gulf was a strong navy.

By the mid-1960s, increased oil revenues afforded Iran new opportunities to modernize and strengthen its navy. A crucial first step was to get rid of the old brass. When British ships found Iranian soldiers and sailors stranded without food and water on one of the islands of the Persian Gulf, the shah was furious. He used the occasion as an excuse to dismiss nine top commanding officers of the navy. In their place, he promoted the new class of officers who had been trained in Europe and America, who had knowledge of new electronic and naval technologies, and who were young. The average age of the new naval command was forty. Among them was Abolfath Ardalan.[10] He became a vice admiral. Before long, he was vice commander in charge of logistics.

His most significant contribution to the navy and to Iranian industry was yet to come. In the new decade, he also began to teach at Tehran’s Polytechnical College. He was keenly interested in research and was asked to join the committee overseeing research at the country’s universities. He was its only military member. In the same period, Ardalan published his first book on electronics, showing a side of him that would serve him well in exile. He was also a fan of rowing and sailing and in 1961 helped found and direct the first Iranian athletic federation for sailing and rowing.

As Iranian industry began to expand, and as more and more Iranian students returned home after graduating from Western universities, the shah began to look for ways to strengthen the military and make Iran more independent of outsiders. Ardalan prepared a proposal for the shah’s consideration. In economic terms, it was an “importsubstitution” strategy whereby Iran would produce the electronic equipment it needed at a fraction of the import cost. He suggested creating a government-owned company that would partner with giants like Westinghouse and Hughes. The company would also engage in research and development and enter into cooperative agreements with Iranian universities. It is not clear to what extent the proposal was just the work of Ardalan and to what extent he was helped in this effort by others, including Western advisors.

The shah approved of the idea, and a bill authorizing the creation of such a company passed the Parliament. Ardalan was placed at the head of the new company, the Iran Electronic Industries. What began as an office of two people—Ardalan and an assistant—developed into a major industrial outfit employing more than four thousand people and around six hundred engineers. They produced everything from walkie-talkies to sophisticated guidance systems for missiles. Nearly every one of these items was produced after licensing agreements with Western companies were signed. By 1977, the company had begun working on lasers. They had a particularly close working relationship with the Aryamehre University (called Sharif University after the revolution), Iran’s top technological university.

Although Iran Electronic Industries was owned by the government, managed by the military, and produced products for the armed forces, Ardalan had the wisdom to run the company like a modern business, not a barracks. There was no sign of the unbending solemnities and hierarchies of the military. Upon his recommendation, the main factory was built in Shiraz. The inhabitants of the city and its environs were known for their fine Persian handicraft and were thus, according to Ardelan, well suited for the intricate work of electronic production.[11]

By late 1978, everything started to change. Engineers and workers organized in favor of the coming revolution. When it came, there was chaos. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Valiollah Gharani, tried to keep a number of high-ranking officers, including Ardalan, at their jobs, but the fervor on the streets, fanned by revolutionary rhetoric, was far more powerful than the pragmatism of wiser leaders. While Ardelan was still discussing his status with Gharani, he heard on the radio that a number of other generals had been retired. Ardalan’s name was on the list. He began to fear for his safety. On the day the revolutionary courts published an announcement in the papers demanding that he turn himself in, he decided that he must leave Iran.
He had no passport and no fortune stashed away in Swiss accounts. After sending his family to Europe, he took to the mountains, and with the help of smugglers, went to Turkey, and from there to the United States. In America, he had to reinvent himself. Being a retired, albeit young, admiral of the Iranian navy hardly qualified him for any jobs. He began to teach at any college or school that would offer him a job; he also went back to school himself. “I was the oldest man in every class,” he remembered with characteristic jocularity. Eventually, he received a Ph.D. in engineering management from George Washington University, and with it he landed a job at the University of Maryland.

Once a month, the retired admirals, commodores, and commanders of the erstwhile Iranian royal navy meet somewhere in Washington and talk about the past, and hope for the future. When Admiral Farajollah Rassai, once the top admiral of Iranian navy, passed away, they buried him with the full pomp and circumstance of a military ceremony.

But Ardalan was not a man given to self-pity. As he was describing the mock-military funeral, he went to the wall of his book-cluttered room in his family’s small house in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington. He pointed to the large family tree that hung there and said, “I had this in my office when I was working at Westinghouse. One day an American colleague came in and asked, ‘What is this?’ ‘It is our family tree,’ I told him. The American looked at the drawing again and said, ‘This ain’t no tree, it’s a bush.’” Ardalan burst into laughter.

Just as he was settling in to the relative comfort of a full-time appointment at the university, he died, on August 31, 2007, in the city of Vienna, Virginia.

His name augured fear first in the hearts of the Iranian people and then in the mind of the shah. For a few years, in fact, as he roamed the world and tried to convince the Iranian opposition groups to form a “united front” against the regime in Iran, he became a virtual obsession with the shah. Before this subversive globetrotting, he had been, until 1961, the head of SAVAK. Earlier, he had been the military governor of Tehran. In the aftermath of the fall of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, it was the military governor’s office that broke the back of the opposition and, most spectacularly, discovered and destroyed the secret cells of not only the Tudeh communist party, but of its surprisingly powerful clandestine military organization. In exile Bakhtiyar was desperately seeking to unite with the very forces he had once decimated. Politics surely makes strange bedfellows, but Bakhtiyar’s de facto alliance with the Tudeh Party was no doubt a cause for cognitive dissonance. Ironically, that strange marriage turned out to be the cause of his downfall. He also tried to form an alliance with Ayatollah Khomeini when both lived in Iraq as exiles.

Teymur Bakhtiyar was born in 1914 (1293), near the city of Isfahan. His father was one of the leaders of the Bakhtiyari tribe, and his mother was also from a notable family. Teymur finished his first nine years of education in the city of Isfahan. He was then sent to Beirut to finish high school. A young cousin named Shapur Bakhtiyar accompanied him on the journey. He, like Teymur, went on to play a prominent role in the politics of the postwar period.

After three years in Beirut, Teymur set out for Paris, where he became one of the handful of young Iranians accepted to the famous military academy of Saint Cyr. Established by Napoleon in a site near Versailles, Saint Cyr was considered the West Point of the French military. After graduating from the academy with the rank of lieutenant, Bakhtiyar went back to Iran. On March 1, 1936, he entered the Iranian military with the same rank. There was nothing memorable about his career until 1945.[1]

By then it had become clear that the Soviet army had no intention of leaving the Azerbaijan province of Iran, as they had promised to do at the Tehran conference of 1943. Bakhtiyar, helped by some of the local grandees of the area, particularly the Zolfaghari brothers, began to organize partisan attacks against units of the Red Army.[2] By the time the Soviet forces left the region in 1946, Bakhtiyar had come to the attention of the shah as a brave soldier and a charismatic officer. Some say that the only real military encounter between the rebels and the forces supporting the central government took place when Bakhtiyar lead his troops in a battle near the Khamseh region, where hundreds of rebels were killed.[3]

Events leading to the August 1953 fall of Dr. Mossadeq helped consolidate Bakhtiyar’s position in the ranks of the military, and, what was more important, in the mind of the shah. It was stipulated in the plans for the coup that if the attempt to dislodge Mossadeq failed in Tehran, the Kermanshah Motorized Army, under Bakhtiyar’s command, would march on the capital. As it happened, his services were not needed, but he reaped the benefits of his promise. He had shown his military mettle in Azerbaijan, and this time he had established his political dependability. His reward was to be named the Military Governor of Tehran. The appointment immediately catapulted him into the center of Iranian politics. It also made him the bane of the opposition.

His meteoric rise had not been based solely on merit. His niece, Soraya, had become Iran’s new queen in February 1951. Through this connection, Bakhtiyar began to frequent the court. In 1957, when American and British advisors helped establish a new security force in Iran, Bakhtiyar was named its first director.[4] Ironically, Nasser Zolfaghari, with whom Bakhtiyar had fought against the Soviets, was one of his chief rivals for the job.[5] But ultimately the shah, encouraged by the British, decided to go with a military leadership for the new organization and thus began Bakhtiyar’s climb to the pinnacle of power.[6]

By then Bakhtiyar was married. While serving in his first command post in Isfahan, he had married a distant relative, Iran. A daughter and a son were the results of this marriage. In Tehran, he married a second time, this time to Godrat, the divorced wife of a journalist. With her he had four children. Bakhtiyar’s life was a case in point of Henry Kissinger’s famous dictum about the aphrodisiacal qualities of power. As his power grew, so did his reputation and behavior as an incorrigible womanizer.

Another old dictum, this one about the corrupting influence of absolute power, was evident in Bakhtiyar’s demeanor. The more powerful he became, the more brazen his corruption, the more insatiable his greed, and the more fantastic his fortune. His increasingly extravagant parties and the lavish sums he spent on his paramours became not only legend, but also tools of subversion in the hands of an increasingly disenfranchised opposition. The fact that he was impeccably dressed, dark-eyed, handsome and debonair, and always well-coiffed and invariably worried about his appearance, augmented his reputation as a playboy.

He was an athletic man in appearance as well as in the habits of daily life. Iran’s traditional wrestling and calisthenics—known as varzesh bastani—were among his favorite sports. In his introduction to a book that chronicled the history of that sport, he described the elements of his Spartan vision of life. A strong and healthy physique, he declared, is the sine qua non for a strong mind and healthy moral fiber. He wrote of his affection for the Iranian tradition of fotovat that advocated rules for chivalrous behavior. As in athletics, so too in society, we must strive to cultivate these lofty values, he wrote.[7]

His good looks, his growing political power, and his habits of womanizing all came together to embroil him in a notorious love affair. A married woman and famous vocalist named Pouran, known for her beauty and the soft melodic timbre of her voice, became the storied lover of the general. In spite of the fact that he had two wives already, he made no effort to hide the affair. Eventually, General Alavi Kia, the deputy director of SAVAK, talked with Bakhtiyar about the affair’s negative consequences for the organization. After some negotiations, the affair came to a relatively amicable end. The general paid Pouran about seventy thousand tooman ($9,000) as the wages of his sin.[8]

The sum, substantial by Iranian standards of the time, meant little to Bakhtiyar, who had by then illicitly amassed a vast fortune. Bribes, “gifts,” and phony partnerships to buy his support had by 1960 made him a very wealthy man. A few years later, when he fell from grace, SAVAK used its considerable power to find out the extent of his fortune in Iran and abroad. What they found was truly amazing. He had vast holdings in land, houses, and villages in Iran and Europe and accounts in numerous banks in at least twenty countries.[9]

More important, his private peccadillos and personal corruption was surely affecting the reputation of the newly created organization. Although only one of SAVAK’s functions was to control the opposition in Iran, Bakhtiyar’s harsh manners and his willingness to use torture and physical punishment to get confessions and information shaped the early reputation of the organization. His reckless abandon in a conversation with a member of the British Embassy, in which he nonchalantly talked of the practice of torture by SAVAK and described in gory details the extent and nature of its use, is still a sobering reminder of his brutality.[10]
Ironically, the two men who had been picked to serve as his deputies—Generals Alavi Kia and Pakravan—were both professional intelligence officers and were trying to develop a favorable reputation for the new organization. The caliber of some of the men they brought into SAVAK’s ranks—men like Alinaghi Alikhani, who was hired as an economic analyst and went on to become one of the most prominent and respected men in Iranian politics—was a testament to their vision.[11]

In spite of this tarnished reputation, in 1961, as Iran was struggling with a financial and political crisis, Bakhtiyar’s name was bandied about as the leading candidate to become prime minister. If SAVAK reports of the time are to be trusted, although the possibility of the appointment was deplored by the opposition, the urban middle classes and even some of the lower classes were happy at the prospect.[12] Bakhtiyar even sent out feelers to members of the National Front about the possibility of a coalition government, but they were not willing to forgive his past or to overlook his tainted reputation.

His growing appetite for power and his increasingly irksome meddling in affairs of the state—like the time he congratulated the government of India on annexing some islands when the official position of Iran was to stay out of the fray13—added to the shah’s suspicions. The shah knew well that his own father had become king through his mastery of the army. Thus throughout his reign he showed little tolerance of charismatic and ambitious officers. Bakhtiyar was no exception. As it happened, he confirmed the shah’s worst suspicions about ambitious officers. These incipient tensions came to a boil during the Kennedy administration.

The 1960 election in the United States was a crucial turning point for the shah. He had been close to Nixon. Kennedy, on the other hand, was openly critical of the shah. Needless to say, when Kennedy was elected, the shah was anxious to find out what the new administration had in store for him. He sent Bakhtiyar to meet with the new president and to give him a personal letter from the shah. Bakhtiyar went to Washington in February 1961, and it was a measure of the American influence in Iran at the time that long before Bakhtiyar’s arrival, “an outline of the general’s planned presentation” as well as the exact text of the shah’s letter had “fortuitously come into” the U.S. government’s possession.[14]

Although official records of the meeting between Bakhtiyar and the president are rather routine and don’t indicate any unusual discussion, rumors immediately reached the shah that Bakhtiyar had tried to conspire with the new administration to remove the shah. Some sources have claimed that in Washington Bakhtiyar met with Kermit Roosevelt, who had been the CIA’s lead officer in Tehran in 1953, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, and solicited their help in overthrowing the shah. Not only was he rebuffed, according to the same sources, but the shah was also informed about his security chief’s shenanigans.[15]

While nothing might have happened in discussions with John Kennedy, back in Tehran Bakhtiyar certainly contacted the American Embassy in early May 1961, seeking their support for his planned coup attempt against the government of Amini. The American response was unequivocal, instructing the embassy “to take all steps necessary to discourage General Teymur Bakhtiyar against initiating any action against the Amini government.”[16] Bakhtiyar was informed that the United States was not only opposed to any such move against Amini, but “[w]ould even take steps to prevent such a coup.”[17] In fact, no sooner had Amini come to power than the United States began to worry about the possibility of just such a coup. Thus: at an “NSC meeting, May 19 President approved series of recommendations including quote US should not favor any military coup against Amini regime.”[18]

The rumors of his conspiracy with the Americans, and his ongoing tensions with the government of Amini, sealed Bakhtiyar’s fate. He was, to the shah’s relief, removed by Amini and eventually forced into exile. Before leaving, for a while he rented an office where he ostensibly attended to his large business interests. In fact, the office became a command center for action against the Amini government.19 For the shah, nothing could be more comforting than having his old nemesis, Amini, fighting his new foe, the overly ambitious general. The army and SAVAK’s brutal attack against the students of Tehran University, blamed on the Amini government and rumored to have been instigated by Bakhtiyar, was the immediate cause of the general’s forced exile.

At first, the exile was thought to be temporary. Several people tried to intercede on Bakhtiyar’s behalf and bring about a rapprochement with the shah, but their efforts were for naught. Gradually, subtle differences of policy turned into open conflict between the disgruntled general and the shah. Seven years after his departure from Iran, in June 1969 (Tir 1348), the shah signed legislation passed by both houses of the Iranian Parliament indicating that “Whereas Bakhtiyar’s treason to the people of Iran is confirmed, all his military titles are annulled, and all his rights suspended, and all his movable and immovable properties” confiscated.[20]

Soon after arriving in Europe, Bakhtiyar began to solicit foreign help for an attempt to dislodge the shah. He was not without his supporters, even among the ranks of the shah’s officials. For example, 1n 1962, “The Persian Consul-General in Geneva” met Sir Denis Wright, who was on his way to Iran as the new British ambassador and “excitedly criticized the Shah and his land reform program. . . . He also pressed me hard to see General Teymur Bakhtiyar.”21 Denis Wright refused to meet him, but nine years later, on at least one occasion, Bakhtiyar succeeded in meeting with British officials, in an “unarranged and unwelcome call”[22] on the British consulate in Nice. After some soul searching, the British decided to level with the shah and tell him about the meeting, lest he hear about it from other sources and become suspicious of British plans. As is now commonly known, the “Shah saw a British hand” behind everything, and in his mind, Bakhtiyar was a British creation.[23]

In fact one of the most serious open breaches between Iran and England took place over the question of Bakhtiyar. In December 1970, SAVAK made public, with great fanfare, documents it claimed to have found in General Bakhtiyar’s papers showing that the oil companies had been “backing him. . . . Among the statements made by Bakhtiyar, but not publicized was one to the effect that the IPC had been subsidizing him to the tune of $30,000.” The British pulled out all the stops to attempt to force Iran into a retraction. The British ambassador issued a demarche and at the same time met with the foreign minister and the minister of court to lodge a serious complaint. Eventually, the Iranians “put out an official statement . . . to the effect that the allegations against the oil companies were based on Bakhtiyar documents and statements and did not reflect the views of the Iranian government.”[24] As is clear from the careful wording of the retraction, Iran did not deny the connection, but simply emphasized that the statement had been made by Bakhtiyar.

The fact that Bakhtiyar spent most of his time in Iraq and that Iranian students had contingents of radicals training in Iraq, along with the shah’s firm belief that the Ba’th party, which ruled Iraq at the time, was a British concoction, reinforced the shah’s lingering suspicions.

While in Baghdad, Bakhtiyar spared no effort to join forces with all elements of the opposition. He tried to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini, although it is not clear whether a meeting ever took place. He was also hoping to join forces with the Tudeh Party, which had little compunction about the morality of such a meeting. Reza Radmanesh, the first secretary of the Tudeh Party at the time, agreed to meet Bakhtiyar. These contacts might well have been the initial source for SAVAK’s ability to send its agents among Bakhtiyar’s entourage. The man who had acted as go-between was Abbas Shahriyari, ostensibly the head of the Tudeh Party organization in Iran. In fact, Shahriyari had been from the beginning an agent of SAVAK sent to infiltrate the party. He was later called “the man with a thousand faces” and eventually was assassinated by Marxist groups in retaliation for all he had done against the opposition.

At the time of the first meeting between Bakhtiyar and Radmanesh, the KGB informed the Tudeh Party that Shahriyari was an agent of SAVAK. Radmanesh refused to believe the KGB warning. When to the party’s great embarrassment the meetings with Bakhtiyar were exposed, Radmanesh was fired. We know all of this because the East German Secret Police (STASSI) had a studious spy in the top ranks of the Tudeh Party; his codename was “Charly” but his real name was Pour-Hormozan. Aside from being a member of the Central Committee, he was also the party’s chief theorist in matters dealing with the Iranian economy. He met regularly with East German police and gave detailed reports, as in this case.[25]

These developments were, thanks to Shahriyari, all well known to SAVAK as well. Furthermore, as SAVAK documents show, all communications by Bakhtiyar with his allies in Iran were also monitored by SAVAK.[26]

Even Bakhtiyar’s movements in Europe were closely monitored. A maid in the hotel he frequented was bought off, and the room in another hotel he regularly visited was bugged. When the Swiss government was about to rescind his visa, thus forcing him to accept asylum from one of the “countries unfriendly” to Iran, the Iranian Embassy was instructed to bring pressure on the Swiss authorities to allow him to stay. He would be more difficult to control, SAVAK decided, if he were somewhere in Iraq or Syria. At the same time, when the government found out that Bakhtiyar was planning to travel to the United States about the same time the shah was visiting the country, Iran asked the American government to delay his visa application.[27]

A sobering warning on the extent of Bakhtiyar’s activities was delivered in 1967, when the shah visited West Germany. One of the first instances where the shah’s government accused Bakhtiyar of interference in Iranian domestic affairs and inciting rebellion against the government was in the aftermath of the June 1963 uprising. Some have claimed that, in fact, the regime was caught off guard by the power of those demonstrations because hitherto they had focused their energies on Bakhtiyar as the main potential enemy, forgetting about the danger posed by the religious forces.28 SAVAK sources claimed at the time that Bakhtiyar had traveled to Egypt on the eve of the uprising and asked for logistical and military help from Nasser—then the sworn enemy of the shah.[29]

The unprecedented demonstrations against the shah during his visit to Germany in 1967, leading to the death of one young German student, angered the shah. He saw Bakhtiyar’s hand behind the demonstrations. Two days after his return from his trip, he dismissed General Alavi Kia from his post as head of SAVAK offices in Europe. The position had been a sinecure given to Alavi Kia in 1962 when he was forced to resign his post as SAVAK’s deputy director on suspicion of harboring sympathies with Bakhtiyar. The shah was by this time convinced of Alavi Kia’s complicity with Bakhtiyar and moved swiftly to dismiss him. At the same time, the shah moved aggressively to eliminate the general’s gathering threat. SAVAK was ordered by the shah to hunt and kill Bakhtiyar.

In March 1968, as Bakhtiyar was entering Lebanon, he was arrested on the charge of carrying illegal arms. The Iranian government used all its power—including allegedly bribing different officials at all levels of the Lebanese government—to extradite him. They almost succeeded, only to be turned away at the last minute by the intervention of the Lebanese president. Clearly the general’s many Arab friends brought pressure on the government of Lebanon to let him go free. There is also evidence to indicate that his wife, Godrat, used some of the family funds to secure her husband’s release. After spending about nine months in Lebanon, much of it under arrest, Bakhtiyar was finally allowed to leave the country. He went first to Switzerland. His real destination, however, was Iraq, whose Ba’thist government, and its new strongman, Saddam Hussein, had offered him asylum and the promise of help for setting up camps for training terrorists and other saboteurs.

His move to Iraq and the intensification of his activities made him an obsession of the shah.30 In his biweekly meetings with General Ne’matollah Nasiri, he invariably raised the issue and asked why Bakhtiyar was still not liquidated. For its part, SAVAK had completely infiltrated the ranks of Bakhtiyar’s entourage by early 1970. By one account, sixteen of Bakhtiyar’s closest aides and assistants—from his cook to his typist—were SAVAK agents.[31]

SAVAK’s tightening of the noose around Bakhtiyar’s neck met a serious stumbling block when its own Eighth Directorate, in charge of counterespionage, noticed unusual contacts between Abbas Shahriyari—SAVAK’s famous double agent, and chief liaison to Bakhtiyar—and the Iraqi Embassy in Tehran. Before they could move to arrest him, the head of the Eighth Directorate received a call from Parviz Sabeti—the head of the Third Directorate, in charge of internal security—asking him to leave Shahriyari alone.[32]

Bakhtiyar returned the favor of the regime’s attempts to kill him by trying to assassinate the shah. When, in early 1970 the shah was planning to visit Turkey, Bakhtiyar tried to convince Saddam to lend him a hand and kill the shah. Saddam refused.33 By then Bakhtiyar had created what he called the Liberation Movement of Iran. It sent arms and ammunition as well as money and harshly worded proclamations against the shah to its handful of supporters in Iran.[34]

Finally, at seven-thirty on the evening of August 10, 1970, as the shah was vacationing in Nowshahr on the Caspian Sea, he received a coded telegram informing him, “said agents have hit the subject who has been transferred to the hospital but is still alive.”[35] As it turned out, an agent of SAVAK had shot Bakhtiyar while they were hunting together. The general did not survive the bullet. After a doubtful shah was assured that Bakhtiyar was in fact dead, Iranian papers reported his death with great jubilation. Several Iranian agents were executed by the Iraqis for their complicity in the assassination of Bakhtiyar. As recompense, SAVAK bought their families homes and offered them cash rewards.[36]

Every revolution has its Rasputin——a figure of enigma and iniquity, a moral monster, a genius of disguise, a focus of intrigue, often redolent of sexual innuendo. In the public imagination, Hoseyn Fardust was the Rasputin of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Persians are connoisseurs of conspiracy theories, and even in their fantastic pantheon, Fardust is peerless as the consummate conspirator. The web of intrigue attributed to him is nothing short of mythical. Like a character from a John le Carré novel, he was for years a name without a face. He had a fearsome reputation and an almost obsessive aversion to the limelight. The aura of power transformed what might have been seen as absence of social grace into a stern, mysterious, soldierly demeanor. His many eccentricities, rooted in the quirks of his character, only added to the lure and luster of his power. His behavior during an emergency meeting of the cabinet in 1966 was par for his course. He “entered the room and sat at the table. . . . He was never introduced. Throughout the session . . . he remained silent. At its conclusion, he rose and silently left the room, not pausing to exchange pleasantries or even bid farewell to the Prime Minister.”[1]

Before the revolution, Fardust was widely believed to be the shah’s closest confidant, his “eyes and ears.” As the head of the Special Bureau, he was in fact the intelligence tsar of the Pahlavi regime. Modeled after the Special Bureau that serves the prime minister in England, both the idea for such an office and Fardust’s leadership of it came from the Brit- ish.2 Myriad intelligence agencies reported to the shah. Fardust’s job was to distill these reports into the shah’s daily intelligence briefing. For many years, Fardust was also the deputy director of SAVAK. The combination afforded him not only constant contact with the shah but knowledge of even the darkest secrets of the system. Knowledge is always power, and the power of his kind of sensitive knowledge, some believed, explained his longevity in power. He was the man who knew too much.

By the mid-1970s, for reasons that are not clear, the shah grew dissatisfied with Far- dust and no longer met with him regularly. Nevertheless, Fardust was not fired or moved out of his crucial post. The two-volume memoir he wrote in prison is a powerful testi- mony to the depth of his information. Although written under possible duress, the narra- tive is particularly memorable for Fardust’s scathing and deeply embittered account of the shah and his entourage. Some of this bitterness can be attributed to his understandable attempt to appease his Islamic captors. Anything said against the shah was music to their ears. But the bitterness of Fardust’s narrative goes far beyond the attempts of a captive to appease his interrogators.

The scathing nature of his narrative was used to confirm the view of those who, after the revolution, saw him as one the chief architects of the shah’s downfall. To some, he was an Iago, angry with the king for innumerable acts of public humiliation and for the suspicion that the shah had done Fardust’s “office between sheets.” Others saw Fardust’s exposé as another part of the grand design to depose the shah. Fardust, they say, was sim- ply doing his job as an agent of a foreign power—some said he worked for the British, oth- ers suggested that the KGB had recruited him in the early 1950s. When reminiscing about his childhood in Answer to History, the shah writes that he had known Fardust “at court since we were both six years old; he was to become one my closest friends and advisors and ultimately betray me. He is now head of SAVAMA, Khomeini’s secret service.”[3]

The shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, echoes her brother’s belief. She theorizes that the Islamic Revolution was more than anything a failure of intelligence, and she faults Fardust for his “failure to keep [the shah] informed. Each day,” she wrote, “my brother met with Hoseyn Fardust . . . whose assignment was to gather, evaluate, and distill all intelli- gence reports and news dispatches. Fardust functioned as a kind of conduit of vital infor- mation on the highest level, which he delivered daily to my brother. . . . I am convinced that Fardust must have withheld vital information from the shah and was in fact in active nego- tiation with Khomeini during the last years of the regime.” For her, Fardust’s survival after the revolution was itself a sign of his guilt. “At a time when anyone remotely connected with the shah was being summarily executed,” she wrote, “Hoseyn Fardust remains alive and well, prospering under the new administration as one of the heads of SAVAMA.”[4]

Her suspicions found an echo even in the mainstream American media. When in August 15, 1980, agents of the Islamic Republic assassinated an Iranian opposition figure in America, some in the media claimed that Fardust had traveled incognito to the United States and arranged the assassination.5 About four years after these rumors, officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran announced that Fardust had been arrested. By then, guessing Fardust’s fate had become a favorite parlor game of the Iranian cognoscenti. While many thought he had been working for the regime in a leadership capacity, his son suggests that he spent the entire period in hiding. He was always just one step ahead of the police, because “he knew how they worked.”[6]

At that time, the once powerful general, now wan and weak, a hallow shell of the man he once was, appeared on a confessional program on television, lambasting the ancien régime and telling the world that he had been a spy for the KGB. Before the second install- ment of the shocking interview was shown, newspapers in Iran announced that Fardust had died in prison of a heart attack.

Even that announcement did not end rumors about him. True cynics think that he is still alive, merrily working for the Islamic regime. The announcement, they say, as well as the television confessional appearance, were simply part of an elaborate ruse to end speculation about him.

It was not Fardust’s first television appearance. Ironically, the earlier appearance, too, though made at the height of his power, had an element of the confessional about it. Fardust’s sole public performance before the revolution marked the beginning of the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. In November 1976, he was appointed director of the Imperial Inspection Commission and given oversight over every ministry and government institu- tion. The commission’s televised hearings opened the floodgates of criticism against the government.

When the first round of hearings ended, Fardust appeared on television to give the commission’s progress report. He looked fidgety; his face seemed contorted; his eyes avoided the camera. His rhetorical skills were sadly wanting. He could not even deliver the prepared text with any authority or clarity. The aura he had spent thirty years culti- vating—the stern, serious, intelligent, focused, informed, and relentlessly reliable general and pillar of the shah’s power—disappeared in less than thirty minutes. There was a dis- cernable absence of conviction in his delivery; the behavior seemed the result of his clear discomfort with the camera. In retrospect, his disposition was just another indication of his complicated, almost schizophrenic, relationship with the shah—his master, mentor, monarch, friend, and deeply despised enemy.

Hoseyn Fardust was born in Tehran in 1917 (1296) to a poor soldier’s family. His father never made it above the rank of a lieutenant. His meager military salary was all that sustained his large family of five children. Following his father’s footsteps, Hoseyn was eight years old when he enrolled in the special elementary school set up for those planning to join the military. For many of the dispossessed, a life in the military was the only sure path to climbing the social ladder. But in his case, his family’s poverty, compared to the affluence of many other students in his class, scarred his soul and left a lasting mark on his character. The time spent at that school, he wrote, led to “an inferiority complex and exaggerated humility.”[7]

The experience warped his character in many other ways as well. He grew to despise all those whose birthrights granted them advantages in life. Envy became a permanent part of his emotional vocabulary. Yet he spend nearly all of his life serving someone whose very right to rule—and to lord it over him—was an accident of birth.
As a young boy, Hoseyn tried to compensate for his family’s poverty by working hard to excel academically. The combination of hard work and humility brought him to the attention of the school’s commanders. When Reza Shah decided to set up a special class for his son, the crown prince, one of those he selected to join him was Hoseyn. Once again he was the only poor boy in the company of a class filled with children of affluence.
Moreover, while the other children made every effort to endear themselves to the crown prince, Fardust’s life was forever changed after the prince chose him as his close friend.

When the crown prince was sent to Switzerland for his education, Fardust was chosen to accompany him. The court paid all his expenses. Furthermore, to put his mind at rest, his father was promoted and given a better job in Tehran. The court eventually helped his family purchase a house. At the Swiss school, Fardust combined hard work with dis- cipline. He was also an athlete, and soccer was his forte. His main duty, however, was to keep the crown prince company. After five years, the two returned to Iran.

In Tehran, Fardust lived at the court for a while with the crown prince. He was tempted to go back to Europe to become a physician. Reza Shah overruled the idea, telling him, “The only honorable life is that of a soldier. Go and register at the Officers Academy.” Fardust dutifully complied.[8] A couple of anecdotes he recounts in his memoir are fascinat- ing windows into his character.

The crown prince liked to play tennis. Reza Shah often visited him at courtside, but he knew nothing about the game. He would ask Fardust the score. Fardust soon noticed that Reza Shah frowned every time he heard his son was losing. After this discovery, every time Reza Shah asked the score, Fardust, regardless of the actual result, would simply say that the crown prince was winning.

On another occasion, the crown prince was given a motorcycle as a gift. Fardust wanted to ride it, but his wish was not granted. That afternoon, he appropriated the motorcycle and took it home. Clearly he had given no thought to the consequences of his rash act. Once he got home, he understandably became frightened. He decided to stay away from the court. Even as a child, the kind of passive aggression that would later char- acterize him as a man was evident in his behavior. After a couple of days, he was called back to the court and forgiven by Reza Shah for his lapse of judgment. The sycophancy evident in the first story, and the envy and recklessness of the second, worked together to make him a dangerous advisor.

At the Officers Academy, Fardust was again included in the special class set up for the crown prince. While his days at the academy were relatively quiet, Hoseyn’s life changed when the crown prince succeeded his father to the throne. Fardust emerged as the new king’s close friend and confidant, often used in some of the most sensitive missions. The shah talked of trusting him “implicitly.”[9]

There are in Iran those who think of Fardust as a British “plant.” Somehow, the omnipotent British intelligence agencies are supposed to have placed Fardust in the shah’s life. But advocates of this theory overlook the fact that at every turn, it was the shah, or his father, who chose Fardust. No less important is the fact that on several occasions, Fardust almost lost his job. The first time was in late 1940s. Damaging leaks about some female members of the royal family were appearing in the press. The shah ordered an investigation, and to his surprise, it turned out that Fardust was the source of the leaks.

As punishment, he was banished from court. What saved his career was the fact that he enjoyed the support of the queen mother. With her help, he gradually wormed his way back into royal favor. Then Mohammad Mossadeq came into power, and Fardust was among the courtiers forced to leave Iran.[10]

He settled in Paris, where he began to study law. His French experience was full of surprises. Fardust was chronically short of money, and at that time a successful Iranian businessman—a rug merchant named Saberi—was the guardian angel of stranded Ira- nian exiles. Fardust was one of those who borrowed money from him. It later turned out that Saberi was a KGB operative, and if it is true that Fardust was working for the KGB, then the Paris trip was when he probably became hooked.[11]

With the fall of Mossadeq and the return of the shah, Fardust, too, returned to Iran. He immediately regained his reputation as one of the shah’s closest confidants. But shortly after his return, he came close to losing his job again. The Zahedi cabinet received reli- able reports about potential ties between Fardust and “foreign intelligence agencies.” The report was given to the shah, who angrily dismissed its allegations, complaining, “They can’t even see me have one friend.”[12]

Fardust remained the shah’s close confidant, and when, in the late 1950s, on the advice of the British, the Special Bureau was set up, Fardust was named its director. Since SAVAK and other intelligence agencies played an increasingly crucial role in all aspects of Iranian society, Fardust, as the ultimate “clearinghouse” for all reports, had his hands on the pulse of the country. He remained in that post until the last days of the shah’s reign.

Over the last two or three years of his long tenure, Fardust was no longer seeing the shah. Clearly the amity that once defined their relationship was no longer present. Instead of meeting the shah on a daily basis, as had been his custom, he was now forced to send in his reports. Every morning, he submitted a written intelligent brief to the shah in a secure briefcase—the kind that has two keys, one held by the shah, and the other by Fardust. The briefcase was cuffed to the wrist of the general who acted as courier.

Some of the most powerful men in the Iranian army, particularly those who played a crucial role in the last stages of the Pahlavi regime, at one time worked in the Special Bureau. Advocates of conspiracy theory believe that Fardust used these years to train and establish special ties with a large cadre of generals and then, on the eve of the revolu- tion, used them to break up the military. They point to General Abbas Garabagi, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when the shah left Iran and who was instrumental in the armed forces’ decision to declare their neutrality—paving the way for the revolu- tion. Garabagi was a protégé of Fardust and a one-time staff officer at the Special Bureau. Affording Fardust this kind of power had a psychological utility for its advocates. To the extent that he is afforded this diabolic, almost omnipotent agency, then the action or inaction of those whose words and deeds were in fact instrumental in bringing about the revolution are absolved of any historic responsibility.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Fardust was never far from the center of power. His char- acter had, by the mid-1960s, become a legend. In an atmosphere where corruption had become a major political problem, he was reputed to be free of financial entanglements. In fact, though, by the 1960s he had developed extensive holdings in real estate and farming. In partnership with General Ne’matollah Nasiri, by then notorious for his corruption,13 he had received large parcels of land in Khuzestan and had begun to develop an industrial farm there.14All his life he had an affinity for nurseries and flowers, and by the late 1960s he owned one of the biggest nurseries in the country.[15]

He was frugal to the point of miserliness. Regardless of where he served, he ate his meals in his office. In Europe, he walked briskly when he strolled around in the streets, focusing his gaze straight ahead and avoiding looking at the storefronts. “I don’t look,” he told a colleague, “because I don’t want to be tempted.”[16] His desire to avoid any temptation to spend money was not an empty boast. He was notorious for wearing the same shirt and shoes for long stretches of time. He never learned how to tie his necktie. He used a half-tie that would attach to the collar with a small metal clip. At times, the shah joked about his friend’s inability to use a regular necktie, and Fardust was not amused.[17] His shoes, too, were invariably a bit oversized and dragged on the floor when he walked.

Nearly all his life, he shared a house with his parents. Although by the mid-1960s he owned several high-rises in Tehran—one he rented to the Saudi Arabian Embassy, another to the Ministry of Labor—nevertheless he continued to live with his parents and sleep in the Spartan bedroom of his childhood in his old bed.18 Even when he married, he did not move out of his parents’ house, or his childhood bedroom.

When he was young, he had fallen in love with a beautiful girl named Tala. They had planned to marry, but then she was married off to a richer suitor. He was married three times, never happily. He never fully lived with any of his wives. His only son was the product of his first marriage. After divorcing his first wife, he married a woman who was known to have been a frequent guest of the shah at the court. Fardust asked her to never go back to the court. This was, in fact, standard practice for him. He rarely participated in any of the nightly parties at the court. His favorite courtier was the queen mother, who had been for many years his chief patron and protector. When, after a short trip, he learned that his wife had been to court, he immediately divorced her, thinking that the shah might have had an affair with her. A few years after the heartbreak of his second breakup, he found his Tala again. By then she was married to a colonel in the army. When she decided to go back to Fardust, the colonel apparently had no choice but to divorce her. Fardust apparently made him an offer he could not refuse.

For all his adult life, Fardust’s favorite pastime was playing cards—poker, bridge, or rummy. There was only a small coterie of friends—many of them generals, and generals’ wives—with whom he played.[19] As the political situation in Iran began to deteriorate, as more and more members of the elite were leaving the country, Fardust insisted on keeping his routine. He went to work every day, but when a few officers and politicians who were concerned about the future went to his office and sought his help and advice on using the military to quell the uprising, Fardust’s answer surprised his visitors. It was useless, he said, “to try and do anything now. Moreover, the shah has for long been guilty of breaking the law. It is high time he pays a price.”[20]

Every afternoon, after his day in the office, Fardust went to the social club called Iran Javan and tried to play a game of cards with some of his friends. But by early 1979, the club was all but abandoned; his friends had either left or were in hiding. He would sit alone in a corner, reading the paper, and with the waiters restlessly standing around, he would gaze at the emptiness.

Valiollah Gharani’s life was a symptom of the cancer eating away the heart of the shah’s power. It is a consensus among scholars and diplomats that the army and the intelligence agencies were the two most solid foundations of the shah’s power. Nevertheless, of the seven important military chiefs of intelligence—Teymur Bakhtiyar, Hassan Pakravan, Hassan Alavi Kia, Ne’matollah Nasiri, Hoseyn Fardust, Nasser Moghadam, and Gharani—only Alavi Kia survived to live his life in relative peace. At least four of the seven—Bakhtiyar, Moghadam, Fardust, and Gharani—have been at one time or another accused of conspiring against the shah. Five of the seven died violent deaths, and the fate of the sixth, Fardust, continues to be mired in a fog of mystery. The regime’s sense of security, thus, turned out to have been a chimera.

Even in this uncanny company, the life and career of Gharani was an enigma and an anomaly. He attempted a coup against the shah’s government in 1958 and survived to become the first chief of staff in the Islamic regime. But his tenure was short-lived. In the whirlwind of revolutionary zeal and violence, he lost not only his command, but his life.

He was born in 1913 (1292) in Tehran. His family was solidly middle class and moderately religious. Valiollah was ten when he lost his father, a government bureaucrat. Aside from the few years he lived in Shiraz as a child, he spent his early formative years in Tehran, where he graduated—like a disproportionally large number of his generation’s elite— from Dar al-Funun and immediately enrolled in the Officers Academy. He was seventeen when he joined the military.

Gharani was one of the top three students of his class. After the Officers Academy he attended the War College, where he took a special course on intelligence, and that decision shaped the contours of his military career. Although after his death Islamic panegyrists have been trying to make of “Martyr Gharani” a devout Muslim and a dour man of unbending pieties,[1] his peers remember him as a jolly young man, given to all the normal, sometimes bawdy frivolities of a young officer. There is also universal admiration for him, even among his political foes. He is known for his honesty, his love of Iran, and his commitment to a better future for the country.[2]

His early career is remarkable only for his unremarkable rise in the ranks of the military. By August 1953, he had become the commander of the Rasht Division, one of the more important command posts in the Iranian army. In those testy days when many of the army officers were trying to distance themselves from the increasingly marginalized shah, Gharani was not only steadfast in his allegiance to the king but took potentially dangerous steps to prove his devotion as well. On several occasions, he met in secret with Aredeshir Zahedi, who was himself in hiding at the time and trying to muster support for the shah’s imminent attempt to topple Mohammad Mossadeq. Gharani’s subsequent rapid rise to the position of vice chief of staff was his reward. It was a sign of the shah’s trust in Gharani that he was also named the head of the Joint Chiefs’ Intelligence Staff—Rokne Dow—in charge of counterespionage. In that capacity, he often traveled to the United States, and it was during one of those trips that he first began seriously to plan a coup in Iran.

When SAVAK was first created in 1957, Gharani, as the chief of the army counterintelligence unit, was one of the obvious candidates to head the new organization. He had many friends and supporters in the ranks of intelligence officers of Iran. More important, the shah liked and trusted him, as he had in 1953 passed the ultimate test of loyalty. It was rumored that Gharani lost his bid to become SAVAK’s first chief because the British advisors to the shah had insisted that a “strongman” like Teymur Bakhtiyar was a better fit for the job.3 Shapur Reporter, later knighted for his services to Her Majesty’s government, was for many years the storied representative of MI6 in Iran, and it was, at least according to Gharani, he who changed the shah’s mind and had Bakhtiyar installed. Gharani was bent on revenge. He began to collect anecdotal evidence against Reporter. On one occasion, Gharani took a senior Iranian officer to the British Embassy to chronicle for an embassy official some of Reporter’s alleged infractions, particularly in terms of illicit financial gains. It is very likely that Reporter heard about this meeting and was afterwards biding his time to take his own revenge.4 The events of February 1958 offered him the chance.

By the mid-1950s, the U.S. government was worried about the future of the shah. A National Intelligence estimate produced at the time offers the overall flavor of these reports when it reported, “We believe that the present political situation in Iran is unlikely to last very long. The most probable development is an attempt by certain military elements possibly in collaboration with civilian elements desiring liberal reforms to force the Shah back into the role of a constitutional monarch.”[5] The United States began a multipronged policy of pushing for reform. They talked with the shah on numerous occasions and encouraged him to open up the system. In fact, the CIA began a covert operation in Tehran by placing articles in the press demanding reform, and warning of dire consequences if nothing was done. At the same time, the CIA operatives made sure to let the shah know that they were behind the articles.[6]

A related development was the decision by some members of Parliament to form a party called Azadi (Freedom). They were generally known to advocate the premiership of Ali Amini. It was in this context that Gharani was appointed chief of the Iranian army’s Intelligence Staff. On the orders of the shah, his unit was also put in charge of controlling the domestic opponents of the regime.[7]

Unbeknownst to the shah, Gharani had changed much since August 1953. He had become increasingly critical of the regime and what he perceived to be its endemic corruption. Arsanjani, the rabble-rousing journalist and foe of the shah, was by then Gharani’s closest friend.

Another circle of friends were called the Baradaran (The Brothers), formed in August 1953 and focused on fighting the communists.[8] Aside from these connections, Gharani began a series of meetings with some opposition leaders like Hassan Nazih and Admiral Madani, who would become, almost twenty-five years later, leaders of the early phase of the Islamic Regime.[9] He also met with Khalil Maleki, a social democrat, and with Ahmad Aramesh, who in a few years would become director of the Plan Organization and who was killed by the security forces shortly thereafter.

After his appointment as chief of intelligence, Gharani went to the United States for a training course and spent about six months there. It was there that he met with a number of American officials, as well as Ali Amini, at the time Iran’s ambassador to the United States. By the time Gharani came back, he was ready to put his coup plans into action. He was convinced that the Americans wanted change and reform in Iran and supported him.[10] Whether he was covertly or subtly goaded on his path by officials in Washington is a question we might never be able to answer.

To ensure that his plans in Tehran went undetected, particularly by his foes in the other security agencies, such as Teymur Bakhtiyar and Alavi Moghadam, Gharani used a clever but old ruse. He told the shah that he was laying a trap for some members of the opposition and wanted to see whether and how far they would participate in a conspiracy against the government.[11] Although he had thus covered his tracks with the Iranian intelligence agencies, he had apparently failed to take note of British intelligence in Iran. Furthermore, his personal animosity with Sir Shapur Reporter came back to haunt him.

When Gharani learned that Dulles and his assistant secretary, Rountree, were on their way to Iran, he began to put his plans into motion. As early as 1956, he had begun meeting with members of the American Embassy, the CIA station chief in Tehran, and the CIA operative in charge of covert operations, soliciting help and complaining of the dangerous situation in Iran.12 On January 22, 1958, at the request of General Gharani, three members of the American Embassy in Tehran—Fraser Wilkins, minister counselor of the embassy; Colonel Baska; and Lieutenant Colonel Braun—met the general at the house of his accomplice, Esfandiyar Bozorgmehr. The memorandum of that conversation is not available; it has been declared “Sensitive; special handling required; not releasable to Foreign Nations.”[13] A redacted “Memorandum for the Record” of the discussion offers the following synopsis of what transpired

[Gharani and Bozorgmehr said] a) The Present government has no popular support and is despised by the mass of Iranian people and particularly by the professional and intellectual groups. The Soviets are quite openly engage in penetrating and wooing the Iranian people. . . . Therefore Gharani stated that is urgent that a change in government be brought about. . . . b) Bozorgmehr stated for Gharani that they have an intellectual group of 2000 Iranians, 1200 of whom were educated in the U.S. and the balance attended the American university of Tehran; c) The approach to the Shah that he should reign and not rule should be made by someone outside of Iran with the inference that Secretary Dulles should make such a demand to the Shah.[14]

Nowhere in the document is it made clear why the embassy officials met with the two Iranians under circumstances that clearly smacked of conspiracy. Even more telling is the fact that Gharani had by then been complaining to the American officials for a good two years and might well have informed his CIA contacts about his plans, yet no one bothered to inform the shah.

After meeting with the American officials, Gharani decided to solicit the help of the British as well. Through one of the members of the embassy, he sent a message to the British ambassador, Sir Roger Stevens, describing the outline of his plans and asking for help. A few days later, he was told the British were “in no way interested.”15 As it turned out, the shah apparently never heard of the contact with the British, as he blamed only the Americans for their failure to report the contacts between Gharani and their embassy.

Nine days after his meeting with the American officials, Gharani’s chief accomplice in the affair, Bozorgmehr, flew to Athens, where he met with Assistant Secretary Rountree. Hard as it may be to fathom, according to the American sources, the meeting had not been previously planned but was essentially imposed on Rountree.16 During the meeting, Bozorgmehr complained about the fact that there was now “considerably less freedom in Iran than under Mossadeq; that present government was completely without power. . . . Shah and government have softened considerably toward Soviet Union, with constant danger Iran will accept large-scale Soviet aid.”[17]

The plotters were only in the early stages of their plans when they were all arrested. On February 27, the Iranian government announced that thirty-nine Iranians, including General Gharani, had been arrested for attempting to overthrow the government and that an “unnamed foreign power was involved.”[18] On that same day, the shah asked to see the American ambassador, and “with a great show of indignation,” told him that “U.S. Embassy personnel had encouraged the Gharani plot by talking to the plotters.”[19] The Americans tried their best to calm the shah and convince him that they had no role in the affair.

Their efforts worked, albeit temporarily. The next day, the “government modified its statement, ostensibly to quell public speculation, by stating that only five Iranians tried to seek help from foreigners to bring about a new government pledged to safeguard foreign interests. The declaration stated that the foreigners ‘ignored the pleas’ of the plotters.”[20]

The shah used the embarrassment of the occasion to begin pushing for an end to any contacts between the American Embassy and Iranian opposition figures. In fact, “on several occasions, high officials close to the Court as well as in the government . . . have suggested that the American Embassy should avoid any contacts with dissident or even opposition elements of the Majlis.”[21] The United States initially rejected the idea. The British were also pressured on the same issue and their response was even more categorical. “We are not prepared,” the ambassador said, “to shut ourselves up in a kind of Ivory tower . . . it would not be in anybody’s interest that we should do so.”22 Seven years later, when the shah was in a far stronger position, he won the battle and forced the U.S. Embassy and the CIA to cease any contacts with the opposition. The results were tragic for the United States.

A couple of days after his initial “show of indignation” and after he had accepted the American Embassy’s explanation for the meeting with Gharani, the shah learned of the Rountree meetings, and he was, once again, indignant. This time, Dulles ordered the embassy to stand firm.

We [are] also concerned that Shah has raised question of Bozorgmehr contact with Rountree in Athens. . . . Shah should understand nature of contacts in Athens. Rountree had no previous knowledge that Bozorgmehr was in Athens when he received telephone call asking for few minutes meeting. This lasted twenty minutes in course of which Bozorgmehr mentioned no plans for organizations, and requested nothing. He merely discussed in general terms situation in Iran. Roundtree had no knowledge of Bozorgmehr’s present activities or associations and was under impression Bozorgmehr was still official of GOI.[23]

Dulles suggested that at a later date the shah should be reminded of the embassy’s right to “maintain broad contacts” in Iran.[24]

On June 11, 1958, Gharani was charged in a military tribunal with the crime of disobeying orders and spared the more serious capital charge of attempting to overthrow the government. He was given the relatively light sentence of two years. Given the fact that a few years earlier more than thirty officers were executed for simply being members of a communist organization, Gharani’s light sentence can be construed as a sign of the power and prestige of the U.S. government. Nevertheless, Gharani appealed, and on July 22, the appeals court found him guilty and increased his sentence to three years.25 After he was released from prison, his phone was bugged, his house was put under constant surveillance, and his every move was monitored by SAVAK. We know, for example, that in the first few days after his release, no less than three hundred bouquets were sent to his
house.[26] In the meantime, not long before he was released, the cabinet he wanted to install had come to power by order of the shah. Amini was Iran’s new prime minister, and Arsanjani was his increasingly powerful minister of agriculture.

As a result of the constant surveillance, SAVAK found that soon after his release Gharani had begun meeting with some of the leading clerics of the time—nearly all critical of the shah. It was not, of course, all easy sailing. For example, when he wanted to meet Ayatollah Milani, the latter needed to consult the Qur’an, and only when the good book gave a green light to the meeting did the ayatollah agree to meet Gharani.[27]

As the result of these activities, Gharani was arrested again in 1963 and this time served two years on the charge of undermining the national security of the country. After the end of his second prison term, Gharani withdrew from public life, only to reemerge on the eve of the revolution. During his years out of the political limelight, he apparently kept a journal in which he chronicled his increasingly religious views.[28] In the tumultuous months leading to the revolution, efforts were made to bring about a rapprochement between him and the shah. Aredeshir Zahedi, old friend of Gharani who had continued to maintain contact with him even after he had fallen from grace, tried to act as a gobetween. Gharani refused, saying it was too late to heal personal wounds.[29]

When the new Islamic regime took over, Gharani was named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. At the same time, he was a member of the secretive Revolutionary Committee that in conjunction with Ayatollah Khomeini led the movement and decided government policy in the first few months after victory.[30] By all accounts, he was very helpful to some of his old friends in the ancien régime. Maybe that was why his tenure as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was brief. There is another possible explanation for Gharani’s speedy dismissal. There is some evidence that Ayatollah Khomeini had reached at least a tacit agreement with the Americans that if they would end their support of the shah, then a National Front government would come to power in Iran—something for which the United States had been hoping since 1959. In this case, the Gharani appointment was part of the overall temporary ascent of figures acceptable to the United States to positions of power.

On March 27, 1979 (Tuesday 7 Farvardin 1358), the Islamic government announced that Gharani had been forced out.[31] About three weeks later, in April 1979 (3 Ordibehesht 1358), they announced that a shady group called Forgan had assassinated Gharani.

On the morning of November 7, 1978,in one of Tehran’s more fashionable neighborhoods, three men climbed the high walls that surrounded the house of General Alimohammad Khademi. There were few passers-by to notice. The city, already taut with the growing tensions of the impending revolution, had yet to commence fully its day’s hustle and bustle.

The general had been spending much of his last two months at home, ever since he had stepped down in early September from the presidency of Iran Air. He had not retired voluntarily. In his letter to the shah tendering his resignation, he had made it amply clear that he was being forced to resign.

Khademi’s reluctance to resign was not hard to understand. Over a decade and a half, his name had become synonymous with Iran Air, the country’s highly successful national airline company. It had enjoyed his leadership from its creation and owed him its success. The shah himself had named General Khademi the company’s managing director on its founding in 1962, even though Khademi was known to be a practicing member of the Bahai religion, and the strong religious movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini, then on the ascendant in Iran, had accused the shah’s regime of protecting and fostering the Bahais in the country.

The shah’s confidence in the general’s abilities had proven well placed. Over sixteen years the general worked hard to build Iran Air’s fleet to thirty-seven Boeings and Airbuses and the company itself into arguably the most profitable non-oil enterprise owned by the government.[1]

But then in September 1978, Khademi had been forced to resign. Against all advice, he refused to leave the country. “I have done nothing wrong,” he would say, shrugging off any suggestion of departure.2 Rumors notwithstanding, Khademi’s daily routine continued unbroken. All his adult life, he had lived and worked by the stern rhythm and disciplined habits of the military. By four in the morning, he would get up, have a light breakfast—without coffee, which his religion forbade and in which he never indulged— read the papers, both local and international, and then set out to work on reading and writing reports. He was a fastidious eater, his lunch as abstemious as his breakfast (as a rule, bread and yogurt). He was vigorously athletic, with a love of the outdoors. All his life, he had been an avid hiker and a serious swimmer. Iran’s northern provinces, with their lush forests and beautiful beaches on the Caspian Sea, were his favorite vacation spot.[3] Even at home, he loved to work outdoors on his balcony, with its open vistas and a fresh breeze.

Most mornings would have found him there. This morning, however, there was to be no work. The general had planned instead to go out with his wife of thirty-four years, Bahiyeh Khademi. Mrs. Khademi came out into the courtyard of the house at about ten in the morning. As she walked toward the family car, she saw the ashen faces of the general’s two orderlies (relics of his glory days). She asked them what was wrong. Three men, they told her, had just climbed in over the wall and were looking for the general.

Ominous hints of imminent danger had begun being dropped even before that morning. Friends and colleagues, even some family members, had suggested that the general should leave Iran. Implicit in every well-meant suggestion was the obvious assumption that the general’s safety was threatened. Then there were the rumors. Tehran was, in those days, awash in gossip, and everyone seemed privy to some “top secret” news. Many had seen “a list” (many had prepared lists themselves) of those soon to be arrested, and the general all too often was reminded that he was on it. On one occasion, Aliasgar Amirani, a journalist as notorious for his insolence and mendacity as he was renowned for his contacts with the court, called the house and asked the general whether rumors of his suicide were accurate. “Rumors of my death,” the general reminded the journalist, quoting the genuine witticism the journalist had attempted to borrow, “are highly exaggerated.”

No sooner had Mrs. Khademi heard from the orderlies about the intrusion than one of the intruders appeared—a man with a red mustache, who approached her and asked for the general. Mrs. Khademi demanded to see his badge, and he produced what turned out to be a fake identification card. (She would remember his face and later, in the course of her long ordeal, would encounter him.) She ran for the house; just as she reached it, she heard three shots fired inside, and opening the door to the hall, she found her husband lying in a pool of blood.
She ran out and into the street, screaming and calling for help. With the help of a neighbor’s sons, the wounded general, his clothing soaked with blood, was rushed to the hospital. The doctors could not save him. By noon, he was pronounced dead. According to at least three witnesses at the hospital, the attending physician, upon emerging from the operating room, declared that the general had been murdered, that the trajectory of the three bullets left no doubt that someone other than the general had fired them.

General Khademi’s death was big news. The Western media reported it as a murder. One London paper, for example, wrote “the former director of Iran Air, the country’s national airline, was critically wounded in an assassination attempt. . . . Islamic youth claimed responsibility.”4 The story of the general’s death inside Iran was far different. For reasons that are still unclear, the “official” version was that he had committed “suicide.” Nothing, certainly not the facts of the case, was able to shake this implausible tale of self-destruction. It mattered little that Khademi was a devout Bahai, a religion strictly set “against self-slaughter.”

Despite the stubborn hold of the “official” version, it was clear enough that Khademi had not silenced himself. It was not clear then, however, nor is it today, why it was deemed necessary to silence him, or who stood to benefit from putting such a violent end to a peaceful man’s long years of service to his country.
Alimohammad Khademi was born on November 27, 1913 (Azar 6, 1292) in the city of Jahrom, in the province of Pars. His father was a successful merchant who closed his business and moved the family to Isfahan when Alimohammad was a small child. Their departure from Jahrom was prompted by pressures on the family after their conversion to the new Bahai religion.

In school, young Alimohammad was a serious student with outstanding grades in mathematics. He usually ranked among the top three students in his class.5 During his last two years of high school, he lived away from the family in a rented room. Across from him lived another student, Ahmad Moggarrebi.[6] They would join the military together; Khademi made a career in the air force, and Moggarrebi went on to become the KGB’s highest-ranking spy in Iran. As soon as Khademi finished high school in 1932, he entered the Military Academy in Tehran. There, too, he excelled. He finished first in his class and graduated with honors in 1935.

Khademi’s dream was to fly, and he immediately enrolled in the Air Force Flying School. After graduation, he finished his training in England; he was the first Iranian to receive a commercial pilot’s license.

He began his career in the Iranian air force, rising rapidly through the ranks. As further training, in 1957, he attended and graduated from the U.S. Air Force War College in Alabama. Eventually, he was named head of the Iranian air force’s “Second Division,” in charge of security—a measure of the shah’s trust in him.

The air force often seconded Khademi to the nation’s nascent private aviation industry. Private aviation began in Iran in 1927, when Junkers, a leading German aviation company, fielded a small number of planes to run a few domestic flights. The Junkers operation ended in 1932, and Iran was left without an effective airline service for a dozen years. In 1944, a small airline company called Iranian Airways was established by a group of investors led by Golamhoseyn Ebtehaj. Its first flight was between Tehran and Meshad. Soon an agreement was reached with TWA, which provided technical support and also eventually helped start an international route. Khademi was the first Persian pilot flying the domestic and international routes of Iranian Airways.
In 1952, Ahmad Shafig set up another small airline company, named Persian Air Services. The two airline companies merged in 1961 to make United Iranian Airlines. In 1962 the government decided to nationalize commercial aviation in Iran, bought out United Iranian Airlines, and created Iran Air.[7]

The shah’s appointment of Khademi as head of Iran Air meant the end of his military career. But Khademi was more than anything a pilot, and when this opportunity came to retire his general’s uniform and instead opt for suits and ties, he did not hesitate.

As the demand for air travel increased in Iran, there developed what the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in a 1971 report called a veritable “Iranian aviation mafia” that controlled “all aviation activities in Iran.” Headed by General Khatam, the shah’s brother-in-law, the alleged “Aviation mafia” also included Khademi, who by then was not only the managing director of Iran Air but reportedly also a “silent partner in Air Taxi; and silent partner in Iranian Aircraft Industries.”8 Although his name appeared on the list, he enjoyed a reputation for financial probity among Iran Air’s employees.9 Khademi was also asked by the shah to “create a body of civil aviation law,” which would assist in the rapid development of Iranian civil aviation. General Khademi then formed the High Aviation Council, a legal body consisting of ten members selected from various ministries and from Iran Air, to codify civil aviation regulations and establish legal precedents for civil air operation in Iran. General Khademi was elected as chairman of the council.10 Khademi’s real contribution to modern Iran began in 1962 when he began to manage Iran Air. When Khademi took over Iran Air, the company had 759 employees and thirteen small planes. By 1977, Iran Air was a resounding success. The company employed 2,264 people in technical capacities, while another 3,064 provided a variety of other services. It had a large fleet of Boeings and Airbuses and had carried close to three million people to their destinations. Khademi predicted that by 1992 Iran Air would have served more than sixteen million travelers. The initial capital of the company was 170 million rials ($2.5 million). By the end of Khademi’s tenure, the company’s net worth was close to one and a half billion rials.

Khademi’s style of management was firm but fair, and forward-looking. From his military training he had brought a sense of discipline, but he had left behind the stern, even cruel attitude of high-ranking officers toward those of lower rank. He had a brilliant mind for streamlining decision making. He had a firm belief in the virtues of modern management. Not only did he himself attend and complete a management course at the American University in Washington, D.C., but when a new school of management was established in Iran with the help of Harvard Business School, Khademi joined the new school’s board of governors.

Another secret of Khademi’s success at Iran Air was his insistence on hiring only qualified candidates. He was particularly careful when it came to pilots. Some of the most experienced pilots of Iran Air speak of his unfailing attention to quality in those who were going to fly the planes; examinations for selection and promotion of pilots were rigorous and fair. His hiring practices were unique in that qualification, not connection, was the rule. Only two hirings raised some eyebrows: when Princess Ashraf insisted on hiring a man for the job of pilot, and after much resistance Khademi caved in, and when he named his own brother-in-law the head of Iran Air’s medical office.[11]

In a country where the top echelons of the government saw governmental offices and services as something akin to their own feudal fiefdom, Khademi sent out a now famous memo, stern in tone and categorical in content, forbidding planes to delay departures to wait for anyone, regardless of rank. When one Iran Air pilot took off without waiting for a general, and was threatened with losing his job, Khademi came to the pilot’s aid. He worked hard to train a large cadre of Iranian pilots and spared no effort in freeing Iran Air from the need for foreign pilots. As a result of his vigilance, Iran Air not only became a highly profitable company but had one of the best safety records of any airline in the world.

In dealing with his staff, or for that matter with the media, he was frank but never rude, honest but always practical. When the shah, on a trip to Europe, told a jubilant British audience that Iran was going to order a pair of Concordes, Khademi felt compelled to correct the misinformation, despite its source. He promptly announced in Tehran that Iran Air did not need Concordes and would not purchase them. Within twenty-four hours, he was forced to retract his statement, and Iran ordered the two unneeded Concordes, thus corroborating the shah’s statement. (They never arrived. Before the time of their delivery, the revolution came, and the new director of Iran Air cancelled the order.)

Throughout the years, Khademi managed to remain an active Bahai. For a while, he was elected to the leadership council of his district. He was, according to Bahai sources, a kind of liaison with the Iranian government. Before the fervor of the revolution occasionally brought out the worst in the Iranian people in attacking Bahais, Khademi’s faith did not affect people’s appreciation of his accomplishments.

These accomplishments were not limited to Iran or to aviation. In 1970, he succeeded in making Iran the first Asian nation to host a meeting of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). At that meeting he was elected IATA’s president for the year 1970–71.12 In the 1970s, when Tehran was a virtual Eldorado of wealth and spending, Khademi expanded his activities into the private sector. And with the help of his son, Monib, recently graduated from MIT, he helped establish the first college of computer science in Tehran.

In the end, Khademi’s astonishing accomplishments could not save his life. Khademi was asked to resign just as the unrest that would eventually topple the regime began to gain momentum. His removal would prove to be a weak government’s first futile gesture of appeasement to the revolutionary movement. There would be many other eminent men and women offered up for sacrifice, but Khademi’s case was the first, and certainly the most bizarre and enigmatic.

SAVAK not only insisted that General Khademi’s death was a suicide (even the prosecutors for the office of the military governor doubted the story), but set out to “prove” it. Eventually, at their insistence, and in spite of the fact that three of their members stood accused of General Khademi’s murder, the military prosecutor’s office issued a warrant for Mrs. Khademi’s arrest. The SAVAK agent in charge of the case boasted that if he had Mrs. Khademi in custody for just two days, he would have her “confess to the whereabouts of the general’s two handguns” and thus confirm the suicide story. SAVAK also ordered the arrest of the general’s brother-in-law, Dr. Moayyed, on the premise that he could help confirm the “official” suicide story.

After about a month in custody, during which Mrs. Khademi had refused to “confess” to the suicide story, she was released.13 Her brother, also, had refused to cooperate. Though it was becoming increasingly clear that the general’s death resulted from foul play, no official announcement or news report correcting the suicide story was forthcoming.

In February 1979 (21 Bahman 1357), a day before the collapse of the shah’s regime, the investigative arm of Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff met with Mrs. Khademi. They asked her to identify, from a group of suspects, her husband’s assailant. According to the official transcript of the meeting, she pointed to a man described as a sergeant seconded from the army to SAVAK and its infamous Joint Committee to Fight Terrorism—created in the aftermath of terrorist attacks against the government in the late 1960s. The committee combined army and police intelligence with SAVAK, hoping to end the petty turf wars that had plagued them till then.[14] SAVAK, however, when confronted by the Joint Chiefs, denied responsibility. The military investigators left the case open. In 1988, a decade after the revolution and Khademi’s death, a new court added his case to a list of thousands of unsolved cases from the revolution.

General Mohammadkhatam was a charismatic officer, a handsome and versatile athlete, a bon vivant, and an ambitious and acclaimed commander. In the last years of his life, he also developed a notorious reputation for financial corruption.

By the mid-1970s, his political persona was so ubiquitous that even in the eerily accurate Paul Erdman novel, The Crash of ‘79, Khatam was an important character and a key advisor to the shah. Khatam was also Iran’s most famous and most decorated pilot. For many years, he was the chief of staff for Iran’s air force. Under his watch, and with the support of the shah, Iran went from having a ragtag collection of a few obsolete planes in the 1940s to having one of the world’s most well-equipped and well-trained air forces in the 1970s. By then Iran had bought some of the most sophisticated American fighters and bombers.

A few generals have gone so far as to claim that in the mid-1970s, Iran had the sixth most powerful air force in the world. While this claim might be hyperbolic, there was no doubt that in the days before the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian air force was the most powerful in the Persian Gulf. This air mastery, according to some analysts, had immediate benefits for Iran. According to Assadollah Alam, for example, at that time, when tensions between Iran and Iraq were at their height, Iraq never dared attack Iran, or “at least set the [oil-rich] city of Abadan ablaze” because it was afraid of Iran’s supremacy in the air. Alam went on to say that this supremacy was in no small measure the result of Khatam’s style of command, which he called “determined, unforgiving, kind to subordinates, and disciplined.”[1]

At the same time, Alam tempered his praise of Khatam by adding that, “of course people talked about his wealth and their claims might well be true.”[2] In fact by the midseventies, Khatam had allegedly amassed a fortune that the shah estimated at about one hundred million dollars. He ordered a secret commission to look into the extent of Khatam’s wealth.[3] By then, stories about Khatam’s corruption had become part of the Iranian rumor mill. The American Embassy in Tehran called him the head of “the Iranian aviation mafia” and suggested that he controlled “all aviation activities in Iran.”[4] Other sources have claimed that Khatam received kickbacks on the purchases of planes, granted bloated contracts to his cronies and partners, and even usurped large plots of land as his private property and sold them to the air force.[5]

By the mid-1970s, talk of Khatam’s corruption had even become part of congressional hearings in the United States. Mainstream American papers such as the New York Times wrote about these allegations.[6] In June 7, 1975, for example, the paper reported on the close friendship between General Khatam and “the swashbuckling Central Intelligent Agency operative” named Kermit Roosevelt[7] and claimed that as the result of this “friendship” Northrop won a major contract from the Iranian Air Force. In a later article, the New York Times reported that Khatam and his partner—General Toufanian—were paid $28 million to ensure that Grumman received a $2.2 billion contract for eighty Tomcats.[8] Khatam angrily denied these accusations, but his premature death made it impossible for him to challenge them.

Even death did not end the controversies that swirled around him. On September 12, 1975 (10 Shahrivar 1354), he died in a kiting accident. Tehran was immediately filled with rumors of foul play. Few believed it was an accident, pointing to the fact that he was an avid flier and athlete. Some blamed the shah for the “accident,” arguing that he eliminated Khatam after he learned that in a “contingency plan” developed by the American government, Khatam was picked to succeed the shah. The shah, the theory goes, somehow learned of the plan and had a clear motive for eliminating a possible rival.

Khatam’s supporters, on the other hand, claim that the “accident” as well as the allegations of corruption were intended to pave the way for the revolution by depriving the shah of his most reliable general. Because on more than one occasion the shah insisted that Khatam had died “because in recent months, he had not been of a sound mind” and “might have planned to kill himself and thus intentionally did not open his hang glider,”[9] and because the shah confided to Alam certain facts about Khatam that “were so sensitive” that Alam decided he “must take them to [his] grave,”[10] an air of mystery surrounded the charismatic officer’s death.

His eventful life began in the city of Rasht where he was born in 1920 (1299). His father was a government functionary, and his mother was a fiercely independent, learned woman who for years managed a farm after her husband’s death. Khatam’s maternal and paternal grandparents were from the ranks of the clergy. His uncle was the famed Imam Jome’, a colorful clergyman with modern sensibilities and habits, and for many years a close confidant of the shah. Mohammad was the oldest of three siblings. Much to his consternation, his father married a second wife, a servant girl, and had another two children with her.[11]

After finishing his first ten years of school in Rasht, the young Mohammad set out for Tehran, where he lived with Imam Jome’. He attended the Alborz high school and was a good student, but his passion was for a life in the military. He enrolled in the Officers Academy, and when the government announced a competition to choose ten young officers to be sent abroad for training as pilots for the air force, Khatam entered the competition and won a place, becoming one of Iran’s first military pilots. Even when he was the chief of staff for the air force he continued to fly, and he maintained his reputation as a fearless pilot.

Coming as he did from a traditional family, and believing as such families do that the marriage of cousins is made in heaven, Mohammad was a young lieutenant when he married his cousin, a girl named Parvin-Dokht Khadivi. With her he had a daughter. Their married life was cut short in 1954 by a dreadful accident in which a fireworks rocket exploded near her, killing her. For a while, Khatam was distraught, spending most of his time with his colleagues. Aside from sports, his favorite pastime was bridge. After about five years, Khatam married again, this time to Princess Fateme, one of the shah’s sisters. Fateme was herself recently divorced from her first husband, an American named Vincent Hillyer. Despite Khatam’s own merits, his meteoric rise in the ranks of the air force was inevitably seen as a consequence of his membership in the royal family.

In fact, Khatam’s first close contact with the shah came long before his marriage to Princess Fateme. He had been the shah’s special pilot since the late 1940s. When in August 1953 the shah decided to flee Iran and took a small plane to Iraq, Khatam flew him there. After a short time in Iraq, the royal family and their entourage took a commercial flight to Rome. That experience afforded Khatam a privileged position with the shah. He was also, like the shah, an avid athlete—soccer, volleyball, basketball, water and snow skiing, tennis, hang gliding, and flying were his strengths. When Khatam returned from Rome, he was a major; within four years, he was a general. The shah, bent on infusing new blood into the air force, appointed Khatam as the commander of the air force.

Khatam used the shah’s keen interest in all things aeronautical and military to expand and refashion the undisciplined, underpaid, and under-equipped air force into a disciplined meritocracy and the envy of the other branches of the military. Officers of the air force were better paid, better trained, and better equipped than those of the other branches. One of Khatam’s many innovations was the creation of a unit of trained technicians called Homafars. They were chosen from the ranks of high school graduates; after they agreed to a fifteen-year contract with the air force, they were sent to the United States for training.[12] Ironically, this group’s uprising in early February 1979 was one of the first signs that the shah’s army was crumbling.

In the course of the major build-up in the 1960s and 1970s, Khatam remained unwavering in his dedication to American planes and missiles. When in 1965 the shah began contemplating the purchase of Soviet MIG airplanes, much to the anxiety of the American government, it was, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, General Khatam who acted as “a realist.” As an “admirer of US Air Force equipment,” he helped “tone the Shah down for moment.” [13] Indeed, in the course of those years, as the United States “no longer [had] the ability to dictate Shah’s policies” and as the American monopoly on the shah’s military plans was “cracking,” the Americans hoped to “use solid citizens like General Khatam to curb some of Shah’s extreme desires.” Moreover, in those days, Khatam told the Americans of his annoyance that other supreme commanders and sycophants fail “to tell the truth to the Shah.”[14] He was very popular with his officers, was seen as a capable manager and as the most powerful general in the Iranian military, and he enjoyed the support of the American Embassy.

But as his military fortunes increased, his private life became more and more mired in bitter controversy and conflict. Beneath the veneer of courtly solemnities, and hidden behind the opulence of their life, his relationship with his wife and children was full of tension. In a letter to the princess, Khatam reminisces about their early days of courting, when love was in the air. He writes of the times when they each found everything about the other fascinating. “Even my dog, and your servant,” he writes in an embittered tone, were in those days the subject of curiosity. But according to the letter, the relationship soon soured into a tormented, abusive, loveless, paranoid, and hateful affair.[15] Even physical beatings had become part of their relationship.16 The picture Khatam offers of their life together is shocking for the violence and hatred the husband and wife had toward one another. Before long, they each lived different lives, staying married in name and appearance only. But the princess, according to Khatam, used her perks of royal power to dominate every aspect of their family life—from when he could visit his daughter from his first marriage to what they should call their children.[17]

What Khatam did not mention in the letter is that the last years of his life were not altogether bereft of joy and love. Indeed, he was involved in a tempestuous relationship with a young girl name Tala. In a defiant act, Khatam was completely open about his dalliance. In fact, for a while Tala lived with Khatam’s mother and appeared in many gatherings with him. Tala had been a paramour of the shah, but by late 1973, as rumors of a possible second royal marriage spread through the country, and as Queen Farah grew increasingly disgruntled, Tala became a political and family liability.18 The shah decided to end the affair, but before long she became Khatam’s beloved. In fact so enamored of her was Khatam, and so embittered was he over his loveless marriage, that much to the consternation of his “legal” family, he left Tala a portion of his assets in his will.19 In turn, Tala defiantly showed up at the funeral and openly mourned her lost beloved.

By all accounts, Khatam’s joy and happiness came to an abrupt end in early September 1975. His friends and fellow officers noticed a sudden change of mood. He was often depressed, anxious, and listless. He began to smoke, something he was averse to all his life. He was taking high dose of sedatives daily.[20] Eventually he confided to his closest friends that the shah had asked him to resign. He was, he said, offered an ambassadorship to the capital of his choice. It was an offer he could not refuse, but did not want to accept. The fact that he had endeared himself to the crown prince by becoming his flying instructor, and regularly played volleyball with the queen, could not save him. To what extent American congressional hearing about kickbacks to Iran, which involved his name, or his bitterly estranged life from the shah’s sister played in his being relieved of his command is not altogether clear. Nor is it known whether the story of the “American contingency plan” had any impact on the decision.

On September 11, Khatam had dinner and played bridge with some of his closest friends. He drank more than usual. He seemed despondent. He told his friends he planned to fly to an air force base in the morning to try the new hang glider he had recently bought. Although he was an avid flier, the designer had warned Khatam not to use the new kite before some lingering glitches could be ironed out.[21]

The next day, he went as planned on his hang-gliding junket. He flew to an air force base, and on a nearby lake he was lifted into the air with the help of a speedboat. But unbeknownst to Khatam there was powerful clear air turbulence where he was flying. He lost control of his hang glider and ran into the rocks near the lake. He died instantly.

The shah was immediately informed of the accident. Soon afterwards he was also informed of rumors of foul play. He ordered a full-scale investigation to be launched by the air force. It was partially conducted by two Western experts, one of them Bob Moise, who had designed the hang glider. They concluded that there had been no foul play. Whether the newly designed kite had malfunctioned, whether Khatam’s depression had led him to make an error in the face of the turbulence, or whether, as the shah often intimated, the general had committed suicide are questions that might never be answered.

So powerful was Khatam’s persona, so charismatic his authority, that a few of his peers have suggested that his death made possible the victory of the Islamic Revolution. They point to June 1963, when religious forces rose against the shah—called by some scholars the “dress rehearsal for the 1979 revolution”—and Khatam was powerful, stern, even brutal in suppressing the uprising, particularly in the south. He would have done the same in 1979, they say, had he been alive. Others have argued that the American contingency plan had stipulated that on such an occasion “General Khatam . . . would assume power,” but that after the general’s death in 1975 the plans had not been revised or updated—leaving the United States with no options on the eve of the Islamic Revolution.[22] This question, too, like much else about his life and death, remains mired in mystery.

Early in 1975, the shah ordered SAVAK to look into the possibility of an Iraqi mole in the Iranian army. He angrily told General Nasiri, the head of SAVAK at the time, that somehow the Iraqis know in advance every planned move of the Iranian army.[1] In those days Iran and Iraq were on the verge of war. Much of the tension was over the question of sovereignty over Shat-al-Arab, the river that is the border between the two countries. Both sides had amassed large armies on the border. There had already been numerous skirmishes. The possibility clearly existed that one of these artillery exchanges would erupt into a major confrontation.
At about the same time, the Eighth Directorate of SAVAK, in charge of counter-Soviet espionage, had heard from its own top mole in the Soviet Embassy—a cultural attaché named Aliof—that KGB agents regularly met someone connected to the army on Naft Avenue in Tehran. As it turned out, the two hints were related. When SAVAK finally solved the mystery, it scored the biggest success in its long struggle with Soviet espionage.

SAVAK’s master spy catcher now lives in his small apartment in London. His name is General Manuchehr Hashemi, and having spent the last twenty-five years eating the “bitter bread of banishment,” there now was a palpable sense of remorse and regret, anguish and anger in his demeanor and words. Cane in hand, bespectacled, occasionally smoking a cigarette cut into halves—“I am trying to quit,” he said sardonically—the first point he made was that there were many in SAVAK like him who had nothing to do with torture and prison. “We were,” he said with anger and conviction in his voice, “patriots, trying to keep the country safe from the Soviets.”
In his book on SAVAK, titled, with a hint of self-assurance, Davari [Judgment], he lays out in detail the story of his involvement with the dread organization, and how he fought the KGB throughout his tenure.[2] “Before I came on board as the head of the Directorate, we had never, not even once, caught a Soviet spy,” he said.[3] His face lit up when he talked about arresting the KGB’s top agent in Iran, and he described in considerable detail his long battle with Russian spies, and his search for clues about how the Iraqis received their information.

With the hint they had received from their embassy mole, SAVAK examined closely all the addresses of houses on Naft Avenue and its neighboring streets and found three army officers living in the area. All three were put on twenty-four-hour surveillance and their phones were tapped. SAVAK rented several apartments in the neighborhood, using them as bases of operation and as cover for agents near the scene of operation. Soon enough, it became clear that the only possible culprit was a man with a dog. Iranian agents had seen the man with the dog pass by the Soviet agent and, without even slowing the pace of his walk, rapidly exchange something with him. It did not take long to figure out that the man with the dog was General Moggarrebi. The shah was immediately informed. As the army had its own intelligence and counterespionage division, SAVAK wanted to know if they should be brought into the investigation. The shah’s response was categorical. He did not want the army involved, or even informed, and he emphasized that he wanted “Moggarrebi caught in the act, with no room for denial or guesswork.”[4]

By then, the KGB had a new man in Iran. His name was Vladimir Kuzichkin, and his candid, albeit long-winded, memoir, Inside the KGB, provides a rare glimpse into the workings of the Soviet Embassy and its intelligence officers in Tehran.[5] He describes an embassy gripped by a culture of gossip, backbiting, corruption, dangerous leaks of sensitive information, and structural inefficiency. There was, he wrote, “an air of permanent holiday”[6] among the staff—which included the grandson of Gorki, the famous Russian writer. In the consular office, where Kuzichkin was supposed to work as a “diplomat,” four of the five officers were KGB agents.[7] There were more than eight thousand Soviet experts working in different industries in Iran at the time, and the work of “supervising” their lives and work required a small army of spies and agents.

There were two rooms on the sixth floor of the embassy that were off limits to all but a handful of KGB agents. They were dedicated to electronic surveillance and eavesdropping. In one room they “intercepted and recorded the radio conversations of SAVAK’s external surveillance teams, and . . . Iran’s military counter-intelligence . . . ’Mars’ was located in a separate room . . . intercepting encoded Iranian communications involving such targets as various ministries, the SAVAK headquarters and the American embassy.”[8] SAVAK and the Americans, of course, returned the favor by operating numerous listening stations in Tehran and near the Soviet border—considered at the time some of the most important electronic surveillance assets of the United States. SAVAK had also purchased a four-story apartment building overlooking the entrance to the embassy, and while the first floor was ostensibly a doctor’s office, the top floors were used by officers of the Eighth Directorate. According to General Hashemi, no sooner had they begun investigating the KGB-army connection case than they realized that every move their surveillance teams made was known to the Soviets. “As soon as we contacted one of our cars used to tail them, they aborted their mission, and returned to their base in the embassy.”[9] According to Kuzichkin, the Soviets not only knew about the apartment, but also figured out that a soft drink kiosk was used to monitor traffic in and out of the embassy.[10]

As soon as SAVAK focused its investigation on Moggarrebi and realized that its secure communication channels had been compromised, it gave up its traditional modes of surveillance. They stationed an agent in the house they had rented across from where Moggarrebi lived, and the mandate of the SAVAK agent chosen to live there was to befriend the general’s servant and get access to the house though him. At the same time, several other houses were also rented in the neighborhood; a surveillance team was stationed in each. As soon as one of the automobiles from the Soviet Embassy arrived in the area, the teams began to follow it discreetly, refraining from any kind of radio contact.

They were baffled by what they discovered. The Soviet agents would arrive in the vicinity of Moggarrebi’s house, park the car, wait a few moments, then leave. On another occasion, the Soviet agent got out of the car, carrying something like a briefcase, walked toward an empty lot nearby, waited for three to four minutes, returned to his car, and departed the scene.

Around May 1977 Moggarrebi left on a trip for the United States. It was a short holiday, to attend to his children and take care of the house he and his wife had purchased in Arizona. As far as SAVAK could detect, Moggarrebi made no contact with any Soviet agents while outside Iran. SAVAK used his absence to search his house thoroughly. Using the agent they had posted near the house, they lured away the servant. Once inside, they found what seemed to be tools of the spy trade, but at the same time the machine was like nothing they had seen before.

A report was immediately sent to the shah indicating that incriminating evidence had been found and recommending that the general should be arrested on his return. The shah rejected the idea, once again insisting that Moggarrebi should be arrested in the act of espionage.[11] One can surmise that the shah, aware of the sensitive nature of the case and appreciative of Iran’s improving relations with the Soviets, did not want anything but an airtight case. The problem was that, other than going to work, Moggarrebi never left his house, save his nightly walks with his dog.

One night in September 1977, two KGB agents arrived on the street. One was Boris Kabanov, who worked under the guise of a consular official. The second was his driver, Titkin. They had received a signal from “the man,” code name for Moggarrebi, asking for a rendezvous in the normal place. They parked their car and turned on the switch for “Close Information Link System,” which allowed the receiver to collect, at fast speed, information being transmitted by Moggarrebi. Before they finished, Moggarrebi emerged from the house with his dog. Kabanov got out of the car, moved toward Moggarrebi, gave him an envelope, and quickly got back in the car. Seconds later, his car was surrounded by agents of SAVAK, demanding he leave his car. He brandished his diplomatic passport and refused. They broke the window, forced him and his driver out of the car, and took them to headquarters. Another team attempted to arrest Moggarrebi, who not only struggled against the arresting agents but called out for his son and his servant to come to his rescue. It was all for naught. He was arrested, and they found on him an envelope containing thirty thousand tooman (about $4,000).[12]

The KGB never paid much for the intelligence they received. A few hundred dollars was the common rate. Anything over ten thousand dollars required the approval of the chairman of the KGB.[13] With his pay in his pocket, General Moggarrebi, the most effective KGB spy in postwar Iran, was arrested. His KGB handler and his driver were released in the morning into the custody of the Soviet Embassy and given forty-eight hours to leave Iran.
At the time of his arrest Moggarrebi was in charge of strategic planning for the entire Iranian military. Every “war plan,” every new defensive formation, every projected new base and airfield went across his desk. The last piece of intelligence he conveyed to his Soviet handlers was about Iran’s plans to build “a new secret airstrip in the desert.”14 It could easily be the same airstrip that was, five years later, used by American Special Forces in their ill-fated attempt to rescue the American hostages held in the embassy in Tehran.

Moggarrebi had been a Soviet spy for over thirty years. He was recruited in the years after World War II. He was a student in the Officers Academy at the time. As KGB manuals made clear, people agreed to spy for the Soviet Union for one of three reasons. Some were driven by ideology; others had a “moral-psychological” ax to grind; and, finally, some did it for greed and financial gain and nothing else. Moggarrebi seems to have begun for ideological reasons and continued for financial ones. Indeed, there was a hiatus of some years between the time he began passing information to the Soviets as an act of comradely cooperation with the “bastion of revolution,” and the second period, when money seems to have been the primary motive.

In the postwar years, when Moggarrebi began his work of infamy, there was a romantic aura about Marxism. The Soviet Union had just emerged from the war victorious. It was widely believed in Iran—as in much of Europe and Asia—that it had been the Soviets who stopped fascism and Nazism. As the cases of Kim Philby in England and Rosenbergs in the United States clearly showed, in those days, before the stench of the gulag had reached the world, there were idealist intellectuals who began to spy for the Soviet Union out of some desire to help the “revolution.” In later years, when the true extent of the Soviet domination of the Tudeh Party was known, when it was learned that the Soviets expected and received from their “Iranian comrades” all manner of intelligence, when Tudeh Party members confessed under duress and after much pressure and torture by Islamic investigators to supplying information to the Soviets—since they were the leaders of the “international” movement for communism—one could see in the flesh the naïve idealism that could have been the original impetus of Moggarrebi’s infamy. He began as an idealist spy and ended up as nothing but a paid Soviet agent.

Moggarrebi had been recruited by an Iranian officer who had also recruited some of the heroes of the Iranian communist movement. His name was Colonel Tarass. Beginning in the mid-1930s, he began to teach at the Officers Academy. Some of the officers who were later discovered to be members of a clandestine communist organization within the army had been his recruits and had begun their initiation into Marxism under his tutelage. Eventually Tarass started a private company that ostensibly dealt with digging deep wells. Tehran had no running water at the time, and affluent houses relied on their own wells for water. But suddenly he disappeared. Most thought he had escaped to the Soviet Union. Others believe that he was secretly executed by SAVAK. General Hashemi indicates that when he raised the issue of Tarass with Nasiri he shrugged it off, indicating that the colonel’s fate was a taboo subject.15 In recently published memoirs of Iranian communists living in the “socialist camp,” there is no mention of him. Moggarrebi was only one page in the mysterious life of the stealthy communist colonel.

Because of the unusual nature of his case, Moggarrebi was not taken to a prison upon his arrest, but instead to a SAVAK safe house. In the first few hours of interrogation, he denied charges of espionage and claimed that he had been in contact with these agents thinking they were Americans.16 Eventually he confessed to his crime and described his long relationship with the Soviets. The mystery of his longevity turned out to be simple. He had stipulated that he would never meet any agents in the street, and that he only worked from his house. For this reason, the KGB had developed an elaborate system in which Moggarrebi sent a signal to his handlers asking for a rendezvous. They would appear on his street at the designated hour. He in his house and the handler in his car would turn on their transmitter and receiver, and in moments the transfer of intelligence was complete. The machines were so sophisticated that SAVAK’s technical department could not figure out how they worked. The contraptions were sent to London, but MI6 was also incapable of deciphering the mode of operation. Eventually, the CIA, or some other intelligence agency in the United States, unraveled the mystery.[17] Moggarrebi himself was tried and executed by a firing squad.

The arrest of Moggarrebi was a major blow for the Soviets. They began a desperate search for the “possible causes of the Moggarrebi debacle.”[18] If Kuzichkin is to be believed, in spite of the common perception of the KGB as an omnipotent powerhouse of intelligence in Iran—a perception shared by the shah—their network of spies consisted of an Afghan diplomat, Homayun Akram, code-named Ram, and a Persian, nicknamed Teymur, who essentially milked the Soviets and passed them insignificant bits of information. Kuzichkin suspended contacts with Teymur. But in Tehran he found that the only real source of intelligence had been someone code-named “the man,” who had access to a great deal of information not only about the army, but about “The Casket,” the code for the shah’s court, and “Barracks” or SAVAK.[19]

The first place the Soviets fished for information about their fallen star was the American Embassy. News of Moggarrebi’s arrest had not yet been made public. On December 15, the Persian press reported his arrest on charges of spying on behalf of foreign power.

A day earlier, “on December 14, Guenady Kazankin, the First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, asked John D. Stempel, the First Secretary of the American Embassy, whether he had heard the rumor ‘that there was a military plot to overthrow the regime involving 25–26 military officers who had been arrested.’ I said I had heard nothing . . . and he continued fishing as to whether we knew about any officers arrested for espionage.”20 Even after the fall of the shah, the KGB continued to try to learn how it had lost Moggarrebi. In a case more fantastic than any spy novel, involving KGB agents, members of the Iranian opposition, and shady characters from the underworld of espionage, they sought to solve the riddle to Moggarrebi’s fall.

When the headquarters of SAVAK were attacked and ransacked by an angry mob, those working in the Eighth Directorate pleaded with those in charge of the new Islamic government to secure the safe where the country’s most sensitive national security secrets were held. The government complied. The “safe” was secured, and only days after the fall of the shah the government asked everyone in the Eighth Directorate of SAVAK to continue their work uninterrupted. The Soviets were surprised to see the hitherto dormant SAVAK frequencies active again. Somehow, though, whether in the attack on prisons and secret police headquarters that had become the customary ritual of all modern revolutions since the fall of the Bastille, or in some other breach of security, the file containing information about the Moggarrebi case fell into the hands of the Mujaheddin Khalg organization (known in American media these days as the MEK).[21] In those days, the Mujaheddin were still allies of the regime. At the same time, they had begun clandestine meetings with Soviet Embassy officials in Tehran.[22]

In the course of a conversation, the Mujaheddin representative told the Soviet authorities they had the Moggarrebi file in their possession. KGB headquarters immediately ordered their operatives in Tehran to get the file. Officials at the embassy, so rattled by the order, threw all customary caution to the wind and contacted the Mujaheddin representative using an embassy phone.[23] This could have been the first misstep that got authorities in the new regime interested in the case. As an enticement, the Mujaheddin were promised a list of all known CIA agents in Iran. KGB operatives met with Sa’adati, one of the leaders of the Mujaheddin, three times to rehearse the document exchange. The KGB went so far as to provide Sa’adati with special dark glasses that allowed him to see whether he was under surveillance.

But as the exchange was taking place, the Soviet officials and Sa’adati were arrested. The “diplomats” were declared persona non grata, and Sa’adati was put on trial. He was finally executed on the charge of espionage. It is not clear whether the Soviets ever learned what was in that file. In London, General Hashemi, Iran’s answer to le Carré’s Karla, probably knew more than any file could contain.

He came to embody the face of oppression during the reign of the shah, and ironically, General Ne’matollah Nasiri also became the face of the new Islamic terror. Battered and bandaged, black-eyed and hoarse-voiced, he was shown on television in the first hours of the revolution as one of its most prominent prisoners. In these early hours, he seemed not so much dazed as intimidated into a stammer as he faced the barrage of questions by a bearded figure in military fatigues. His name was Ebrahim Yazdi, and he soon became a key figure of the new regime. To a discerning eye, the sad spectacle was an ominous sign of the incipient revolutionary terror. Some have infamy in their souls; others have it thrust upon them by force of history or fortune. Nasiri’s infamy was as much a work of chance as willing effort. His rise to the pinnacle of power, as well as his fall into the hands of forces lusting for his blood, were both directly the result of his unfailing dedication to his one master and commander—the shah.

Ne’matollah Mohammad Nasiri was born in 1910 (1289) in the city of Semnan, on the margins of a vast desolate desert. From childhood, he “had an affinity for the life in the military”1 and thus at the first opportunity, he joined the special high school set up as early training for future officers of the new modern Iranian military. In 1933 he entered the Officers Academy and was already a first lieutenant when in 1937 the young crown prince, upon his return from his European educational sojourn, enrolled in the academy. Nasiri would have gone down in history as yet another cog in the wheel of the Iranian military machine had it not been for the events of August 1953, and then June 1963.

He was first catapulted into a sensitive command position when Hoseyn Fardust, the shah’s closest confidant, picked Nasiri as an officer in a new unit that was being set up at the time to guard the palaces. According to Fardust, Nasiri was chosen “not for his intelligence, but his reliability.”[2] For much of his public life, that was indeed the gist of Nasiri’s image—no intellectual giant, in fact even a bit daft, but completely dedicated to the shah. Before receiving his important new assignment, Nasiri had been the commander of a small army garrison in the city of Kerman. Aside from the recommendation of Fardust, what helped Nasiri secure the appointment was the fact that the shah had also come to trust him from the days they were both in the Officers Academy.[3] Nasiri was by then a colonel, and before long he was promoted to the post of the commander of the unit entrusted with the task of guarding the shah’s residences.

In early August 1953, as plans were being drawn to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadeq, someone was needed to deliver a royal decree dismissing him. Nasiri was chosen for the task. Late on the evening of August 15, accompanied by four trucks of soldiers, he arrived at the prime minister’s residence and delivered the note. But unbeknownst to him, the government had received advance warning of the plans to unseat Mossadeq and was waiting for him. No sooner had he delivered the note than he was arrested. Aredeshir Zahedi, who was intimately involved in the planning of the overthrow, has suggested that Nasiri lingered at the prime minister’s house too long, allowing forces loyal to the government to arrest him.[4]

What happened in the next three days is a matter of some controversy. Newspapers close to the government at the time announced that Nasiri not only repented but attacked the shah and his supporters. Nasiri and his allies, on the other hand, denied these allegations, claiming that he had stood firm in face of this temporary setback. Official records of what actually happened during two days of interrogations have been hard to find. But on August 19, when the tide turned in favor of the shah and his allies, Nasiri was freed from prison, and a new stage in his life began. He was immediately promoted to the rank of a general by the new prime minister, General Fazlollah Zahedi.

Nasiri’s services during those crucial August events almost came to naught on the day the shah returned from his exile. At the airport, he saw that Nasiri, a colonel when the shah had left the country, was wearing a general’s uniform. “Who gave you your star?” the shah asked angrily. When he heard that Zahedi had promoted Nasiri as reward for his service, the shah was clearly not pleased. He saw the army as solely in his purview and tolerated no interference in its affairs. Nasiri soon proved more than willing to accept the shah as his sole master, and even to move against General Zahedi. Within months after his promotion, the shah picked Nasiri to be a member of the cabal called “the politboro” and entrusted with the task of preparing the ground for General Zahedi’s dismissal.[5]

After Zahedi’s removal, the shah established himself as the most powerful person in Iran, and from that moment until the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, Nasiri was one of the shah’s most reliable and relentlessly obedient tools. His peers saw him as someone who would do anything and betray anyone if it meant satisfying the shah.[6] And for his dedication, he was amply rewarded.

By 1960, he was already a three-star general and commander of the National Police Force. In that capacity, he had another occasion to show his mettle. Early in June 1963, religious forces led by Ayatollah Khomeini masterminded a massive urban uprising against the regime, and Nasiri used the forces under his command to quell the rioters. He was named the military governor of the capital on the day of the uprising and developed a reputation for his willingness to use an iron fist to silence opponents.

During the days leading up to the June 1963 uprising, there were clearly two distinct camps among the security agencies, the cabinet, and the army about what policy the government should adopt. Some in the government, led by Hoseyn Ala, the minister of court at the time, and General Pakravan, the head of SAVAK, advocated a conciliatory approach. In particular, they wanted the shah to make peace with the clergy. Others, led by the Prime Minister Assadollah Alam and General Nasiri, advocated an iron-fist policy. “Khomeini has no more than two thousand followers in Tehran,” and the army could easily take care of them, Nasiri said.[7] On many subsequent occasions, Alam would whisper to the shah that on that June day, he had not only saved the throne but completely deracinated the clergy.[8]

History showed that the second group was wrong in its assessment. Nearly all who advocated the soft approach were, before long, dismissed by the shah. Iran, he believed, needed a new elite. Nasiri, as an apparent reward for his tactical victory in June, was within a couple of years appointed to head SAVAK. In retrospect, the appointment was a historic moment for the shah. By 1965, he was riding a high wave of popularity for the success of the White Revolution. The time seemed ripe to follow the advice of General Hassan Pakravan, an erudite liberal-minded professional intelligence officer who had banned torture during his tenure and was beginning a serious effort to bring about a rapprochement with the opposition. Instead, the shah opted for a policy of confrontation and suppression of the opposition. Nasiri, who became the new chief of SAVAK on January 30, 1965, was to be the public face of this policy. By the time the shah realized he had made a mistake and replaced Nasiri in 1978, it was too late.

In fact, the defeat of the Pakravan paradigm, the use of the military to put down the June uprising, and changing international circumstances—particularly the rise of a new revolutionary culture nourished by the Cuban and Algerian revolutions—meant that by the mid-1960s, many in the Iranian opposition decided to pick up guns and start a military campaign against the regime—terrorism in the official language and “guerrilla struggle” in the political parlance of the time. SAVAK was entrusted with the task of fighting this new challenge to the regime, and it used harsh tactics, including torture, to suppress the militants. Before long, helped by the international campaign against the regime spearheaded by Iranian student groups in Europe and America, SAVAK became the face of the regime’s brutality, and Nasiri its poster child.

Moreover, during Nasiri’s tenure, SAVAK vastly expanded the scope of its operations. Rumors put its operatives in the hundreds of thousands while the official version had the figure as low as about five thousand people.[9] According to the initial plans for the organization, developed by British and American advisors, SAVAK was to be a mixture of the FBI and the CIA. It was supposed to combine espionage and counterespionage with internal security. But by the mid-1960s, every important appointment to sensitive jobs—either in the government bureaucracy or the education system—required SAVAK clearance. Even sensitive management positions in the private sector, particularly when they had direct interface with workers, required SAVAK clearance.
Furthermore, the organization was by then in practice responsible for censorship of books, films, and the media. At one stage, SAVAK forced new editors on many of the country’s most important daily and weekly magazines. Even passports were in the control of SAVAK, and none were issued without its approval. In major embassies around the world, SAVAK had its own representatives, and they operated more or less independently of the embassies in which they were housed. Their work was deemed particularly important in European and American capitals, where Iranian students had created a vast network of organizations opposed to the regime.[10] In short, as SAVAK’s power, or infamy, increased, Nasiri’s image as one of the most powerful men in the country also grew.

He parlayed his new power into wealth and illicit gains not only for himself and his allies, but also for some in his family. His brother was named representative for the city of Semnan, their birthplace, and his most notorious financial entanglement was with Hojabr Yazdani, an Iranian-style robber baron. Yazdani built his empire on the power of the support he received from his two patrons—General Nasiri and General Abdolkarim Ayadi, the shah’s personal physician.11 Moreover, Nasiri himself was by the mid-1970s directly involved in all kinds of investments—from partnership with Fardust in industrial farms in the south to other investments in real estate around the country.[12] By then corruption had become a serious political problem for the regime and Nasiri’s name was often connected to many of the most infamous instances of this alleged corruption.

What in the long run proved more dangerous for the system was not so much Nasiri’s tarnished financial reputation as his reluctance to bear bad news to the shah. SAVAK was from its inception, according to many reports from the British and American Embassies, one of the most important pillars of the regime’s power. The shah relied on it not only to control and suppress his opponents, but also to keep himself informed about popular sentiments. Some in SAVAK had realized by the early 1970s that financial corruption was a sensitive political issue. On occasion, they prepared reports for the shah describing these cases of malfeasance or kickbacks.[13] The shah, giddy with success in increasing Iran’s oil revenues, was reluctant to take these reports seriously. He considered corruption the natural by-products of rapid economic development. Nasiri met with the king twice a week at a set time and brought the many reports from different branches of SAVAK. It was generally known around SAVAK that he is ill disposed toward reports that might anger the shah or were critical of the regime. In a sense, he doctored intelligence to satisfy the shah and his mood. Even in democracies, doctored intelligence often leads to calamitous policies; in despotic societies, whose very survival depends on the power and acuity of the intelligence agencies, such doctoring is tantamount to suicide. The Iranian experience was a case in point. By 1977, SAVAK was powerful enough not only to suppress all organized opposition internally, but also to reach across many borders. It had, for example, successfully predicted the coup in Afghanistan. But Nasiri was reluctant to take reports of problems at home to the shah.

When in late 1977 public disgruntlement began to bubble to the surface, one of the first public gestures by the Amuzegar government to heed the people’s cries for reform was to remove Nasiri from his perch as head of SAVAK. He had been at the helm for thirteen years, making him the longest-serving head of the organization since its creation in 1957. His sinecure was the ambassadorship to Pakistan. The job was, in fact, more important than it had seemed initially. By the mid-1970s, the CIA had built its biggest office outside Langley in Islamabad, Pakistan. America was using those offices to help spread the message of Islam among the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union. Iran was an important ally of the United States in its fight against the Soviet Union.

But Nasiri’s new post did not last long. As the situation deteriorated in Iran, as the opposition became more and more assertive in its demand, and as the regime panicked and went into appeasement mode, it was decided to arrest a number of key figures, blame past mistakes on them, and eventually put them on trial as sacrificial lambs. It would have been hard to find another figure who could match Nasiri in terms of his value as a potential symbolic sacrifice. He was asked to come back to Tehran, and he knew that this was no normal ambassadorial recall. After some initial hesitation, he ultimately decided to return home. He had seen, maybe better than anyone, the rewards that came to the people who, during the shah’s hours of desperation in 1953, remained faithful to him. This could be another 1953.

Not long after his return, however, the government arrested him. He was sent to the Jamshidabad garrison, where other arrested members of the regime were also being held. Even among the political elite, he was despised. Some felt he had been particularly abrasive and arrogant during the height of his power. Others saw him as the main culprit in creating discontent among the population. As he later recalled, he spent most of his time in prison in self-imposed solitary confinement. He had only one visit from his wife—a young woman he had married late in life and with whom he had two children.14 He denied any financial wrongdoing, claiming he lived only on his meager salary of thirty-five hundred dollars per month.

On February 11, when the shah’s regime finally collapsed, a mob arrived at the garrison holding Nasiri and other political luminaries of the fallen Pahlavi dynasty. There was chaos for a while, when the soldiers tried to put up some resistance. Eventually the prison was conquered, and in the next few minutes some of the prisoners escaped. Nasiri was among those detained. It is not clear whether he was simply too afraid to make an effort to escape as others did, or whether his face was too known to afford him a realistic chance of melting into the mob. He was arrested and immediately taken to the Refah School, fast becoming the headquarters of the Islamic Revolution. Along with Hoveyda, he was clearly the most important prisoner of the revolution.

Only three days after the fall of the regime, Nasiri and three other generals were tried in the Refah School where Ayatollah Khomeini lived in the early days of the revolution. The entire proceeding took about ten hours. The verdict was immediately issued and taken for final approval to Ayatollah Khomeini, and within minutes Nasiri was sent to a firing squad on the rooftop of the school. According to newspaper reports, he looked “despairing and frightened” when he heard the verdict. Members of families of those executed during the days Nasiri headed SAVAK were present to witness the execution.[15]

Moments before his death, journalists were allowed to ask him some questions. His earlier television appearance, moments after the victory of the revolution, had become controversial. Ayatollah Khomeini had come to believe that Nasiri had used the interview to send secret messages to the agents of SAVAK, ordering them to attack the new regime. In fact, Ayatollah Khomeini used this allegation as one of his reasons for unleashing the reign of terror against members of the ancien régime. This time, the journalists’ questions were more in the spirit of an interrogation than an impartial interview. Nasiri was asked about torture, and he denied knowledge of it. “That kind of thing was handled by people six or seven levels below me,” he claimed.[16] He repeatedly claimed that he was never more than a courier between the shah and SAVAK. The organization wrote a report, he said, and “I simply took it to the king and wrote on them the orders of the Shah.” He was certainly right in his claim that he had little to do with the day-to-day affairs of the organization. He was a figurehead, but even figureheads bear legal and moral responsibility for the actions of the organizations they lead. In the course of the trial, on more than one occasion he claimed that the real criminals had all fled and that if he, too, had committed any crimes, he would never have returned to Iran. He blamed “American imperialism” for what had happened in Iran. “They did in Iran the same thing they did in Vietnam,” he claimed. Moments after the interview, he was shot.

Gory images of Nasiri’s blood-spattered body marked the beginning of the revolution’s orgy of blood. On the front page of Tehran’s biggest dailies, a picture of him sitting on a chair with his hands tied behind his back, and a verse of the Qur’an hanging on a banner over his head, was accompanied by another big image of his body lying in a pool of blood. Surely images of Nasiri’s suffering and death were relished by the thousands who had suffered at the hands of SAVAK when he ran it. But brutality never begets democracy or even long-term security, and neither Nasiri, during his days of power, nor his opponents, in their early days of glory, learned that lesson.

General Pakravan was a man of many paradoxes. He was an intellectual, a historian manqué, a liberal at heart, and a connoisseur of French literature and Persian poetry. He was also one of the three founders of Iran’s dread secret police, SAVAK.

A polyglot, French was as much his native tongue as Persian. He also knew English well and had a smattering of German. He was a voracious reader, with the varied appetite of a true Renaissance man. He was polite and deferential in demeanor, careful and cautious in discourse. He had the decorum and deliberation of a diplomat. Yet he was, for almost four years, the head of SAVAK. Moreover, he had spent much of his earlier distinguished military career in intelligence and its G2 “Second Bureau,” or Rokne do— notorious in postwar Iran for alleged cruelty against opponents of the government.

His successful attempt to save the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1964 cost him his job under the shah, and his life under Ayatollah Khomeini. The shah blamed Pakravan for the regime’s inability to put down the June riots of 1963, while Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies accused the cosmopolitan general of complicity in the death of hundreds during what they called the “revolutionary movement of June.” Furthermore, they allege—with considerable support for the claim available in a variety of sources—that many of Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters were badly tortured in the aftermath of the riots.[1] Nevertheless, Pakravan died a heroic death, remaining faithful to a shah who had dismissed him, and defiant in the face of a vengeful Ayatollah who had come for blood and revenge.

In a moving eulogy to her father, Saideh Pakravan tried to parse out the paradoxes that shaped General Pakravan’s life. How could a humanist like him, she asked, an erudite man who had read St. Augustine and Kant, who loved the glories of the Renaissance, become the head of an organization like SAVAK? The answer, she said, is simple. “He was more than anything else an Iranian.” He wanted to serve his country in its hour of need, and the many years he had spent in Europe, the partial European lineage of his parentage, had in no way diminished his desire or his willingness to give of himself for the greater good of the country.[2] What is not clear is why he chose—or decided to accept—to help his country as the head of an organization whose reputation was tarnished.

Whatever the reason for that decision, he showed considerable courage in the last months of his life. He loved Paris, and in November 1978, as the situation worsened in Iran and as the Iranian elite began an exodus, hurriedly leaving the ship they thought was sinking, Pakravan and his wife were in Paris. His friends and family repeatedly advised him against going back to Iran. Yet he returned, knowing full well that he might be walking into a deadly trap. These were tragic and despairing hours for Iran, he told them, and he said he must be there. He also hoped to change the shah’s position to something like that of Juan Carlos of Spain and thus save the country and the throne.[3]

Back in Iran, as the revolution became more and more inevitable, again family and friends pleaded with him to depart. “I know they will kill me,” he told his lifelong friend and colleague, General Alavi Kia, “but somebody has to stay and fight. I know Khomeini, and he is like a rhinoceros. He will raze the country, and kill me.”[4] While insisting that others should leave, Pakravan stubbornly refused the advice he gave to others, and the result was tragedy for him and his family.

Hassan Pakravan was born in 1911 (1290) in Tehran to a uniquely multicultural family steeped in Iranian and European culture, politics, and history. His mother, Emineh Pakravan, was of hybrid parentage. Her father was Persian and her mother Austrian. Her great-grandfather, Karl Hersfeld, was an Austrian bourgeois, and the story of Emineh’s fascinating family life and her successful writing career is the subject of a well-researched master’s thesis by Saideh Pakravan.[5] The narrative is woven from the lives of a cast of characters that includes kings and princes—and the Marquis de Cuernavaca—against a backdrop that incorporates the revolution in Mexico and political intrigues in Europe.

Emineh was four when she lost her father. Her mother, beset with grief, took refuge in a convent in Yugoslavia, where Emineh lived for the next ten years. She was eighteen when she traveled to Turkey, where she met and married Pakravan’s father, Fatholah Khan, in June 1910. He was a dashing young man from a prominent Persian family and a graduate of Saint-Cyr, France’s famed officers academy. On August 4, 1911, they had their first child, and they called him Hassan.

Emineh was, of course, no simple housewife. She was a true intellectual, and the years she spent accompanying her husband in his career as a diplomat were at once a source of intellectual enrichment and emotional estrangement from “her unrelentingly Eastern husband.”6 Finally the gradual grind of his idiosyncrasies, his jealousy and paranoia, took their toll. In the summer of 1923, the couple divorced, and Emineh took her two children, Hassan and Paridokht, affectionately known as Chouchou, to Belgium. While attending to her responsibilities as a single parent, she also began to write, eventually winning some prestigious literary awards in France. Of her writings, the most famous in Iran is the Persian translation of her historical novel about the life of Aga Mohammad Khan, the eunuch who founded the Qajar dynasty.

Hassan went to school in Belgium. In 1929, he entered the University of Liege, where he was to study engineering. It did not take him long to abandon the field and prepare for a career in the military.7 He went to France and enrolled in two military schools—first at Poitiers and then at Fontainebleau, where he trained as an artillery officer at the Ecole Des Caissons d’Artillerie.[8] Although his father wanted his son to become a soldier, Pakravan’s decision seemed rooted in his own love of the military. He once told his wife late in life that of all the jobs he had had, he was most proud of his life as a soldier.[9]

In 1933, after he graduated from the military school, he decided to return to Iran. On his way, he traveled to Moscow, where his father was then serving as Iran’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. After spending several weeks with his long-estranged father, Hassan returned to Iran, where he immediately was invited to teach at the Officers Academy. Not long afterward, his mother and sister joined him. Emineh was invited to teach at the Faculty of Literature at Tehran University. She agreed and with fervent enthusiasm began to prepare for classes in the history of art.

The happy life of the three changed suddenly when Paridokht became sick. The symptoms were of pneumonia; her real malady might have been heartbreak. She had fallen in love with a Russian, and for a variety of reasons, including her father’s stern opposition to her relationship with a non-Iranian, the affair ended. Not long after that she became ill and died.

In addition to teaching at the academy, Pakravan was trying to master the Persian language. The long years he had spent abroad and his multicultural lineage had meant that he was less than fluent in Persian. Yet he worked tirelessly to master his native tongue and soon succeeded admirably in the effort. He read voraciously, particularly about Iranian history and culture. All his life he had an avid interest in history and biography. Genealogy, particularly that of his own family, was also of great interest to him. When his daughter, Saideh, wrote her master’s thesis about Emineh Pakravan’s life as a writer, he read the text carefully and offered copious notes and suggestions in the margins of the manuscript. The notes indicate his mastery not only of his family tree but of European history as well.[10]

Emineh’s life changed when she began to frequent the court. She had become a tutor to some of the children of the Pahlavi princes and princesses. She had a particular affinity for Princess Shams. According to Saideh, Emineh’s affection for the princess was a substitute for the love she had for her dead daughter.[11]
Pakravan’s life also underwent some important changes in this period. In late 1940, as a result of an accident—a self-inflicted wound, by some accounts—he was hospitalized. In the course of his convalescence, he met Fatemeh Farifteh and in February 1941 married her. She was at that time the director of the hospital,[12] and, like her husband, a woman of many cultures. Her mother was half Russian and half Polish, and her father was a resourceful Iranian named Javad Farifteh. He had been a chef to Mozafar-al-Din Shah

and eventually went on to establish the first Persian restaurant in Paris, where he served, among other things, his famous chello kebab. While the family lived in Paris, Fatemeh pursued, in her words, “paramedical studies.”[13] Back in Iran, she was named the head of the Najmoyeh hospital, where she met Pakravan. For much of her married life she worked in different capacities—from a hospital director to a tourism officer in the government. Pakravan and Fatemeh had four children; her Harvard oral history interview is a chronicle of important moments of their almost thirty-nine-year marriage.

Pakravan’s career in the military, made temporarily more tumultuous by the advent of World War II, eventually led to his first important assignment. In 1949 he was named Iran’s first military attaché to the newly created country of Pakistan. During his tenure there, the shah visited the country and had a “long, very, very long”14 talk with Pakravan. In those days, the shah was bracing for what were clearly turbulent waters in Iranian politics. In preparation, he was looking for officers he could trust. Pakravan had clearly impressed the shah.
Not long after, Pakravan was recalled and appointed deputy commander, and shortly afterwards, commander of the key G2 Division, in charge of army intelligence, and, more important, sensitive aspects of internal security as well. It was an unusually sensitive and important job for the forty-one-year old-colonel. G-2, the precursor to SAVAK, was in those days the bête noire of the opposition, and Pakravan’s tenure did nothing to improve its image. One of Pakravan’s first steps as commander was to bring an officer he trusted, Alavi Kia, to serve with him; it was the beginning of a friendship that continued for the rest of his life.

It was a measure of Pakravan’s political savvy that for the next two years, while the country was enmeshed in a fierce battle between the shah and his increasingly belligerent prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, Pakravan lasted in his job. He met regularly with the shah, giving him detailed reports about the activities of the opposition, particularly the Tudeh Party. The shah oversaw this aspect of the G2 operations very closely. On more than one occasion, the shah ordered Pakravan and his deputy, Alavi Kia, to contact high-ranking moles in the leadership of the Tudeh Party and other parties of the opposition.[15]

As relations between the shah and Dr. Mossadeq headed toward a showdown, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, Pakravan was relieved of his post and sent to France as an assistant military attaché. After a year in that capacity, he was sent to India, where he served for two years, this time as a military attaché. He was by all accounts very happy in his new life. He had more time to spend with his family. His fourth and last child, a son, was born in India. But his idyllic life in India changed rather suddenly in 1957.

He was asked to return to Iran for what seemed like a routine reporting trip. But in Tehran, he learned of plans to develop a new intelligence organization for Iran. Some two dozen American and British advisors had arrived in Tehran and were helping implement plans to create the new agency. There had been a civilian and two military candidates for head of the organization. General Teymur Bakhtiyar was ultimately named the head, and Pakravan and Alavi Kia were named his deputies.[16]

According to his wife, Pakravan was jubilant about his new appointment. She had hoped they would stay longer in India, but Pakravan was convinced that he could do much good in the new organization.[17] It was not clear why he was so optimistic, particularly in light of the already sordid reputation Bakhtiyar had developed during his days as Tehran’s feared military governor.

For the next four years, Pakravan served in the shadow of General Bakhtiyar—a charismatic but cruel and corrupt director who stamped the new organization in his own image. He was unabashedly ambitious, and by 1961 his ambition had led to his fall. On the day of Bakhtiyar’s dismissal, Pakravan was in Israel[18] on official SAVAK business. He was ordered to return to Tehran immediately, where he was taken to see the shah. He offered him the job of leading SAVAK.

One of his first decisions was to order an end to all forms of torture. When he heard that an interrogator had slapped a prisoner, he moved swiftly to reprimand and demote the man. He also created a kind of think tank that brought together Iranian intellectuals and technocrats like Ehsan Naragi. Pakravan consulted with them on problems facing the country. He also enjoyed engaging in intellectual banter with his writer and poet friends. He was constantly trying to bridge the gap between the shah and the opposition. In some cases, when the opponents were in prison, he visited them there; others he invited to his office, or arranged to meet through his friends—who included respected intellectuals such as Sadeq Chubak,19 Mohammad Zohari, and Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani.[20] Of the people he met in prison, Bijan Jazani was surely one of the most intransigent opponents of the regime. It is reported that Jazani came away from the meeting believing that this time the “regime seems serious in trying to achieve reconciliation.”[21]

All hopes for reconciliation were, of course, dashed on June 3, 1963, when supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini took to the streets after his arrest. The government of Assadollah Alam used the full force of the Iranian army to put down the uprising. Pakravan’s life was drastically changed by these events. On the day after the riots, Pakravan delivered a passionate speech on the radio, blaming the leaders of the uprising for abusing his trust and leniency. But the die was cast. Blood was to be washed away only with blood. Islamists today see that June day as the beginning of the Islamic Revolution.

The opposition was dismayed by Pakravan’s role in the riots. It claimed that SAVAK had used torture to get false confessions from Islamists connecting them to Nasser of Egypt. A mysterious man named “Jou Jou” was supposed to have brought cash from Egypt and dispensed it among the rioters.[22]

The shah was no less dismayed. A few days after the riots, in a meeting with a member of the American Embassy in Tehran, the shah declared in no uncertain terms his dissatisfaction with Pakravan’s leadership of SAVAK. He said the uprising “could have been avoided if SAVAK had functioned effectively.” He then promised to do “some house cleaning among the people surrounding him.”[23] In the case of Pakravan, the “house cleaning” took a few months to achieve.

In the meantime, it was necessary to decide the fate of the arrested Ayatollah Khomeini. Even after his release from prison, he continued to speak against the shah and his policies—particularly the decision to grant members of the American military serving in Iran, and their families, immunity from prosecution. Some of those around the shah and in the security organization advocated the execution of the intransigent cleric, while others, like Pakravan, advocated leniency. The hard-liners accused Pakravan of insufficient resolve for the job he had accepted. Parviz Sabeti, who in later years came to represent the harshest face of SAVAK, says of Pakravan, “he was a nice man, but should have been a professor at some university.”24 Ultimately it was decided that the Ayatollah would be exiled from Iran. In her memoir, Queen Farah writes, “General Hassan Pakravan, a man of great culture, intelligence and humanity . . . pleaded clemency to the king. In his opinion, it was necessary to calm people’s minds, let the clergy get used to reforms gradually, and for the moment be content with exiling Khomeini. The king agreed.”[25] Some have suggested that it was Pakravan who asked the other ayatollahs, particularly Shari’atmadari, to intercede on Ayatollah Khomeini’s behalf.[26] Both Shari’atmadari and Pakravan lived to rue their decision.

During the period when Ayatollah Khomeini was under arrest, Pakravan had a few meetings with him. They talked of politics and theology, and they bantered about the state of Iranian society. In their last meeting, just before the ayatollah was to be set free, Pakravan told him that his speech against the shah had been very “harsh in tone” and that anywhere in the world such a speech would be punished by the law. The ayatollah, according to his semiofficial hagiography-cum-biography, agreed, saying, “maybe there was some excess in that speech but it was not meant as an insult, but advice. You should also give him advice.”[27]

In the same meeting, Pakravan suggested that the world of politics is full of lies, hypocrisy, duplicity, and violence, and that the clergy should leave that profane world to politicians and concentrate, instead, on the sacred world of religion and the spirit. The ayatollah demurred. Choosing his words with deliberation, as always, he said, “We never interfere in politics as you define it.”28 Pakravan took the sentence to mean that the ayatollah had promised to give up his activism. The government immediately announced that the ayatollah had been freed only after he promised he would never again interfere in politics. The ayatollah, of course, had meant something entirely different by his declaration. His verbal dexterity, his well-constructed and calculated ambiguities, always left room for multiple interpretations. When a quarter of century later he returned from exile triumphant, he showed that he had clearly not forgotten Pakravan or the debate.

Not long after the exile of the ayatollah, Pakravan was relieved of his duties as the head of SAVAK and replaced by General Ne’matollah Nasiri. It is easy to see why the shah might have been unhappy with Pakravan. Aside from his fervent belief in the virtue of reconciliation, Pakravan was also critical of the shah’s increasing appetite for arms. In February 1962, for example, he had told American officials that “he opposed our supplying military equipment on a scale that cut into the development budget. He asserted that the key element in the military balance was to keep the officers’ ‘morale above danger point.’”[29]

Whatever the cause, the change of leadership at SAVAK might have seemed insignificant at the time. In retrospect, however, it can be seen as a change of historic significance. By 1965, the shah was probably at the height of his popularity in Iran. His White Revolution had changed the fabric of Iranian society. The country was, at least in the eyes of the people, moving in the right direction. Pakravan was still bent on bringing about the reconciliation with the opposition that had been dashed by the bloodshed in June 1963. If ever the shah could have opened up the system from a position of benevolent strength, it was then. But Pakravan’s dismissal meant a radical change of course for SAVAK. The reconciliation never came, and a few years later, when some in the opposition took up arms against the government, even the idea of rapprochement was no longer on the table.

The shah, too, seemed eventually to have recognized the error of his appraisal of Pakravan. But his realization came much too late. It is reported by Mrs. Pakravan that while in exile, not long before his death, the shah told Henrie Bonnier, the man who helped write and publish the shah’s last memoir, Answer to History, that of all his advisors, there was one he should have listened to. He said, “Yes, there was a wonderful person. A man who told me always the truth. A man who was devoted to me. A man who was never lowly and crawling. But I did not understand it at the time. And that was Pakravan.”[30]

Another report, this one from an American diplomat, confirms the shah’s opinion about Pakravan’s devotion. In 1965, the diplomat spent eleven months in Tehran talking to a wide variety of officials in the government. He writes of his shock at the realization that of all the people he talked to, only one was willing fully to support the shah when the conversation was private. That one person was General Pakravan, who had said that the shah is not without his faults, but that under the circumstances he is Iran’s best hope.[31]

Pakravan was not dismissed in disgrace. As a sinecure, he was appointed minister of information, where he served for about a year. His next two appointments were in the Foreign Ministry, first as ambassador to Pakistan, where he served from 1966 to 1969, and then to France. Paris was his favorite city in the world, and France was as much his emotional and cultural home as Iran. With the help of Saideh and her husband, he set out to refurbish the embassy chancellery. His reports about the internal politics of the countries to which he was posted were considered by the shah to be the best of their kind. They were brief, thoughtful, and precise, reasoned and informed, and bereft of the kind of bombast or bluster that found its way into many of the other ambassadors’ reports.[32]

When his ambassadorial days ended, he wanted to retire to Paris, but he was convinced to accept the role of senior advisor to the Ministry of Court—primarily a titular role, with little substantive decision-making responsibility. For a while, he joined the office of the Royal Inspectorate, whose job was to weed out corrupt and inefficient officials and practices.

As the country was increasingly inching toward a violent revolution, Pakravan became part of the inner group of elder statesmen who advised the shah on how to cope with the crisis. Of the meetings he attended, the most controversial was arguably the one where the decision to arrest Amir-Abbas Hoveyda was made. Hoveyda had been, for many years, a close friend of Pakravan, whose daughter worked for a while as a secretary in the prime minister’s office. According to Saideh, in her fictional rendition of the Hoveyda arrest,33 and her mother, in her Harvard oral history interview, at that fateful meeting, Pakravan voiced opposition to arresting Hoveyda. Others who participated in the meeting, including the queen, offer an altogether different picture. They all concur that no one opposed the idea. In her memoir, the queen is categorical when she writes that the decision to arrest Hoveyda “was made in a meeting attended by several members of the government and high-ranking army officials. They were all in favor of Mr. Hoveyda being taken in for questioning.”[34]

Pakravan was nothing if not a man of paradoxes. While serving at the court and dealing with the growing turmoil, he seemed also to live another life—a life of the mind, of scholarship, and of voracious reading into sometimes arcane aspects of history. On April 2, 1978, in a letter to his daughter—“My dear little Saide”—he asks her for three technical books of history—one, for example, was called La Vie Quotidienne Dans les Chemins de fer au 19t siecle, or Daily Life on the 19th Century Railroads. He added that the books would cost five hundred French francs and that he would include the sum in the letter.[35]

When the royal family left Iran in January 1979, keeping the court running and the staff paid and safe was the responsibility of the court minister, Alinaghi Ardalan, and Pakravan, his deputy. But the end seemed near.
For Pakravan, it came on the afternoon of February 16, 1979, when he was arrested and sent the Refah School, where Ayatollah Khomeini resided. In prison, he passed his time reading Persian poetry, particularly the poems of Rumi and Hafez. He also wrote about twenty pages of notes on his favorite subject, family genealogy. He wrote about his mother, her “independence of spirit,” her “excellent constitution,” her “love of 17th and 18th century French literature,” and finally about “her love of love.” He also wrote at some length about his father, his family pedigree, his habits of life and mind, his life as a soldier.

During his trial and interrogations, he was defiant yet stoically resigned to what he knew would be his fate. His behavior even impressed Khalkhali, the infamous “hanging judge.” He talked of Pakravan’s honesty, of his unwillingness to blame anyone else, of his full acceptance of all responsibility for what had happened under his watch. When he was given a chance to say his last words to the court, he politely demurred, saying that what he had hitherto said was his only defense.

Khalkhali claims that, impressed as he was with Pakravan’s honesty, “I decided to reduce his sentence.”[36] The fact that the general’s family had been promised that he would soon be set free gives some credence to Khalkhali’s claim of intended clemency.[37] The rest of Khalkhali’s statement, however, seems like an important hint about who made the ultimate decision to kill the septuagenarian general. Khalkhali says, “After a while, I said to myself, I am a judge and must not be moved by my own emotion, and this is a crime for a judge, and the Imam had on several occasions suggested this, and of course we succeeded in overcoming our emotions.”[38] In deconstructing this sentence, we must bear in mind first of all that it is now generally agreed that Ayatollah Khomeini was consistently the advocate of the harshest treatment of opponents. Furthermore, on more than one occasion Khalkhali declared that everyone he killed he killed at the behest of the ayatollah. Considering these facts, and Khalkhali’s statement, it seems reasonable to assume that Ayatollah Khomeini made the decision to kill Pakravan.

At two in the morning of April 11, 1979 (22 Farvardin), exactly three months after the victory of the revolution, General Pakravan was executed. That day, Tehran’s daily papers were particularly full of gore and cruelty. Keyhan, the country’s most important paper of the time, was particularly ghoulish that day. On page one, it announced in big print and in obvious glee that twenty of the ancien régime’s leaders had been executed that day. On the same page were also pictures of eleven faces, some jarringly deformed by rigor mortis, others seemingly serene. Pakravan was one of them. Even in death, it seems, “the enemy” was not spared the violence of the revolution.

Page seven featured another inferno of cruelty and sadistic gore. Four bodies, each tied to a pole, each fallen at different angles of final repose, appear in one corner. Next to this horrifying image is the picture of a blindfolded man waiting for the firing squad, and below him two bodies for whom the agony of waiting had ended. On the next page, there is a picture of Pakravan in court, moments before his execution. Arms locked together in the universal gesture of defiance, dressed in a dark turtleneck shirt and without a jacket, eyes angrily, even mockingly, looking at the court, he sits with grace and dignity. The headline next to him read, “A butcher whose hand was tainted with the blood of thousands of Iranians.”[39]

Razmara was unique. He was a solider-scholar of impressive productivity, a politician-general of great ambition, and a calculating intriguer of Machiavellian guile and finesse. His murder at the hands of Islamic terrorists was a pivotal point not just in the history of modern Iran, but in the rise of Islamic radicalism in the country. He was also a memoirist, leaving behind intimate accounts of his childhood, his early years in the military, and his European travels.

He was born in Tehran in 1901 (1280). His father, himself a soldier and a man known for his love and mastery of military history, was married three times. He had eleven children from his first marriage, eight of whom survived. His third wife gave him three children. Hadji Ali was a child of the second marriage. His mother was a descendent of the Qajar family. She was, he suggests, much abused by her ill-tempered husband but nevertheless made every effort to afford her nine children a happy and love-filled life. Ali was her fourth child.[1] His blue eyes and light complexion were, he says, her genetic influence. All his life he was known as Hadj Ali. His family had chosen Ali as his name, but he was born on the night of the special Muslim holiday when Hadjis offer their sacrificial lambs to the Lord. As custom had it in Iran, children born on that day were given the honorary and coveted title of Hadji, otherwise reserved for those who have actually made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Hadj Ali began his school in a traditional maktab, taught by a woman. He spent a year under her tutelage and later entered an elementary school called Agdasiye. He was the top student of his class—a distinction he maintained through nearly all his education. At the same time, he developed an affinity for the military. He loved everything about the army, from its uniforms to its marches.[2]

For high school, he enrolled in Alliance, where he mastered the French language and took the school’s modern, European set of courses. After spending a year in Dar al-Funun, Hadj Ali changed his life’s trajectory and began to pursue the career he craved. He enrolled in a military school that had just opened in Tehran. On the school’s highly competitive entrance exam, he received the tenth highest score of any applicant.
As a soldier, he was known for his unrelenting sense of military discipline, as well as for his fearlessness. Every day, even when he was a general, he woke up at five-thirty in the morning. He usually took a nap in the afternoon, and then went on to work until late into the night. He ascended rapidly in the ranks and, before long, joined forces with Reza Khan, a rising star in the Iranian Cossack Brigade. In 1924, when the army decided to send some of its best officers to France for training at the celebrated Saint Cyr Academy, Hadj Ali was among those chosen to go. In France, too, Razmara established his reputation as a serious student of all things military.

After his return from Europe, his rise in the ranks of the new Iranian army was meteoric. Among his jobs was teaching at Iran’s War College and at the Officers Academy, where he was in charge of teaching cartography and the military geography of Iran. In fact, he is considered the founder of the army’s Geography Department. He was a military scholar, with interest and expertise in Iran’s geography and cartography. He published a twentyvolume military geography of Iran, praised by critics as “an admirable fund of information on the economic, social, and political peculiarities of Iran’s various provinces.”[3] The total number of books he published is said to be twenty-seven.[4]

On the eve of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, he showed bravery and full command of military matters, endearing himself to Reza Shah and bringing him to the attention of the future king, Mohammad Reza Shah. Long before, he had warned of the army’s weakness and its stark inability to withstand a serious invasion.

Before long Razmara was promoted, becoming one of the youngest generals in the Iranian army. At the same time, it became clear that he harbored political ambitions. He established a set of close relationships with journalists and through them fought his foes and rivals and promoted his own political agenda. One such ally was Ali Akbar Safipour, at the time the editor of the Badi’e paper, and in later years the founding editor of Omid Iran. Mozzaffar Firuz, a controversial character despised by the shah and a close friend to Ghavam, was another. Through selective leaks to these journalists, and others like them, Razmara turned them into powerful weapons, useful in paving the way for his ambitious rise. But there was a serious obstacle on his way. As early as 1943, there was evidence of ties between Razmara and the Russians. Bullard, the British ambassador to Iran, wrote on October 27, 1943, “not only is Razmara in the pockets of the Russians, but he is an incorrigible intriguer with a party of his own in the army.”

Much the same idea was reiterated a few days later in another dispatch from the British Embassy, where it was claimed that “we presumably cannot hope to obtain Razmara’s removal if he has Russian backing.”[5] The suspicion of secret ties with the Soviet Union and its Iranian allies, the Tudeh Party, hung over Razmara for the rest of his political life. In 1949, when he was serving his third term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the entire leadership of the Tudeh Party escaped from prison. Rumors immediately connected Razmara to their daring escape. The fact that he was known to have been a close friend of Khosrow Ruzbeh, one of the leaders of the Tudeh Party’s clandestine officers’ organization and among the freed leaders of the party, added a new twist to these lingering suspicions.

Finally, it was often said in those days that Razmara regularly and covertly met with one Aliyef, a Soviet operative based at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran.[6]

Razmara had held the chair of the Joint Chiefs three times, first in 1943, again in 1944, and finally from 1944 to 1950. By the time of his third appointment, he was openly canvassing for the job of prime minister. In 1949, the British wrote of Razmara as “probably the most feared and disliked man in Persia today . . . [he is] an able energetic but corrupt officer with a reputation as a disciplinarian . . . very ambitious and a great intriguer who trims his sails to any wind. An unprincipled adventurer.”[7] There were also whispers of his “corruption, ambition, and pro-Soviet inclination.”[8]

A fascinating aspect of his life in this period is the story of his affair with Princess Ashraf. He was married at the time, with five children. In 1928 (1307), he had married Ahvaral Moluk Hedayat, Sadeq Hedayat’s sister and the daughter of a prominent family with ties to the military and to the court. But Razmara also had a reputation as a great womanizer, and of his many affairs, none was as controversial as the one with Princess Ashraf. Judging by already published letters between him and the princess, it can be said with considerable certainty that theirs was a relationship based on an unusual level of intimacy and informality. While she addresses him as “My dear general” (Sepahbode Azizam), he writes back to “My kind beloved” (Aziz-e Mehrabanam). Moreover, he addresses her in the informal second person singular, tow. Aside from the illuminating informal tone, the text of the letters is also revealing. In one letter, for example, he writes, “You had asked whether I am still thinking about you. Your heart is even stonier than mine. Isn’t it true? Every day I have sent a telegram. Every day I have written you a note. Whether they have reached you or not, I don’t know.”9 In another letter, she asks him whether he minds meeting her in public, in front of her brothers, implying that hitherto they had been meeting more discreetly.[10]

Another recurring theme of these letters is Princess Ashraf’s emphasis on her love for her brother, the shah, and her constant attempt to encourage Razmara to continue to serve the king. “Maybe it is god’s will,” she wrote, “that my brother, who is night and day working to help this land, will have his commands and ideals materialized by you.”11 Aside from many intimations of intimacy, a hint of anxiety about the “dear general’s” ambition, a touch of concern that he might in fact be planning to overthrow the shah, and later, a serious attempt to dissuade him from such a course, is also evident in the letters.

As the nationalist movement gained momentum and it became clear that the new British proposal to solve the oil impasse—called the Supplemental Oil Agreement or the Gass-Golshai’yan Agreement—was not going to pass the Parliament, Razmara used his contacts in the media to create an image of himself as the only man capable of untangling this Gordian knot. By then, both the British and American Embassies were also beginning to think that only Razmara could save the day for them and for Iran.

Before he was appointed prime minister, on June 10, Razmara had a number of meetings with members of the British and American Embassies, outlining what he would do if appointed. The now-declassified minutes of those meetings clearly show that Razmara was obviously trying to convince the British and American governments that he had a plan for solving the oil impasse and ending the political crisis. They also reveal his willingness to compromise and even conspire with the British and Americans to achieve his personal ambition. He promised to resign his military commission before assuming office and confirmed that in foreign affairs, “although he would look to the support of Britain and America, he would refrain from provoking the Soviet Union.” He insisted that he wanted no intermediaries between himself and the British Embassy. Most important of all, he wanted the embassy to force the shah to “make a public declaration of support and sympathy, that we [the British] should let it be know to Kashani that when Razmara had become prime minister he, Kashani, should not have our support in opposing him.”[12]

His third “demand” gives away the most crucial element of his platform. He wanted the British government to “persuade the Oil Company to pay royalties at the new rate during the six months which it would take Razmara to get his new organization of the country going and subsequently get the Supplementary Oil Agreement approved by the Majlis.”[13] In the same meeting, the hopeful prime minister even named his yet-to-beformed cabinet for the British Embassy.

In another meeting on June 10, Razmara promised that if appointed prime minister, he was prepared to sign a secret agreement with the British government in which he would undertake to successfully pass through the Majlis “a revised agreement within its present formula.” In the same meeting, he indicated that he would “need a loan of $100,000,000 to finance the first year” of his government, before new revenues began to arrive.14 In other words, instead of worrying about the passage of a bill or an agreement through the Parliament, he would simply settle the matter through a secret deal. By then, the British and the American governments had both decided that Razmara offered “the best chance” for a solution to Iran’s problems, and that the only problem with him was that he would “be tempted to cut across constitutional processes.” But they knew that “dependent as he will be on our [British] (and particularly on American) goodwill” they could restrain him from “proceeding to extremes in this respect.”15 One can only surmise that the “extremes” in this case included establishing a military dictatorship and overthrowing the shah.

The shah was reluctant to make the Razmara appointment. All his life he remained wary of ambitious and charismatic officers—and Razmara was nothing if not ambitious—and he certainly had cultivated a solid base of support for himself in the ranks of the army. A few weeks before making the appointment, the shah had declared that “he will never agree to the General Razmara becoming Prime Minister.”16 Ultimately, the American and British governments “encouraged” and finally persuaded him to make the appointment. Before actually signing the order, the shah sent Ernst Perron, his trusted emissary, to the British Embassy and instructed him to give the British “categorical assurance that if Razmara became Prime Minister, he would not be allowed to have any say in military affairs and his position in that respect would be just the same as that of the normal civilian Prime Minister.”[17]

When Razmara was finally appointed prime minister, he seemed, according to British diplomats, “as keen and happy as a schoolboy over his new job” and tackled it with “considerable gusto.”[18] On the domestic front, decentralization and fighting corruption were the key elements of his program. While decentralization faced stiff opposition from all sides of the political spectrum, Razmara’s approach to fighting corruption created a political storm. He appointed a commission that classified government employees, civil servants, and politicians into three categories—those on the A list were deemed impeccably honest, the B list was reserved for mediocrities who were neither corrupt nor commendable, and finally, the J clause (Bande Jim) consisted of incorrigible, unemployable, corrupt bureaucrats. On the crucial oil issue, his plan “was to withdraw the [Supplemental] Agreement,” “appoint a Technical Commission,” and then reintroduce it to the Parliament.[19]

Not long after making the appointment, the shah complained to the British that the new prime minister was not able to hold his position and that “activity against the Shah was being carried out by Razmara or any rate by people in his confidence.”[20] The British had, in fact, anticipated that before long the “Shah would become jealous, if not suspicious of his new prime minister.”[21] Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the shah’s decision to allow Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani to return to Iran in 1950 was part of the court’s attempt to undermine Razmara. Not long after his return, Kashani declared “that all Iranians should oppose this government,” which has come to power, he said, “to serve the foreigners.” The National Front had long opposed the general and other nationalist leaders, such as Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, and compared Razmara and his rise to power to Hitler and the Nazi seizure of the state.[22]

In the heat of these attacks, Razmara acted with cool aplomb. Even when faced with an incessant barrage of boos and invective in the Majlis, he exuded a serene sense of confidence. So tense was one meeting, so loud were the shouts against Razmara as a dictator and the puppet of the United States and Britain, that one of the deputies, Dr. Mossadeq, in his excitement, had an epileptic fit. Razmara, on the other hand, strolled to the podium with a self-confidence bordering on arrogance.

His was hardly an imposing figure. He was short and skinny, with a bony face and deep-set, piercing eyes. Unlike most generals, who look uncomfortable in civilian clothes, he cherished his finely tailored suits. He was hardworking, disciplined in his habits, and willing to use any and all tactics to achieve his ends.
In spite of his formidable foes, Britain and the United States were still hopeful that Razmara would succeed in his effort to pacify the political situation and solve the oil crisis. The new American ambassador to Iran, Henry Grady, arrived “with a team of economic experts and a reputation for having revitalized a distressed Greece.”23 It was widely believed that Grady had come to save Razmara.

Razmara could not get any of his bills passed, and word got to the British Embassy that “the shah had begun to oppose Razmara through the Majlis a week after his ministry began.”[24] In domestic politics, a bill decentralizing power and creating local councils— which was promised by the constitution but never materialized—faced stiff resistance in the Parliament. Mossadeq was one of the most vociferous opponents of the bill. Resistance on the oil issue was even greater. In fact, Razmara soon informed the British Embassy that Iraq was rumored to be getting a favorable new oil deal, and thus passing the Supplemental Agreement was no longer a possibility in any form.[25] It was then that the British company offered a new deal, granting Iran 50 percent of the profits.

In foreign policy, Razmara tried to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, signing a trade agreement and agreeing to the creation of a border commission to solve lingering territorial issues between the two countries. There were even rumors that he was about to give the Soviets a naval base in the south. At the same time, he made a number of gestures indicating his desire to distance himself from his Western supporters. They included his refusal to send Iranian military forces to fight in Korea under the UN flag. Another gesture in this vein was his decision to expel the top American advisor in the economic field.[26]

In order to consolidate his hold on power, Razmara began moving toward creating what he called a Social Democratic Party. The shah grew suspicious, but Razmara reassured him “that he had no particular interest in building up a political party.” To the British Embassy, however, he confided that he was discreetly behind the party and that “as long as the Prime Minister’s name was associated with the party, there was no doubt that mass support would be forthcoming.”[27] At the same time, he put trusted friends and relatives in key military and police command positions.

After a while, relations between the shah and Razmara soured even more. When the wedding of the shah and his new queen, Soraya, turned out to be a disaster in terms of planning and organization, people attributed the problems to Razmara’s desire to embarrass the shah.[28] According to Perron, one of the reasons the shah distrusted Razmara was that he had given an interview to “a weekly called ‘Young Asia’ in the same edition that . . . contained the statement that Reza Shah by his first wife ‘had had a son who had died, who might have been a useful man.’”[29] On more than one occasion, Razmara complained to the British Embassy, and apparently to the shah himself, about undue interference by members of the royal family in the work of the government. Of particular significance was the prime minister’s “first-class row” with Prince Abdolreza, who had interfered in matters pertaining to the seven-year economic plan.[30]

On March 7, 1951 (16 Esfand 1329)—eight days before the ominous Ides of March— there was a memorial in a mosque in the city center for a mullah who had just passed away. Razmara was keen on mending his relations with the clergy, particularly to spite Kashani,

who remained strident in his opposition. That morning, Assadollah Alam, a close friend of the shah and a member of Razmara’s cabinet, came to remind the prime minister that he must attend the memorial. Razmara demurred, saying that he had too much to do that day. Tehran was awash with rumors that he was about to unveil a new oil proposal that would grant Iran 50 percent of the profits. Alam insisted, and eventually convinced Razmara to attend the memorial. The two set out for the mosque.

As the prime minister exited his car, an assassin—a member of the Feda’yan-e Islam and a devotee of Ayatollah Kashani—was awaiting him. Unbeknownst to the general, Kashani had already issued a fatwa condemning him to death. Now the executor of that fatwa was waiting for the hurried general. No sooner had he entered the yard than three shots rang out. All the bullets hit Razmara in the head and neck. By the time he reached the hospital, he was dead. Rumors of the shah’s complicity in the assassination immediately started. The fact that Alam was questioned in the police investigation, and the fact that Sharif-Emami, a member of the Razmara cabinet and himself a future two-time prime minister, insists in his memoirs on Alam’s role in getting a reluctant Razmara to the mosque, have given the rumor an unusually long shelf-life.

Not long after Razmara’s death, the Majlis, at the behest of Kashani and with the support of deputies belonging to the National Front, passed an incredible resolution, pardoning the assassin and criticizing the slain prime minister. Razmara’s father, by then 105 years old, wrote a letter to the Senate, imploring them to reject the resolution. The letter is a fatherly lament for his fallen forty-nine-year-old son, and full of fulsome praise for his service to his country.[31] But his plea went for naught; the assassin was pardoned. An unintended consequence of Razmara’s death was to augment the suicidal depression of his brother-in-law, Sadeq Hedayat, who killed himself in Paris not long after the assassination.

In the 1970s, the shah’s decision to build up the Iranian army became a concern not just to policy makers around the world, but in the American popular imagination. In a dime novel that called itself, “The most erotic novel you’ll read this year, or any year,” the shah, helped by a sycophantic general and a motley crew of diplomats and agents, is involved in a conspiracy to take over the world.[1] And in an eerily prescient and best-selling novel, The Crash of ‘79, the same motif is handled in a more sober but still apocalyptic narrative style. Inside Iran, Hassan Toufanian was, after the shah himself, more than anyone else the face of this extravagant military buildup. For years he was the chief procurer for the multibillion-dollar shopping spree. His allegedly illicit fortune, the storied corruption in his procurements, his arrest on the eve of the revolution, and his subsequent escape have all taken on near-mythical dimensions.

Hassan Toufanian was born in Tehran, in 1913 (1292).[2] His father kept a small shop (he was a tailor who also sold fabric) and his mother, Ameneh, came from a devout, traditional, middle-class background. Her father was a mullah, and “she knew the whole of Qur’an by heart,” Toufanian mused late in life, while in exile. Betraying a surprising degree of religiosity himself, he went on to add, “I too knew it; even now, I can recite you parts of the Qur’an from the heart.”[3] They had a large family of five sons and two daughters. Hassan was the oldest. True to the classic typology of birth order as a determining element of character, as the firstborn he was “ambitious . . . achievement oriented . . . defensive” and he identified with authority.[4] He attended elementary and high school in Tehran where he was a mediocre student. He graduated from Dar al-Funun with an average of 13.7 (out of 20).[5] In talking about his high school years, Toufanian claims that he had immersed himself in the French language during the entire period, suggesting that, “in actual fact I had French culture.”[6]

After high school, he entered a “medical school” only to satisfy his father. In fact the school consisted of only four rooms, and lacked even the most basic tools and equipment. Before long, Toufanian left the school and gave up the idea of a future in medicine.[7] He decided on a life in the military, where he could pursue his passion for planes and for flying. He entered the military academy and in 1936 received his commission and was
picked to train as a pilot. A year later, he was licensed, but in those years the Iranian air force existed mostly on paper. He excelled as a student in the military academy, finishing seventh in his class of fifty-five.[8]

Not long after graduating from the academy, Toufanian married a woman named Shams-al Moluk. They had six children—four boys and two girls. According to his daily journals, he was close to his family and averse to any nightlife or gambling. He lived to work and to spend time with his family. Some of his colleagues saw him as “a human dynamo, serving constantly at 110 percent.” He saw himself as “perhaps the most capable officer in Iran.”9 He had no friends in the military and was seen as diffident and aloof, if not arrogant. As his power grew, so did his distance from his peers.

He served in a variety of positions in the air force. Before the war, he worked at an airplane-assembly factory managed by the British, where he was the test pilot. He was also involved in some of the skirmishes that took place between the Iranian army and different forces that had emerged in the chaos of the postwar years. During this period, Toufanian also spent eighteen months in England where he continued to train as a pilot. By the time he returned, the shah had become interested in flying and “Toufanian was one of his teachers.”[10] In 1950, he was picked to go to the United States for a two-year military training program. He graduated on December 12, 1952.[11] He had, in his own words, no role in the events of August 1953 but he was the pilot of one of the military planes that flew to welcome and escort the commercial flight that brought the shah back to Iran.[12]

For many years during the early part of his service, he taught at the Officers Academy. His expertise was in air warfare. His students remember him as “a good teacher, wellinformed, and willing to answer all inquiries from students.”[13] By the late 1950s, he was working in the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Office of Planning, and before long he was chosen to lead that office. It was during his tenure that Iran’s strategic defense posture was radically changed. Before 1959, the Soviet Union was assumed to be the main threat, and all defensive plans—“the Northern Tier” in the military parlance of the time—were intended to stop Soviet aggression. After the military coup in Iraq, the shah became convinced that henceforth the more serious threat would come from Iraq. Toufanian was at least partially responsible for drawing new defensive plans in accordance with this new threat analysis. It was in the course of working on these plans that he came into close contact with the shah, and their relationship grew closer in the 1960s and 1970s, during the shah’s big military buildup. One of the first signs of Toufanian’s rising star was that in 1961 he was named one of the shah’s special adjutants. These officers each spent one night a week at the court, outside the shah’s private quarters. Their chief responsibility was to awaken the shah if an emergency warranted it.

Toufanian’s next big step toward the pinnacle of power came in 1963, when the shah picked him as his “arms purchaser.”[14] For the next fifteen years, not only British, French, German, and American companies tried to keep him “happy,” but even the Soviets, according to the shah, “fell all over themselves to be gracious” to him.15 At the same time, according to numerous other reports—from personal memoirs and interviews to reports in the British Parliament and American Congress—these purchases were often tainted by stories of corruption. For example, according to General Alavi Kia, for many years the head of the SAVAK office in Germany, when Toufanian made a big purchase of German military equipment in 1965, he received kickbacks.[16] Shapur Reporter, the famed British Intelligence officer in Iran and for many years a close friend of Toufanian, was implicated in one of these controversies. Toufanian and the shah himself were also allegedly involved.[17]

Toufanian denied all allegations of wrongdoing, claiming that he never accepted a dime as “commission.” Ironically, while claiming innocence for himself, he pointed an accusing finger at the shah. He claimed that when he tried to stop others from receiving commissions, the shah overruled him, ordering him not to interfere with “common trade practices.” In an interview, he cited a multimillion-dollar telecommunication deal as an example. According to Toufanian, Princess Ashraf’s husband insisted on receiving a commission for the deal, and when Toufanian tried to stop it, the shah interfered on behalf of the husband. In the same interview, Toufanian admitted that in one case he gave a commission of sixty-five million dollars for the purchase of Dell computers to a man who was a close friend of the shah and of Assadollah Alam.[18]

Moreover, if Toufanian’s daily journals, which were published in Iran, are to be believed, as early as the early 1960s he had “saved enough, thanks to god” to be comfortable. On a trip to Europe in 1964, he reported buying his wife diamond rings and other jewelry and clothes, and himself a gold watch.19 On the eve of the revolution, when an American general visited Toufanian’s house, he was surprised by the opulence. To call it “ostentatious would be an understatement,” the general wrote, adding that the house was full of “breathtaking Persian rugs.”[20]

Toufanian’s responsibilities were not limited to being the “purchaser” for the shah. He was undersecretary in the Ministry of War, and more important, the director of Iran’s main military industrial corporation. He used his power to turn the new corporation into a model of efficient management. He hired promising officers and scientists to run the organization and its Research and Development Department. Some of those who worked for him there praise his managerial skills and his ability to get things done.[21] He championed the process of “reverse engineering” of missiles and anti-tank and other weapons. They also had licensing agreements with a number of big Western companies.

In this period, another of Toufanian’s many responsibilities was as chief liaison with Israel, particularly on military matters. In July 1977, he traveled to Israel and negotiated the details of what was called Project Flower. It was “a multi-billion dollar project to modify advanced surface to surface [Israeli Jericho] missiles.”[22] Another secret project, named Tzier, called for Iran to provide the funds and Israel the know-how to increase the range of

the Jericho missiles. Finally, according to reliable sources, “Israel told the Iranians that the missiles could be fitted with nuclear warheads.”[23] It was a measure of the size of these deals that the first down payment was $280 million, paid to Israel in 1978. Toufanian admitted his participation in these negotiations to the New York Times. On another occasion, he claimed that a few days before the revolution, he had a sack full of sensitive documents relating to this relationship that were to be taken to Israel for safety. “I believed the uprising was masterminded by the communists,” he said, “and I did not want them to get their hands on them.[24] The combination of these many important responsibilities made him, in the eyes of the American Embassy in Iran, one of the five most powerful generals in Iran. “He directly reports to the Shah,” the embassy reported, adding that he was responsible for procuring all supplies for the Iranian military.25 It is estimated that in the last eight years of the shah’s rule, total military purchases neared twenty billion dollars. In one case alone, when the Grumman Company was trying to sell Iran eighty new F-14s, Toufanian was offered a twenty-eight million dollar commission on that purchase alone.[26] Congressional hearings looked into the murky world of these military purchases.

Although corruption was surely one of the causes of the disgruntlement of the populace, Toufanian takes no responsibility for the revolution, taking comfort instead in the theory that it was all a big “communist conspiracy.” As tensions between the shah and his opponents increased in the months leading to the revolution, Toufanian almost lost his life when he was attacked near his office.[27] Opponents of the regime wrote threatening slogans on the walls around his house. Ultimately, he came to believe that his gardener’s son was working for the opposition and had been secretly taping his phone conversations.[28]

During those tumultuous days, Toufanian was, reluctantly, part of the group of military men meeting to find a solution to the crisis. He had nothing but contempt for his peers. When General Robert E. Huyser arrived in Tehran for his controversial mission— primarily to dissuade the military from organizing a coup against the government of Teymur Bakhtiyar—Toufanian was the first general with whom he met. To his surprise, Huyser found Toufanian dismayed and despairing. He was unhappy “because he felt that as the oldest, most senior, and perhaps most capable officer in Iran, he should have been made Minister of War.” He also confided in Huyser that he “felt he had been slighted by the Shah. He thought the Shah should have made him Prime Minister instead of Gholam Reza Azhari.”[29]

Toufanian’s remedy for ending the uprising was an iron fist. He claims that on more than one occasion, he offered the shah plans to use the military to take over the capital and quell the uprising. One of his plans called for taking over Tehran’s water and electricity pumps and using them as leverage against the people, but he gave up the idea when “they told me the pumps were all controlled by the communists.” He also thinks the country’s National Radio and Television Organization, lead by Reza Ghotbi, the queen’s cousin, was also controlled by the communists and thus only showed images detrimental to the shah. As the situation deteriorated, Toufanian grew despondent, even disheveled. His most important consideration was “clearly how to save his own neck.”[30]

Five days after the victory of the revolution, daily papers in Tehran announced his arrest.[31] The announcement appeared next to the image of nine members of the ancien régime, including several generals, moments before their execution. The regime was apparently interested in what he knew. According to Sadeq Khalkhali, known as the “hanging judge,” when the news of Toufanian’s arrest was reported in the papers, he was called by Ayatollah Khomeini and ordered to go immediately to the prison where Toufanian was being held. “He has many secrets,” Khomeini told his minion, and ordered him to make sure he was safely guarded. Khalkhali went to the prison and was told that Toufanian had been arrested, but within hours, Khalkhali was informed that there had been a mistake, and that Toufanian had not been arrested. Rumors claim that he was flown out of the prison in a daring daytime operation. According to some radical Islamists, Toufanian’s release was in fact the result of a secret “deal” signed by the more moderate wing of the new Islamic regime.[32]

After escaping from prison, Toufanian spent about nine months in Tehran, hiding in eight different houses. He grew a beard as a disguise. Sources in the Islamic Republic claim that he eventually left the country via the Turkish border. Eventually he ended up in the United States, where he lived the last years of his life—isolated from much of the exile community and keen on cleaning his tarnished image.

He was a kingmaker, a handsome charismatic soldier with the reputation of a bon vivant. He was known to have a taste for luxury, fancy cars, and beautiful women. He dressed impeccably and loved films. Humphrey Bogart was one of his favorite actors.[1]

He was one of the most decorated and reviled generals of the Iranian army in the twentieth century. The infamous Islamic terrorist group Feda’yan-e Islam, had plans to assassinate him.[2] At the height of his political life, when he was prime minister of a cabinet that had just overthrown the popular Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, his chief of staff and trusted aide de camp was a communist and member of the Tudeh Party’s secret organization of officers.[3]

He had victoriously fought many wars, but his ambition and his widespread reputation for having a following in the Iranian army made him suspect in the eyes of both Pahlavi kings. Although in August 1953 he saved the throne for the shah, he was himself exiled to Europe, where he lived the last years of his life in banishment.
He was born in 1893 (1272) in the village of Shervin, near the city of Hamadan. His was a relatively wealthy family, particularly close to the city’s governor.[4] His father’s name was Basir-Divan (the Visionary of the Court), and he was among the city’s eminent citizens. In the early part of the century, for much of the winter, cold and snow isolated the city from the outside world. The city’s benevolent grandees, including Basir-Divan, organized a de facto system of social welfare for the poor, buying ample supplies of coal and, when winter and want came, freely distributing it to the neediest families.[5] Upon his father’s death, a number of small villages—like Damag, Khorbandeh, and others—were left to the children. As the eldest boy, Fazlollah took care of the properties. Late in his own life, he directed his son, Aredeshir, to ensure that the rest of the family got their fair share of the paternal inheritance.[6]

The young Fazlollah went to school at Mozzafari and Alliance, both in Isfahan. He was never a very good student. But eventually his love of guns and of a soldier’s life, evident even in his youth, led him to the military. Hamadan, like most other urban centers of Iran at the early part of the century, was often prey to bandits and armed hooligans. Fazlollah was barely a teenager when he organized a posse to capture a bandit. He was shot and almost died as a result. Only the fortuitous arrival of a group of American missionaries, who happened to have a physician in their midst, saved his life. But seven of his ribs had to be removed, and for the rest of his life he suffered from a weak kidney.[7]

He was only thirteen when he first met Reza Shah, who was then a commander of the Cossack Brigade traveling through Hamadan on his way to the Kurdestan region. Reza Khan, as he was known then, stayed in Zahedi’s family home, and it was the beginning of a long relationship between a rapidly rising colonel and the aspiring young soldier.8 At the urging of Reza Khan, the young Fazlollah joined the Cossack Brigade. In pictures of the period, he cuts a dashing figure in full Cossack regalia. In those days, he still used his father’s title of Basir-Divan, in lieu of a surname. Before long, the family, like everyone else in the country, was forced to give up its title and opt for a family name. They chose Zahedi, which means piety.

As a young officer, he showed himself to be fearless and tactful. One of his first battles was against the forces loyal to Mirza Kuchek Khan Jangali and his Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran.[9] By 1922, Reza Khan had become the commander of the armed forces, and Zahedi was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, the youngest in the Iranian army. He was involved in several other important wars against forces in Iran—from the fight against Turkomans to the famous battle to defeat and arrest the army of Sheikh Khaz’al, who had turned the oil-rich province of Khuzestan into a veritable protectorate of the British. It was General Zahedi who, on the order of Reza Shah, finally arranged for the arrest of the Sheikh and his son. Zahedi invited Khaz’al to a party and, when the sheikh and his guards were inebriated, he had them arrested.[10]

After the battle for Khuzestan, Zahedi took his first trip to Europe. He traveled around leisurely for three months and picked up a smattering of French. He also had a command of Turkish. Upon his return, he was appointed commander of the Sixth Army, based in the province of Gilan. In that capacity, one of the enduring aspects of Zahedi’s life and character became evident. He arranged for a concert by Abolhassan Saba. All his life, Zahedi befriended artists, intellectuals, and journalists. His coterie of friends included such figures as Abbas Egbal Ashtiyani, a self-made scholar; Zabih Behruz, a fiercely nationalist historian; and Aliasgar Amirani, the controversial editor of the influential magazine Khandaniha.[11]

One of Reza Shah’s earliest policies as king was turning, often forcefully, the nomads of Iran into sedentary citizens of the new polity. The nomads fought back, and for several years the government was involved in military skirmishes with various armed tribes. During this period, Zahedi was named commander of the Iranian Gendarmerie, and quelling this uprising was part of his responsibilities. But Reza Shah grew suspicious of the way Zahedi handled the assignment and ordered him arrested.[12]

Zahedi’s fall from favor did not last long. After a short time, he was released and appointed to the even more important post of commander of Iran’s National Police. He lasted a year in his new post, which was among the most important positions in the Iranian armed forces. Then two prisoners, one a British spy named Lawrence, and the other a common criminal named Seyyed Farhad, escaped from the Gasre prison in Tehran. An angry Reza Shah demanded their capture within twenty-four hours. When the allotted time elapsed and the prisoners were still at large, the king not only angrily dismissed Zahedi from his post, but also—in one of his famed theatrical gestures—tore away the stars from Zahedi’s uniform and ordered him arrested. This time, he was in prison about a month. More important, for the first time in his life he had to look for a job outside the army.

He first opened a shoe store on Lale Zar Avenue, at the time the capital’s most fashionable street.[13] After a while, he entered into partnership with two other businessmen and created a company called Kazadma. The company became the representative of Ford Motor Company in Iran.[14] Zahedi also established a construction company called Zamaneh, in partnership with another general, Amianallah Jahanbani.15 These partnerships were important as the general’s first forays into the world of business, but also as the beginning of a problem that haunted him for the rest of his life. As his power grew, so did his reputation as a man who was dedicated to his many friends, but who had too many greedy and corrupt businessmen among his associates.

After a year-long hiatus from the army, Reza Shah recalled Zahedi, gave him back his stars and appointed him a special adjutant to the king. This time, too, his tenure was short. By then, Reza Shah was even more wary of charismatic officers and ambitious politicians. He again grew suspicious of Zahedi, who was both. Aware of the king’s distrust, Zahedi had no choice but to resign his post. He remained in the army but spent the next few years with perfunctory duties such as purchasing five hundred Hungarian horses for the cavalry.

The general had married in 1929. His wife was the daughter of Motamen-ol-Molk, one of the most respected Iranian statesmen of his generation. Some sources have accused Zahedi of hoping to climb the social latter rapidly by marrying into one of the most prominent families in the country.[16] It was a rocky marriage from the beginning. Husband and wife were both fiercely independent, and after they had two children together—a boy named Aredeshir and a girl called Homa—they separated. The parents had de facto joint custody of the children, for whom the estrangement was particularly difficult. Their mother went back to live with her father, whose house, though a salon of Iran’s top politicians and intellectuals, was steeped in every ritual of traditional Iranian households of the time. The father’s house, on the other hand, was as a bachelor’s den—more carefree, but at the same time bereft of the grandeur of the grandfather’s house.

Although Zahedi was known as a tough disciplinarian as a general, at home with his children he was tender and soft. He had a particularly affectionate relationship with his daughter, Homa. The children did not dare challenge his authority, but a stern look of displeasure was all that was required from him to tame his rowdy son, Aredeshir.

On the eve of the Allied invasion of Iran, Zahedi was back in favor. When the top brass of the Iranian army surrendered almost immediately, Zahedi was among the few who refused to sign the declaration that dissolved the army.

On the day Reza Shah abdicated, General Zahedi decided to leave Iran with him. He had a history of fighting the communists and the British, and as the two armies were converging on the city, it seemed wise for him to leave. He was joined by General Yazdanpanah and Aredeshir. The three left the capital on the same day that Reza Shah’s entourage left the city. They were to join the newly abdicated king in the city of Gom. As the general saw soldiers of the army roam the streets aimlessly, often out of uniform, frightened and emaciated, the son “saw [his] father’s tears for the first time. . . . ’Look at these people. They are so decent. Anywhere else in the world, these soldiers would be ransacking the city.’”[17]

Forty kilometers outside the city the generals met with Reza Shah, who was convinced that Zahedi should return to the capital. “I leave my son in your care,” Reza Shah is reported to have told the general. Thus it was that a new stage in Zahedi’s life began. He returned to Tehran and began almost two decades of a deeply complicated, eventful relationship with the new shah.

His first post in the postwar cabinet was as the commander of the Gendarmerie. His tenure lasted only a few months. The end of Reza Shah’s iron-fisted rule brought about a surge of political activities, and the armed rebellion of the nomadic tribes was one of the most serious. Zahedi had a history of fighting these nomads and was known to have close ties to some of the leaders, or khans, of the tribes. For all these reasons, he was appointed commander of the Ninth Army, stationed in Isfahan. The British and the Soviet authorities had another theory about why Zahedi was going to Isfahan.

The Allies had received intelligence that Nazi spies had secretly entered Iran and were on their way to join the nomadic tribes and together act as a “fifth column” for Germany. Indeed, the British believed that the plot included the “arrival [of] paratroops [and] German forces in North Persia.”[18] Zahedi was suspected of complicity with the German spies.

Some in the British government did not believe these charges against Zahedi. The British Consulate in Isfahan, for example, wrote that “there is now little likelihood of any coup d’etat” by Zahedi.” The only concrete evidence the British had against him was “the matter of the W/T transmitter which he is said to have.”19 The reports from the British Embassy make it clear that a member of Zahedi’s household was an agent of the British, or occasionally provided them with information. In early April, this person informed the British that the general was “hiding a German agent in one or another of his properties.”20 The Allies were determined to abort what they considered to be an elaborate German conspiracy and prepared a list of pro-German suspects. Eventually they rounded up a couple of hundred Iranians from all walks of life. They put some under arrest in Iran, and others they exiled. General Zahedi was one of the second group. Plans for his arrest were
not even discussed with the shah or the Iranian government. Only after he was arrested in a clock and dagger operation in Isfahan on December 5, 1941, was the Iranian government informed.

Aside from pro-German sympathies, there are indications that Zahedi and the British had a number of other confrontations during his tenure in Isfahan. From the distribution of bread to the treatment of Iranian officers by the British, there were constant run-ins between the general and the British consulate in the city. Furthermore, Aredeshir Zahedi has suggested that the fact that his father hid two Iraqi nationalists who had fought the British and sought safe haven in Iran and this fact added to the history of bad blood between his father and the British.

The arrest of Zahedi did not, according to the British, lead to any disturbances in the city of Isfahan. There were faint words of protest from the shah and the Iranian government, and the American Embassy and the State Department expressed “deep concern about arrest of General Zahedi.”[21] In response, the British prepared “talking points” to be used by diplomats in response to such criticism. The notes suggest that “Zahedi is a born intriguer and is notorious for his anti-Allied attitude. . . . He is known to have harbored German agents. . . . His past record gives no ground for any confidence in his integrity.”[22] At the same time, they believed Zahedi to be an “intriguer, and womanizer and gambler” but “not without ability.”[23] The British provided the same set of answers to the Americans as they did to the shah and to the Persian government. Nevertheless, from their confidential correspondence, it is clear that as a result of these pressures, they decided to stop the arrests and afterward proceed only after they received the approval of the American Embassy in Tehran. But for Zahedi, the protest and the change of policy came too late. He was whisked out of Iran to Palestine. The story of the planning and implementation of his arrest by a special unit of the British army became the subject of a memoir by Fitzroy MacLean, the commander of the British unit that actually attacked the general’s house and put him under arrest.

General Zahedi spent the next three years in exile. Not long after his arrest, the British, much to Zahedi’s consternation, convinced the Iranian army to announce the general’s retirement.24 After several months, using a Druse family, the general smuggled a brief note to his son, reassuring him of his safety.25 When Zahedi finally returned home, it did not take him long to convince the shah to rescind the retirement order and return him to active duty. When the nomadic tribes of the south rose up against the government again, General Zahedi was entrusted with the task of quelling the uprising. He used a combination of force and finesse to bring peace to the region and was appointed governor of the Fars region. During this period, he was approached on several occasions by Nasser Qhashghai, of the Qhashghai tribe, and asked to cooperate in a coup against the shah. On each occasion, the general, according to Nasser Khan, refused, suggesting, “We need this young man. With him we can do much good for Iran.”[26]

As tensions within the Iranian political scene increased, Zahedi emerged more and more as a pivotal figure. His next appointment after the governorship was the command of the Iranian National Police, then a seat in the newly founded Senate as one of the senators appointed by the shah. In February 1951, he was named minister of the interior in Hoseyn Ala’s cabinet. During this time, Dr. Mossadeq and his allies won seats to the Parliament. According to Aredeshir, the fact that his father held a fair election endeared him to Mossadeq but was the subject of snide remarks by the shah, who suggested, “It was your father who brought these guys to power.”[27]

Ala’s cabinet, as expected, lasted only about two months. Mossadeq had in the meantime succeeded in having the Parliament ratify his proposed bill to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. On the wave of nationalist euphoria following that success, he was appointed prime minister and asked Zahedi to remain at the crucial post in the Interior Ministry. The general agreed and thus began a period of tense cooperation and conflict between these two towering and charismatic figures. The first stage of cooperation came to an end in the aftermath of Averell Harriman’s eventful trip to Iran and his aborted attempt to mediate between Iran and Britain. The communist Tudeh Party pulled out all stops in organizing violent and bloody demonstrations against his presence. A number of people were killed, and Mossadeq, under pressure from his radical allies, asked that the commander of the National Police be fired. Zahedi, in his capacity as minister of the interior, had the police under his jurisdiction. He had himself commanded the police on the day of demonstrations, he said, and all responsibility was his. Instead of firing the police chief, as Mossadeq wished, Zahedi resigned.

After his resignation, Zahedi began meeting regularly with a group of retired officers and generals. The government saw them as a cabal of conspirators out to organize a coup. In September 1952, a member of the group, General Hejazi, was arrested by the government on charges of conspiring with a foreign government. Evidence from the American and British archives show that as early as July 31, 1952, the Americans and the British had jointly decided that only a coup against Mossadeq could bring about desired changes, and that the only “army officers who seemed to be best fitted for leadership in effecting coup d’etat were General Zahedi and Genera Hejazi.”28 The same report goes on to add that of the two, “Zahedi sympathized with moderates of National Front.” Both governments decided that “neither British nor American government should” appear to participate or encourage such a coup.[29]

The Mossadeq government also named Zahedi as co-conspirator in the “foreign intrigues.” General Zahedi took to the podium in the Senate and attacked the government for hypocrisy and ineptitude and declared that he had no part in any intrigue. He talked of his relationship with Mossadeq and how it had deteriorated, and he ended by calling on the prime minister to come to his senses and save the country from the precipice he had brought it to.[30]

After the speech, Zahedi became a focal point of opposition to the government of Mossadeq. He enjoyed immunity as a member of the Senate, but before long, Mossadeq arranged for its dissolution. On February 26, 1953, Zahedi, no longer a senator, was arrested. Three weeks later he was released and decided to go into hiding. Relations between the shah and Dr. Mossadeq were by then beyond repair. Furthermore, the new Eisenhower administration was convinced that attempts to mediate between Iran and Britain were futile. They decided to sign on to the long-simmering British plan to organize a military coup against the Mossadeq government. The events of February 28, 1953, when thousands of people showed up at the palace and successfully stopped the shah from leaving Iran, convinced the Americans that that “the institution of the Crown may have more popular backing than was expected.”31 The fact that the once-popular Mossadeq had lost much popular support further convinced the Americans and the British that he was now vulnerable. At the same time, there were efforts in the Parliament to muster enough votes to dismiss the cabinet and bring in a new prime minister. The American Embassy reported that General Zahedi “wishes to become prime minister, and his adherents are active in Majlis. It is unlikely that he will succeed.”[32]

One major obstacle in his way was the fact that the shah, according to the American Embassy in Tehran, “did not fully trust Zahedi.”33 Events later confirmed their view. Even Ala, then court minister, opined to the embassy that, “Zahedi was not completely trustworthy.”[34] But by April 1953, as the situation deteriorated and the shah was left with few viable options, his attitude toward General Zahedi changed, and for the first time, the court began to regard “Zahedi’s candidacy with favor.”[35]

About this time, Zahedi, usually through his son, began to meet secretly with the shah to plan their next move. As the court was now under the constant surveillance of forces loyal to Mossadeq, great care was taken to keep these meetings covert. At the same time, the British and American governments were trying to force the shah to act. They wanted him to sign orders dismissing Mossadeq and appointing Zahedi in his place. In May 30, 1953, for example, Loy Henderson, the American ambassador in Iran, met with the shah and “told him I would like frank statement his attitude re General Zahedi. He said although General not intellectual giant, nevertheless he would be acceptable under three conditions.” He “would come into office through legal, parliamentary means” and the United States as well as Britain “be prepared to give new government emergency financial as well as massive economic aid.”36 The fact that Mossadeq had, after a referendum, dismissed the Parliament, gave the shah the authority to issue a recess farman, dismiss Mossadeq and his cabinet, and appoint General Zahedi prime minister. The shah signed the orders on August 13, 1953. After some initial delays and mishaps, the order dismissing Mossadeq was delivered on the night of August 16, 1953.

What happened in the next three days is one of the most contested issues in modern Iranian history. It is clear that after the first two days, both the CIA station in Tehran and the general himself assumed that the effort had been defeated. Zahedi was planning to leave the city and go to the province of Khermanshah to join forces with Colonel Teymur Bakhtiyar and begin an armed struggle against the Mossadeq government. The CIA ordered its officers to leave Iran forthwith. But on the August 19, the situation changed. Crowds appeared on the streets chanting slogans in favor of the shah. To Dr. Mossadeq and his followers, the dismissal, the August 19 attack on his house, and the taking over of the government offices and radio station by forces loyal to the shah were part of an infamous coup masterminded by the CIA and the British. To the royalists, August 19 was a day of national uprising against the increasingly inept government of Dr. Mossadeq. The real coup, they claim, was Mossadeq’s refusal to accept the fully legal dismissal order signed by the sovereign.

By two-thirty in the afternoon of the nineteenth, General Zahedi came out of hiding and delivered a speech on the radio, announcing himself the only legitimate prime minister. By four he was “master of the situation” in the country. Almost immediately, despite the advice of his elder advisors who suggested that he should keep the shah waiting for at least a few days—thus undermining his ability to reassert his authority on his return37—he sent a telegram inviting the shah back to Iran. The shah was in Rome, planning for a life of retirement as a gentleman farmer in America.

Not long after this important telegram, Zahedi sent another, this time to President Eisenhower. Iran, he wrote, “needs immediate financial aid to emerge from a state of economic and financial chaos.” Eisenhower wrote back, congratulating Zahedi for his victory and promising that his “request will receive our sympathetic consideration.”[38]

To the surprise of the political cognoscenti, there were few generals in the cabinet. The majority were politicians. The American government immediately offered grants and aid to help the new cabinet to cope with a dire economic situation. At the same time, Zahedi had to face the fact that the shah was unhappy with the cabinet and almost immediately after his return began trying to push Zahedi out of office. There were rumors of tension between the two over control of the army. The shah had let Zahedi know that there would be no “differences [with the shah] or even rumors of differences if Zahedi would realize he had nothing to do with the army.” Another sticking point was the appointment of Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj to head the Plan Organization. Abolgassem Panahi, a friend of Zahedi, had been the director, and the general made every effort to save his friend. Eventually, Ebtehaj was appointed to replace Panahi; before long, the prime minister and the increasingly powerful head of the Plan Organization were not on speaking terms.

By far the most pressing and sensitive issue facing the new cabinet was the question of oil. After some negotiations, Iran signed an agreement with a consortium of oil companies. The agreement was severely criticized by members of the opposition as a great betrayal of Iran’s national interests. There were rumors of a five million dollar bribe paid to Ali Amini and Zahedi, the former as the chief of Iran’s delegation and the latter as the
prime minister. Both Amin and Zahedi have either directly or through their sons denied the allegation. Even the Iranian architects of the new agreement conceded that it was far from a favorable deal for Iran. They were negotiating from a position of weakness, they said, and had to agree to unfavorable terms.

All these small and big differences between the shah and Zahedi, and the fact that the king was, like his father, inherently wary of charismatic and ambitious officers, led to an early attempt by the shah to sack the man who had saved his throne. American and British embassies forcefully dissuaded the shah from such a move. For his part, Zahedi had big plans. He hoped to use a carrot and stick approach. A week after the coup, for example, he told the American ambassador, “He hoped [to] put hundred thousand to work on roads . . . also necessary begin construction immediately thousands houses.”39 At the same time, he appointed Colonel Bakhtiyar military governor of Tehran, and his units began a crackdown on members of the opposition. What has remained in the collective memory of Iranian history is more stick and less carrot.

Another point of contention between the shah and Zahedi was the fate of Mossadeq. Less than two days after the shah’s victory, Dr. Mossadeq turned himself in. The headquarters of the new government had been set up at the Officers Club, and General Zahedi made every effort to show deference and politeness to the fallen prime minister. Zahedi was also adamantly opposed to the idea of putting Mossadeq on trial. He was in favor of exiling him to his estate outside Tehran. The shah, however, insisted on having a trial, and the result was the apotheosis of Mossadeq as the nationalist leader unjustly pushed out of power by a coup.

From late 1954, the shah had created a cabal of trusted aides—including Hoseyn Ala, Assadollah Alam, and Jahanguir Tafazolli—and entrusted them with preparing the ground for Zahedi’s dismissal. By mid-March 1955, the shah finally let it be known unambiguously that he wanted the general to resign. Zahedi was equally unequivocal that he would not abide by the shah’s wishes. In fact, on March 23, he sent for General Teymur Bakhtiyar and told him,

he supposed General Bakhtiyar knew that his relations with the Shah were not good and that it was all the fault of that wretched fellow Ebtehaj: he did not see why he should lose his job after all that he had done for his country and he could not understand why the Shah wanted to get rid of him . . . he was damned if he would go gracefully. If he were thrown out he would not go to Europe but to South America, where he would be able to speak his mind about the present rulers of Persia. He added that it would be perfectly open for him to invoke the assistance of foreigners in order to maintain himself in power.40

By early April, after several unsuccessful attempts to solicit the general’s resignation, the shah finally dispatched Alam to reason with the prime minister. Ultimately he succeeded. Alam worked out the details of the letter of resignation, as well as the shah’s response.[41] Zahedi finally resigned on April 7, 1955, citing ill health as the reason. The American Embassy reported that Zahedi left believing that “his own return to power in not too distant future will be necessary” and thus “conducted himself in loyal and dignified manner at departure.” The same report contends that Zahedi’s devotion “to certain cronies among ministers who were neither particularly effective nor interested in the Shah’s program,” along with his “opposition to Plan Director Ebtehaj,” contributed to his demise.[42]

Only hours after submitting his resignation, Zahedi was asked to leave Iran, and he was put on a plane. Lest the rift become a sore point and used by the opposition, the general, in spite of his initial resistance and refusal to accept any job in the government, was appointed ambassador at large. The job was ceremonial. The general tried to go back to Iran as little as possible, but he did make a special trip to attend his son’s wedding to the shah’s daughter, Princess Shahnaz.

Zahedi lived his last years isolated and disheartened in Europe. He grew increasingly concerned about the future of the throne in Iran. His hoped-for return to power never materialized. The shah had begun to consolidate power; a strong and charismatic prime minister who insisted that the shah should reign, not rule, was the last thing he wanted. General Zahedi made his home in the city of Montreux, in a villa called La Rose.
In documents about the Zahedi family published by the Islamic Republic, there are letters from the general to his son that show his character and concerns in the last years of his life in exile and in his earlier periods of power and glory. He emerges as a father deeply concerned about his son—about his education, his mastery of the English and Persian languages, his penmanship, and his profligate ways. When his son asks him what subject he should pursue in college, the general writes, “choose a field according to your own taste; in other words, choose a field that is necessary but to your liking.”43 At the same time, in another letter, he writes, “I want you to be like a soldier; a soldier is absolutely obedient in the face of his commander . . . if you want to be my loving son, you have to be absolutely obedient.”44 He invites his son to forgo using profanities in his letters and in his daily discourse. He tried to educate Aredeshir in the history of Iran, asking Zabih Behruz, the famed historian, to send them some material on the subject.[45]

On the day of his departure from Iran, he wrote to his son in a lamenting tone about leaving Tehran “with a world of sorrow . . . you should not get too mad about this. I swear to god that the trip has been a blessing, and it was good, and it was god’s wish. God is always with us. The hand of fortune worked in my favor.” He goes on to tell his son to accept any post they offer him, adding, “don’t stay alone, but also be careful. People have no honor. Be very, very careful. You and I have no friend or ally other than god. You are now the light of the Zahedi family.”[46] In another letter he wrote, “I have lived my life . . . it was necessary and preferred that I step aside . . . those who had escaped during the Mossadeq days, or had sided with him, are now surrounding the Shah. I am worried that they might in future betray the king. I don’t think I shall ever return to Iran again. I will leave what there is left of my life, finances permitting, away from the world of politics. . . . You must stay and preserve the family name.”[47]

On September 2, 1963, General Zahedi died in Montreux. He had been sick for some time. Friends who visited him shortly before his death wrote of his loneliness and his deteriorating mood and condition. His body was carried to Iran after a short pilgrimage to the cities of Karbala and Najaf. He was buried outside Tehran.

Abbreviations

EGA East German Stasi Archive, Berlin

FIS Foundation for Iranian Studies, Bethesda, Md., Oral History Program, www.fis-iran.org/
index.php/oralhistory

FRUS U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.:
GPO). Individual volumes are cited by date and volume number. See www.state.gov/r/
pa/ho/frus/ for information about specific volumes.

IOHP Harvard University Iranian Oral History Project, Cambridge, Mass., www.fas.harvard
.edu/~iohp/

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
National Security Archive, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C. Public Records Office, London

Foreword
1. The Ellis Island Medal of Honor is awarded annually to more than one hundred American citizens, including many immigrants, for outstanding citizenship, individual achievement, and cultural unity. More than twenty Iranian Americans have been honored within the past five years.

Introduction
1. William St. Clair, “The Biographer as Archeologist,” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St. Clair (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 232.
2. Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), 1.
3. Javier Marias, Written Lives, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (New York: New Directions Pub., 2007). The book, originally in Spanish, consists of minibiographies of writers and their eccentricities.
4. Hamilton, Biography, 3.
5. Sir Eldon has recently published his memoirs. See Sir Eldon Griffiths, Turbulent Iran: Recol-
lections, Revelations, and a Plan for Peace (Santa Ana: Seven Locks Press, 2007).

Politics
Purposes Mistook: Politics in Iran, 1941–1979

1. For a discussion of Iranian society’s approach to individualism, see Nader Ahmadi and Fereshteh Ahmadi, Iranian Islam: The Concept of the Individual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 124–35.
2. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).
3. For many years, Freedom House has been rating, on a scale of one to seven, countries of the world based on the degree of freedom the citizens of each country enjoy. Seven is the worst “grade” a country can get. Oil-rich countries in the Middle East have been afforded the inglorious six, often teetering on the verge of seven. See Freedom House Report (New York: Freedom House, 2003).
4. In spite of these startling facts, little of scholarly merit has been written about the subject. The very welcome exception to this tragic circumstance is the work of Dr. Amir Arsalan Afkhami, who is a physician and also a trained historian. See Amir A. Afkhami, “Disease and Water Supply: The Case of Cholera in 19th Century Iran,” Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies, Bulletin Series, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, no. 103 (1998): 205–20; and Afkhami, “Epidemics and the Emergence of an International Sanitary Policy in Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19, no. 1 (1999): 122–36.
5. For a discussion of Mossadeq’s views on this topic, and the views of the British, see Jalal Matini, “Mossadeq va rah ahan” [Mossadeq and the Railroad], Iranshenasi, no. 2, new period (Summer 2003): 20.
6. For a pioneering account of Gorat-al-ayn’s life and thoughts, and her influence, see Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1992). For a scholarly study of the Babi movement in general, see Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989). For an attempt to place the rise of the Bahai faith in the historical context of the rise of modernity in Middle East, see Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998). For Nakhjavani’s novel, see Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, La Femme Qui Lisait Trop, trans. Christine Le Bœuf (Paris: Proche, 2007).
7. In a vengeful narrative, Mohammad Gholi Majd has tried to chronicle this aspect of Reza Shah’s rule. He has hand-picked the most damaging reports he could retrieve in the American archives to claim that the bulk of Iran’s oil revenue, specifically twenty to thirty million pounds, were transferred to Reza Shah’s personal accounts. The author’s wrath against the Pahlavi dynasty has unfortunately clouded the narrative. See Mohammad Gholi Majd, Great Britain and Reza Shah: The Plunder of Iran, 1921–1941 (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2001), 269.
8. British archives leave no doubt about the fact that the government knew the truth when it made those false claims.
9. For an extended and careful study of the Anglo-Soviet ultimatum and the German response, see F. Eshragi, “Anglo-Soviet Occupation of Iran in August 1941,” Middle East Studies 20, no. 1 (Jan. 1984): 27–52.
10. On numerous occasions, the shah told British and American diplomats about this conspiracy.
11. Hitherto, Forughi’s role has been well known, but Ala’s crucial contribution has not been discussed. Ann Lambton, an eminent British scholar of Iran who served in the British Embassy during the war, told me about Ala’s role. Ann Lambton, interview with author, Berwick-on-Tweed, England, Aug. 14, 2002.
12. For a discussion of British complaints, see Sir Reader Bullard, Letters from Tehran: A British Ambassador in World War II Persia, ed. E. C. Hodgkin (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1991).
13. The Public Record Office (PRO) archive documents are an embarrassing example of colonial haughtiness. The language that Bullard and the Soviet government use in this correspondence reeks of arrogance.
14. James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 15.
15. Missionaries first arrived in 1830; diplomatic relations between the two countries commenced in 1850.
16. Reza Shah to FDR, Aug. 25, 1941, in The United States and Iran: A Documentary History, ed. Alexander and Allan Nanes (New York: Univ. Publications of America, Aletheia Books, 1980): 77–78.
17. Ibid., 80.
18. For a discussion of Hurley’s report, and its importance in U.S.-Iranian relations, see my “Hurley’s Dreams” in Hoover Digest (Fall 2003).
19. While working at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Kennan published his famous essay in Foreign Affairs, July 1947, under the pseudonym “X.” It is hard to imagine an essay that had more enduring influence on U.S. foreign policy for the second half of the twentieth century. On a few occasions, Kennan was himself engaged in negotiating with the Soviets on the question of Iran.
20. There has been much controversy about whether Truman actually gave Stalin an “ultimatum”—in diplomacy a very specific kind of action—or simply made a strong threat. Furthermore, political scientists and historians have been arguing about the degree to which this “ultimatum” was the real reason for Soviet withdrawal. See Kuross A. Samii, “Truman Against Stalin in Iran: A Tale of Three Messages,” Middle Eastern Studies 23 (Summer 1987): 95–107; see also James A. Thorpe, “Truman’s Ultimatum to Stalin on the 1946 Azerbaijan Crisis: The Making of a Myth,” Journal of Politics 40, no. 1 (Feb. 1978): 188–95.
21. Julius Caesar, 1.2.206–7.
22. Much has been written on this subject. See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
23. For a brief account of the political parties at the time, see L. P. Elwell-Sutton, “Political Parties in Iran: 1941–1948,” Middle East Journal 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1949): 45–62.
NotestoPages11–16 | 511
512 | Notes to Pages 17–27
24. American and British archives provide fascinating clues to how Razmara was elected and to the role Great Britain and the United States played in the affair. It is no exaggeration to claim that the general first went to the British embassy for a “job interview” and only later, when he had “passed,” was the idea of his premiership floated.
25. An interesting account of these tensions has been provided by Ayatollah Montazeri in Khaterat-e Ayatollah Montazeri [Memoirs of Ayatollah Montazeri] (Los Angeles: Ketab, 2001).
26. In many documents in the PRO and the American Archives, we can detect the shah’s clear disgruntlement with Mossadeq. As he often repeats, for political reasons, there was no choice but to support Mossadeq in the early months.
27. CIA, “National Intelligence Estimate, Iran,” NA, 1953.
28. A journalist’s rendition of the events of August 1953, written from the perspective of a supporter of Mossadeq, can be found in Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2003).
29. Both documents in British and American archives, and Aredeshir Zahedi in interviews with the author, indicate that General Zahedi was opposed to the idea of putting Mossadeq on trial.
30. Jahanguir Tafazolli, Khaterat-e Jahanguir-e Tafazolli [Memoirs of Jahanguir Tafazolli], ed. Ya’goub Tavakoli (Tehran: Sureh, 1376/1997), 96–97.
31. Sir Denis Wright, interviewed by author, Haden Ham, England, Oct. 14, 2002.
32. Gassem Lajevardi, phone interview by author, Mar. 15, 2004.
33. For a detailed account of these episodes in the history of Iranian and Israeli relations, see
Meir Ezri,Yadnameh, ed. Bozorg Omid, trans. Ebrahim Hakhami (Jerusalem: Meir Ezri, 2000). Ezri was Israel’s ambassador to Iran. A copy of the book was provided to me courtesy of the author. He kindly agreed to be interviewed on two occasions for this book.
34. The dean of such scholars is easily Ann Lambton, whose works on the agrarian question are still standard texts in the area. See Ann Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 1969).
35. Someone on the staff of Senator Robert Kennedy prepared a report on Iran focusing on the rise of this class of technocrats. It is called “The New Man and the Challenge to American Policy in Iran,” 1967, Senator Robert F. Kennedy Papers, JFK.
36. For an account of Shari’ati’s life and the creation of the Ershad, see Ali Rahnama, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
37. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “The Shah and U.S.,” no. 560, 1, NSA.
38. On the celebrations and their secular themes, and on the values of Acta Iranica, I have interviewed Shojadin Shafa, generally thought to have played a crucial role in articulating the historical necessity of such celebrations. Shojadin Shafa, phone interview by author, June 12, 2003.
39. In a report, the CIA writes of the shah’s “lending binge” and goes on to list all the countries that had received money from the shah. See CIA, “The Shah’s Lending Binge,” 1977, NSA.
40. In several interviews in the course of the last two years, Samii has provided me with details of these negotiations, and the shah’s concerns about developing “institutions” for transition. The shah sometimes used the French word, Samii remembers, and sometimes the English.
41. For a discussion of the likely source of this idea, and the role people like Afkhami, Alimard, Goreishi, and Ganji played in the development of this idea, see my Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2000), 275–77.
42. For example, Ali Ebrahimi, and his partner, Akbar Lari, had been contemplating starting a modern brick-making factory. There were in those days serious shortages of bricks and a black market had developed for them. But the government’s new guidelines on prices would have been impossible to meet. The plans were scrapped. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Feb. 12, 2002, and New York, Oct. 20, 2003.
43. Gassem Lajevardi, phone interview by author, Mar. 12, 2002.
44. Maryam Panahi (Ansari), interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 2, 2002.
45. The letter has never been published. Two people, Alinagi Alikhani and Alam’s daughter,
Roudabeh, told me of its existence and its content.
46. Mohsen Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Repub-
lic (Boulder. Colo.: Westview, 1994), 97.
47. Amuzegar asked Ahmad Goreishi to intervene on his behalf and ask Hoveyda and Sabeti to
stop their agitations. They denied any hand in the affair. Ahmad Goreishi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., Mar. 12, 2003.
48. Nassir Assar, interviewed by author, Washington D.C., Sept. 2002. He was for many years the government’s point man in dealing with the clergy and the head of the Department of Religious Endowment.
49. He wrote about this claim in a letter to Rahavard—a quarterly published in Los Angeles and devoted to publishing, among other things, letters and memoirs of members of the ancien régime. Rahavard 11, no. 42 (Summer and Fall 1996): 244–48.
50. The American embassy reports a meeting between Shari’atmadari’s son-in-law and the head of SAVAK, General Moghadam, in which the ayatollah is quoted as favoring the appointment of either Ali Amini or Sharif-Emami. See U.S. Embassy, Tehran, “Increased Religious Pressure on the Government,” Secret Cable no. 07890, 19/78/08, NSA.
51. Nahavandi, in his Carnets Secrets: Chute et Mort du Shah (Paris: Osmondes, 2003), 135–40, writes of this report and the urgency of the decision to declare martial law.
52. For an account of the cabinet meeting, and the media’s mysterious delay, see Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets, 125–35.
53. Hamlet, 5.2.385–90.
54. Hassanali Mehran, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 2003.
55. At least three independent sources have confirmed to me that the two were actually respon-
sible for writing the text and convincing the shah of the wisdom of broadcasting it.
56. William Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: Norton, 1981). He begins the book by recount-
ing his surprise at being chosen to serve in Iran, and his lack of familiarity with the situation.
57. For the translation of the letter, see Political Digest, Sept. 14, 1978, 5.
58. The text of the letter is alluded to in an overview of U.S.-Iranian relations that I found in
the National Security Archives. It is not clear who authored this important text. Whoever it was had apparently absolute clearance to see and read any and all documents in the files of different governmental agencies. The report is called “The Evolution of U.S.-Iranian Relations, 1941–1980.”

POLITICS AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Hoseyn Ala
1. Ann Lambton, interviewed by author, Berwick on Tweed, Aug. 14, 2002. 2. Sir Denis Wright, “The Memoirs of Sir Denis Wright, 1911–1971,” 395. 3. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035.
4. Issa Sadiq, Chehel Goftar [Forty Talks] (Tehran, 1352/1973), 49–50.
5. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035. 6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Dr. Fereydun Ala kindly shared some of those cartoons with me in an interview in Birmingham, England, Aug. 17, 2004.
10. Dr. Fereydun Ala, interviewed by author, Birmingham, England, Aug. 17, 2004.
11. Sadiq, Chehel Goftar, 51.
12. Abolhassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 20, 1981.
13. Ahmad Aramesh, Khaterate Siyasi Ahmad Aramesh [Political Memoirs of Ahmad Aramesh],
ed. Golamhoseyn Mirza Saleh (Tehran: Ney, 1369/1990), 197.
14. Peter Avery, Modern Iran (New York: Praeger, 1965), 267.
15. Quoted in Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 248.
16. Dr. Fereydun Ala, interviewed by author, Birmingham, England, Aug. 17, 2004.
17. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035.
18. Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani was a notary and handled all the financial transactions for the
Ala family. See his “Ala’s Will,” in Keyhan (London), 16 Khordad 1380/June 6, 2001, 10. Some of the details of the will and how it was prepared are questioned by Ala’s son, Dr. Fereydun. Dr. Fereydun Ala, interviewed by author, Birmingham, England, Aug. 17, 2004.
19. Wright, “Memoirs,” 292.
20. Dr. Gassem Ghani, Yadashthaye Doctor Gassem Ghani [Journals], vol. 11 (London, 1984), 157.
21. FRUS, 1945, vol. 8, 461.
22. Ibid., 473.
23. Sir Denis Wright, “Report of Trip to Iran, May 13, 1959.” The report was apparently pre-
pared for the Foreign Office and Sir Denis kindly provided me with a copy. 24. FRUS, 1955–57, vol. 12, 822.
25. Ibid., 823.
26. Ibid., 489.
27. Manuchehre Egbal and General Hassan Arfa’ were the other two. 28. Wright, “Memoirs,” 314.
29. Ibid., 315.
30. Denis Wright’s report of the meeting where the Russian ties were discussed is fascinating and worth quoting at length: “On Thursday 29 of January, at precisely 10:10, I was ushered into the Shah’s study. . . . He told me of his disenchantment with the Baghdad Pact allies; the Turks were getting far more from it that he. . . . ’You treat me more like a kept-woman than a wife,’ he complained. To which I remember replying that kept women sometimes earned fur coats if they behaved themselves . . . tears came to my eyes when, towards the end of our conversation I begged the Shah not to sign with the Russian and prophesized that if he did so, he would eventually lose his throne,” Wright, “Memoirs,” 314–15.
31. “Private Report, Ala to His Majesty, 19 Dey 1337/Jan. 9, 1959,” Tarikhe Moaser-e Iran [Journal of Contemporary History of Iran] (Summer 1376/1997): 145–47.
32. Wright, “Memoirs,” 344.
33. Ibid., 396.
34. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 20, 1981, Paris.
35. A copy of the letter was provided to me courtesy of Sir Denis Wright.

Assadollah Alam
1. Alam is generally considered the first person to have used the term “house-born slave” (golame khanezad) to refer to himself, when corresponding with the shah, or when referring to himself in a public address, if the shah was present.
2. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002. Alinaghi Alikhani, in his introduction to Alam’s Diaries, also recounts this story.
3. The original plan was for six volumes. After the publication of the sixth volume, the editor announced that another volume, of newly found entries, will soon be published.
4. Sadrealdin Elahi compares Alam’s Diaries with the classic book of memoirs by Etemad-alSaltaneh. See Sadrealdin Elahi, Iran Nameh 14, no. 4 (Fall 1969): 559–69. The article is aptly called “Reflections of a Century in Two Diaries.”
5. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224, 7.
6. Assadollah Alam, Yadashthaye Alam [The Diaries of Assadollah Alam], vol. 1 (Bethesda, Md.: Ibex, 1992), 20–21.
7. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224, 50.
8. Different kinds of sources, each reliable in its own right, have indicated this reason for Alam’s longevity. Sir Denis Wright, for many years England’s ambassador to Iran and a close friend of Alam’s, and Badri Ajoudani, an astute observer of the Iranian political scene and a fierce fan of the shah, both told me so. Jamshid Amuzegar, in a letter to the editor of Rahavard, a monthly magazine of the Iranian diaspora, claimed the shah told him that Alam’s loyalties were with the oil companies. The letter incurred the ire of Alam’s friends, like Mohammad Baheri. See Rahavard and Keyhan.
9. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
10. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224, 7.
11. Alikhani, in his introduction to the first volume of the Diaries, mentions the episode and
offers contextual excuses for it.
NotestoPages41–47 | 515
516 | Notes to Pages 48–55
12. Mahmood Toloui, Bazigarane Assre Pahlavi [Players of the Pahlavi Era], vol. 1 (Tehran: Javidan, 1376/1987), 444.
13. The text of his question and answer is provided in Toloui, Bazigarane Assre Pahlavi, 445–46.
14. Ja’far Sharif-Emami, IOHP, published as a book in Iran and in the diaspora. See SharifEmami, Memoirs.
15. Tafazolli, Khaterat-e Jahanguir-e Tafazolli, 94.
16. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 31.
17. Ibid., 95–97.
18. CIA, “Current Intelligence Memorandum,” July 18, 1962, NA. 19. Tehran to State Dept., July 20, 1962, NA.
20. U.S. Embassy, Tehran, to State Dept., July 19, 1962, NA. 21. “The New Iranian Government,” 23 July 1962, NA.
22. Holmes to State Dept., July 19, 1962, 6 pm, NA.
23. “The New Iranian Government,” July 23, 1962, NA.
24. “CD Jackson, Overseas Report, Iran,” Aug. 7, 1962, JFK Archives.
25. I have heard of Alam’s demeanor in those days from several sources, including Alinaghi Alikhani, Ahmad Goreishi, and Mohammad Baheri. Goreishi told me of the drinking episode.
26. FRUS, 1961–63, vol. 18, 610–12.
27. See Milani, Persian Sphinx, 156–70. I have provided a lengthy account of these deliberations and Alam’s role in them.
28. Assadolah Alam, “Daneshgahe Shiraz” [University of Shiraz] (Yagma, Tir and Mordad 1347/July and August 1968): 224–28, 288–91.
29. Hushang Nahavandi was named chancellor after Alam, and he told me about the missing funds. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
30. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 47.
31. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7,2002.
32. Roudabeh Alam informed me of their existence; all my efforts to have a glance at them
came to naught.
33. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 128.
34. Details of the affair were provided to me by Roudabeh Alam in an interview in London,
Oct. 2, 2002.
35. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
36. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 268–69.
37. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 2, 2002.
38. Roudabeh Alam, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
39. I was provided with copies of the court hearing giving details of the case. The German
company also tried to use its connection with the exiled shah to convince the family to return the money. It all came to naught. See Milani, Persian Sphinx.
40. I have heard two versions of the meeting, from two persons present. Abdolreza Ansari, interviewed by author, Paris, July 2004, and Shojaeddin Shafa, interviewed by author, August 15, 2002.

Alinaghi Alikhani
1. General Alavi Kia, who was one of the founders of SAVAK, shared with me, in the course of more than thirty interviews over two years, detailed accounts of the organization’s creation.
2. For an account of Amir Kabir’s rise to power, see Fereydoon Adamiyat, Amir Kabir va Iran [Iran and Amir Kabir] (Tehran: Kharazmi, 1969).
3. Alinaghi Alikhani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
4. A small wine-growing village some one hundred miles outside Tehran, Takestan has some historic significance. Reza Khan, on his way to conquer the capital and orchestrate his 1921 coup with Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i, stayed in the village for a while. The house where he stayed was, before the revolution, turned into a museum. After the revolution, all evidence of Reza Shah’s stay was destroyed.
5. Alinaghi Alikhani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
6. Ibid.
7. I was told about these activities of SAVAK by Parviz Sabeti, the “high-ranking security of-
ficial,” in a phone interview on Sept. 3, 2004.
8. The text of the report was published after the revolution in Iran. See Tarikhe Moaser-e Iran
[Journal of Contemporary History of Iran], no. 9:146–56.
9. Letter to John F. Kennedy from the Shah of Iran, Jan. 26, 1961, JFK.
10. “Call upon You by General Teymur Bakhtiyar, Memorandum Prepared for the President
by Secretary Rusk,” undated, JFK.
11. Parviz Sabeti told me that SAVAK was fully supportive of his appointment.
12. Alinaghi Alikhani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. Several people, from Ahmad Goreishi to Alikhani himself, told me about the comment by
the shah.
15. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2003.
16. Alinaghi Alikhani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
17. Members of the opposition, ostensibly working at the Central Bank, published several lists
indicating how much money was sent out of Iran. The first of these lists was, according to reliable sources from the bank, more or less accurate, but an immediate surge of false lists undermined the authority of the original list as well. Hamid Bagshomali, who had worked at the Central Bank, told me about the original list.
18. Alinaghi Alikhani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.

Ali Amini
1. Tafazolli, Khaterat-e Jahanguir-e Tafazolli, 96–97.
2. See Dr. Ali Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat [Pseudo-Memoirs] (Tehran: Zarin, 1376/1998), vol. 1, 71. Behzadi had once been a supporter of Amini. In his own words, he turned the popular magazine he edited—Sepid-o Siyah—into a semiofficial “organ for Amini.” He feels bitter about what he thinks is Amini’s betrayal of trust and friendship. He calls his erstwhile friend the most “opportunistic” politician of his time.
3. Many sources have quoted these words. Some attribute it to Moddaress, the famous cleric of the Reza Shah era.
4. Iraj Amini, A Biography of Dr. Ali Amini, unpublished manuscript. Mr. Amini kindly provided me an early draft of the book. The quote is from pages 22–24.
5. Different sources have suggested that when he finally received the royal decree to present his cabinet, he had no list of suitable candidates to fill different portfolios. His son, Iraj Amini, told me this incredible fact. Iraj Amini, interviewed by author, Paris, July 30, 2003. It also appears in Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 85.
6. Amini, Dr. Ali Amini, 10–22.
7. There are conflicting reports on why Amini was chosen minister of finance. The shah believed that the choice had been forced on General Zahedi by the Americans. According to Aredeshir Zahedi, his father, General Fazlollah Zahedi, originally had someone else in mind. A jeep was sent to bring the chosen minister to the Officer’s Club, the temporary seat of government. When the first candidate could not be found, they searched for another. The second choice was Ali Amini, whose mother had called earlier—at five in the morning, in fact—to ask for a job for her son. “I hope you don’t forget Ali,” she is reported to have said. For an account of that morning, I have relied on interview with Aredeshir Zahedi, August 8, 2004, Montreux. Iraj Amini dismisses the story and suggests that neither the Americans nor his grandmother had anything to do with his father’s appointment to the key Ministry of Finance. Iraj Amini, interviewed by author, Paris, July 30, 2003.
8. “The Ambassador in Iran (Henderson) to the Department of State, August 23, 1953,” in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 763.
9. “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Tehran, February 28, 1958,” in FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 541.
10. General Hassan Alavi Kia, who at the time worked with Gharani and was later named deputy head of SAVAK indicates that Gharani surely met with Amini when he came for his training tour to America. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Aug. 12, 2003.
11. “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Tehran, February 28, 1958,” in FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1993), 540–541.
12. Amini, Dr. Ali Amini, 121.
13. Doctor Amini be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Dr. Amini According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Center for Archival Research of the Ministry of Intelligence, 1379/2000), 624.
14. According to his son, Iraj, Arsanjani was one of the few people who addressed Amini in the first person, as Ali. He often reminded Amini that given a chance, “this little man, the shah, is going to get rid of us both.” Iraj Amini, interviwed by author, Paris, July 30, 2003.
15. Doctor Amini be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 769.
16. He had met with Khalil Maleki (ibid., 210) and leaders of the National Front (ibid., 189). On several occasions, he also met religious figures.
17. Doctor Amini be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 299.
18. Tehran, American Embassy to State Dept., “Ex–Prime Minister Ali Amini Reenters the Political Lists,” 8/3/78, doc. no. 1462, NSA.
19. In an obituary of Amini, Rahavard, a journal usually sympathetic to the figures from the Pahlavi Iran, has some harsh words for Amini. It refers to the $100,000 monthly stipend. See Rahavard, no. 22 (1371/Winter 1992), 316. Officials of the Islamic regime have claimed the stipend to be $180,000 each month. See Doctor Amini be Ravayate, 45.
20. Iraj Amini, interviewed by author, Paris, July 30, 2003.

Jamshid Amuzegar
1. Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Amuzegar According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran, 1382/2003), 34–77.
2. Maryam Panahi Ansary, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 8, 2002.
3. Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 376.
4. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 160.
5. Nasir Assar was, for many years, responsible for dispensing the stipend. In interviews with
me he talked about the small sum, and the refusal of radical mullahs to take it.
6. The essay first appeared in Rahavard and then was republished in Keyhan (London).
7. Taraneh Zolfagari, correspondence with author. On numerous occasions, she has spoken
of his kindness and gentle demeanor in glowing terms. She has known him for many years and is a family friend.
8. Farhad Masudi, Pirouziy-e Labkhand [Victory of Laughter] (Tehran: Etela’at, 1354/1975), 67. 9. Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, a.
10. Masud Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar [From Seyyed to Bakhtiyar] (Tehran,
1369/2000), 721.
11. Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, C and D.
12. Ibid., 142.
13. Dr. Bagher Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran [Biographies of Contempo-
rary Iran’s Military and Political Elite] (Tehran: Elm, 1380/2000) vol. 1, 30–35.
14. “An Assessment of the Internal Political Situation,” May 3, 1960, doc. 390, NSA.
15. “A Letter from Dr. Jamshid Amuzegar,” Rahavard, no. 34 (Summer and Fall 1373/1994):
271–75.
16. Details of this episode were provided to me in interviews and letters from Ali Rezai, who
was intimately involved in the events himself.
17. Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar, 720.
Hushang Ansary
1. Robert Cohen, and Joe Donehue, “Probe of Funds for Torricelli,” Newark Star Ledger, Feb. 2, 2001.
2. Susan Schmidt, “Donations to Torricelli Reimbursed, Two Say,” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2001.
3. Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia to Bakhtiyar, 646. Behnoud is one of the most prolific and powerful journalists of his generation. His close ties to Hoveyda afforded him a rare glance into the corridors of the Pahlavi court.
4. Ibid., 530.
5. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, Khaterat [Memoirs], vol. 2 (Tehran: Elmi, 1375/1996), 556.
6. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 148–81.
7. See the chapter on General Hoseyn Fardust in this book.
8. Hoseyn Fardust, Khaterate Hoseyn Fardust [Memoirs], vol. 1 (Tehran: Etela’at, 1370/1981),
326.
9. Many sources, from Parviz Sabeti to Hassan Nemazi, whose family was the partner, have
told me details of this deal. See also Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 530–36.
10. Hassan Nemazi, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 10, 2003.
11. Not much of substance was said in that meeting. For a memorandum of conversation for
the meeting, see FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 376–78.
12. “State Dept. to the Embassy in Iran,” Nov. 23, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 563.
13. “U.S. Embassy in Tehran to State,” July 22, 1976, in Asnade Laney-e Jasusi [Documents
from the Den of Spies], vol. 7 (Tehran, n.d.), 121.
14. On his role in mediating between the shah and the senator, see FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22,
370 –71.
15. Ibid., 464–69
16. Ibid., 518.
17. “Iranian Internal-Miscellaneous,” British Embassy to FO, PRO, FO 248/1696.
18. CIA, Elites and the Distribution of Power in Iran, Feb. 1976, doc. no. 10122, NSA.
19. Maryam Panahi told me of her close relationship with Alam.
20. State Dept., “New Hoveyda Cabinet,” Sept. 1971, NSA.
21. U.S. Embassy in Tehran to State Dept., Jan. 5, 1972, no. 618, NSA. Ansary delivered a tough
message from the shah to the United States, encouraging them to press the oil companies to engage in more serious negotiations.
22. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, vol. 4, 112.
23. “The Shah’s Lending Binge,” Dec. 1974, no. 689, NSA.
24. William Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), 147–48. 25. James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 204.
26. Shawcross, Shah’s Last Ride, 147.
27. Bill, Eagle and the Lion, 165–75.
28. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 337.
29. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984.
30. Maryam Panahi, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 8, 2002.
31. Bill, Eagle and the Lion, 224.
32. Ibid., 165.
33. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 148–81.
34. Ansary has been called one of Taheri’s “sentimental favorites.” See Ghani, Iran and the
West, 365. A new edition of the book has recently been published by Mage Publishers. 35. Ibid., 352–53.
36. Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia to Bakhtiyar, 802.
37. Allan Dodds Frank, “Creative Financing,” Forbes, June 2, 1986.
38. The $700 million figure is given in a brief biography he seems to have provided to the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. In the prospectus prepared for stockholders and the Securities Commission, the estimated valued of his shares is even more.

Hassan Arsanjani
1. Nouraldin Arsanjani, Dr. Arsanjani dar Ayneye Zaman [Dr. Arsanjani in the Mirror of Time] (Tehran, 1379/2000), 24–26.
2. Ibid., 29.
3. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 1, 18.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.; the same story, with the copy of the court order changing the birth date is recounted
in Arsanjani, Dr. Arsanjani dar Ayneye Zaman, 39.
6. Mohammad Goli Majd, Resistance to the Shah: Landowners and the Ulama in Iran (Gaines-
ville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2000), 28.
7. For an account of the coup, see the chapter on Gharani in this book, and also Esfandiyar
Bozorgmehr, Caravan-e Omr [The Caravan of Life] (Tehran, 1372/1993). 8. “Arsanjani Again Stirs the Political Pot,” Oct. 5, 1964, NA.
9. Majd, Resistance to the Shah, 343.
10. Ibid., 358.
11. Ann K. Lambton, The Persian Land Reform, 1962–1966 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 63–64. 12. Majd, Resistance to the Shah, 73.
13. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 102.
14. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 1, 40–41.
15. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 106.
16. “Arsanjani Again Stirs the Political Pot,” Oct. 5, 1964, NA.
17. Ibid.
18. “Recent Events Which Did Not Take Place,” June 8, 1964, NA. 19. “Arsanjani Again Stirs the Political Pot,” NA.
20. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 108
21. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 2, 47–48.
22. Arsanjani, Dr. Arsanjani dar Ayneye Zaman, 216.
23. Arsanjani, Dr. Arsanjani dar Ayneye Zaman, 194–95.
24. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 108.

Safi Asfia
1. Ehsan Naragi was in prison with Asfia, and he told me about the latter’s behavior in prison. Naragi, interviewed author, Paris, Oct. 19, 2002.
2. Asfia is described in the Web site for the Zirakzadeh Science Foundation. See www.iranonline.com/zsf.
NotestoPages84–92 | 521
522 | Notes to Pages 92–98
3. I called him in Paris, after one of his close friends, Mohammedi, told me Asfia had agreed to an interview.
4. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 5, The Harvest Years, 1959–1965 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 65.
5. Ibid., 79.
6. Ibid., 204.
7. Ibid., 394.
8. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1.
9. Lilienthal, Journals, 79.
10. Gholam Reza Afkhami, ed., Ideology, Process, and Politics in Iran’s Development Planning
(Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1999), 174.
11. Iran Almanac, 1971 (Tehran, 1972) 749.
12. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 129.
13. Ibid.
14. Iran Almanac, 749.
15. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 20, 1981.
16. Nahavandi, Iran, 315.
17. Gholam Reza Afkhami, ed., Khuzistan’s Development (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for
Iranian Studies, 1994), 78. 18. Ibid.
19. Many people told me about this role for Asfia. For example, Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2002.
20. Mostafa Alamuti, Bazigaran-e Siyasi [Political Players], vol. 4 (London: Book Press, 1997), 348.

Hamid Ashraf
1. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Sept. 2, 2004.
2. On numerous occasions, including in his last book, the shah writes that these radical groups invariably rose up when the shah was engaged in a battle of wills with the oil companies (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Answer to History [New York: Stein and Day, 1980]). At other times, he accused these groups of being stooges of the communist world.
3. On the early history of the organization, and the role of Ashraf in it, see Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 62–64.
4. Ahmad Ashraf, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 28, 2002.
5. Farokh Negahdar, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 4, 2002. He also described him in similar terms in a eulogy he read on the twentieth anniversary of his death. See Farokh Negahdar, Democracy for Iran: 1990–1997 (London, 1997), 146–149.
6. Farokh Negahdar, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 4, 2002.
7. Ashraf expounds this theory in one of the few works that he authored; see Hamid Ashraf, Jambandiyeh Se-Saleh [Lessons of Three Years], n.p., n.d., 9.
8. Ashraf offers an early history of the organization in Jambandiyeh Se-Saleh (6). Needless to say, Ashraf makes no mention of his own name at the time.
9. I was told about the details of the escape attempt by Farokh Negahdar during my interview with him, London, Oct. 4, 2002.
10. Ibid.
11. In the chapter on Bakhtiyar, I will discuss at some length the manner of his death. I was told of the shah’s “obsession” with Bakhtiyar by Parviz Sabeti in my phone interview with him, Sept. 3, 2004. 12. The action is described in great detail in a pamphlet called E’dame Engelabi Abbas Shahriyari [The Revolutionary Execution of Abbas Shahriyari]. The rest of the long title of the pamphlet
is “The man with a thousand faces, the biggest spy and a chief advisor to the SAVAK.” 13. Negahdar, Democracy For Iran, 146.
14. Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, 65.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. Ibid., 67.
17. Ashraf, Jambandiyeh Se-Saleh, 51–52.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Ibid., 27.
20. Ibid., 107.
21. The account of his death was provide by Parviz Sabeti who, at the time, led the third divi-
sion of SAVAK in charge of internal security.

Shapur Bakhtiyar
1. Mahshid Amirshahi, Dar Hazar [At Home] (Los Angeles: Shirkat-i Kitab, 1987), 102.
2. Another heroic character in her novel is Mostafa. He bears an unmistakable resemblance to Mustafa Rahimi—one of the unsung heroes of Iran. An honest, erudite lawyer and judge and a careful translator of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, on the eve of the revolution he wrote a brilliant essay in Ayandegan. It was called “Why I Am Against the Islamic Republic.” Few came to his support at the time, while in subsequent years, the wrath of the new regime combined with the constant sniping of the orthodox Left—who despised his defense of social democracy—took its toll on his sensitive, melancholy soul. Bouts of depression all but made it impossible for him to continue his creative life. He died a broken man, a victim of the gradual, uncounted grind of brutalities of the quotidian in revolutionary times.
3. Omid-Iran, 8 Mordad 1358/1980, 2.
4. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 170.
5. Farah Pahlavi, An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah (New York: Miramax, 2004),
291–93.
6. France Bakhtiyar, interview, May 4, 2006. The interview was conducted in Palo Alto, Calif.,
by Ms. Mahin Afkhami on behalf of the author.
7. Jebheye Meli be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye
Vezarate Etela’at, 1379/2000), 126.
NotestoPages99–105 | 523
524 | Notes to Pages 106–13
8. For an account of these pressures, see Milani, Persian Sphinx.
9. Shapur Bakhtiyar, IOHP, Mar. 1984.
10. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
11. Shapur Bakhtiyar, Sio Haft Rooz ba’d az Sio Haft Sal [Thirty-seven Days after Thirty-seven
Years] (Los Angeles, 2002), 127.
12. An agent of SAVAK was present in a leadership meeting in 1963 and filed a report of
what went on. There it refers to Bakhtiyar’s frank discussion. See Jebheye Meli be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 376.
13. Documents of the American Embassy and the White House make clear the growing frustration of the American government with the National Front. See Milani, Persian Sphinx.
14. In The Persian Sphinx, there is an extensive discussion of Hoveyda’s role in these changes. 15. Bakhtiyar, Sio Haft Rooz. 132.
16. Majid A’lam, interviewed by author, San Diego, Jan. 5, 2001.
17. Bakhtiyar, Sio Haft Rooz, 67.
18. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Apr. 12, 2006.

Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani
1. Saidi-Sirjani, Afsaneha, (Tehran, n.d.), 3.
2. Khalil Maleki, Khaterat-e Siyasiy-e Khalil Maleki [The Political Memoir of Khalil Maleki], with an introduction by Homa Katouzian (Tehran: Enteshar, 1358/1979), 80.
3. CIA, “Supplementary Biographic Data: Mozafar Bagai,” Feb. 3, 1953, NA.
4. For example, see Golam-Reza Mosavar Rahmani, Kohne Sarbaz [Old Soldier] (Tehran, 1355), 287–88. Khatibi’s confessions are quoted at length there. See also “Hezbe Zahmatkeshan va Gatle Afshar-Tous” [The Toilers Party and the Murder of Afshar-Tous], in Omid-e Iran, no. 1011 (Khordad 1358/June 21, 1979: 44–45.
5. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
6. For an account of the murder and the role of Baqa’i and other National Front leaders, see Jalal Matini,Negahi be Karnameye Siyasiye Doctor Mohammad Mossadeq [A Glance at the Political Career of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq] (Los Angeles: Sherkat-e Kitab, 2005), particularly 220–222.
7. In a text called “Biography of Dr. Baghai,” offered in lieu of introduction to what was called “Baqa’i’s Political Testament,” his birthday is given as 1908. See Ali Mohammad Sadiqi, Vasiyatnamey-e Siyasiy-e Dr. Mozaffar Baqa’i [Dr. Baqa’i’s Political Testament], (Tehran, 1365/1986), 12.
8. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
9. Maleki and his supporters think of Sepahbodi as a shady figure with dubious connections and think that he played a key role in every major decision that Baqa’i made. For example, see Maleki, Khaterat-e Siyasi, 90–100.
10. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
11. For a brief account of Ebn-e Meskawayh’s life, see Farhang-e Moin, vol. 5 (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1371/1992).
12. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986. 13. Ibid.
14. Mansur Rafizadeh, Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal (New York: Morrow, 1987), 41–42. He was a member of SAVAK, working in the Iranian Embassy in Washington under the shah. His controversial memoirs, with its outlandish claims about the king’s sexual activities, made him a pariah among the royalists. He was, from early youth to his days as a SAVAK agent, a supporter of Baqa’i.
15. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
16. Ibid.
17. According to General Alavi Kia, one time deputy director of SAVAK, in the late 1940s
Baqa’i had introduced to the shah someone who would inform the court about the most recent and secret developments in the Tudeh Party. General Alavi Kia was the officer ordered by the shah to meet regularly with the informer and receive his reports, which were then conveyed to the court through General Hassan Pakravan. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Apr. 12, 2005.
18. The translation of the party program is quoted from Ervand Ebrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 256.
19. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
20. CIA, “Supplementary Biographic Data: Mozaffar Baqa’i,” Feb. 3, 1953, NA.
21. Two volumes of documents published by the Islamic Republic of Iran, called “Baqa’i Ac-
cording to SAVAK Documents,” show clearly that Baqa’i’s circle was infiltrated with regime agents who reported his every move.
22. Hamid Seyfzadeh, a fervent fan of Dr. Baqa’i, in a brief introduction to a pirated version of the Harvard Iranian Oral History interview with Baqa’i, quotes Baqa’i about the hundred letters. See Khaterat-e Mozafar-e Baqa’i-Kermani (Tehran: Nashre Elm, 1384/2005), 25.
23. Bagai be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Baqa’i According to SAVAK Documents], vol. 2 (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1383/2004), 124–39.
24. The second volume of SAVAK documents, covering this period, is filled with these analyses. See Baqai be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK vol. 2.
25. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986. 26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Feb. 9, 2006.
30. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986
31. Mozaffar Baqa’i, Anke Goft Na [He Who Said No] (n.p., 1984). 32. Bagai be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, vol. 2, 6.

Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi
1. For an extensive discussion of her role, see Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1992). There is a detailed chapter on her work.
2. For an account of her machinations, See Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997).
NotestoPages114–19 | 525
526 | Notes to Pages 120–26
3. For an account of the shah’s caving in to the demands of the clergy, see Seyyed Mohammad Hoseyn Manzur-al Ajdad, Marjaiyat dar Arseye Ejtema va Siyasat [The Ayatollahs in the Social and Political Arena] (Tehran: Shirazeh, 1379/2000), 232–313.
4. In the oral history interview, Dowlatshahi gives her birth date as 1919. At the end of the book, the editors provide a biographical sketch of her, and there, inexplicably, they give her date of birth as 1917. There is also a discrepancy between the two narratives about her city of birth. She talks of Tehran as her birthplace and waxes poetic about the city and her neighborhood. The sketch offers her birthplace as Isfahan. See Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi, Women, State, and Society in Iran, ed. Gholan Reza Afkhami (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 2002), 181.
5. Ibid., 6–8.
6. Ibid., 16–19.
7. Ibid., 29.
8. Dowlatshahi, Women, State, and Society, 45.
9. See the section on Maryam in the chapter on the Farmanfarma’ian family in this book.
10. Dowlatshahi, Women, State, and Society, 55–75.
11. Assadollah Alam, in his Diaries, refers to these rumors and to the reality that there was in
fact a woman, who had spread the rumor that the shah would soon marry her. The queen was upset by the rumors, and eventually the young woman was married off to someone else; the wedding was announced in the newspapers to quell the rumors.
12. In a letter she wrote to Mostafa Alamouti, she corrects some claims he made in a biographical sketch he wrote about the Dowlatshahi family. The letter appeared in Keyhan (London) and was reprinted in Alamouti’s book. See Mostafa Alamouti, Namdaran-e Moaser Iran [Iran’s Contemporary Elite], vol. 2 (London: Book Press, 1378/1998), 355–59.
13. Dowlatshahi, Women, State, and Society, 182.
Dr. Manuchehre Egbal
1. Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Dept., “Studies in Political Dynamics in Iran,” Secret Intelligent Report no. 13, no. 603, 41, NSA.
2. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 2, 15–16.
3. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 166.
4. Manuchehre Egbal be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Egbal According to SAVAK Documents]
(Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1379/2000), 447–50. 5. Ibid., 48.
6. Ibid., 47–55.
7. Rise and Fall of the Pahlavi Monarchy, vol. 2 (Tehran, 1370/1991), 331–34.
8. Manuchehre Egbal be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 79.
9. Ibid.
10. Numerous accounts of this episode has been provided. For example, see Manuchehre Egbal
be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, and Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 2, 16–17. 11. Manuchehre Egbal be Ravayate Asnade
SAVAK, 130.
12. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, 25–27, vol. 2.
13. Ibid., 29.
14. Ibid., 30.
15. Sir Denis Wright shared his memoirs with me, and in them, as well as in several interviews,
he referred to these instances.
16. “State Dept. to US Embassy in Iran,” Text of president’s letter, in FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 628. 17. In his memoirs Sir Denis Wright has provided an extensive account of his meeting with the
shah on that occasion.
18. Manuchehre Egbal be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 130.
19. Ibid., 82.
20. Egbal’s brother, Khosrow, reported the content of the letter and the shah’s response to the
American Embassy in Tehran at the time. See U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Memorandum of Conversation, October 11, 1978,” no. 1586, NSA.

The Entezam Brothers
1. On more than one occasion, Alam makes a reference to the events of that day, the shah’s orders, and his subsequent reaction. He believed that the unrest was organized by the British and Americans and was intended to remove him from office.
2. FRUS, 1961–19, vol. 17, 610–12.
3. Nahavandi, Iran, 55–56.
4. Ibid., 56–57.
5. For an account of this episode and the relationship between Hoveyda and Entezam, see
Milani, Persian Sphinx, 97–134.
6. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224, 27.
7. Ibid.
8. Nasrullah Entezam, Khaterate Nasrullah Entezam [Memoirs], ed. Mohammad Reza Abbasi
and Behrooz Teyrani (Tehran: Sazman Asnade Melli, 1371/1992).
9. “Report on Political Events of 1943,” quoted in Encyclopedia Iranica, s.v. “Entezam.”
10. FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 1989), 211.
11. Ibid., 142.
12. One source talks of his “sartorial elegance.” See Encyclopedia Iranica, s.v. “Entezam.”
13. In preparing The Persian Sphinx, I interviewed Horan.
14. Abdullah Entezam, Encyclopedia Iranica, 462.
15. FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 1989), 382.
16. Ibid., 841–44.
17. FRUS, 1955–57, vol. 12, 775–76.
18. Ibid., 728–29.
19. Abdullah Entezam, “Letter,” Kavosh, no. 1 (Aug. 1960).
20. Abdullah Entezam, “A New Perspective on Mysticism and Sufism,” in Religion and Politics
in Modern Iran, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 160.
21. Sir Denis Wright, Entezam’s obituary in the Times, Apr. 23, 1983.

Akbar Etemad
1. General Alavi Kia provided information on the city’s composition, and the role of the Etemad family, in the course of numerous interviews. The general was also a native of Hamadan.
2. Akbar Etemad, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2004. 3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Akbar Etemad, “Curriculum Vitae.” Courtesy of Akbar Etemad.
7. Akbar Etemad, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2004.
8. Ibid.
9. Zahra Shadman worked at the institute and provided me with detailed information about
its work. Zahra Shadman, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C. I spoke to her on several occasions.
10. Akbar Etemad, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2004.
11. Ibid.
12. Etemad offers an account of these early days in his oral history interview for the FIS. See
Gholam Reza Afkhami, ed., Akbar Etemad: Iran’s Atomic Energy Program: Mission, Structure, Politics (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1997).
13. In his FIS oral history interview, as well as his interview with me, he provided an account of the meeting.
14. Akbar Etemad, correspondence with Mark Johnson, Aug. 16, 2001, 2. The letter is eight pages long and describes in some detail the early phase of Iran’s nuclear program. He kindly provided me with a copy of the letter.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. See Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, vol. 5, 360. The translation is mine.
17. Akbar Etemad, correspondence with Mark Johnson, Aug. 16, 2001, 4.

Reza Fallah
1. “Representative List of Intermediaries and Influence Peddlers,” Annex D, in Asnade Laney-e Jasusi, vol. 17, 67.
2. Ezri, Yadnameh, 245.
3. Ibid.
4. Gougouli Fallah, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 5, 2002.
5. Ibid.
6. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 2, 1131.
7. Manuchehre Egbal be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 325.
8. Ahmad Zirakzadeh, Khaterat [Memoirs], ed. Abolhassan Ziazarifi and Dr. Khosrow Saidi
(Tehran: Niloufar, 1376/1997), 325–28.
9. For the story of Marc Rich and his adventures in Iran and elsewhere see, Craig A. Copetas,
Metal Men: Marc Rich and the 10-Billion-Dollar Scam (New York: Perennial Library, 1986), 150.
10. Meir, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 245.
11. Many people who had seen him in the last months of his life talk of the tragic but clear fact of his drug abuse.
12. Jack Anderson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Forge, 1999). Parts of the book were excerpted in the magazine Meridian.
13. Meir, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 245. 14. New York Times, Dec. 16, 1982.

Aziz, Khodadad, Maryam, and Sattareh Farmanfarma’ian
1. For example, see Manucher Farmanfarma’ian and Roxanne Farmanfarma’ian, Blood and Oil: A Prince’s Memoir of Iran, from the Shah to the Ayatollah (New York: Random House, 2005).
2. Aziz Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 12, 2002.
3. Sattereh Farmanfarma’ian with Dona Munker, Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution (New York: Crown, 1992), 31. When it was first published, I wrote a review of the book for the San Francisco Chronicle.
4. Ibid., 19.
5. Ibid.
6. Some of the responses were simply written out of anger, others, like the one written by
Hafez, used the rigors of scholarship to refute the blemish on his father’s reputation.
7. The text of the letter is published in Mehrmah Farmanfarma’ian (Rais), Zendeginamy-e Abdolhussein Farmanfarma’ian [Biography] (Tehran: Tus, 1377/1998) vol. 1, 314–15. The author
kindly provided me a copy of the book.
8. One son, Manuchehre, became a high-ranking member of the Iranian National Iranian
Oil Company and was sent by Iran as a delegate to the first meetings of OPEC. With the help of his daughter, a successful journalist in California, he published a memoir of his life called Blood and Oil. Another son, Gobad, was one of the country’s most successful contractors, while other children were eminent in banking, industry, academia, and the bureaucracy. It is hard, arguably impossible, to find another family with as many accomplished children.
9. Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, London, June 17, 2002.
10. Ibid.
11. Farmanfarmain (Rais), Zendeginamy-e Abdolhussein Farmanfarma’ian, vol. 1, 359–37,
appendix.
12. Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, London, June 17, 2002.
13. Ibid.
14. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 116.
15. Ibid., 128.
16. Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, letter to editor, Rahavard, no. 51 (1378/1999), 338.
17. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 137.
18. Ibid., 149.
19. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda was the epitome of this generation. See Milani, Persian Sphinx, for
his life and times.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, London, June 17, 2002. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 208.
Aziz Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 12, 2002.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
He first wrote his views in the form of a letter to the editor of Enclyclopedia Iranica. He
kindly provided me with a copy of the letter.
29. Aziz Farmanfarma’ian, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 12, 2002. 30. Ibid.

Mohammad-Ali Forughi
1. In his journals, Etemad-al-Saltaneh refers to Forughi as a friend and employee. He also discusses the process whereby he successfully petitioned the king for a title for Forughi. See Etemad-alSaltaneh, Rooznamey-e Khaterat [Daily Journals], ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1345/1965). On getting the title and what it means, see Daily Journals, 1088. On numerous other pages there are references to their friendship and the nature of their work together.
2. Ibid., 291.
3. E. Khajenouri, Mardan-e Khod-Sakhteh [Self-Made Men] (Tehran: Javidan, 1325/1946), 141–42.
4. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, Magalat-e Foroughi [Collected Essays] (Tehran: Zawar, 1353/ 1974), 3.
5. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” 1940, PRO, FO 371/24382.
6. Bamdad, Tarikhe Rejale Iran, vol. 3, 450.
7. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, “Tarikh-cheye Hogoug” [History of Law], Ta’lim va Tarbiyat, no.
10 (Dey 1315/1926): 717–18. 8. Ibid., 725.
9. Esmail Rain, Faramoushkhaneh va Faramasonery dar Iran [Freemasons in Iran], vol. 2 (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1378/1998), 49–50.
10. Clive to Henderson, May 5, 1931, PRO, FO 371/153337.
11. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, “Iran dar 1919” [Iran in 1919], Rahnamay-e Ketab, nos. 10–12 (Dey–Bahman 1351/1972): 832.
12. Ibid., 839.
13. Forughi, Magalat-e Foroughi, vol. 2, 231–36.
14. Habib Yagmai, “Yadboode Zoka-al Mulk Forughi” [In Memory of Forughi], Yagma, no. 9
(Azar 1350/1971): 546–47.
15. Abolfazle Gassemi, “Siyasat-Madarane Iran dar Asnad Mahramaneye Vezerat-e Omour
Kharejeh Engelestan” [Iranian Politicians in the Confidential Documents of the British Foreign Office], Ayandeh, no. 5–7 (Mordad 1270/1990): 525–26.
16. Bamdad, Tarikhe Rejale Iran, 45.
17. Khajenouri, Mardan-e Khod-Sakhteh, 151.
18. His translation of Descartes is called Gofta-e dar RavesheKarborde Agle, first published
in Tehran in 1327/1948. His book on Socrates is called Hekmate Sograt be Ghalame Aflatun, first published in Tehran in 1304/1925. Both works are often reissued.
19. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, Kaveh, Nov. 14, 1914, 1–11. For a general discussion of Kaveh and its role in Iranian modernity, see my “Kaveh va Masale-ye Tajadod,” in Tajadod va Tajadod Setizy dar Iran [Modernity and Its Foes in Iran] (Tehran: Akhtaran, 1378/1999), 175, 193.
20. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, “Adabiyate Iran,” Ta’lim va Tarbiyat, no. 3 (Khordad 1316/1937): 129–34.
21. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, “Introduction,” Ta’lim va Tarbiyat, no. 11–12 (Bahman–Esfand 1316/1937), 619–21.
22. Mohammad-Ali Forughi, ed., Koliyat-e Sa’di [Complete Works of Sa’di]. The work has remained in print since its publication some sixty years ago. In the last two decades, Golestan and Boostan, the two most important sections of Sa’di’s opus, have been published in a new edition by Youssefi, and they have now become the standard texts for these two books.
23. The best account of these turbulent days can be found in the memoirs of Abbasqoli Golshai’yan, who was himself a member of several cabinets in those early days of the war. See Abbasqoli Golshai’yan, Gozashteha va Andishehaye Man Ya Khaterat-e Man [The Past and Thoughts on Life, or My Memoirs], 2 vols. (Tehran: Aftab, 1377/1998). On page 526 of volume 1, ministers are having a discussion with Reza Shah, and Reza Shah at first refuses to invite Forughi, saying, “Why don’t you say I should just go and get Vosough.” Vosough, it must be remembered, was notorious as a stooge of the British Embassy.
24. Issa Sadiq, Chehel Goftar dar Bare Salgardhaye Tarikhi [Forty Essays on the Occasion of Historic Memorial Days] (Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1352/1973), 152.
25. Bullard, Letters from Tehran, 73.
26. Sir Denis Wright, in his book on the history of British diplomacy in Iran, refers to hearings in Parliament where this issue was discussed. For a discussion of this theory, see Ahmad Kazemi Moussavi, “Mohammad-Ali Foroughi va Namehaye Boulard” [Forughi and the Bullard Letters], Ayandeh, nos. 7–9 (Mehr 1372/1993): 679–80.
27. R. Bullard to Eden, Apr. 10, 1942, quoted in Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 50. 28. For both scenes, see Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 1, 550–51.
29. Quoted in Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 43.
30. Habib Yagmai, “In Memory of Forughi,” Yagma, no. 9 (Azar 1350/1971): 546–47.

Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh
1. Mehdi Bamdad, Sharhe Hale Rejale Iran [Biographies of Iran’s Elite], 6 vols. (Tehran: Zavvar, 1378/1999).
2. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 2, 1239. 3. Tehran to FO, Mar. 8, 1944, PRO, FO 371/40186.
NotestoPages155–61 | 531
532 | Notes to Pages 161–68
4. For an account of Nazi machinations and Ghavam’s role, see Hamid Shokat, Dar Tiras Haudes [Path of the Gate] (Tehran: Akhtaran, 1305/2006), 153–93.
5. Fakhreddin Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 62.
6. For a detailed account of Soviet views and actions on this matter, see Jamil Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-American Crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
7. Many documents about his role in this crisis can be found in FRUS, 1946, vol. 7), 375–382.
8. Both U. S. and Soviet documents confirm this fact. See Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War, last chapter.
9. Hasanli’s Soviet documents, and many memoirs of Tudeh Party leaders, confirm that every move of the Tudeh Party during this period was masterminded by the Soviet Union.
10. Details of the allegations have been discussed in Milani, Persian Sphinx. Documents of the French foreign embassy provide details of the allegations.
11. Aspects of this story are covered in other chapters of this book. See especially chapters on Manuchehre Egbal and Sardar Fakher Hekmat.
12. Chapters in this book on Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i, Hassan Arsanjani, and Mohammad Mossadeq cover other details of these machinations.

Reza Ghotbi
1. In his book Carnets Secrets, Hushang Nahavandi talks of these comments. I have also heard about them from several other sources, including the shah’s bodyguard, Colonel Jahanbini.
2. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 16.
3. See the chapter on Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi in this collection.
4. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 47.
5. Ibid., 47–48.
6. Dr. Kambiz Mahmoudi, “Sazmane Radio Television Miliye Iran” [The National Radio and
Television Organization], Rahavard, no. 23 (Spring 1368/1999).
7. See the chapter on Parviz Sayyad in this collection. While all of these programs were ordered
and produced, the managers of the television network forgot to order enough blank tapes. As a result, they began using old tapes to record new programs, erasing most of the episodes of Octopus.
8. In An Enduring Love, the queen makes clear that the Shiraz Festival was as much Reza’s brainchild as hers (227–38).
9. Pahlavi, Answer to History.
10. For an account of this conspiracy, see Abbas Samakar, Man Yek Shoureshi Hastam [I Am a Rebel] (Los Angeles: Ketab, 2001).
11. Nahavandi, Iran, 532
12. Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets, 154.
13. Ibid., 248.
14. I have a copy of a handwritten speech. I sent a message to Reza Ghotbi, telling him that I
had been told the speech is in his handwriting, and asked him to confirm or deny authorship. He
did not respond to my request. Nahavandi also declares that Nasr and Ghotbi were the authors of the text and that, with help from the queen, they convinced a reluctant shah to deliver the speech. See Nahavandi, Iran, 549.
15. I have a copy of the letter from Reza Ghotbi to the shah’s office, courtesy of Aredeshir Zahedi.
16. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 215. 17. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love.

Abbasqoli Golshai’yan
1. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 2, 1161.
2. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 1, 33–34.
3. Ibid., 332.
4. Ibid., 167.
5. FRUS, 1951–54, vol. 5, 496–97.
6. Mohammad Ali Movahed, Khabe Ashofte-ye Naft: Doctor Mossadeq va Nehzat-e Melliy-e
Iran [The Nightmare of Oil: Dr. Mossadeq and the Iranian National Movement], vol. 1 (Tehran: Karnameh, 1378/1999).
7. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 2, 799–810.
8. Manuchehre Saneir, “Dargozashte Abbasgoli Golshai’yan” [In Memory of Golshai’yan], Rahavard, no. 27 (Spring 1370/1991): 311–12.
9. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 2, 1131–33.
10. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 1, 35.
11. Golshai’yan, Khaterat-e Man, vol. 2, 1176.
12. Abbasqoli Golshai’yan, interviewed by author, London, Apr. 12, 2002.

Ebrahim Hakimi (Hakim-al Molk)
1. On his Freemasonary, see Esmail Ra’in, Farmush-khaneh va Feramasuneri dar Iran [Freemasonry in Iran], vol. 3 (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1998), 52. On Hakimi’s general character, see Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, “Hakim al Mulk,” in Magalat-e Taghizadeh [Taghizadeh’s Essays], vol. 2, ed. Iraj Afashar (Tehran, 1971), 101–4.
2. The Hakimi family has now prepared a Web site where the family history is outlined. See Hakimi, “A Brief History of the Hakimi Family,” at http://home.online.no/~hhakimi/history.htm. See also Lothollah Honarfar, Ganjineye Asare Tarikhiy-e Esfahan [Isfahan’s Historic Monuments] (Isfahan: Tus, 1965).
3. Bagher Ageli, Ruzshomar-e Tarikh-e Iran [Daily Almanac of Iran] (Tehran: Elmi, 1990), and Nakhostvaziran-Iran az Moshir-al Dowleh ta Bakhtiya [Iran’s Prime Ministers] (Tehran, 1992), 560–77.
4. For example see, Ebrahim Safai, Nakhost-vazirane [Prime Ministers] (Tehran, n.d.), 92–120.
5. Ra’in, Farmush-khaneh va Feramasuneri, vol. 3, 58.
6. In a letter to the scholar and memoirist Gassem Ghani, Hakimi describes this aspect of his life; see Gassem Ghani, Yadashthaye Doctor Gassem Ghani [Journals], vol. 9 (London, 1980–82), 804.
7. In another letter to Ghani, Forughi describes his and Hakimi’s activities; see Ghani, Yadashthaye, 786.
8. Zahra Shaji-e, Nokhbegan-e Siyasi Iran az Engelabe Mashrute ta Engelabe Islami [Iran’s Political Elite from the Constitutional Revolution to the Islamic Revolution], vol. 3 (Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1993), 209–10, 214–17.
9. For a discussion of this period, see Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy.
10. For a detailed discussion of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward Hakimi and their machinations in Iran, see Natalie I. Yegorova, “The Iran Crisis of 1945–1946: A View from the Russian Archives,” Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project, Working Paper no. 15.
11. For a discussion of British opposition to Iran’s attempt, see FRUS, 1946, vol. 7, 293. 12. Ibid., 299.
13. For a discussion of this epistolary struggle, see Shokat, Dar Tiras Haudes, 268–72. 14. Ibid.

Aliasgar Hekmat
1. British Embassy, Tehran, to FO, Apr. 16, 1959, PRO, FO 371/140881, 107913.
2. Reza Moini, ed., Chehreha-ye Ashna [Familiar Faces] (Tehran: Keyhan, 1344/1965) 188.
3. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 586.
4. Moini, Chehreha-ye Ashna, 188.
5. Hushang Etehad, Pajouheshgaran-e Mo’aser Iran [Modern Scholars], vol. 1 (Tehran: Gha-
treh, 1379/2000), 530–40.
6. Habib Yagmai, “Khaterat-e Modir-e Majeley-e Yagma” [Memoirs of Yagma’s Editor], Ayan-
deh, nos. 1–2 (Farvardin–Ordibehesht 1360/1981): 49.
7. Aliasgar Hekmat, Kalamat-e Tayebat [Sacred Words] (Tehran: Tus, 1354/1975), 333–65.
8. Ibrahim Safai, Reza Shah-e Kabir dar Ayneye Khaterat [Reza Shah in the Mirror of Memo-
ries], Tehran (Los Angeles: Sherkat Ketab, 1986), 107–8.
9. Iraj Afshar, “Ali Asgar Hekmat,” Ayandeh, nos. 7–8 (Mehr–Aban 1359/1980): 613.
10. Aliasgar Hekmat, Si Khatere Az Asre Farkhondey-e Pahlavi [Thirty Memories from the
August Pahlavi Era] (Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1976/1355), 75–82. 11. Ibid., 82.
12. Ibid., 99–101.
13. Ibid., 390–92.
14. Bagher Kazemi, “Letter to Taghi-Zadeh,” in Namehay-e Tehran [Letters from Tehran], ed.
Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Farzan, 1379/2000), 419–20.
15. Yagmai, “Memoirs,” 49–50.
16. Hormoz Hekmat, interviewed by the author, Washington, D.C., Apr. 23, 2002. 17. Yagmai, “Memoirs,” 49–50.
18. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224 95673.
19. FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 632.
20. British Embassy, Tehran, to FO, Apr. 16, 1959, PRO, FO 371/140881, 107913.
21. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 588
22. Aliasgar Hekmat, Nagshe Parsi bar Farhang-er-Hend [The Influence of Persian on Indian
Culture] (Tehran: Tus, 1337/1958); Hekmat, Aliasgar, Sarzamin-e Hend (Tehran: Tus, 1337/1958). 23. Aliasgar Hekmat, Parsiye Nagz [Pristine Persian] (Tehran: Tus, 1951/1330).
24. Hekmat, Kalamat-e Tayebat.
25. Hekmat, Si Khatere Az Asre.
26. Parichehr Afshari, phone interview by author, Apr. 25, 2002.

Sardar Fakher Hekmat
1. Sardar Fakher Hekmat, Khaterat-e Sardar Fakher Hekmat [Memoirs of Sardar Fakher Hekmat], ed. S. Vahid Nia (Tehran: Mofid, 1379/2000), 69.
2. Meir Ezri, Yadnameh, 95.
3. Amir A. Afkhami, “Infection, Jihad, and Achieving the Virtues of Civilization: The 1889– 1890 Cholera and Influenza Epidemics and Their Social Impact on Iran,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Summer 2003); Afkhami, “Disease and Water Supply,” 206–9.
4. Hekmat makes no reference to this fact in the memoirs. The book’s editor alludes to it in the accompanying notes. See Hekmat, Khaterat-e, 220.
5. Ibid., 85.
6. Hekmat, Khaterat-e, 57.
7. Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 21–40.
8. Sadeq Chubaq, Dalirane Tangestani [The Tangestan Warriors] (Tehran: Javidan, 1967).
9. In his memoirs, Hekmat has published a series of letters written to him by Farmanfarma’ian,
as well as some of his own responses. See Hekmat, Khaterat-e, 140–73.
10. Not long after his return from the assignment, Hekmat gave an interview to a newspaper
and offered his version of the events. Much the same version was recounted later in his memoirs. For the text of the interview, see Mohammad Javad Sheik-al Eslami, Simay-e Ahmad Shah-e Qajar (Tehran: Tus, 1372/1993) 359–65.
11. Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921: Birth of the Trauma, (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 234–35.
12. Houshang Sabahi, British Policy in Persia, 1918–1925 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1990). 13. Ibrahim Safai, Rahbaran-e Mashrooteh, vol. 2 (Tehran: Javidan, 1363/1984) 662–70.
14. FRUS, 1947, vol. 5, 957–59.
15. Some sources have claimed that the same house was sold several times to the government.
See for example, Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 584.
16. Embassy Minute, Dec. 6, 1947, PRO, FO 248/1462.
17. Amir Teymur Kalali is a critic of his and offers some of his views in Khaterat-e Amir
Teymour Kalali [Memoirs of Amir Teymur Kalali], ed. Habib Ladjevardi (Bethesda, Md.: IOHP, 1997). For a litany of other criticisms, see Mohammad Ali Safari, Galam va Siyasat, 2 vols. (Tehran, 1370/1994). See vol. 1, 82–84, 221–357.
18. Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 266.
19. FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 1048.
20. Ahman Goreishi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., May 12, 2002. 21. Ahmad Goreishi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., May 12, 2002. 22. Hormoz Hekmat, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Apr. 29, 2002. 23. Parichehr Afshar, phone interview by author, Apr. 28, 2002.

Amir-Abbas Hoveyda
1. Milani, Persian Sphinx, 37. Some have given his date of birth as the February 18. His family believes it is the February 19.
2. For a scholarly account of this period, see Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Rule (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000).
3. Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 22.
4. See Fereydoun Hoveyda, The Shah and the Ayatollah: Iranian Mythology and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Praeger, 2003).
5. For a detailed discussion of these documents, see my Persian Sphinx, specifically the chapter on this episode, 71–87.
6. Marvin Zonis, The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971).
7. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, “Iran’s Future,” in Iran: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Jane W. Jacqz (New York: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1976), 449–50.
8. Joseph Kraft, “Letter from Tehran,” New Yorker, Dec. 18, 1978, 153–54.

Fereydun Mahdavi
1. Romeo and Juliet, 2.5.10.
2. Fereydun Mahdavi, interviewed by author, Paris, June 23, 2002.
3. “Biographical Reporting,” Dec. 6, 1974, in Asnade Laney-e Jasusi, vol. 22.
4. Fereydun Mahdavi, interviewed by author, Paris, June 23, 2002.
5. Ibid.
6. “Memorandum of Conversation, Fereydun Mahdavi with T. L. Eliot,” Sept. 21, 1965, Asnade
Laney-e Jasusi.
7. Fereydun Mahdavi, interviewed by author, Paris, June 23, 2002. 8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Among those was Farrokh Mostofi, who became his de facto chief of staff. Farrokh Mostofi, interview with author, Atherton, Calif., Sept. 15, 2004.
12. Fereydun Mahdavi, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 7, 2003.
13. A number of other people, including Alinaghi Alikhani, Farrokh Mostofi, and Fereydun Hoveyda have confirmed this story.
14. The question of grain purchase was recounted to me not only by Mahdavi but also by his chief of staff; Farrokh Mostofi, interviewed by author, Atherton, Calif., Sept. 15, 2004.
15. For a discussion of this policy and its ramifications, see Milani, Persian Sphinx.
16. Parviz Parsa was the accountant brought on board to look into the contract. He wrote a report indicating that no bribes had been paid. Parviz Parsa, phone interview by author, June 4, 2002.
17. I have a copy of Shapur Reporter’s answers to the questions he was asked by Iranian prosecutors.
18. Farrokh Mostofi told me about Mahdavi’s record in this phase; Farrokh Mostofi, interviewed by author, Atherton, Calif., Sept. 15, 2004.
19. For Hoveyda’s views on the party, see Milani, Persian Sphinx, particularly the chapter “Politics in Pompeii.”
20. Assadollah Alam, in his Diaries, particularly in volume 5, blasts the party as a mere farce played for personal political gain by Hoveyda.

Abdol-Majid and Monir Vakili Majidi
1. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 22, 2002. 2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. The shah had actually used a Persian expression, referring to the “Morteza-Ali cat”—known for its capacity to weather all adversity and land on its feet. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 22, 2002.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, London, Aug. 6, 2004.
9. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 22, 2002.
10. One of his uncles was Dr. Saleh, the obstetrician to the queen—who helped deliver
Crown Prince Reza, and another was Alahyare Saleh, after Mossadeq, the most revered leader of the National Front.
11. I am grateful to Jaja Saleh for sharing these documents with me.
12. The U.S. Embassy and some American social scientists were reporting on the emerging significance of these dowrehs. Marvin Zonis’s Political Elite of Iran is founded on this central concept. 13. A detailed account of this relationship is provided in Majidi’s interview for the FIS (Apr. and Oct. 1982). The Foundation for Iranian Studies published Ideology, Process, and Politics in Iran’s Development Planning, ed. Gholam Reza Afkhami, in which Majidi is one of the three technocrats
recounting his work.
14. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 23, 2002.
15. Mehrjui is a friend of mine and gave me, over the years, vivid accounts of his battle with
censors and the eventual reaction to the film. While the shah did not like the film, Khomeini later referred to it as one of his favorites.
16. An is Persian for “shit.” As Assadollah reports, the shah derisively mispronounced the word “intellectual” to give it a scatological connotation.
17. In his Diaries, Assadollah Alam offers a poignant image of the night the film was shown. 18. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 23, 2002.
19. Many people, including Majidi himself, have told me the story.
20. The Stakhanovite Movement was an invention of Stalinist Russia. The term refers to work-
ers who had outpaced and outproduced their peers and their quotas. As it turned out, the movement was fraught with fraud.
21. In his interview for the Oral History Program, Majidi provides an account of these rebuffed efforts.
22. For a discussion of this episode and Majidi’s role in it, see Milani, Persian Sphinx. 23. Majidi offers a full account of the meeting in his interview for the FIS.
24. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, Aug. 7, 2002.
25. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 23, 2002.
26. During several meetings, Mr. Majidi kindly provided me with details of his escape. 27. Abdol-Majid Majidi, interviewed by author, Sausalito, July 23, 2002.

Khalil Maleki
1. Darius Ashuri, interviewed by author, Berkeley, Calif., July 15, 2002.
2. Maleki, Khaterat-e Siyasi, 10–17.
3. Ibid., 19.
4. For example see Khalil Maleki, “Maktabe Physic Iyoniha” [Physics among the Ionians],
Nameye Mardom [People’s Journal], no. 10 (1326/1947): 34–53.
5. Maleki, Khaterat-e Siyasi, 17.
6. Ibid., 484–85.
7. A full account of this episode is provided in Maleki’s memoirs. 8. Elmo Zendegi [Science and Life], Esfand 1330/Mar. 1951.
9. The book is generally considered a masterpiece of political fiction. It had a profound impact in postwar Europe, where it was first published. At the center of the story is the trial of a character who is a composite of Bukharin and Trotsky. The communists in Iran—as in Europe—blacklisted the book as anticommunist propaganda. Even after Koestler’s death the Stalinists in Iran continued to attack him as a lackey of the “bourgeoisie.” I was involved in a long-running polemic with one of these Stalinists. The articles have now been published in a book. See Abbas Milani et al., Mabahesi Dar Bareye Democracy va Socialism [On Democracy and Socialism] (Berkeley: Pars Press, 1988).
10. Khalil Maleki, “Sarneveshte Tarikhi Liberalism” [The Historic Fate of Liberalism], Elmo Zendegi 7 (Shahrivar 1332/Aug. 1952).
11. I was given a copy of this rare letter by Dr. Amir Pishdad. I am grateful to him for his generosity.
12. Khalil Maleki be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Khalil Maleki According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarat Etela’at, 1379/2000), 507.
13. Maleki, Khaterat-e Siyasi, 470–71.
14. Dr. Amir Pishdad, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 22, 2002.
15. Khalil Maleki be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 368.
16. Dr. Amir Pishdad, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 18, 2002.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. For an account of these pressures, see the chapters on the White Revolution in Milani,
Persian Sphinx.
20. The fifteen-page analysis, entitled “Bayaniyeh Jame’e Socialistha” [Statement by the Socialist Society], dated Tir 1341/June 1962, was provided courtesy of Dr. Amir Pishdad. He informed me that the text was written by Maleki.
21. Khalil Maleki, Dow Nameh [Two Letters] (Tehran: Ghatreh, 1355/1976). 22. Dr. Amir Pishdad, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 18, 2002.
23. Ibid.
24. Khalil Maleki be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 370.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 493 27. Ibid., 585. 28. Ibid., 556.

The Mansur Family
1. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 127.
2. Stuart Rockwell, phone interview by author, May 23, 1999; quoted in Milani, Persian Sphinx, 91.
3. Hezbe Irane Novin be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [The New Iran Party According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarat Etela’at, 1383/2004), 2.
4. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1552–1553.
5. CBE is part of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire,” established on June 4, 1917, as an Order of Chivalry that includes five classes in order of seniority. The third class is CBE, Commander of the British Empire.
6. British Embassy in Tehran, “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035.
7. Tehran to FO, Dec. 16, 1949, PRO, FO 371/75468, 2.
8. Fereydun Hoveyda, interviewed by author, Centerville, Md., Apr. 2004.
9. Milani, Persian Sphinx. The chapter entitled “Wandering Years” covers these early years of
Mansur’s life at length.
10. Fereydun Hoveyda, interviewed by author, May 12, 1999.
11. Ibid.
12. Alam, in the fifth volume of his Diaries, makes it clear that in his view, the dismissal of
the two-party system by the shah was intended as a slap to the haughty Hoveyda and to the party congress that had become a paean to his glory, as well as the shah’s. Dr. Manuchehr Shahgoli, a close confidant of Hoveyda, also confides to the American Embassy that the creation of the one-party
Notes to Pages 226–32 | 539
540 | Notes to Pages 234–40
system was an attempt to curtail the power of Hoveyda. See U. S. Embassy, Tehran, to State Dept., “Hoveyda Loyalist Lets off Steam,” Jan. 25, 1977, 2177, NSA.
13. Details of these behind the scene machinations are provided in Milani, Persian Sphinx. 14. U. S. Embassy in Tehran to State Dept., Apr. 8, 1964, in FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 108–10. 15. Ibid., 27.
16. Ibid., 26.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 102.
19. Ibid., 126.
20. Sir Denis Wright has kindly allowed me to read his memoirs, not to be published even in
the future and destined for Oxford University after he passes away. In the memoirs, he describes the episode in colorful detail.

Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq
1. Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, “Against Making Icons,” Azadi, nos. 24–25 (Spring and Summer 2001): 70.
2. Time, Jan. 7, 1952.
3. This argument is made in Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men.
4. Matini, Matini, Negahi be Karnameye Siyasiye Doctor Mohammad Mossadeq, 1–5.
5. Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, Khaterat va Ta’alomat [Memoirs and Musings] (Tehran: Nashre
Jebhe, 1980), 11.
6. Jalal Matini, Matini,Negahi be Karnameye Siyasiye Doctor Mohammad Mossadeq, 15–17.
7. Tehran to FO, Jan. 20, 1944, 1–2, FO 371/40186.
8. It is an interesting incidental fact of history that two of Iran’s most powerful political per-
sonalities were somehow involved with capitulation rights. Mossadeq’s first published monograph was on that subject, while almost half a century later, in 1963, a hitherto little-known cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini was catapulted to national fame because of his opposition to the American government’s attempt to establish similar rights for its servicemen and their families. In 1964, Mossadeq also wrote a letter to the then prime minister, Hassan-Ali Mansur, objecting to the passage of the law and to the claim made by Mansur that a similar law was passed during the Mossadeq era (Azadi 26, 27 [Summer/Fall 1380/2001), special Mossadeq issue, 80).
9. Mossadeq, Khaterat va Ta’alomat, 118.
10. Ibid., 328.
11. Ibid., 152.
12. For an account of this episode and of Perron’s life, see Daniela Meier, “Between Court
Jester and Spy: The Career of a Swiss Gardener at the Royal Court in Iran. A Footnote to Modern Iranian History,” Critique, no. 16 (Spring 2000): 76–82.
13. According to Dr. Mossadeq, Reza Shah, too, once offered to appoint him as prime minister; it is not clear how serious the offer was.
14. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Mission for My Country (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 86–87.
15. Mossadeq, Khaterat va Ta’alomat, 358. In an often overlooked passing reference in this section of the book, Dr. Mossadeq elucidates the reasons he thinks the British oppose him, suggesting “my opposition to the British claims of ownership of the Abu Musa Islands . . . in the Persian Gulf” (359). The islands become the subject of tension between Iran and not just Britain but the lateral states of the Persian Gulf in the late 1960s.
16. Tehran to FO, Jan. 20,1944, PRO, FO 371/40186,
17. “Political Situation in Persia: Activities of the Shah,” Jan. 22, 1944, PRO, FO 371/40816. 18. Tehran to FO, Jan. 20, 1944, 1–2, PRO, FO 371/40186.
19. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” 1940, PRO, FO 371/24382, 199.
20. Fakhreddin Azimi, “The Reconciliation of Politics and Ethics, Nationalism and Democracy:
An Overview of the Political Career of Dr. Muhammad Mussaddig,” in Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism and Oil, ed. by James A. Bill and Wm. Roger Louis (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1988), 51.
21. Ann Lambton, interview with author, Berwick-on-Tweed, Eng., Aug. 14, 2002. 22. Mossadeq, Khaterat va Ta’alomat, 343.
23. Ibid., 204.
24. Sir P. Loraine to FO, Jan. 6, 1926, PRO, FO 371/1487.
25. Tehran to FO, Feb. 2, 1926, PRO, FO 248/1377.
26. Secretary of State to the Embassy in the United Kingdom, July 26, 1952, FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 415.
27. For evidence of this incipient anxiety, see FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 430–34.
28. Ibid., 742.
29. In his political biography of Mossadeq, Jalal Matini writes about these appointments and
suggests that up to that time eighteen such appointments had been made.
30. For Saleh’s report to the prime minister, see, “Nameye Saleh be Mossadeq” [Letter to Mos-
sadeq], in Mehregan (1376/Summer 1997), 157–62. 31. Ibid., 748.
32. Ibid., 749. 33. Ibid., 751. 34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, “Bisto Hashte Mordad” [28th of Mordad]. The essay has been published in many books and magazines.
37. Jalil Bozorgmehr published at least two books about these conversations. One is called Ranjhaye Siyasiye Dr. Mossadeq [The Political Travails of Dr. Mossadeq], and the other is Taghrirate Mossadeq [Mossadeq’s Discourses]. Both were first published after the Islamic Revolution.
38. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, “Chand Khatere” [A Few Memories], Ayandeh, nos. 9–12 (Esfand 1359/1980): 724.
39. Ahmad Mossadeq, “Ravayate Ahmade Mossadeq az Marge Pedar” [Ahmad Mossadeq’s Version of the Day His Father Died], in Ma’refi va Shenakhte Dr. Mossadeq [An Introduction to Dr. Mossadeq], ed. Mohammad J’afari (Tehran: Elm, 1380/2001), 627.
40. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Death of Former Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq,” Mar. 9, 1967, A-493, NA.
41. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Aftermath of Mossadeq Death,” Mar. 8, 1967, NA.

Hushang Nahavandi
1. Even brief accounts of his life refer to his unfulfilled desire to become prime minister. For example, see Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1675–76. The brief biography has Nahavandi’s birth date, as well as the place where he received his law degree, wrong. He claims Nahavandi “spared no effort to his goal of becoming the prime minister” (1676).
2. Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets.
3. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
4. For a detailed discussion of that movement and their relations with the Soviet Union, see
Mostafa Shoa’iyan, Shoravai va Nehzate Engelabi-ye Jangal [The Soviet Union and the Revolutionary Movement of Jangal] (Tehran, n.p., 1347/1968).
5. In a brief and bitterly critical biographical sketch of Nahavandi, officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran have nearly all the essential facts of his life wrong. They have him going to law school in Iran and joining the Bahai religion while in Paris. The first claim is simply wrong, and there is no reliable evidence for the second. See Rooz-shomar-e Engelab-e Eslami [A Calender of the Islamic Revolution] (Tehran: Elmi, 1376/1997), 141.
6. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
7. For a full discussion of the group’s rise to power, see Milani, Persian Sphinx.
8. Alinaghi Alikhani was the third member of the trio that worked against the cabinet. See
Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 148. 9. Ibid., 147–50.
10. Ibid., 151–52.
11. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
12. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Dec. 29, 2004.
13. Ibid.
14. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 258–59.
15. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
16. In the fifth volume of his Diaries, Assadollah Alam writes of the shah’s decision to take a
sudden and unexpected trip to one of Iran’s provinces, and according to Alam, the only purpose of the trip only to outdo the thunderous reception given to the queen when she visited the area.
17. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
18. On rumors in Tehran about candidates to follow Hoveyda, see Jamshid Amuzegar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 26.
19. Etela’at, no. 10124, July 6, 1978, 3.
20. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 281.
21. An interesting aspect of the queen’s memoirs is the dearth of references to Nahavandi.
Although he was her chief of staff during a very crucial period, there are only five references to him throughout the 435-page book. The first reference is on page 166, where she merely mentions that the position of “chief secretary” was “later taken by Hushang Nahavandi.” Pages 258–59 refer to a survey conducted by Nahavandi’s group at the university, and discussed above. She describes the
report and laments the fact that it was not taken seriously. The last reference is to the fact that the king “also received my former chief secretary, Hushang Nahavandi, who was active in the resistance” (375). There is, in short, an eloquent absence of words of approbation about the quality of his work as “chief secretary.”
22. Ibid., 282.
23. Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets, 122–23.
24. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Dec. 29, 2004.
25. Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets, 122–23.
26. Ibid., 125.
27. Hushang Nahavandi, interviewed by author, Brussels, Oct. 22, 2002.
28. Darius Homayun, who was at the time in prison with Nehavandi, told me of their prison
woes.
29. Other than the recent Carnets Secret, he had published Revolution Iranienne, Verite et Men-
songes (Lausanne: Age d’homme, 2000). His other books are Le Dossier Noir de L’integrisme Islamique, Le Voile Dechire de l’Islamisme, and Iran: Deus Reves Brises.
30. Shah Abbas: Emperor de Perse (Paris: Perrin, 1999).

Parviz Nikkhah
1. Iraj Nikkhah, correspondence with author, Aug. 24, 2003. Iraj is one of Nikkhah’s brothers. He lives in Australia and kindly answered many of my questions in a lengthy letter.
2. Farokh Mostofi, interviewed by author, ATherton, Calif., June 19, 2004.
3. Iraj Nikkhah, correspondence with author, Aug. 24, 2003.
4. I was provided a copy of one of his poems. It is in his own handwriting. It is heroic in tone
and filled with allusions to the grandeur of nature.
5. Iraj Nikkhah, correspondence with author, Aug. 24, 2003.
6. At that time, SAVAK’s head of European operations was General Alavi Kia. He told me of his
observation of this change and of his reports to the shah and the other authorities about the necessity of responding to change. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Dec. 2003.
7. The early history of this group is now well documented in three book-length interviews by Hamid Shokat with early activists and leaders of the organization. His series of interviews is published under the title Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran [An Inside Look at the Iranian Leftist Movement] (Tehran: Akhtaran, 1381/2002).
8. Iraj Nikkhah, correspondence with author, Aug. 24, 2003.
9. For a collection of these documents, see Parviz Nikkhah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK (Tehran: Markez Baresiye Asnad, 1385/2006).
10. Richard Rorty, the great American philosopher, has written extensively about pragmatism and how accepting the contingency of our beliefs is a kernel of that philosophy.
11. Terrore Shah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [The Shah’s Terror According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye, 1378/1999), 9–12.
12. His last defense in the court was published in underground pamphlets by the opposition, but he also said the same thing in Parviz Nikkhah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 142.
NotestoPages252–57 | 543
544 | Notes to Pages 257–62
13. For a history of the confederation and the role of the Nikkhah trial in its evolution, see Hamid Shokat, Confedrasione Danshejooyane Iran [Confederation of Iranian Students], 2 vols. (Kohn: Mortazavi, 1997).
14. Terrore Shah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK. On numerous pages, there are references to such meetings. SAVAK was closely monitoring all of these discussions with hearing devices or by having someone sit in on the discussions. For example, see pages 316–19. Furthermore, when the confederation sent an attorney to visit Nikkhah before his trial, SAVAK had monitored their entire conversation (304).
15. Terrore Shah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK. In a report, SAVAK reports the shah’s “happiness at several of the passages” (316).
16. Nemat Mirzadeh, Sahouri (n.p., n.d.), 169–72.
17. Bijan Jazani, “Mohre-I bar Sahneye Chatranj” [A Pawn in the Chess Board], Ketabe Jome (Khordad 1359/1979): 46–57.
18. Terrore Shah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 322.
19. Dr. Kourosh Lashai, who considered himself a close friend of Nikkhah’s, talks of Nikkhah’s prominent role in “editing” Lashai’s mea culpa. See Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 3, interview with Lashai. Lashai also told me, with no hint of rancor and on numerous occasions, about his dealings with Nikkhah in prison. Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi also talks of a similar role played by Nikkhah in his own television show of recantation. See Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi, IOHP.
20. SAVAK’s approval is indicated in Terrore Shah be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 324.
21. Jamshid Gharachedaghi, interviewed by author, Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 18, 1998.
22. An account of these tensions is provided by Kourosh Lashai in his interview with Hamid
Shokat. See Negahi Az Daroune Be Jonbesh Chape Iran.
23. One of his closest friends in England, and his close comrade-in-arms, was Mohsen Rez-
vani. He talks of Nikkhah’s enormous popularity.
24. Parand Nikkhah, interviewed by author, London, July 22, 2003.
25. Kourosh Lashai in numerous interviews with me discussed the details of this suggestion
and its rejection. SAVAK, in his opinion, still did not trust this group.
26. Parand Nikkhah, interviewed by author, London, July 22, 2003.
27. Details of this episode was provided for me by Masoud Behnoud, who worked at the Ira-
nian television organization at the time and was at the station.
28. The Iranian media was allowed to participate in the trial at the time and reported some of
the proceedings.
29. I am grateful to Parand Nikkhah for sharing with me a copy of the letter.

Nasser and Khosrow Qhashghai
1. William O. Douglas, Strange Lands and Friendly People (New York: Harper, 1951), 55. 2. Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 386–87.
3. Franz Mayr, Nomads of Fars, 170.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 173.
6. Lois Beck, The Qhashghai of Iran (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986). 7. Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 1, 107–10.
8. Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 1, 111.
9. “Audience of the Shah,” Aug. 29, 1944, PRO, FO 371/50187.
10. Bullard to Eden, July 1, 1944, PRO, FO 406/82.
11. “Audience of the Shah,” Aug. 29, 1944, PRO, FO 371/50187.
12. Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, IOHP, Apr. 10, 1986.
13. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Memorandum of Conversation, Khosrow Qashqaui,” July 24,
1952, NSA.
14. Mohammad Nasser Qhashghai, IOHP, Jan. 31, 1983.
15. Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 3, 112.
16. William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters: Selections from the Private Papers of Justice Wil-
liam O. Douglas, ed. by Melvin Urofsky (Bethesda, Md.: Adler and Adler, 1987), 285. 17. Ibid., 286.
18. Nasser Khan’s letter to the president, Jan. 15, 1963, NSF, Kromer Papers, box 424, JFK Presidential Library.
19. Letter to Mr. Gashgai, no date, NSF, Kromer Papers, box 424, JFK Presidential library.
20. Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 3, 19–33.
21. In his passionate dislike of the shah, Justice Douglas certainly had the facts of the case
wrong about Bahman. He writes that Bahman was just a student and returned “to Tehran to obtain financial help to continue his studies . . . [but] he was arrested, charged with inciting revolution, tried by a military court and immediately shot.” See William O. Douglas, Towards a Global Federalism (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1968), 46.
22. State Dept. to U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Khosrow Khan,” Jan 4, 1979, NSA.
23. A tragic account of this camp and the role of the different factions in it can be found in Shokat, Negahi Az Daroune be Jonbesh Chape Iran, vol. 2, in which he has interviewed Iraj Kashkouli.
24. Ibid., 117–19.

Shapur and Mehri Rasekh
1. Since first interviewing him for this essay, I have received a number of letters from him. He is generous with his time and with his memories.
2. Shapur Rasekh, interviewed by author, Geneva, Oct. 19, 2002.
3. George Gurvitch, Industrialisation et Technocratie (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1949). In a personal correspondence, undated, Mr. Rasekh told me of the influence Gurvitch had on his thought and theories.
4. A biography of him is provided in Hassan Balyusi, Eminent Baha’is in the Time of Baha’u’llah (Oxford: G. Ronald, 1985). I was informed of this fact by Shapur Rasekh, correspondence with author, May 13, 2002.
5. Shapur Rasekh, interviewed by author, Geneva, Dec. 16, 2004.
6. “A Brief Account of Dr. Mehri Rasekh” was provided to me courtesy of Shapur Rasekh. He had prepared it in consultation with his wife. When I visited him in Geneva, she was suffering from a cold and promised to provide me with any information I sought through the mail, and she and he both have been more than faithful to their promise. Dr. Rasekh and his wife have sent me some fifty pages of correspondence and letters in response to my queries.
7. Much has been written about the project. For a synopsis, see Milani, Persian Sphinx. For a firsthand account of the work of the office from some of the people who worked there, see Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics.
8. Ahmad Ashraf, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 14, 2004.
9. Shapur Rasekh, correspondence with author, May 13, 2002. I also talked to Ahmad Ashraf about the nature of his work at the center and the role played by Shapur Rasekh. Ahmad Ashraf, interviewed by author, New York. Dec. 14, 2004.
10. Rasekh and Jamshid Behnam published a series of articles called “An Introduction to Urban Sociology of Iran” in the 1969 issues of the Sokhan magazine. They were later published as a book. See for example, “Urban Demography,” Sokhan, Tir 1338/1969, 416–21.
11. Shapur Rasekh and Jamshid Behnam, “Nazari be Ezdevaj dar Iran” [A View of Marriage in Iran], Sokhan, Mordad 1339/1960, 437–48.
12. Shapur Rasekh, “Tarhriziye Barnamey-e Talim-o Tarbiyat” [A Program for Planning Education], Sokhan, Day 1347/1968, 585–97.
13. He published a series of articles on the sociology of the countryside in the Sokhan with Behnam. For example, see “Bahre Bardiry-e Keshavarzi dar Deh-haye Iran” [Agricultural Production in Iranian Villages], Sokhan, Tir 1342/1963, 37–47.
14. Shapur Rasekh, “Ertebat-e Tahgigate Iranshenasi ba Niazhay-e Jame-ye Konuni” [The Relations Between Iranian Studies and the Current Needs of Society], Sokhan, Shahrivar 1351/1972, 114–26.
15. Shapur Rasekh, interviewed by author, Geneva, Oct. 19, 2002. 16. Shapur Rasekh correspondence with author, Mar. 5, 2002.
17. Shapur Rasekh, interviewed by author, Geneva, Oct. 19, 2002.

Fuad Ruhani
1. Ian Skeet, OPEC: Twenty-five Years of Prices and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 19–20.
2. Guity Hoseynpour, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 21, 2002.
3. Skeet, OPEC, 20.
4. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, London, Nov. 9, 2003. In my years of friendship
with Chubak, I also heard on many occasions how he and Hedayat respected Ruhani as one of the country’s most erudite men.
5. Negar Ruhani, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 23, 2002.
6. See Milani, Persian Sphinx.
7. Ruhani prepared a brief outline of his life’s work in the form of a curriculum vitae in late
1985. A copy of the document was given to me, courtesy of his family.
8. Attar, Elahi Nameh, ed. and annot. Fuad Ruhani (Tehran: Tus, 1340/1961). For other schol-
ars’ acclaim for the book, see Mohammad Ja’far Mahjoob, “Elahi Nameh,” Rahnameye Ketab (Summer 1340/1961): 622–33.
9. Omar Khayam, La Vin de Nishapour (Paris: Souffles, 1988).
10. Aeschylus, Persians, trans. Fuad Ruhani (Bethesda, Md.: Ibex, 1984); Herodotus, Iran be Ravayat Tarikh Herodut [Iran According to Herodotus’s Histories], Bethesda, Md.: Ibex, 1985).
11. Sherif, Faruq, A Guide to the Contents of the Qur’an (London: Ithaca Press, 1985).

Khosrow Ruzbeh
1. Mohsen Rezvani was one of the founding members of an Iranian Maoist group that splintered from the party. He claims to have seen and read the paper. Mohsen Rezvani, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Mar. 14, 2004.
2. Colonel Azar was a charismatic officer at the academy. He turned many young officers into Marxists and was afforded asylum in the Soviet Union before Iranian authorities could arrest him. General Alavi Kia, inteviewed by author, Dec. 10, 2003.
3. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Nov. 15, 2003.
4. FO to Tehran, Oct. 31, 1943, PRO, FO 371/35077.
5. The words are from Ruzbeh’s records of interrogation, quoted in Mohammed Hoseyn Khos-
row-Panah, Sazmane Afsaran-e Hezbe Tudey-e Iran [Tudeh Party of Iran’s Officers Organization] (Tehran: Payum-e Imruz, 1380/2001), 113–14.
6. Donya, special edition on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Ruzbeh’s death, (Farvardin 1357/1978): 10–11.
7. Khosrow Ruzbeh, Eta’ate Kourkourane [Blind Obedience] (Tehran, n.d.]. 8. Ibid., 8.
9. Ibid., 8–10.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 51–53.
13. Ibid., 58–59.
14. Ibid., 46–48.
15. Ruzbeh, quoted in Khosrow-Panah, Sazmane Afsaran-e Hezbe Tudey-e Iran, 115.
16. Arashes Avanesian, Khaterate Ardashes Avanesian (Tehran, n.d.), 427. Anvar Khamei
thinks the group was connected, if not in fact conducted, by the Soviets. See Anvar Khamei, Az Ensheab ta Koodeta [From the Split to the Coup] (Tehran: Akntaran, 1363/1984), 94–108. It must be borne in mind that Khamei was, by the time he wrote these lines, a staunch critic of the Tudeh Party and the Soviet Union. His claim is not backed by any evidence, other than his own guess.
17. Khosrow Ruzbeh, “Avaline va Akharine Defa” [First and Last Defense], Donya, no. 4 (30 Tir 1327/1948).
18. Sazmane Afsaran be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [The Officers Organization According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarat Etela’at, 1380/2001), 12.
19. Much has been written about Gobadi. Babak Amir Khosravi and General Alavi Kia are arguably the most trustworthy sources. Alavi Kia was present in the deliberations.
20. The person in charge of this investigation for the army was General Alavi Kia; he told me of the story; Kia, phone interview by author, Mar. 14, 2003.
21. Sazmane Afsaran be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 11.
22. Khosrow-Panah, Sazmane Afsaran-e Hezbe Tudey-e Iran, 107–10.
23. Ibid., 20.
24. See the section on General Bakhtiyar in this book.
25. The young man, named Kourosh, had been meeting regularly with General Alavi Kia of
the army’s “Second Division.” His body was found when his family reported him missing. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Mar. 10, 2003.

Parviz Sabeti
1. Manuchehr Hashemi, Davari: Sokhani Dar Karnameye-e SAVAK [Judgment: Some Remarks about SAVAK] (London: Aras, 1373/1994).
2. In an interview with General Pakravan’s daughter, she remembered this conversation. Saideh Pakravan, interview with author, Palo Alto, Calif. Nov. 14, 2002.
3. In her portrait of the Irani-American diaspora, Connie Bruck of the New Yorker refers to this relationship. See Connie Bruck, “Exiles,” New Yorker, Mar. 6, 2006.
4. Parviz Sabeti, interviewed by author, Nov. 17, Los Angeles, 2002.
5. Hoseyn Fardust, Jostarhai Dar Tarikhe Moaser Iran [Inquiries in the Modern History of Iran], vol. 2 (Tehran: Markaz Asnad, 1370/1991), 450–51. The book is, in fact, the second volume of Fardust’s alleged memoirs.
6. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Jan. 10, 2003. 7. Ibid.
8. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Nov. 24, 1997. 9. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Jan. 10, 2003. 10. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Feb. 26, 2003. 11. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Sept. 3, 2005. 12. Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Sept. 4, 2004.

Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi
1. Ehsan Naragi and Ata Ayati, Nazari be Tahgihat-e Ejtema-e dar Iran [A Survey of Social Research in Iran], ed. Ata Ayati (Tehran, 1379/2000), 189.
2. For the exact nature of his views on this question, see Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, “On the Referendum,” in Iranshenasi 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 307–14.
3. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, “Coup D’etay-e Bisto Hashte Mordad be Ravayat Asnad SAVAK,” in Yadnameye Dr Gholam Hussein Sadiqi: Farzaneye Iran Zamin [In Memory of Dr. Gholam Hussein Sadiqi: The Sage of Iran], ed. Dr. Varjavand (Tehran: Zavvar, 1372/1993), 119–14.
4. Hamid Ashraf, “Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi: The Founder of Sociology in Iran,” Iran Nameh 15, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 519–39.
5. Ibid.
6. Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi, Les Mouvements Religieux Iraniens au IIe et IIIe Siecles de l’Hegire; for the Persian, see Jonbeshhay-e Dini Irani dar Garnhaye Dovom va Sevom Hejri [Iranian Religious Movement in the Second and Third Centuries of Hijra] (Tehran: Zavvar, 1356/1978).
7. Naragi and Ayati, Nazari be Tahgihat-e Ejtema-e dar Iran, 20. 8. Varjavand, Yadnameye Dr. Gholam Hussein Sadiqi.
9. Naragi and Ayati, Nazari be Tahgihat-e Ejtema-e dar Iran, 183. 10. Varjavand, Yadnameye Dr. Gholam Hussein Sadiqi, 118.
11. Ashraf, “Gholamhoseyn Sadiqi,” 536.
12. Ibid., 185.
13. Jebheye Meli be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 62–63.
14. Ibid., 144.
15. For a discussion of “statecraft” and “soulcraft,” see Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vi-
sion: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004).
16. See the section on Ashraf in this book.
17. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 168.
18. See the section on Nahavandi in this book.
19. Hushang Nahavandi, Iran: Le Choc Des Ambitions (Paris: Aquilion, 2006), 703. 20. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 169.
21. Nahavandi, Iran, 568.

Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman
1. By way of disclosure, it should be known that Shadman was my uncle.
2. Jalal Al Ahmad, Garbzadegi [Westophilia] (Tehran: Ravag, 1357/1979). In a footnote on page 78, Al Ahmad writes of his debt to Shadman.
3. In his selection of the best modern prose writers of Iran, Jalal Matini has included a section of Shadman’s writing. See Jalal Matini, Nemounehay-e Nasr-e Fasihe Farsiy-e Moaser [Anthology of Modern Persian Prose], vol. 2 (Tehran, 1357/1978), 104.
4. For an account of his childhood, I have relied on interviews with Dr. Zahra Shadman, June 6, 2002, and Dr. Zia Shadman, May 19, 2002, Montreux, Canada. He himself provided a small sketch of his life for a journal. See Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman, “Dr. Seyyed Fakhrodin Shadman,” Rahnamaye Ketab, no. 1, 5th year (Farvardin 1341/March 1962): 100–196.
5. Of the brothers, the most politically successful was clearly Jalal. He entered government service when he was young and, not long after World War II, entered the close circle of the shah’s trusted advisors. For years he was in charge of the shah’s properties. He was also for years a member of the Parliament—first in the Majlis and then as a senator. He made a conscious effort to avoid the limelight, but the cognoscenti knew him as one of the most powerful men of Iranian politics in the 1950s. As a new generation of technocrats were appointed to positions of authority, Jalal Shadman’s days at the center of power ended. Nevertheless, he was for years the deputy director of the Pahlavi Foundation, and when Sharif-Emami was named prime minister late in 1978, Shadman replaced him as director. It was a measure of his probity and honesty that after the revolution, he made no effort to hide or to leave Iran, but he was never arrested.
6. George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays, 1978–1995 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 48, 148.
7. Seyyed Fakroddin Shadman, Taskhir-e Tamadon-e Farang [Conquering the Western Civilization] (Tehran: Ibn Sina Press, 1326/1947), 220–23.
8. Ibid., 168.
9. “Notes on Meshad, June 1957,” PRO, FO 371/127675.
10. Seyyed Fakroddin Shadman, “Zaban Farsi Che Rahi Ra Bayad Baraye Bayane Andisheha
va Mafahim Tazeh Burgozinad” [What Should the Persian Language Do to Express New Ideas and Concepts], Rahnamaye-Ketab, no. 2 (Ordibehesh 1340/1961), 99.

Ja’far Sharif-Emami
1. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 2, 876.
2. American Embassy, Tehran, to State Dept., Aug. 27, 1951, NA.
3. Ali Sharif-Emami, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 7, 2002.
4. Many people told me about his reluctance to kiss the shah’s hands, for example Mehdi
Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2002.
5. For a discussion of the selection process, and Ayatollah Shari’atmadari’s role, see Milani
Persian Sphinx.
6. Ja’far Sharif-Emami, Memoirs of Ja’ far Sharif-Emami, ed. Habib Lajevardi (Bethesda: Ibex,
1999), 11.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. “A Preliminary Appraisal of Some of the Factors Involved in the Proposed Economic Stabilization Program,” June 11, 1960, NA.
9. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 20, 1981.
10. “A Preliminary Appraisal of Some of the Factors Involved in the Proposed Economic Stabilization Program,” June 11, 1960, NA.
11. Tehran to FO, Sept. 6, 1960, PRO, FO 371/164228.
12. “Basic Facts in Iranian Situation,” 2, JFK.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Javad Mansuri, ed., Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayate Asnade [15th of Khor-
dad According to Documents], vol. 1 (Tehran, 1377/1998), Document 1/45.
15. General Alavi Kia was at the time deputy director of SAVAK and happened to be at the court waiting for a meeting with the shah when Sharif-Emami came in to tender his resignation. Waiting in the antechamber, Alavi Kia could easily hear Sharif-Emami’s angry tone. General Alavi
Kia, interviewed by author, San Diego, Calif., Sept 4, 2002.
16. “U.S. Embassy to State Dept., Nov. 1, 1960,” FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 704n.
17. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayat-Asnad, vol. 1, doc. 1/47.
18. Ibid.
19. “Asnad” [Documents], Tarikhe Moaser-e Iran [Journal of Contemporary History of Iran] (Summer 1376/1997), 191.
20. Sharif-Emami, Memoirs, 8.
21. The shah had launched a new calendar in 1976 that established the new date as 2535, reflecting the beginning of the monarchy. Sharif-Emami restored the Islamic calendar, which originated with the Prophet’s journey from Mecca to Medina.
22. Sharif-Emami, Memoirs, 288–90.
23. Huchang Ram, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Dec. 12, 2005. 24. Sharif-Emami, Memoirs, 288–90.

Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i
1. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035, E 5601/1688/34, 33–34. I have changed the order of some of the sentences from the original narrative.
2. Mehdi Bamdad, Tarikh-e Rejal-e Iran [History of Iran’s Statesmen], vol. 5 (Tehran: Zavvar, 1347/1968), 123.
3. Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i, “Interview with Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi,” first published in Iran and reprinted in a fuller version in an émigré paper called Jong, Oct. 1990. The reprint indicates where and how SAVAK had censored the original interview. Nothing that would deprecate the royal family and Reza Shah was allowed in print.
4. For an account of his early years, see Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Seyyed Zia According to SAVAK documents] (Tehran, 1380/2000), 5–10.
5. Tabataba’i, “Interview,” 86–87.
6. Tehran to FO, Military Attache’s Summary Intelligent Report, May 10, 1944, PRO, FO 371/40186.
7. Ahmad Kasravi, in his famous Tarikhe Mashroutey-e Iran (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1357/1979), refers to his bombing of an anticonstitutionalist merchant of the bazaar, who had defied an order for a strike and opened his shop.
8. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK has him taking refuge in the Belgian Embassy (6), while Homa Katouzian writes of the Austrian Legation; see Homa Katouzian, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 110.
9. Telegrams from Iranian Embassy officials in St. Petersburg at the time confirm his arrival in the city. His stated purpose for coming to Russia was “to learn Russian.” Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 8.
10. Tabataba’i, “Interview,” 87.
11. For an informed account of the agreement, its friends, and its foes, see Katouzian, State and Society in Iran, 25–164.
12. Ibid., 110–11.
13. Ibid.
14. Near East News reported his arrival at the head of a fourteen-man delegation, Dec. 5, 1919, 1.
NotestoPages309–13 | 551
552 | Notes to Pages 314–20
15. Cyrus Ghani, in his Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, has covered the political developments of the period in some detail. He has also provided a pithy account of this period in Iran and the West: A Critical Bibliography (London: Kegan Paul, 1987), 376–78.
16. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, Mar. 1, 1921, PRO, FO 379/6403, 3. 17. Ibid., 4.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, Feb. 22, 1921, PRO, FO 371/6401.
21. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, Mar. 1, 1921, PRO, FO 379/6403, 6.
22. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, Feb. 25, 1921, PRO, FO 371/6401.
23. Tabataba’i, “Interview,” 9. There he says, “Mussolini was my hero.” Throughout the inter-
view he waxed eloquent about Lenin and his political virtues.
24. “Foreign Countries Report: Persia, No. 38, March 1921,” PRO, FO 248/6402.
25. “Foreign Countries Report: Persia, No. 38, March 1921,” PRO, FO 248/6402.
26. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, Mar. 1, 1921, PRO, FO 379/6403, 8.
27. R. N. Bosten, “Baznegari be Zendegiy-e yek Rooznameh Nevis Siyo Dosaleh Gomnan Ke
Nagahan Nakhost Vazire Iran Shod” [Revisiting the Life of an Unknown Thirty-Two-Year-Old Journalist Who Suddenly Became Prime Minister], Rahavard, no. 3 (Summer 1371/1992): 112.
28. Mr. Norman to Earl Curzon, May 26, 1921, PRO, FO 371/35077.
29. Bosten, “Baznegari be Zendegiy-e yek Rooznameh Nevis,” 111.
30. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., Feb. 27, 2004.
31. Ibid.
32. British Embassy in Tehran to Cairo, 7/9/42, PRO, FO 371/34940.
33. Tehran to FO, Oct. 6, 1942, PRO, FO 371/34940.
34. Princess Ashraf is quoted as having revealed this in Zohoor va Sogoot Saltanat-e Pahlavi,
vol. 2 (Tehran: Etela’at, 1370/1990), 31.
35. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 357.
36. Tehran to FO, Apr. 11, 1944, PRO, FO 371/40186.
37. Tabataba’i, “Interview,” 4.
38. FO’s discussion of Sir John le Rougetel’s letter, Dec. 22, 1949, PRO, FO 371/75468. Le
Rougetel was the British Ambassador.
39. Tehran to FO, Dec. 16, 1949, PRO, FO 371/75468, 2.
40. FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 175.
41. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK. The book clearly shows that all such meetings at his
house were fully “covered” and reported.
42. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Feb. 27, 2004. 43. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 366–67.
44. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 358.
45. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Feb. 27, 2004. 46. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Feb. 27, 2004. 47. Seyyed Zia be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK.

Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh
1. Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Zendigiy-e Tufani: Khaterat-e Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh [A Stormy Life: The Memoirs of Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh], ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Elmi, 1362/1983).
2. No one has done more than Iraj Afshar to find, annotate, and publish the essays and letters of Taqizadeh. Afshar not only edited the collected works of Taqizadeh, but also his letters from London, from Tehran, and to Allame Qazvini.
3. Taqizadeh, Zendigiy-e Tufani, 18–20.
4. Ibid., 21.
5. Ibid., 25.
6. He wrote the lines in an editorial of the magazine he edited, called Kaveh. See Kaveh, Jan.
22, 1920, 2.
7. Taqizadeh made his most passionate plea to correct the misperception of his position in
a talk later published as a monograph. See Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Akhz-e Tamadon-e Gharb [Adapting the Western Civilization] (Tehran: Ferdows, 1379/2000).
8. The first book he translated was from the French; it was called Les Merveilles Celestes [The Mysteries of the Skies].
9. Taqizadeh, Zendigiy-e Tufani, 29. 10. Ibid., 21–31.
11. Ibid., 36.
12. Ibid., 57.
13. For his account of the asylum, see Taqizadeh, Zendigiy-e Tufani, 78.
14. Abdolhoseyn Azarang, “Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh,” Bokhara, no. 25 (Mordad 1381/2002), 37.
15. For a discussion of the journal and its content, and its role in advocating modernity, see my “Kaveh va Masale-ye Tajadod” [Kaveh and the Question of Modernity], in Tajjadod va Tajjadod Setizi dar Iran [Modernity and Its Foes in Iran] (Tehran: Akhtaran, 1998), 175–93.
16. Taqizadeh, Zendigiy-e Tufani, 195.
17. Azarang, “Taqizadeh,” 44.
18. Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Namehay-e London [Letters from London], ed. Iraj Afshar (Teh-
ran: Farzan, 1357/1978), 158. 19. Ibid., 156.
20. Ibid., 210. 21. Ibid., 274.

Aredeshir Zahedi
1. In the collection of SAVAK documents on Zahedi published by the Islamic Republic, it is reported that some of the employees complained about his harsh treatment. See Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Aredeshir Zahedi According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1378/1999), 16. In the second volume of the book that
NotestoPages321–27 | 553
554 | Notes to Pages 328–33
purports to be the memoirs of General Hoseyn Fardust, there are also reports of mistreatment. See Jostarhai dar Tarikhe Moaser Iran, 266–67.
2. In talking about the shah, he often refers to him as “my beloved monarch.”
3. N. Bunod, “Zahedi’s Affairs,” Harper’s, Sept. 1979.
4. Sally Quinn, The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 1997), 206.
5. Diana Davenport, The Power Eaters (New York: Morrow, 1979). On the cover is a reclining
blonde, brandy in hand, barely dressed. The queen, of course, saves the day.
6. For an account of Pirnia’s life and times, see Bastani Parizi, Dar Talashe Azadi [The Struggle
for Freedom] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1355/1976).
7. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, June 20, 2002.
8. Ibid.
9. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK. The book is composed of documents hand-
picked to embarrass Zahedi and display him in the worst possible light. Hundreds of documents showing Zahedi, for example, quarreling with England and the United States over issues important to Iran are clearly suppressed. I have seen many of these documents in American and British archives.
10. Ibid., 82.
11. Fereydoon Zandfar, Khaterate Khedmat dar Vezarate Omour Khareje [Memoirs of Service in the Foreign Ministry] (Tehran: Shirazeh, 1383/2004), 94–98. Although the book was published in Iran, Zandfar offered much praise for Zahedi as foreign minister.
12. Aredeshir Zahedi to the shah, 1971. Courtesy of Aredeshir Zahedi, who gave me access to his archives.
13. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 253.
14. Sir Elden Griffiths, interviewed by author, La Jolla, Calif., July 21, 2004.
15. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, June 20, 2002.
16. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 108.
17. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, June 7, 2004.
18. CIA, “Elites and the Distribution of Power in Iran,” Feb. 1976, no. 1012, 37, NSA.
19. Aredeshir Zahedi, Panj Roozer Bohrani [Five Days of Crisis]. The articles were first pub-
lished in a weekly journal and have since then reappeared in a couple of different formats.
20. Aredeshir Zahedi, IOHP, Jan. 15, 1992, 77.
21. Ibid., 82.
22. Ibid., 79.
23. “Charge in Iran to Department of State,” Aug. 16, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10,
745–46.
24. Zahedi, IOHP, 83.
25. FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 738.
26. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Aug. 12, 2003.
27. U.S. Embassy to State Dept., Jan. 8, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 894. The report indi-
cates that Aredeshir was acting as translator in the meeting between his father, the prime minister, and Henderson, the U.S. ambassador. The subject was the upcoming elections.
28. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, June 7, 2004.
29. In his memoirs, Fardust refers to Zahedi as America’s “good boy.” See Fardust, Khaterat, 258. 30. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK.
31. “The Shah of Iran: A Revised Study,” in FRUS, 1955–57, 917.
32. I had heard the story from Zahedi, and the queen confirms it in broad outlines, without
going into too much detail about the role of Zahedi, in her memoirs. See Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love.
33. Ibid.
34. “Zahedi, Aredeshir, Engineer (Muhandess),” PRO, FCO 17/373.
35. The most detailed account of these simmering tensions between the shah and his eldest
daughter can be found in Assadollah Alam’s Diaries. He was in charge of attending to her problems and needs.
36. Dept. of State, Oct. 22, 1968, NA.
37. U.S. Embassy, Tehran, Iran, “Style of the New Foreign Minister,” Feb. 13, 1967, A-431, NSA. 38. Ibid., 2.
39. Ibid., 1.
40. “Zahedi,” PRO, FCO 17/373.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Ibid.
43. “Record of Conversation, between Foreign Secretary and the Iranian Foreign Minister,
March 12, 1968,” PRO, FCO 17/1372.
44. Fereydoon Zandfar, Iran Dar Jahani Por Talatom [Iran in a Tumultuous World] (Tehran:
Shirazeh, 1379/2000), 94–101.
45. “Record of Conversation.”
46. Sir Denis Wright, interviewed by author, London, Aug. 11, 2004. The episode is also de-
scribed in his memoirs, to which he kindly gave me access.
47. Dept. of State to U.S. Embassy in Iran, Mar. 16, 1968, in FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 482–83. 48. Ibid., 483.
49. Ezri, Yadnameh.
50. “Iranian Internal Politics,” British Embassy in Tehran to FO, Mar. 28, 1968, PRO, FO
248/1646.
51. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 167, 184.
52. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 165.
53. Ibid., 191.
54. The Islamic Republic’s authorities, oblivious to the value of a dollar in 1976, even claim
that “Zahedi spent one hundred twenty million dollars on the Ford campaign.” See Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 14.
55. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, July 10, 2003.
56. Colonel Cyrus Khiltash, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., June 5, 2004. He was present at the meeting and had been, for many years, one of the shah’s bodyguards.
57. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, July 10, 2003, and Aredeshir Zahedi, IOHP, Jan. 15, 1992. Although the interview is closed until after his death, he kindly gave me access to it.
58. The FBI report for the House of Representatives provides eerie details of the FBI investigation. See FBI Report to the Select Sub-Committee. Aredeshir Zahidi provided me with a copy of the report.
59. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 391. I have also interviewed Mr. Ali Rezai, who took part in actually preparing the document, and Aredeshir Zahedi, who was present at its creation.

RELIGION

Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani
1. Ayatollah Kashani be Ravayate Asnad [Ayatollah Kashani According to Documents], vol. 1 (Tehran: Chapaksh, 1379/1990), 12.
2. For a discussion of ejazeh and its impact on the West, see Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, eds., Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999).
3. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1258.
4. Habibollah Ahmadi and Behnam Sadri, “Ayatollah Kashani dar Zendane Mottafegin” [Ayatollah Kashani in Allies’ Prison], Tahgigate Tarikhi [Historical Research], nos. 17–18 (1374/1995): 30.
5. Ibid., 36.
6. Ibid., 49.
7. Ahmadi, “Ayatollah Kashani,” 65.
8. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224.
9. Ahmadi, “Ayatollah Kashani,” 35.
10. Mohammad Ali Movahed, Khabe Ashofte-ye Naft [The Tortured Dream of Oil] (Tehran:
Karnameh, 1378/1999), vol. 1, 95.
11. In a letter, Ayatollah Kashani’s son wrote to me about his father’s aversion to the radicalism
of the Islamic group. Hassan Salemi to author, 2003.
12. Ayatollah Kashani be Ravayate Asnad, vol. 1, 399.
13. U.S. Embassy, Tehran, to Dept. of State, Aug. 30, 1951, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10.
14. U.S. Embassy to Dept. of State, May 28, 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 384.
15. The letter has been quoted in several sources. See, for example, Movahed, Khabe Ashofte-ye
Naft, vol. 1, 475. 16. Ibid., 567.
17. U.S. Embassy to Dept. of State, Feb. 28, 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 362.
18. Movahed, Khabe Ashofte-ye Naft, vol. 1, 400.
19. U.S. Embassy to Dept. of State, June 27, 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 405.
20. British Embassy to the Department of State, Aug. 9, 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 433. 21. U.S. Embassy to Dept. of State, Aug. 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 438.
22. Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men.
23. Hassan Salemi, interviewed by Hamid Shokat, “Rooze Gable Coup d’Etat” [Day Before the Coup], in Peyame Emrooz, Shahrivar 1374/1995, 60–69.
24. SAVAK clearly had Kashani under constant surveillence during the last years and reported on many of his conversations. This bitterness comes through in many of the reported conversations. See Ayatollah Kashani be Ravayate Asnad, 858–901
25. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, July 10, 2003.
26. U.S. Embassy to Dept. of State, Jan. 8, 1954, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 895. 27. Ayatollah Kashani be Ravayate Asnad, 619.
28. Ibid., 901.
29. Doctor Amini be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 495–96.

Ruhollah Khomeini
1. At least three English biographies of Khomeini exist. The author of the first is a journalist. He has used many of the available facts about the ayatollah, yet to support some of the more controversial points he has made in the book, he has often relied only on gossip and rather convenient but completely unverifiable “private conversations” he has had with Khomeini’s adversaries. See Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (Bethesda: Adler and Adler, 1986).
2. Different sources have offered different dates for his birth. Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, gives his birth date as May 17, 1902.
3. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000), 2–4.
4. Ibid., 7–8. For an almost hagiographic rendition of Khomeini’s early years, see Hamed Algar, “Imam Khomeini, 1902–1962: The Pre-Revolutionary Years” in Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, ed. Edmund Burke III and Ira M. Lapidus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988).
5. For a brilliant and shocking study of these epidemics, see Amir Afkhami, “Compromised Constitutions: The Iranian Experience with the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, no. 77 (2003): 367–92.
6. Moin, Khomeini, 2.
7. The same Hakam-Zadeh published a book called Asrar-e Hezar Saleh [Thousand-Year-Old Mysteries] (Qom, n.d.), in which he made his argument against obscurantist Shiism and for a more rational Islam.
8. An account of Khomeini’s days in seminary in Qom has been provided in the memoirs of Ayatollah Montazeri. See Hoseyn Montazeri, Khaterat-e Ayatollah Montazeri (Los Angeles: Ketab, 2003).
9. Moin, Khomeini, 37.
10. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. and annot. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981).
11. “Expedient dissimulation” or tagiyyah is an interesting concept in Shii thought that allows believers to hide their true beliefs when their safety or the interest of Islam demands it. For a discussion of the concept, see Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), 177–81.
12. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 367.
13. William Harraway, “Five Mystical Ghazals by the Ayatollah Khomeini,” Iranian Studies 30, no. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1997): 273–76. Harraway calls the Ghazals squarely in the classical tradition, particularly “in their diction and rhetoric of praise, erotic longing, and power” (273).
14. Ruhollah Khomeini, A Clarification of Questions: An Unabridged Translation of Resaleh Towzih al Masael, trans. J. Bourjerdi (Boulder: Westview, 1984).
15. The text is routine only in the sense that since the seventeenth century every major cleric has had to publish such a work as his “right of passage” to the higher ranks of clerical authority. Khomeini’s book is only a slightly modified version of similar texts written by his predecessors.
16. Khomeini, Clarification of Questions, 376.
17. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 48, 153–54.
18. Several people have made this comparison. For example, see Vanessa Martin, Creating
an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). She writes, “Khomeini’s vision . . . in certain respects recalls Plato’s Republic” (35).
19. Ruhollah Khomeini, Hokumat-e Islami [Islamic Government] (Tehran, n.d.), 44.
20. Hannah Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” Confluence 2, no. 3 (Sept. 1953): 108.
21. Ruhollah Khomeini, Kashfol, Asrar [Exploration of Mysteries] (Tehran: Ravag, 1979). 22. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 36.

Ali Shari’ati
1. Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994), 208–42. Other essays in the collection cover the lives of such historic figures as Jamala Din Afghani, who, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, started the whole Pan-Islamic movement, and Hassan Al-Banna (1906–1949) who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
2. For the last decade, the group known as MEK has been the subject of some controversy in the United States. The State Department has placed it on the list of terrorist organizations, while the group itself and its supporters have been trying to challenge the designation. The group has been alleged by journalists such as Seymour Hersh to be cooperating with the United States in efforts to destabilize the regime in Tehran.
3. Rahnema, Pioneers of Islamic Revival, 208. For a brilliant study of the three stages of clerical training, see Roy Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
4. Ahmad Kasravi, Shiigari [Shiism] (Tehran: Pargham, 1356/1978).
5. Rahnema, Pioneers of Islamic Revival, 211–12.
6. Ibid., 209.
7. Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati (London: I. B. Tauris,
2000), 31.
8. Rahnema, Pioneers of Islamic Revival, 212.
9. Rahnema, Islamic Utopian, 43.
10. Ibid., 57.
11. Rahnema has offered a lengthy discussion of this “fictive mind.” See his Islamic Utopian,
161–75.
12. Ibid., 65–66, 90.
13. Ibid., 63.
14. Ibid., 69.
15. The letter has never been published. Parts of it are quoted in Rahnema, Islamic Utopian, 71.
16. Ibid., 80.
17. Ibid., 82–84
18. Ali Rahnema has provided a brief account of this fiasco in his book Islamic Utopian,
86–87. Based on interviews and other sources, I have argued that his rendition tries to whitewash Shari’ati’s role and ignores the premeditated nature of his cruel and calculated action. For my review, see Abbas Milani, “Shari’ati va Nakoja-abad?” [Shari’ati and Utopia?], Iranshenasi, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 370–84.
19. Rahnema, Islamic Utopian,, 108.
20. Jalal Matini, “Zaryab Khoi Che Goft?” [What Did Zaryabe Khoi Say?], Iranshenasi, no. 2 (Summer 1373/1994): 377–441. Zaryabe Khoi is the historian in charge of the exam.
21. Professor Jalal Matini was at the time associate dean of the school and directly involved in hiring Shari’ati. He kindly informed me of these developments in several interviews, He has also written a seminal essay on the topic in Iranshenasi.
22. I have written about these pressures at some length in The Persian Sphinx.
23. Masoud Pedram, Roshenfekrane Dini va Modernite dar Irane Pass az Engelab [Religious Thinkers and Modernity in Iran after the Revolution] (Tehran, 1382/1994), 140.
24. Rahnema also points to the Leninist component in Shari’ati’s ideas, though overall he seems to argue that the evolution of such an idea is expected in the context in which Shari’ati lived and operated. See Rahnema, Pioneers of Islamic Revival, 241.
25. Ali Shari’ati, Martyrdom, trans. and quoted in Mohammad Yadegari, Ideological Revolution in the Muslim World (Brentwood, Md.: IGPS, 1983), 2–3.
26. It is the term used by Ali Rahnema.
27. In an interview with a “high-ranking security official” I asked about Shari’ati’s claim, and he dismissed it with derision. Everything about his movements, he said, “was known to us and having him out of Iran under those circumstances was to our advantage.” Phone interview, July 15, 2004.
28. Yadegari, Ideological Revolution in the Muslim World, 25. The essay epitomized the hagiography of Shari’ati.

eyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari
1. Hassan Shari’atmadari, interviewed by Hamid Shokat, Hamburg, June 16, 2002.
2. Muhammad Gazzali, in his Kimiyae Sa’adat, begins by explaining why he is breaking with the common clerical practice and writing in Persian. He chastises Persian as an inferior language ill suited to the rigors and finer complexities of theology. This statement typifies almost a millennium of Persian mullahs’ disregard for their own native tongue. Ketabe Mohammadi is also a good reference to the sources of this tradition.
3. Hassan Shari’atmadari, interviewed by Hamid Shokat, Hamburg, June 16, 2002.
4. According to Hassan Shari’atmadari, the reason Amini visited Khomeini was that the man arranging the meetings was one of Khomeini’s minions.
5. According to Justice Douglas, even after the shah’s visit to the United States, the Kennedy administration was frustrated by the shah and sought to replace him. Douglas writes, “the idea was to withdraw support from the Shah, causing his abdication, and to put his son on the throne and establish a regency around him.” William O. Douglas, The Court Years: 1939–1975 (New York: Random House, 1980), 303–4. It is important to remember that Douglas was on very close and friendly terms with Nasser Khan and the other Qhashghai brothers.
6. Seyyed Zia be Ravayat-e Asnad SAVAK [Seyyed Zia According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1380/2001), 314.
7. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Latest Developments in the Religious Front,” June 21, 1978, no. 1427, NSA.
8. Ibid., 145.
9. Hamid Ruhani, Shari’atmadari dar Dadgahe Tarikh [Shari’atmadari in the Court of History] (Tehran: n.d.), 152.
10. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “Elements of GOI Agreement with Religious Opposition,” Oct. 24, 1978, no. 1615, NSA.

JOURNALISM

Aliasqar Amirani
1. Fuad Amirani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, 2003.
2. Although some sources claim that he was ten when he moved to Tehran, his son, Fuad, indicates that his father was thirteen when, with five dollars in his pocket, he escaped his family and went to Tehran. Fuad Amirani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
3. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 31–32.
4. Ibid., 32.
5. Fuad Amirani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2003.
6. Princeton University Library has the entire collection of this paper. I studied the paper’s
content, and its evolution, at the library. I am grateful to Mrs. Ashraf for her generous help.
7. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 38.
8. His son claims that his father finished law school, but the SAVAK account of his life has him
only finishing high school.
9. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 39–40.
10. Copies of both poems as well as Amirani’s attempt at creating an aura of impartiality are
provided in Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 35–78.
11. I was told of his contact with Behboodi by General Alavi Kia, one of the founders of SAVAK.
Phone interview by author, Dec. 5, 2004.
12. Matbouate Asre Pahlavi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [The Press During the Pahlavi Era
According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1382/2003), 188.
13. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 3, 47–65.
14. General Hassan Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Apr. 22, 2005. 15. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Aug. 12, 2003.
16. General Hassan Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Apr. 22, 2005.
17. I read the letters in Aredeshir Zahedi’s files. When I asked whether he had arranged for any payment, he refused to answer, saying “I will not talk about issues that have to do with people’s honor.” Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Aug. 12, 2003.
18. Behzadi, himself the editor of an influential magazine, calls Amirani the most influential journalist of his time—particularly during much of the 1960s and 1970s. See Behzadi, ShebeheKhaterat, vol. 3, 35–65.
19. I have described Hoveyda’s concern in this regard in Milani, Persian Sphinx.
20. Fuad Amirani, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, 2003.
21. Fuad Amirani read the entire will to me, as well as parts of his father’s memoirs. Parts of
it are also published in Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat. Fuad did not want me to make a copy of the will. Rather than relying on faulty memory, I have used the segments quoted in Behzadi, ShebeheKhaterat, vol. 3, 43–44.

Darius Homayun
1. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, June 9, 2002.
2. Hoseyn Mohri, “Darius Homayun,” Talash, no. 18, special issue devoted to Homayun.
3. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, June 10, 2002.
4. Homayun, in his interviews as well as in the collection of SAVAK documents published by
the Islamic Republic (see note 9), indicated that the shah subsidized the Sumka. 5. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, June 9, 2002.
6. Ibid.
7. Mohri, “Darius Homayun.”
8. Darius Homayun interviewed by author, Geneva, June 10, 2002.
9. Darius Homayun be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Darius Homayun According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1378/1999), 127–29.
10. For an example of these behind-the-scenes negotiations involving Sanatizadeh, Homayun, and leaders of the Front, see U.S. Embassy, “Memorandum of Conversation,” Dec. 11, 1963, NA.
11. Darius Homayun, “Vazifeye Grouhe Mokhalef” [Responsibilities of an Opposition Group], Etela’at, 16 Khordad 1341/June 1962.
12. Darius Homayun, “Tamrine Democracy” [Democratic Exercise], Etela’at, 24 Dey 1339/1960.
13. In the special issue of Talash devoted to Homayun, several journalists wrote about Homayun’s role in fighting for journalists’ rights and revenues.
14. Keyhan, 17 Mordad 1358/Aug, 8, 1979.
15. Ibid., 2
16. In The Persian Sphinx, I have explained in some detail the contours of the negotiations
leading to the creating of Ayandegan.
17. Dariush Homayun, “Life After Dying Before Death,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of
Homayun, 1.
18. An account of this conversation is provided in the book that is a de facto “official” history of Ayatollah Khomeini’s life and struggles. See Seyyed Hassan Ruhani, Nehzate Imam Khomeini [Imam Khomeini’s Movement] (Qom: Dar-al Elmi, 1356/1978).
19. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, June 10, 2002. 20. Homayun, “Life After Dying,” 1.
21. Ibid., 2.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Darius Homayun be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 238. 25. Homayun, “Life After Dying,” 3.
26. Ibid., 4.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 7.
29. Ibid., 6.
30. Ibid., 8.
31. Ibid., 9.

Abbas Masudi
1. For an account of the essay’s preparation, see Milani, Persian Sphinx.
2. British Embassy, Tehran, “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/ 40224, 36.
3. Ibid., 30.
4. Masudi, Pirouziy-e Labkhand, 6.
5. Ibid., 24.
6. Kaveh Bayat, ed., Asnade Matbouat [Documents about the Press], vol. 1 (Tehran, 1372/1993),
125.
7. Darius Homayun be Ravayate Asnad SAVAK, 115.
8. Ibid., 125.
9. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 1, 535–80.
10. Masudi, Pirouziy-e Labkhand, 67.
11. Ibid., 67.
12. Abbas Masudi, Khaterate Mosaferat-e Moscow [Memoirs of the Moscow Trip], n.d., 5.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. For an account of Keyhan’s creation and the shah’s dismay with Masudi, see Fardust, Khat-
erat, vol. 1, 131.
15. See the section on Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh in this collection for more about Keyhan. 16. Behzadi, Shebehe-Khaterat, vol. 1, 539–55.
17. Fardust, Khaterat. According to the editors of this book, Masudi was among the recipients
of funds in a special covert operations.
18. Mohammad Ali Movahad, Khabe Ashofte-ye Naft, vol. 1, 182, 208, 270. 19. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, Aug. 15, 2003.

Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh
1. Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Sept. 12, 2006.
2. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, “Dar Keyhane Khaterat” [In Memory of Keyhan], interview by Sadrealdin Elahi, Ira Nameh 16, nos. 2–3 (Spring and Summer, 1998): 332.
3. Ibid., 333.
4. The episode is mentioned in Karim Sanjabi’s memoirs and discussed in Hoseyn Fardust’s memoirs. See Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 2, 132.
5. Iraj Afshar, ed. Namehaye-Tehran [Letters from Tehran] (Tehran: Farzan, 1379/2000), 64.
6. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, La Politique de L’Iran dans la Societe Des Nations: La Conception Iraniane de L’Organisation de la Paix (Aix-en-Provence: Roubad, 1936). The library at the University of California at Berkeley has a copy of the dissertation.
7. An account of the marriage is provided in Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980).
8. BBC interview with Mesbahzadeh, published in Keyhan, 16 Khordad 1373/June 6, 1994. 9. Keyhan, 6 Khordad 1321/May 27, 1942.
10. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, interviewed by author, Newport Beach, Calif., Dec. 4, 2002. 11. BBC interview with Mesbahzadeh, Keyhan, June 16, 1994.
12. Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., Sept. 22, 2006. 13. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 2, 185.
14. Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., Sept. 22, 2006. 15. BBC interview with Mesbahzadeh.
16. Dr. Sadrealdin Elahi, interviewed by author, Walnut Creek, Calif., Sept. 22, 2006.
17. Michael Amin Couran, “Important ‘Beauty Culture’ in the Age of Anti-Imperialist Sacrifice,” Comparative Studies of South Asian and Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004), 47.
18. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, letter to author, Aug. 21, 1998. In a later interview with Dr. Mesbahzadeh, he provided more details about the incident.
19. Parviz Mesbahzadeh, phone interview by the author, Sept. 19, 2006.
20. Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, interviewed by author, Newport Beach, Calif., Dec. 4, 2002.

The Towfiq Brothers
1. Abolqassem Halet, “Mohammad Ali Towfiq,” Ayandeh, no. 1–6 (Farvardin 1371/1992): 252–53.
2. Dr. Abbas Towfiq, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2006.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. The issue of how and why Abbas Towfiq was dismissed from the Plan Organization became
the subject of a controversy when Abdol-Majid Majidi, director of the Plan Organization, made some claims that were denied by Abbas Towfiq.
6. Farideh Towfiq, Ruznamey-e Towfiqh va Kaka Towfiq [Towfiqh and Kaka] (Tehran, 1383/2004), 2.
7. Ibid., 45.
8. For a copy of the text of the proclamation, see Towfiq, Ruznamey-e Towfiqh va Kaka Towfiq, 51.
9. Dr. Abbas Towfiq, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2006. 10. Ibid.
11. For an account of these rumors, see Milani, Persian Sphinx.
12. Dr. Abbas Towfiq, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2006. 13. Ibid.
14. Hadi Khorsandi, interviewed by author, London, Aug. 9, 2003.
15. Towfiq, Ruznamey-e Towfiq, 197.
16. For example, see Hassan Towfiq, Keyhan, no. 917, 23 Mordad 1381/Aug. 14, 2002.

LAW

Shahin Agayan
1. Nina G. Garsoian, Armenia Between Byzantium and the Sasanians (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985), 29.
2. Houri Berberian, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001).
3. For a discussion of him and his role in the Tudeh Party, see the chapter on Mehdi Samii in this collection.
4. For example see Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 27.
5. Hoseyn Fardust, Zohour va Soghout-e Saltanat-e Pahlavi [Rise and Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty], 2 vols. (Tehran, 1370/1990), 1:262–64.
6. Fereydun Mahdavi and Dr. Hoseyn Alizadeh were accused of malfeasance. I have interviewed them both and a number of other people involved in the case—from the judge to the prosecutor general. There is something of a consensus that in the case of sugar purchase, there was no bribe involved.
7. Fardust, Zohour, vol. 1, 262–64.
8. Zanan Darbar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Women of the Court According to SAVAK Documents], vol. 1 (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1381/2002), 99.
9. Shahin Agayan, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2003. 10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Nahavandi, Iran, 132.
13. He was famous because of his wife’s starlike beauty and because of allegations that the shah was attracted to her.
14. Cyrus Ghani, himself the son of a prominent politician and renowned scholar, headed another such firm. He represented most of the major American companies in Iran. His knowledge of films and football, American elections and Iranian calligraphy made him a favorite of the social circles of the time. He was also a friend of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. He now lives in the United States.
The third big firm representing major Western clients was headed by Parviz Osia. A poet manqué, and during his student days an opponent of the shah, his circle of friends included both powerful men of politics and prominent intellectuals and writers of the opposition. He was generous in his support of those poets and writers who were persecuted by the regime. Eventually, he escaped to London, where he died.
15. Shahin Agayan, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2003.

Mohammad Baheri
1. Ebrahim Golestan, a man of exacting standards in finding and keeping friends, talks of Baheri with unfailing affection and respect, and offers many anecdotes on how Baheri helped his old comrades in their time of need.
2. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 270.
3. Mohammad Baheri, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003.
4. A brilliant account of the city is provided by Golestan in his work. See the Ebrahim Golestan
chapter in this collection. Another excellent rendition of this city in transition was provided in Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun, trans. M. R. Ghanounparvar (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1990).
5. Mohammad Baheri, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003. 6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 1, 270–71.
9. Fardust, Zohour, vol. 2, 315.
10. For the text of the minutes of the cabinet meeting, see Tafazolli, Khaterat-e Jahanguir-e Tafazolli, 28–34.
11. Ibid., 40.
12. A copy of the letter was provided to me courtesy of Mohammad Baheri. 13. Mohammad Baheri, IOHP, Aug. 13, 1983, tape 25.
14. Nahavandi, Carnets Secrets, 140–43.
15. Ibid., 172–73.

MILITARY

Abolfath Ardalan
1. According to the Shahnameh, the Kurds are the purest Persians of all. During the thousandyear dreadful rule of Zahak, the Arab despot, each day the brains of two Iranian youth had to be fed to the two snakes that had grown in his two shoulders. After a while a patriotic cook decided that each day he would kill only one youth and spare the life of the other, and satisfy the snake with a substitute. The freed youth he then sent to the safety of mountains. The tribe of these spared youth became the Kurds.
2. Logatnameh Dehkhoda (Tehran: Dehkhoda Foundation, 1357/1978), vol. 5, 778.
3. A copy of the letter is available at the Ardalan family Web site. See ardalanfamily.com.
Notes to Pages 416–25 | 565
566 | Notes to Pages 425–33
4. Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiyar, The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973).
5. Amanollah Ardalan, Khaterat-e Hadj Ezol-Mulk Ardalan [Memoirs], ed. by Dr. Bagher Ageli (Tehran: Elmi, 1372/1983).
6. Abolfath Ardalan, FIS, interviews in Sept. 1987 and Aug. 1991.
7. State Dept. to the U.S. Embassy in Iran, “Possible Iran-British crisis brewing,” June 1971, NA.
8. State Dept. to the U.S. Embassy in Iran, “British-Iranian Differences,” June 1971, NA.
9. “State Dept. to the U.S. Embassy in Iran, November 23, 1968,” in FRUS1964–68, vol. 22, 563.
10. Abolfath Ardalan, FIS, interviews in Sept. 1987 and Aug. 1991. 11. Ibid.

Teymur Bakhtiyar
1. For a brief account of his life and early years, see Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [General Teymur Bakhtiyar According to SAVAK Documents], vol. 1 (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1378/1999).
2. Nasser Zolfaghari, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 7, 2003.
3. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 21.
4. General Alavi Kia in numerous interviews told me about the details of the role played by
American and British advisors in the early years of SAVAK.
5. Nasser Zolfaghari, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 7, 2003.
6. On this appointment, General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Oct. 7, 2004.
7. Teymur Bakhtiyar, “Tagriz” [Introduction], in Tarik Varzeshe Bastani [A History of Tradi-
tional Sport] (Tehran, 1337/1958).
8. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Nov. 20, 2002.
9. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 1220–35.
10. An account of this conversation is provided in a file in the British Public Record Office.
Initially closed till 2035, the file was opened in 2003. It includes the memorandum of a conversation between the general and an employee of the British embassy.
11. See Hashemi, Davari, 122–201.
12. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 40–44.
13. Ibid., 21–42.
14. “Memorandum for the President,” Feb. 28, 1961, JFK.
15. In the Islamic Republic’s collection of documents about Bakhtiyar, Barry Rubin is quoted
as saying that the two American CIA officials divulged these discussions to him. See Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK, 25.
16. Foreign Policy of the United States of America, vol. 18, Microfiche Supplements, “Memorandum for Mr. Philip Talbott,” May 25, 1961, JFK Library.
17. Ibid.
18. “Rusk to U.S. Embassy in Iran,” 115A, NSC, JFK.
19. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Oct. 12, 2003.
20. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 1, 151.
21. Wright, “Memoirs,” 363. Sir Denis kindly afforded me a chance to read the entire
manuscript.
22. Ibid., 388.
23. Ibid.
24. “General Bakhtiyar and the Oil Companies,” Dec. 30, 1970, PRO, FCO 17/151, 1.
25. Hauptabeilun 5.4, Berlin Treff Mit Im “Charly” 10.5.1972, EGA.
26. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 1, 160–285. 27. Ibid., 236–52.
28. Ibid., 27.
29. Ibid.
30. Parviz Sabeti, who was in charge of internal security in those days, recounted this story.
Sabeti, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, June 2003.
31. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 1, 44.
32. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, Aug. 4, 2004. 33. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 1, 338.
34. Sepahpod Teymur Bakhtiyar be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 3, 313–39.
35. Ibid., 443.
36. Ibid., 427.

Hoseyn Fardust
1. Marvin Zonis, Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 141.
2. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Nov. 21, 2003.
3. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 64.
4. Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror, 196.
5. For example see, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Aug. 15, 1980, tvnews.vanderbilt.edu.
Tabataba’i was the name of the assassinated figure.
6. Shahrokh Fardust, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2003.
7. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 24.
8. Ibid., 55.
9. Zonis, Majestic Failure, 134.
10. Fardust, Khaterat, 52–56.
11. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Nov. 21, 2003.
12. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Dec. 5, 2005.
13. For a detailed account of his financial activities, see “Iranian Internal Situation,” Oct. 31,
1978, PRO, BT 241/3045.
14. General Alavi Kia, interviewed by author, Nov. 21, 2003.
15. I was told about his financial activities by his son, as well as by General Alavi Kia. 16. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Nov. 21, 2003.
17. Ibid.
18. Shahrokh Fardust, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2003. He is the only son of Fardust.
19. The card habit was told to me by Mrs. Badri Ajoudani, who was herself for many years part of the game in which Fardust participated.
20. Several people, including at least one person who was present at the meeting, recounted the discussion (e.g., Alireza Zanuzi).

Valiollah Gharani
1. Ahmad Norouzi Farsangi, Nagoftehay-e Zendegiy-e Sepahbod Gharani [The Untold Life of General Gharani] (Tehran: Zohd, 1382/2003). Throughout the book, Gharani is referred to as shahid, or “martyr.” They say he was devout since he was a child.
2. General Alavi Kia and General Hashemi, both professional intelligence officers who remained dedicated to the shah, to this day talk in glowing terms about Gharani. Also Aredeshir Zahedi, a man who was probably as close to the shah as any, talks of Gharani in only profusely praiseful tone. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Oct. 9, 2004.
3. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Oct. 10, 2003.
4. Ibid.
5. “Special National Intelligence Estimate, August 26, 1958,” in FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 586. 6. Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The Qarani Affair and Iranian Politics,” International Journal of Mid-
dle East Studies (Nov. 1993): 628. 7. Ibid., 629.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 642.
10. One of his closest friends was Holaku Rambod. He told me of Gharani’s beliefs upon his
return. Rambod, interviewed by author, Nice, Aug. 2003.
11. General Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, Aug. 7, 2004. The ruse is also described
at some length in Gasiorowski, “Qarani Affair.” 12. Gasiorowski, “Qarani Affair,” 632.
13. FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 539.
14. Ibid., 539.
15. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, doc. 1/32. 16. Ibid., 537.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 541.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 553
22. “Secret Minutes, March 3, 1958,” PRO, FO 371/133009.
23. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, 542.
24. Ibid.
25. Farsangi, Nagoftehay-e Zendegiy-e, appendix.
26. Ibid., 466.
27. Ibid., 163.
28. Ibid., 333–60.
29. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Oct. 12, 2004. 30. Farsangi, Nagoftehay-e Zendegiy-e, 199.
31. Keyhan, 7 Farvardin 1358/Mar. 27, 1979, 2.

Alimohammad Khademi
1. Monib Khademi, interviewed by author, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 26, 2003.
2. His family, and friends told him repeatedly to leave. In fact, a friend by the name of Namvar visited him the day before his death and urged him to leave. To him he repeated the same mantra: “I have done nothing wrong.” Kharazm Namvar, personal correspondence, Nov. 28, 1993, courtesy of the Khademi family.
3. Monib Khademi, interviewed by author, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 26, 2003.
4. Evening Standard (London), Nov. 7, 1978. The Herald Tribune reported both the official version—“the wound was self-inflicted”—as well as the family’s claim that “he was attacked at his house,” International Herald Tribune, Nov. 8, 1978.
5. Transcripts of his early years in school have been provided to me courtesy of the Khademi family.
6. Ali Tavangar was a fellow classmate of Khademi and Moggarrebi. Personal correspondence, Dec. 16, 1990. Courtesy of the Khademi family.
7. Abbas Atravash, “The Evolution of the Iranian Airline Industry,” The Iranian, May 1997, 3–7.
8. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, “The Iranian Aviation Mafia, Apr. 27, 1971,” in Asnade Laneye Jasusi, vol. 17, 45–48.
9. Amir Kasravi, interviewed by author, Ontario, Canada, Oct. 29, 2003. Kasravi was among the first group of pilots sent by Khademi for training in the United States. He was known in the company as a first-rate pilot, and a man of integrity and honesty. He has much praise for Khademi.
10. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “The Iranian Aviation Mafia,” 45, NA.
11. Amir Kasravi, interviewed by author, Montreal, Canada, Oct. 28, 2003.
12. An official copy of the minutes of the meeting was provided to me, courtesy of the Kha-
demi family.
13. Letter number 406/68/290/26, dated 1357/9/20, from the investigative arm of the mili-
tary governor’s office recounts these details and asks for and receives permission to issue orders for her release. A copy of the order is in my possession, courtesy of the Khademi family. I randomly checked the veracity of copy in my possession with offices in Iran and was assured of the letter’s authenticity.
14. Monib Khademi, interview with the author, Berkeley, Sept. 26, 2003.

Mohammad Khatam
1. Assadalloh Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, vol. 5, 234.
2. Ibid.
3. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam.
4. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, “The Iranian Aviation Mafia,” 45–48.
5. Amir Taheri writes of Khatam’s land grabs in The Unknown Life of the Shah (London:
Hutchinson, 1991), 235.
6. David Binder, “Northrop Cites Undercover Role,” New York Times, June 7, 1975.
7. It was Kermit Roosevelt who traveled to Iran in August 1953 with plans to help organize a
coup against the government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. He wrote a memoir of his exploits as soon as the shah fell from power. See Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
8. Paranay Gupte, “Grumman’s ‘Fees’ to Iran Beg Question,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1976. 9. Alam, Yadashthaye Alam, 235.
10. Ibid., 258.
11. Se Marde Bozorg [Three Great Men], ed. Assadollah Morovati (n.p., n.d.), 141–56.
12. Ibid., 134.
13. “U.S. Embassy in Iran to State Dept., November 28, 1965,” in FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 195. 14. Ibid., 199.
15. Document no. 25, in Pahlaviha, vol. 2, ed. Jalal Andarmanizadeh (Tehran, 1378/1999), 423. 16. In the letter Khatam refers to such beatings. Others close to him and his family have con-
firmed the claim. For example, Maryam Panahi, interviewed by author, New York, June 21, 2006. 17. Ibid., 423–25.
18. In his daily journals, Alam writes about the affair, and about tensions in the court as the result, and of the decision to end the affair. Indeed SAVAK was brought in, and, to end the rumors, pictures of her wedding and of a “husband” appeared in the Persian press. By the time the pictures appeared, Tala was already involved with Khatam.
19. Many people told me about Khatam’s will, and about his leaving a sum for Tala. Among them were Hamid Ghadimi and Maryam Panahi.
20. Several people have talked about his taking of sedatives. For example, see Se RadMarde Bozorg; General Azar Barzin, who was Khatam’s deputy, is among those interviewed.
21. This point is emphasized in the official report of the incident prepared by the commission assigned to investigate. The report is published in Se RadMarde Bozorg.
22. Ghani, Iran and the West, 211.

Ahmad Moggarrebi
1. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, July 4, 2004.
2. The book is well written, in a simple style, free from frills, and clearly intended as an exoneration of his own role in the secret police.
3. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, July 4, 2004.
4. Ibid.
5. Vladimir Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage, tr. Thomas B. Beattie (New York: Pantheon, 1990).
6. Ibid., 147.
7. Ibid., 135.
8. Ibid., 144.
9. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, July 4, 2004. 10. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, 151.
11. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, July 4, 2004.
12. Vladimir Kuzichkin’s account of the arrest (Inside the KGB, 196–98), is, by and large, corroborated by the version offered by General Hashemi.
13. Ibid., 57.
14. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interviewed by author, London, July 4, 2004.
15. I heard about his disappearance from Ebrahim Golestan, whom I interviewed in London in
July 2004. General Hashemi told me of his discussion with Nasiri about Tarass. 16. General Manuchehr Hashemi, interview with author, July 4, 2004.
17. Ibid.
18. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, 200.
19. Ibid., 115.
20. Memorandum of conversation, Tehran, Dec. 14, 1977, NSA.
21. It is interesting to note that a few years later, in 1986, the same Mujaheddin wrote a lengthy
letter to “Comrade Gorbachev” and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, outlining their bona fides as the “anti-imperialist” force in Iran, and indeed the region, and asking for a “loan” of three hundred million dollars, payable when the organization came to power. This was, of course, before they chose Saddam Hussein as their patron. I found the copy of the original letter in the Hoover Archives. It might well be that the Soviets were the ones who first brokered the Saddam patronage for the Mujaheddin. Their camp in Iraq eventually surrendered to the American forces. Their status continues to be the subject of an ongoing battle between their advocates in the Defense Department and their detractors in the State Department, who consider them terrorists.
22. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, 266. 23. Ibid.

Ne’matollah Nasiri
1. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1627.
2. Hoseyn Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 180.
3. Hoseyn Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 181.
4. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat-e Aredeshir Zahedi [Memoirs of Aredeshir Zahedi] (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Ibex, 2006), 169–230.
5. Tafazolli, Khaterat-e Jahanguir-e Tafazolli, 96–97.
6. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Dec. 4, 2003.
NotestoPages463–69 | 571
572 | Notes to Pages 470–76
7. Mansuri, Tarikh Giyam-e Panzdahe Khordad Be Ravayat-Asnad SAVAK, vol. 2, doc. no. 4/107.
8. For a discussion of these whispers, see my “Alam va Richehaye Engelab Islami dar Iran” [Alam and the Origins of the Islamic Revolution], in Abbas Milani, Sayyad-e Sayah’ha [King of Shadows] (Los Angeles: Nashr-i Kitab, 2005).
9. On different occasions toward the end of the shah’s days, the government made announcements about how many “agents” SAVAK had. In interviews with members of the organization, they also repeat that five thousand figure. For example, Parviz Sabeti, phone interview by author, Sept. 3, 2005.
10. For example, see Mansur Rafizadeh, Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal (New York: Morrow, 1987). Although he was an operative in America, the book cover calls him the “chief of SAVAK.” The book became notorious for its strange allegations about the shah’s sexual dalliances while in the United States. Even his account of his meeting with Nasiri when the latter was first appointed the new head, and of how Nasiri had been anxious about what the the CIA thought about him, seem fabricated, 135–55.
11. Many sources testify to Hobajr Yazdani’s use of his connection with Nasiri. See for example the chapters on Mehdi Samii and Yazdani in this collection.
12. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Dec. 4, 2003.
13. Parviz Sabeti, in charge of internal security by the late 1960s, was responsible for many of these reports. On at least one occasion, the shah threatened to have him court-martialed if he continued with his reports on corruption. See the chapter on Sabeti in this book.
14. Interview with Ne’matollah Nasiri, Keyhan, 24 Bahman 1357/Feb. 13, 1979, 8. 15. Keyhan, 28 Bahman 1357/Feb. 17, 1979, 2.
16. Interview with Ne’matollah Nasiri, Keyhan, 28 Bahman 1357/Feb. 17, 1979, 2.

Hassan Pakravan
1. Ruhani, Nehzate Imam Khomeini, 570–80. The author was in fact Seyyed Hassan Ruhani, who was a close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini. The book has since been “revised” to eliminate any favorable reference to characters who have since fallen out of favor.
2. Saideh Pakravan, “Questions sur Mon Pere,” Le Monde, May 11, 1979.
3. Liberation, Apr. 13, 1979.
4. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Sept. 16, 2002.
5. Saideh Pakravan, “Emineh Pakravan: Genese d’un Ecrivan,” unpublished master’s thesis,
Université Paul Valery, Montpellier III, 1977. I am grateful to Ms. Pakravan for kindly trusting me with her sole copy of the thesis.
6. Saideh Pakravan, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Nov. 14, 2002.
7. Pakravan, “Emineh Pakravan,” 39.
8. Fateme Pakravan, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Paris, Mar. 3, 1983. 9. Ibid.
10. I was given a copy of the thesis, with all of the general’s marginal notes.
11. Ibid., 41.
12. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Jan. 29, 2005.
13. Fateme Pakravan, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Paris, Mar. 3, 1983.
14. Ibid.
15. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Sept. 16, 2002.
16. In numerous interviews, General Alavi Kia has kindly given me a detailed account of the
creation of SAVAK.
17. Fateme Pakravan, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Paris, Mar. 3, 1983.
18. In her Harvard Iranian Oral History Project interview, Mrs. Pakravan claims that her hus-
band was in Turkey. According to General Alavi Kia, who met Pakravan at the airport on his return and was, like Pakravan, a SAVAK deputy at the time, the meeting was in Israel, a part of the yearly meeting Iran, Israel, and Turkey held on a rotating basis. In 1961, it was in Israel. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Jan. 29, 2005.
19. While Sadeq Chubak often talked of his close friendship with Pakravan, and of spending many hours in the company of the general self-medicating with opiates—arguably the general’s Achilles’ heel, and a habit he had picked up while serving, early in his career, in a border guard unit stationed in an isolated place—the general’s daughter, Saideh, has questioned the veracity of the claim. The self-medicating proclivity has been confirmed by several other reliable sources, including General Alavi Kia.
20. I had learned of his friendship with Chubak through interviews with Chubak before his death. General Alavi Kia confirmed the Chubak story and added the names of Zohari and Baghai. General Hassan Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Sept. 15, 2002.
21. When the conversation took place, Farokh Negahdar was a cellmate of Jazani. He told me of Jazani’s reaction to the friendly gestures by Pakravan.
22. S. H. R. Baresi va Tahlile Nehzate Imam Khomeini, 570–80.
23. U.S. Department of State, “The Evolution of the US-Iranian Relationship,” no. 3556, 26, NSA.
24. Parviz Sabeti, interview with author, Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2003. 25. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 131.
26. Pakravan’s wife and daughter are among the advocates of this view. 27. S. H. R. Baresi va Tahlile Nehzate Imam Khomeini, 575.
28. Ibid.
29. Chester Bowles to JFK, Feb. 17, 1962, box 116, JFK Library, NSF.
30. Fateme Pakravan, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Paris, Mar. 3, 1983.
31. “A Diplomat’s View from Tehran,” U.S. Embassy in Tehran, reprinted by Georgetown
Univ., Series on History of Diplomacy, Washington, D.C., 1980.
32. Aredeshir Zahedi told me of the succinct and informed nature of General Pakravan’s re-
port and of the shah’s praise of their wisdom and wit. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Dec. 10, 2005.
33. Saideh Pakravan, The Arrest of Hoveyda: Stories of the Iranian Revolution (Costa Mesa: Blind Owl Press, 1998).
34. Farah Pahlavi, Enduring Love, 287.
35. A copy of the letter was provided to me courtesy of Saideh Pakravan.
36. Etela’at Haftegi, Feb. 1981, special issue commemorating the second anniversary of the revolution.
37. In an open letter to Le Monde, Saideh Pakravan refers to these promises. See Le Monde, May 11, 1979.
38. Ibid.
39. Keyhan, 22 Farvardin 1379/Apr. 10, 2000.

Hadji Ali Razmara
1. Kambiz Razmara and Kaveh Bayat, Khaterat va Asnad-e Sepahbod Hadj-Ali Razmara [Memoirs and Documents of General Hadj Ali Razmara] (Tehran: Shirazeh, 1382/2003), 18.
2. Ibid., 19.
3. M. Reza Ghods, “The Rise and Fall of General Razmara,” Middle Eastern Studies 1, no. 1 (1993).
4. Ali Karimian, “Razmara,” Tahgigate Iran [Iranian History], no. 25–27 (Spring–Summer 1376/1997): 67.
5. FO to Tehran, Oct. 31, 1943, PRO, FO 371/35077. 6. Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar, 316.
7. Tehran to FO, May 11, 1949, PRO, FO 371/35077. 8. Ibid.
9. Razmara and Bayat, Khaterat va Asnad-e, 465. 10. Ibid., 471.
11. Ibid., 473.
12. Tehran to FO, June 25, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Tehran to FO, Feb. 1, 1950, PRO, FO 371/82310. 17. Tehran to FO, June 5, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 18. Tehran to FO, June 29, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 19. Ibid.
20. Tehran to FO, Oct. 3,1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 21. Tehran to FO, July 1, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 22. Ghods, “Rise and Fall of General Razmara.”
23. Ibid.
24. Tehran to FO, Sept. 28, 1959, PRO, FO 248/1493. 25. Tehran to FO, July 1, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 26. Ghods, “Rise and Fall of General Razmara.”
27. Tehran to FO, July 20, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 28. Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar, 319.
29. Tehran to FO, Aug. 26, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493. 30. Tehran to FO, Aug. 17, 1950, PRO, FO 248/1493.
NotestoPages489–94 | 575 31. The text of the letter is published in Razmara and Bayat, Khaterat va Asnad-e.

Hassan Toufanian
1. Diana Davenport, The Power-Eaters (New York: Mayflower, 1980).
2. Some sources have put his birthdate a full year earlier, at 1912 (1291). See Ziaeddin Torabian, Sarabe Yek General [A Mirage of A General] (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1377/1998), 3. The book is based on many documents from the government files. It is prepared by one of the institutions connected to the Islamic regime.
3. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985. 4. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 22.
5. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985. 6. Ibid.
7. In his oral history interview with Harvard University, he talks of his medical school experience. Other sources, using his personnel files claim he entered the military right after graduating from high school.
8. Torabian, Sarabe Yek General, 5.
9. General Robert E. Huyser, Mission to Tehran (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 26.
10. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985.
11. Torabian, Sarabe Yek General.
12. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985.
13. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 218.
14. U.S. Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, Nov. 26, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22,
447.
15. Ibid.
16. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Dec. 4, 2004. 17. Torabian, Sarabe Yek General, 35–45.
18. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985.
19. Torabian, Sarabe Yek General, 41.
20. Huyser, Mission to Tehran, 51.
21. General Abolfath Ardalan, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C.
22. Elaine Scoliono, “Documents Detail Israel’s Missile Deal with the Shah,” New York Times,
Apr. 1, 1986, 6.
23. Ibid., 6. The overall details of these deals are confirmed in several other sources, including
the CIA.
24. Hassan Toufanian, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, May 9, 1985. 25. Asnade Laney-e Jasusi, vol. 6, 154.
26. New York Times, Feb. 11, 1976.
27. Hassan Toufanian, IOHP, May 9, 1985.
28. Ibid.
29. Huyser, Mission to Tehran, 26.
30. Ibid., 32.
576 | Notes to Pages 494–500
31. Keyhan, 27 Bahman 1357/Feb. 6, 1979, 2.
32. Hoseyn Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 2, 469.

Fazlollah Zahedi
1. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 345.
2. Ibid., 338.
3. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Oct. 20, 2002.
4. Jalal Andarzamani, “Zahedi dar Takapuye Godrat” [Zahedi in Search of Power], Tarikhe
Moaser-e Iran (Winter 1399/1988): 126.
5. General Hassan Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Apr. 12, 2004.
6. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK.
7. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 10.
8. Ibid.
9. Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1995).
10. Many sources, including Reza Shah’s own travel diaries of his Khuzestan journey confirm
Zahedi’s role in the arrest. See Reza Shah Kabir, Safer-Nameye Khuzestan [Khuzestan Travel Diaries] (Tehran, n.d.), 243.
11. For Zahedi’s relationship with Egbal Ashtiyani, see Abbas Milani, “Daneshkadeh and the Question of Modernity in Iran,” Iranshenasi, Summer 2005.
12. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 28.
13. Homa Zahedi, interviewed by author, Geneva, Oct. 15, 2002.
14. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Oct. 16, 2003.
15. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 25.
16. Andarzamani, “Zahedi dar Takapuye Godrat,” 125.
17. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 34.
18. British Legation to War Office, Nov. 11, 1941, PRO, FO 371/31387.
19. British Consulate to British Embassy, Tehran, Oct. 16, 1942, PRO, FO 248/1411.
20. Security Office, British Embassy, Tehran, Aug. 30, 1942, PRO.
21. FO to Tehran Legation, Dec. 13, 1942, PRO, FO 371/31587.
22. Tehran to FO, Dec. 8, 1942, PRO, FO 371/31387.
23. British Consulate to British Embassy in Tehran, Apr. 11, 1942, PRO, FO 248/1411.
24. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 63.
25. Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 53.
26. Nasser Qhashghai, IOHP, Jan. 31, 1983. Interview conducted by Habib Lajevardi. Nasser
Khan talks about his relations with the general and about how, in his view, Zahedi was very faithful to the shah and never conspired against him, though the opportunity arose on more than one occasion.
27. Zahedi, Khaterat, 68.
28. U.S. Embassy in Tehran to State Dept., July 31, 1952, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 427.
29. One problem with such a coup, both embassies concurred, was the shah, who, they believed, “would not have stamina to see it through and might at certain stage weaken and denounced leaders.” See ibid.
30. The text is quoted in Aredeshir Zahedi, Khaterat, 116–18.
31. “Memorandum Prepared in the Office of National Estimates, Central Intelligence Agency,” Mar. 1, 1953, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 690.
32. Ibid., 691.
33. Ibid., 674.
34. Ibid., 681.
35. Ibid., 721.
36. Ibid., 730–32.
37. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Oct. 2004.
38. Prime Minister Zahedi to President Eisenhower, Document 316, NSA. 39. U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 769.
40. British Embassy to FO, Apr. 5, 1955, PRO, FO 371/114810.
41. Ibid., 2.
42. U.S. Embassy in Tehran to State Dept., April 8, 1955, in FRUS, 1957–57, vol. 12, 727. 43 Andarzamani, “Zahedi dar Takapuye Godrat,” 142.
44. Ibid., 146.
45. Ibid., 144
46. Aredeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK.
47. Ibid.

From Rags to Riches to Revolution: The Iranian Economy, 1941–1979

Industry and Commerce
The Amid-Hozour Family
The Arjomand Brothers
Morad Aryeh
The Barkhordar Brothers
Hadj Habib Elghanian
Rahim Irvani
Abdurrahim J’afari
The Khayami Brothers
The Khosrowshahi Brothers
The Lajevardi Family
Bager Mostofi
Abdul-Hussein Nikpour
The Rezai Brothers
The Rastegar Brothers
Habib Sabet
The Sadat-Tehrani Family
The Sudavar Brothers

Construction
Majid A’lam
Ali Ebrahimi
Hamid Ghadimi
Akbar Alex Lari
Amir Malekyazdi
Fereydoon Rabii

Banks and Finance
Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj
Abolqassem Kheradju
Mohammadali Moffarah
The Moghadam Brothers
Mehdi Samii

Architecture and Engineering
Hoseyn Amanat
Mohsen Forughi
M. Reza Moghtader
Hushang Seyhun

Agriculture
Hashem Naraqi
Hojabr Yazdani

Introduction To Economics

If it is true that it is “the economy, stupid, ”then the Islamic Revolution of 1979 should never have happened. Indeed, if history teaches us anything, it is that it is never just the economy. From the J-curve, which shows that revolutions take place in societies when the people’s rapidly rising expectations outpace the ruling regime’s ability to satisfy them,[1] to Theda Skocpol’s theories of revolution, which argue that revolutions are the results of aborted modernizing efforts by authoritarian regimes,[2] social scientists have long known that the ancient dictum that men and women do not live by bread alone is a far more cogent explanation of human action than any crude materialist explanation that reduces behavior to dictates of the economy. Even to Karl Marx, it is never just the economic realities that render a society “ripe” for revolution. Instead, it is a sharp incongruence between the society’s cultural and political “superstructure” and its economic “base” that brings about a revolution.

In Iran of the late 1970s, certainly issues of corruption, inequality, squandered wealth, and heavy investment in the military figured prominently in creating discontent. In the mid-1970s, by nearly every economic measure, the Iranian economy was the best it had been in perhaps centuries. Between 1941, when the shah took over, and 1979, when the Islamic Revolution forced him off the Peacock Throne, the economy had taken giant strides, improving the lives of nearly every strata of society.

The revolution, one could surmise, occurred because the nascent Iranian bourgeoisie and the burgeoning technocratic elites had, in spite of their increasing economic muscle, no role in politics. From the more traditional entrepreneurial powerhouses, like the Barkhordar and Khosrowshahi families to the younger businessmen like Akbar Lari and the Sudavars, they all invariably give the same response when asked about the dynamics of the revolution and the logic of their own inaction. They point to an implicit contract that existed between the shah and the economic elite: he would attend to politics and ensure security and stability and the creation of a business-friendly environment, and they, in return, would agree to eschew politics and concentrate instead on the economy. The occasional attempts by members of this class, like the speech to the Senate by Gassem Lajevardi warning of economic woes and of the perils of an economy run on the whims and wishes of one man, albeit a well-meaning leader, fell on deaf ears.

The technocratic middle class, on the other hand, never completely ceased its attempts to register discontent. A disproportionate number of opposition figures in the period were from this class.[3] In one case, Abbas Barkhordar, a member of the industrialist class, joined the militant underground opposition. In different ways, both of these classes contributed to the Islamic Revolution: The middle class by joining forces with Ayatollah Khomeini against the shah, and the entrepreneurial class by making no serious effort to save their own investments and the regime.

In addition to the implied covenant with the shah, a large number of industrialists and members of the middle class who were favorably disposed toward the shah and his regime had been seduced by the events of August 1953. They had developed a false sense of comfort, a belief that, at the last minute, the Americans would come, like the charge of the cavalry at the end of western films, to save the shah or, at least, the regime. According to an American Embassy report from Tehran sent on the eve of the revolution, “confidential sources in the business community state that the United States can resolve the crisis in Iran.”[4] The effort late in 1978 led by figures such as Ali Rezai and Mahmood Khayami to organize some opposition to the rising tide of the revolution was too little too late. Ultimately, part of their apathy can be explained by the rapid economic growth they had witnessed and from which they had benefited. The shah had hitherto successfully steered the ship of state and weathered many crises, and this time would be no exception.

When World War II came to Iran, the economy, hitherto dominated by the government, soon fell into a near-chaotic state. So much until then had depended on the state that when it became apparent that “the center cannot hold,” the entire system crashed. In 1942 through 1943, there were bread riots in Iran; hunger was widespread. Shortages of everything, from tires and wheat to sugar and tea, threatened the stability of the society and the very survival of some of its lower strata. The Iranian regime was at the mercy of the assistance it received from the Allies, and the British used the situation to force the Iranians to follow Her Majesty’s wishes—from changing the rate of exchange to one more favorable to the pound sterling, to the appointment of ministers and the “election” of Majlis deputies.[5]

The total Iranian government revenue from taxes in 1941 was $10.8 million; the entire government budget was $166.5 million. Three decades later, the same Iranian government went on what the CIA called “the Shah’s lending binge,” giving out almost a billion and a half dollars in aid, loans, and grants to anyone who asked—including Britain, France, Syria, and Gabon. In that same year, the Fifth Development Plan (1973–78) had anticipated investments of more than $36 billion.[6] Nearly the entire budget (more than $150 billion by then) and, in fact, much of the economic progress made in those three decades, were fueled by petroleum. Important social and economic indicators marked the dimensions of these changes.

In 1925, only 20 factories existed in Iran. By 1941, under Reza Shah’s rule, that number had increased to 1467—37 of them in textile, 8 sugar refineries, 11 match factories, 8 chemical companies, 2 glassworks, 1 tobacco-processing plant and 5 tea-processing plants.[8] In the same period, the population went from about nine million to almost thirteen million. On the eve of the revolution, the population was nearing forty million. By that time, there were more than 6,000 factories (5,651 in 1972, with a 6 to 12 percent rate of growth in subsequent years).[9] More than three million people were employed in industry, about ninety thousand in mines, and more than a million in construction. By 1976, there was such a shortage of workers and semiskilled laborers that more than twentyseven thousand foreign workers were given work permits for employment in Iran. The growth in GDP (at constant 1974 prices) gives a sense of these changes. It rose from “10.6 billion dollars in 1960 to fifty-one billion in 1977, or an increase of three-hundred eightynine percent in less than two decades.”10 The average growth rate of the economy as a whole was even more impressive: from an average of 4.4 percent per year in 1962 to 33.9 percent in 1973 and 41.6 percent in 1975.[11]

Two of the most profound changes in this period were undertaken in 1962, when the White Revolution was launched. Iranian women were enfranchised and allowed to enter the labor force, where the number of employed women increased from 573,000 in 1950 to 7,644,970 in 1976.12 The second aspect of the White Revolution was land reform.

Many in the opposition suggested that land reform was in fact the result of Kennedy administration pressure on the shah to reform. To his credit, the shah had been talking about the necessity of land reform since ascending the throne. The goal was to end absentee landlordism in the country. Land was bought from the landlords at decidedly low prices, by force, and divided among villagers, each person receiving a small parcel. One of the shah’s economic advisors, Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, argued against the idea of taking land from the landlords this way, suggesting that the sanctity of private property must not be undermined. But he could not change the shah’s opinion. The American government, particularly during the Kennedy years, had pressured the shah for reforms, including land reform. But the American proposal was predicated on interlinked political, social, and economic changes. The shah would give up his social base among the landed gentry and the clergy, who were against land reform, and instead find a new more solid base among the peasantry, the new upper and middle classes, and the rising working classes. In his “Valedictory Dispatch” from Tehran, sent before leaving his post at Britain’s ambassador to Iran, Anthony Parsons captured the essence of these changes by writing, the Shah, in his White Revolution, deliberately set out to destroy the influence of the traditional leaders of the Iranian society, landowners, religious leaders and bazaaris. His intention was to rule through westernized technocrats who shared his vision. . . . Things did not go too badly until the Shah created the great economic boom at the end of 1973. Until that time material progress had continued at an acceptable rate and to some extent at least the people could feel that their aspirations were being satisfied without too violent a disruption of their way of life. The bazaar economy was threatened but not mortally so. The students were discontented and turbulent but so they were throughout the western world. . . . The boom of 1974 brought about a monstrous acceleration in the pace of events . . . the modernizing technocrats felt able at least to execute the concepts which they had learned at MIT or elsewhere . . . government intervention in the economy grew and the bazaari leaders felt their future seriously threatened. . . . By 1977 the boom was over. A great deal had been achieved—let there be no mistake about that—but a great deal had gone wrong . . . the country was suffering the consequences of over-rapid urbanization, of galloping inflation, of appalling corruption, waste and incompetence and of a general governmental inability to translate words into action. . . . In hindsight, the Shah could not have chosen a worse moment to start to liberalize. If he had been a student of history, he would have known from the experiences of pre-revolutionary France and of Tsarist Russia that the period of liberalization is the one that poses the most mortal danger to a dictatorial regime. . . . Why did he choose such a bad moment? Briefly, I think it was first a feeling of Anno Domini as he realized that he had only another ten years or so of active life and that he must try to create a genuine political base for his son to inherit: and secondly because of the burgeoning pressure coming from Western governments, particularly after President Carter’s inauguration.[13]

In an earlier meeting with the shah, Parsons had told him something else that was crucial to understanding the revolution. To a despondent shah, searching for clues to why “his people” had risen against him, Parsons said,
the massive influx into the cities from the rural areas caused by the boom created a rootless urban proletariat of dimensions hitherto unknown in Iran, particularly in Tehran. Many of these people had not benefited from the boom. Most of them could only find work in the construction industry. . . . Furthermore, the crass materialism which the boom had created had made most people feel insecure. . . . In this state of mind, it was natural for them to turn back to their traditional guides and leaders, the religious hierarchy.[14]

By the mid-1970s, the shah’s only solid source of support was among the army and the secret police, SAVAK. The peasants had either joined this massive new proletariat, or if they had remained in the countryside and were still supporting the shah, they were inexplicably never brought into the political fray.

A few statistics offer a glimpse into the nature and dimension of the changes to which Parsons refers, as well as into the transformation they brought about in the urban scene in Iran. On the eve of World War II, about 20 percent of Iran’s population lived in the cities. In 1977, that figure had increased to 47 percent. The literacy rate went from 14.0 percent in 1956 to 47.1 percent in 1977.15 In that same period, life expectancy went from forty-four to fifty-seven years.

Aside from the massive migration of peasants out of the villages, another important new component in the Iranian agricultural scene was the advent of agribusinesses modeled on what the shah had seen in America. The shah’s eagerness for these businesses was encouraged by the de facto Israeli Embassy in Tehran, which showcased Israel’s own success in this area and as a result was invited to develop model farms.16 Hashem Naraqi, for example, who had made a vast fortune for himself farming in California, was convinced by the shah to return to Iran and set up an agribusiness in the fertile lands created by new dams in the Khuzestan province. In spite of some success with these new industrialized farms, the shah’s record in agriculture was well intentioned but disastrous in its actual consequences.

On the other hand, in the industrial, construction, and mining fields, Iran experienced astonishing success in the postwar years. The efforts of a large, dedicated industrialist class, trained engineers and architects, along with enlightened plans supported by the shah and masterminded by such figures as Alinaghi Alikhani, Mehdi Samii, Reza Moghadam, and Khodadad Farmanfarma’ian, brought about impressive industrial gains. From the automotive industry and the efforts of the Khayamis, to mining and the work of the Rezai and the Rastegar brothers, to the construction industry and the old guard engineers such as Majid A’lam and the new breed of American-trained engineers such as Hamid Ghadimi and Ali Ebrahimi, even in the production of household and consumer goods by the Lajevardis, the Amid-Hozours, the Khosrowshahis, and the pioneering work of the Arjomand brothers and Rahim Irvani—in nearly every field, Iranian industry witnessed great success in the postwar years.
By the mid-1970s, many of these industries were no longer simple assembly plants putting together parts imported from Europe and America but instead had begun producing many of the parts in Iran. Some, like Iran National, National, and Bella shoes, and Arj Industries had begun to export some of their products to countries in the Middle East and even to the Soviet bloc. The story of Iran National is emblematic of these efforts. When it began, it imported over 80 percent of its parts from England; by 1978, that percentage had been reduced to less than 20 percent. Indeed, by nearly every measure, Iran of the 1970s was at the place Walt W. Rostow described as the “takeoff” stage, in which underdeveloped economies accumulate the capital and the technology required to enter the industrialized stage and leave behind the cycle of poverty and dependency.

The efforts of this large group of entrepreneurs were helped by a number of important political developments. The most important change might well have been the passage of a law in the late 1950s encouraging, even offering government guarantees for, foreign investment. Mehdi Samii was among those who drafted these laws. Moreover, there was, in spite of the shah’s occasional tendency to rely too heavily on the role of the state, a conscious policy to support the private sector. It wasn’t so much a policy of “import substitution” as a vision of industry that wanted not only to replace imports, but also to encourage Iranian companies to think ambitiously and plan for export of their commodities as well.[17]

Legal and government encouragement without security will not bring about economic change. What convinced many of the Iranian merchants that long-term security was now a reality in Iran was the letter President Eisenhower wrote to the shah offering to defend Iran against Soviet aggression. According to industrialists like the elder Lajevardi, it was that letter that convinced the traditional merchants, hitherto dominant in the bazaars and engaged in commerce, that the time for industrial investment had arrived.[18]

Many of the patriarchs of this class of industrialist had come of age in the years around World War I, when warlords dominated the roads and bullies roamed the cities; liquidity of capital was the only available insurance against the blight of these parasites. While Reza Shah secured the country from these hooligans, the Eisenhower letter convinced the merchants that there was now security against a possible communist revolution as well.

A majority of these industrialists shared many characteristics. Aside from their roots in the bazaar, Iranian industrialists were invariably part of a family company; often one of the siblings served in the government while another, or one of their children, went to Europe or the United States to learn modern theories of management or production. In nearly every case, a matriarch or patriarch held the family together and fended off sibling rivalries.

Two paradoxes, however, tempered the unfettered growth of the private sector in this period. First was the shah’s “statist” proclivities. During Hoveyda’s thirteen-year tenure as prime minister, he encouraged this tendency in the shah. Both men distrusted the market mechanism, particularly when it came to politically sensitive issues like price control and fighting inflation. What happened to Habib Elghanian, the most prominent Jewish businessman of his generation, was a dire warning to all industrialists and an early indication that further investment in Iran might not be warranted. In the much-publicized government effort to fight inflation by forcefully bringing down prices and punishing those who allegedly broke the law, Elghanian was arrested, his head was shaved, and he was sent for months of internal exile.

The second paradox was the reality that growth of the private sector beyond a certain level was invariably not tolerated. The fates of Mahmood Rezai and Habib Sabet—both forced to give up their lucrative businesses to the government—were emblematic of the fact that growing beyond some particular level of prosperity was either seen as a threat to the regime, or, as some have suggested, was simply anathema to the shah, who preferred everyone to be in a subservient position.

Regardless of these subtle limits, as the lives of many Iranian industrialists, engineers, architects, and economic planners clearly show, during the years between the World War II and the Islamic Revolution, the efforts of this group helped transform Iran from a semifeudal society to a contender to become a “newly industrialized society.” Other countries in a similar position at the time, South Korea, Turkey, and Taiwan, certainly made the transition. But the excesses of the Islamic Revolution aborted Iran’s chances.

The Amid-Hozour Family
The Arjomand Brothers
Morad Aryeh
The Barkhordar Brothers
Hadj Habib Elghanian
Rahim Irvani
Abdurrahim J’afari
The Khayami Brothers
The Khosrowshahi Brothers
The Lajevardi Family
Bager Mostofi
Abdul-Hussein Nikpour
The Rezai Brothers
The Rastegar Brothers
Habib Sabet
The Sadat-Tehrani Family
The Sudavar Brothers

Theirs was a veritable Persian Horatio Alger story. It was also the tale—almost archetypal in modern Iranian economic history—of how a fortune amassed by a patriarch who had honed his entrepreneurial skills in the labyrinthine alleys and traditions of the bazaar was sustained and expanded into modern industry by the collective managerial and engineering skills of his children—and held together by the wise and charismatic authority of a matriarch.

Many feminists in recent years have argued that in societies like Iran, in spite of the often misogynistic laws of Islam and beneath the veil of subservience and second-class citizenship, women actually exercise considerable clout in managing and shaping not only the family’s affairs, but the social fabric of life in general. The women of the first generation of Amid-Hozours certainly seem to confirm this theory.[1]

Much has been written about the “miracle” of the Iranian economy during the last two decades of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. If there was a miracle, it took place in the 1960s, when the economy grew at a whopping yearly average of 9.2 percent and when its management was in the hands of a team of expert economists who believed in the irreplaceable role of the private sector in Iran’s development.[2] The Amid-Hozour family not only grew into a major industrial force during this period, but two of the five brothers were members of this expert team. Hashem was a mid-level technocrat working at the Ministry of Economy and active in many negotiations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.[3] The youngest brother, Esmail, was for a couple of years in the early 1970s an advisor on oil policy to Janshid Amuzegar. Among his ideas was the notion of pegging the price of oil to the rate of inflation on an agreed basket of industrial goods.[4] He was also part of Iran’s delegation to the important north-south conferences, geared toward finding a way to bridge the growing gap between the poor countries of the south and the rich northern areas.

The knowledge that Hashem and Esmail gained through their experiences proved invaluable to the family’s successful effort to move out of its traditional role of shoe middlemen in the bazaar to become one of the two main manufacturers of footwear in Iran. Ultimately the global market was their target, rather than just the bazaar in Iran. At the height of their operation, at least 5 percent of their total output was exported.[5] On the eve of the revolution, the Amid-Hozour companies—sometimes also called the Amidi group—was managed by the five brothers through a holding company and employed about six thousand people. In some of their manufacturing and retail activities, they were partners with Bata, one of the oldest shoe manufacturing companies in the world. It all began at a small stand on a street corner near Tehran’s bazaar.

The Amid-Hozour family was originally from the city of Kashan, known around the world for the sublime beauty and artistry of its carpets, and in recent decades as the city immortalized in a Sohrab Sepehri poem (“I am from Kashan,” he famously declared). The family patriarch, Hadj Hassan, was a small child when he lost his father. The task of supporting the family of four was on the young boy’s shoulders. He developed a particularly close relationship with his mother, and he was all of twelve when he convinced his mother to go with him to Tehran. The year was 1904 (1282).[6]

They arrived in the capital more or less penniless. They rented a small room, and he immediately set to work. He had an aversion to working for others. He began peddling merchandise he received on consignment form a trusting merchant. Before long, he had saved enough to rent a small stand near the bazaar. As luck would have it, right across the alley where he had set up his stand, another young man had started another stall, dealing with shoes and galoshes. The man was Hadj Jalal Sadat-Tehrani. His family also grew into one of Iran’s biggest industrialists. As bazaaris are notorious for keeping their wealth in the family, once the two men became prosperous, they also became relatives when one of Amid-Hozour’s sons—Hashem—married one of Sadat-Tehrani’s daughters.

Hadj Hassan was a man of tireless energy and disciplined frugality. Even in the hardest times, when he and his mother barely had enough to eat, he regularly saved some part of his earnings, however small. Furthermore, his mother was the master of the house and remained so for the rest of her life. As Hadj Hassan prospered, he succeeded in moving into a hojreh, or office. Tehran’s bazaar was in those days—as it is now—divided along trade lines. In the shoe bazaar, for example, there were stores that sold to the public, as well as hojrehs, located in what is called a timcheh—akin to a business-office compound—that catered to middlemen and shop owners. There was an important hierarchy of status among these timchehs.[7] One of the most esteemed timchehs in all of Iran at the time was Hajeb al-dowleh, and that was where Hadj Hassan located his office. All through the years, as the family fortune grew and as they bought and built new offices in the most fashionable parts of town, they always kept the offices in Hajeb al-dowleh. It had become a symbol of the family’s roots in the bazaar.

As the family began to prosper, Hadj Hassan bought a large house in one of Tehran’s old and traditional neighborhoods. The best room and amenities in the new place were set aside for his mother. She decided that the time had arrived for him to get married. After some searching, she found a young girl named Robabeh who was a distant relative, from a middle-class family that owned a small brick-making furnace in Tehran. The new bride
from the Hadj Reza Ahmad family came to the house she had to share with her omnipotent mother-in-law. One can imagine that the managerial skills the young bride developed and later exhibited as the matriarch of her own children were honed in the complicated context of her early married life. A little more than a year after marriage, their first son was born. They called him Amir. Eventually, she and Hadj Hassan had five sons—Amir, Mansur, Hashem, Mohsen, and Esmail. The couple’s only daughter died as a child.

Calamity came when Hadj Hassan’s mother died. He suffered an almost debilitating depression. The house was no longer bearable for him; the world had lost its luster. Salvation was back in Kashan. There lived an older woman who had been a friend of the family and, more important, a close acquaintance of his departed mother. Hadj Hassan adopted her as a surrogate mother and invited her to come and live with him and his family in Tehran. “This is my new mother,” he told his family.8 Around the house she was simply called Mashdi Khanoum—khanoum is Persian for lady and Mashdi is the title given to those who travel to Meshed, where Shiism’s Eighth Imam, Reza, is buried.

Mashdi Khanoum took over all the roles and duties in family life formerly played by Hadj Hassan’s mother. Among these was to act as the boys’ conduit to their otherwise serious and stern father. The oldest son, Amir, for example, was only eleven when he decided that school was not for him. He had, he said, a burning desire to begin working in the bazaar. Mashdi Khanoum took the message to the father and before long Amir, helped by his father’s seed capital, had a business of his own. Although the two businesses were, on paper, independent, both were in fact under the managerial and financial umbrella of the father.[9]

One afternoon in 1948 Hadj Hassan came home from the bazaar and told his family he did not feel well. Esmail, his youngest son, was only one year old at the time. Hadj Hassan ended up being bedridden for eight months. One cold winter night he called his sons to his bedside. He had had a premonition that the end was near. He asked Mansur, his second son, to quit school and join his older brother in running the business. Before the morning broke, the family was awakened to learn that their father had passed away. He was only forty-four years old.
He had made Amir the executor of his will. At the same time, he had forbade the family from selling any assets until his youngest son, Esmail, reached maturity. Another interesting aspect of the will, and a testimony to his close and intimate relationship with his wife, was that contrary to Islamic laws of inheritance—whereby a wife gets no cash and only an eighth of the value of the house left by her husband—she was given a full share of the inheritance, equal to that of each son.[10] Although she was young, she succeeded in becoming the revered matriarch of the family for the rest of her life.

She also succeeded not only in keeping the partnership together but in helping to keep it free of rancor. She instilled in her sons a forceful sense of family life and obligation. While she was the de facto mediator of any tensions among the siblings, she had also made it a family ritual for all the brothers and their increasingly large families to gather at her house every Friday. It was usually during these Friday get-togethers that most brewing problems were resolved with her intervention.

She had begun to create a sense of family cohesion immediately after Hadj Hassan’s death. For years, every Thursday night—the night when the dead, according to Persian lore, await a visit from the living—she took all her children to his grave. Although she was only thirty-two when he died, she never remarried.[11] She would spend long hours at the graveside talking with her dead husband; the sons would read Qur’anic verses. Sometimes Hashem recited them, as he was an amateur vocalist.

The word on the street was that the Amid-Hozour business would not survive the father’s death. Amir and Mansur were both thought to be young and inexperienced. But Amir and Mansur both had also developed reputations as hard-working, dependable young men with a sharp sense of what the market wanted in shoes. About that time, one of the bazaar’s richest men, Asad Hariri, contacted the brothers. “I want to expand,” he said “and my sons are not up to the task.” He offered them a partnership in which he would provide the capital, the brothers would run the business, and the two sides would share profits equally. The brothers agreed, and before long they made a trip to Czechoslovakia, then a capital of the shoe industry, and began importing shoes. Their first step out of the confines of the bazaar was now a reality.

Their business grew by leaps and bounds. They soon emerged as the biggest distributor of shoes in Iran. Their two old offices—one that had been used by their father, the other by Amir—were no longer adequate. They wanted to sell one and to purchase a bigger office in a more fashionable part of the city. The problem was that their father’s will prohibited any such sales until the youngest son was mature. It was a measure of the family’s religiosity that to solve their problem they consulted not a court, or a lawyer, but Ayatollah Muhammad Hoseyn Boroujerdi, then the head of Shiites around the world. The ayatollah gave them permission—written, as was customary in such cases, on the margin of the original document and signed and sealed by the ayatollah to authenticate the opinion rendered—to make the changes as long as they included Esmail as an equal partner in any new deed or legal document they signed.12 Their expansion was now in full force.

Early in 1959, the third son, Hashem, who was born in Tehran in 1941 (1319), finished high school and decided to travel to the United States for his university education. There was disagreement between the two elder brothers on what to do. Amir was opposed to the idea, but Mansur favored it. “Our father,” he said, “started this business only after he left Kashan. We, too, must discover the new world and what it has to offer us.”[13]
Their mother broke the deadlock by suggesting that Hashem should go on the condition that he also take the fourth son, Mohsen, with him. Before long the two set out for the United States, where they ended up in Arizona. Mohsen did not last long. He yearned to return home and spent most of his time in his new environment crying. He was sent back, where he joined the family business. Hashem stayed on and received a bachelor’s degree in economics. Immediately after graduation, he returned to Iran and began to work for the family business. He also began to work for the Ministry of Trade, where he became involved in some of Iran’s burgeoning trade with Eastern bloc countries.

By the time of his return, the elder brothers, particularly on account of Mansur’s leadership, had begun changing the direction of their business. Until then, the family had been involved only in selling shoes at the wholesale level. The main supplier had been National Shoes, a new manufacturing company headed by Rahim Irvani. While in America on a business trip, Irvani met Hashem and told him about his plans to expand and introduce automation into his factories. Iran was in those days in the midst of a rapid government-supported expansion of the private sector. In a long letter Hashem wrote to his brothers, he outlined in detail Irvani’s plans, listed all the machinery he was purchasing and supported the idea that the Amid-Hozours, too, must use generous government support to enter the industrial field.[14]

Before long, the Amid-Hozour brothers had purchased a big parcel of land not far from Tehran, and Bella Shoes was born. When I asked one of the brothers what he considered to be the biggest contribution of the Bella Group to modern Iranian industry, he said, “We went against an entrenched, existing monopoly enjoyed by Irvani [National Shoes] and in the process not only did we improve as a business, but consumers benefited.”15 In the beginning, it was an uphill struggle, as Irvani had developed a very extensive network of helpful politicians, bankers, and technocrats, and he used them all against his upstart competitors.

By the early 1970s, the Amid-Hozour group was further strengthened by the return of Esmail, the youngest brother, from his own American sojourn. Of all the brothers, he was the only one seriously inclined toward academic work. He attended Hadaf, considered, along with Alborz, the most academically challenging and successful high school in Iran. He was always among the top three students of his high school class. Math was his forte. In the United States he finished his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, and in 1972 he received his Ph.D. in economics from Claremont College in California. He wrote a dissertation on the econometrics of oil. He was immediately recruited to work for the International Monetary Fund.

When the Iranian government, then engaged in intense oil negotiations, learned about Esmail’s area of expertise, it convinced him to go back to Iran and become an advisor to Jamshid Amuzegar—then minister of finance and in charge of oil negotiations. With his return the Amid-Hozour group now had at its disposal someone with expertise in international finance. After a couple of years of working in the government, Esmail gave up his government job at the insistence of his brothers and began to focus on helping run the rapidly expanding family business. One subtle obstacle to their growth was their mother’s views.

The brothers all respected her opinions and advice, and she had a few business principles she constantly advocated. Hers was a more traditional vision shaped by the bitter experience of generations of families whose wealth begot only the unwanted attention of greedy government officials and no less parasitic bullies and brigands. Bazaaris thus became notorious not only for their obsession with hiding their wealth, but for the often comical lengths to which they went to feign poverty and hard times. As it happened, in the case of the Amid-Hozours, their mother’s fears were not altogether baseless. She admonished the brothers against bringing in partners into the family business. “If having a partner is a good thing,” she used to say, “then God would have taken one.” She warned against internal strife among the brothers; and, finally, she was adamantly against the family over-extending itself. One time she told one of her sons, “I heard it said by another lady that ‘everywhere I look, I see a sign of Bella Shoes.’ When I heard that, I trembled.”[16] In spite of her warning, the group’s expansion continued unabated.

Their expansion was, with one exception, all vertical. From selling shoes made by others, they turned to manufacturing shoes themselves, then they invested in industries that had anything to do with the manufacturing process—including those producing leather, shoe boxes, shoelaces, and hosiery. At the same time, they developed a highly sophisticated network of retail stores. Their entire operation was becoming computerized by 1972. In fact, another one of their business innovations was that, contrary to the common practice of the time, they combined production and retail, establishing close to two hundred stores in prime locations across Iran.

Their only investment outside the shoe industry—and real estate—was made in the mid-1970s, when they joined the business fad of the day to become partners in the new Darius Bank started at the initiative of Ja’far Akhavan. Just before the revolution, they had been on the verge of another major expansion when they bought a million square meters of land on the outskirts of the city of Saveh for the purpose of building a new industrial city. Their decision to expand came at the time when there was a mass exodus of capital from Iran. By one account, in 1976–78 more than two billion dollars had already left Iran. Another two billion dollars was reportedly sent out in the last three months of the ancien régime.[17]

The Amid-Hozour brothers swam against the tide and began to plan for more growth despite early warnings. Their major foreign partner, Thomas J. Bata, the founding president of the Bata Company, traveled to Iran in 1978 to sign an agreement with Bella. But after witnessing demonstrations on the street, he decided to pull out of the transaction. Furthermore, some of the younger brothers had warned that trouble was ahead. But Amir and Mansur, the elder brothers, reassured the family that all these warnings and fears were much ado about nothing. Even when the clouds of revolution were no longer able to be ignored, the elder brothers remained adamant that their group would be safe, even under an Islamic government.

Their sense of certainty and security was based on several factors. Some of the brothers had always been deeply religious in their convictions. Furthermore, at least two of the five had developed, through marriage, family ties with some of the most powerful figures in the emerging Islamic revolutionary hierarchy. Finally, unlike some of the other important industrialists, the Amid-Hozour group had no ties to the Pahlavi family. Indeed, when at the height of their prosperity they were directly contacted by a representative of one of the shah’s brothers demanding to be given a “partnership” in the company—offering such gratis “partnerships” to members of the royal family was an easy way to circumvent bureaucratic obstacles—the brothers convened a special family meeting and after much discussion, and considerable temptation, refused the “offer.”[18] In a sense, it was a vindication of their mother’s early fears.

There was an incongruous mix of management and entrepreneurial styles among the brothers, as well as a lingering sense of traditional values. Although they were partners in the firm, the older brother, who had taken over the role of the family patriarch after the death of their father, enjoyed the deference and respect that would have been afforded the father. The youngest brothers, for example, eschewed smoking or drinking alcohol in front of him—as they also did in front of their mother. Amir was a man steeped in the values of the traditional bazaar—where a man’s word was as important as his signature on any contract, but where merchants also bent the law to their will and where every “connection” was used to increase their profits and their competitive edge. Hashem and Esmail, on the other hand, had been trained and educated in America and were thus more likely to favor a more modern approach to the ethics and practices of business.

At times the two cultures clashed, and it was invariably up to the power and authority of their mother to solve the resulting crisis. The Friday gatherings at her house were when she discreetly interjected her voice and invariably solved problems. To Esmail she once said tartly, “Don’t think that just because you have a Ph.D. from America you can disregard what your older brother says to you.”19 She was, of course, no less tart with the older brother. It was not so much the Islamic Revolution but the death of the matriarch that finally brought the brothers’ long partnership to an end.

A few weeks after the victory of the revolution, the Amid-Hozour group—along with fifty-one other major industrial groups in the country—was “nationalized.” Their factories, their accounts, and their real estate, including a large office tower at the heart of what was becoming Iran’s “Wall Street,” were confiscated. By then three of the brothers had chosen a life of exile. Mohsen remained in Iran, ostensibly attempting to get the family property back. He passed away in February 2006. Mansur, the second oldest, also stayed in Iran but did not survive the agony and pain of the revolution, dying of a heart attack in 1982.

The brothers in exile have each succeeded in making prosperous new lives for themselves. Amir ended up in California, where he began a business importing and selling fine Persian rugs. His sons have also been successful, investing early in some of the most lucrative companies of Silicon Valley. Their father, Amir, passed away in July 2000. Hashem returned to his roots, working with his younger daughter to start a shoe business in the south of France. Esmail began in trade, becoming the first businessman to bring Nintendo to America. He later purchased the American branch of the Grundig Company, successfully transforming it into a new manufacturing and trading company that operates factories in Asia and successfully offers electronic equipment to fashionable stores around the world.

Early in 1980, a few lucky Iranians — anxiously fighting their way through the drudgeries and anxieties of exile, many of them bereft of nearly all their financial capital, many more finding it hard to translate their technological capital, which had accumulated at home, into saleable commodities in America, and shocked by the incivility of the hostage-taking Islamic regime—received a surprising gift. It was from their former boss, Eskander Arjomand. It came in an envelope that included a hefty check and a note indicating that he had recently received a commission owed him from the days before the revolution. Since in the old days the money would have gone into a fund from which bonuses were drawn, he had decided to uphold that tradition and pay each engineer and manager what they would have earned had they been in Iran. “There was no way for any of us,” one of the recipients of the note said, “to have known that he received such a commission. Even if we had, none of us would have expected him to share it with us.”[1] This anecdote about unusual honesty and attention to the welfare of staff is a key to understanding the incredible growth of the Arj Industries in Iran.

In less than four decades, the family went from a three-man, homegrown shop to the biggest producers of home appliances in the Middle East. Their advertising slogan, “From the Aras River[2] to the shores of the Persian Gulf, Arj products are at your disposal,”[3] was anything but hyperbole. They had succeeded in finding a niche for the company in nearly every corner of Iranian society. The range of their products, from refrigerator coolers and space heaters to simple folding chairs and sophisticated central heating systems, made them not only a household name, but a recognized leader in the field of industrial products in Iran. Indeed, by the early 1970s, their reputation and their financial empire reached far beyond Iran. When the largest Iranian and American companies met and formed a council to promote trade between the two countries, Arj was one of the companies invited to participate. Shortly afterward, when an American engineer came up with a revolutionary new design for a helicopter and needed substantial backing to begin manufacturing it in Iran, David Rockefeller introduced the man to Siavosh Arjomand. But the revolution aborted the deal—as it did thousands of others—and brought to an abrupt and tragic end a rag-to-riches story that cuts to the core of Iran’s great industrial leap of the 1960s and 1970s.

The phenomenal growth of the family is made even more impressive in light of the fact that the brothers were known to be devout and dedicated members of the Bahai faith. Their success was accomplished against the backdrop of the concentrated Bahai-bashing efforts of the clergy and the rampant anti-Bahai sentiments of the masses. The family’s impressive success story neatly shows in a microcosm what classical economic theory teaches about the natural growth of capitalism from small shops to small factories, to mass-producing conglomerates and powerful financial holding companies. But it began with the genius and dedication of the oldest brother, Khalil.

Khalil Arjomand was born in 1910 (1289) in Tehran. His father was a government functionary who worked in the Ministry of Telegraph and Telephone and went as far as becoming acting minister. After Khalil came three daughters and two more sons. The younger sons, Eskandar and Siavosh, followed in their elder brother’s footsteps and in due time took over the family business. Khalil was precociously good in mathematics and had, from childhood, a knack for making and fixing gadgets and fixtures. In 1929 he won a scholarship: he was among the hundred top students in the country chosen each year during the reign of Reza Shah on the basis of academic merit and sent by the government to study in Europe on a full scholarship. As other recipients of these scholarships have indicated, and as is also clear in the case of Khalil, during the Reza Shah period, these students were chosen irrespective of their social class and, more important, their religious affiliation.[4] This kind of political magnanimity was hard to find in Muslim countries then, but it certainly does not exist in Islamic Iran today.

In 1936, Khalil returned from his European trip with an engineering degree from France. He was immediately hired as a professor at the newly founded Faculty of Engineering at Tehran University. He soon established his reputation as a professor of much erudition, a man of myriad talent and an unremitting drive not only for academic excellence but also for industrial growth in Iran. He was too ambitious in his plans, and too enamored of actually producing—rather than just teaching—about the laws of production to remain a professor. In 1937, he rented three adjoining shops in a working-class neighborhood of Tehran and hired two other workers. The three created what eventually became the Arj industrial empire. The name Arj was at once an acronym and the first three letters of their family name. “A” was the first letter of the Persian word for metal work, “R” for foundry, and “J” for welding. It was a telling sign of the industrial backwardness of Iran that when the small workshop opened, their welding work was so novel in the eyes of the men and women of the neighborhood that it often became a spectator sport, with awe-struck people gathered to watch the magic of flying embers and flames.
In the beginning their work was limited to building metal trellises, windows, and doors. Before long they needed to move to a bigger space; they relocated to a new factory with a modern design that was the work of Khalil himself. The building’s unusual shape, and its use of cement, attracted the attention of Iranian architects and engineers.

Khalil was, like most of the Arjomand family, known for having a hot temper. He easily got angry, and often the intensity of his anger led to a nosebleed. Physicians repeatedly warned him of the danger to his health if he did not control his temper. To lessen the burdens of running the new business, Khalil decided to find partners. Two other men were initially brought in; one of the two even ran the Arj factory for a while. But by the early 1950s, with the return of Eskander and Siavosh from their European trips, outsider shares were completely bought out, and Arj became a family-owned operation once again.

World War II brought hardships and opportunities to the family business. Disruption of commerce, and the occupation of the country by Russian and British forces, meant that a wide array of hitherto imported products were no longer available. Khalil began to expand the work of his factory to producing commodities such as electrical pumps, high-tension transformers, copper wires, and steel constructions, even car tires—in short, products that were rare and in much demand. Car tires, for example were such a rarity that owning a few dozens of them could translate into a small fortune at the time. Indeed, in later years, as the Arj industries grew in size and sophistication, many of their products were changed and different from those begun during the war years under Khalil’s clever management.

By then he was married. Three years after his return from his European journey, he wed a young girl named Barazandeh Ashraf. They had three daughters. But Khalil was preoccupied with his work, both at the university and at his own workshop, which was fast growing into a veritable factory. He spent countless hours studying engineering drawings and reading engineering books. He was at once a doer and a thinker, and a man of restless energy—clever in business, disciplined as a professor, innovative as an engineer.[5]

An example of his energy and shrewd business sense was evident at the time that the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza and his new bride, Fawziye, were returning from their wedding in Egypt. Tehran was getting ready to welcome the couple with much fanfare. Khalil volunteered to build the first metal arch, with lights and decorations, across one of the major streets on the path of the royal couple. Reza Shah was at once intrigued by the idea and worried that a disaster could happen. Reportedly he agreed to the suggestion with one condition. He said, “Tell the son-of-a-bitch that if anybody falls from the scaffolds, I will hang him right there on his arch.”[6]
All of Khalil’s efforts, and the rapid growth of the industry he had created, came to a tragic halt on October 22, 1944 (30 Mehre 1323). A few months earlier, Khalil had witnessed how the poor used the often-dirty water running in the city waterways for washing. As an act of philanthropy, he decided to build them a new washroom. He needed to find water, as in those days Tehran still did not have running water. He began to dig a well and had designed a chairlift that could take him in and out of the well. On the fateful day, as he used the lift to go down, the wire broke and he fell thirty-four meters to the bottom of the well. He died instantly. Ultimately, it was decided that he had died accidentally and not because of foul play.[7] His father and a partner managed the factory for five years, then Eskandar, who was twenty-five, returned to Iran. From then on, it would be up to him to carry the family torch.

Eskandar was born in December 1924 (1303). He finished high school in Tehran and entered the Science and Technology School of Tehran. After finishing his engineering degree and working in Tehran for a while, he set out for America, where he studied central heating systems; eventually he finished a program in air conditioning engineering at Iowa State University. Not long after he returned to Iran, the man who had replaced his deceased brother at the helm of the Arj factory decided to leave for the United States. Eskander and Siovash took over the management of the factory, and before long they bought out the partner’s shares.

The early 1950s coincided with the tumultuous days when the communist Tudeh Party was at the height of its power and had created cells around the country. Many factories were paralyzed with workers’ strikes. Arj Industries and their almost three hundred workers were by and large spared. An essential reason for the relative peace they enjoyed was their unique model of management. Fordism[8] is a type of management in which the company worries not just about the efficiency of the workers during their hours of work, but also about the quality of their lives at home. If workers are happy at home, it was assumed, then they will be better, more productive workers in the factory. Arj Industries had, from the early 1950s, emulated this management style. As they grew in size, their social programs—cheap employee housing, schools for children, banks on the premises—became a model for other enlightened industrialists. The Arj industries were also among the pioneers in helping illiterate workers learn how to read and write. The company would provide an hour of paid off-time for every hour the workers spent in class. The envelopes those exiled managers and engineers received in 1980 was only the latest example of the Arj style of management.

By late 1950s, the Iranian government began to implement new policies encouraging industrial growth and development. The establishment of the Ministry of Industry and Mines was, according to Siavosh, a “big step in the right direction. Low interest loans for expansion began to be made available.”[9] Even the shah began to take interest in Arj Industries, visiting the factory for the first time in late 1957. During that visit, once he heard about the Arjomand family’s progress and plans, the shah ordered the government to make a seven hundred thousand dollar loan available to the Arjomand brothers.[10]

By the mid-1950s there had been important changes in the leadership of the group. Siavosh had taken over in 1954 as Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive of Arj Corporation, while Eskander had begun developing companies closer to his area of expertise, air conditioning. Before long, he established new companies as leaders of the field in Iran, while Siavosh made great strides in building on Arj Industries’ past and expanding it to new levels of productivity and profitability.

Siavosh was born in Tehran on July 24, 1928 (1307). He finished his early education in Tehran and enrolled at Tehran University where, in 1948, he earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.11 Both Eskandar and Siavosh had, as young men, worked in the family business. They were invariably given the most menial jobs. Eskander began his work there spending countless hours sweeping the floors, while Siavosh spent many hours deep in water wells, trying to install Arj-produced water pumps to produce fresh water, a rare commodity then in Iran. Their father—and elder brother—did not believe in pampering the two young sons, or in leading them to believe that a life of easy wealth and affluence was guaranteed for them in the future. It is true for that generation, as well as the next, that wealthy families who forced their children to earn their living and learn the hardships of accumulating wealth produced successful offspring. Conversely, those who gave their young children endless access to money produced jet-setters forever dependent on their family fortunes. Siavosh and Eskandar were fine examples of the first group.

Siavosh was still studying at the university when he undertook his first business and engineering venture, and it turned out to be a great success—both for him and for some small Iranian towns and villages. Although the government and private sector had established many electricity generators in the country, there was a dire shortage of copper cable to transmit the electricity to the villages and towns. Siavosh learned that the American army had left behind a vast quantity of thick copper wires in Iraq, but no one had thought about using it because it was too thick for the purpose. Siavosh designed and build the machinery required to turn the otherwise useless wire into thin and intertwined cable that could be procured cheaply and be of great use in the Iranian market. The conduit for this business deal was one of his professors, Abdullah Riazi, who later became the Speaker of the Majlis and was executed by the Islamic Republic. The same combination of savvy and ingenuity that had helped the Arjomand brothers in the past was evident in this youthful venture and would, in later years, serve Siavosh well at the helm of the company.

Immediately after he completed his education in Iran, Siavosh set out for Germany, where he lived with a German family and studied at the University of Munich. In 1953, he received an engineering diploma (Dipl. Ing.) from the university12 and began to work for Siemens. He wanted to learn firsthand how top European companies manufacturing household products operated. Once he was back in Iran, this knowledge and experience would prove pivotal in his ability to make radical changes in the company.

And radical changes he did make. Once he took over from his brother Eskandar in 1954, Siavosh astutely realized the gradual but inexorable emergence of an Iranian middle class with the economic wherewithal to support a market in modern household appliances. He thus took the bold step of changing Arj from a company that only produced what customers had ordered into a factory that engaged in mass production of commodities it deemed the market needed and wanted. One of his first steps was to mass produce 650,000 metal folding chairs per year. As Iran was undergoing a gradual process of modernization and urbanization, more and more families were giving up the old habit of sitting on the floor. Tables and chairs were fast becoming part of the paraphernalia of being “modern.” Siavosh’s gamble paid off. Consumers showed an avid interest in the new product and, what was more important, had developed the economic power to purchase it.

In a sense, after the return of Siavosh, the Arjomand brothers worked together in two different but connected fields. Eskandar focused on offering heating and air conditioning services to the rapidly rising number of new offices, factories, cinemas, and hospitals being built around the country. He used the government’s pro-industry policies to establish Sholeh Khavar—Eastern Flame—as the preeminent company in the field, with licensing agreements with some internationally well-known companies like Carrier. By the early 1970s, he was one of Iran’s most active and trusted contractors. He had one of the finest reputations among the industrial elite and was known as a man of probity, honesty, and efficiency. He was a friend and a confidant of some of the most powerful people of Iran. He was, in short, a trusted elder statesman in the construction industry, trusted by both the Young Turks who were rapidly emerging—people like Akbar Lari and his partner, Ali Ebrahimi—and the old guard who held power and secured contracts only through connections and payoffs. Siavosh, also known for the efficiency of his side of the family business, was overseeing a rapid expansion of Arj Industries, in terms of product line, overall volume of production, and the efficiency and technological advancement of their factories.

In the 1960s, the volume of their business and the variety of their products increased rapidly, and Arj Industries, now a public corporation, had to move to a new site. They chose Karaj Road, fast becoming an industrial park, with a surprisingly large concentration of industries and factories. This time, the new factory and the adjoining management offices and employee housing and research center were not designed in house, but by one of Iran’s preeminent architects, Aziz Farmanfarma’ian. The commission of the design to such a prominent firm was a sign of Arjomand’s new wealth, but more important, it signaled the advent of a new stage of capitalist development, where duties and responsibilities are clearly defined and modern styles of management implemented.

As Siavosh oversaw this expansion and specialization, and as he was changing the nature of their business, he was also changing his private life. In July 1958 he married Haydeh Mostofi, a woman of strong character and strong opinions. They have three children—two sons and a daughter.

The daughter was involved in a fascinating incident that involved the shah, the child, and her mother. The shah had agreed to open the new Arj facilities on Karaj Road. His helicopter landed one hundred yards away from where the workers and management were waiting. The program called for the daughter, Leyla, then five years old, to walk toward the shah and offer him a bouquet and a few well-rehearsed words of welcome. The helicopter landed, and the shah descended and began walking toward the parking area where everyone was anxiously waiting. It was Leyla’s turn to begin her part. A large bouquet in her small hands, she began to walk gingerly toward the shah. Halfway through the ordeal, the solemnity of the moment got the better of the young girl. She suddenly turned around and began running away from the shah to the embarrassed embrace of her mother. When the shah arrived where the girl was hiding in the comfort of her mother’s arms, he asked, “What happened to your daughter?” Haydeh, more German than Persian, and thus less constrained by the dissimulation that is part of Persian discourse, minced no words and said, “Your Majesty, she was frightened by you.”

The shah said nothing. He went through the inspection, and as he was about to depart, he turned to the mother, waiting again this time to bid farewell to the king, and said with a hint of bitterness in his words, “You should raise your children in such a way that they are not afraid of me.”[13]

In the 1970s, as Iran witnessed a great leap in oil revenue, and as the economy began to expand, Arjomand family interests also began to grow. Siavosh was president of Iran Management Association. The two brothers were by then two of the most respected industrialists in Iran. They were members of numerous boards—from the Bank of Shahriyar to the Iran College of Science and Technology. At the same time, despite their growing economic power, they eschewed any overt interference in politics. They, too, had partaken of the unwritten pact between the shah and the economic elite. He would attend to matters political, and they would make possible the economic growth of the country. At the same time, as the shah began to change economic policy in a more whimsical manner—suddenly ordering, for example, the mandatory sale of 49 percent of each company’s stocks to workers, and trying to control prices by the use of coercion and force—both Siavosh and Eskandar knew where the dangerous road such policies would lead. They both favored a voluntary plan to give shares to workers and thus make them stakeholders in the company. They both knew that mandatory price controls would never work and only lead to black markets and the flight of capital. They also believed that the mandatory sale of stock would lead to the flight of capital and little actual long-term economic benefits for the workers. Both predictions were correct. Yet Iranian industrialists like the Arjomand brothers lacked the political muscle or the will to convince the shah that such policies were ill advised. Their inaction, and the shah’s continuous belief in the absolute wisdom of his own policies and prescriptions, can be considered among the causes of the revolution.

By the time the revolution came, Arjomand Industries had more than five thousand employees. They were known for their enlightened method of management and for their vision and wisdom in anticipating market patterns. But they had failed to predict the revolution. Until the last days of the ancien régime, both brothers believed that the situation was under the shah’s control. They believed they had nothing to fear from a revolution. They had been fair to their workers, paid their taxes, had no royal partners, and were known for their probity in financial matters. This time, despite their many wise predictions in the past, they were wrong. When the revolution came, they were among the group of large industrialists whose properties were confiscated.

Before long, both brothers and their families were forced to leave Iran and settle in New York. Their combination of acumen and good name, honesty and dedication has served them well in fashioning a new life for themselves and their families.

On August 17, 1953, when the shah arrived in Rome, despondent and convinced that he had lost the throne, the Iranian Embassy refused to meet with him. Even the keys to a car he kept at the embassy—a Rolls Royce—were kept from him. Then an Iranian Jew who happened to be in Italy at the time came to the rescue. His name was Morad Aryeh, and he had been in Milan on business. He immediately set out for Rome, where he visited the shah, gave him a blank check, and offered him the use of his brand new Cadillac.[1] Within hours of that offer, the shah’s fortunes turned, and he was on his way back to Iran, this time triumphant. Aryeh’s generous gesture was amply rewarded in the years to come.

According to some sources, Aryeh put his reputation of being in the shah’s favor to great use. On the desk in his office, they claim, there were two telephones—one red, one black. When he wanted to impress a visitor, he would have the red phone ring, and he would immediately stand up, click his heels, and pretend that he was talking with the shah himself.[2] The Israeli Embassy in Tehran, which is the source of the story of the two phones, also reported that while Aryeh’s relationship with the shah had gradually waned after 1953, he kept close to the court by entering into partnerships with the shah’s twin sister and with the shah’s mother.[3]

Aryeh’s children dismiss the story of the two phones, and attribute it, and the other stories critical of their father in some of the Israeli embassy reports, to a history of bad blood between Aryeh and Ezri, one of the powerful Israeli ambassadors.4 There is no doubt that using a combination of entrepreneurial skills, political savvy, and a healthy dose of good luck—being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing—he became one of the most successful Iranian Jews of his generation, with a long history of service in the Parliament as the Jewish community’s one representative in the Majlis.

He was born in 1889 (1267) in the city of Kashan. His father was a rabbi and a teacher. For several generations, his ancestors had been rabbis. Morad was never much of a student, and he was thirteen when he left the city, going to the port city of Pahlavi, where some of his brothers had already moved. They were small businessmen, trading primarily in textiles with Russia. The partnership grew, but soon Morad decided to set out on his own. The claim that he owed his success to the support he received from the shah ignores the fact that long before the shah arrived in Rome, Aryeh was already a successful businessman, in a position to offer a despondent king unlimited cash and a Cadillac.

Like many merchants of his generation, in the late 1950s Aryeh gradually moved from simple mercantilism into industrial production. In his case, his companies produced an eclectic mix of everything from tiles to textiles, plastics to upholstery for cars. When, for example, Iran began to assemble the car called Peykan, the upholstery and rugs were produced by some of the Aryeh factories. By the mid-1970s, he was in more than thirty different kinds of production. He had also bought large plots of land in and around the capital, and they were worth a fortune by themselves. Morad made his name not so much as a successful or innovating businessmen, but as a political figure and leader of the Iranian Jewish community.

The Iranian Constitution of 1905 called for the recognized religious minorities (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians) each to have a representative in the Majlis, and Morad held the Jewish seat from the fourteenth Majlis (1944–46) to the twentieth, with the exception of the sixteenth (1950–52). During his tenure, he was a reliable royalist and a cautious but persistent advocate of Jewish rights. “My father was a devout Jew,” his son, Raffie, said, “and it is in our prayers that we must support the ruler of the time. My father always prayed for the shah.”[5] It was also a tradition in the Iranian Jewish community that whoever occupied the Majlis seat was also named the leader of the country’s central Jewish organization. Under his leadership, the government agreed to allow Jews to take paid time off during important Jewish holidays.

He was also an advocate of expenditures on cultural and educational matters. For example, in 1945, along with Dr. Abdullah Moazzami, an enlightened member of the Parliament and its one-time Speaker, and Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, he was one of the members of the Parliament who passed a resolution to ensure the publication of Allame Dehkhoda’s magnum opus, the Logatnameh. The Ministry of Education was required to help sustain the research and the Parliament’s printing office was required to publish it.[6]

Most important of all, scholars like David Menasheri have concluded that the years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign was “the Golden Age of Iranian Jewry,” when “Jews enjoyed almost total cultural and religious autonomy, experienced economic progress and had no less political freedom than their Muslim counterparts.”[7] He goes on to claim that, “on per capita terms, they may well have been the richest Jewish community in the world.”[8] Aryeh, as someone who had the trust of the shah, and was a member of the Parliament for much of this period, must be given some credit for these accomplishments. But Aryeh is nothing if not controversial. According to some in the Iranian Jewish community, however, he used his seat in the Parliament for “personal aggrandizement” and even impeded some of the reforms that could have been made during his tenure.[9]

But what was for many years the source of his power became in the late 1950s the source of his political demise. Aryeh’s relationship with the Israeli Embassy in Iran was rather tense, sometimes even acrimonious. According to Meir Ezri, the ambassador, when he arrived in Tehran in 1958, he went to see Aryeh. “I was shocked by his cold response. When I introduced myself, he turned even colder. He said, ‘In Iran there is no place for a Zionist movement or for an Israeli Embassy. Under the leadership of His Imperial Majesty, Jews enjoy equal rights with others, and that obviates the need for an Israeli official in Iran.’”[10] The Israeli Embassy decided to end Aryeh’s parliamentary career, and, in a bold move, in 1960 they supported another candidate for the Jewish seat. Their candidate, Jamshid Kashfi, defeated Aryeh. In its rendition of the history of Jewish organizations in Iran, the Islamic Republic confirms the clash within these organizations around the issue of ties with Israel, and that Kashfi was chosen to replace Aryeh by those advocating closer ties.[11]

The Aryeh children offer a different account of the tensions between the Israeli Embassy and their father. They confirm the fact that their father refused to establish any contacts with Israel’s embassy, suggesting that their father “believed we are Iranians. Why should we contact a foreign embassy?” The only dealings he was willing to have with Israel were for works of philanthropy.12 They insist, however, that there was a history of bad blood between their father and Meir Ezri, the Iranian-born Jew who returned to Iran as Israel’s ambassador. The tension, they say, went back to the days when Ezri’s father collected funds from Jews in the city of Isfahan, promising to deliver them to the Promised Land, and when the journeys did not materialize, allegations of financial malfeasance ensued.13 It is all but impossible to find the truth of what happened in Isfahan a hundred years ago, and what role it played in the tensions between Israel’s new ambassador and Aryeh, but it is clear that many Jews in Iran felt estranged from Aryeh. It is a telling measure of this estrangement that in histories of prominent Jews in Iran there is hardly ever any mention of him.

The year 1960 was painful for Aryeh for a reason entirely different from the loss of his seat in the Parliament. Early in the summer of that year, he had bought an Austin Healey for one of his sons. Morad had married Agdasiye Yazhari in 1930; she was also from the city of Kashan. By 1960 they had a large family of children and grandchildren. Morad had promised one of his sons a sports car if he was accepted into a “first-rate American college.” The young man was accepted to the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was spending his summer in Europe, where he had taken ownership of his new car. Before the summer was out, he died in a car accident in Switzerland. According to one of his brothers, “what made the death even more incredible was the fact that a week before the accident, someone called my father and told him ‘Your son has died of an accident.’” To Morad Aryeh’s temporary relief, he found out that the caller had lied, and that his son was alive. But then a few days later, he received another call, this time informing him that his son had been involved in an accident. The son was in a coma for days and then passed away. “After his death,” his brother declared, “it felt like our entire family died; something fizzled out of us and our father.”[14] Morad’s wife of thirty years arguably lost her life to her grief. Fourteen months after her son’s death, she passed away of a heart attack.

Although Morad spent the rest of his days in Iran working and taking care of his large family, and although he was an avid hiker and a man of firm faith, there was something missing in his life. He was more than willing to leave Iran when the revolution appeared on the horizon. In his case, the early warning shots were fired even earlier than most. A little over a year before the revolution, his office was bombed. It was only by chance that he was not killed. The bomb had been placed on the third floor of the building where his office was located. Aryeh decided to leave his office and visit a friend, and he was thus saved from the explosion. The culprit was never found, but it was clear that the time to leave Iran was coming.

Disgruntlement with the court over the issue of his son Raffie’s confiscated lands finally convinced him to go. “My father always lived with a suitcase, ready to travel,” his son said, and in late March 1978, he and his sons left for the United States, where they settled. There, too, he and his family achieved impressive economic success. Raffie sued the Iranian government under the terms of the agreement that ended the hostage crisis. Before leaving Iran, he had turned over ownership of some of his properties to his two children from his American wife. The Hague Tribunal awarded the Aryeh children forty eight million dollars. But long before this legal victory, Morad Aryeh, the patriarch of the family, died of heart attack, on November 30, 1980.

In 1973, in a film called The Mongolians, a cozy teahouse in a small town in Iran undergoes a profound change. In the beginning, the customers’ favorite pastime is watching a naggal performing his act of using verbal and hand gestures to retell the stories of Shahnameh, the grand epic of Persian culture. But then television comes to the town, and the warm teahouse is transformed into a silent, soulless room where isolated individuals have their empty gazes on the television screen, which looms over everyone from an elevated, godlike perch in one corner of the room. Television, we soon learn, is a metaphor for the Mongolians who have invaded the town. Despite the disparaging disposition of intellectuals like Parviz Kimiavi, who directed the film, by the 1970s television had indeed “invaded” many households and neighborhoods in Iran, and no one was more directly identified with the production of television sets than the Barkhordar family.

By then the Barkhordar family was also known to the political cognoscenti for an entirely different reason. The youngest brother, Abbas, had been sent to America in 1960 to become an engineer. That was when the family was beginning to enter the realm of industry. While the other brothers were all, by temperament and desire, businessmen, Abbas was an intellectual and a math and chess prodigy. After a few years in Berkeley, Abbas joined an underground Iranian Maoist group.[1] His native intelligence, his discipline, and his dedication combined to catapult him to the leadership of the group.

The group was also involved in the student movement against the shah, and before long, Abbas’s picture appeared in the newspapers, leading opposition demonstrations. The brothers were worried, even embarrassed, but their mother had a special affinity for Abbas, her youngest son, and she demanded that her other children take care of their wayward brother. Occasionally, when the other brothers visited the United States on business, they arranged to meet with Abbas. The presence of one of his brothers, Hadj Mohammad Tagi Barkhordar, one of Iran’s biggest “bourgeois” industrialists, among a bevy of Maoists was like a scene from the theater of the absurd.[2]
By the mid-1970s, Abbas, who had finished his engineering degree at the University of California at Berkeley, seemed to have a change of heart. He asked his brothers to arrange for him to come in from the cold. He spent a few months in New York, away from his comrades and under the watchful eyes of the shah’s secret police. And when they were convinced that Abbas had, in fact, converted, they arranged for his return home. He immediately joined the family business and before long he took over the management of one of the Barkhordars’ many factories.

During his days as a Maoist, such “proximity to the proletariat” was the ultimate prize of his group, and now that he had the proximity, he was a “bourgeois.” But reality was more complicated and seemed to imitate art—and the novels of John le Carré. Unbeknownst to everyone save a handful of his comrades, Abbas had all along remained in the organization. His belated conversion to the cause of monarchy had been a carefully planned charade, a ruse to get his hands—more accurately, the organization’s hands—on his multimillion-dollar share of the family fortune, which had been kept in trust by the other brothers, particularly Hadj Mohammad Tagi.[3]
For the first four to five years of the revolution, Abbas’s organization had, by some convoluted logic, sided with the Islamic regime and supported its every action. When the group finally decided to break with the regime, forces loyal to the Islamic Revolution brutally decimated their erstwhile Maoist allies, and it did not take long for the interrogators to learn about the group’s access to millions of dollars and about the identity of Abbas. When they surrounded the house where he lived with his wife and two children, Abbas tried to escape, he was shot and was taken to the hospital.

His brothers once again tried to come to his rescue. There were rumors of big bribes paid to high-ranking authorities to allow Abbas to be moved to London for an operation.[4] But then authorities announced his death. Some in the family believe that he was intentionally denied adequate care and maybe even interrogated while in the hospital. The truth shall never be known. All that is certain is that he was dead, bringing to an end one of the strangest chapters in the Barkhordar family history.

The Barkhordar name, synonymous in Iran with televisions and radios and home appliances, was more than anything identified with Hadj Mohammad Tagi. He was less like an elder brother and more like the patriarch of the family, particularly after the death of their father in 1961.5 Hadj Mohammad Tagi was born in the city of Yazd in 1924 (1303).6 The city had had for centuries a high concentration of Iranian Zoroastrians. In fact, until the end of the nineteenth century, the Barkhordar family was also Zoroastrian, but they converted to Islam at that time. He was the second child of a family with a long history in commerce. In the last decades of the nineteenth century there were, for reasons that have not yet been adequately studied, a flood of conversions, particularly in the city of Yazd—Jews converting to the Bahai faith, Jews converting to Islam, and Zoroastrians converting to Islam. As is often the case with converts, the Barkhordars were known for the fervor of their faith.

Mohammad Tagi was the second child of a family known for its history of engagement in trade. His father was one of Yazd’s most eminent merchants. The young Mohammad Tagi went to school in Yazd, but from his early youth, his mind was on business. He accompanied his father to his office and helped with chores, including bookkeeping. A few months after he finished high school, he decided to leave Yazd and head for Tehran, where he entered the world of commerce. His father’s reputation, and the fact that there was a large contingent of other merchants from the city of Yazd already working in Tehran, worked to his advantage.

Around bazaar merchants, Hadj Mahmood developed a reputation for piety, probity, and hard work. He worked all day and well into the night, resting for a few minutes after lunch. To avoid wasting too much time, he ate his lunch at work and took a few minutes nap in the mosque. All his life, even when he traveled to the United States on business at the height of his affluence, he invariably performed the quintet of daily prayers required for all Muslims. He was also known to insist on reading some verses of the Qur’an every day. As soon as he had the financial requirements for a visit to Mecca for his Hadj ceremony—enough to live on and to support one’s family for a year is the minimum needed—he went, becoming Hadj Mohammad Tagi.[7]

After about twenty years in the bazaar, trading in everything from batteries and radios to coolers and air conditioners, he decided that the time had come for change. Before changing his business, he had already changed his private life, marrying Badremir Hoseyni Vakil, a young woman from the city of Kerman, in 1956 . Their first child, Hamid, was born three years later. They went on to have two more children, both girls. Another crucial change in the brothers’ lives was the loss of their father in 1961.

By the early 1960s the Barkhordars, like many other merchants of the bazaar, decided that the time to move from trade to industry has arrived. The emerging pattern can be discerned from many of the social and economic indicators of the period. In 1956, for example, the government of Iran had issued only 46 licenses for new industrial concerns, which employed 815,000 people. In 1966, the number of licenses had increased to 743, and the new businesses employed 1,252,000 workers. The value of industrial output in the same period went from 0.2 billion tooman to 1,400 billion, an incredible increase.[8] The Barkhordar family played an important role in this quantum leap.

Entering into a partnership with the American company Rayovac Batteries, the Barkhordars launched their first factory. Before long, they had started the Pars Electric Company, which operated under licensing agreements with major German and Japanese companies (such as Grundig in Germany and Toshiba in Japan).
Part of the Barkhordar economic strategy was vertical and horizontal expansion at a dizzying, rapid pace. In less than five years, they had created Pars Toshiba to produce small household goods, Pars Production (in partnership with General Electric) to produce refrigerators, Pars Rugs to produce machine-made carpets, and Pars Tiles to produce tiles. If this were not enough, the brothers also invested in an industrial farm near the city of Jiroft. And, like many other businessmen of the time, they had also invested in some banks. By the time of the revolution, more than twelve thousand people worked in the Barkhordar companies.

Their style of management was to hire competent managers and then delegate power and authority to them. Hajd Mohammad Tagi, in particular, was demanding but fair. At the same time, he understood the value of professional training in managers. He was among the most generous supporters of educational institutions in Iran.[9] It was partially the result of this recognition that he was among the first businessmen to support the creation of an Iranian satellite campus of the Harvard Business School in Tehran.10 Barkhordar companies hired most of their new managers from the ranks of the school graduates. He also began planning for the establishment of a technical school in conjunction with General Electric.11 But like many other ambitious plans of his peers, this one was aborted by the revolution.

In spite of his reputation for Islamic piety, and in spite of his effort to make peace with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when the latter was in Paris, when the new Islamic regime began its policy of confiscating the properties of big businessmen, the Barkhordars were not spared. Most of the brothers and their families moved to Europe or America. Abbas was the exception. His wife and children eventually moved to London after his death. Hadj Mohammad Tagi continued his business activities in exile. But the onset of Alzheimer’s forced him to slow down. His family, knowing the singularity of his life, tried to arrange for an authorized biography of the man who helped build the Barkhordar empire, but nothing has come of it yet.

“Plastics. . . . There’s a great future in plastics,” said the meddlesome family friend in Mike Nichol’s The Graduate. In Iran, long before the film ever arrived, one man knew the utility, the potential ubiquitous usefulness, and the profitability of plastic. His name was Hadj Habib Elghanian, and he was easily the most dedicated and influential leader of the Iranian Jewish community in postwar Iran. According to Israel’s ambassador to Iran, Meir Ezri, he was also one of the most stalwart supporters of Israel. Documents from SAVAK from that time, published by authorities of the Islamic Republic, go one step further and claim that “Elghanian is of a group of Iranian Jews who will do nothing without prior consultation with the Israeli Embassy.”[1]

The dual affinities of a whole generation of Iranian Jews was poignantly captured in him. In his rise and fall one can see, too, in embryonic and revealing detail, the duality of the twenty-five-hundred-year relationship of Iran with its Jewish population, at times sublimely tolerant, at other times cruelly oppressive. The Bible is full of profuse praise for Persia and its benevolent ruler, Cyrus. In the book of Ezra (1:2), God speaks through Cyrus, who proclaimed, “The Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he had charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem.” Cyrus not only heeded the edict but freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity.

Later, an Iranian king married Esther, a Jew, and she was the beloved of the king. She had to face and ultimately fend off the demonic machinations and the blood lust of Hamon, of the race of Agog, who was filled with anti-Semitic hatred. The feast of Purim celebrates Esther’s victory and Hamon’s defeat. The hateful disposition of Hamon has remained the demonic underbelly of Iranian history, while the benevolence of Cyrus has been no less a powerful force, enlightening the Iranian horizon.

The same dualism was evident in the twentieth century, during the childhood of Habib. On the one hand, as soon as the Final Solution reared its murderous head, the Iranian government convinced Nazi “race experts” that Iranian Jews, known in Persian as kalimi, had been thoroughly assimilated in the Iranian nation, and must be considered its full citizens. Nazis accepted the argument and the lives of Iranian Jews living in Europe was saved. Moreover, thousands of Iranian passports were provided to European Jews, affording them safe harbor from the Nazi killing machine. Finally, during World War II, hundreds of Polish Jews were given safe haven in Tehran. When the war ended, some remained and contributed to the cultural diversity of the city; a few others fell in love with Iranians, and their plight became the material for classic short stories; still a third group left Iran after the war and took with them only their memories as “the Children of Tehran.”[2]

In addition to these acts of hospitality, the Iranian government helped with the transfer of Iraqi Jews who wanted to go to Israel. Moreover, contrary to most countries of the world, Iran made no effort to block the migration of its own Jews to the Promised Land. Indeed, in the years after the war, it is estimated that seventy thousand Iranian Jews moved to Israel. Today, they account for about two hundred thousand citizens of that country.[3]

In the same period, the descendents and disciples of Hamon were not, sadly, inactive. They preached anti-Semitic hatred and spewed poisonous ideas about Jews in the guise of fighting Zionism. It was in this context that Habib Elghanian grew up, and before long he stood out as one of the most recognized faces of the Iranian Jewish community.

He was unfailing proud of his identity as an Iranian. All his life, in his house the Jewish holidays and feasts were celebrated with no more dedication and ostentation than were Persian feasts like Nowrooz.[4] At the same time, he was relentless in his devotion to Israel as the Promised Land of all Jews. During the days of the shah—which, compared to the days of Islamic Republic, were days of religious tolerance—he could serve his dual emotional affinities with relative ease and safety. In the early days of the Islamic Revolution, when the blood lust of the victors took thousands of lives, his affinity for Israel cost him his life.

Ironically the tragedy could have been avoided had it not been for Elghanian’s devotion to the Iranian Jewish community. In the weeks leading to the collapse of the shah’s regime, Elghanian was in the United States, where he had sent his wife and children. In spite of their pleas, he insisted on returning to Iran. He argued, naïvely, that he had done nothing wrong and believed, optimistically, that at worst there would be a military coup in favor of the shah. There were, in fact, a number of complicated reasons for his unusual decision to return. Like hundreds of other members of the ancien régime’s elite, he could not fathom the idea of an Islamic Revolution in Iran. Like them he was inflicted with the August 1953 syndrome, hoping against hope that the United States had plans to save the throne. Moreover, he and another of his brothers who was living in London at the time hoped to go back to Iran to try to sell, if need be at a fraction of its value, some of their vast holdings.5 He repeatedly told his family that, as the leader of the Iranian Jewish community, he had to go back and be with his fellows in faith. “I cannot leave my tribe behind,” he told his family. His miscalculations and his devotion cost him his life.

Habib Elghanian was born in 1909 (1288) to a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Tehran. The etymology of his last name is biblical and refers to the Hebrew name for the father of Samuel, the prophet.6 Habib’s father was a tailor. After finishing elementary school and three years of high school, he left school to earn a living. “School was never his forte,” said his son, adding that from early youth, “Habib wanted to work and help his family with their expenses”[7] He found work at a hotel owned by one of his uncles.

That same uncle had a daughter by the name of Nikoukhah, and Habib was barely twenty when the two cousins were married. By then, he had started his own business. He began by buying and selling fabric, and before long he expanded into other areas of retail. He entered into a lifelong partnership with his five brothers, but of the group, Habib was clearly the most charismatic and outgoing. In those days, like Moslems who visited Mecca, any Jew who had visited Jerusalem was called Hadj, and thus Elghanian’s title of Hadj Habib. Because of his affable character, when the brother’s business grew into a veritable empire, Habib was put in charge of the sales department.

Although the Elghanian brothers had gone into business before World War II, it was the fluid economic realities of the war that gave them a chance for their first large accumulation of capital. They purchased Allied army surplus uniforms in Iran and sold them at a considerable profit. More crucially, one of the brothers, Jon, was dispatched to the United States, where he made two important business decisions. He discovered plastic, and he convinced his brothers to begin planning a factory. Habib often carried a plastic comb in his pocket as a reminder of where their fortune began. Jon also found that Americans were donating vast quantities of secondhand clothes for the less fortunate, war-torn parts of the world. He began exporting large amounts of these clothes to Iran, where his other brothers sold them for a profit.[8] The war had led to serious shortages of almost every commodity; it was a seller’s market, and the Elghanians were, like good capitalists, effective in using market realities to their own benefit.

In the years after the end of the war, in spite of the fact that the country was engulfed in fierce, ideological political battles, the Elghanian brothers tried to stay clear of any potentially troubling political entanglement. Neither in the office nor certainly at home did the brothers talk politics. They concentrated instead on family and religious matters. Although never a dogmatist, Habib was a man of devout faith. He instilled in his children a similar respect for Jewish values and rituals. More than anything, he was a family man. All his life his favorite pastime was to spend time with his children and grandchildren.
His aversion to politics had only one exception. He was willing to risk the wrath of the market, or even of the government of Iran, as the price for his defense of Israel. At the same time he never wavered in his affinity for Iran as his country of birth. In 1959, there was a major shake-up in the leadership of the Iranian Jewish community. Morad Aryeh had hitherto been the leader of the community and its representative to the Majlis. But that year, in an orchestrated effort, clearly joined if not led by the Israeli Embassy in Tehran, Aryeh was removed from his seat in the Parliament. Not long after, he resigned from his post as the leader of Iran’s Jewish community. Habib Elghanian took over that post. The shake-up, according to some sources, was rooted in Aryeh’s reluctance to allow Iranian Jews to become too identified with Israel.

Many people talk of the years of Elghanian’s stewardship as the golden days of the Iranian Jewish community.[9] He created a number of new organizations—like the National Jewish Fund and a committee of arbitration for Jews—and actively promoted Jewish philanthropic activities. He was himself known for his generous, sometimes anonymous, donations to less fortunate Iranian Jews. More than one source talks of his unfailing willingness to help not only needy Iranian Jews but also philanthropic causes in Israel.

An often-cited example of his willingness to help Israel was his decision to purchase Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltaneh’s house in Tehran and dedicate it to Israel for its embassy.

Elghanian also became the first Jew to join the Iranian Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber of Industry’s board of governors. Hitherto, Jews had been allowed to join both chambers, but were barred from their leadership. On the eve of the election in 1960, Elghanian and his allies had gathered, “through special initiative,”10 the proxy votes of 1700 hundred of the 3260 commercial licenses in the city of Tehran, and in this way insured that he was elected to the fifteen-member board.

Although Elghanian’s role as a trailblazer was directly related to plastic, he owed his fame to the Plasco Building he and his brothers had built. Aside from its notoriety as the first modern building of its kind, “Plasco” was significant for historic reasons as well. It has been suggested that arcades—vast covered areas of shops and restaurants—are one of the most important signs of a new stage in the rise of capitalism.11 In the case of Iran, their construction begot the gradual decline of the bazaar and an end to its monopoly control of the country’s retail and distribution system. For these reasons, the Elghanians’ Plasco Building, before long something of a tourist attraction, was a harbinger of a gradual shift of Tehran’s economic heart away from the bazaar and toward the rapidly burgeoning center and northern neighborhoods of the city. The building was finished and was put to use just at the time the new consumer culture was taking root in Iran. Before long, the Plasco building was a new Mecca for mercantilism.

The name Plasco was short for plastic company. Habib and his brothers had been the first industrialists to build a factory producing plastic ware in Iran. The new commodity and its infinite iterations were an instant success. Moreover, the brothers began to expand their industrial production to many new fields—from refrigerators to aluminum doors and windows. It is estimated that they employed more than six thousand people in all their factories and stores. By the mid-1970s, the Elghanian brothers were surely among the most visible millionaires in Iran.

They were not alone in benefiting from the shah’s enlightened attitude toward religious minorities. By the late 1960s, Iranian Jews were, in terms of their per capita income, one of the most prosperous Jewish communities in the world.[12]

Elghanian was, among the Iranian Jews, one of the most forceful advocates of the necessity of investing in Israel. A twenty-three-story building that served as a diamond trade center, as well as big parcels of land valued at ten million dollars, were part of this investment.

When the government of the shah embarked on a policy of forced price control and price stabilization, Elghanian was among the first to be harassed and arrested. His incarceration was the most notorious example of the shah’s ill-planned and ill-advised policy. Even Assadollah Alam, the shah’s close confidant and by the mid-1970s a powerful minister of court, found the arrest of Elghanian particularly objectionable. In his daily journals, he writes, “a number of powerful men, including Habib Elghanian, have been arrested. It is of course against the law; even if in a big store, they have sold something at inflated prices, what does the director of the company have to do with that sale?”[13]

Lawful or not, Elghanian was arrested, and after a short stay in Tehran, he was exiled to Sanandaj, where he rented a hotel room and was regularly visited by his family and friends. Before being shipped off, his head was shaved. In spite of these attempts to humiliate him, he was, at least with his family, rather stoic about his experience and encouraged them to remain positive and optimistic.[14]

The end of his exile was not, however, the end of his ordeal. After finishing his sentence, he flew back to Tehran. Upon his arrival, he was, much to his consternation, arrested again. His family was particularly frustrated. The second incarceration was mercifully shorter than the first. On the day he returned, he received a call from Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the prime minister. “The arrest had been necessary,” Hoveyda said, “because His Majesty wanted a show of force against the industrialists.” Elghanian was then reassured that, “All will be well from now on.”15 Before long, he was called to a meeting with the shah, and by way of consolation, the shah approved Elghanian’s request for the import of machinery for aluminum extrusion.[16] By then he had established a factory for the manufacture of aluminum household goods in partnership with one of his sons.[17]

No sooner was he released than his friends, even members of the Israeli Embassy, advised him to leave Iran. In September 1976, for example, the second-ranking official of the Israeli Embassy visited Elghanian at his house and said, “Now that the economy is in shambles, now that the Shah’s intermittent and ill-advised interventions are causing the further deterioration of the conditions, is it not better that you should gather up your holdings and leave the country, at least for a while?”18 While Elghanian seems to have moved at least part of his wealth outside Iran, on the whole he dismissed the words of those who advised him to leave. All will be well, he repeatedly said; to the concerned Israeli official, he reiterated the story of the shah’s promise of new opportunities in aluminum.19 Aside from these economic and political anxieties, other kinds of pressures were also increasing on wealthy Iranian Jews. According to the same Israeli official in the embassy in Tehran, Princess Ashraf was building a charitable hospital, and she had informed the leaders of the Jewish community that she expected them to raise tens of millions of dollars for the cause.[20]

If these factors were not enough, even before the fall of the shah newspapers, enjoying fruits of their newfound freedom, began to go on a rampage against elites of the ancien régime. Elghanian was among their favorite targets. Stories about his fantastic fortune and illicit gains, and about his role in all manner of “Zionist conspiracies,” began to appear in the papers. Worried about the increasingly acerbic tone of the attacks, Elghanian sent his family away first to Israel and then to the United States. In October 1978, he visited them for a few days, then returned home.

After he returned from the United States, Elghanian tried to resume his routines of the past. He often spent his evenings at a social club that was frequented by prominent Iranians and wealthy Jews. The club, as was its wont, acted as a hub for eminent Persians. It allowed members like Elghanian not only to keep abreast of the country’s developments, but to form or cement important relationships with other members of the elite. But in the months before the revolution, the club had become a hollow shell of its past. As more and more of the elite left the country, or ended up behind bars, the club was bereft of its vitality and utility. Nevertheless, Elghanian, alone and without his family, spent more and more of his evenings there. There was about him a palpable sense of isolation and estrangement from the storm that lurked on the horizon. When it finally came, Elghanian was one of its earliest victims.[21]

Not long after the collapse of the shah’s army, Elghanian was arrested. The ninecount indictment against him was, like most indictments of the revolutionary court of the time, an exercise in cruel absurdity. The court trafficked only in generalities and eschewed making any specific charges. It accused Elghanian of
being friend of God’s enemies and enemy of God’s friends; of having spied for the Zionist government of Israel; of having collected money and support for Israel; of having invested funds originating from the exploitation of Iran with the intent of developing Israel; of corruption on earth; of waging war against God and his Messenger, the present Imam; of blocking God’s ways and the ways of happiness; and of helping in the “daily and cruel massacre of our brothers the Palestinian fighters.”[22]

Among his other alleged crimes, though not mentioned in the indictment, were his apparent membership in Freemasonry Lodges, particularly Ibne Sina and Homayoon.[23]

On May 29, 1979, after a kangaroo court session, Elghanian was executed by a firing squad. By the order of the court, his remaining properties in Iran were confiscated. At the same time, less than a week after his death, new leaders of the Iranian Jewish community, clearly fearing for their lives and hoping to find a way to work with the new regime, “met with Ayatollah Khomeini . . . congratulating him, and expressing solidarity with the revolution.”[24] The ayatollah insisted that Islam has no hatred for Jews, and that it is only Zionism that the new regime fights.

The death of Elghanian brought about a global outcry against the Islamic regime. Only days after his death, the House of Representatives in the United States approved a resolution proposed by Rep. Harold Hollenbeck to express “the sense of the House of Representative that the leaders of the government of Iran are violating the human rights . . . and to denounce the summary trial and execution of industrialist Habib Elghanian on account of his contacts with Israel and his religious beliefs.”[25]

In Iran, unfortunately, the press tried to legitimize Elghanian’s murder by clinging to revolutionary rhetoric. “The news media reveled in [Elghanian’s] execution,” jubilantly justifying the murder on the absurd ground that he had met with Israeli leaders like Abba Eban and Moshe Dayan.[26]

Keyhan quoted a man who was involved in finding all the confiscated Elghanian properties. The article referred to Elghanian not as an Iranian, but as the “Israeli” or the “Zionist” capitalist. It writes of the “difficult task” of finding all he owned. Eventually it turned out to include a number of companies, including “Pars-America company, Plasco, Admiral, Shomal Plastic, Louleh Shomal, Aluminume Shomal, Copper Looleh of Esfahan, and Gazvin Plastic Works.” They claim he owned fifteen different villas, buildings, and houses around the country. Furthermore, he had purchased large parcels of land—a million square meters in Farahzad, and a number of other prime locations. They talked of his stocks in a number of banks, including Saderat, Commerce and Distribution, and Industry and Mining.[27] Finally, the article referred to four hundred photograph albums that were found around Elghanian’s houses. Of all the pictures, they decided to publish one that showed Elghanian on a tank in the Sinai desert, allegedly fighting with the Israeli army.[28]

“And what are galoshes, Gabriel?” Aunt Julie asks in James Joyce’s masterpiece, The Dead. Someone chimes in, “Galoshes! That is the latest. Whenever it is wet underfoot, I must put on my galoshes.”[1] Iran is not Ireland when it comes to having a wet clime, but one man knew the significance of galoshes; his name was Rahim Irvani and he went on to turn an early premonition into a fortune.

Shoes made in a factory were an early sign of modernity in Iran. Before their advent, Iranian men wore a variety of traditional contraptions, from orsi to giveh—the latter handmade footwear of cotton and sturdy soles, surprisingly cool in summers and almost indestructible in all seasons. As more and more Iranians visited Europe, modern shoes were not only imported, but a burgeoning handmade shoe industry, in which the leather was prepared by one shop, the soles by another, with a third shop putting them together, also began to develop.[2] Then Rahim Irvani appeared on the scene, and with his love of galoshes, he changed the business of shoemaking in Iran.

He was a man of big ambitions and an even bigger ego. Living on the financial edge, borrowing and risking surprisingly large sums of money, and making grand and sometimes grandiose plans were all second nature to him. In spite of his larger-than-life appetites and his craving for success and approval, he was also averse to the limelight. He was relentless in his attempts to reach his goals. “No” was an answer he did not accept. With friends, he was unfailingly faithful; with competitors he was ferocious. He had a keen eye for favorable economic opportunities, and a keener one for turning friendships and relationships into occasions for profit. He had a large coterie of friends and kept “in touch with them, particularly through the phone,” his wife of some sixty years said.

He was generous to a fault, willing to help not only friends but also workers in their hour of need. He was devoutly religious but opposed to the ritualistic pieties of regimented religion. His was a private faith, negotiated directly with the Divine. He had, for example, developed his own singular system for saying his daily prayers, but through thick and thin, as a young student or a maturing tycoon, he never left the practice of saying them.[3] Even his acts of generosity were often more religious and traditional in form and substance than in line with modern philanthropy. He had, for example, endowed a mosque near his factories in Tehran.[4] His favorite act of philanthropy, however, was his decision to adopt about twenty-five orphaned children. He put them through school, found them jobs, and even filed official adoption papers for some.[5] He had a passion for these poor orphans, and often talked about his plans for their future as well as the difficulties of their past. His own life as a child bore no resemblance to that of the children he adopted.
He was born in the city of Shiraz in 1920 (1299). He was the first son of three. His father was a rich merchant with properties in and around Shiraz. Rahim went to school in his city of birth. He was only eight when he lost his mother, and his father decided to send him to a boarding school run by missionaries in the city of Isfahan. That was where he began to learn English, and that knowledge proved crucial in deciding the future contours of his life. For the last three years of school, he went back to Shiraz, where he enrolled in the Shapur high school.

An early harbinger of his ambitious, even adventurous soul was his willingness as a high school student to write and publish a textbook for learning English.[6] He had other eccentricities, too. He wasn’t particularly political, but when the crown prince was married, Rahim convinced his friend Ebrahim Golestan that together they should organize a party celebrating the royal wedding.[7]

In 1941, he went to Tehran and enrolled in the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Law. Through a family connection, he found himself a room in one of the university dorms, and his next step arose from one of the defining elements of his nature. Although there was no financial compulsion for him to work, and though working while going to college was something uncommon among children of affluent classes, Rahim found a job at the oil company as manager at the gas station near the university. Tehran was in those days a city of few cars, and the university station was one of only a handful in the city.[8]

Rahim was never much inclined toward academics and was also never averse to using his friends’ “help” to finish assignments or even pass exams. He received his bachelor’s degree, but he never entered the law profession, nor did he engage in radical politics, the fad among his peers at the time. Many of his friends were members of the Tudeh communist party. It was an early sign of his unfailing propensity to cleverly use every situation to his own advantage that while he steered clear of joining the party, he tried to enjoy what benefits it could afford him. Through his friends, for example, he convinced the editors of the party newspaper to appoint him their reporter in the United States. He went there in 1944, and he stayed a few months, enrolled in some courses at the University of Maryland, but never completed any program. He returned to Iran when he learned that his father was sick. Before going home, however, he traveled to San Francisco, and using his press credentials, he attended the meetings that helped launch the United Nations.

Back in Shiraz, he joined his father’s business, and when the latter passed away, attending to his fortune became Rahim’s responsibility. He also began teaching part-time in the all-girl Mehrain School, run by a British woman of Armenian descent. Her name was Ella Gerard, and a whole mythology developed around her and her connections to the British intelligence services. But there was consensus that the school she ran was the best of its kind in the city.

Sometime after he started teaching there, Rahim asked Miss Ella, as the principal was affectionately called, to help him find a wife. His heart had been broken once, when he fell in love with a young girl from Shiraz, but his love was unrequited. For the rest of his life, he continued to talk about her with friends, invariably with affection. Before long, she introduced Irvani to one of her favorite students, a young woman named Zinat. Rahim had seen her picture in the local papers when she was commended for finishing first in her graduating class. Zinat and Rahim married in 1947. The first of their three children was born a year later. Zinat, a woman both clever and beautiful, stayed at Rahim’s side for the rest of his life. She was not only mother to their children, but she also became an advisor and participant in their family business.

In 1949, the family moved to Tehran. Rahim rented an office near the bazaar and took up his father’s career as a merchant. He exported everything from herbal roots to nuts and imported an eclectic mix of commodities that included umbrellas and, of course, galoshes. One day he saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a job opportunity with a Western company for someone who could show mastery of the English language. He decided to apply, and through connections in the newspaper where the announcement had appeared, he went to the site of the interview before the announced time and was given the job. Cutting corners, using his own considerable abilities and intelligence as well as any other necessary means to achieve his ends, was one of his characteristic ways of operating.

He was hired in 1949 to work as a salesman for the Bata Shoe Company. Their main import was galoshes from Czechoslovakia, where the company headquarters were located. If in Joyce’s turn-of-the-century Ireland galoshes were high fashion, in the Iran of Irvani’s time they were the footwear of the poor. But Irvani was a man of big ambitions, and before long he concluded that he had to go out on his own. He launched a company that imported a variety of shoes, particularly sneakers, and then, in 1955, he decided that he must take the next step and begin manufacturing them in Iran. Czechoslovakia had by then been taken over by the communists, and the Bata Company had been nationalized. The owner, Thomas Bata, lived in London, where Irvani met with him, and the two entered into a new partnership. Bata would provide the technological know-how and Irvani the capital, and together they would begin manufacturing shoes in Iran. The machinery and shoe designs were bought from the American company Welco, and with a dozen employees (five of them in production) Meli—or National Shoes—was launched. Within three decades, this small shop expanded into an industrial park of thirty-four factories, producing sixty thousand pairs of shoes per day.[9]

The success was at least partially due to the fact that it was an idea whose time had come. Other factors contributed to the company’s meteoric rise. A chronic shortage of supply ensured that it was always a seller’s market. “It was so easy to sell everything,” Zinat remembered.[10] In addition to the favorable market, Rahim, as was his wont, augmented his company’s growth by cutting corners. He used his vast network of friends to get a bigger share of the market. And when friends couldn’t get the job done, he made sure to hire the person who could help him with his plans. For years, for example, he employed Badri Ajudani as his public relations coordinator. She was one of the most well-connected women of her generation; she knew everyone. She opened many doors to Irvani.

As the government began its policy in the late 1950s of supporting native industries, Irvani cleverly used every loan and assistance, grant and tariff that was available. Maybe the most controversial of these was a three-year sixty-million-tooman loan ($11 million), at the prime rate of interest, given to National Shoes at the behest of SAVAK. Its purpose was to support the export of military boots to Saudi Arabia, and SAVAK was involved because Iran’s economic expansion in the Persian Gulf was ostensibly a matter of national security. When Irvani asked for a year extension on the loan, officials at the Central Bank grew suspicious about the deal. How could Saudi Arabia, they asked, with its history of anti-Persian sentiments, grant a deal for military boots to an Iranian company?[11] What the officials did not know was that Irvani had become the silent partner of a controversial company called Safeer.[12] Richard Helms, the one-time director of the CIA and the American ambassador to Iran, had created the company, and it was Safeer who had, in fact, secured the deal.[13] Irvani and his partner were not only to sell boots, but also uniforms, to the Saudi army. Through the same partnership, Irvani launched businesses in Egypt and Afghanistan after the revolution.[14]

In the early 1960s another major change took place in Irvani’s business model. Until then, a few major distributors who bought shoes from Irvani and other sources and distributed them throughout the country dominated the shoe market in Iran. In fact, they controlled the entire distribution system in the country, and in Irvani’s words, “held him and his future hostage.”[15] He decided to eliminate this troublesome intermediary and deal directly with the customer. He took the unusual step of opening retail stores, and by the time the revolution came, his company had more than four hundred outlets. The fact that the Bata Company had, since the mid-1960s, started to work with another shoe company, called Bella, had done little to slow down Irvani’s expansion.

National Shoes outlets began to appear everywhere. Rahim had a particular affinity for stores located on street corners, with the store signs visible from two streets. Moreover, he invariably tried to purchase the properties where the outlets were located. As the price of land in Tehran and other major cities increased with the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, his decision to open the outlets became hugely lucrative not just from direct sales, but from increased value of the real estate.

During the late 1960s, National Shoes also began to expand into the Soviet bloc countries. By the mid-1970s, it was estimated that about 20 percent of the company’s total production was exported to the Soviet Union and its satellites, where they were considered a luxury item. Ultimately, what competitors could not do, the revolution accomplished. Irvani was in the United States when the shah left Iran. Instead of going back to Iran, he went to Paris and met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But Irvani was the eleventh name on the list of the fifty-two families or companies confiscated by the new Islamic regime.

He tried first to use his friendship with Mehdi Bazorgan, the first prime minister of the new regime, to save his company. When that failed, he tried to use his meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini as protection. In fact, he later claimed that he had secured a letter from Ayatollah Khomeini, “ordering that all [his] factories . . . must be returned to [him].”[16] But all of these early efforts came to naught. Papers in Tehran occasionally published incendiary material against Irvani. On one occasion, it was announced that a list of seven hundred Freemasons had been discovered in the house of Ja’far Sharif-Emami, and that “Rahim Irvani was among them.”[17]

In spite of his age and the drudgeries of exile, he kept relentlessly active after leaving Iran. There was to be no resting on his financial laurels for him. For a while he worked in the United States, trying to launch a leather factory in Boston. He tried his luck in other cities, and finally, at the suggestion of his children, gave up doing business in America. He went on to Egypt, where he tried to launch a shoe factory, and then to Afghanistan. He never ceased in his attempts to regain control of his lost fortune.

In 2005, he wrote a strange and almost sycophantic letter to a minor official in the Islamic Republic. “Though I am now a wanderer in London,” he wrote, “at the behest of the bazaaris in Tehran, I had an audience with His Holiness, the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris suburbs.” And when the ayatollah returned to Iran and, “by way of acknowledging his humble servant, asked me how I was, I told His Holiness that all my factories, and all my wealth had been confiscated.” Then in a tone that is almost ironic, he wrote, “and now they have shut down all the factories, throwing out more than twelve thousand workers. And since an important part of the President’s stated plan is to create employment, I request that you return all my factories and properties back to me and I will in return guarantee that within three years, I will employ ten thousand workers.” He ends by telling the official that, “if you don’t like your government job, then please accept the presidency of the National Shoes and I will be your deputy.”[18] Not long after writing this letter, on a Friday afternoon in March 2006, Irvani finished his lunch and went to his office to make some calls to his friends. “He loved his friends,” his wife said wistfully. At three o’clock he had a massive heart attack and died almost immediately.

Modern publishing in Iran is synonymous with Amir Kabir,[1] a company founded and managed for more than three decades by Abdurrahim J’afari. The company was named after the quintessential reformist politician of modern Iran.[2] What began in 1947 as a handful of books peddled in front of a mosque in Tehran had become on the eve of the Islamic Revolution the most powerful publishing house in the Muslim Middle East. It had published 1,961 titles, including some of the greatest Iranian and international masterpieces, from literature and lexicography to self-help treatises and philosophy.

In the early 1970s, Amir Kabir bought controlling shares or complete ownership of three competing publishing houses that had collectively published 2,200 titles.[3] To put the total number of titles controlled by Amir Kabir—over 4,000—in regional context, during the last millennium the entire Arab world did not translate more than ten thousand books. In 1996, the 280,000,000 Arabs in the world had published only 1,945 books.[4]

Amir Kabir was one man’s labor of love. It was also a “rags to riches” story. J’afari’s tenacious dedication, his love of books, the printing press, the smell of ink, and the collegial atmosphere of the print shop, and the fact that, in his own words, he loved Amir Kabir “more than my own wife and children,”[5] led to his success.

The tragic end of his odyssey, his beloved Ithaca confiscated by “easy grabbers,” “freeloaders,” and “usurpers”—three of the names he defiantly called the Islamic revolutionary zealots who took over Amir Kabir after the revolution—have led him to question the wisdom and worth of the sacrifices he’d made.[6] He suggested in his understandably bitter memoir that it might have been better for him and his family if he had invested in real estate and plastic instead of culture and ideas.[7]

His forced estrangement from his company led to his decision to publish his memoirs. The two volumes already published, Dar Jostojouy-e Sobh (In Search of Dawn), established his reputation as a masterful storyteller who writes in powerful and precise prose.

He tells of the rancor between him and his chief rivals, the Elmi family. This war had an added element of drama because J’afari was married to an Elmi. They had married when he was a laborer in a printing shop owned by the family. When he started his own company, an amicable relationship turned into a nasty competition. At every turn of his life and of Amir Kabir’s growth, some Elmi seemed to lurk on the horizon, conniving and conspiring against him.

The otherwise sober and serious narrative is enlivened with biographical sketches of some of the five hundred writers and poets, scholars and translators whose work Amir Kabir published over the years. Gossipy details of their lives—from their character quirks to the size of their advances—spice up the narrative.

Born in Tehran in November 1919 (12 Aban 1298), Abdurrahim was the child of a single mother. In an age when women were expected to have male patrons and protectors, she was fiercely independent. She raised her only son by the sweat of her brow; her weaving was her family’s sole source of income. She was thirteen when her mother insisted that she marry “a good man,” a devout Muslim many years her senior.[8] He was only a peddler but offered the promise of relative comfort and security. But unbeknownst to them, the “good man” had another family in another city. By the time mother and daughter discovered this, Abdurrahim had already been conceived. His mother’s difficulties were augmented by the fact that J’afari was an “insolent, nasty, nagging” child.[9]

His father disappeared soon after his birth. The family lived in small rented rooms in Tehran’s working-class neighborhood. But the kindness of strangers suddenly changed the family’s fortunes. A middle-class husband and wife took pity on the struggling young mother and child and adopted them into their family. For the next few months, Abdurrahim lived a life of relative comfort. He was enrolled in school, where he tried to pass himself off as the child of the new family. When his real name was discovered, his teacher berated him as a liar and punished him. But he hated his family name. By law, a son could not take the name of his father without his presence, nor could he take a name other than his father’s. After court petitions and affidavits proving that his father had deserted, his mother was allowed to give her newborn son her maiden name.

“J’afar” was an unusual name in that it is usually only a first name, and his classmates made fun of him for it. In 1971, after much wrangling, he legally changed his name to J’afari. But all his life he preferred to be called “A’taghi,” or Mr. Taghi. In explaining his love of the name, J’afari reminds us that Amir Kabir, too, used to like to be called Taghi.[10]

After finishing only five years of elementary school, he had to begin earning money. He was twelve years old. His mother found him a job as janitor and messenger boy in a print shop. Gradually, he learned to operate the printing press, and before long he was a foreman. The long hours of work, the miserliness and cruelty of his employers, the Elmi family, and the lawlessness of their attitude were Dickensian. He and other workers had to struggle and bicker just to be paid.

But he was hardworking, disciplined, and dedicated to fashioning a more comfortable life for himself and his mother—the real hero of his life. Her steely determination and defiant pride, her stern discipline and dedication to her son were his sole source of comfort. Even “when she beat me to a pulp,” he wrote, “I never doubted her love.”[11] Some of the most moving passages of J’afari’s memoirs are dedicated to the difficulties she suffered, the heroism she exhibited, and the grief that consumed him when she died of a heart attack. She was only thirty-six years old.

After endearing himself to the Elmi family, he was offered a chance to join them through marriage. He accepted. In spite of the subsequent professional jealousies between him and the family, his marriage to Seddige Elmi has lasted for more than fifty years. They have four daughters and a son. Two of the daughters and the son eventually joined him in Amir Kabir. At the time of his first child’s birth in 1943, J’afari was serving his two-year term as a conscript soldier. He witnessed the embarrassing collapse of the much-vaunted Iranian army after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.

After the war, J’afari contracted typhoid fever and had to spend a few weeks at home. When he went back to work, he found that he had lost his job. It was a blessing in disguise. He had been dreaming of starting his own business, and finally he could do it. He and two friends bought a small grocery store, but he was no grocer, and soon the partnership failed.

He knew he wanted to be involved with books and publishing, but he had no capital. Through an agreement with the janitor of Tehran’s central mosque, he “rented” just enough space in front of the mosque—in those days a favorite place for peddlers—to spread out a few books he had received on consignment. A few months later, he moved to a small room on the second floor of a store near the bazaar to begin publishing. He chose the image of an Achamenedian soldier riding a galloping chariot for the company logo. From those meager origins, within twenty years he had built the biggest publishing house in the Middle East.

There had always been many stores in the bazaar and its environs that specialized in publishing religious texts and popular folk tales. The production quality of their books was poor, and they paid no attention to the covers and little to the manuscripts. They printed books by the thousands and catered to the lower classes. Their forte was religious books. In the postwar years, there were also a small number of publishers located around Tehran University that served the middle and educated classes and printed works of artistic and scholarly merit. Their books had runs of a thousand copies, and often it took years to sell even that number. But they paid attention to the aesthetics of the book, as well as to the manuscript.

J’afari’s genius was to recognize the significance of the growing middle classes and to cater to its intellectual needs. He bridged the gap between the two cultures of the bazaar and the new urbanites by publishing religious books and modern literary and historical masterpieces. The first book he published was on sports, it was translated by a woman named Monir Mehran. His second book was on nuclear energy.12 He also published a translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From then on, anytime he heard of new writers or poets, he descended on them, in his own words “like an eagle,” and tried to convince them to publish with him. Before long, Amir Kabir was the most important publisher of scholarly works in Iran, particularly those dealing with Iran’s rich literary legacy, as well as references books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

Amir Kabir became a household name when it published the collected works of Sadeq Hedayat in the mid-1950s. By the 1970s, Amir Kabir owned its own printing company and had Iran’s most elaborate distribution system. It ran twelve big stores of its own and was beginning to place bookstalls in public places like airports and department stores. J’afari used every means at his disposal to expand his domain and increase the number of readers in Iran. When television came to Iran, he hosted a program called People and Books, where he promoted new books and interviewed prominent writers.[13]

The company’s growth was the result of J’afari’s storied work habits. From his laboring days to his golden age as a very rich man, he made no change in his work ethic. He arrived at his office at seven and often left at midnight. He was frequently seen doing the most menial jobs. His years as a laborer enabled him to connect with his own workers and share a congenial atmosphere with them. Before he was joined by his son, Mohammad Reza, who in later years acted as the editor-in-chief, J’afari alone chose what books to publish or translate.

In the postwar decade, when Marxism was in its heyday in Iran, he had been a “fellow traveler” and even published a novel that was a favorite of the Left.14 Nevertheless, he ensured that Amir Kabir was never identified as a publisher dedicated to any ideology. Even during the Mohammad Mossadeq era, when politics was consuming nearly every facet of life in urban Iran, he stayed clear of it.

His eminence had led to his selection as the director of a private consortium, created in 1962, that published millions of copies of texts for Iran’s student population. Before its creation, the government was embarrassed every year by shortages of books. Under J’afari’s management, quality books arrived on time and in sufficient quantity. His twelve years in charge of the consortium came back to haunt him after the Islamic Revolution.

He was a devout Muslim, for many years a follower of a reform-minded mullah called Sangalaji. He published a number of now classic religious books—particularly a Qur’an and biographies of the prophet and one of his wives. But he was also deeply attached to Iran’s pre-Islamic past. He published a beautiful Shahnameh, handwritten by a master calligrapher in the traditional elegant style and illustrated with specially commissioned paintings. In the frenzy of the Islamic Revolution, when promotion of pre-Islamic Persia became a sin, J’afari was arrested and the publication of the Shahnameh became one of his crimes.[15]

As the political situation deteriorated, he saw no choice but to enter the fray. He had published a favorable biography of the shah and a few other books that were laudatory of the Pahlavi dynasty, but by then the days of the shah were numbered. In l978 he ordered thousands of posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini printed and distributed around the country. Some saw the decision as opportunistic, others as a gesture of contrition.
Whatever his motive, it did nothing to endear him to the victors. The revolution was far more volatile and radical than he anticipated. The Left began to agitate against all capitalists and wealth became an affliction. J’afari’s legal troubles began at the instigation of Esmail Ra’in, the author of a controversial four-volume book on the history of Freemasons in Iran. Articles began to appear in the press complaining about Amir Kabir’s mistreatment of writers and translators and its tendency to cheat them of their royalties by under-reporting the number of books it sold, and then about J’afari’s supposed ties to the court, particularly to Princess Ashraf.

J’afari’s problems took a turn for the worse when Ra’in died in the offices of Amir Kabir. He had come to confiscate the plates and galleys for his books, and he suffered a massive heart attack in a confrontation with workers. Rumors of foul play immediately began to spread, and J’afari became entangled in the web of intrigue.

Almost a year after the fall of the shah, revolutionary fervor continued to be stoked by radicals who wanted more action against capitalists. J’afari was arrested and spent almost a year in prison. At his trial, he defended his record and challenged his accusers to show his political or financial impropriety. The court found him not guilty of the more serious political charges, but he was ordered to sell 75 percent of his share of Amir Kabir to Jame’e Moderassin, a powerful group of mullahs who taught at the seminaries in Qom. Amir Kabir was worth $15 million but Ja’fari did not receive even a small fraction of the fair market value. The coerced sale was called a mosalehe, or voluntary compromise. During Iran’s long night of despotism, many usurpers had used this “juridical trick,” or kolahe shar-e, to hide an unjust and coerced transaction.

J’afari asked for a retrial, or for a new decision overturning the order forcing him to relinquish part of Amir Kabir. In the meantime, his son, Mohammad Reza, established Nashre No, which soon became one of the most successful new publishing houses in Iran. But a son was responsible for the sins of his father in the Iran of the time; Mohammad Reza’s company was forced to cease operating in a few years.[16]

The wall of silence about J’afari’s accomplishments was finally broken in 2004 at an evening commemorating his contributions to the publishing industry in Iran. He was hailed as “the symbol, the vanguard, and the founder of modern publishing in Iran.”[17] One speaker praised him for spending a lifetime promoting “the national and religious culture” of Iran.[18] A documentary about J’afari’s life was shown, and then he spoke. He talked briefly and haltingly[19] about being denied the right to be part of the publishing industry. He began to weep, and many in the overflowing audience wept with him.

Mahmood Khayami is a burly man with a gaze and disposition that is at once intense and intelligent, piercing and gentle, humble and kind. I met him in his summer home in the French Riviera. It is a sprawling but beautiful villa on the hills in the city of Cannes, overlooking the Mediterranean coast. Signs of tasteful opulence were everywhere—it was less like a residence and more akin to the set of a film about the lives of “the rich and famous,” impeccably appointed, its adobe color standing out in beautiful contrast to the azure of the sea. Although deeply European in setting and design, the house is also unmistakably a shrine to Iran, with relics of the old country everywhere—an exquisite rug here, an antique light there, a graceful miniature on the wall.

The quiet grandeur of the house, and the duality of its decor, both cosmopolitan flair and unrelenting Persian flavor, parallels the self-effacing nature of its owner, a devoutly Persian and decidedly successful global businessman: the man whose family name is synonymous with the Iranian automotive industry. “I am not important,” he said, insisting that we should talk of the workers who made the company what it was. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time,”[1] he said. He was far more interested in talking about the future of Iran than about his own past, or about the role he and his brother Ahmad played in the rapid economic development of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s. Theirs was known as a rags-to-riches story, but the truth, as is often the case, is more complicated.

Mahmood and his older brother, Ahmad Khayami, were both born in the city of Mashad to a family of middle-class comfort. The common rumor that “they were just mechanics” or that “they were poor machine-washers,” often circulated disparagingly by members of the landed elite who resented the brothers’ sudden affluence, was simply not true.[2] Their father, Hajd Ali Akbar Khayami, was the head of a large household—three sons and six daughters—but as a small landowner he could afford them a life of relative comfort. Ahmad was born in 1924 (1303) and Mahmood in 1930 (1309). Neither of the brothers was much interested in school, both leaving after they had finished only ninth grade. Both continued to study in their spare time, though, and received the equivalent of high school diplomas.[3] Later in life, when they were both men of affluence, the brothers became great supporters of education, particularly for the poor and the disenfranchised.

After school, Ahmad and Mahmood both worked at odd jobs but soon joined forces to create a car wash combined with a mechanic shop in the city—something of a novelty in Meshed. The launch of their business coincided with the commencement of regular bus service between Tehran, which was teeming with population, and Meshed, after Mecca and Karbala the most coveted destination of all Shiite pilgrims. Bus service between the two cities had been chaotically irregular, with buses leaving for their destination only when they had enough passengers. By the early 1950s, two modern bus companies, Iran Tour and BBT, began the novel practice of having scheduled departure times. Two buses arrived in Meshed from Tehran every day, and two left for the capital. The Khayami business was helped by the regular bus service and the invariable need of the cranky old buses for mechanical work.

Before long, the brothers decided to expand their business. Ahmad set out for Tehran, where he rented an office. He convinced the Sudavar brothers to give him and his brother the Mercedes-Benz dealership in the city of Meshed. At that time, the Sudavars had been the sole representative of the German company; they agreed to choose the Khayami brothers as their agents.

The brothers’ ambition soon outgrew their limited partnership with the Sudavar Company. Ahmad Khayami went to Germany, and using the contacts he had established earlier, much to the consternation of the Sudavars, he signed an agreement with Mercedes-Benz for the construction—more accurately, the assembly—of buses in Iran. The engine as well as nearly every other part of the bus would be imported from Germany, and the Khayamis agreed to build the wooden body for the seating compartment. This was the beginning of the meteoric rise of the Khayami brothers to the pinnacle of Iran’s automotive industry. By then, both brothers were married—Ahmad to a cousin named Marziye, and Mahmood to a girl named Guity from a prominent merchant family called Rashti.[4]

In the early 1960s, the Iranian government was actively promoting new industries in Iran. Easy loans, tax benefits and deferments, and stiff protective tariffs were all used to protect nascent industries. The Khayami brothers decided to use the opportunity to start a new enterprise assembling sedans for the local market. The car they produced, the Peykan, was not only an immediate success but something of an economic anomaly, defying all the laws of value and resale value. It was the only car in the history of the automotive industry whose resale value after several years of use was invariably higher than its original sticker price. While inflation accounted for part of this strange economic phenomenon, the real explanation was that supply was chronically short of demand. The company producing the new Peykan was called Iran National, and it was established with an initial capital of ten million tooman ($1.5 million at the contemporary exchange rate). The Khayami brothers and their wives, as well as their father, Hadj Ali Akbar, provided the funds.[5] In its first year, the company was supposed to produce seven thousand cars—a figure deemed overly optimistic by everyone from the government to the private sector— except for the Khayami brothers.

By 1978, the company was employing more than twelve thousand people and producing 136,000 cars annually. The factory was working around the clock, in three shifts. More than 120 other companies, producing everything from tires and batteries to upholstery and windshields, thrived producing parts for Iran National. In fact, at the time of its creation, more than 80 percent of the parts for each car were imported from England. By 1978 that figure had been reduced to 22 percent. Moreover, by then Iran National was producing everything from buses to trucks and sedans. If in its early years the company could not have survived without the protective tariffs imposed by the government, making it prohibitively expensive to import foreign-made cars, by the mid-1970s the company felt capable of competing in some of the regional markets, even exporting cars to Soviet bloc countries. “If the revolution had not happened,” Khayami said in a tone more melancholy than mad, “Iran would be today, in terms of the car industry, where South Korea is.”[6]

A crucial factor contributing to the company’s striking success was the Khayami brothers’ policy of providing special social services for their employees. Iran National was known for its enlightened benefits program. They had built five stores around the city, and their employees could shop in them for groceries and other household commodities at discount prices. There was also a policy of providing cheap housing for the workers. Each worker received at least one full meal a day. Ahmad, who managed the day-to-day affairs of the company, kept in close contact with workers, his office usually open to them and their grievances. “He acted like their friend,” his colleagues declared.[7]

Of course the company, cognizant of the value of public relations and image, made sure that some of its social services receive attention in the media. For example, in 1971, when the company sponsored the collective wedding of twenty-five of its employees, paying for the party and giving the couples gifts, there was a big article about the gesture of philanthropy in popular magazines.[8]

But with success often comes controversy in public and conflict among partners, and the Khayami brothers were no exception. During the 1970s, Tehran was awash in rumors about the “real” owners of Iran National. Many, according to SAVAK reports, believed that Aredeshir Zahedi was “fifty-one percent owner, and it was he who arranged for the purchase of the Hillman engines.”[9] The rumor seems altogether baseless. What seems to have fueled the spread of the story is that Reza Daneshvar, a close friend of Zahedi, was in fact involved with Iran National. “He had an office there and had been instrumental in the launch of the endeavor,”[10] said Reza Fazel, one of the top managers of the company and a relative of the Khayami brothers. Other sources claim that the shah himself was a silent partner in the company. Here, too, it is difficult to establish the truth. There is some indication that a number of company stocks were in the name of the shah’s oldest daughter,[11] Princess Shahnaz, who was also married to Zahedi.

The pressures of sudden success, the grinding novelties, anxieties, and jealousies of newfound wealth, and the invariable tensions of sibling rivalry took their toll on the Khayami brothers, and they decided to go their separate ways. By the mid-1970s, their veritable empire included an insurance company, a big bank (The Industrial Bank), and a chain of all-purpose department stores called Kourosh (Cyrus). When the brothers split, Mahmood took over Iran National, and his older brother took over the other companies.

Even after the breakup, each brother’s business continued to thrive. On the eve of the Persian new year of 1977, the Iran National board, for example, approved plans to begin production of a new line of Peugeot sedans in Iran. “For both Mercedes-Benz and Peugeot, Iran was going to be the center of production for the entire Asian continent.”[12]

But the revolution aborted the two brothers’ ambitious plans for growth and development. As strikes spread throughout the country and brought production to a standstill, Iran National and the other Khayami companies were no exception. When their companies stopped working, the brothers saw the writing on the wall and decided to leave Iran.

Exile was an economic boon and an emotional bust for the brothers. Ahmad died in March 2000, after shouldering the grief of his son’s tragic life and death. Mahmood continued to work, this time as a dealer for Mercedes-Benz, with territories throughout much of Europe and all of America. He is surprisingly empty of rancor and anger when looking back at what has befallen him and his brother and others in his generation of industrialists. Our problem, he said, was “that we didn’t know our country well enough. We lived in our isolated world.” With sadness in his eyes, he added, “If I had to do it again, I would first learn about my country, and then build Iran National.” Although he had made every effort to save the throne for the shah, he has, in retrospect, many subtle words of criticism for his style of rule. “We gave the country to the mullahs,” he said. “They certainly did not win it.” But as is his wont, he began his disquisition on the revolution by first criticizing himself. “We made a mistake leaving the country,” he said, “we should have stayed and fought for our country.” He was, in fact, one of a handful of industrialists who tried to mobilize some resistance to the revolutionary onslaught, and he made many efforts to bolster the shah’s courage. In one instance, he offered to bring several thousand workers to lie down on the airport runway to stop the shah from leaving Iran. The offer was rejected. Weeks before this futile meeting, he had come back to Iran from a trip to Europe where he had met his old friend Assadollah Alam. “Tell His Majesty,” Alam had said, “that the only way to survive is to use the iron fist, otherwise, not only the throne, but the country will be destroyed.”[13]

Khayami was willing to help in the process of organizing a resistance to the revolutionary tide, but his efforts came to naught. He even contacted Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari and solicited his help in the endeavor, and though Shari’atmadari was wary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and knew the mettle of the man, he was incapable of stemming the tide. When it all failed, Mahmood and his brother, despondent and despairing, left Iran. “If I am sad,” he said, “it isn’t because I lost money. I have sold more Mercedes-Benz, and probably made more money here in the West than I did in Iran. But I wanted all of this for Iran.”[14]

His exuberant love of Iran, and of his Khorasan province, is still evident not only in his insistence on using the distinctive Khorasan accent, but in the focus of his philanthropy as well. In addition to his more public acts of philanthropy in the diaspora, like his generous support of Encyclopedia Iranica, he has begun building a series of technical schools throughout his beloved province of Khorasan. There are also a number of other projects, big and small, that he discreetly supports. “Everything I have I owe to Iran,” he said in the sad tone of a jilted lover, “and giving some of it back to that country is only a small token of my debt and appreciation.”[15]

As late as the early twentieth century, modern pharmacies were still rare and mistrusted anomalies in Iran. Traditional attars, trained by practice under the guidance of other herbalists, worked in often dark and dingy shops, with burlap sacks stacked ceiling-high and shelves lined with rows and rows of jars filled with herbs, each of a different hue, weight, and smell, each with different alleged medicinal qualities. Ordinary Iranians scoffed at the idea of modern pharmacies, and on more than one occasion pharmacies were ransacked by mobs, often incited by mullahs who declared the establishments bastions of Bahai or centers for Jewish power and conspiracies.[1] With the advent of the modern state, and the concurrent emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs, the traditional attars and their herbs gradually and grudgingly gave way to modern medications and pharmacies. The Khosrowshahi family was in no small measure, and more than any other family or firm, responsible for establishing a modern pharmaceutical industry in Iran.

In the early years, they had to overcome not only the customary obstacles facing any company in the third world—from inadequate infrastructure to an illiterate labor force—but also people’s firm and persistent belief, when they finally consented to the use of modern medicine, that medications made in Iran were dangerously inferior to those produced by Western manufacturers. Practical problems peculiar to the pharmaceutical industry added new layers of complexity to the challenge. Pharmaceutical production requires, for example, impeccable hygiene in the work environment and in the labor force. The workers who made up the traditional labor force in Iranian cities were—like workers in other developing economies—recent arrivals from the villages, often new to such ideas as daily showers.[2] In a characteristic combination of pragmatism and strategic prudence, the Khosrowshahi brothers installed showers in the factory compound and at the same time undertook a long-term pedagogical project to convince the workers that in their case, absolute hygiene was not merely an individual virtue but a professional exigency.

In spite of the formidable economic, social, and cultural obstacles, by 1978 the Khosrowshahi family’s pharmaceutical company, Tolid-Daru (Persian for “manufacturing medicine”), had become the flagship company in the Alborz Investment Corporation. Alborz/AIC, a public company traded on the Tehran Stock Exchange, was itself owned by the KBC Industrial Group (“KBC” for “Khosrowshahi Brothers Company”) and thus primarily by the family. On the eve of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, KBC had assets valued at close to $150 million.[3]
While KBC was broadly diversified (its motto was “import[ing], export[ing], manufacturing, distribution and marketing of products which have something in common with our existing established lines in the market”),[4] the vast interlocking companies it owned followed a basic philosophy that was shaped by the family patriarch, the brothers’ father, Hadj Hassan Khosrowshahi.

Hadj Hassan was a man of deep and devout faith in Islam. He had studied theology and had all the qualifications to be a mujtahed—the Shiite cleric empowered to issue fatwas or rulings. Every morning before sunrise, he awoke and personally delivered, in a loud voice, the traditional Muslim call to prayer, or azan, for his family and the immediate neighbors. He was frugal to a fault, using the bus even when he was the head of one of the wealthiest families in Iran. In all he did, he was disciplined and punctual. Every day at twelve, for example, he ate lunch. The only things he collected were religious books. He lived to be 110 years old, dying not long after the Islamic Revolution.

Hadj Hassan was a prominent member of the bazaar in the city of Tabriz, known as a center of Iranian trade and commerce in the first half of the twentieth century. The bazaars in Tabriz and Tehran were the places were the Khosrowshahi fortune first began to accumulate and forge itself into one of the most a formidable forces in the Iranian economy.

Hadji’s faith was at times an obstacle to his family’s economic growth. When, for example, during the Reza Shah period, women were ordered to unveil in public places, Hadji all but quit his business, lest he be forced to take his wife out in public.5 Later, during the 1970s, when his sons’ enterprise had grown into one of the most formidable industrialist groups in Iran and (like other similar conglomerates) wanted to buy a bank, he initially opposed the move. The brothers had set their eyes on the Industrial Development Bank; Hadji resisted because receiving interest payments was strictly forbidden in Islam. But then Reza Moghadam, the designated president of the bank, along with one of the brothers, Kazem, met with Hadji and convinced him that the bank would not receive interest in the strict sense, only its share of profits from the joint ventures it underwrote.[6] As it turned out, a few years later the Islamic Republic of Iran, following in the footsteps of other Islamic societies, used exactly the same argument to justify its policy of paying, and receiving, interest.

Opposition to interest payments, however, was a small part of Hadj Hassan’s vision of commerce. In 1957, he outlined his views and business philosophy in a letter he wrote to his sons. In the vernacular of modern management, the letter was a “mission statement” for the company. It proposed a set of principles for the company and its employees. The letter is particularly striking for its fervent religious form and foundation. Hadj Hassan talked of heavenly design as the ultimate architect of human fate, adding that those who
dedicate their lives to serving others are lucky. Helping patients recover from disease, he wrote, is a perfect example of such service. “Blessed are those who serve their fellowmen,” he wrote.[7] He then pointed to six principles that were, in his view, the key to his own success in the past and should be the guidelines for the new company in the future. They were: “First, belief in God Almighty. . . . Second, consciousness of our responsibilities. . . . Third, honesty, loyalty, and dignity. . . . Fourth, cleanliness. . . . Fifth, to be kind to [your] fellow employees and to heed [your] superiors. . . . Sixth, [to remember that] . . . the release of [some] information prior to the achievement of a goal may hinder its success.”[8]

Inspired by these general ideas of benevolence, and mixing them with new concepts rooted in the entrepreneurial ethos of capitalism, the Khosrowshahi family forged a set of business values and ideas uniquely their own, at once rigorously modern and global and recognizably traditional and Iranian. This business credo emphasized good global credit, the use of the most recent modern technologies, and traditional family unity mixed with modern expert management. They successfully combined the marketing savvy and “local” knowledge rooted in their organic ties to the bazaar with the most innovative and technologically developed sales and production techniques they could find anywhere in the world. They were, for example, firm believers in the power of modern advertising and were among the Iranian industrialists most fervent in its use. “Our techniques in advertisement, from brochures to our television spots,” declared Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, “were all American in style.” The companies had a yearly advertising budget of fifty million tooman—about seven million dollars.[9]

The global/local formula clearly seemed to have worked in their case. What began as a small company with fewer than sixty employees had, by the late 1970s, developed into an Iranian commercial giant, with more than six thousand employees and offices in nearly every major city in Iran. In 1975, KBC controlled companies that produced about six hundred different products. The brothers believed in both vertical and horizontal expansion. They produced cosmetics and toiletries, packaged foods (like candies and canned vegetables), laundry products, agricultural chemicals, specialty containers, and corrugated cartons and bottles. Furthermore, they were involved in construction and housing, including solar energy and air-conditioning equipment.

By the mid-1970s, they had expanded into markets not only in the Persian Gulf region, but also into the Soviet Union and its satellite states. About 20 percent of KBC’s total output was by then exported to these countries. As the family’s roots, like those of most modern Iranian industrialists, were in the bazaar and in merchant capital, even at the height of their expansion into the industrial and banking sectors of the economy, the brothers maintained their general import and export business ties.

In addition to the father, Hadj Hassan, KBC was created by the cooperative partnership of his six sons—Hadj Ahmad, Javad, Majid, Nasrollah, Kazem, and Mohammad. Their only sister died at a tragically early age. The brothers created a comfortable division of labor among themselves. Their education and cultural values ran the gamut from Nasrollah, a doctor of pharmacy who had spent most of his life in New York and was the family’s representative in the United States, to the religious Hadj Ahmad, who had only finished high school and was in charge of accounting and supervision of the family holdings. Mohammad was an engineer by training, based in Hamburg, who represented the family interests in Europe. Kazem, with a doctorate in economics from Tehran University, was in charge of sales, while Majid was responsible for inventory, and Javad handled all banking matters.

In the formative years of the company, the brothers met at least twice a week at their father’s house, where they discussed business matters and decided on policies and investments. Regardless of their age, the sons had formal relations with the patriarch. They got up every time he entered the room, and they never took the liberty of smoking in front of him. Their relationship with their mother was more relaxed and jovial. With the growth of their business, the father’s intervention in decisions gradually came to an end. He was by the late 1950s more a source of moral support and guidance than an active manager or partner in the company.
As their business expanded in volume and kinds of production, the brothers changed their style of management. They began hiring, and delegating managerial responsibilities to highly trained (often Western-trained) engineers and managers. While giving these managers relative autonomy, the most important financial and long-term investment decisions continued to be made by a management committee composed only of the brothers. While in the early years their meetings had been held at their father’s house, in later years, to accommodate the two brothers who lived outside Iran, sometimes the management meetings were held in Europe or in the United States.

The family generally eschewed political involvement. Of the brothers only one, Kazem, entered politics, joining the cabinet when Jamshid Amuzegar became prime minister. He was put in charge of the Ministry of Commerce. His tenure was short-lived, lasting only from August of 1977 to July of 1978. However briefly he served, Kazem’s decision to accept a ministerial portfolio may have doomed the Khosrowshahi family’s fortune after the revolution and subjected the family itself to the wrath of the Islamic regime.

When the revolution came, not even Hadj Hassan’s well-known and well-established religiosity could save the family. The new regime sometimes disguised its zeal for nationalization, and the leveling tendency of all revolutions, by using political ties to the past as an excuse to appropriate the property of the rich. But often no excuse was offered or needed. Thus families with no political ties to the ancien régime, and those with bona fide religious inclinations, were as much subject to the expropriation frenzy as those with close ties to members of the royal family. The nationalization fever was even written into the Iranian constitution. Following the already anachronistic Soviet model of state control, key industries were, according to articles forty-four and forty-five, declared the monopoly of the state.

Kazem recalls the days after his parents’ home was declared public domain. The family was forced to build a new house, and Kazem participated in every phase of the construction from building the foundations to painting the windows. In his spare time, he even tried to learn how to weave a Persian carpet—Tabriz is, among other things, famous for the beauty, the colors, and the fine designs of its carpets.

Hadj Hassan survived the revolution, the nationalization of KBC, and the confiscation of his home with dignity. He died soon after, in 1981. Those of his sons who were not already living abroad went into exile. Even in exile, the brothers have kept their extended family together. They hold regular family reunions where at least three generations—the brothers and their nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren—get together and renew their family ties.

It is a measure of the Khosrowshahi family’s entrepreneurial talents that members of the extended family have become in exile even more prosperous than they were in Iran. One of the brothers, Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, ascribes this success in exile not only to the family’s unity, and their entrepreneurial spirit, but most importantly to the value the new generation has placed on education. Twenty-five of the secondgeneration children graduated from Buckley, one of the most prestigious private schools in New York, where Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi served on the board of governors for many years.

Kazem Khosrowshahi has published a memoir that chronicles his own life as well as the rise of the family industries, providing an insider’s glimpse of the family. Not only the brothers’ entrepreneurial philosophy, but also the tragic trajectory of their life, is captured in its title and dedication. He called his book Notes on Job Creating: What Befell Us and dedicated it to “Job-creators who love to create jobs and prosperity in Iran and are the magnanimous builders of their country’s future.”[10]

He writes of his childhood in the city of Tabriz, of his large family. Like most traditional families of the time, the extended family were partners not just in business but also in much of life. One uncle lived next door and the two families shared nearly everything in their daily life.

Educational zeal was, according to Kazem’s memoirs, evident in his generation of Khosrowshahis. He writes of his own passion for school, of his avid interest in sports, and of his early proclivity for building things on his own. He writes of being only twelve when he first started building tables and chairs.

Kazem finished high school in Tabriz, graduating from the famous Roshdiye high school—named after the man revered as an early advocate of modern education and a staunch supporter of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. Kazem then moved to Tehran, where he graduated from the School of Commerce. Instead of heading to the university, he followed the traditional path of men of his time and began working for his father in the bazaar.11 Hadj Hassan, in partnership with Kazem’s uncles, had begun trading in everything from fabric and paper to tea and sugar. The family was known for their financial probity, religious devotion and close-knit and amicable partnership.

By 1935, the family had decided to move into industrial production. One of the uncles was dispatched to Italy, and before long a factory was set up in the city of Gazvin that, under the technical supervision of an Italian engineer, produced a coarse fabric mostly used by peasants. This marked the Khosrowshahi family’s first foray into industry and away from simple commerce. The factory was located in Gazvin to be safely away from the Soviet border and the constant threat of a communist takeover. The factory was run based on piety, with virtually no knowledge of modern management and industry. Soon after World War II, when the protectionist policies of the Reza Shah period were rescinded, the factory went bankrupt, and the partnership dissolved.[12]

In this interlude Kazem decided to resume his education and went to Tehran University, where he pursued a bachelor’s degree in economics. After finishing his freshman year in college, he set out for the United States, where “for the first time [he] saw the workings of modern industries and companies.”[13] After returning to Iran, he resumed his education, working at the same time in the family business. Ultimately he finished a doctoral degree in economics from Tehran University, but all along, his primary focus was the burgeoning family business.

At the end of World War II, the family business was managed by the father, Hadj Hassan, and three of the brothers, Hadj Ahmad, Nasrollah, and Kazem. Nasrollah, by then a doctor of pharmacy, was dispatched by the family to the United States to act as their representative and purchaser. Instead of simply importing drugs, as they had hitherto done, the family decided to enter the retail market as well. They set up their first shop (now famous) near the Tehran bazaar and hired a large number of salesmen—“visitors,” as they were called at the time. One of their first innovations was to hire qualified pharmacists, often with doctoral degrees, as visitors, instead of the traditional traveling salesmen. They also began to implement a modern system of sales and distribution similar to what the brothers had seen in the West. Before long, the family business had offices in most major cities in the country. Thus the first steps toward the creation of the eventual empire were taken.

The other three brothers, Javad, Mohammad, and Majid, who until that time had been involved in importing different consumer commodities, decided to refocus their own and the family partnership on the rapidly growing pharmaceutical business. The family moved from being the first major importers of drugs to being the first major privatesector producer of modern pharmaceutical products in Iran and then to being a producer of household products and cosmetics. The brothers formed KBC in 1955 to replace their father’s initial company. The family’s amicable working relations, the father’s spiritual and commanding presence, and the family decision to stay clear of politics, hand in hand with the Iranian government’s concentrated effort to encourage local industry, facilitated the Khosrowshahi family’s meteoric rise from a successful bazaar firm to one of the Middle East’s premier producers of pharmaceutical, household, and cosmetic products.

In deciding their path of growth, the brothers worked vigorously to identity “compatible groups of products which had something in common with its already existing”14 lines and were commensurate with the brothers’ different areas of expertise. For example, KBC had a chance to represent Canada Dry in Iran, and it was by all reports a lucrative product line to pursue; but as none of the brothers had any interest or expertise in this area, they decided to forgo the option to concentrate instead in areas related to their original line of pharmaceutical products.[15]

The Khosrowshahi brothers followed a business ethos that underscored frugality, hard work, innovation, and aversion to conspicuous or frivolous consumption. But as their investments branched away from commerce toward industry, and as they began making larger and larger long-term investments, they became sensitive to issues that might affect the long-term security of their investments. For the private sector to create jobs, Kazem writes, the sine qua non is the “rule of law and respect for private property.”16 Furthermore, in words reminiscent of Max Weber’s classic account of the rise of capitalism, he adds that societies must “respect wealth and the wealthy” before the private sector can, without undue worry, engage in creating jobs. This spirit began in Iran, he writes, only during the Reza Shah period. The legal infrastructure for investments—from business laws to a clear system of taxation and accounting, modeled on the most developed capitalist countries of the world—was set up in pre–World War II Iran. But in the war’s immediate aftermath, the specter of communism, as manifested in the Soviet Union, worked to undermine the sense of stability and security needed for investment. Iranian capitalists preferred to engage in commerce, eschewing investments in industry and production. Only in the late 1950s did the rich feel secure enough to invest in industry.

Much to their chagrin, in the 1970s the government began to engage in sudden changes of policy, like the decision to give half of the each big industrial company’s shares to its workers. These decisions made all industrial investors, including the Khosrowshahi brothers, increasingly concerned. According to Kazem, himself a minister of the government at the time, the whimsical nature of these decisions was inimical to the kind of security needed for long-term industrial growth. Like other major industrialists, the Khosrowshahi brothers did not publicly criticize the government for these decisions. Even when the situation began to deteriorate, they, like other industrialists, believed that somehow the shah would find a way to stabilize the situation. By the time they fully realized the seriousness of the crisis, it was too late.

After the revolution, the new Islamic regime began to exert more and more pressure on industrialists like the Khosrowshahi family, and newspapers, particularly those of the Left, began publishing scathing attacks on capitalists, their greed, and the interlocking nature of their interests. Hadj Hassan Khosrowshahi, hoping that his known piety would afford the family some protection, published a letter in one of the capital’s daily papers, denying the charges against the family. Nevertheless, when the Islamic regime finally moved to “nationalize” big industrial groups, one of the famous fifty-three expropriated families was the Khosrowshahis. The Khosrowshahi family’s entire conglomerate—all of KBC—was declared nationalized in 1980. They had little choice but to leave Iran.

In exile, the Khosrowshahi family has had spectacular success in reestablishing their prominence, this time in Canadian as well as American markets. Members of the family, as well as their secondand third-generation children, have make a reputation and considerable wealth in new electronic and information industries. Hassan Khosrowshahi, a cousin of the Khosrowshahi brothers whose family owned Minou Biscuits in Iran, is now a businessman in Canada, and one of the founders of the Future Shop chain specializing in computers and electronic equipment, with a fortune estimated in 2004 to be $525 million.[17]

In the United States the family has had an impressive array of no less successful ventures in different areas of business. Dara Khosrowshahi runs Expedia Travel. Two secondgeneration Khosrowshahis, Ali and Hadi Partovi, grandchildren of Majid, created and sold their company to Microsoft for a hefty multimillion-dollar price.

Of the brothers, Nasrollah had roots and family in America even before the revolution. He had given to his American wife and half-American children part ownership of his shares in KBC. Thus after the revolution, under the terms of the Algerian accords between the Islamic Republic and the United States, he was able to file for damages incurred as the result of the revolution. Nasrollah’s family is in fact one of a handful of Iranian families who have won judgments in the Hague tribunal established to consider such claims. They were awarded $2,484,746.31.18

There is a recurring pattern discernable in the trajectory of growth of Iranian industry. As a rule, the Iranian captains of industry are not individuals but family partnerships that eventually turn into conglomerates. Their economic growth begins in commerce and the bazaar and gradually moves to industry and new centers of production. The economic topography of Tehran reflected this pattern, as more of these families moved their humble headquarters away from the famous saras in the bazaar—traditional rows of offices—to modern ostentatious offices nestled in new streets on the northern slopes of the city. They usually began their economic expansion with vertical concentration gradually leading to horizontal expansion and often ending by becoming genuine diversified conglomerates. They combined the economic savvy of the traditional bazaar with the new marketing and financial expertise of modern business management.

Another discernable pattern is a division of labor among the brothers of these successful family partnerships. Invariably, at least one of the brothers is sent abroad to master the new theories of management and developments in technology; another enters politics, usually at the less controversial margins, like the Parliament, or in some advisory capacity. Finally, these Iranian captains of industry are as a rule held together by a patriarch or a matriarch who enjoys the power of the purse as well as the authority and power that tradition affords the elderly. Usually the patriarch is an exemplar in terms of entrepreneurial skill, unrelenting stamina, and pragmatic creativity.

The Lajevardi family is the perfect example of this pattern. By the time the revolution came, the Behshar Industrial Group, as their family interests had come to be called, was “Iran’s biggest private enterprise—snaring many coveted government franchises.” The family’s forty-eight companies were engaged in banking, land development, and steel production, as well as the production of a long list of consumer products ranging from soap and textiles to cooking oil and textiles. In 1974 the group had total sales of about $280 million and it was estimated that it “will double in three years.”[1] What began as a smalltime retailer to haberdashers had, by 1974, signed an agreement with DuPont to establish a $280-million synthetic-fiber plant in Iran, easily the “largest joint venture ever undertaken by Iran’s private sector.”[2]

On the eve of the revolution, according to the estimates of the Islamic Republic itself, the Behshar companies employed more than sixteen thousand people and were industry vanguards in terms of enlightened management philosophy and assiduous efforts to improve the lives of their workers and managers.[3] A report prepared by a committee of the Islamic Parliament criticizes the government for confiscating the assets of the group and lumping it together with robber barons like Hojabr Yazdani.[4]

The famed Lajevardi fortune began in the city of Kashan, on the eve of World War I. Iran was in those days wracked by disease, hunger, war, and corruption. By one estimate, from the first of the century until 1918, Iran had lost some 40 percent of its population to the scourges of poverty and disease.[5] Furthermore, a weak central government had given rise to a bevy of brigands and bullies. The notorious bandit Seyyed Hoseyn Kashi terrorized the city of Kashan, one of the most beautiful cities in Iran, renowned for its magnificent ancient mosques and its masterful rugs. Although his educated grandchildren tried to refashion Seyyed Hoseyn into a “proletarian hero,”6 to the Lajevardi family he was nothing but a thief who occasionally ransacked the city, took members of the wealthy family hostage, and released them only in return for a rich ransom.

Moreover, Seyyed Hoseyn had sided with the enemies of the Constitutional Revolution, and for this reason the Lajevardi family were targets of his terror.[7] It was in this context that Mahmood Lajevardi was born in 1895 (1274).

His exact date of birth is not known because, in his own words, “there was no capable system to attend to the simple task of registering births.”[8] The chaos of his early years was to leave an indelible mark on his psyche and on his business philosophy. For much of his early career he was averse to long-term industrial investments, as he believed that capital must be liquid, thus capable of rapid movement in times of crisis. He remained, like his father, a merchant, and only in the mid-1950s, when he was finally assured of Iran’s long-term security, did he change his strategy. On the one hand, Iran joined the Baghdad Pact, later called CENTO, and was, according to Lajevardi, relatively safe from the threat of the Soviet Union.[9] On the other hand, the shah finally convinced the Eisenhower administration to commit to safeguarding Iran’s security, and in lieu of the mutual defense agreement Iran coveted, the president wrote a letter to the shah reaffirming the American commitment to Iran’s security. No sooner was the content of the letter made public than Mahmood told his sons that the time to expand into industry and plan for the long-term investment had finally arrived in Iran.[10]

Hadj Mahmood’s own business career began when he was a teenager. He was six when, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he was sent to a traditional school for girls, or maktab, run by a woman named Nabat Beygom. After a few months there, he finally moved to a maktab for boys. All in all, he spent three years in these traditional schools, and by his own reckoning he learned nothing. Learning by rote was the only style of pedagogy used in the schools, and physical punishment the only tool of discipline. Only when
he enrolled in a modern high school in 1910 did he begin to learn to read and write. At the same time, he also began to work with his father.[11]

Clearly, his father played the formative role in Mahmood’s life. He was nine when he lost his mother to cholera.[12] His father soon married his deceased wife’s sister, and contrary to the legends of mean stepmothers, she proved to be a loving presence in the young Mahmood’s life. The father, on the other hand, was a stern man who ruled the house with absolute authority and tolerated no disagreement. Although “there was never any physical punishment,” there were, Mahmood remembers, all too often angry outbursts that “no doubt left an impact in me.”[13] Nevertheless, in much of his private ethos and public demeanor, the young man followed in his father’s footsteps.

Both men, in spite of considerable wealth, were notoriously frugal.[14] At the same time, both were renowned for their generosity and philanthropy. At the height of the family’s reputation as the richest industrialists in Iran, Hadj Mahmood lived modestly and expected his children to follow suit. When a son began plans to build a big house, Hadji made his displeasure known in no uncertain terms, and the plans were aborted.[15] Hadj Mahmood was, of course, the child of a time when any sign of wealth only attracted the unwanted attention of greedy despots and ruthless brigands. The bazaar ethos— developed over a millennium of insecurity at the hands of these twin curses of commerce— consisted of notorious frugality and a relentless effort to hide wealth and feign poverty. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the old culture of circumspection came into sharp conflict with the new passion for conspicuous consumption. The austere appearance of houses belonging to old money was in stark contrast to the gaudy new expansive houses of the nouveau riche. The simple habits and tastes of Hajd Mahmood were among the relics of a bygone era.

He was sixteen when the chaos and disorder of his beloved Kashan convinced his father to allow him to leave for Tehran. Indeed, on the last night of his stay in Kashan, his parental home was raided by Seyyed Hoseyn’s band, and the young Mahmood stole away in the dark of the night, lest he become a hostage. The next few nights he and his father spent in hiding, moving about after dark, often wearing veils, disguised as women.[16] Eventually, Mahmood arrived in Tehran in 1911, thus escaping the stern discipline of his father as well as the chaos of Kashan.[17]

In Tehran, he began his own business venture using the sixty tooman—a meager thirty dollars, at the current rate of exchange—he had saved while working for his father. He also enrolled in high school. The first innovation he brought to his father’s business was turning it from a seasonal trade in raw materials for textiles into a year-long activity. When the textile business was slow, he traded in everything from watermelon to tobacco. Money, he came to believe, means constant work and never being idle. Another lifelong economic principle he abided by was the notion that honest money is made in commerce and production, and not in speculation in land.

He began as a door-to-door salesman, selling not to the public but to tailors and small shop owners. His life in those days consisted of seven-day work weeks and an ascetic private life, in which he ate little, leisured even less, and focused his energy and mind on improving his business. From cornering the market on certain medicinal drugs to developing new techniques for more customer satisfaction, his memoir reads like a Dale Carnegie manual for capitalist success.[18] He wrote of the time he had “one hundred sixty bags of silver coin in my office. This delightful and encouraging sight increased my sense of self-confidence.”[19] He also dabbled in politics and joined the Democratic Party—one of the most influential Constitutionalist forces of the time.[20]

He was eighteen when he married. As was the custom, he talked to his father and asked him for help in finding a suitable wife. There were, he wrote, many candidates, but he was bent on taking his time and finding the right woman, who would “afford me every comfort of the mind, and would bring no impediment to my increased business activities.”21 Eventually he set his eyes on the daughter of a fellow Kashani who made his living buying and selling stamps. In his earlier days, the man had been a journalist and one of the chief advocates of democracy in his hometown.22 On an auspicious day—the day the Prophet Mohammad was told of his prophetic mission—the young Mahmood married Tahereh, a woman of unusually modern sensibilities and even attire. It was, by all accounts, a harmonious marriage that lasted until the end of their lives.

The security and stability of the Reza Shah period were, in Mahmood’s words, the “years of blooming.”[23] This new age dawned when the nemesis of his childhood, Seyyed Hoseyn Kashi, was arrested and executed in 1919.24 As Iran was changing, so was the Lajevardi family. Mahmood himself, once attired in the traditional turban and clerical attire, was, by 1922, dressed like a European gentleman. His business, on the other hand, had expanded in quantity but not in quality, essentially maintaining the same age-old tradition of merchant capitalism.

By 1920, Mahmood decided that the “sun of science and industry” shines in the West and that he must expand his intellectual and commercial horizons by visiting foreign lands. He first traveled to the revolutionary Soviet Union, and later to Germany. He came back from his German trip convinced of the wisdom of a new idea then taking shape. It was in the years after World War I when the notion of separating management from ownership began to take root in the West. Some went so far as to talk of a managerial revolution as a new phase in capitalism, where the rational skills of the managers, not the passions and pathos of the profit-hungry owners, would decide corporate policy. The Lajevardi group is, in fact, credited for being the first major private group in Iran to move consciously to separate management from ownership. They began to hire a new class of often American-trained managers and gave them more or less complete autonomy in running their companies. The parent company, led by Hadji Lajevardi and his sons, acted as a de facto board of directors that set policy and made strategic decisions.[25]

When he came back from his first European journey, Mahmood was more than ever convinced that capitalism needs security and stability. He was one of a group of important bazaar merchants who wanted Reza Khan to take over the reins of power in Iran.[26] Once power was centralized, the Lajevardi family tried to stay clear of all political entanglements. “The book of politics,” he wrote, “I had kissed and put away.”[27] He wrote of reaping the economic benefits of his aversion to politics. Furthermore, the family had, contrary to a practice that had become common by the early 1970s, no powerful “partners” in the royal family or among the political elite. In fact, so insistent was he on keeping the company only in his immediate family that eventually, to his own father’s great consternation, he separated their businesses and established a company owned solely by himself, his wife, and his children. Only once, during the height of the economic boom, did the family break with the tradition of aversion to politics; one of the sons, Gassem, entered the political fray as a senator. The family paid a heavy price for this decision.

Habib was the first son to go the United States. After finishing a master’s program in business administration at Harvard University, he went on to receive his Ph.D. in industrial administration from Yale University, writing a dissertation on the history of the Iranian labor union movement. It was the first time the topic was studied from a scholarly perspective. His eventual return to Iran in 1963 brought about great changes not only in the management of the Lajevardi family companies, but in the field of management studies in general.

The family’s first brush with politics came in 1941, when the Soviets attacked Tehran; Hajdi Mahmood hurriedly took all his liquid possessions and escaped back to Kashan.28 Later on, during the Mohammad Mossadeq era, though he had begun with some sympathy and great respect for Mossadeq, he gradually grew wary of the communist threat. He was thus quietly in favor of the coup that brought the Zahedi government to power in 1953. In fact, many years earlier, he had been a partner of the general when the latter invested in developing agriculture in the northern provinces of Iran.[29]

The ultimate move from commerce to industry, and from focused attention on textiles to diversity, came in the late 1950s, when Hadji Mahmood was reassured of Iran’s long-term stability. By then the government had also passed the law that offered numerous incentives and guarantees to foreign capital invested in Iran. By the early 1960s, it was the policy of the government to support the growth of indigenous industry. Arguably no other industrial group used these fortuitous moments more effectively, more productively, and more profitably than the Lajevardi family.

By that time, Hadji Mahmood had turned over the reins of the company almost entirely to his sons. Their name was synonymous with financial probity and honesty. Their companies were exemplary in their fair and equitable treatment of their employees and such innovative ideas as giving marriage and housing loans to employees,[30] using students from Tehran University’s engineering faculty as interns, and offering grants and scholarships to their employees.[31] Furthermore, they began to expand their activities to include everything from producing acrylic and traditional textiles to creating a bank (Banke Bime, the Insurance Bank) and establishing a packaging company, a shipping company, and, arguably their most famous enterprise, the Shahpasand Cooking Oil Company. The advertising campaign that successfully turned that brand into a household name is a legend in Iran’s business circles. Their later advertisements, using such literary luminaries as Ahmad Reza Ahmadi and Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi, were precociously sophisticated for the Iranian market, which had hitherto put little trust in advertisements and paid less attention to the aesthetics of the advertisement itself.[32] It was a measure of the Lajevardi family’s commitment to continuing their industrial development that in 1978, as a massive flight of capital shook Iranian industry and finance to its core, they were among a handful of people who invested three hundred million tooman (or more than $40 million) in a new venture.

One of the most farsighted efforts of the Lajevardi family was Habib’s successful establishment of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Management in Tehran. Habib was the first son of the family to finish a graduate program. He had been, all along, a fervent believer in the utility of new management skills, and his return to Iran brought about many changes in the Behshahr Group’s style of management.

Beginning in 1969, he tried to create a first-rate program in Iran. At his urging, his two brothers attended a seminar for corporate executives directed by Harvard and held in Switzerland. His next move was to solicit the brothers’ financial commitment to the establishment of a college in Iran. The family agreed to set aside a multimillion-dollar fund for this purpose. Through a series of meetings, Iran’s new captains of industry were convinced of the necessity for such a school in Iran—one that would, in the famous Harvard style, study cases, but this time based on experiences in Iran. Habib chose the college’s board of trustees from some of Iran’s most respected political and business leaders.[33]

The family’s only serious foray into politics was Gassem’s brief tenure as a senator. Many industrialists praise Gassem as the ultimate symbol of all that was good in his class of entrepreneurs. He was, they say, peerless in his probity, honesty, industry, and vision.[34] While Gassem’s senatorial tenure might have been one of the reasons the new Islamic authorities decided to confiscate the Lajevardi fortune, it was also a fascinating case in point of the belated and begrudging confluence of interest between Iran’s captains of industry and the shah’s government. Before the political ascent of such figures as Rezai and Lajevardi, Iranian industrialists had shunned the political limelight. They deferred to the shah, and economic support by the government was the reward for their silent political acquiescence.

In the Senate, Gassem Lajevardi was anything but silent. He made a now-famous speech on the floor of the Senate that in retrospect stands as one of the earliest, most prescient warnings about the revolution that blindsided not only the industrialists but also the politicians and the security forces. It can also be seen as a de facto manifesto for Iran’s nascent industrialist class. Senate rules mandated that opening speeches on the floor were delivered on a first-come, first-served basis. At the height of the shah’s power, when few dared question the wisdom of his authority, Lajevardi took the unusual step of spending a night in his office in the Senate so that he could be the first to register for a speech in the morning.[35] To the opposition, the speech was an early sign of emerging tensions in the ranks of the Iranian elite. But in spite of its dire warnings, no one in the government—from the cabinet ministers to SAVAK or the court—deigned even to ask Lajevardi to clarify his position further.[36]

The speech was delivered when a new budget for 1976 was about to be ratified. Lajevardi began with a customary praise of the shah and the wisdom of his policies. He reaffirmed the value of constructive criticism and then gingerly pointed to the startling fact that of the 104 government-run companies, 103 had been losing money, and the only one that showed any profit was the oil company![37]

It is today generally agreed that one of the causes of the revolution was the shah’s unusual decision to control prices forcefully by unleashing an army of students on businessmen accused of price gouging. Long before the dire consequences of these actions became apparent, in a cautious but clear tone, Lajevardi reminded the senators of the unusual fact that controlling prices had become one of the principles of the “White Revolution.” After reaffirming the notion that Iranian industrialists had commendably placed their trust in the wisdom of the shah by adhering to this principle, he went on to articulate his criticism of this policy by suggesting that capitalists will invest only if they can make legitimate profits, and only through this free and unfettered investment will enough employment be created. Nowhere in the world, he said, has the effort to control prices led to any success. He went on to criticize the government policy of arbitrarily deciding workers’ wages. Wages, he said, must correlate with productivity and cannot, as was the case in Iran, be treated as a political bonus given to the working class by the government because of political exigencies. Lajevardi then laid out a litany of other complaints. He talked of severe shortages of electricity and of the strange decision not to ban the private import of engines capable of producing electricity. He referred to the shortage of housing and the fact that the government had essentially made the private sector responsible for solving a problem that had arisen only because the government had failed to plan adequately.

In spite of the disparate nature of his complaints, they had a common theme: capitalism needs security, rule of law, and the force of the market to develop, and it cannot grow if it is hostage to the vagaries of one person. His father had worried about Seyyed Hoseyn Kashi; seventy years later, after much growth and development, after building Iran’s biggest conglomerate, the problem of security and rule of law remained paramount for the sons. As it turned out, the revolution showed that their anxiety was well founded.

The Ardalan Clan is one of the oldest in Iran. Their family tree, with kings and princes, ministers and scholars, landlords and generals on its branches, goes back almost a thousand years.[1] For much of that period, they either ruled in the Kurdistan province of Iran or had numerous members of the clan occupying prime positions of power in the central government. The shah’s last minister of court was an Ardalan, as was the new Islamic government’s new minister of the treasury.

The Mostofi family had been “revenue administrators” for the Qajar kings who ruled Iran for at least two hundred years. The family name itself signifies this hereditary office. The financial business of the country had been in the hands of a small number of officials called mustaufis, or revenue receivers. Their duties and knowledge of the tax system “tended to pass from father to son.”[2] Bager Mostofi was the last child of a marriage between a domineering Ardalan woman and a gentle and scholarly Mostofi son. Bager was to be more than the proud scion of these two notable families; he developed a reputation of his own as an oil expert, “the father of Iran’s petrochemical industries.”[3]

Bager was a child of Nowrooz, the Persian new year. He was born on March 27, 1918 (6 Farvardin 1297) in Tehran. He was the third child, and as there were no birth certificates at the time, the time and place of his birth, like those of countless others, was written on the back of a family copy of the Qur’an. He was a good student, with an avid interest in calligraphy and literature. Occasionally, he dabbled in poetry. His mother was instrumental in encouraging his literary interests. Their family’s favorite parlor game was Mosha’ere, where one player recites a line of poetry, and a second player must then recite from memory another poem in which the first letter of its first word is the same as the last letter of the last word of the line recited by the previous player. Whoever fails to come up with a fitting line is eliminated.

His father, Abdullah Mostofi, defied the dictates of his name and pedigree and, instead of becoming a scribe and tax collector, chose to become a diplomat. He began by receiving training in Iran’s first and only School of Political Science. His three-volume memoir is one of the most reliable sources of information on the administrative and social history of the Qajar dynasty. Abdullah’s affinity for the world of letters and poetry, his knack for narrative, his probity, and his long experience in the corridors of power make the book readable and popular, but rigorous and reliable.[4] He wrote it during his retirement, when, on account of “the high price of living,” he also “started an agricultural company and in reality divided my time between a pen and a plow.”[5]

Bager’s mother was also an eminent Persian of her age, an unusual woman of strong opinions as well as great polish and poise. In public as well as in private, she projected power and independence. Her husband left the care of the quotidian to his wife while he attended to the world of letters and politics. She ran the house with authority and aplomb. Her children called her “Shah Joon.” She was a descendent of Mohammad Ali Shah, the Qajar king, on her maternal side; her paternal side included prominent members of the Ardalan clan. Ever since Shah Abbas, the seventeenth century Safavid king who had arranged for his sister, Khorshid Kola, to marry an Ardalan in a political move intended to keep the important border region of Kurdistan pacified, it became a pattern for an Ardalan to marry a member of the ruling dynasty. Not all these marriages were successful or produced stalwarts of citizenship. Shah Joon’s brother, for example, Izz-ul-Mamalik, was a member of Parliament and a governor of Azarbaijan, but according to the British Embassy in Tehran, he was “an intelligent progressive man though not over-scrupulous when it comes to taking money.”[6]

Shah Joon was, in the Kurdish tradition, an accomplished rider. She also played the tar. She was religious, but free from dogma and zealotry. Like her husband, she was a committed advocate of education for her children. Bager was her only son and the favorite child, and she spared no effort to afford him the best education possible, but she was no less insistent on the education of her daughters. “This high school diploma you got,” she declared to one of her daughters after her graduation, “is not worth the paper it is printed on. If you want to be somebody, you have to go to the university.”[7] The daughter, Houri, did go on to college, eventually becoming a teacher in one of Iran’s famed high schools for girls and then a professor of languages at the university. Houri’s mastery of English and French, her avid curiosity about the cultures of the West, her habit of writing “the story of her life” in a daily journal, as her father did,[8] have made her, also like her father, a “transcultural Persian.”[9] Successful and accomplished as her life has been, it is tempting to ask what could she have accomplished if the Iran of the 1950s and 1960s had been as genuinely hospitable to self-assertive and ambitious women as it was to such men. Be that as it may, the son, Bager, used the opportunities afforded him wisely.

He graduated high school in Tehran in 1934, finishing when he was only seventeen. He then entered the newly founded School of Engineering at Tehran University, but at the end of his first year, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he was forced to leave the university.10 Before long, he won a scholarship to study petroleum engineering in England.

His mother had learned of the scholarship and hired private tutors to prepare her son for the examination. He set out for Europe in 1935. Lest her son be lonely, for a while his mother traveled to England with Bager and lived with him. He entered Birmingham University and in 1939 received his bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering. According to his obituary in the Times, “he was the first foreign student to win the Cadman award,”11 given each year to the most outstanding student of petroleum engineering and named after a colorful man who had, for years, led the British Petroleum Company, which had the monopoly on Persian oil.

After working for about a year at a petroleum research center at Sudbury Bager returned to Iran on the eve of World War II. His mother was waiting for him at the port in the city of Abadan.[12] After spending about a month with his family, he returned to Abadan to work for the oil company. His stay there was brief. He had to report to Tehran early in 1941 for his conscript duty. Before he could enlist, the Iranian army collapsed under the weight of Soviet and British attacks on Iran. In the meantime, Abadan came under British occupation, and Bager could not get there to reclaim his job. Instead, he found a job in the new Department of Irrigation in the Ministry of Agriculture.13 His courses in geology had prepared him for working in a department whose responsibility was to look for water in an otherwise dry and arid land.

In spite of some success in the new job, Bager was not happy. His heart was in petroleum engineering. In 1944, he won another scholarship, this time to the Imperial College of Science and Technology in England, to continue his petroleum engineering studies. After three years, he finished a special diploma program (DIC) with special training in the field of exploration. When he returned home, he resumed work at the oil company.
Not long after, a special law was passed by the Iranian Parliament ordering the creation of a new office charged with exploring for new oil fields in Iran. All the existing fields were under the monopoly control of the British company. The nationalist movement, bent on nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, was already in full swing, and exploration for such fields was one element in the overall attempt to rid Iran of England. Bager was put in charge of the new office, which was called the Iranian National Oil Company. He stayed in that post for the next twelve years. By his own estimation, one of his most important accomplishments during this period was facilitating the preparation of a complete geological survey of Iran that was, in later years, instrumental in finding new oil fields. It was, in fact, the first time the country had made such a survey. Swiss geologists helped with the technical aspect of mapping out the country and bringing it all under aerial coverage.[14]

As he was engaged in this work, Iran was experiencing a political earthquake. Bager avoided taking any positions that would jeopardize his career. For a while, he helped Hoseyn Makki and the Nationalists defeat the infamous Gass-Golshai’yan contract, and less than three years later, he was advisor to Ali Amini in signing the no less infamous

Consortium agreement of 1954.[15] Ironically, he believes that in both cases, he had no goal other than serving the “national interest.”

During these tough and tense years, Mostofi’s private life was drastically transformed. In 1950, he lost his father, and two years later, he married a cousin named Asefeh Badre. It was an arranged marriage, and, as expected, it was his mother who made the decision for him. Asefeh came from a wealthy family. She had been studying in Switzerland when the marriage plans were made, and she returned home for the marriage. They had three children, a boy and two girls.

Surely his most important accomplishment was the discovery of oil in the area outside the city of Qom. For years no one had thought the area held anything other than salt mines, but after studying the geological survey, Mostofi and his associates concluded that there must be oil there. After four wells turned up nothing, the fifth well hit the jackpot. At three in the morning of August 26, 1956 (3 Shahrivar 1335), Mostofi was awakened with good, but potentially deadly news. They had hit oil, he was told. But the thick, highly flammable oil—the “black gold”—was gushing out of the well at a dizzying rate, putting not only the salt flats, but also the roads and the rail tracks in peril. A train was scheduled to arrive in the area in a few hours. Morning traffic, taking pilgrims to the city of Qom, would also begin in a couple of hours. The shah had to be awakened as well. He ordered a unit of the Imperial Guard to the scene and gave Mostofi the power to make any decision—including stopping the trains and cars—that would avoid catastrophe. It took the engineering genius of Myron Kinley, a legend in the field of controlling unwieldy wells, to bring the oil under control. It was a measure of his unique expertise that in 1956, he charged the staggering sum of $10,000 per day for his services. The fact that John Wayne appeared in a movie about his life is another sure indication of his iconic status. In his Texan drawl and unique lexicon, Kinley, maybe unwittingly, captured the paradox that was Persian when he said, “Goddammit, you have no right to find an oil well which has 9,000 pounds per square inch pressure in a country where there is no such a thing as 9,000 pound per square inch equipment.”[16]

Not long after scoring the major victory of finding oil in the salt flats of Qom, Mostofi was rewarded by being named to the board of directors of the Iranian National Oil Company. He was thirty-eight at the time, the youngest man ever appointed to the board. But his real accomplishments belong to the period of his life that began in 1964, when he was named managing director of the newly founded National Petrochemical Company.
In the 1960s, two industries were central to the shah’s conception of an industrial and developed Iran. The first was steel, mired in a long history of unfulfilled dreams and promises going as far back as 1930s to his father’s failed attempt to bring a steel mill to Iran. The second was the petrochemical industry. Long before the National Petrochemical Company was created, the shah had written in his Mission for My Country about the necessity of developing an industry that could use and develop other needed products from petroleum and its residue. Mostofi, too, was a firm believer in the power and importance of the petrochemical field.

It was, according to Mostofi, the nature of the petrochemical business that only large-scale operations could ever turn a profit and compete on the global market. He also convinced the government to make the strategic decision to be involved in all phases of petroleum production, particularly downstream operations. Some of the world’s biggest conglomerates, from Allied Chemicals and B. F. Goodrich to Mitsui and Japan Synthetic Rubber, became partners in a variety of joint ventures with the Iranian company. Everything from ammoniac to fertilizers was produced. The shah was intimately involved in the process of creating the new industry, carefully reading all the reports submitted by Mostofi and asking pertinent questions.[17]

Of the planned construction sites, almost 85 percent had been completed on the eve of the revolution. The total cost had been more than three billion dollars. For reasons that are still not clear, the leaders of the Islamic regime initially decided to stop further construction and pulled out of the partnerships. Rumors of shady contracts in those days dogged not just the petrochemical industry, but every major undertaking of the ancien régime.

After a brief hiatus, the new regime resurrected the petrochemical industry, inviting foreign investments as well as setting aside a substantial budget for the program. Today, Iran claims to be the second largest producer and exporter of petrochemical products in the Middle East. At the same time, the regime has created two “Petrochemical Special Zones” where they hope to invite investment, spurred by tax relief and lax regulations. As they readily admit, what they have built today exists only because of the solid foundation created during Mostofi’s long tenure.[18]

On the eve of the revolution, Mostofi happened to be in Europe for what he said were medical reasons. As the situation deteriorated in Iran, he decided not to return. Eventually he settled in London, where he and his wife owned a home. For a while he worked as a consultant, but eventually he found retirement preferable. Having been to the mountaintop, it was hard for him to settle down in the valley. On the morning of December 14, 2002, he died of a heart attack.

Abdul-Hussein Nikpour was from the old school of Iranian business men and politicians. Steeped in Islam and economically conservative, he had the propensity for frugality common to merchants of the bazaar and rooted in the vagaries of an unstable economy and the lawlessness of despotic governments. He was one of the many industrialists and bankers who began their careers in the bazaar, but unlike many of his peers, all his life he stayed, in manners and methods, more a merchant than a modern industrialist.[1]

He was politically cautious and conservative, too, and was one of the few Iranian businessmen who was involved in politics without giving up his economic interests. Nikpour’s foray into politics was historic—part of a newly emerging relationship between the state and the private sector in Iran. He was a close friend and confidante of Ali Akabar Davar and Ahmad Ghavam-ol Saltanah, two of the most colorful and pivotal figures in modern Iran.

Before the modernizing ethos of Davar, the innovative minister of the treasury under Reza Shah, the state had generally been seen by the rich as a parasitic nuisance. It operated independently of the will of the affluent classes, particularly the merchants, and often to their financial detriment. Davar was the architect of a new kind of relationship between government and the wealthy, one in which the state was at least cognizant of what the entrepreneurial class wanted. He invited the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce, including Nikpour, to join him in the government as advisors. Nikpour’s alliance with Davar was an important moment in the evolving dealings between the state and financial capital in Iran.

He was born in 1895 (1274) to a large, prosperous family on the day that Nasir al-din Shah, the Qajar king, was assassinated. The king’s death heralded the end of the Qajar despotism, and a new stage in Iran’s march to modernity. Nikpour’s father was a merchant of the bazaar, and as there were no last names in Iran in those days, he was known by his profession, as “Bolour Foroush” or crystal merchant. He had an office in Timcheh Hajeb al-Dowleh,[2] the most prestigious address in the status-conscious Tehran bazaar.

When his father died, the management of the fifteen-person household and the business fell on fourteen-year-old Abdul-Hussein’s shoulders as the eldest son. He left school and spent the next six decades in the bazaar, as one of its most influential and prosperous leaders. He expanded the family business by traveling to Bolshevik Russia and signing agreements with Stalin for the export of china and crystal to Iran. He also bought the arcade or timcheh where his father’s business had been located. He had joined the Chamber of Commerce in 1925 and was eventually elected to the powerful position of Chamber leader. Before him, the position had been held for many years by Hadj Amin-al Zarb, who was a symbol of modern Iran’s emerging and enlightened bourgeois class. They were big shoes to fill.

The Russian journeys not only expanded his business horizons but forced him to learn Russian. The knowledge played a crucial role in his political life in the years after World War II. By then, he was a member of the Majlis, the lower house of Iran’s parliament, where he would serve seven terms, often on committees with oversight over the economy and commerce. During the height of Ghavam’s power, when he formed the Democratic Party, Nikpour was among his chief financial backers. In fact, he ran for a seat in the Parliament on the Democratic Party slate, and cynics considered his victory a “reward” for his financial assistance.[3]

Moreover, he befriended Ghavam. Although he accepted none of the ministerial portfolios offered to him, he agreed to accompany Ghavam on his historic trip to Moscow to resolve the Azarbaijan crisis of 1946, when the Soviet Red Army refused to leave Iran. Nikpour was the leading economic expert in the delegation and also acted at times as the translator. At least one other member of the delegation has mentioned in his memoirs that Nikpour was one of the two advisors most respected and most often consulted by Ghavam.[4] Although he was privy to some of the most sensitive discussions in Moscow, Nikpour did not leave a full account of this trip.
Nikpour and the delegation were housed at the National Hotel, adjacent to the Kremlin, while Ghavam stayed in a “villa earlier inhabited by Churchill.”[5] Nikpour later recounted how, fearing KGB bugs in their rooms, confidential conversations between Ghavam and himself were held in the bathroom, with all the faucets running at full force.6 Henry Kissinger has also written in his memoirs of his visits to the Kremlin and of using similar tactics to ensure that voices were washed away by the sound of running water.

A few weeks after the trip, the Soviets sent a delegation to begin implementing the agreements made between Ghavam and Stalin. Ghavam appointed Nikpour to the High Economic Council, which was entrusted with the task of carrying out the negotiations.[7] The key issue was the Soviet Union’s relentless insistence on receiving an oil concession for Iran’s Southern region.

Before this trip, Nikpour had also traveled to Germany during the days of the Nazis, for the purpose of importing household commodities, including the first automatic telephones. His interest in this area led to his appointment to lead the new Department of the Telephone. During his tenure, Tehran’s system of modern automatic telephone communication was inaugurated.

By the time he went to Russia, he was married and had several children. His first marriage had lasted only a few months and ended with his wife’s death. His second marriage, to Badr-al Zaman Sardar Afkham, lasted until the end of his life. She was a woman of considerable authority in the home. While following in the footsteps of the traditional men of his generation, he maintained ostensible authority over the household, but daily decisions about the children’s lives were handled by his wife.

She acted as a shield for the children against the intransigent seriousness of their father. “It was rare to hear him say a word of endearment,”[8] said one of his sons. When they wanted something from their father, they wrote him letters. He was not enthusiastic about his children receiving a college education. When one of his sons told him he wanted to go to the United States to learn business management, he was incredulous. “Management is not something you can learn,” he said dismissively, “it has to be in your blood.” But his son Manuchehr did go and received a bachelor’s degree and eventually a master’s degree, and he became a respected banker in Iran.

Nikpour tried to maintain parity between his children, but there was no small amount of squabbling among them for the family fortune. Tension between the sons, and even between the sons and their father, often turned nasty. The combination of his traditional authority, his economic power, and his political prominence made him a formidable foe.

In the early 1940s he invested in a small factory that produced glasses, glassware, and, eventually, china. But the postwar years were also the years of a bourgeoning radical workers’ movement, and keeping the fledgling industry afloat was not easy. He was faced with strikes and demands for better working conditions. His uncompromising tendencies and his expectation that the workers should “know their place” exacerbated an already tense situation.

The problems were made worse during the Mohammad Mossadeq era when Nikpour expanded into the world of finance by creating Iran’s second private bank. Called Bank Pars, it was established in 1952 with an initial capital of ten million tooman (about $3 million at the contemporary rate of exchange). The bank built the first high-rise in the bazaar—an almost twenty-story central headquarters that was an anomaly in the bazaar area. He also helped establish an insurance company, Sharg. Both of these ventures were important sources of income and power for the family.

His instincts, his political inclinations, and his connections were all opposed to Mossadeq, and he made every effort to destabilize his government. He was a supporter of Ghavam when he was chosen to replace Mossadeq in June 1951, but he was also one of the first advisors to tell Ghavam the bitter truth six days later—that he had to resign. The popular tide of support for Mossadeq was insurmountable.[9] In early 1953, over the serious objections of his son, Manuchehre, who was running the glass factory, he stopped production. He was deliberately adding to the unemployment and to the workers’ unrest, preparing the ground for a move against the Mossadeq government.

During the years after Mossadeq, Nikpour was considered an elder statesman of the Iranian business community. He was appointed senator and served two terms, heading the commerce committee. With the help of one of his sons, he used funds provided by Point Four, the American aid program, to expand the glass factory. In the mid-1950s, pasteurized milk was introduced to Tehran, and Nikpour’s factory became a supplier of the bottles needed in the process, also with the help of Point Four. The factory was ultimately sold to the government for a hefty profit.

In the last decade of his life, Nikpour spent some of his time tending to a farm he owned and some time involved in philanthropic works. He had been influential in building and maintaining the Bazorganan Hospital, the Merchants’ Hospital, for years Tehran’s most modern institution, which served the poor segments of the city. He also helped found the Nikpour Foundation, which was dedicated to education.

He died in Tehran in June 1968, after a long bout with diabetes and heart ailments, and left a large fortune to a feuding family.

The Rastegar Brothers were only three years apart in age; in their habits and demeanor they were separated by a chasm of different styles. Reza was practical and organized, and he brought his university training as a microbiologist and his habit of paying attention to the smallest details to his later career as a businessman. He was at home with the most arcane details of balance sheets and business plans. Every page of each company report or of plans for future investments he read most carefully and understood perfectly. Even late in life, when he was a septuagenarian in exile and had partnered with a younger generation of entrepreneurs, including his own son, Ali, he was invariably most acute in his critical reading of balance sheets and reports.[1]

His younger brother, Morteza, on the other hand, was an explorer, most at home in the wilds of nature. He never read financial reports, leaving those chores to his brother. He was a visionary and a wizard in finding and developing mines. He was called Mohandess, or “engineer,”[2] and it was in doing the work of a mining engineer that he was the happiest. Although lax in his attitudes toward business, he was exacting and stern with his children. His life on the road and his demanding standards at home were a recipe for tense relations with his children. “I spent all my life trying to please [my father],” wrote one of his sons, “and he was never happy.”[3] The son’s political persuasion, particularly his support for his controversial uncle, Mozaffar Baqa’i-Kermani, might have exacerbated these Oedipal tensions, particularly in the days of exile. Unlike his older brother, Reza, who had a lifelong aversion to politics, Morteza came back from his college years in France attached to some of the Marxist ideas he had picked up in prewar socialist France.

Yet in spite of the two brothers’ starkly different personalities and political proclivities, all their adult life in Iran, Reza and Morteza were partners in every business adventure. Although they made their name and much of their fortune in mining, by the mid-1970s their initial partnership had morphed into one of the biggest conglomerates in Iran, employing over twelve thousand people and ranging from manufacturing tractors and radiators to mining lead and zinc. There was a logic to their apparently disparate investments. They followed the pattern of horizontal and vertical integration, going from a mining company to producing machinery used in mines, and from there to tractors and trucks used in construction, and finally to producing truck parts and auxiliaries, like tires and batteries.[4]

In spite of the diversity of their portfolio, by the mid-1970s the two brothers were often referred to as the “fathers of modern mining in Iran.” Surely there had been many a miner before the Rastegars appeared on the horizon. But what differentiated them from earlier generations of miners was their ability to transform what had been local and limited traditional mining into an industry that had its eyes on world markets and exports and harbored the ambition of becoming as efficient as any mine in the world.

Reza Rastegar was born in 1908 (1286), according to his birth certificate. In fact, according to his son, he was born in 1906 in the city of Isfahan.[5] His father and mother were both members of the small propertied class. Reza began his schooling in Isfahan and then went to Tehran to finish high school at Dar al-Funun. He was a child prodigy, and in every school he finished at the top of his class.

In 1926 he was sent to France on a scholarship from the military school as a cadet of the cavalry. At five in the morning of the day he and his peers were heading for Europe, Reza Shah appeared where the students had congregated, riding a horse. He had charisma, and he left an indelible mark on the impressionable mind of the young man from Isfahan.[6]

In France, Reza’s first task was to learn French, thus he enrolled in a school in the city of Toulouse. He went on to college in the same city, receiving a doctorate in microbiology, with expertise and training in making serums. He also spent six months at Saumur, France’s famous school for officers of the cavalry. He was sent to Algeria for a year, learning in practice what he would later face in the field of public health in Iran. Soon after finishing his dissertation, he returned to Iran, where he went back to the military as a lieutenant of the cavalry. His days in the military were short-lived. Concurrent with his military service, he began teaching at the newly established Tehran University, where he was soon appointed to the chair in microbiology. His academic life continued for more than two decades. He published four textbooks on microbiology and was also involved in establishing the university’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Not long after Reza had begun his academic career, the Iranian government decided to establish an institution along the lines of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. It would be responsible for “treatment of diseases, primarily infectious diseases, through research, education, public health activities.”[7] The Iranian institute was to be connected to Tehran University and called Razi—after the famous Iranian scientist, Zakariya Razi, from the city of Rey, which was not far from Tehran. Razi was a philosopher, alchemist, and experimental scientist, known for his many innovations in medicine—including the use of opium in anesthesia and the importance of understanding psychosomatic diseases. When the Iranian government solicited help from the French to establish this new institute, instead of sending someone, French authorities recommended Reza Rastegar as the perfect candidate to lead the endeavor. In order to make his work possible, Rastegar resigned his commission as an officer, bringing his military career to an early end.

As the director of the Razi Institute, Rastegar was responsible for developing the first Iranian-made serums. He was also instrumental in building the institute’s headquarters in Hesarak, not far from Tehran. He lived there with other scientists, including some Europeans. By the time he began working at the institute, he was married. When he returned from France, he had been one of Tehran’s most eligible bachelors, but courting was not high on his agenda. All his life, he was a workaholic—with sixteen-hour days part of his daily routine. It was left to his parents to find him a suitable wife. His was an arranged marriage. They chose Sediqeh Kashefi, a young girl from one of Isfahan’s most famous families, but more important, her maternal grandfather was Zell al-Soltan (1850–1918). Of the many Qajar princes, he was one of the most infamous. He was Nasir al-din Shah’s oldest son, but he “could not inherit the throne because his mother was a commoner and not of the Qajar tribe. He was made the powerful Governor of Isfahan and 14 other provinces. . . . He was one of the cruelest princes of the nineteenth century and his excesses are legendary.”[8] Zell al-Soltan had an important role in the early education of Sediqeh.

The future bride was a young woman of unusual accomplishments. In the tradition of women in the Qajar period, she had been tutored at home. She was also a great rider and hunter. She had a keen eye for antiques and throughout her life collecting them has remained one of her main avocations. Reza Rastegar’s marriage to her was a match between a descending aristocracy, rich in cash but poor in ideas profitable in a market economy, and the ascendant Iranian industrialist class who were, like the Rastegar brothers, clever and creative but wanting in capital. After the marriage, and particularly when Reza and Morteza left the academic world and entered the industrial domain, they borrowed money from the family of Reza’s wife and “returned it to them with great profit.”[9]

Reza’s entry into the world of industry began when Morteza decided to forfeit a career in academia for a career in mining. Morteza, too, was born in Isfahan, in 1912. His early life was patterned much like his older brother’s life—early school in Isfahan, high school in Tehran, and college in France. Instead of biology, he majored in engineering, and like his brother, he entered academia right after his return home, teaching at Tehran University. He also had a side job working for the Iranian railroad. But not long after the end of World War II, the brothers decided to launch a private company. They called it SIMIRAN, an acronym for the Persian name of their company, the Industrial and Mining Corporation. Finance and office management, as well as contacts with the government and investors, were left to Reza, while the technical aspects of the company, from discovering and developing new mines to constructing roads, was Morteza’s purview.

Mining was still a limited, traditional endeavor in Iran. There was no infrastructure to support the work of a modern mining company. If a new mine was found, paving the road, constructing buildings to house the workers and engineers, and finding ways of transporting the mined material to the market were all left to the miners themselves. The exigencies of these many requirements were the driving force behind the company’s expansion. What began as a small after-hours company for two brothers who were both fully employed was by the time of the revolution one of the biggest conglomerates in the country, producing everything from Volvo trucks to zinc and other metals.

The Angooran mine, located near the city of Zanjan, was their most successful investment, considered as late as November 2006 one of Iran’s most important and lucrative mines. The brothers’ one unsuccessful endeavor failed not because of any mistake of theirs, but because of a misguided government policy. The brothers built a factory to produce car and truck batteries, but only a week after they began production the army “nationalized” the factory and took control of it. The brothers had asked the shah to open the factory; it was the one time they had departed from their policy of keeping a low profile. But the Iranian army was in a period of rapid expansion, and batteries were declared “important for national security.”[10]

The low profile and the aversion to politics had another consequence as well. When the revolution came in 1979, the brothers, like nearly every other industrialist in Iran, were taken by surprise. “Iranian industry was,” suggested Ali Rastegar, “in its adolescent period and for this reason, they had no experience in politics. Had the revolution not come, the industrialists were on their way to demand a more democratic state.”[11]

At the same time, thinking that they had no relationship with any member of the royal family, the Rastegar brothers assumed they would be safe, and thus they continued their work. But as the political situation in Iran turned more radical, the brothers eventually were caught in the whirlwind. Reza was arrested and kept behind bars for about a month. The day after he was released he changed his mind about staying in Iran and asked his son, Ali, to arrange for his departure. Before long, with the help of human smugglers, both brothers were in Europe. The fact that they had made some investments in the West before the revolution ensured that neither of the two had to worry about the future. Morteza moved to Canada, and Reza moved to London. They died within a short time of each other—Morteza in January 1999, and a year later almost to the day, his older brother passed away in London. In death, as in business, they were nearly inseparable.

Like Lear on the blasted heath, he roared as he roamed the small living room of the apartment he shares with his thirty-five-year-old handicapped son, a Costa Rican maid, her two children, and her husband. The apartment is located in the part of town that teeters between working-class barrio and middle-class respectability. A large wooden desk, a faint reminder of his past days of glory, sits in an alcove off the corner of the spartan living room. A small television set, with blurry images that betray its age, sits on a corner of the desk, showing advertisements for Persian grocery stores in Los Angeles and old videos of Pahlavi-era divas and heartthrobs. There is occasionally some news, too—tinged with the self-deluding optimism that keeps all émigrés hopeful of an imminent return home.

He rarely talks to his son. “He cannot understand much,” he laments with a loving sigh of grief. Shahdad is his name. To the maid, he must use the international semiotics of hand movements and broken, verbless sentences. His current partner in business, Leyla Mehran, a woman of grace and gravitas and the daughter of a past minister of culture in Iran, is his connection not only to the maid and her husband, but also to much of the outside world.

Before traveling to San Jose to meet Ali Rezai, I had heard of the vast network of industrial and banking companies he and his brothers had created and owned, and of their Sarcheshmeh mine that promised to make them one of the wealthiest families in the world. I had also heard of the legendary opulence of their parties in the old days, at their palatial home in Tehran; of his gift of a rare and expensive necklace for the queen—the shah, according to Assadollah Alam, ordered the jewels sent to a museum[1]—and of the three million tooman he paid to have his name added to the list of senatorial candidates of the one-party system in 1975.[2] When I asked him about this, he said, “It was a loan.” I had heard that exile had been particularly cruel on him; that his next of kin had walked away with much of the “nest-egg” he had hurriedly managed to send abroad in the last days of the ancien régime, and of his failed projects in the United States and Costa Rica. Yet nothing I had heard or could have imagined had prepared me for what I witnessed on my sojourn to San Jose.

Ali Rezai and his brother, Mahmood, who lived in Houston, had been partners for most of their lives. Ali and Mahmood had a reputation as debonair, impeccably dressed businessmen, with a penchant for high risks and big profits. When in 1973, Le Monde, the French daily paper, published a lengthy report on Iran’s emerging “captains of industry,” and the new “bourgeoisie,” they featured Ali Rezai.[3] They wrote about his globetrotting from Paris and London to Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. They even mentioned the many phones on his desk that seemed to be all in use.

All their lives the two brothers had been masters of turning conspicuous consumption into capital and credit. Their latest model luxury cars, their big homes, their lavish parties and gifts, their ability and willingness to “wheel and deal” in the corridors of power made the Rezai brothers the flamboyant face of the new Iranian entrepreneurial class. For them, no project was too daunting, no competitor too established. Iran was no longer the only market they sought. The whole of the Persian Gulf, much of the Middle East, and all of Soviet Union they considered to be their backyard. There was a swagger in their business demeanor that was fueled partly by their past success, partly by petrodollars, and partly by the fact that they enjoyed the complete support of the regime, which was bent on rapidly industrializing Iran.

Even in exile, something of that swagger was still there. Indeed, it might have been the undoing of Mahmood. But exile is cruel to old men. Ali’s left eye was covered with a dark patch—“an operation I just had,” he told me—and every time he talked of his estranged son, Shahriyar, and his wife, Rahlo, now living in Tehran, tears welled up in his wrinkled eyes. Yet the contours of his aging face still were those of a handsome man. “I have made and lost three fortunes,” he said wistfully, and thus he began to talk about his life and his family’s incredible rise and fall.

Ali was born in 1921 (1300), if not in the lap of luxury then in small-town mercantile opulence. Mahmood was born in 1923. Their city of birth was Sabzevar, where their father was a grandee, the city’s biggest merchant and property owner, with an office that employed many of his relatives. It was a traditional office, run more on trust, business intuition, and gold than credit, modern accounting, and business planning. Iran lacked a powerful central government at the time. A viable national currency did not exist, and gold and foreign money were the preferred tools of exchange and accumulation of capital. Their father died when the children were young. “Missing fatherly love,” Ali said, “is probably the biggest hole in my emotional life.”[4]

Their mother, Ashraf Makui, was a Qajar princess, a distant descendent of Mohammad Ali Shah. Around the town she was often referred to as the Shazdeh. She was fourteen when she was married off to the fifty-year-older Rezai, and only twenty-three at his death, when she was left with the sole responsibility for the upbringing of their four sons. Fourteen different people—three wives, five sons, and six daughters from previous marriages—were entitled to shares of his fortune. The portion belonging to the four youngest children—Ali, Mahmood, Abbas, and Gassem—was not given to them, as they were minors. Nor were the shares given to their mother, as Islamic law does not allow women to receive such inheritance shares. Instead, the money was given “in trust” to an ayatollah—himself a grandee and a friend of the deceased older Rezai—who doled out a monthly allowance to the young widow.

Ali and Mahmood spent the first years after the death of their father in Sabzevar. In 1930 (1309), their mother decided to move the family to Tehran. Three years later, the family moved again, this time to Meshed, where Ashraf had relatives and living expenses were lower. In spite of this itinerant life, Ali remembers his childhood as essentially a life of easy comfort and happiness. Their elder half-sisters particularly helped the boys and their mother. “Without our sisters,” Ali remembers, “our future success would have been impossible.”[5]

After two years the family moved again, back to Tehran, where Ali and Mahmood were enrolled in the boarding school still known as the American College and run by its legendary principal, Dr. Samuel Jordan, and his wife. Jordan was a disciplinarian; his wife was the school’s musical director. The young boys were taken to the chapel every morning at ten and required to keep quiet during a time of silent contemplation. Dr. Jordan also carried a whip, lest the music and spiritual training were not enough to control his teenage pupils. Ali and Mahmood were not intellectuals. The world of business, entertainment, and the life of bon vivants were more appealing to them. Yet their mother insisted on her children’s formal education and kept them on a small allowance. She systematically rejected Ali’s persistent request for a car—the ultimate luxury in prewar Tehran, where there were probably no more than a few hundred private automobiles. By all accounts, she had great authority over the boys and succeeded in maintaining that authority even when they had become tycoons. Until the end of her life, she was the unifying force of her family.

After graduating from high school, Ali enrolled in the Teachers College. He was supposedly destined for a degree in foreign languages. His heart, however, was elsewhere. Even the one year he spent at the college, he readily admits, had been to satisfy his mother’s wish. Without consulting or telling anyone, he applied for a job at the oil company. He was hired at an entry-level position. He had already become interested in the city’s limited nightlife, and tennis was one of his many avocations.

After an ingloriously short tenure as a salaried employee, Ali and four friends began his first business adventure. Still in their late teens, they opened a boutique on one of Tehran’s fashionable streets. The partners were young dandies. The store, named Paykan, soon developed a reputation as a hangout for the “in crowd.”

The store’s operating mode revealed much of the Rezais’ later style of operation. All their lives, the brothers well understood the appeal of advertisement and market image in business. Apparently at the behest of Ali Rezai, before opening the boutique the partners began buying adds on the front page of one of Tehran’s daily papers and enigmatically promising the beginning of something new, dropping mysterious hints in the form of letters of the alphabet. By the time the boutique opened its doors, there was already a buzz about it. While in most future business activities this high profile style served the Rezais well, in at least one crucial case it proved disastrous.

As soon as Ali and his brothers were legally of age, they asked for their inheritance. Each of their individual shares was a large fortune. Ali’s first big expenditure was the purchase of a late-model Mercedes-Benz. Gambling, drinking, and the life of a playboy, along with the advent of the war and an increase in the price of everything, including lechery, made for a quick end to the windfall.

In the meantime, in 1938 Mahmood had fallen in love with the daughter of a White Russian émigré family. It was the first love affair of his life. It occupied his mind and time for the next few months. All his life he remained a romantic, falling as quickly in love as out of it. Sometimes his romances turned into complicated affairs, other times they were mere flings.[6]

In 1941, Ali entered the Officers Academy as a conscript. By 1943, when he was finishing his service, he and Mahmood, having spent their inheritance, had to earn some money. The boutique, more a place for philandering than profit, had been sold for little money in 1941. The brothers decided to return to their roots. Using some family connection, and making the necessary payoffs to the notoriously corrupt government officials managing the state monopoly of tobacco, they obtained distribution rights for the city of Sabzevar. Before long, they expanded their area of control, obtaining monopoly distribution rights for most of the biggest markets in Iran. “Our legal revenue was close to half a million tooman a month,” Ali claimed, adding with cavalier honesty that there was a 300 percent difference between the government mandated price and what a pack of cigarette would bring in the black market, and “we certainly availed ourselves of the chance to make that extra money as well.” By 1949, Ali and Mahmood had made the first big fortune of their own.

They were, of course, generous with it. They built schools and a hospital in Sabzevar, and throughout their lives were very philanthropic in the city of their birth. At the same time, they used their increasing political connections to land pork-barrel projects—like new roads and new schools—for Sabzevar.
But easy fortunes brought by the wind are just as easily taken by the wind. In 1951, with a cabinet decree declaring that henceforth the government would itself handle cigarette distribution, the brothers were out of the cigarette business overnight. But they had already developed other interests. With some of their surfeit cigarette capital, they had decided on a whim to become part owners of the Mayak theater group, which consisted of a few movie houses around the country, including two in Tehran. The majority owner of the theater had been a Russian tsarist general, and when the Red Army invaded Iran, the general was executed and the Soviets claimed his share of the theater as theirs.[7] The Rezai brothers became partners with the Soviet Embassy![8]

By then Ali had married and was deeply unhappy and trying to negotiate his way out. “I never wanted to marry and have children,” he says in no uncertain terms. The marriage began as a matter of the heart and produced his two sons, but it soon developed into a contentious relationship, full of tension. In November 1949, happy to be away, he set out for the United States in search of new business opportunities for himself and the Rezai family. He assured his family that he would be successful, telling then in the kind of dramatic pronouncement that is one of his fortes, “I will kill myself if I fail.”[9]

Through a long circuitous route he arrived in New York on November 24, 1949. His memoirs of that trip—in fact, of any recollections of his life—are interlaced with constant rejoinders of regret over everything from never revisiting Cyprus, where he had a wonderful time in 1949, to never thanking the men who were instrumental in some of his successful business deals. Exiles have, by nature, a tendency to romanticize their past. Regret is another common ingredient of their life narratives. But in Rezai’s case, his memory, or at least the parts he shared with me, is sadly marred by a foreboding sense of melancholy about roads not taken, loves not requited, fatherly responsibilities not fully performed— in short, of missed opportunities and misplaced values. Old age, melancholy regrets, and youthful braggadocio all too often follow one another in quick succession. And Ali Rezai is not tongue-tied in describing his youthful follies and accomplishments, or the sorrows and misgivings of his older days.

The contours of the Rezai brothers’ rise and fall, the sheer magnitude of what they lost, is almost biblical in its dimensions. Ali was, after all, a man who would have been a member of one of the richest families in the world if their properties had not been confiscated and nationalized first by the Pahlavi regime and then by the Islamic Republic. Instead, Ali now sits in his small living room, concerned about his small business of importing chewing tobacco into the United States. His brother Mahmood had an even more tragic end.
Ali’s trip to America in 1949 was successful. He purchased a number of inexpensive “B movies” for their theater chain, and, what was more important, began to import into Iran cheap American fabric that quickly became popular and profitable. In the next few months, the brothers made a hefty profit from their textile business. The most important financial consequence of the trip, however, was inadvertent. In a chance encounter in New York, he was introduced to a Turkish businessmen who exported chromite from Turkey. Rezai had never heard of chromite before. He learned it was an ore significant in the military and aeronautic industries, and he was told that Iran was probably rich in chromite deposits. He went back to Tehran convinced that his family’s future was in textiles, however. And he took an oddity home with him. He had never before seen a business directory, and on a whim he took New York’s Yellow Pages to Iran. He returned to Tehran on March 3, 1950.

Politics was beginning to overshadow everything in Iran, and the Rezai brothers’ lives were no exception. The family decided that Mahmood should be sent overseas for further education. Furthermore, faced with England’s economic embargo, the Mossadeq government put in force an austerity program that included an end to the import of all luxury items. Textiles were included on the list of luxury items primarily because they were available more cheaply from the Soviet Union. Once again a government decree ended another profitable Rezai business. But politics was not a source only of loss. The vagaries of the same political turmoil decided a future turn in the family’s financial fortune.

During the Mossadeq era, elections became hotly contested. Both royalists and followers of Mossadeq worked hard to get candidates favorable to their side elected to the Parliament. The Rezai brothers sided with the shah and took an active part in the election campaign in Sabzevar to ensure that one of the brothers was sent to the Majlis. But the election had an unintended consequence. By sheer accident, the Rezai brothers learned about a chromite mine near Sabzevar. When their attempts to buy a share in the mine came to naught, they resolved to find a mine of their own. Thus began one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the Razai business saga.

Ironically, their big break came during the Mossadeq era, when the government announced that any Iranian individual holding a birth certificate would be entitled to apply for exploration rights to a plot of land not to exceed forty square kilometers. The brothers had already started their mining adventure by investing in a small mine in the vicinity of Sabzevar, but their eyes were set on bigger goals. They wanted big risks for big profits. Hoping to cash in on the new government announcement, the Rezais collected a large number of birth certificates, mostly from relatives and friends in Sabzevar. They used the certificates to apply for and win control of two hundred adjoining lots in an area they assumed to be rich in chromite. From travelogues of British soldiers early in the century, and from anecdotal evidence provided by shepherds who roamed the mountains with their herds, they had picked the area around Esfandage as the region most likely to produce a rich mine.

Their guess was correct. They had managed to become owners of the richest chromite mine in Iran—or rather a large number of their relatives, without knowing it, were the legal owners of that lot. All they needed now were buyers, and here the Yellow Pages Ali had brought back from New York proved invaluable in finding dependable buyers in the United States. Before long, they were on their way to making their third fortune, this time in mining. Ali’s memoirs of these efforts chronicle in some detail the difficulties they faced at each stage, fighting (or using) the bureaucracy’s incompetence, corruption, and lethargy. In short, it took them a while before they could cash in their chromite and turn it into a fortune.

That fortune took on a fantastical dimension in the mid-1960s when they decided to expand their activities and purchased a derelict old copper mine in Sarcheshmeh, near the city of Kerman. By then Ali and Mahmood had more or less separated their business activities. Ali was concentrating on developing new steel industries, and Mahmood was focused on mining. In 1967, Mahmood purchased for a million tooman (close to $150,000) the license for the old Sarcheshmeh mine from a university professor. A number of British and American companies had examined the mine and dismissed it as a losing proposition. Mahmood was not convinced. After purchasing the mine and investing thirty million tooman of his own money in its early development, the enormity of its reserves was discovered.

Friends and family cautioned Mahmood to keep quiet about his success. But bragging was second nature to the Rezai brothers, and part of their business ethos. Furthermore, as a relative who worked with Mahmood at the time pointed out, he had spent months in the dust-ridden dirt roads and tents, and “he had, against all odds, hit the jackpot, and to expect him to keep quiet about it was simply unreasonable.”10 If he did not fully develop the mine’s potential, Mahmood believed, he would be betraying the country. Thus Tehran was soon filled with stories of the new mine and its apparently infinite riches. With the help of a four-hundred-million-dollar investment by Selection Trust, a British mining company, in return for a 30 percent share of the profits, the copper mine was finally ready to become a source of huge profits for the Rezais and considerable foreign currency for the government of Iran. It has been estimated that after Chile, the mine had the second largest deposit of copper in the world.

Some of the American companies that had earlier passed on the chance to invest in the mine were now intriguing behind the scenes to find a foothold in Sarcheshmeh. Mahmood was aware of these machinations, but he had been told in an audience with the shah “to go ahead with his work.” Mahmood had even offered to make the government a partner in the endeavor, and the shah had dismissed the idea as unnecessary. Furthermore, Assadollah Alam was among Mahmood’s “friends,” and assured of his protection and by the shah’s words of support, Mahmood felt secure in his position and refused to understate the mine’s true reserves and underproduce its minerals.

Then one day in February 1971, he heard in the morning news that mines at Sarcheshmeh had been nationalized. Desperate and despondent, he called Alam for help. “It is the shah’s orders,” Alam told him. Next he tried to get an audience with the shah. He was not granted one. A message came from the court, however, that in recompense for his lost opportunities, he would be given special licenses to invest in factories making cement—in those days a coveted commodity in Iran—and in another that made heavy machinery. He failed to make money in either of the two projects, however. He had by then lost his passion for business. The economy was also losing steam. Ironically, when the Islamic Republic confiscated all his properties, their value was estimated to be near $120 million. The conservative estimated value of the nationalized mine was close to $1 billion.[11]

The decision to nationalize the enormously lucrative mine seems to have been taken at the junction of a truly labyrinthine array of dynamic economic forces and static historic patterns. In despotic Oriental societies, no person, institution, or class is allowed to become more powerful and more wealthy than the potentate or the state and thus become independent of that state. Furthermore, during the Pahlavi era, both Reza Shah and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, firmly believed that nationally strategic industries—oil, gas, and electricity—and even the market for sensitive commodities—such as tea and sugar—must be in the monopoly control of the government. If these historic forces were not enough, a coterie of different and at times conflicting companies, and politicians representing them, were for a variety of reasons working hard to undermine the Rezai hold on Sarcheshmeh, and on that February day, they finally succeeded.

The same set of historic and contemporary forces were helping Ali Rezai develop into a steel tycoon in Iran at the very same time. With the shah at the helm, an important ingredient of the country’s development was seen to be its ability to produce steel independently. A combination of individual psychology and arguably misguided economic theory combined to make this a nonnegotiable element of the shah’s grand economic vision. His father’s attempt to set up a steel mill was for many years spurned by the West until finally Nazi Germany, covetous of a foothold in Iran and the Persian Gulf, offered to supply Iran with the required technology and machinery. But the Thousand Year Reich lasted only thirteen years, and with its demise the Iranian steel mill also died. Where the father had failed, the son would now insist on succeeding.

All arguments by Western economists and American and British Embassy officials that developing a steel mill was no longer an economically wise and viable choice for Iran, and that economic laws of comparative advantage made it necessary for countries like Iran to rely on others who can produce steel far more economically, did not change the shah’s mind. Early in the 1960s, he began to plan for the construction of a steel mill in Iran. When the West began to drag its feet again, Iran opened negotiations with the Soviet Union. The American Embassy closely monitored these developments. When in January 1965, a “sevenmember Soviet delegation arrived in Tehran” and went on to visit other cities, including Isfahan, where they eventually built the steel mill, the embassy filed a lengthy report.[12]

When Iran finally signed the agreement, the shah, in a meeting with the American ambassador, complained about the fact that the “United States had blocked him in his three-year effort to obtain a steel mill from the west. When the pending agreement with the Soviets became known, he said he had received two or three bids from the west, but it was too late.”[13] A few months earlier, in August 1965, he had told the American ambassador that “Americans sabotaged British-German steel mill project seven years ago. President Eisenhower spoke to the Shah sneeringly of countries insisting on having ‘damn steel mill.’”[14]

The arrival of some six hundred Soviet technicians, and the fear of KGB activities, only added to the shah’s, as well as American and British, concerns. Again, the American Embassy reported “that a number of dossiers concerning suspicious activities on the part of the Soviets are piled on the desk of the Shah.”15 It was in this context, apparently in an attempt partly to mollify the West and its concerns about Iran’s increasing ties with the Soviets, and partly in the hope of making the country independent of the Soviets Union’s incurably suspect advisors, that Rezai was invited to invest in a new steel mill.

The same German company that had been slated to build Iran’s steel mill during the Nazi era, DEMAG, was again contracted in April 1965 for the construction of a lightsection steel rolling mill. Within the next three years, Navard Ahvaz, with its multiple mills, began producing a variety of steel products. A government decree mandated that contractors working for the government use Iranian steel products rather than importing them from abroad. On at least one occasion, a cantankerous contractor hired to build a large stadium for the Asian games refused to use Navard products on the grounds that they were half as strong, in terms of their resistance, as their German counterpart. There was little time to adjudicate the issue with due diligence. The problem was resolved by allowing the contractor a special, one-time exemption.[16]

Although Navard was never nationalized under the shah, the law that required owners to sell about half of their shares to their workers took away some of Rezai’s control of the industry. In one of his visits to the factory in Ahvaz, the shah said to the Navard workers, “I am particularly interested in the question of participation, in other words, workers should join, to the maximum legal limit possible in the ownership of the factories they work in.”[17]

By then Rezai had expanded into a new field. He wanted to own a bank. Laws that had once kept the banking system a monopoly of the government had changed in the late 1950s, but it was only in the mid-1970s, with the surge of surfeit capital in Iran, that new banks began to mushroom. The Rezais, of course, joined the crowd and created the Shahriyar Bank.

To keep track of these burgeoning interests, by the mid-1970s Ali Rezai had four highly trained, bilingual executive secretaries that tended only to his business.[18] The Rezai conglomeration of companies employed several hundred American and European engineers and technicians and about seven thousand Iranian workers. A comparison of his office in 1975, with all its modern accoutrements and the nearly fully automatic factories he owned, with his father’s store in 1900, steeped in all the solemnities of tradition and bereft of even a whiff of modernity, captures in a nutshell the historic economic transition witnessed and brought about by the Rezai brothers’ generation.

From a stagnant semicolonial economy, Iran changed to a rapidly developing capitalist polity, and it all took place in less than a century. There was, since 1955, when the shah took over as the most powerful man in the country, an implicit contract between him and Iran’s captains of industry and commerce. According to this contract, the shah attended to politics and ensured the internal and external security of the country, and the businessmen would, with the support of the government, concentrate on the country’s economic development and eschew political involvement.

This contract came back to haunt both the shah and the captains of commerce in 1978, when the system went through a serious crisis. When I asked the exiled entrepreneurs why they made no effort to save the system in 1978—in spite of the fact that they had billions of dollars at stake, they made all but no effort—their eerily similar and I think probably unrehearsed answer was that politics, according to that implicit contract, was not their purview. They also pointed to what can be called the August 1953 syndrome. As things were taken care of in 1953, so this time would the system and the shah be saved by someone.

The Rezai brothers were, among the industrialists, the rare exceptions who also participated in politics. Of the four brothers, Abbas was least interested in the mundane details of running the business. He rested instead on his ample share of the common family fortune and paid for his excesses with his life. The other brother, Gassem, went to the United States for his education. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska, a master’s degree in international relations from UCLA, and a doctoral degree in public administration from the University of South Carolina. Upon his return to Iran, he was for one term chosen for the Majlis, and then for eight years he served as vice premier in charge of tourism for the government of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. Both Ali and Mahmood had been active in politics since the 1950s. During the tumult of the Mohammad Mossadeq era, Mahmood ran as an unabashedly royalist candidate from the city of Sabzevar. Mossadeq’s National Front had a candidate of its own, and Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani was also trying to get his son elected from that city. Realizing that the result was unpredictable, the government of Mossadeq suspended the city’s election. It was the first campaign the brothers ran, with Ali acting as campaign manager. Rumor had it that he had hired an American advisor. He introduced innovations like giving away matches with the name of the candidate printed on them. Of course, stuffing the ballot box also turned into a jolly family event, with people of all ages, including children, participating in the festival-like atmosphere.[19] Other candidates, of course, were no less interested in mastering this art. No one even pretended that the elections in the city were free and fair.

Mahmood and Ali were active in the events leading to the August 1953 fall of Dr. Mossadeq. They represent a section of the Iranian entrepreneurial class that became increasingly frightened by the growing power of the communist Tudeh Party. Ali was particularly active in the events of August 16 to August 19. By his own reckoning, he was in the lead tank that took over the Mossadeq house and signaled the end of his government.[20] The position the family took during those tense and tumultuous days put them in very favorable stead with the shah in the years that followed.

The shah’s good graces almost came to an end in 1962 when Mahmood was reported to have been involved in the coup attempt by General Bakhtiyar, the recently deposed head of SAVAK. The fact that Mahmood had traveled to Meshed and met with the American consulate official in that city made his actions more suspect in the eyes of the shah. It is a measure of the Rezai brothers’ resilience that in spite of this close friendship with Bakhtiyar, and in spite of one brother’s possible complicity in the coup attempt, the shah not only did not punish them for their lapsed judgment, but allowed them to continue their business activities. In the ensuing years, he visited Rezai factories at least three times to show his support.

The brothers’ next political move came in 1975, when the shah, apparently on a whim, created the one-party system. It was decided that the party would come up with a list of candidates for each district, then allow the electorate to choose freely from the vetted list. Furthermore, party leaders were bent on finding and nominating only “locally respected” candidates with good reputations. Ali Rezai wanted to be on the candidate list for the Senate from Tehran. But the committee selecting the candidates decided to exclude him, arguing that he had the “reputation of a wheeler-dealer,” and was a member of “old guard.” Rezai was angry and complained to Princess Ashraf, who used her influence to get him on the list. He then ran the most expensive campaign in modern Iranian politics and won handily.[21]

By early 1978, Ali began to detect signs of trouble. Not only was the economy slowing down, but he could feel an increasing sense of frustration in the populace. The idea that a revolution was on the way was “totally strange to” him. Although he knew that the shah was not a resolute leader in times of crisis, he also knew that the army was extremely powerful and loyal to the king. There was, in short, nothing to worry about. When family and friends recommended that he should move some assets overseas, he angrily rejected the idea.

The appointment of Sharif-Emami was, for Rezai, the first sign that the crisis was indeed serious. Soon after the change of government, he flew to Paris, where Princess Ashraf was spending time in her new apartment on Avenue Montaigne. He claims he carried with him twenty million dollars in bank notes. He told her of the dire nature of the crisis, comparing it to the days in 1953 when she had played a key role in saving the throne. She first dismissed his concerns as exaggerated but eventually agreed to return to Tehran immediately. Rezai returned home the next day, buoyed by the idea that finally there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Three days later she arrived in Iran. Rezai met her on her arrival and told her of his ability to raise as much money as needed, and of the general’s concerns that the shah had already abdicated his leadership role. She promised to talk to her brother the next day and asked him to come to her residence the following evening to plan their next move.

Her meeting with the shah lasted longer than anticipated. Ali Rezai was waiting, he says, when she returned. Her dejected look spoke eloquently about what had transpired. The shah had refused to hear of any military plans to save the throne, and told her that the country’s troubles were political and that her return had only added to his problems.[22] When the next day Rezai returned to meet with the princess, he saw that the household was being packed. Finally it dawned on him that he, too, must flee and that the situation was beyond repair.

With Sharif-Emami at the helm, and with his policy of appeasement already on display—or in Rezai’s own words, “with Sharif-Emami doing his Freemason Master’s bidding to destroy the country”[23]—he called the office of the princess, described his predicament, and asked to be taken out of the country on the plane with her. To his utter dismay, he learned the next morning that Princess Ashraf had left Tehran at eight o’clock. In his memoirs of those days, he wrote of his many years of service both to the Pahlavi dynasty and to Princess Ashraf and asked with bitterness why he was left to fend for himself against the wolves.

Ali Rezai decided to plan for his own exit. Eventually he chartered a special jet and had it ready at the airport. The dreaded call finally came. One of his many friends in the army—General Gholamali Oveissi—called him to say that a warrant for his arrest had been issued and that within a couple of hours they would be coming for him. He immediately went to his waiting jet, and with a small carry-on suitcase, left Iran, convinced that return was imminent.

Mahmood refused to leave. He had nothing to hide and no reason to worry, he told his increasingly anxious family. But when the revolution came, he was swept up in its frenzy. He was in prison for two months, and his family was eventually forced to pay a hefty bribe to a powerful mullah to secure his release.[24] With the help of smugglers, he escaped Iran through Kurdistan, ending up in Turkey, then France, and eventually Houston.

Exile was particularly rough on him. His health began to deteriorate in 1994. He had insomnia, his hands shook, and most of his bodily functions were no longer at his command. He was depressed, and there was no hope of a cure. Death was not far away. His nephew, Ali Ebrahimi, had been for many years a constant source of support. One day he asked Ali to buy him a gun. Both knew the intended use. After some soul searching, Ali decided to comply, as he knew his uncle’s desperate situation. A few weeks later, in February 1995, Ali received the dreaded phone call. The police summoned him to his uncle’s house. There he saw Mahmood Rezai, dead but still in his chair, his blood-spattered, lifeless head dropped to one side. The gun, pills, whiskey, and an Iranian flag and several letters were there, too. As it turned out, he had secretly amassed a stash of pills, drank half a bottle of whiskey, then shot himself in the head. This time failure was not possible. Of the three letters, one was for his wife, the other for his three children, and the third for Ali Ebrahimi. He thanked him for all his love, told him he no longer had a desire to live, and gave some directions about his family and his funeral.[25] As his last gesture of defiance against clerics, he willed that his body be cremated.

Ali Rezai was devastated by the news. Although the brothers had been estranged for some time, it was still hard to accept Mahmood’s absence. “He was always there, even when we were not on speaking terms,” he said, tears rolling from his eyes, “and the idea that he is not there is simply impossible to take.” Since then, Ali constantly hints at a similar end for himself. As he sat behind his oversized desk in the corner of his living room, occasionally glancing furtively at the television set, he said, “Living is for me nothing but agony now. All my past mistakes, all my regrets haunt me. I have nothing to live for.”

But depressed and despondent as he may be, the mine and the factories he and his brother helped build continue to operate in Iran. Sarcheshmeh is still a major source of revenue for the government. Posterity will judge the Rezai brothers not by what they mourn for in their exilic despair, but instead by what they built in their entrepreneurial exuberance at home.

Capitalism , Max Weber argued in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,1 needs, indeed begets, a spirit of hard and disciplined work, frugality, and appreciation for wealth as a sign of grace. Habib Sabet, one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of modern Iran, was the quintessence of this spirit.

That spirit was deeply ingrained in Sabet’s family and religion. His parents were members of the Bahai faith, long considered by scholars as a movement and religion akin, in its modern ethos, to Protestantism.2 Poor and uneducated themselves, the Sabets made sure their son received early lessons in business and a superior education. But his family’s poverty and the persecution of Bahais and other religious minorities in Iran were roadblocks to achievement.

Sabet’s story is particularly compelling because it is an archetypal tale of rags to riches. By 1975, Newsweek marveled at his success. This “self-made Persian potentate,” they noted, was “an anomaly [who] came from a poor family and . . . had no government connections . . . and was of the Bahai rather than the Moslem faith,” and thus had “three strikes against him.”[3] In spite of these obstacles and handicaps, he had become chairman of the board of the Sabet Group, comprising twenty-eight companies with “annual sales in excess of 300 million dollars, a work force of over eight thousand Iranians and 175 foreign engineers and executives.”[4] The Sabet Group was widely diversified, with interests ranging from banking and real estate to gas distribution, soft drinks, pharmaceuticals and nuclear energy. It had licensing or partnership agreements with an impressively eclectic mix of multinational companies and banks, among them Chartered Bank of London, RCA, Volkswagen, Revlon, Union Carbide, Magic Chef, Whirlpool, and Nabisco.

Sabet’s most notable contributions to Iran were his introductions of Pepsi Cola and television. In August of 1955, the first Pepsi bottle arrived in Iranian markets after an unusual and elaborate advertising campaign. The Tehran bottling factory became an immediate tourist attraction, novel for its automation, its spotless cleanliness, the elegance of its architectural design, and finally, for its giant display windows. The arrival of Pepsi, according to Sabet, brought another, unintended benefit in the field of public health: the number of reported dysentery cases in the country declined sharply, as Pepsi began to be used instead of contaminated water.[5]

Incredibly, Sabet started both these enterprises in the 1950s, when anti-Bahai fervor reached fever pitch in Iran. Attacks on the Bahai culminated in the destruction of one of the Bahai faith’s most sacred buildings in Tehran.[6] The religious tensions spilled over into commerce: in an attempt to bring Sabet to his knees, religious leaders issued fatwas against both Pepsi and television. But the lure of these two American cultural icons, Sabet’s individual economic resilience, and the united effort of the Bahai community proved more powerful than any religion’s fatwa.[7]

Although Sabet fought and won the battle with religious zealots, the zeal of the government to control commerce and industry proved more than even he could handle. In 1966, to Sabet’s utter consternation, the Iranian government decided to nationalize the television industry. He tried to persuade the government to start a station of its own and to convince them that competition would be good for all sides. But ultimately, he was forced to sell his interest. He was heartbroken. “The television network was like my child,” he lamented.[8] As always, he drove a hard bargain and, after lengthy negotiations, sold his interest for seventeen million tooman (almost $2.5 million at that time).[9] His children considered the price scandalous, a fraction of their investment’s worth and its profit-making potential in the future.

Habib Sabet was born in Tehran in 1903 (1282) to a poor, persecuted Bahai family. The earlier generation on his father’s side had been members of the no less persecuted Jewish minority. His father was a hard-working shopkeeper who sold fabric in one of Tehran’s poorer neighborhoods. He could not read or write; yet he and his wife were keen on educating Habib and his sister.[10] In his memoir of childhood, Sabet writes of his family’s economic hardships, but insists that they were more than compensated for by the love and attention showered on him by his doting parents.[11]

To begin his schooling, they sent Habib to the Tarbiyat school in Tehran. Founded by members of the Bahai faith, it was among the most enlightened educational institutions of its time. Corporal punishment, for example, an essential tool of discipline in traditional schools, did not exist at Tarbiyat.[12]
After finishing six years at Tarbiyat, Habib enrolled at Saint Louis, a well-known school run by French Jesuits and named, ironically enough, after one of the crusader kings of France. This private school was in those days a favorite of the Francophile Iranian elite. It was thus at once a great opportunity and inhospitable terrain for a poor young man from the wrong side of the tracks.

One of Habib’s classmates in the new school was the son of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. Learning of Habib’s strained financial circumstances, Dr. Mossadeq agreed to pay him a small monthly stipend. It is unclear whether the payment was a gesture of generosity or a wage for Habib’s promise to study with Mossadeq’s son.
Habib’s first business opportunity was afforded him by one of his uncles, Rahim Arjomand (whose own sons would also become prominent industrialists, the famous Arjomand Brothers). Habib’s uncle had an old disused bicycle, which he agreed to sell to the young man. This bicycle not only eased Habib’s journey to and from school but also became a source of income. Habib began teaching neighborhood children how to ride. The bicycle was then a novelty of wondrous magic for Iranians.[13] Indeed, only a few years earlier, when the first bicycles had arrived in Tehran, and the two young English boys to whom they belonged rode them around the city, elderly Iranian citizens had seen it as a sure sign of the Apocalypse.[14]

At the same time, young Habib engaged in what would, in later years, become a hallmark of his business style: vertical economic integration. During his after-school time, he went to work for a bicycle shop—at first gratis—to learn how to repair and maintain bicycles.

Soon his employer took the schoolboy on as a minor partner. In a new shop, more or less managed by Habib, they repaired and rented bicycles.15 All along, Habib continued his education at Saint Louis, where he mastered the French language. He would continue to study languages all his life. By the time he had established his vast business empire, he was fluent in several languages, including English, French, Arabic, and, of course, Persian.

In 1921, when he graduated from Saint Louis, eighteen-year-old Habib invested all his savings in another relative novelty. He had found a Willys-Overland jeep left unused in a garage. He purchased it for five hundred tooman (about $150). It was a risky venture: the money was all his capital. But he began by taking curious inhabitants of the capital on “joy rides,” and within three days he had recouped a fifth of his original capital.16 Another pattern was already emerging in his business style. He catered to society’s demand for “something new,” and rarely missed in his assessment of “public taste.”[17] But Habib also had a knack for distinguishing the frivolous novelty from those with practical and enduring utility. And while he was notoriously frugal with money, he was fearless in investing his money on what he perceived were lucrative deals.

Soon Sabet turned his car into a one-man transportation company, traveling as far as Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut, carrying passengers and goods all over the Levant. He expanded his automotive interests by importing cars. He was at the forefront of Iran’s discovery of the automobile’s magic.

By 1927, Sabet decided that the time for marriage had arrived. In those days, men and women had little opportunity to meet one another, except in family gatherings. Most marriages were arranged. Habib’s first designated wife was his cousin.

Although a common adage of the day held that the marriage of cousins was made in heaven, heaven seemed to conspire against Habib’s betrothal. When the bride’s grandmother passed away, their planned marriage was delayed. Then, before a new date could be set, a wealthier suitor appeared. The bride’s family changed its mind, and Habib, much to his chagrin, was sent packing. To avoid the awkwardness and embarrassment of explaining why the arrangement had failed, Habib immediately searched for another wife.

Through a friend, he met Bahareh Bagheroff, who lived with her family in Rasht. By the summer of 1929, they were married.

Soon, what had begun as an arranged marriage of convenience became a marriage of love. It would last until Sabet’s death more than a half-century later, and in that time Sabet would voluntarily stay away from his beloved wife for only three nights, spent in Moscow when he was part of the shah’s entourage.[18]

In 1931, Sabet expanded his activities into an altogether different realm. Since childhood, he had been interested in carpentry. The rising bureaucracy and the sharp increase in the number of urban households meant a burgeoning need for furniture, and Sabet was one of the first entrepreneurs to discern the pattern and profitably invest in it. He established a factory to manufacture office and domestic furniture. He purchased the machinery from Germany and began production in early 1932. Success seemed imminent as government ministries placed orders for furniture.

Instead, of all Sabet’s ventures, this one proved the only relative failure. Delays by the ministries in paying for the furniture they had ordered put the new factory on the verge of bankruptcy. When Sabet attempted to confront the minister in charge, he was arrested. He spent three months in jail. Not long after Sabet’s release, however, Reza Shah himself intervened. By his order, Sabet’s factory received the exclusive contract for all furniture used in the court and in Tehran’s municipal government.[19]

In 1936, Sabet traveled to France. This was not his first journey outside Iran; in earlier years his one-car transportation service had taken him throughout the Middle East. But his European journey was to expand his business. He purchased a couple of trucks and, once back in Iran, established the Sabet Transportation Company—arguably the first in Iran. After a while his company received a lucrative government contract to transport parts of the country’s mail. The same uncle who had earlier sold him his first bicycle, now serving as the vice minister of post, signed the mail delivery contract on behalf of the government.[20]

Sabet’s European sojourn also led to the first steps in another aspect of his future empire, entertainment. On his way back to Iran, Sabet had seen, for the first time, a circus. He was mesmerized. He also saw in it a lucrative business opportunity. He brought the group to Iran, and in the process, he later recalled, “made a bundle of money.”

Sabet had by this time established his reputation as a hard-working, disciplined, diversified, and innovative entrepreneur. His life, however, like that of everyone else in Iran, suddenly changed in 1941. The country was occupied by Soviet and British troops, and Reza Shah’s forced abdication set off a period of instability and turmoil.

Sabet decided to leave Iran, at least temporarily. On November 7, 1941, accompanied by his wife and two children, he set out for New York, traveling eastward through Asia, the Philippines, and Hawaii. On this long journey, he made every effort to connect with local members of the Bahai faith.[21]

By the time he arrived in New York, concern over the war had led to a sharp downturn in the real estate market, particularly in high-rise apartments. As Sabet never tired of repeating to his friends and family, the most important business lesson his father had taught him was that profits are always made at the point of purchase, not sale. He rented an office in Rockefeller Center and an apartment in one of the city’s fashionable neighborhoods and began to reinvent himself. This time, exports and imports were his main line of business. Everything from Persian carpets to nylon stockings was now fair game for him. Eventually, the now famous Sabet Pasal Company, with offices in Tehran and New York, was established.

His economic success during the war had much to do with his character. He did not take no for an answer but pursued his goals relentlessly, deterred neither by setbacks, nor by unfavorable responses to requests. He was indefatigable in his search for new opportunities, and resourceful and tireless in turning these opportunities into profitable ventures.22 He was admittedly a workaholic. (Though he clearly loved his wife and lived a long and happy life with her, in his Memoirs the story of their love and marriage first appears only at page 278 of a 282-page narrative.) He combined the anticipatory power of a visionary with entrepreneurial discipline and frugality. No business opportunity was too small, and no work was beneath his dignity. In his daily expenses, he was uncompromisingly frugal. In his business ventures, by contrast, he was ready to take risks, and no risk was too great for him. Large fortunes, he knew, are often made through taking big risks.

By all accounts, he was an unusually effective salesman. In negotiation, he was at once tough and resilient, forceful and supple. Before returning to Iran in 1947, he made a list of the top multinational companies based in New York and its surroundings. With little capital or experience, he called on every one of these companies—their businesses ranging from pharmaceuticals to manufacturing of household goods—and asked to be their “representative” in Iran. He proposed a six-month risk-free contract, and promised profits in Iran’s “new open markets.” What little capital he had, he had amassed by trade—including sending used and discarded clothes from the prosperous United States to poverty-stricken Iran.

A handful of the one hundred companies he contacted agreed to give him the opportunity. Thus began, Sabet would later recall, “a beautiful friendship” with some of America’s greatest companies.
By 1974, Fortune calculated, he owned “ten percent of practically everything in Iran.”[23] From banking and construction to energy and pharmaceuticals, he had a hand in nearly every major aspect of the commerce and industry of the time.

Sabet was by then more than willing to show his wealth. One indulgence was collecting antiques and jade. In 1971, he recounted later, he had paid “a record $440,000 for an antique desk once owned by the Czarina.” He had installed the desk in the Paris apartment he shared with his wife. He recalled it “had given me more pleasure than anything.”[24]

Sabet also built himself a mansion in Tehran that embodied the Pompeian spirit of the times. Tehran was in those days filled with often-gaudy monuments to the country’s newfound wealth. Sabet’s mansion was not only a trailblazer in this pattern of conspicuous architecture, but his talent for anticipating the needs and mood of the people this time manifested itself in an inadvertent and ironic mode. He had developed, like many of the economic elite, a taste for eighteenth-century prerevolutionary French splendor. Furniture in the style of Louis XIV and Versailles-sized buildings were much in vogue. Wallowing in this faux-Versailles, the rich forgot to remember that after Louis and his grandeur came the deluge and the guillotine. This often embarrassingly tasteless splendor was purchased at the price of the Islamic deluge that followed.

Even in the midst of this building frenzy, Sabet’s house stood out. His was “a magnificent replica of the Petit Trianon, where Marie Antoinette once relaxed in splendor.” The traditional splendor had been improved and updated by “such modern touches as a swimming pool and underground garage.”[25] The house cost a then-staggering fifteen million dollars to build.

Despite the dizzying prosperity of the setting, Sabet’s family remained both devoted and grounded in solid achievement. Sabet was very close to his two sons. The elder, Iraj, graduated from Harvard, while Hormoz received his master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School of Business. Both sons eventually joined their father as partners and associates.

What helped cement Sabet’s close family relations was their devotion to the Bahai faith. Sabet’s own firm belief in the tenets of this nineteenth-century religion was at the core of his character. For a while he was a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of Iran, the council that leads the Bahais of the country. In his own mind, and in the Beytol-Adl A’zam—the spiritual center of the faith in the world—his most important contribution was his purchase and preservation of some of the holiest Bahai sites in Iran—specifically, his success in purchasing the place known as Siahchal (the Dungeon), sacred for the fact that the faith’s prophet was kept there for a while.[26]

Sabet was also religious about paying what the Bahais call Hag-ollah, or “God’s share.” This religiously recommended act of philanthropy should ideally consist of 19 percent—nineteen is a sacred number in the Bahai faith—of what the individual deems to be above and beyond her or his needs. Like much else in the faith, the assessment and the mode of giving are entirely at the discretion of the individual.[27]

It was a mark of Sabet’s character that despite the ardor of his faith, when he had introduced television into Iran and had his own television station, he never succumbed to the temptation of using it for the purpose of proselytizing. Of course he also knew that even a hint of proselytizing would give his enemies—particularly among the clergy—the ammunition they needed to destroy him.

Sabet’s introduction of television to Iran was the result of a sequence of fortuitous events. Sabet’s son, Iraj, on his way back to Iran after finishing his education, brought with him a small closed-circuit television kit. Through his friendship with the queen mother, Sabet arranged for a special showing at her palace in 1959. The camera was set up in one room and the television in the next. There bewildered guests watched the first simulated broadcast in the country. The chosen program involved a child musical prodigy called Googoosh, who in later years became the ultimate diva of Iranian pop music.

The shah was among the guests at his mother’s home that night. He was immediately attracted to the new medium and asked whether it was possible to bring television to Iran. It was an invitation Sabet jumped at. Within months, prosperous inhabitants of Tehran could turn on their television sets every night and see a few hours of programming that included everything from The Untouchables, The Lone Ranger, and Annie Oakley to quiz shows, religious programs, and musical performances.

By the mid-1960s, the size of the audience had sharply increased. The shah had also become fully cognizant of the potential political power of television. His incorrigible “statist” tendency—envisioning the state as the ultimate engine of change and modernization—led to his decision to nationalize the industry. As already recounted, Sabet was forced to sell his television station to the government.

It was the first, but not the last blow the shah would deliver to free enterprise. Around 1975, when the shah began a disastrous policy of forcefully reducing prices, Sabet was threatened with arrest. Like Yeats’s wise protagonist, he decided Iran had become “no country for an old man.”[28] With his wife, he moved to their antique-filled apartment in Paris and began the last, most leisurely stage of his life.

Throughout 1979, the violence of the revolution spread: one of the Pepsi bottling factories was burned down by an angry mob. Sabet decided never to return to Iran. He spent his last years traveling, tending to his vast collection of antiques and works of art, and spending time in America with his grandchildren. And he continued working. Sabet had always kept the office he had rented fifty years earlier at Rockefeller Center. Now he made it the headquarters for the newly founded, increasingly successful, family business.

Although much of his fortune was confiscated by the Islamic regime and although he was in exile, Sabet kept the same unfailingly optimistic spirit that had, all his life, spurred him on to the height of success. It was just this unique combination of optimism, missionary zeal, and entrepreneurial discipline and acumen that made Sabet one of the quintessential entrepreneurs of modern Iran. Sabet himself summed it up beautifully at a rare public appearance. “My fellow countryman,” he said, “do not allow exile or estrangement from home lead you to despair and grief. Rest assured that it must have been divine providence that so many of you have converged in developed western countries. Keep your eyes and ears open, learn their industry and technology; you will one day return home with an invaluable wealth of experience which you can then place at the service of your country’s progress. In this century, your country deserves much prosperity and predominance. Such is your divine mission.”[29] No wonder, then, that when he died in February 1990, the New York Times obituary referred to him as an Iranian “altruist and industrialist.”[30]

In explaining the roots of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a facile dichotomy is often cited that pits a secular, modernizing camp, led by the shah and centered in the northern parts of Tehran, against the foes of modernity, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, inspired by religious fervor and centered in the bazaar. The problem with this neat conceptual construct is that it bears little resemblance to reality. Many of Iran’s important innovators in industry and commerce were devout Muslims, and the Sadat-Tehrani family is a perfect example of that group.

Seyyed Jalal, the patriarch of the family, was a man defined by his religious devotion, his love of family, and his rags-to-riches story—one he never tired of retelling. Even the family name, particularly the use of Sadat (plural for Seyyed, used to refer to those claiming prophetic descent) hinted at their religious bent.

One of the biggest fortunes in textile manufacturing in Iran, whose yearly production equaled that of the entire country of Canada,1 had begun from a veritable hole in the wall in one of Tehran’s bazaars. The old man’s acumen and honesty and the trained business professionalism of his son, Roknaddin, combined to transform a small company manufacturing socks into a vertically integrated giant set of interlocking companies, producing everything from curtains and acrylic string to socks and cotton fabric.

Seyyed Jalal was born in Tehran in 1902 (1282). His father and brother were both members of the clergy. Many in his family were Sufis—mystics of Islam—some even claiming karamet, or special powers claimed by a handful of Sufis. Some claim to walk on water, others see the future or the past, a few other peer into the soul of men. Seyyed Jalal’s uncle was said to have once prepared a full feast for a bevy of unexpected guests from thin air, without access to any ingredients.[2] Seyyed Jalal himself often referred to a miracle in his own life. Long before his days of affluence, one of his brothers became gravely ill, in critical need of medical care. When a doctor was brought, he prescribed expensive medication, but money was wanting in the family. A despondent Seyyed Jalal hit the streets, hoping against hope for some help, and he found coins valued at exactly the price of the needed medication.[3]

Seyyed Jalal’s piety was strictly private. He made no effort to impose the fervor of his faith on his family or others. For many years, his wife appeared in public without the Islamic veil. Late in life, of her own volition, she turned more religious and began wearing the veil. In this matter, Seyyed Jalal made no effort to enforce his views on his wife. In fact, he was open to new ideas and unabashedly modern not just in his business practices, but in many of his values as well. He was, for example, an advocate of education for all of his children and grandchildren, including the girls.

He had married Zakie Alal-Hessab in 1929 (1308), and two years later they had their first child. He forbade his children to fast when they were too young. Unlike nearly every man of his generation, he was not averse to undertaking chores around the house, including making breakfast for the children in the morning and reading to them in the evening. Even when nurses and nannies were aplenty in the household, he insisted on performing at least these two tasks. His tender ways and the generosity of his soul endeared him to his children and to his many grandchildren. “For all of the children in our large family,” his granddaughter Azi Hariri remembered, “he was certainly the most favorite.”[4] Like most men of his generation, he was called “Aga Joon” around the house.

But beneath the amities and the tenderness of his behavior at home, he was a shrewd, calculating, tough businessman, impeccably honest and scrupulous. Within ten years, he transformed his rented hole in the wall first into an office, then into a factory, and eventually, with the help of his son, into the biggest textile manufacturing company in Iran and one of the biggest in the Middle East.

Roknaddin Sadat-Tehrani was born on April 29, 1931 (8 Ordibehesth 1310). He went to school in Tehran—Kherad elementary and Sharaf high school—and was not only at the top of his class but was invariably the top student in the country. In 1949, he entered Tehran University, where he majored in economics. He also had an affinity for theology and took a few courses in that field. Like his father, he has been religious all his life, and like his father, his piety has remained consistently private.

He was sixteen when he convinced his father to give him a role in the family business. Seyyed Jalal had by that time opened a store where he sold everything from perfume to purses. He entrusted the management of the store to the young Roknaddin. With the money he made during his time at the store, the son entered into a partnership with his father, and together they bought a small shop that produced textiles. The exact terms of this partnership later became the subject of some controversy.[5] But if there were really any issues, the family handled them with dignity and with a refreshing absence of rancor. The company was called Pars Trico. When Roknaddin went to the United States to begin graduate school, his father took over the management of the company. By 1978, the network of factories and companies that had grown out of Pars Trico, including their famous flagship company, Starlight, were worth more than one hundred million dollars and employed over three thousand people.[6]

Roknaddin finished Tehran University in 1953 at the top of his class. Academic excellence has been a constant theme all of his life, and in exile, basking in the luxury of hindsight when talking about his sterling academic record, he laments, “of leisure I have had little all my life.”[7] But of course there were ample rewards for his habit of hard work, and among them was the fact that as the top student of his class he qualified for a government scholarship to study abroad. He chose the United States and arrived in New York in 1953. By 1960, he had received first an M.B.A. and then a Ph.D. in managerial economics, both from New York University. His areas of expertise were the uses of planning, quality control, and operation research in management. He wrote a nine-hundred-page dissertation on the subject of planning in the Iranian economy.

Among his professors was the famous Peter Drucker—a best-selling author and celebrity professor.[8] Roknaddin’s wife, Mahvash Esalat, was a student in England before her marriage. As soon as she married, she quit school.

Back in Iran, Roknaddin had first to compensate the government for the scholarship he had received by working in the public sector. He joined the government and was soon named undersecretary in the Ministry of Economy. He served in that capacity for eight years (1960–68). He often worked eighteen hours a day, attending to his governmental duties all day and working at his family business at the end of his office workday. And, in addition to that, he was soon to become a father.

Finally, in 1969, he finished the period of his mandatory government service and immediately quit his job and joined the family business. He had developed a reputation for honesty, diligence, and discipline. Relying on his own reputation and on his father’s name and knack for understanding and mastering the ways of the bazaar, and using what he had learned of management from the likes of Drucker, he transformed their company into the most advanced one in Iran’s textile industry.

Textiles were one of the first areas where Iranian industry began to grow. The Kazerouni family, for example, had by the early 1930s created a name for themselves producing fabric that was, by the order of the government, used to make all military uniforms in Iran. What was new about the Sadat-Tehrani venture was not only its size but also its success in maintaining technological and managerial parity with the best companies in Asia and the Middle East. “Had the revolution not happened,” Roknaddin suggests, “not only Starlight, but many other industrial companies, would have become giants, far more developed than either Turkey or South Korea.”9 While it is hard to test the veracity of this prediction, what the statement betrays is the sense of confidence this class of Iranian industrialists had at that time. The revolution squandered that confidence and replaced it with corruption at home, and disappointment, if not despair, in the diaspora.

Because of the rapid rate of expansion of their company and their need for skilled labor, in 1976 they hired several hundred laborers from South Korea. One of their factories was, in jest, renamed Seoul. Starlight had by the mid-1970s become the jewel in the crown of their many investments. Its twenty-six hundred weaving machines worked around the clock in three shifts, and it stopped production only two days a year—not
on the Persian new year, as was the practice of almost every other company, but on two religious days (the day the prophet Mohammad died and the day Shiism’s third Imam, Hussein, was killed).

During the 1970s, the Sadat-Tehrani business expanded in several directions, mostly into integrated parts of the textile industry. The only exception was their investment in two banks—Shahriyar Bank and Bank of Foreign Trade of Iran. In the realm of textiles, their most important investment was in a factory that produced acrylic material, the first of its kind in Iran. After increasing their capacity to produce almost ten million square feet of fabric a year, they entered into a partnership with a South Korean company to set up a factory to produce more than a million ready-to-wear suits annually. When they ran into shortages of the cardboard cartons used to ship their products, they set up a factory to produce them. In all of this enterprise, father and son worked in tandem.

There was, however, one big difference between Seyyed Jalal and his son. Whereas Roknaddin believed in reinvesting all the profits back into the business, Seyyed Jalal, like many in his generation, had a particular affinity for buying land and buildings. By the time of the revolution, he owned millions of dollars worth of real estate in and around Tehran.

Neither Seyyed Jalal, as the patriarch of the family, nor Roknaddin were given to ostentation or conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, they spared no effort to afford their families comfort, even luxury. The combination of Roknaddin’s own and his father’s probity and experience, and his reputation as someone with considerable erudition and experience in problems of economics and planning, made him one of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda’s favorite advisors. After the military coup of 1972 in Morocco, Hoveyda, at the behest of the shah, convened an ad hoc committee of trusted captains of industry and asked them to keep him abreast of developments in the country and inform him of instances of corruption. Roknaddin was asked to be a member of that committee.[10]

The work of the committee was soon suspended and less than a decade later the Islamic Revolution came. The Sadat Tehrani family was among those whose assets were confiscated by the regime. Even the family mausoleum, built near a holy shrine and at great expense with marble imported from Italy, was taken by the revolutionaries.

Both Roknaddin and Seyyed Jalal left Iran when their companies were “nationalized.” But after a few months, Seyyed Jalal decided to return. “I am afraid of no one save God,” he told his concerned family. He wanted to try to retrieve the properties that had been confiscated. After a long, often heart-wrenching battle with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the revolutionary courts, he succeeded in having only his house and one piece of property returned to him.

On October 16, 1993, when he was almost ninety years old, he died. Five years later, his wife passed away. His son and his three daughters continue to live in exile. Many of Seyyed Jalal’s grandchildren have become impressively successful in the diaspora. Azi Hariri, for example, has built a successful multimillion dollar business with her husband in California and devotes much of her time to philanthropy. The Iranian Scholarship Foundation11 she launched initially almost entirely with her own money is one of the most successful ventures of its kind. “Aga Joon was my hero, and if he were alive, I am sure this is what he would have wanted me to do,” she said.

The Sudavarsem bodied cosmopolitan entrepreneurship in Iran. The three brothers who established their family as an industrial powerhouse in Iran were equally at home in Kashan and in Kiev, as comfortable speaking Persian as Russian, and as much at home in their luxurious summer dacha in Central Asia—the Firuze, as the dacha was called—as in the suburbs of Tehran.[1] For many years before the Bolshevik Revolution, the family lived in the Russian city of Ashgabat, and their daily routines “were just like scenes from a Chekhov play—with their European-style homes, their liveried servants, their tendency to speak French outside and Persian at home, and their habit of taking their carriage for a ride around town in the afternoon.” At the same time, their business empire covered almost the entire “Greater Iran map—from Tashkent to the Persian Gulf.”[2] The Sudavars had a unique trajectory in the history of Iranian industry.

In the annals of modern industry in Iran, several recurring patterns emerge. Most industrial groups were begun by brothers; most began in the bazaar; most had one of the younger siblings, or more often one of their children, educated in the West, and with their help, they introduced innovations in production and management; most had at least one family member enter the government; and nearly all of them began their industrial production assembling pieces produced in the West, with labor the only real value added in Iran.
Gradually, by the late 1960s, as Iran was entering what Walt Rostow called the “takeoff” stage—the “watershed event of life in modern society,” when an underdeveloped traditional economy is poised to become an industrialized country (or to reach “maturity,” in Rostow’s words), assembly-line industries gradually gave way to producing the components and the machines themselves.[3] The way a human embryo is said to mimic in little less than nine months the entire history of life on earth, the Sudavar brothers captured in their trajectory—from mercantilism to assembly, and then to full industrial production of machines and commodities, and finally an aborted “takeoff”—the contours of the development of modern Iranian industry.

At the same time, the brothers’ expansion exemplified rational horizontal concentration of industry. On the eve of the revolution, their central holding company, the Khawar Industrial Group, included factories that produced trucks, engines, upholstery, spare parts, suspension systems, and even a network of service centers for their trucks. Finally, even in their decision to include a member of the royal family as a partner in their company—in their case, Princess Ashraf—they resembled many other major Iranian entrepreneurs.

If in Iran the Sudavars epitomized much that was common in their generation of industrialists, in exile they came to be identified as pioneering visionary philanthropists. When Margaret Thatcher began to cut funding for universities, and the Iranian studies program at Oxford and Cambridge were about to lose much of their funding, Fereydun Sudavar and his wife stepped in and endowed both programs. They became the first Iranian family to endow professorial chairs of Iranian studies at major universities—a chair in Persian Studies at Oxford (the Masoumah and Fereydun Sudavar Chair of Persian Studies), followed by an endowed lectureship in Iranian studies at Cambridge. Even in Iran, the older Sudavar brother, Samad, had married into the family of Hadj Hoseyn Malek, a name that had become synonymous with philanthropy in Iran.

Before Reza Shah ordered every Iranian to pick a family name, and banned foreign names for citizens of the country, the Sudavar family was called Kashanchi—a name that combined their family roots in the city of Kashan with the suffix of “chi” connoting the family’s Russian ties. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the family moved from Kashan to Mashad, and eventually to Ashgabat. By the late nineteenth century, the Kashanchi family was based as much in Central Asia as in Iran. They traded with China and India and for a while concentrated their trade on tea—which in those days was, on account of its scarcity and high demand, called “black gold.”

The Sudavar brothers’ father, Mohammad Kashanchi, and their mother, Masoumeh, the daughter of powerful gentry, established their main house in one of Ashgabat’s most fashionable neighborhoods. Samad was the second child, born in 1904 (1283), two years after his sister. His brother Ahmad was born in 1907 (1286), and his third brother, Fereydun, in 1909 (1288). The children lived a truly cosmopolitan life: they spoke Persian at home, Russian in school, and like other Russian gentry of the time, French on occasions of ostentation. The oldest son, Samad, became a polyglot, mastering German, Turkish, and English in addition to the three languages spoken at home and school.

The family’s idyllic Chekhovian life came to an abrupt end with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. When they learned that the Bolsheviks were about to capture the city, they fled in the dark of the early morning hours. They hid some of their valuables in their home’s wall heaters, in the hope of an early return. Dreams of a speedy return are a staple of the exilic experience. They also hid what they could in different parts of the carriage they hurriedly took to Iran.[4]

In Iran, the family settled in the city of Meshed, living for a while in a house lent to them by a family friend, Hadj Hoseyn Malek. The three sons enrolled in the city’s schools, augmenting what they learned there with special tutors. But the provincialism and forced pieties of the city of Meshed, defined more than anything else by the shrine of the Eighth Imam buried there, was more than the Kashanchi boys could bear. No sooner had World War I ended than the oldest son, Samad, walked into his father’s office and demanded to be sent to Europe. “He had a gun in his hands,” his daughter said, “and told our grandfather, send me to Europe or else I will shoot myself.”[5]

Samad did not have to resort to self-slaughter; instead he was soon on his way to Berlin. More than a few of Iran’s future political and cultural elite—from Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh to Taghi Arani—were in Berlin at the time. Some of them were organized under the banner of the Kaveh magazine.6 Eventually, recognizing that there were simply too many distractions in Berlin, Samad decided to move to Leipzig, where he began to study civil engineering.

Although he was a cultured man of myriad interests—from Western classical music to Persian prose and poetry—and though he was immersed in the values of Weimar Germany, he was not a serious student. Even in the relative isolation of Leipzig he never finished college, and he returned to Iran in 1933, bent on making his career in the world of business. He had established close ties with several prominent German companies, and they helped him with his business career but hurt him during World War II.

Around the time Samad returned, his two other brothers, Ahmad and Fereydun, also came back to Iran. Ahmad had gone to Paris when Samad set out for Germany, and finished a bachelor’s degree in business management. Fereydun, on the other hand, left for Europe in 1924 in the company of his father. He, too, was no scholar, but a bon vivant. Ahmad and Samad began to work at Bank Melli, the country’s main financial organization, which was directed at the time by a German named Lindenblatt. Samad was soon named the head of foreign currency office of the bank, and it was there that he met Jalal Shadman, a powerful politician who became a lifelong friend of him and his family.

Before the end of the 1930s, two of the three brothers were married—each to girls from prominent families. Samad’s wife, Ezat, was a woman of exceptional qualities. She was a top student in her class, spoke English fluently, and was an avid fan of classical Persian literature. She was also the daughter of Hadj Hoseyn Malek, one of the country’s richest and most philanthropic men. It was a marriage of love. Fereydun, too, was married by the time World War II began. His wife was a descendent of the Qajar family.

By that time Samad had begun working for a company whose goal was to barter heavy German industrial equipment for Iranian raw materials. Reza Shah was keen on industrializing Iran rapidly, and the Nazis, eager to gain a foothold in the Persian Gulf, were willing to give him whatever he wanted. But Reza Shah’s victory was but a chimera. Increased trade with German ultimately led to his downfall. Samad was the man responsible for much of the increased trade between the two countries. In the process, he established contacts with many of Germany’s preeminent industrial firms, and the contacts proved invaluable in later years. Throughout these years, Ahmad continued to work at the bank, while Fereydun was still trying to find his field of interest.
The invasion of Iran by British and Soviet forces brought about profound changes in the lives of the Sudavar brothers. Samad was the most affected. His ties with German companies made him a suspect in the eyes of the British, and when they grew concerned about a possible new front being created by a German “fifth column” in Iran, they arrested about two hundred of Iran’s political, economic, and military elite. Samad was among them. By then he and his wife had two children. While Ahmad stayed at the bank, Fereydun found employment with a company created by the Allies and entrusted with the task of ensuring that supplies reached the Soviet Union’s beleaguered army. Through Fereydun’s influence, the family kept in contact with Samad. After about two years in prison, Samad was finally released.

As soon as the war ended, Ahmad decided to leave Iran and settle in the United States, where he soon married an American woman. Samad, on the other hand, began to work in the business offices of the Kataneh brothers—considered by many as the harbingers of entrepreneurial modernity in the early postwar years.[7]

But the Sudavar brothers were not happy working for others. When the dust had settled after the war, Samad set out for Germany and, using the contacts he had established in his earlier sojourns, signed an agreement with the Mercedes-Benz Company to be their sole representative in Iran. At the same time, he imported two thousand buses and turned around and sold seven hundred of them directly to the government, who used them to begin the Tehran busing company. At the same time, Ahmad was busy signing dealership agreements with a number of American companies like Caterpillar. The three brothers joined forces and formed a company in the late 1940s that was the genesis of what became, in less than two decades, one of the biggest industrial conglomerates in Iran.

The end of the 1940s were also a period of political turmoil in Iran, and one consequence of these changing times was the decision by Samad to enter the world of politics. With the help of his father-in-law, who was one of the most influential citizens of the district of Khorasan, Samad was elected to the Majlis from the city of Meshed. In the Parliament, he was among those who voted for the passage of the bill nationalizing Iranian oil. But he soon parted company with Mohammad Mossadeq. Samad agreed to become an economic advisor to the minister of the treasury, Ali Amini, in the Zahedi cabinet that replaced Mossadeq. It has been suggested that in that period he wrote a proposal for the Iranian government arguing for the necessity of establishing an economy completely independent of oil.[8]

The years after the fall of Mossadeq were a period of tragedy and rapid growth for the Sudavar family. Samad died of a heart attack in 1954. His son, Abolala, believes the attack was the result of “anger and grief; the man he had helped and promoted in the company betrayed him, and the anguish was just too much for him to bear.”9
The everyday management of the business was left in the hands of Ahmad. Fereydun, in the meantime, continued to be a partner but had little to do with the everyday management of the company.

More important, not long after Samad’s death, the brothers lost the very lucrative Mercedes-Benz dealership to the Khayami brothers. The Khayamis had been the representative of the Sudavar Company in the city of Meshed, and “they were aggressive and ambitious.” Through the Sudavars they met the German executives in charge of the Mercedes-Benz. The fact that “German executives were the most corrupt,” Abolala claims, helped the Khayami brothers to achieve their goal.10 The Khayamis signed a licensing agreement with Mercedes-Benz for the production of buses in Iran. The Sudavar brothers were left with no choice but to concentrate on the import of Mercedes-Benz sedans in Iran. They also signed an agreement to begin producing Mercedes-Benz trucks in Iran. It was the beginning of the Sudavars’ entry into the realm of industrial production.

Moreover, convinced that they lost the bus dealership because they lacked political muscle, and worried about the predatory designs of their competitors, Ahmad decided to bring the shah’s twin sister into the company as a partner. She was a silent partner in the company, and on the eve of the revolution she owned 6.25 percent of the company shares. (She had initially been given a gift of 5 percent ownership, and over the years, as a result of different buy-outs, her share had increased.) On the eve of the revolution, she demanded her dividends for the past three years. They amounted to twenty million tooman ($3 million). But as she had given the shares to her children, Abolala, the new chairman of the Sudavar companies, insisted that the checks could be made out only in the names of the legal owners of the stocks. The revolution came before they could resolve these differences, and, ironically, the last checks a Sudavar signed for the company were to the three children of Princess Ashraf, whose properties had been confiscated by the new Islamic government.11 These accounting complications were all the results of decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the early 1960s, the government policy of support for burgeoning Iranian industries began to unfold. Samad’s two sons, Abolala and Hoseyn Ali, both graduates of Stanford University, also returned home and began to exert influence on the daily affairs of the company, and to introduce new models of management and production. The Sudavar companies were soon among the most successful in the country.

In 1967, Ahmad died, and Fereydun took over as chairman of the board. His children had no interest in the family business, and Ahmad’s only child, a daughter named Layla, was far more interested in Qajar portraits than corporate policies. She became a worldclass expert on the art of that period.[12] As a consequence, Samad’s sons’ influence over the company increased. “We were more interested in transfer of technology than just the assembly of parts imported from the West,” Abolala suggested.[13] By the mid-1970s, they succeeded in producing over 55 percent of the materials used in every bus produced by their company in Iran. During this period, the Sudavar conglomerate employed about five thousand people.

The partnership ended two years before the revolution, when Fereydun sold his shares to other members of the family and left Iran. In exile, after the tragic death of his two sons, he first established two chairs of Iranian studies and eventually left the remainder of his fortune to a foundation dedicated to the promotion of culture and education. For the rest of the family, who stayed in Iran, the revolution first brought hope but before long, despair. The new generation of Sudavars, young managers like Abolala and his brother, Hoseyn Ali, were unhappy with the shah and his authoritarian rule. The fact that the king decided economic policy often on his own and changed his mind on a whim—like his decision to force industrialists to sell more than half of their company’s shares to workers—were anathema to them. The shah’s policy of using force to bring down prices was also something the Sudavars, like nearly all industrialists of the time, found ill advised. “We had second thoughts about expansion from the mid-1970s, when the shah embarked on his policy of using force to lower prices.”14 When the shah and the royal family were no longer in power, the younger Sudavars imagined that private industry would blossom unfettered. It did not take long for them to be disabused of their romantic notion. Eventually, their companies were confiscated by the new regime and after much difficulty, the remaining children of Samad and Ahmad left Iran.

Sudavar children spent their time in exile in a variety of endeavors—from business and scholarship to collecting antiques and furniture design. At least three of them write on a variety of topics, all relating to Iran or Central Asia.[15] Fateme Sudavar Farmanfarma’ian helps run the foundation created by her uncle. Her brother, Abolala pursues his passion for antiques and furniture design and indulges in his tireless passion for filing lawsuits against the American government, based on the Treaty of Amity of 1955, and against the government of the Islamic Republic, for confiscating the family wealth.16 His Art of the Persian Courts17 is monumental in the scope of the beauty and grace of the art reproduced on its pages. Abolala’s erudite commentary on the variety of Persian art forms—from calligraphy and tiles to miniatures and portraits—is impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that a good part of the art discussed in the book is from the private collection of the Sudavar family. The cultured cosmopolitanism of the book conjures that of the earlier generations of Sudavars, living Chekhovian lives in Russia. In their beginning is, as the poet said, their end.

Majid A’lam
Ali Ebrahimi
Hamid Ghadimi
Akbar Alex Lari
Amir Malekyazdi
Fereydoon Rabii

In the mid 1970s, when Tehran was a virtual El Dorado and the shah was at the height of his pomp and power, when the circle of friends and family with whom he socialized had shrunk to a handful of people, and when the grandiosity of his sense of self as well as security concerns made it difficult for him to visit homes outside the royal compounds, there was one party he never missed. It took place once a year, and the host was his oldest friend, Majid A’lam.

In the status-conscious culture of the time, when proximity to power was power, and when any hint of familiarity with the shah was the most coveted prize of all, an invitation to the A’lam party was desperately sought by the social climbers and invariably accepted by anyone lucky enough to be invited.

The party would take months of planning, from decisions about everything from the menu to the music to consultations with the shah’s security detail to ensure that all necessary precautions were taken. Sometimes food was flown in from Europe. The shah, for example, loved steaks, and finding the best cuts and making them available for the king was only one of many concerns. Iran A’lam, a hostess at once graceful, tasteful, and tempestuous, handled all issues of décor and decorum, while her husband, Majid, had the ultimate say in the composition of the guest list.

Much thought went into finding the right kind of dance, particularly for the period after the arrival of the shah and his queen. As everyone wanted a chance to dance with one or the other of the royals, and as it was gauche to allow someone to go up to the queen or the shah and ask for a dance, the A’lams, helped by masters of protocol, finally decided on American line dancing—in time with the music and at the command of the lyrics, partners are changed; thus chance, not individual effort, would choose partners for the royal family.
For the children of the A’lam family, permission to watch the gala was the biggest delight of the year. “I can’t tell you how nervous and happy I was,” his daughter said, “when for the first time I was allowed to come downstairs and meet with the Shah.” Even in exile, twenty years after the revolution, she talks of the king with deference bordering on hero-worship. A’lam himself, on the other hand, has a more sober view of the shah. After the queen mother and the shah’s siblings, no one had known the shah as long as he had. In fact, they were playmates when the shah was just another boy named Mohammad Reza.

They met when he was about eight years old (and Mohammad Reza was about five). A’lam’s father was a respected doctor, a physician to kings and courtiers. Mohammad Reza’s father, Reza Khan, was at the time a powerful general, the country’s “strongman” but still only the minister of war, and eventually prime minister. He was all but illiterate, but he wanted his children to mingle only with the sons and daughters of aristocracy. A’lam was of the aristocracy of the mind and of the land. Majid and Mohammad Reza became playmates around 1924. A’lam’s new friend also had a twin sister. She was, in her own words, “what the Americans call a tomboy,”[1] and she insisted on playing with the boys. “I can’t tell you how often I have beaten up as a child the future king or his twin sister,” A’lam said, with sadness and resignation on his face.

I met him at his house in San Diego. His reputation preceded him. He had been one of Iran’s biggest contractors. He had been the shah’s partner; in every major construction contract, he had gotten a piece of the action. He was rich, they said, beyond dreams. When I was on my way to his house, with these rumors in the back of my mind, I had a vision of a mansion of gaudy proportions and gilded décor in mind. When I finally arrived at the address and saw a simple one-story bungalow in a declining middle-class neighborhood of the city, I was convinced I had come to the wrong address. There must be, I thought, another street with the same name, where the master builder of the age of El Dorado lives in exile. But as it turned out, it was the right house. As I sat in my car contemplating my next move, a man with a raincoat pulled over his head to keep himself dry, knocked on the window, pointed to the house and said, “Are you looking for our house?” I followed him in.

Much to my surprise, there was no hint of past grandeur and glitz in the house. It was sparsely furnished with a simple dining room table, a threadbare old couch, and a matching divan. A small television was playing in the corner of the room. There were no pictures or paintings on the walls. Majid A’lam, his right arm immobilized after a stroke, dressed in warm-ups, with grief and sad resignation etched on his face, greeted me and soon began to tell his Shakespearean tale of woe and wonder, of wealth and loss.

He was born in 1915 (1294) in Tehran to a prosperous family of court physicians, politicians, and landed gentry. His mother was the oldest daughter of Vosug al-Dowleh, one of the most controversial politicians in the Iran of his time. His father, Dr. Amir A’lam, was the son of “Persian consul at Damascus . . . educated at Damascus, Beirut, and Lyons where he obtained a medical degree. . . . He took part in politics through the influence of his father-in-law . . . court physician in 1925 and subsequent years. . . . Helped to found the Red Lion and Sun Society of Iran.”[2] Majid was about eight when his father took him to a stranger’s house, introduced him to a boy named Mohammad Reza, and told him they should play together. This was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until the last days of the shah’s life. Just as suddenly, one day later, when Majid was to play with his friends, he was taken not to the house he knew, but to a larger, lonelier mansion. Liveried footmen and guards, attendants and soldiers now ran the place. Before he was allowed to enter the room where his friend waited, he was given some new orders. “From now on, you address His Highness only as Your Highness. No more first names.” But when they were finally left alone, the young Mohammad Reza told him, “In front of them, call me what they say. When we are alone, you can still call me by my old name.”[3]

When a special school was set up at the court to accommodate the crown prince and a number of boys were chosen by Reza Shah as his son’s classmates, Majid was one of them. But the daily grind of courtly solemnities made a boyish friendship between the two no longer possible. Eventually the crown prince was sent to Switzerland for education. A couple of years later Majid, after finishing high school in Tehran, set out for Europe. He went to Paris, where he was accepted to the Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious school of engineering in France. In later years, the fact that he had been a graduate of such a prestigious school helped mitigate the invariable tendency of people to attribute his success to his close ties with the shah.
After he finished his engineering degree and returned to Iran, it did not take him long to reconnect with his old friend who was by then the crown prince. When the latter became king, the friendship continued unabated. A’lam was for the next three decades a regular at the court and at and the dinner parties and card games that became the almost ritualistic pattern of court life. When the shah ended poker playing and insisted on bridge, Majid A’lam was a permanent fixture of these games. It was the unwritten rule that no politics was discussed while they played. If in the course of a game an aide approached and needed either to talk with the shah or to have him talk on the phone, A’lam and the other players would immediately leave the room and wait until they were called back. When in late 1978 an aide asked the shah to talk on the phone and the shah ordered A’lam and the other players to stay, they all knew, according to A’lam, that “the end was near, and the shah had lost the stomach to fight and had resigned to his fate.”[4]

In the course of those tense last weeks, one night as the game was on, the television in the room was broadcasting the press conference of the newly appointed prime minister, Shapur Bakhtiyar. The shah watched the interview intently and halfway through told his bridge partners, “See how he is handling the press. Where was he all of these years?” A’lam, emboldened by the recognition that the end was already here, dared to tell the shah, “Your Majesty, he was right here, and when I tried to hire him as an engineer, it was SAVAK that blocked it.” There was silence.[5]

Aside from his friendship with the shah, what afforded A’lam a privileged position on many contracts was the fact that he was also a close friend of General Mohammad Khatam, who was known to give contracts only to his cronies and silent partners. It was later claimed that Majid, along with the queen’s uncle, Diba, “were awarded about eighty percent of all big governmental contracts.”6 It is impossible to confirm the veracity of this claim, and though it seems to be an exaggeration, it was nevertheless the reality of the public’s perception. What is true is that A’lam’s company was considered one of the most powerful contractors in the country. At one time, he also expanded into banking, becoming the chairman of the board of a bank he established and called Kar Bank.[7]

Moreover, A’lam was the shah’s partner in at least one endeavor. In A’lam’s own telling, one night, as they were playing bridge, they were casually talking about his attempt to start a cement factory in Iran and how he was short of money. “How much are you short?” the shah asked, and when A’lam told him the sum—about a million tooman ($150,000 at the time)—the shah immediately agreed to put up the money and become a silent partner.[8] As it turned out, in the mid-1970s, when there were chronic shortages of raw material as the result of the boom in the economy, particularly in the construction sector, A’lam’s ownership of the cement factory became a matter of considerable controversy. He was accused of hoarding cement in a secret storage area, and, at least according to Fardust, a criminal complaint was filed against him.[9]

On that rainy day in San Diego, there was no sign of his storied wealth. The diaspora rumor mill had been no less active about him and his activities. He had lost a lot of money in Hawaii, whisper had it. Others suggested that after the death of his son in a skiing accident in Switzerland, he had lost his joie de vivre. His wife, Iran, who was in the 1970s Tehran’s preeminent hostess, was now a shadow of her glamorous self. She, too, had been a permanent fixture at court parties and bridge games. Like the shah, she was an insomniac, and when one night in the mid-1970s she talked of the wonders of a new sleeping pill, the shah immediately asked for some. She caused the ire of the shah’s aides and physician when, in her characteristic candid fashion, she gave the shah a few of her pills. A few nights later, at another bridge party after another dinner, the shah complained that the pill had not worked. “It works for me,” she said, “it allows me a few hours of comfortable sleep.”10 When I saw her, clearly the pills were no longer working. When her husband, talking of the revolution, suggested, “We gave the country to these mullahs on a silver platter; the shah had simply lost it, and we didn’t do our share,” much to A’lam’s consternation, she jumped in, defending the shah and casting aspersions on all his critics. She died in 2006 after a long ailment.

By the late 1960s, Iran was beginning to reverse the “brain drain,” the economically debilitating malaise that afflicts third-world countries and results in the loss of their best and brightest to the more comfortable climes of the West. As petrodollars began to pour into Iran, and the Iranian government began an ambitious policy of economic development and industrial growth, more and more of Iran’s foreign-trained technocrats and engineers returned to Iran. Many were recent graduates from some of America’s top universities, and many more had spent time working in major American companies and learning firsthand modern managerial and technological innovations. These Iranians were proud of their accomplishments and their know-how and no longer saw Europeans and Americans as advisors or mentors—as the earlier generation of technocrats tended to do—but as their equal partners.[1] Their mastery of the English language, their intimate knowledge of new developments in their fields, their new-found sense of national pride, and their proud membership in the global community of technocracy made these “Young Turks” great innovators at home and tough negotiators abroad. Ali Ebrahimi was the epitome of this new kind of Iranian technocratic elite.

His burly built, his athletic gait and deportment, his quick and bilingual wit, his impressive command of business trends around the world, his penchant for frank and honest discourse, his dedication to hard work, and his willingness to delegate authority enabled him and his partner, Akbar Lari, to establish one of the foremost construction companies in Iran in less than a decade. But the revolution destroyed the company. When he built a second fortune, again in less than a decade but this time in America—no less impressive in size and the pace of its accumulation—he proved that that his meteoric rise was not a fluke or an accident of history.

Ali was born in 1941 (1320) in the city of Sabzevar, one of the oldest municipalities in all of Iran. The city has been known for many centuries as a particularly devout center of Shiism. One of the most renowned Islamic theologians, Hadj Mullah Ja’far Sabzevari, was one of the town’s favorite sons.[2] But by the mid–twentieth century, Sabzevar was a town of only 28,750 people and, save for the lofty mountains on the horizon, altogether bereft of grandeur. At the time of Ali’s birth, his paternal and maternal families were considered part of the political and economic elite of the city. His father came from a family of landed wealth, while his mother’s fortune was in trade. He was the tenth child of the family. It was a sobering sign of the times that although his mother was pregnant twenty times, only three of her children survived the traumas of birth and the dread diseases of infancy. Ali’s childhood, spent in the busy households of his father and grandparents, was full of love and affection. His uncles, the Rezai brothers, were active in city politics and had ambitions to represent the city in the Parliament. Like other candidates of the time, stuffing ballots, paying for votes, and busing peasants on election days were part of their uncles’ election strategy, and observing and sometimes participating in these activities are part of Ebrahimi’s fond childhood memories.

His mother was a devout and strict Shiite, but his father was a bon vivant, known for his jovial company, his poker parties, and his intellectual curiosities. He was something of a rebel without a cause, or in his son’s words, a “rich outcast.”[3] Ali’s mother doted on her only son. With the bitter memory of her many dead infants always on her mind, she insisted on sleeping in the same bed with her sole surviving son—a practice she continued until the day he left home. Her selfless love, and her gravitas as a member of her large family, made her not just a pivotal figure in his son’s life, but also in the lives of her brothers. “Without her,” lamented Ali Rezai, “none of us could have accomplished what we did.”[4]

Ali was twelve when at his own insistence he was sent to Tehran. He enrolled in the Alborz boarding school. Ali’s accent, bearing hints of his provincial birthplace, made him for a while the butt of cruel adolescent jokes. But he was capable of physically defending his turf. He never shied away from confronting or fighting his abrasive fellow students. On more than one occasion, he faced disciplinary action for his behavior. More important, he was a good student, and at Alborz that counted for much. “I was never at the top of the class,” he says, “but always amongst the better ones.”5 In academics, math was his favorite subject. He was—and remains today—jovial and given to easy banter and light chatter with friends. He is also something of an intellectual manqué. History has always been a passion. The world of ideas, particularly those relating to the history of religion and the dangers of obscurantism, are of particular interest to him. He was thus an avid reader and has remained one all his life. “All we have suffered in our history,” he often declares, “has been because of religion, and the ability of religious leaders to abuse the trust of the people. Unless we can expose their hypocrisy, we can’t fix the mess in Iran.”6 He has written a still unpublished essay explaining some of his ideas in this area.[7] In spite of his busy life as a developer, he still devours books on Iran and the critical history of religions.

Ali was also an athlete and still regularly plays different sports in the exclusive club he frequents in the city of Houston.[8] In his youth he played soccer, but Greco-Roman wrestling was his forte. When he came to America, his wresting experience became his first source of revenue.[9]

In 1959, Ali came to the United States. While his father was ambivalent about sending his son abroad, his mother was resolute about it. Ali arrived on the East Coast, landing where some of his cousins and nephews had landed before. Like many other Iranian students of his generation, these relatives became his de facto guides and gurus in academic matters. In fact, he and two cousins decided to enroll in the same college. For a while, the four young men drove around the East and made cold calls to admissions offices, asking whether they would accept the foursome into their colleges. They visited a number of institutions, from Columbia and Fordham to military schools that happened to be on their path.

It was surely a strange way to find a college, and the results was no less strange. Ali ended up in a small Presbyterian college in West Virginia called Davis and Elkins College, where students were expected to attend church at least three times a week. Established in 1904, and located in the city of Elkins, in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, the private college was established by two American senators, named Davis and Elkins. What the school lacked in academic excellence it more than made up in the fact that two-thirds of the school’s students were girls, and for a young man from a traditional family in Sabzevar, that was the very heaven.

To his credit, Ali stayed in this heaven only one year. His eyes were on a bigger prize. As soon as he learned the academic ropes and as soon as he cut the emotional umbilical cord that had kept him tied to his cousins, he transferred to the University of Maryland, where he joined the department of civil engineering. His facility with mathematics was now an asset.

Although in his first year he had worked at sundry part-time jobs—teaching GrecoRoman wrestling and working as an attendant at an amusement park—his main source of support had come from his parents. But by 1961, his family fortunes were changing. There was a land reform going on in Iran and much of his father’s income had come from the villages that were about to be sold by the government to the peasants who worked on them. Ali decided to support himself and began to work in a restaurant.

By then he had to provide not just for himself but also for his family. In his first year in the United States, he had met and married an American woman. Before long they had a son. The marriage was something of a secret. Ali was reluctant to break the news to his parents—particularly to his mother, who would find the idea of her only son marrying a non-Muslim difficult to fathom.

In summer of 1964, Ali paid a visit to Iran, and in his own words, “for the first time began to think about the country in a serious manner.”10 The country was changing, and Ali liked the pattern of change. He decided that the shah must be supported in his modernizing effort. He was not alone in this decision. By the early 1960s, a whole generation of Iranian technocrats had made much the same de facto pact with the shah. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and his “Progressive Circle” were the obvious political manifestations of this pattern.[11] Modernizing technocrats, sometimes even critical of aspects of the shah’s regime, decided that only by supporting him and his leadership could they help bring much-needed change to Iran.

When Ebrahimi returned to the United States, he immediately began to set up an Iranian student group that was, contary to the usual trend, supportive of the shah. The early 1960s were also the years when the Confederation of Iranian Students in America was beginning its rapid turn toward radical anti-shah politics. The confederation was chiefly composed of students who, contrary to people like Ali, believed that only by opposing and deposing the shah could they help end the cycle of poverty and despotism in Iran. One of Ali’s roommates was an activist in that group.

His name was Sadeq Gotbzadeh, and he and Ali had been roommates for about three months. Gotbzadeh was a rabble-rouser and, even in those early days, the subject of an intense diplomatic row between Iran and the United States. Iran accused him of being a communist and wanted him deported, and the Kennedy administration, led in this case by the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, refused to comply.[12] Gotbzadeh went on to become a close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini and returned to Iran as part of his entourage. For a while, he was Iran’s foreign minister. He was then arrested on charges of attempting a coup against the ayatollahs and sent to the firing squad. At the height of his power, he and Ebrahimi, his erstwhile roommate, talked on the phone once.[13]
But in the early 1960s, all of that was still in the distant future. Ebrahimi received his engineering degree from the University of Maryland in 1965 and was immediately hired to work at the Maryland State Road Commission. His salary was $5,285 a year. His parttime work at one of Washington’s trendy restaurants, where Richard Nixon was a regular customer, paid him more than his engineering salary.

While at the commission, Ali began to teach part-time at Catholic University, where he also enrolled in the graduate engineering program. In 1967, he completed his master’s degree. By then he was a project manager at the commission. In this capacity, he occasionally ran into Spiro Agnew, who would soon become Nixon’s running mate, and was, in his early days a county commissioner in Maryland.

In 1967, Ali went west. He found an engineering job for the state of California. He was happy at his job and unhappy in his marriage; moreover, home beckoned. In early 1968, he answered the call, and, having accumulated impressive professional and educational experiences, he quit his job and returned to Iran. The country was bustling with new economic energy. By then he had broken the news of his marriage to his family.
When he returned, his uncles, the Rezai brothers, had already established a near dynastic domination over some arenas of Iranian industry. They both wanted Ali to work for them, and much to their consternation, he refused. There was something of a rugged individualist in him. He wanted to find a job on his own.

In spite of the booming economy, finding one proved difficult. His attempt to find employment with Majid A’lam, the biggest contractor in Iran, failed. Eventually, he was hired to work in Hamid Ghadimi’s firm, itself one of the biggest in the country. On his way to his job in Shiraz, where he was to be a project manager, he lost half of the lump sum his mother had given him, as a homecoming gift, in a poker game. All his adult life, he has been an avid poker player. His friends consider him a good player. But that night, the results were disastrous. His relations with his wife were also less than satisfying. He decided to work at his new job only as long as necessary to save enough to pay for his and his family’s return trip to the United States.

After about a year, he decided to work for one of his uncles, Mahmood. By then Mahmood had split from his brother and started a company of his own. He was concentrating on mining. On a whim, he had purchased, for one million tooman, the rights to the Sarcheshmeh mine from a professor at Tehran University. It was an old copper mine that had been passed up as unworthy of further exploration by a number of prospectors and big Western companies. It turned out to be one of the richest copper mines in the world. Much of the construction around the mine—everything from access roads to housing for workers and staff—was built under the direct supervision of Ali.

After a few months at the new job, Ali was promoted to the position of deputy managing director of what was rapidly becoming the most important company in Iran—with billions of dollars in future estimated revenues. In this capacity, Ali had to negotiate multimillion-dollar deals with some of the biggest banks and mining companies in the world. “The experience was,” he said, “good for me. It taught me much about the world of high finance.”[14]

Then suddenly the government, without prior notice, decided to nationalize the mine. Ali was shocked and angry. He was particularly distressed by the level of corruption. While one famous developer offered Ebrahimi one million dollars for privileged information about the company, a prominent politician had apparently taken a bribe to ensure that an American company got a piece of the copper mine. He had already decided that the country was being mismanaged in economic terms. The experience of the mine only confirmed his views. But he still believed that working within the system was the best alternative. Moreover, increased oil revenues had further heated up the Iranian economy. Ali finally decided to fulfill the dream he had long nurtured and with a friend, Akbar Lari, started a new company. Housing and construction was a booming business, and both partners had worked in American companies that specialized in the field.

The partnership they started began to grow at a dizzyingly rapid pace. They built houses and roads, hangers and airports. They used the most modern techniques in operating their work sites. They developed a reputation for efficiency and honesty. “In all the years we worked,” he says, “we only paid a bribe once to get a job.”[15]

Iran at the time had no mortgage system. Houses were essentially bought for cash, with few people able to garner special loans from banks. At the same time, major cities in the country, particularly Tehran, were faced with massive housing shortages. Ali and his partner began negotiating with General Motors to start a factory for constructing prefabricated homes in Iran. At the same time, they began thinking about establishing a mortgage company along the lines of Fannie Mae in the United States.

By 1978, their partnership had grown into two companies. One focused on housing, the second on other construction projects. Ebrahimi took over dealing with housing. At the time of their breakup, the two companies employed sixty engineers, almost sixty thousand workers, and owned machinery estimated to be worth fifty million dollars.[16] They also had hundreds of foreign technicians from as far away as Korea and Taiwan, working on their projects.

The revolution changed everything. By then Ali’s private life had also changed. In 1974, his first wife, along with their three children, left for America in what was the first step toward divorce. By 1977, Ali had married again. His second wife, Suzann, was also American. Together they have two children, a boy and a girl. “Only after my marriage to Suzann,” says Ali affectionately, “did I really know what it means to be married.”[17]

On the work front, Ali tried to keep his company operating. Aside from occasional stoppages brought about by workers’ wildcat strikes, he was successful in keeping the projects, particularly the big construction work in the city of Ahwaz, more or less on schedule. But workers were not his only trouble. Revolutionary Committees had spread through out the country, and the local committees for the city were a source of agitation. On several occasions, they arrested Ali; each time he was released hours later by the intervention of the governor, Admiral Ahmad Madani.[18]

On one occasion, Ebrahimi met with Bani Sadre, in those early days a close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini and the first-elected and first-impeached president of the new republic. “You have won,” Ali told him, “the country is yours; why are you destroying it?” Bani Sadre’s response was an omen of things to come. He blamed the chaos and destruction on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and went on to add that people like Ali should stay and fight.[19]

But by July 1979, conditions had deteriorated enough that Ali found it impossible to continue. He decided to leave Iran, but he had no exit visa. Fortunately, the new revolutionaries were as corrupt in deeds as they were pious in words. Ebrahimi paid off the gang that controlled the main Tehran airport. On the designated day, he arrived at the airport, and without an exit visa, and without his name appearing on the passenger manifest, he left Iran aboard a flight heading to Europe.[20]

His final destination was America, where Ebrahimi settled in Houston and created a new company called Ersa Grae. This company, too, has grown with incredible speed, with projects in a variety of places—from Sarasota, Florida, to Houston, Texas—that include everything from high-rises to plans to develop shopping malls and residential developments. The “sell-out” value of his projects is now estimated to be close to one billion dollars. He is unrelenting in pursuing his goals.

Part of his time and effort in America has been devoted to taking care of his many needy relatives. He has been a patron saint for his two uncles—Mahmood, who lived in Houston, and Ali, who still lives in Costa Rica.21 He is also keen on taking care of his first family.

In Tehran, he had turned 18 percent ownership of his company over to his first wife and their three children. The agreement signed between Iran and the United States ending the hostage crisis allowed for American citizens to sue Iran for damages caused by the revolution. Ali spent countless hours in depositions and court sessions to show to the international tribunal, set up at The Hague to adjudicate cases brought by American citizens against the Islamic Republic, that his children’s share of his company must be restored to them. It was a testimony to his tenacity that his was the first case[22]—and only one of four[23]—where those holding dual American and Iranian citizens successfully sued and won a case against the Islamic Republic of Iran in that tribunal. “I was overjoyed,” he said with a grin on his face, “when I received a check for $14 million from the tribunal.” The entire sum was put in trust for his family.

In oriental societies, talent, particularly when it is proximate to power,can be a lethal liability. In the heyday of Ottoman power and glory, the greatest miniaturist of the realm was blinded immediately after finishing his illumination of what the sultan had decreed would be “the greatest book” of all time,[1] lest he be tempted to accept another commission for a still “greater” book.

Another tale, apocryphal though it, too, might be, surely reflects at least some elements of the culture of the time. The architect of the Taj Mahal was pushed off his masterful creation, they say, just after he completed the project. The sultan did not want another building to compete with the grand edifice to his love.

In postwar Iran, builders for the court were not only spared their lives, but also were even allowed to enjoy the financial fruits of their talent. The price of admission to that circle was a willingness to accept the fact that some members of the royalty refused to pay their construction bills. There was, of course, no dearth of those eager to pay this price, as the political and professional rewards were great. Hamid Ghadimi was, for much of the 1960s and 1970s, the master builder in the court of Mohammad Reza Shah. He had also built a number of other important buildings. Although by 1978 he had diversified into a wide variety of fields—from banks to bicycles—no less than one hundred engineers and architects worked for just one of his companies.

Hamid Ghadimi was born in Tehran in 1929 (1308). His father and many of his other relatives had been midlevel government functionaries. His parents were religious, but they were keen on giving their children a modern education. For the first six years of his elementary education, Hamid went to a small school in Tehran. As he was about to enter the middle school, his father was transferred to the city of Zahedan—in the hot and arid district of Zaheda—where he became the head of the local customs office. After only two years, Hamid moved back to Tehran, where he enrolled in Dar al-Funun.

Like many of his peers, in high school he was drawn to the communist Tudeh Party. Although he never joined, he did have a youthful affinity for their ideas and ideology. He was a good student, but by no means outstanding. He was active in the school’s journalism club, responsible for publishing the school paper. At the same time, he was an avid fan of sports, particularly volleyball, though in his characteristic disarming honesty, he laments the fact that he “was always mediocre.”[2]

By his last year of high school, his love of journalism tempted him to consider it as a career. But he is in all he does a man of meticulous planning and keen entrepreneurial spirit, virtues apparently evident in him no less as a young man than later as a successful manager. “I looked into the lives of some of the journalists,” he said, “and when I saw their desperate financial lot, I was easily dissuaded.”[3]

No sooner had he finished high school than he set out for the United States. He could count on no family support in this effort, and thus needed to work and support his own education. Pinning his hopes on a cousin who had been living there, he arrived in Michigan early in 1950. First he had to learn English. In Iran, the little foreign language he had learned was French. Today, after a quarter century of exile and after spending part of this time in France—particularly to satisfy his wife, who is an unabashed Francophile[4] —his French has improved. But back in 1950, after finishing some classes in English, he set out for the west, ending up in San Francisco, California, with its temperate clime, ample employment opportunities, accommodating public education system, and generally liberal and welcoming attitude toward “foreigners.” It was then, as it is now, a veritable mecca for generations of young Iranians.

For the first two years, Ghadimi enrolled in classes in San Francisco City College— one of the best in a large network of two-year city colleges that sprang up all around in the postwar GI Bill era. These colleges had no admission requirements; anyone over the age of eighteen could register for classes. Students could either take courses for the purpose of transferring to a university or simply receive an Associate of Arts degree in one of the professional fields. Hamid obviously intended to transfer. At the same time, to make ends meet, he worked in a number of different jobs—from working in a camera shop to trying to find steel at a time when the war in Korea made it a coveted commodity.

After two years, Ghadimi entered what is now called San Jose State University. The San Jose college was, and still is, renowned among the nineteen California State universities for the high caliber of its engineering program. After another two years, he graduated with a degree in construction engineering. He then took the unusual step of entering the University of California at Berkeley—arguably the top public university in the country at the time—and graduated with another bachelor’s degree, this time in civil engineering. Upon completion of his second bachelor’s degree in 1956, he began taking courses in Berkeley’s graduate program in civil engineering. He had completed much of the required course work for a master’s degree, with only his thesis remaining, when a job offer from an American company, Amman and Whitney, derailed his educational plans. The company worked in Europe and Iran and offered Hamid a one-year contract for work on a project in Paris. He accepted the offer, hoping to finish his thesis while working in France. The hope, as is often the case with deferred theses, never became reality. On his way to Paris, he took a detour.

In those days, the number of Iranian students in American colleges and universities was rapidly rising. They had begun to organize in campus student groups. By the mid1950s, they had created a national association called Anjoman Daneshjooyan Irani dar America, the Iranian Student Association in America, which published a journal called Daneshjoo (University Student).5 They had begun meeting in regular conventions. Ghadimi was a member of the group and the journal’s representative in California. During the mid-1950s, these groups were still more cultural than political. They helped newcomers cope with the demands of their new environment and offered solace and a sense of community to forlorn young men and women; they were homes away from home, safe niches where the anxieties of daily life, the pressures of work and school, and estrangement from home were assuaged. Furthermore, in these meetings students spoke Persian, a dependable balm for all benighted exiles. There were students in these groups who intended to politicize the association and push it toward opposition to the shah. Around 1960, the radicals won the day, and the association joined the Confederation of Iranian Students, which became, in the 1960s and 1970s, a constant source of headaches for the shah. Hamid was active in the association before it took its radical turn, but at the same time he made no effort to hide his own sympathies for Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq.[6]

In 1958, the national convention of the association was held in the city of Minneapolis, and Ghadimi decided to participate before he left for France. The journey turned out to be far more important in his life than he had bargained for. In the first meeting, a vote was taken to elect the chair for the convention, as was custom, and Hamid was elected. More important, he met a young beautiful woman who had just come from Iran to go to college in America. Her name was Afat Honari, and Ghadimi was smitten. Her brother was a friend of his, and no sooner had he reached Paris, where the brother lived, than he asked to marry Afat. Before long, they were married. They shall soon celebrate their golden anniversary. They have two children—both were enrolled in La Rosey, the prestigious boarding school that lists the shah among its alumni, and both eventually graduated from American colleges. Their daughter now lives in Texas, and their son in Italy.

The convention had another consequence for Ghadimi. The meeting happened at a time when the shah was on a private visit to the United States—on his way back from an official visit to the Far East—and had accepted the students’ invitation to open the convention. On June 27, 1958, he gave the opening talk, which was full of optimism about the future of Iran. Furthermore, apparently against the advice of his entourage, he had agreed to meet individually with a large number of students. Ghadimi was put in charge of organizing the meetings and ensuring that they proceeded on schedule. As he listened to the shah, watched him interact with the students, and heard him enthusiastically endorse Dr. Ali Sheikholislam’s idea of starting the first private university in Iran—which came to be called the National University—Ghadimi was convinced that the shah meant well for Iran. The shah was sufficiently impressed with the young engineer that he told his private physician and confident, Dr. Ayadi, to note Ghadimi’s name and assure that once back in Iran, he would be given an audience with the shah.

Finished with the work of the convention, Ghadimi went to Paris to begin work for Amman and Whitney. Before long, however, he received a telegram from one of his brothers in Tehran saying that he had put up the initial capital to start a construction company for Hamid. He would have a couple of other engineers as partners, including Majid Ardalan, another graduate of Berkeley. Hamid was now keen on an expeditious return to Iran. As soon as he finished his contractual obligations to Amman and Whitney, he returned to Iran full of hope and optimism, and began working at the company in which he was a partner, the National Construction Company (now the Melli Construction Company).

During this time, a revolution was taking place in Iran’s construction industry. Hitherto, all major construction contracts—from dams and governmental buildings to roads and airports—were given to foreign companies. The famous Mowlem contract, given to a British company for the construction of six thousand kilometers of roads and rumored to be infested with corruption, epitomized the weakness of Iran’s indigenous construction industry.[7] The country’s development plans were in those days centered at the Plan Organization, and its director, Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, believed that Iranians had yet to develop the experience, the expertise, and the manpower and management skills required to take on major construction jobs and complete them according to the standards set by the Plan Organization. While many Iranian engineers and architects accused Ebtehaj of being a self-loathing Iranian, or of serving the interests of American and British companies, Ebtehaj believed that he was trying to set and abide by high standards. Many experts confirm Ebtehaj’s view. Eventually companies were ranked by the type of contracts they could bid on, and Ghadimi’s company was, before long, one of the highest-ranking companies in Iran. The Association of Construction Companies—of which Ghadimi was secretary treasurer—played an increasingly important role in determining the rankings and adjudicating the complaints that arose in the process.

The National Construction Company grew at a rapid pace. “If I had to do it all over again,” Ghadimi said, “this time around I would slow down the pace of our growth; I would have kept my holdings a bit more liquid, more moveable, and less dispersed.”8 The expansion of his business activities was both vertical and horizontal. By the time of the revolution, Ghadimi not only was involved in at least twenty different construction companies, but had also expanded into other industries, banking, and hotel management. He had also begun a number of joint ventures with Hedayat Behbahani and his construction company.

Ghadimi had an eye for picking and recruiting first-rate engineering and managerial talent. An impressively large number of Iran’s top managers, contractors, and engineers—including the Fateh brothers, Akbar Lari, and Ali Ebrahimi—began their work in his offices. At the same time, as the Iranian economy began to pick up steam and the rate of growth surpassed 10 percent, and as there was a dire shortage of competent engineers and managers, Ghadimi’s company was faced with the problem that many of its most talented engineers soon left to create their own firms; Tehran in the 1970s was a veritable El Dorado where amassing a fast fortune, even without corruption, was an easily attainable dream. Ghadimi and Behbahani found a clever solution to this problem. Before the better employees had a chance to leave, Ghadimi, often in partnership with Behbahani, put up the capital and the equipment and jointly created a new company that turned their prized but departing employees into profit-making partners. Ghadimi and Behbahani were usually major shareholders in these new companies, keeping about 60 percent of the shares for themselves.[9] At least twenty such companies were begun in about fifteen years.

Ghadimi’s foray into building palaces and villas for members of the royal family began in 1967, when he was commissioned to build a new palace for the queen mother. Sardar Afkhami, a favorite architect of the queen, who had developed a notorious reputation at the time for using his connections to get lucrative contracts and then, for a substantial fee, contracting them to others, was the man who first suggested Ghadimi. One of Ghadimi’s partners was a relative of Sardar Afkhami. In the next twelve years, Ghadimi built palaces for Princess Ashraf, Princess Fateme, Princess Shams, and the shah. Of these, the most scrupulous in paying her bills was the queen mother, who usually insisted on paying in advance. On the other hand, it seemed to be a matter of policy for Princess Shams not to pay any of her bills. When Ghadimi left Iran in 1979, Princess Shams alone owed him and his company more than four million dollars (or 2,961,199,439 rial).[10] They had built a number of villas for her, with roads, a sewage system, and retaining walls, near Chaloos, on the Caspian Coast.

Ghadimi was building a summer palace for the shah and the queen, this one in Nowshahr, also on the Caspian coast. “It would be an exaggeration,” he says, “to call it a palace, as it was a simple building with a few rooms. It was a challenge in that much of it was being built on the water.” Furthermore, the plans for the building constantly changed, as the queen changed her mind, and “the shah, as a rule, tried to resist change, particularly if it meant making the building any larger.”[11]

Ghadimi’s construction companies had a reputation for dependable and efficient work. When, for example, the government needed to build the Shiraz airport on extremely short notice, it was National Construction that was entrusted with the job. The airport was needed for the thousands of guests who were expected to arrive for the celebration of twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran. When the date for the event was finally set by the shah, the committee entrusted with the task of managing the event realized how little infrastructural preparation had been made for the event.[12] The airport was most urgently needed, and Ghadimi’s company succeeded in finishing the project, and the complicated construction of the runway, on time.

By then, his was one of the few, and certainly one of the earliest, Iranian companies licensed to bid for the construction of every kind of project—from dams to airports.

Indeed, they were the first Iranian company to build a dam—the Gatvand Dam—without a foreign partner.[13]
Ghadimi’s first move toward diversification was his involvement in building large hotels around the country. He first built one for the oil consortium, but soon expanded his work. Eventually he formed a partnership with the Sofitel Hotels, and together they established the Iran-France Hotels Company, building and managing several hotels in the country.

Impressive as Ghadimi’s success in the construction industry was, he gradually became more interested in industry. “There was far less corruption in industry than in construction,” he says, “and that is why there was a movement of capital in that direction in the early seventies.”14 His company’s first forays into the field were its role in the construction some of the “industrial cities” that were being built all around the country. He and his partners then began investing directly in a variety of industries, including making bicycles and motorcycles, most of them in cooperation with Western or Japanese partners.

By the early 1970s, it had become something of a fad for Iranian entrepreneurs to own banks of their own. Almost every big industrial group had one. At the same time, the growth of the urban population and the rise in standards of living suddenly brought about a frenzied boom to the housing market. There were drastic shortages in everything from cement to bricks. Ghadimi and Behbehani decided to help alleviate the problem by creating a bank—Bank Sakhteman—dedicated to loaning money to those interested in investing in the housing industry. The bank was highly successful.

As his fortune increased, he became involved in works of philanthropy. From the time Alinaghi Alikhani had been minister of economy, he had urged Iranian entrepreneurs to engage in different forms of philanthropy—including endowing scholarships for needy university students. In addition to participating in this program, Ghadimi also helped build, at cost, a school for the blind and donated another school for the deaf.

Ghadimi is a good example of a self-made man. Although it was rumored that in those days Iran was ruled “by a thousand families,” and though a CIA report in 1977 claimed the actual number to be closer to 40 families at the national level and another 150 to 200 at the local level, Ghadimi rose to the top of his profession and amassed an impressive fortune in spite of his relatively humble origins. He came to Iran with less than ten thousand dollars in his account, and by the time the revolution forced him to leave the country and confiscated all his properties, the estimated value of his assets was close to one hundred million dollars.

Aside from the favorable climate for industrial development, Ghadimi’s success must be at least partially attributable to his character. He is calm and attentive in demeanor and speech. He listens more than he talks. He has a keen and curious mind about a variety of fields, particularly history. His parsimony in discourse is matched by his engineer’s precision in his choice of words. He invariably claims to know far less than he actually does, and then surprises with the depth of his knowledge and the care he has shown in reading a text.[15] He has the one quality required for survival in the top echelons of power anywhere in the world: he is discreet about things he does not wish to discuss. He is, at the same time, honest and candid about his discretion. More important, he is of the firm opinion that secrets of the past must now be brought into the light of scrutiny. The only way to disarm the malignancy of conspiracy theories, the only effective antidote to the poison of the culture of gossip and innuendo, the only way to disarm the nihilists who want to deny everything about the past, he says, is to be as transparent about the past as possible.[16] “If all was perfect in the past,” he says, “we would not be in exile today.” At the same time, he believes that he and his generation have much to be proud of, and the only way to get “our due credit” is to admit “our faults with as much vigor as we defend our accomplishments.”[17]

He reads regularly, and tennis is his favorite sport. In Iran, his reading was more or less limited to trade journals, but in exile he has delved deeply into Iranian history and culture. He is also a film buff. But he has limited his professional activities. He has succeeded in his business ventures but has, in his own words, “slowed down quite a bit. I have lost the fire that burned in me when I was young.”[18]

For Akbar Alex Lari, maps are his vocation and avocation. He is an avid reader and collector of maps—maps of old cities he loves and new structures he builds, of roads and bridges he constructs, and monuments and historic cites he adores or preserves, and finally maps of lives, past and present. Biographies are, after all, nothing but maps of lives, creatively imagined but dedicated to signposts of reality.[1] In his vocation as a builder and developer, and his avocation of collecting maps and old letters, reading old and new biographies, and compiling family trees,[2] he combines the disciplined rigor of an engineer and the passionate commitment of a collector. Whether he is decoding intricate designs of a skyscraper or developing the genealogical maps of his family, he brings to the task a contagious curiosity, relentless energy, and an endearing honesty.

He is a man of many accomplishments and few words. His reticence with words is not for lack of ideas or interests. He chooses his words with the precision of a jurist and the caution of a diplomat. The brevity of his discourse is matched by his candor and honesty. He is at once self-effacing and self-assertive, shy and ambitious, forceful but not abrasive. His shyness can easily be construed as aloofness. He is old-fashioned in his dedication to his family and friends. He is in his demeanor cautious, decorous, even insistent on the solemnities of rituals. In all he does, he uses the cold rigor of mathematics and numbers, preferring the comfort of empirical benchmarks. Above all, he is a man given to relentless order. His calendar captures the spirit of his orderliness.

Not only is every event and appointment of each day neatly marked on its pages, but on the last page, in small uniform letters that characterize the engineer’s writing style— just as illegible scribbles is the signature style of physicians—he jots down every important date, detail, or piece of information he might need and use in the course of the year. Even the preparation of that page is something of a ritual: every year, as he heads toward his Christmas holidays, “on the plane, [he] copies last year’s information onto the last page of the new year’s calendar.”[3] Lari’s own birthday, in both the Gregorian and Persian calendars, are written on that page.

Akbar Lari was born on June 26, 1943 (4 Tir 1322) in Yazd, one of the oldest cities in Iran. The city took its name from Yazdegard, a king from Iran’s pre-Islamic days.

When the Islamic invasion came in the seventh century, Yazd was among the cities that refused to accept Islam, agreeing instead to pay the extra tax, the jazeeye, levied on those who refused to convert to the new faith. Even today, Yazd continues to be the city where the largest number of Iranian Zoroastrians live. Moreover, many Zoroastrian places of worship are located in the city.[4] In the early part of the new millennium, the city became something of an international cause célèbre when it turned out that the presidents of Iran and Israel were both born there.

Akbar was born in one of the most gracefully beautiful houses of the city. Known as “the Lari House” the building has been left untended, and members of the Lari family are negotiating with the city to turn it into a historic cite or a museum.[5] There is also another old “Lari House,” but it has already been designated a historic monument, worthy of preservation.

Aside from its stunning architecture, Yazd was also known for the entrepreneurial skills of many of its inhabitants, and Lari’s family was one of the city’s eminent merchants. The Laris, as their name indicates, were initially from the city of Lar, in the province of Fars. Early in the nineteenth century, the founder of the family, Mulla Zeinal, a merchant, moved to Yazd.[6] While in pursuing careers in trade, the Lari family confirmed Yazd’s reputation, they were, in another arena, an anomaly. “It is an enigma,” Lari said, “but no one in the larger Lari family, and certainly not my parents, were religious.”7 His mother, Safa Mohageg Yazdi, for example, was a fashionable woman, more inclined to wear a high couture imported dress than the traditional Islamic dress or hejab. Akbar’s own birth in his family’s ancestral city and in the “Lari House” was, however, a matter of accident.

Akbar’s father had moved from Yazd to the city of Zahedan, closer to Pakistan and India, where his trade was centered. When World War II began, his business blossomed, and he decided to move his family to Tehran. On their way, they stopped in Yazd to visit relatives, and it was there that Akbar was born. He was the third child and the first and only son of the family.

He went to school in Tehran, and, ironically, the real trauma of his childhood came not during the war but when it ended. During the war years, Iran suffered from great shortages of commodities such as tires, wheat, and sugar. Many fortunes were made in those years by those who found themselves in possession of a few dozen tires. Cognizant of this fact, Lari’s father invested nearly all of his capital in importing tires and sugar. But when the shipments arrived, the war had ended, the price of both commodities plummeted, and Lari’s fortune suddenly evaporated. As a young boy, Akbar watched in anguish as debt-collectors carted away everything of value from his home. “They even took away my father’s flower pots,” Lari said with lingering sadness in his voice, “and he had worked so hard on nurturing them.”[8]

A few months after the dread experience, the family was on the move again, this time to Isfahan, where the young Akbar enrolled in school. He graduated from the city’s Harati high school. He was not a good student, finishing with a 12 average (20 was the maximum), and equivalent to a C average in the American system. His grade for “citizenship” was not much better (at 12.5), showing his lack of interest in all that was happening in his school.[9]

In 1961, he set out for America, where he settled in New York City, a place that became his home for the rest of his adult life, save for eight years he spent back in Iran. After spending one night in the local YMCA, he enrolled in college and immediately began to work as well. “Though I received small sums of money from my father,” he said, “I also worked throughout my years in college.”[10] After two years at Hofstra University, where he had initially enrolled, he transferred to New York University (NYU), where he graduated in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, followed in eighteen months with a master’s degree with honors in the same field.

By the time he graduated, he had been already married for three years. In 1963 he met an Irish-American girl named Eileen Flanagan. Four years later, in 1967, they married, and they returned to Iran in 1970. For eighteen months before returning home, Akbar had found employment with a large American construction company (Slattery Construction). When he returned to Iran, this experience proved invaluable.

The economic boom of the 1970s had already begun when Lari arrived in Tehran. The construction industry was one of the most lucrative, and controversial, parts of the booming economy. Shortages of raw material and of expertise were rampant. Lari was hired to work at one of the country’s largest construction companies, owned and managed by Hamid Ghadimi. His first job was as project manager for the construction of the Shiraz airport. “He was full of energy, and very organized,” Ghadimi remembered.[11] The “bash of bashes” celebrating twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran was about to begin near the city of Shiraz, and the construction of the airport, as well as roads to the city and to the cite of the celebrations, were all behind schedule. What made the work of finishing the project even more daunting was the fact that the Iranian Air Force was one of the clients in the project (because military planes were also going to use the Shiraz airport), and General Mohammad Khatam, the commander of the air force had his own “favorite” companies,[12] and he made every effort to make sure Ghadimi’s company was never again tempted to bid for another air force contract. But Lari succeeded in finishing the airport and roads on time. In the course of his work, he met another engineer, Ali Ebrahimi, who worked for the same company. Lari and Ebrahimi were both graduates of American universities, and they were both married to American women. Their common profile, and their work together, led first into a partnership and then into a lifelong friendship.[13]

During the two years he lived in Shiraz, Lari also began to teach at the university. Lari’s brief tenure as a professor afforded him a chance to bring his basic philosophy of life to his teaching style. His American training and cultural habits have created in him a decided preference for pragmatism, an appreciation for practical truths and a dislike for theoretical abstractions. This cult of the concrete has remained an essential component of his character. Much to his students’ surprise and delight, he took them to the construction cites he managed and taught them, in practice, the processes and problems of construction. Many of them later worked for Lari after graduation.

Two years after his return home, Lari’s life changed. The year 1972 was an important one in Lari’s life. His first child, a boy, was born. He would be the first of three—two boys and a girl. But his son’s birth changed his life in another, altogether unexpected manner. Eileen’s pregnancy was made complicated by a surgeon’s error. The mistake threatened her life, but also ended up increasing the hospital cost. Trying to pay the hospital bill, Lari asked for an advance from the company he worked for and much to his dismay, he was curtly refused. “We are not a bank,” he was told.

And then laws of serendipity chimed in, and about the same time, he was approached by his friend, Ali Ebrahimi, with the proposal to launch a company of their own. “Had I not been rejected,” Lari suggested, “I might not have been tempted to leave.” But he did leave, and the two young American-trained engineers established a new company, calling it in characteristically pragmatic simplicity, Tamin Sakhteman (providing buildings).

It took less than a decade for this upstart construction company to become something of giant by Iranian standards, employing, along with a prefab housing company, close to six thousand people—including two thousand laborers, technicians, and foremen from South Korea, and three hundred drivers from Philippines, and many Scottish and Israeli engineers. In 1978 alone, for example, the company completed more than $130 million in construction projects. They built everything from residential units for the army and prefabricated houses to cement factories and industrial plants. They also built some of the most technically challenging projects in the big Olympic stadium in Tehran—including the velodrome and shooting ranges.

Their projects were so numerous, and so spread around the country, that Lari was forced to buy two small Cessna planes, learn to fly, and commute around the country to different job cites. A joy ride—in those days his only recreation, aside from his lifelong passion for friendly games of serious poker—turned out to be unexpectedly important in his life.

Each summer, his wife, Eileen, and their children traveled to the United States, where they stayed at the house they had bought. During those months, Lari’s favorite pastime was to take his plane for a short flight to the Caspian coast, have lunch at the picturesque Ramsar Hotel, and then return in the afternoon.

One day, as his plane was taxing on the tarmac, traffic control told him of a boy seriously injured in a car accident, and of his desperate parents’ hope to take their dying son to Tehran for treatment. Although the laws at the time forbade Lari’s category of planes and pilot license to carry passengers—let alone seriously ill patients—he chose to overlook the law and flew the boy and his weeping parents to Tehran.

And then came the 1979 political tsunami. Lari happened to be vacationing in America when it happened. By then Lari and Ebrahimi had gone their separate ways, with Ebrahimi taking the part of their company that focused on housing, and Lari taking the construction company. Against the advice of friends, he decided to return to Iran. Back in Tehran he found a city in chaos. The company he now managed by himself was essentially defunct. Angry unpaid laborers had converged on the company headquarters in Tehran. Moreover, upon entry at the airport, Lari’s passport was confiscated.

After settling the company’s business, and trying to arrange for exit visas for the company’s remaining foreign engineers, he set out to receive an exit visa for himself. The process proved to be a long ordeal, and eventually he was led to an office that would determine the fate of his application. Much to his surprise and delight, the man in charge turned out to be the father of the injured son Lari had transferred to Tehran. The son’s life had been saved, and in recompense, the man immediately approved the exit visa. Before long, Lari was on his way to America, having left behind all but a small part of the considerable fortune he and Ebrahimi had built.

In the United States, Lari was for a short while without a job. “I had worked all my life,” he said, “and doing nothing was simply not an option for me.” He made himself an office in his house, he said, and “dressed up every morning, put on a tie, and went to work, downstairs.”[14] Eventually, at the urging of his wife, he rented an office, hired a secretary, and after securing a four hundred thousand dollar loan, he built a small shopping mall, and thus began a new phase of his life. Dedicated, disciplined hard work, and a bit of luck, he believes, is sure recipe for success in America and in life. For him, surely the recipe has worked, as he has led a productive and happy life and has made two fortunes—first in Iran, in eight years and through creating a model construction company, and the second in the United States, even larger than the first and in about twenty years.

In the new stage of his life, he created the Claremont Group with his two sons, and his daughter, undertaking a variety of projects—from building high-rise condominiums in New York City and offices in the suburbs to building and leasing specially designed offices for such federal government agencies as the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the FBI. For a while the company also engaged in developing hotels and even dabbled in manufacturing.

But Lari’s life in the United States changed in other ways as well. His three-decades-long marriage to Eileen ended, but their close relationships with their children, their temperament, and their long amicable history together ensured that they remained close, cordial, and cooperative even after their divorce.

Another change in his life in America was that he began to engage in politics—something he, along with almost every other Iranian entrepreneur, had studiously avoided in Iran. He took part in party politics, helping found the Iranian-American Republicans of New York. He also expanded his social activities by joining organizations such as the Foreign Policy Association and the World Affairs Councils of America, where he sits on its national board of directors. It was in appreciation of his public service and impressive individual accomplishments that in 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He also continues his passion for collecting historical letters, rare books, artifacts of other cultures and times, and, of course, maps, of places and people’s lives.

I met Amir Malekyazdi in a noisy café in Paris. I had already read his self-published and self-congratulating memoirs. He arrived on time but was visibly uncomfortable, even nervous. He never looked into my eyes. He had a timid, shy demeanor, but his reputation was that of a brash contractor, an aggressive businessman, and a no-nonsense manager. We sat down, and as I tried to prepare the tape recorder, he told me, while still looking away, that he was not comfortable with taped interviews. All my arguments came to naught. Finally, he agreed to answer my questions in writing.

His handwritten responses came back promptly. He had written in great detail, and with much precision. His handwriting had the polish and sophistication of someone with a keen interest in calligraphy and Persian letters. At the same time, the orderliness of the note, the symmetry of its paragraphs, the similarity in size and rendition of its words, all bore the markings of an engineer with a penchant for order and regularity.

The disparity between his reputation and his personal demeanor paralleled the difference between the substance of his memoirs and the whispers of his peers. By his own reckoning, he is a man of militant honesty, who combined German efficiency with Islamic piety and turned his company into a trail-blazing, innovative, honest, efficient contracting firm. According to some of his peers, many of whom were his competitors, his company was one of the biggest in the country, but he himself, they say, was notorious for cutting corners, renegotiating contracts, and overcharging for his company’s services.[1]

The most controversial deal of his long and impressive career in Iran, and the one that went to the heart of the dissonance between his personal narrative and those of his critics, had to do with the construction of the one-hundred-thousand-seat Aryamehre Stadium, built to host the Asia Games. Rumors of kickbacks and bribes and of dangerously shabby construction began to swirl around the stadium just as construction began. Some of the rumors were probably a part of the inevitable psychological warfare waged by the regime’s critics at the time. But in this case, even before the stadium opened its doors, there were cracks and wet spots visible on some of the foundations for the spectator stands. Rumor had it that Malekyazdi’s company had tried to cut corners and had failed to use enough steel reinforcements. Malekyazdi vehemently denied the allegations, accusing his critics of jealousy and foul play. He attributes the rumors to the fierce battle he had with the Rezai brothers, who owned the Navard steel mill. The brothers had successfully used their connections in the government, he claims, and passed a law requiring all Iranian contractors to use only Navard products in their buildings. Malekyazdi not only refused, but he sent samples of the locally produced steel to independent laboratories in Iran and Germany. They “showed that the Iranian [produced steel] had only half the resistance of the international standard.”[2] Malekyazdi eventually was allowed to import the steel he needed, and in his own mind, the rumors and charges against him were simply payback for his defiance. Ali Rezai, on the other hand, believes that the whole episode was a ruse to import vast amounts of steel and sell it on the highly lucrative black market.[3] Finding the truth in this labyrinth of claims and counterclaims is difficult even today.

But in 1970, the controversy turned nasty and spilled into the public domain. The shah ordered an investigation. The stadium, particularly its spectator stands, were put through strenuous tests—with thousands of cement bags placed on the seats to test the resistance of the stands. A committee of elder contractors studied the situation and cleared Malekyazdi’s company, Arme, of any wrongdoing.[4] In the meantime, the issue of stadium safety was sensitive enough that while investigations were going on, Malekyazdi’s passport was taken away from him. Eventually he was back in favor, and his company went on to undertake many more important projects.

Amir Malekyazdi was born in the city of Yazd in 1923 (1302) to a family of merchants. Yazd is one of Iran’s oldest cities, with records showing continuous habitation for over two thousand years. Its incarnation as Yazd goes back some twelve hundred years, and to the days when Yazdegerd, the Sassanian king, lost his empire to the invading Arab armies. Some sources have even suggested that the city was built by Alexander when he was marching through ancient Iran. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the city of Yazd was made famous globally for the fact that two sitting presidents, one in Iran and the other in Israel, had been among its favorite sons.

He was the last of seven children. His father was the city’s malek-a tojjar, the head of the city’s de facto merchant’s guild. The house he had build for his family was more like a family compound than a single dwelling, with seven units destined to house the seven children and their families, with the father at the center of this patriarchal universe. His mother, too, came from a family of merchants, the Laris of Yazd. Her husband died relatively young, when he was only fifty-two years old, and the burden of running the entire family fell on her. She used her own inheritance to defray the costs of raising her children, leaving her husband’s inheritance intact for her children to have when they grew up. For Amir, the decision proved particularly profitable.

Amir was five years old when the family moved to Tehran. He went first to an elementary school called Hedayat and then to the Sharaf high school. His elder brother, Akbar, had already moved to Tehran and played the role of mentor and guide. Particularly in their relationships with each other, the family was steeped in the solemnities of Iranian tradition. At the same time, they were averse to pampering the children. For example, in summers, the young Amir was required to work and earn his pocket money for the rest of the year—a practice not that common among the prosperous classes of the time.

In 1937, after finishing high school, Amir followed Akbar to Germany. Akbar was twenty years older than Amir and had earlier moved there with his family. Once he settled down, he wrote to his mother and suggested that his younger brother Amir also be sent there.5 The mother was a deeply pious woman, and though Amir was only fourteen years old at the time, she agreed, albeit reluctantly, with the idea, and Amir was sent to a Europe on the eve of World War II.

He took a boat to Soviet Azarbaijan, and from there a train to Berlin, where his older brother was waiting for him at the station. Much to his surprise, there, too, Amir was forced to work from the second day of his arrival. He worked as a construction laborer, and when he was not working, he studied at the city’s polytechnic school. The idea of going to that school was not Amir’s but his brother’s, as he believed that Iran would need engineers in the future. “I lived with my brother’s family,” Amir remembers, “and since I had nothing else to do, I just studied around the clock.”[6] Although he had not finished high school in Iran, he graduated in 1941 and immediately was hired by Philipp Holzam, a big German firm doing construction projects in Iran.[7]

Immersed as he was in his work and studies, he paid no attention to the Nazis and their ideology. “I simply noticed their pomp and ceremony, their propaganda, and it all seemed interesting. But I knew nothing about their ideology.” He noticed that “Jews were now forced to wear yellow stars, but I did not know that there was any compulsion in all of this.”[8] Before he could take up his duties with the German company, Iran was occupied by Soviet and British forces, and Nazi companies and citizens were expelled from the country. Amir, now without a job, decided to go back to school. Two years later, in 1943, he finished a master’s degree in civil engineering from the same college in Berlin. After graduation, he went back to work for the same German company.

By 1943, the war was beginning to reach Berlin, and Amir and his brother had no stomach for the destruction and violence it brought to the city. Amir took refuge in Switzerland in 1944, where he learned French and after a while found employment in a construction company. In 1945, he returned to Iran and began to work in a government office responsible for constructing irrigation systems around the country. He lasted no more than a year. The temptations of the private sector proved too strong, and on December 28, 1947, his company, called the Arme Corporation, was officially registered and began operating. Its initial capital was a million rials9 ($150,000, according to the rate of exchange at the time). “I used my share of my father’s inheritance to come up with the initial capital,” he wrote.[10] The company had been the brainchild of another engineer, a man named Monsieur Adran, and together they created the partnership, with Malekyazdi owning about 67 percent of the stock. Eventually the company came to be entirely owned by Malekyazdi.

About the same time, Amir’s mother decided it was time for him to marry. With the help of her two daughters, she embarked on the task of finding the proper mate for their Amir. Eventually, they set their sights on a daughter from the Mousavizadeh family. Also from the city of Yazd, the future bride was a self-assertive young girl whose father was a government functionary. Her family was respected around the city as they had a long history of defending the constitution. Her father had been a cabinet minister in the tumultuous postwar period. The famous poet Farokhi Yazdi was also a relative of the future bride.[11] The bride was initially opposed to the marriage. “I won’t succumb to coercion in my marriage,” she said.[12] Ultimately, she changed her mind. The two were married in the spring of 1948. They had four children—two boys and two girls. The boys were both educated in British boarding schools. The girls, on the other hand, were “required by their mother to stay in the family and under her supervision until they were ready to go to college.”[13] When their time came, the daughters both went to university in France.

The Arme Corporation’s first years coincided with the rise of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and his nationalist movement. Malekyazdi, while “certainly in favor of the government’s attempt to nationalize the oil industry,” and fully cognizant of the fact that Mossadeq was “a patriot, working as hard as he could to defend the rights of the Iranian people,” stayed clear of political entanglements in this period. It was a practice he kept to for the rest of his professional life in Iran.

Those years of nationalist fervor were also a period of personal grief for Amir. In 1951, six years after his return home, he lost his mother. “Her death and the death of my older brother, Akbar, were the biggest griefs of my life.”[14] Although he visited his mother every day, and made every effort to afford her all the comforts money could buy, he still regretted “that I did not have enough time to show my gratitude.”[15]

In the meantime, the company he had helped create was rapidly growing, winning more and more important projects. The terminal at Shiraz airport, the road from Tehran to its airport, and the segment of railroad between the cities of Tabriz and Maraghe were among its earliest big contracts. The real jump in the company, in terms of the kind and number of its contracts, came in the 1960s, when the country was going through a period of rapid economic growth and a big military buildup.

One of the most lucrative areas for construction companies were contracts for building bases, airports, and housing for the rapidly expanding Iranian Air Force. By all accounts, the commander of the air force, General Mohammad Khatam, had “sweetheart deals” with his crony contractors, and those who were not in his “circle of trust” were told not to apply. But Malekyazdi was nothing if not aggressive in business. He decided to ignore
the warnings and participated in one of the competitions, winning the bid to build an air base. General Khatam called him to his office, warning him of the dangers of working for the air force, “where a dust of sand can destroy a multi-million dollar jet.”[16] Malekyazdi would not relent. He had won the contract fair and square, and he was going to finish the project. The project was mired in lawsuits, late payments, and repeated claims and counterclaims by the two sides. Khatam used his considerable clout to make life difficult for this unwanted contractor. That turned out to be the last bid Malekyazdi ever made in the thriving market of building for the air force.

There was no shortage of other major construction projects, however, and by the 1970s, Arme had emerged as one of the biggest and most efficient contractors in Iran. It had built a couple of bridges using the latest technology, pioneered by a French company. From an engineering standpoint, the bridges were unique in Iran. One of the company’s other innovations was to build the first privately funded toll bridge in the country; he agreed to build a new bridge for the city of Ahwaz and finance it by collecting tolls from already existing bridges.[17] Arme’s other major projects included innumerable roads, particularly Iran’s first freeway connecting Tehran to its suburb of Karj; housing and industrial buildings connected to Iran’s steel mill in the city of Isfahan; the monument at the entrance to Tehran University; and many of the auxiliary buildings connected to the big stadium, including an artificial lake, parking facilities, and a cycling rink.

As his fortune grew, Malekyazdi took some interest in philanthropy. He had, in the early 1960s, helped create the Yazd Foundation, whose purpose, as its name suggested, was to help the city and its inhabitants fight the scourges of poverty, ignorance, and poor public health. Every year, for example, the foundation picked up to four poor university-bound students from the city of Yazd and paid all of their expenses—from tuition and books to living allowances—for the duration of their studies. They also helped build medical facilities as well as schools to train technicians.[18]

Neither his philanthropic work, nor his decided disdain for the world of politics, not even his and his family’s reputation for devotion to Islam, could save him from the wrath of the Islamic Revolution. Barely a month after the revolution, on the eve of the Persian new year, twenty armed men attacked Malekyazdi’s house late at night. They stormed his bedroom, where they arrested him.

He was kept in prison for twenty-four days. One of the charges against him was entering into a secret partnership with the shah, particularly in the building of the stadium. He was released after putting up a bond of about a million tooman ($150,000) and promising to build houses, gratis, for the poor. His family was by then already in Europe. He decided that he must join them. Finally, using the good offices of some of the mullahs he knew—particularly the prosecutor of the revolutionary court whose daughter was a classmate of one of Malekyazdi’s daughters[19]—he was given his passport and the much-coveted exit visa. Early in June 1979 (Khordad 1358), he left Iran and joined his family in Europe.

He settled in Paris and, with help from his sons, he resumed work as a contractor. Before long, they had established their new company as a leader and highly respected part of the industry, with big projects that ranged from office towers to new urban development. Most of their work was now in Canada and France. He spends most of his time with his wife in Paris, in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in the city, not far from the café where we met on that windy afternoon.

The Rabii Family has electronics in its blood. Fereydoon Rabii, the patriarch of the family, was the most successful electrical contractor in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. The companies he built, all in the field of electronics, were the biggest of their kind in Iran. By the early 1960s, they had grown to be the dominant force in the field. He has been called “the father of the modern electronic industry of Iran.”[1] His wife, Azar Arjangi, was an electrical engineering wizard. Their three sons all have Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering or related fields. They are graduates of MIT, Stanford, and the University of California. The son who has moved farthest from the field is their youngest, Bahman, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from University of California at Berkeley.[2]

Fereydoon was born in Malayer, a small town in the center of the country, not too old by Iranian standards, and surrounded by more than 170 villages.[3] His father was one of the small gentleman farmers in the city, but he was more than anything an intellectual manqué, who worked as a teacher until a heart ailment made it impossible for him to continue his passion. The family moved to Tehran when Fereydoon, the oldest son of four siblings, was about eight. Fereydoon and his family moved around in his early years, and he went to school wherever his father settled to work. But he spent the last three years of high school in the storied Alborz[4] high school. He developed a particularly close relationship with the school’s principal, Dr. Mojtahedi. “I owe a great deal to Dr. Mojtahedi,” he said, adding, “He loved running Alborz more than any other job in the world.”[5]

Two things endeared him to the otherwise exacting Dr. Mojtahedi. On the one hand, he was at the top of his class, and good students were invariably Dr. Mojtahedi’s favorites. On the other hand, and equally important, was the fact that Rabii was averse to politics, even in the years 1949 to 1951, when schools like Alborz were engulfed in radical politics. All through those years, however, Rabii resisted the temptation of politics, concentrating on his academic pursuits instead. “I never believed that agitation is the way to get things done, “ he said, “and more crucially I didn’t believe any of the groups had any workable plans for Iran.”6 Soon after finishing high school at the top of his class, in 1951 he entered the Tehran’s University’s College of Engineering—after medical school the most coveted school in Iran’s highly competitive university system.

Four years later, he finished college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. The second year of his college coincided with the political turmoil of August 1953, but even then Rabii steered clear of any political entanglement.

After college, he was hired as a project engineer by a German company called Cox. The company had been hired by the Plan Organization to do the electrical work on some of the biggest ongoing construction projects in Iran. Fereydoon had decided to seek employment at Cox at the suggestion of Professor Zangeneh, one of his professors at Tehran University. In those days Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj directed the Plan Organization, and it was his policy to only use big Western companies for major construction projects.

Rabii’s plans were to work for a couple of years at Cox and save enough money to go to graduate school in the United States. But his plans were aborted when, a couple of years later, he was involved in a car accident and was bedridden for nine months. “Not only did I gain some weight,” he remembered, “but I also went through nearly all of my savings. The idea of going to graduate school was no longer, at least financially, an option.”[7] But the weight and the months of confinement to bed had one sanguine result. He developed a passion for boating, and boats and the sea remained an important part of his life. At one time, he said, “I had eight boats moored on the Caspian coast.”[8] Even in exile, he chose to live in Florida, not far from the sea and his boats. But in the mid-1950s, there were also other important changes in his life.

In college, he had met an exceptional young woman named Azarmidokht Arjangi. She would become only the second woman in Iran’s history to receive a college degree in electrical engineering. She came from a family of artists; since the fifteenth century there had been painters and miniaturists in her paternal lineage. She was the daughter of Rassam Arjangi, a famous Iranian painter. He specialized in everything from historical canvases depicting important moments and men of Iranian history to miniatures and still lives. He also painted a portrait of his daughter, Azarmidokht; the canvas is called Azar.[9]

Soon after graduating from college, Azarmidokht found a job with the National Iranian Oil Company. She then went on to create a consulting company with a few of her friends. In her capacity as a pioneer engineer, she participated in a couple of international conferences of women scientists as Iran’s representative. But all that ended when her husband, Fereydoon, became more successful in business. She felt compelled to quit her job and leave the company she had helped create. Instead, she began to concentrate on her responsibilities as a mother and hostess. “Our social life,” Fereydoon said, “was soon such that she could no longer work.” In other words, she traded “a room of her own”[10] for one where she was a hostess, and her husband and other men dominated.

Not long after their marriage, Fereydoon decided to start a company of his own. In the surge of new Iranian contracting companies established in the second half of the 1950s, he realized the absolute dearth of Iranian companies in the electrical field. All electrical work was still managed by traditional electricians who had no education in the field and had learned the trade though long years of experience. Rabii thus launched a company he simply called Sherkat Tamin-e Barg o Abe Iran (Electricity and Water Procurement Company of Iran.) In spite of his initial plans, the company never did any work in the field of water supply and irrigation, but the name remained. Rabii had one partner, an engineer named Farhad Eskandari; the two had met when they both worked at Cox. The year was 1960.

Since they had the field all to themselves, and since both partners insisted on professional excellence as the best form of advertisement, it did not take long for their company to grow. Moreover, as it developed, they realized the necessity of creating small workshops that could manufacture parts and equipment to meet their growing needs. Their first subsidiary company was set up to produce switchboards. They wanted to call their company Elco, short for Electrical Company. The board in charge of approving names for new companies rejected the proposed name as too Western. After combing the dictionary, Rabii found the name Elca and convinced the board that it was a Persian word and could be found in dictionaries. Rabii was right, but ironically, Elca was originally a Mongolian term that had found its way into Persian and was used in archaic texts to refer to a territory or country.[11]

The growth of both companies went hand in hand with the boom in construction and the general economic expansion of the 1960s. It was also the decade that Iran’s oil income was on the increase, making the country a magnet for foreign investment and companies anxious to set up shop in Iran. Before long, Rabii and his partner had established joint companies or signed licensing agreements with some of the most important global electrical companies—from the British Brown Boveri, “one of the world’s leading manufacturers of power machinery,”[12] to Nova Form and Sylvania. By the early 1970s, their experience, their global partners, and their reputation for reliability meant that Rabii’s companies won the contract for the electrical part of every major construction project. The controversial one-hundred-thousand-seat stadium in Tehran, every airport, nearly all major hospitals and university buildings were among the long list of projects completed by Rabii’s companies.

One of the smallest jobs his company undertook was also one of his favorites. When Alborz launched a capital drive to expand its dormitories, Rabii agreed to finish, gratis, the electrical part of the building. A plaque indicating the names of all who, like Rabii, had contributed to the construction of the building adorned its entrance.[13] Of course, compared to other projects undertaken by his companies, the Alborz dormitory was rather small.

The sudden surge of oil income beginning in 1972 meant that bigger and bigger projects were now being undertaken by the government. One of the largest and most controversial was the decision to increase telephone lines in the country. By the time all the plans for the project had been approved, the total estimated cost had reached almost one billion dollars. Rabii’s company entered into partnership with the American giant GTE Sylvania and was awarded the big contract without a bid. There was considerable controversy about the process and even allegations of foul play. Rabii denies any wrongdoing. “We simply convinced the shah,” he said, “that GTE has the most advanced technology. Nothing more.”[14] Moreover, before the project could fully commence, the revolution came, and the economy, as well as Rabii’s companies—by then employing over two thousand people—all came to a grinding halt. By October 1978, he and his family had all settled in the United States, where his three sons began their sterling academic careers.

Before leaving Iran, Rabii was tempted to start yet another company, one that combined his passion for boats with his relentless desire to build and engage in business. He began to negotiate with Western companies to set up a factory to produce boats in Iran. But the dream was aborted by the nightmare of the revolution. “We were unceremoniously kicked out of the country,” he said. In fact, in September 1978, one of his prominent British partners—a lord who headed a big firm—told Fereydoon that the shah was on the way out and that change was on the horizon for Iran. Fereydoon did not take the warning seriously. “In my mind, I laughed, thinking that these Brits still think they rule the world.” In Iran, too, all his friends and contacts in the ancien régime told him that the shah was fully in charge, that the army was unrelenting in its support for the king, and that “it shall all pass soon.” Although in retrospect he believes that signs of decay and demise were everywhere, and “we simply were not looking,” in 1978 he continued to believe that the shah would stay in power. But the revolution came, and it did not take long for all of Rabii’s properties in Iran to be confiscated by the revolutionary regime. “If the new regime had at least continued and preserved all we had built,” he said, “the pain of losing it all would have been less. Now I console myself with the thought that my best legacy will be my three educated sons.”[15]

Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj
Abolqassem Kheradju
Mohammadali Moffarah
The Moghadam Brothers
Mehdi Samii

Ebtehaj is a legend among Iran’s technocrats and financiers. They call him the “first technocrat.”[1] David Lilienthal, himself a legend in America as the architect of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), called him, “intense, cultivated and utterly sincere. He is positively incandescent, impetuous, full of feeling.” At the same time, Lilienthal wrote of his “missionary zeal”[2] and “temper, how many enemies he has and is constantly adding to with his impatience, attacks, tempers.” He believed that his hard-nosed tactics were a natural “outgrowth of his conviction that Iran will only get out of “‘her old ways’ . . . by a kind of shock treatment,”[3] and used these tactics to complete an impressive array of projects. Ebtehaj went down in history as the most powerful director of the Plan Organization in Iran, but his complicated and conflicting personality led to a surprising fall from grace.

By the late 1950s, when he was at the top of his power, he was unusually isolated. He enjoyed the support of the British and American Embassies in Tehran, and the unimpeachable trust and respect of the aides he handpicked for himself, but his only other source of support was the shah. The shah believed that Iranian politicians belonged either to the “American” or to the “British” camps, and more than once directly asked British and American embassy officials whether Ebtehaj was one of their “supporters.” Both embassies told the shah that, as far as they knew, Ebtehaj was a patriot with no special ties to them. In spite of his initial distrust and the machinations of many courtiers, for more than five tumultuous years, the shah defended Ebtehaj against powerful foes, including two prime ministers—General Fazlollah Zahedi and Manuchehre Egbal. But his isolation meant that as soon as Ebtehaj lost royal favor, his enemies were able to bring his career as a public servant to an end.

Even in his earliest profiles, hints of his bad temper and his dogged determination to bring rapid development to Iran are discernible. In a profile prepared by the British Legation in Tehran in 1941, for example, Ebtehaj is described as “[a] very intelligent, and well-mannered little man, who may well have an important future. . . . Left the Imperial Bank of Iran dissatisfied with the treatment they gave him. . . . According to the bank he has a very exaggerated idea of his own worth and importance.”[4]

Six years later, when Ebtehaj had reached the pinnacle of financial power in Iran and had been named the president of the National Bank of Iran, the British Legation referred to the fact that, “in that post he has worked hard and been of great service to us in many ways. He seems to be one of the few Persian financiers with intelligence, ability and energy. On the other hand, he is hasty, hot-tempered and easily upset. . . . Pro-British and antiRussian to such an extent that he is also regarded as British agent by his numerous political rivals . . . very much in the confidence of the Shah and Princess Ashraf.”[5]

Ebtehaj was larger than life, and remains so in the memory of his friends and foes. Everything about him—from the most intimate details of his private life to the most public aspects of his long career in the private and public sectors—was subjected to the curiosity of the public, especially his divorce from his wife of two decades, a courtier and lady-in-waiting to Queen Soraya, and his subsequent love affair and eventual marriage to Azar Sani’. Azar was the daughter of a dentist from the city of Shiraz6 and a woman of startling beauty. She was also self-assertive and independent and highly educated. She was a dentist by vocation and taught at Tehran University’s School of Dentistry. She had lost her first husband, with whom she had two children. Her second marriage was one of convenience; her attempt to have it annulled came to naught.

Azar and Ebtehaj met in 1955 at a party at the house of his brother, and they fell in love. “His jaw dropped,” Azar said in an interview. At that time, Ebtehaj had been called back from America to head the Plan Organization and was being mentioned as a candidate for the post of prime minister. In fact, at least once he was offered the job and refused it.

Azar and Ebtehaj followed their initial meeting with increasingly regular and public encounters. Before long, Tehran was abuzz with sometimes sordid tales of their affair. Azar’s beauty and independence and rumors that she was a paramour of General Zahedi[7] gave the story more potency. The fact that Ebtehaj was a married man added a moral twist and made it a genuine scandal. Princess Ashraf was said to have been the matchmaker. The prison memoirs of General Hoseyn Fardust the shah’s one-time confidant, say that Ebtehaj

had a very intelligent wife whose only fault was that she was not beautiful. . . . Ashraf, who wanted to misuse as much of the funds from the Plan Organization as she could, befriended a beautiful woman named Azar, whose husband was a . . . junior employee of the Plan Organization. . . . In a party given by Ashraf at Hotel Darband . . . Ashraf invited Azar, along with Ebtehaj, and me into a room, and she asked me, in front of Azar and Ebtehaj, “Have you ever seen a woman this beautiful? She is even a doctor!” I said that even if she was not a doctor, I had still not seen such a beautiful woman. Then Ashraf said, “And now this Ebtehaj is playing hard to get for this woman. It is my plan to have them get married.”[8]

Fardust then recounted how Princess Ashraf masterminded Azar’s divorce from her second husband and her marriage to Ebtehaj. Azar denied every aspect of the story—save the
fact that she did marry Ebtehaj in spite of their age difference, and found him “god-like in his perfection.”[9]

They were married in a simple ceremony in Tehran a few months after they met and went on to have two children. Azar also had two children from her first marriage, and Ebtehaj took a paternal interest in their lives. Ebtehaj’s power and panache and Azar’s ties to Tehran’s intellectual community and engaging personality made the couple glamorous members of Tehran’s fledging social scene.

The glamour and glory was a long distance from Ebtehaj’s relatively humble origins. He was born in the city of Rasht on November 29, 1899 (8 Azar 1278). His mother came from a family of small landowners, and his father, a disciplinarian from a family of mullahs, was the property manager for one of Rasht’s most famous aristocratic families. AbolHassan was one of six children.

In 1912, when he was twelve, his father sent him and his older brother to Paris for an education. After two years, he was sent to Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, where he was a classmate of some of Iran’s future luminaries. He returned to Tehran for a holiday in 1914, but the outbreak of the First World War made his return to school impossible. He was enrolled in a boarding school in Tehran and studied English and mathematics with private tutors.[10] By the time he returned to his city of his birth, he was nineteen, and British forces, there to fight the Bolsheviks, were stationed in the city. He became an interpreter.

At this time, forces loyal to the Jangali revolutionary movement murdered his father and briefly arrested Abol-Hassan and his brother. Not long after that tragic incident, when rumors spread in the city that Soviet forces were about to attack, Ebtejaj, his brother, and a throng of anxious citizens fled on foot. Fearing arrest, he and his brother donned women’s chadors to escape detection.[11] His politics, decidedly protective of private property and anticommunist, had put him on a collision course with the Jangali revolutionaries. These ideas would shape his political persona for the rest of his life.

One day a friend casually mentioned that there was an opening at the Bank Shahi. According to Ebtehaj, this information “changed [his] life”[12] and put him on the path to a life in finance. He was hired by the bank on the strength of his English. Run by the British, the bank was at the time the most important financial institution in the country. According to his memoirs and the reports of the British Embassy, even as a junior member of the bank Ebtehaj challenged the rules and practices that privileged the British and treated Persians as second-class citizens in their own country.

After a sixteen-year career at Bank Shahi, Ebtehaj joined the Ministry of the Treasury at the suggestion of Ali Akabar Davar—one of the pivotal figures in Iran’s march to modernity and a powerful minister in Reza Shah’s early years.[13] The year was 1936. Reza Shah initially resisted the idea, telling Davar that anyone who had worked at a “British company” could not be trusted. But Davar convinced the king that Ebtehaj was an exception and that he had a solid reputation for financial probity. Ebtehaj was put in charge of supervising more than forty companies owned by the state. A year later, Davar fell from grace and committed “suicide” in prison. Davar’s fall brought a quick end to Ebtehaj’s first foray into public service.

Ebtehaj returned to the banking sector, and in a couple of years he was appointed director of Bank Melli, the most important job in the Iranian financial system of the time. At the same time, the government also hired an American named Arthur Millspaugh to act as a financial advisor. Ebtehaj’s storied short temper, his intolerance of haughty supervisors, and his sensitivity to any slight from a Westerner put the two men on a collision course.
Late in 1944, Millspaugh fired Ebtehaj in a letter that cited his inability to work with a team and his insistence on pursuing his own policies. Ebtehaj fired back an angry letter telling Millspaugh that he lacked the legal authority to fire him. The long-simmering rift became public; ultimately, Ebtehaj prevailed and stayed on at the bank.[14]

Ebtehaj served as the bank’s director for eight years. In that capacity, he was Iran’s representative at the famous Bretton Woods conference in 1944, where the financial structure of the postwar global economy was set, and the dollar officially replaced the pound sterling as the currency of international capitalism.

In the heyday of Iran’s nascent leftist movement, Ebtehaj’s retained his anticommunist ideology. When two of the bank’s star employees—both chartered accountants from England who had been awarded the bank’s scholarship to complete their studies—tried to organize an employee union, Ebtehaj acted forcefully to nip the union in the bud.[15]

His nationalism helped shape his managerial style. In 1947, for example, in his capacity as the governor of the National Bank of Iran, Ebtehaj complained to the British oil company enjoying the monopoly of Persian oil that “it was not justified in depositing all its funds in British banks.” The authorities begrudgingly accepted the argument, and before long, a quarter of their cash balance was placed in an Iranian bank.[16]
As Mohammad Mossadeq ascended and the number of Ebtehaj’s enemies increased, he was finally dismissed from the bank in 1950. The air of conspiracy that surrounded the firing was a harbinger of things to come. Ebtehaj was alone in his office when a man walked in. He was carrying a letter from General Hadji Ali Razmara, then the prime minister, that announced the dismissal of Ebtehaj and the appointment of his replacement. Ebtehaj later claimed that he had been forced out of his post at the behest of the American Embassy. The American government, he claimed, told the shah that Iran would receive one hundred million dollars in aid if they fired Ebtehaj. He was fired, but no aid was forthcoming.[17]

Not long after his dismissal, according to Ebtehaj, the shah, through an emissary, broached the possibility of appointing him prime minister. He asserted that at least one other time, his candidacy was discussed with the shah. Neither time did the idea go far. Instead, Ebtehaj was named Iran’s ambassador to France, where he spent most of the politically tense months of the Mossadeq era. The French government and its diplomatic establishment—according to Mehdi Samii, who visited Paris at the time—treated Ebtehaj with great deference.
Ebtehaj was no fan of Mossadeq. The two had often clashed in the past, particularly over bank policy. Ebtehaj even told the British ambassador in France that “the oil crisis would not be settled unless Mossadeq resigned.”[18] Finally, these tensions boiled over and brought about Ebtehaj’s dismissal. Once again, his replacement arrived at the embassy with no prior notice, carrying a letter dismissing Ebtehaj.

An angry Ebtehaj wrote letters to Mossadeq and to the shah’s close confidant, Hoseyn Ala, asking for a job and an opportunity to serve the country. Neither responded. Ebtehaj was, though, offered a post at the International Monetary Fund as a special senior advisor. He accepted and set out for Washington.[19]

His American journey did not last long. In the aftermath of the August coup in 1953, the Iranian economy was in a dangerous slump, and the American Embassy, in search of a solution, promoted Ebtehaj and campaigned for his return. In September 18, 1953, the American ambassador, Loy Henderson, met with the shah and told him that he “thought that at present juncture [the] best Iranian financial brains should be brought to bear on Iran’s fiscal problems. I asked why it was that [a] man like Ebtehaj not being used.”[20]

General Zahedi was reluctant to call Ebtehaj back, at least partly because he preferred Abolgassem Panahi, whom he had appointed as director of the Plan Organization. By June 1954, the shah was convinced that “it would be a good idea for Abolgassem Panahi to be relieved but did not seem enthusiastic at [the] idea [of] Ebtehaj being his successor.”[21] The road to Ebtehaj’s appointment was paved when Panahi died of a heart attack. Ebtehaj was offered the job that would establish his name in the pantheon of Iranian economic planning.

He met with the shah and General Fazlollah Zahedi. He wanted to make sure they would give him a free hand in running the organization. Zahedi and Ebtehaj had been friends and bridge partners, and in their first meeting, the general promised “on his military honor, not to interfere in the work of the Plan Organization.”[22] After a few days, Ebtehaj accepted the offer and began to remake the Plan Organization in his own image. Some of the most notable future leaders of the organization—including Khodad Farmanfarma’ian and Safi Asfia—were his recruits. He looked for honest, educated men trained at America’s top institutions. He was allowed to pay them salaries that were competitive with Western institutions. They became the object of envy in Iran’s otherwise underpaid bureaucracy.

His tenure at the Plan Organization is surely one of the most colorful, consequential, and controversial periods in the history of the organization. He was intolerant of the nagging economists—Iranian and American—who warned him and the shah that too rapid a change, or too much public investment, could do more harm than good. He shared with the shah a proclivity to distrust, if not disdain, the advice and caution of economists, as well as a propensity to push for rapid economic development, regardless of possible social and infrastructural obstacles. In a famous encounter with Burke Knapp, a high-ranking official of the World Bank, Ebtehaj said, “the way to develop a country is not to listen to economists, who always say no. . . . If America in her early days had listened to economists, she would never have developed. . . . Of course there are dangers. . . . But unless that chance is taken, Iran will surely die.”[23] Their shared dispositions might be one of the factors that led to the shah’s support of the otherwise intransigent and fiercely independent Ebtehaj. The American Embassy in Tehran believed that another reason for this support was the shah’s “overriding fear of any ‘strong man’ in Iran besides himself . . . one reason why the Shah has so much confidence in the Director of the Plan Organization (and has no fears of him as a potential rival) is that he realizes that Mr. Ebtehaj has practically no standing outside his support from the king.”[24]

Ebtehaj was optimistic about the future of the country. Not long after his debate with Knapp, Ebtehaj told his American counterparts, “In ten years, Iran will be earning $1 billion from oil revenues; by that time, I will be lending money”[25] to American institutions instead of borrowing. His prediction turned out to be wrong on only two minor points: It took a little longer than ten years for Iran to begin giving grants and loans to Western countries and companies, and by then Ebtehaj was in no position to lend the money himself.

The Plan Organization played a crucial role in Iranian politics and society in the years following the fall of Dr. Mossadeq. According to the American Embassy, people “accepted the humiliating defeat of Mossedeq’s nationalism in the hope that an oil agreement would at least obtain [a] better economic standard of living. The Plan Organization is the instrument of obtaining these objectives.”[26]

By early 1957, public discontent was “directed against [the] poor record of Plan Organization and focuses particularly on its director Ebtehaj. Hatred of him in parliament and government circles has become almost pathological.”[27]

Of the many projects he developed and promoted, Ebtehaj was particularly attached to his extensive plans to develop the province of Khuzestan. Modeled on the TVA in the United States, his plan called for the construction of a dam on the river Dez, the production of 520,000 thousand kilovolts of electricity, the planting of 125,000 thousand hectares of new farmland, the creation of new farms for the production of sugar cane, and the construction of a new sugar-refining factory.[28] Ebtehaj worked hard to convince the World Bank and other international financial institutions to help underwrite the project. Once he had their approval, and several hundred million dollars of loans and grants, he hired the Development Resources Corporation, an American company created by David Lilienthal, to implement and oversee the project. He had given the Lilienthal company the contract because he judged that they were the best candidates for the job. That decision would come back to haunt him.

The Khuzestan project was crucial to Ebtehaj from development and strategic perspectives. After the 1958 coup in Iraq, Ebetehaj wrote to Lilienthal that this confirmed “the importance and urgency of the Khuzestan program, bordering on Iraq as the region does.”[29] In December 1958, Ebtehaj wrote to American officials asking for more money and aid for both Khuzestan development projects, as well as for the army.[30]

Of his many pet projects, classifying Iranian contractors and consulting engineers according to a strict and complicated ranking system was one of Ebtehaj’s most controversial. The process was fraught with potential corruption, since a “doctored” rank could mean millions of dollars in profits for a company. Ebtehaj was accused of favoring big American and British companies over Iranian firms. On the whole, however, he completed the process with surprising success and with no hint of foul play or corruption. His alleged favoritism toward big Western companies was typical of his complicated attitude towards the West. He was an enemy of Western advisors and politicians and lashed out at them with the abandon of an equal, but “he also believed that everything Iran has, everything people like [him] have, they owe to the west.”[31]

Ebtehaj’s insistence that the bulk of the oil revenues should be dedicated to development was, for the shah, the straw that broke the camel’s back and led to his dismissal. The shah wanted a stronger military, while other factions in the government were vying for such projects as an expensive new Senate building and a radio station.[32] For the third time in his life, Ebtehaj was working in his office when a friend heard on the radio that he had been stripped of his power. He had no option but to “resign.” With bitterness, he wrote of hearing during the radio broadcast of the parliamentary session, “shouted words of approbation. . . . There was not in that meeting a single member who would defend me, nor one who even liked me.”[33]

In October 1959, immediately after resigning, Ebtehaj set out for the United States to organize a private bank called the Iranian Bank. He solicited and received the partnership of First National City Bank of New York.

When Ebtehaj’s nemesis, one of his “most violent enemies, both official and personal,” a rabble-rousing politician named Ahmad Aramesh, was appointed as director of the Plan Organization, Ebtehaj knew that danger was on the horizon. Aramesh accused Ebtehaj of gross mismanagement of funds, of being a “lackey of the British,” and of ensuring that Iran’s oil revenues flowed back to the coffers of British companies. The battle between Aramesh and Ebtejah was fought in the pages of Tehran’s dailies, then it took a more ominous turn.

In a speech Ebtehaj gave in San Francisco, he criticized the U.S. policy of pouring money into corrupt third-world countries without paying enough attention to economic development. The speech was considered a direct challenge to the shah. Ebtehaj received a subpoena from the Ministry of Justice in October 1961. He sensed that he was about to be arrested. He immediately contacted his old friend, Ali Amini, who was the prime minister at the time, who assured him that his fears were unfounded. When Ebtehaj showed up at the Ministry of Justice, he was arrested. He stayed behind bars for eight months. Ebtehaj had ordered that no picture of the shah should be hung in any of the offices of the bank, contrary to what was fast becoming a mandatory show of respect; the day after his arrest, his wife, Azar, reversed his decision and ordered pictures of the shah to be hung on every wall of the building.[34]

He was accused of illegally signing no-bid contracts with the Lilienthal Company and of misusing government funds. Azar also became entangled in a web of intrigue, conspiracy, and rumor that combined high finance and romance with thuggery and politics. With Ali Abdo, she had founded Iran’s first bowling alley. If in the 1950s and 1960s, bowling was the favorite pastime of middleand working-class America, in the Tehran of the period, it was the fad of socialites. Before he had a lane set up at the court, even the shah frequented the bowling alley. But as Ebtehaj’s political problems piled up, Azar’s partnership with Abdo broke down; rumors began to spread about an alleged romantic entanglement with him, and of her failed attempt to hire a knife-wielding thug to kill her erstwhile lover. Azar dismissed these rumors.

Ebtehaj was eventually cleared of all charges. He never addressed any questions about his wife. “He was a gentleman,” she said, “and never trafficked in gossip.” At the time of his arrest, he had just finished the construction of his house, which Lilienthal called, “a palace, designed by his rich and talented wife . . . in the very best Persian taste, with glowing tile and a million mirrors. Such grandeur.”[35] He had always wanted to project not just power, but refined taste. He drove an Alfa Romeo and wore two-thousand-dollar shoes, specially ordered from Lobbs, one of London’s most prestigious shoemakers.[36]

He lived the life of a wealthy banker. He loved horses, and was a serious rider. He was an avid tennis player, and had installed a tennis court at his new house. He loved Western classical music and was a fan of the theater. There was by then even a golf course in Tehran where Ebtehaj could play, a love he learned in Paris. The Duke of Windsor was his playmate.37 As Iran’s oil revenues increased, and there was more money to invest in places like the Khuzestan region, Ebtehaj watched with considerable pain from the sidelines as his idea that Khuzestan “was Iran’s greatest asset” gained currency. He wrote a letter to the shah offering his help and received a “gracious reply,” and was left with the impression that the “question of my assistance is being discussed actively.”38 But he was never called back.

The only time he ever met the shah again was in 1977, after a hiatus of eighteen years. By the mid-1970s, owning a bank had become a necessity for the Iranian economic and industrial elite. The Iranian Bank, whose stocks were traded publicly in the Tehran Stock Exchange, had many wooers. Azar, who helped run the bank and was the first Iranian woman to serve on the board of a bank, realized that Hojabr Yazdani, a controversial mogul, had been quietly purchasing stock and owned 28 percent of the bank. Azar met with General Karim Ayadi, thought to be one of Yazdani’s supporters, and tried to solicit his help in dissuading Yazdani from a hostile take-over of the bank. The general was dismissive. “Isn’t his money good enough?” he asked Azar.[39]

She was entrusted with the task of negotiating with Yazdani for the outright sale of all Ebtehaj stocks. In his eagerness to have a bank, Yazdani agreed to pay three times the market value of the stock, but the Stock Exchange objected to the deal and stopped it. Ebtehaj solicited the help of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda; he, in turn, asked the shah. The deal went through, and the Ebtehaj couple netted twelve million dollars. Ebtehaj wanted to invest the money in government bonds in Iran; Azar, though, smelled trouble and convinced her husband to transfer the entire sum to European banks.

Amir-Abbas Hoveyda arranged for Ebtehaj to thank the shah personally for his help. The meeting was cordial but cool. Their rancorous past was never discussed. Instead, they talked of the difficulty of watering trees in arid Iran. Not long after the meeting, Ebtehaj left Iran, never to return.

When the Islamic Revolution came, the transferred funds allowed Ebtehaj and Azar to live a life of comfort and luxury. But the deal was criticized by some as a blemish on the otherwise sterling reputation of a great public servant. Ebtehaj spent some of his years of exile in preparing, with the help of Esmail Nouri-Ala and his wife, Shokouh Mirzadegi, a two-volume memoir based on his daily journal. His wife Azar went out of her way to ensure that his last years were comfortable. He died on February 25, 1999, in London.

Azar’s storied beauty is still evident, even as a septuagenarian. For years she lived in the spacious and elegantly decorated apartment she once shared with her husband and son, overlooking Kensington Palace Gardens in London. The house was a veritable salon for Iranian writers and intellectuals. She also started a bookstore in London that caters to the needs of the Iranian exile community. A patron of art and scholarship, she contributes to many charitable causes. Known as “Mrs. Ebtehaj,” she is determined to make history give her husband his due. The death of her two sons eventually made the house intolerable for her. She now divides her time between Tehran and Paris and is reported to be writing her memoirs.

Kheradju was a banker’s banker. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wielded much power in Iran’s financial and industrial sectors, but he stayed out of the limelight. His peers saw him as one of the most honest, astute, conscientious, and informed financiers of his generation,[1] and his sterling reputation extended beyond Iran to banking circles around the world. Under his leadership, the Industrial and Mining Development Bank of Iran (IMDBI) received much of its capital from international markets. His claim to the bank’s board of directors in 1974 that “most of the large and reputable international companies who seek partnership opportunities with Iran’s private sector come to IMDBI”[2] was not hyperbole.

It is a measure of his personal honesty, managerial acumen, and political savvy that his reputation was achieved and maintained despite the fact that during his tenure at the bank, its chairman of the board was Ja’far Sharif-Emami, a man notorious in Iran for his alleged financial shenanigans. But as Kheradju has made clear, Sharif-Emami lived according to the culture of the bank in the performance of his duties at the IMDBI.3 Kheradju himself resisted pressure from the court, and even from members of the royal family, to agree to loans that did not have sound financial footing. “Everybody knew he [was] a no-nonsense guy,” his deputy said, and “after a while people just quit trying to push him around.”[4]

Kheradju was born in Tehran in December 1915 (1294). His father was a merchant who dealt primarily in textiles, particularly those produced by Iranian Turkeman tribes. His mother came from a prominent Shiite clerical family. Abolqassem was two when he lost his father. He went to school in Tehran, and like many of the best and brightest of his age, graduated from Dar al-Funun. Among his classmates was Nour-al-Din Kianouri, who later became one of the leaders of the Tudeh Party.

After high school, Kheradju enrolled in the country’s only university, but in 1936, Bank Melli, the country’s de facto central bank, announced a competition to select a dozen students to be sent to Europe to be educated in banking, finance, and economics. Kheradju was chosen out of a pool of 350 other students.[5] The selection process was free from cronyism or prejudice, and many of Iran’s most important postwar economists, accountants, and financiers were Bank Melli’s scholarship students.[6]
744
Traveling through Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on trains and boats, the group arrived at their different destinations, some in France, and some, as in Kheradju’s case, England. He enrolled in the London School of Economics, and after an eight-year stay, he received a degree in economics in 1944 and passed the examinations to become a chartered accountant—one of the first Iranians to do so.

In January 1945 Kheradju returned to a much-changed Iran. He was no longer an inexperienced young man, and he had developed sympathies with leftist causes. The London School of Economics was in those days a notorious bastion of social democratic ideas. Although he never joined the Tudeh Party, his youthful political sympathies certainly made him a “fellow traveler” of the party.

He was obligated to work at Bank Melli for a number of years in return for his scholarship. Not long after he was hired, he tried to organize a union of the bank’s employees, along with two other returning scholarship winners, Mehdi Samii and Ishag Eprim. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, the head of the bank, was an anticommunist and believed the union was a communist front. He was not going to allow these “three young idealists,”[7] to bring communism into the bank.[8] Ebtehaj came down hard on the union organizers because he believed that as a public institution, a bank survives on the trust of the people and of the business community, and that an institution plagued by labor troubles would not garner the support it needs.[9] Samii was exiled to a desolate corner of the country, and Eprim, disgusted by the behavior of both the bank that fired him and the party that disillusioned him, exiled himself to England, where he spent the rest of his life as an Oxford don.[10] Ebtehaj claims that Kheradju’s only punishment was “a note of reprimand in his personal file.”[11] Kheradju, on the other hand, suggests that the bank tried to exile him to Abadan, but he refused to go,[12] and even offered to pay back the money he had received as a student to free himself from his contractual obligations. The bank refused his offer. Ultimately, Kheradju was given a new job in Tehran, and he continued to work there until early 1951.

At that time, he was the head of the bank’s office of research. When Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq nationalized the British Oil Company, his government sent a delegation of accountants to look into the books the British had kept. Kheradju was part of that delegation. Although he later complained that “nobody around Mossadeq understood the intricacies of the international oil market, and unfortunately, as is customary in Iran . . . no experts were consulted,” and though he believed that Mossadeq would have been better off accepting some form of negotiated settlement,13 Kheradju was proud of being part of the team that helped take over the oil industry and rid it of British control. Another man involved in the Iranian team was a Tehran University professor named Mehdi Bazorgan. A quarter century later, the friendship begun in those heady days of nationalism became crucial to Kheradju in the frenzied days of revolution.

Not long after the fall of Mossadeq in 1953, Ebtehaj assumed leadership of the Plan Organization and asked Kheradju to join him. He agreed and worked there for the next few months, but his heart was not in his work. Mossadeq’s defeat had disillusioned him. When he was offered a job at the World Bank in 1956, he decided to accept. He arrived in Washington in early 1957 and worked there for the next six years. He began as a loan officer and eventually became deputy director of the office that oversaw the Far East from Japan to Sri Lanka (Ceylon, at that time).

The last few months of his stay at the World Bank were spent at the International Finance Corporation, which was responsible for loans to private sector industries around the world. This work prepared him for the next important appointment, the one that took him back to Iran and afforded him a chance to help the burgeoning Iranian private sector expand its industrial investments.

The Industrial and Mining Development Bank of Iran had been created on October 14, 1959, and by late 1963 was looking for Iranians to manage it. Fifteen percent of its shares were owned by a variety of European and American banks (including Chase Manhattan of New York and Continental International Financial Corporation of Chicago).14 Hitherto, the bank had relied on foreign financial experts for its management. In 1963, for example, a Dutch banker led the bank, while Mehdi Samii acted as his deputy director. It was Samii, appointed in 1963 to head the Central Bank, who suggested Kheradju for IMDBI. His work at the World Bank and his reputation for honesty, discipline, and determination made him the perfect candidate for the job. He remained at the helm of the bank for the next fifteen years, his tenure ending with the end of the shah’s regime.
One of his first steps was to recruit a reliable team of economists, bankers, engineers, and analysts to work with him. He chose Fereydun Mahdavi, a controversial political figure and one-time activist of the National Front to be his deputy. He also hired Shapur Bakhtiyar, the last prime minister before the Islamic Revolution.

Although the bank was ostensibly private, it worked intimately with government officials, particularly those in ministries involved with the economy of the country. In his early years he met with Alinaghi Alikhani on a weekly basis, and through these meetings he became part of a de facto team of economists and bankers who masterminded Iran’s private-sector industrial growth in the 1960s.15 In the process, the bank witnessed an impressive growth. The initial capital of the bank was four hundred million rials; by 1975, the figure had increased seventeen-and-a-half times to seven thousand million rials. It was involved in nearly every field of industry, from dairy and food processing to footwear and metallurgy.[16]

He relished this growth, but he saw trouble on the horizon. He came to believe that the end of the Pahlavi regime wasn’t far away when he witnessed the shah scuttle the existing party system and create a one-party structure. “It was,” he said later, “like watching a desperate man drowning.”[17] In the retrospective view of exile, he came to believe that the shah’s fate was sealed when he parted ways with the clergy. Iranian soldiers, he suggested, were all religious; they were not going to fight the clergy. Moreover, in his opinion, the shah was a weak and vacillating man, and “faced with a powerful opponent, he would cave.” That, in his view, is what happened in the revolution.[18]

He was also harshly critical of Jamshid Amuzegar, the prime minister under whose watch the fires of discontent grew out of control. He blamed him for a failure of vision. He would go along with any amount of expenditure on the military, Kheradju said, but in spite of vast oil revenues, he insisted on collecting taxes from the poor, creating discontent. When these policies finally led to the revolution, Kheradju was as damaged by it as those who, in his mind, were responsible for it.

He stopped going to the bank a few weeks after the fall of the shah. He credits his friendship with Bazorgan as one reason he might not have been arrested during the early days of revolution. He stayed home, out of the public eye, for more than a year. Finally, with the help of human smugglers, he walked to freedom in Turkey, and from there to America. He died in Washington in August 1986, leaving behind an impeccable reputation.

The world of banks and finance is notoriously sober and sedate,if not obsessively secretive and stern. It is also known to be cautious. Bank Saderate Iran (Iran Bank of Export; BSI), however, was an exception. The tale of its rise and fall, of its wonders and woes, and of the personal tragedy and financial wizardry of its founder, is more like a Greek tragedy than the normal story of banks and fortunes. Even the story of the bank’s meteoric rise and rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with branches mushrooming on every corner of the country, was full of controversy. So unusual was the bank’s growth and its ability to set up new branches that it became the only financial institution in modern Iran to become the subject of jokes and cartoons, particularly in the famous Towfiq magazine. In one cartoon, a man is surprised when he enters the inner sanctum of his own house and discovers a new BSI branch there.

This growth and expansion made BSI—particularly in the 1970s, when owning a bank was the dream of every upstart industrialist—not only the target of predatory capitalists, but also an issue of intense political sensitivity. There were rumors that the bank’s branches worked in tandem with the secret police, SAVAK, and helped keep tabs on the population. Moreover, as it turned out, under direct pressure from SAVAK’s head, General Ne’matollah Nasiri, the bank was forced to pay millions of tooman in questionable loans to Hojabr Yazdani, the feared and loathed corporate raider and leveraged-buyout artist. Yazdani used the borrowed funds to quietly buy shares of the bank from the employees who had, over the years, received shares as rewards. When Hojabr was poised to take over the bank, the issue immediately took on dire financial implications and a nasty political turn. The director of Iran’s Central Bank at the time, Hassanali Mehran, realized that Yazdani had accumulated millions of dollars of real and de facto loans and was becoming a threat to the financial system. Aside from the normal loans, Yazdani had been floating millions of dollars of checks between different branches. After intense negotiations that included the shah himself—the shah was brought in at least partially because one of Yazdani’s main supporters was Dr. Abdol Karim Ayadi, the shah’s private physician— Yazdani was forced to give up his attempt to buy Bank Saderat but was allowed in return to buy another bank.

What further contributed to the necessity of blocking Yazdani’s purchase of Bank Saderat was opposition from the clergy. The Islamic clergy had always been against banks and their practice of paying interest, particularly in light of Islam’s ban on usury, but they eventually had to live with the idea. The possibility that someone like Yazdani, known to be of the Bahai faith, would own the bank that had branches in every nook and cranny of the country was simply too much for them to tolerate. The normally conservative Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari sent a message to the shah indicating that if Yazdani was allowed to own Bank Saderat-e Iran, then the ayatollahs would be left with no choice but to call for a boycott of the bank. Such a boycott would not only have created havoc in the financial life of the country, but more important, it would have emboldened the otherwise depoliticized population. While the bank was spared the control of Yazdani, the bank’s founder, Moffarah, who had approved millions of dollars of questionable loans to Yazdani, was forced to resign from the board of the bank he had created. In the months leading to his tragic loss of the bank he built, he often lamented to friends about how “they have ruined him,” and how “they’ve controlled him.” Although it was an enigmatic “they,” most friends understood that for him, “they” were SAVAK, and that somewhere in his past something had happened to afford “them” a Damoclean sword to hold over him. In the last decade of his life he was more like a character from a Graham Greene novel—a man with some “darkness palpable” in his past, a brooding disposition, a saintly goodness of the heart, a sharp and brilliant mind, and always drunk. Occasionally, in those moments of stupor, his searing honesty would allow him to open up to friends and lament his own fate.

Mohammadali Moffarah was a self-made man and a financial wizard. He was born in Tehran in 1915 (1294), to a family of middle-class means. His father was a merchant of the bazaar. Mohammadali was the second child, He went to school in Tehran and then on to Tehran University, where he received an engineering degree. He was never, according to those who knew him, more than “a mediocre student.”[1] During his college days he joined the Tudeh Party, and for the rest of his life he paid heavily for his walk on the wild side. Even during the height of his financial success, he kept in touch with a small group of lapsed communists, who would together commiserate on what had happened to them and to their country.

In 1945, at the height of his political activism, Moffarah married a young woman named Mahin Banu Tehrani. Together they had five children, four boys and a girl. He was an unusual father and husband, living most of his life in a peripatetic pursuit of not so much profit but something ineffable that remained a mystery even to his closest friends.

On November 13, 1952, he received permission from the government to establish a private bank called Bank Saderat-e Iran (BSI). The headquarters were set up in small rented offices.[2] Before that he had worked at another private bank, the Bazorganan Bank (Merchants Bank), and for reasons that are not clear, he separated from that bank and decided to go out on his own. His new creation was to be a full service bank focused primarily on smaller investors and on making a formidable aggregate of capital from disparate and very small accounts. It was a novel idea in Iran, and it paid off. From its second-floor offices in a small building in a poorer section of town, the bank started with an initial capital of twenty million rials (about $700,000 at the exchange rate of the time) and twenty employees. Within a decade, the bank had by far the largest total assets of any private bank; only the National Bank of Iran, which was in those days Iran’s de facto central bank, had more. BSI’s assets in 1961, for example, were 15,682 million rials; the next largest bank was the Army Bank with assets of 10,290 million rials.[3] On the eve of the revolution, the bank’s asset reached over three hundred billion rials ($500 million). It had more than thirty-two hundred offices in Iran and twenty-three offices overseas.[4] By then, almost 23 percent of bank employees in the country and 29 percent of all branches belonged to BSI.[5]

Moffarah’s approach was unique in the annals of banking in Iran. The institution he created was to the banking industry in Iran what cheap airlines like Southwest are to the American airline industry. He applied some of the populism of his Marxist ideology to the world of finance. Rather than simply concentrating on big customers and institutional investors, he decided to rely on “the people.” We should take the bank to the people, he often said, rather than “wait for the people to come to our bank.”[6] His banks were altogether free of frills and extra expenses[7]—no fancy buildings or expensive furniture, no servants or chauffeurs.[8] He tried to keep the salaries of management and staff close and equitable. In the early years of the bank, Moffarah insisted on meeting all the employees of the bank to establish something of a personal relationship with each of them.[9] After a while, he further expanded his populism by turning the company into an employee-owned venture by distributing company stock to all the employees. In fact, the bank would give employees loans to acquire stock. Much to his grief, it was precisely this decision that proved crucial to his undoing.

He was a workaholic and worked about eighteen hours a day. He was an itinerant manager, moving from one branch to another and from one city to another. “He was constantly calling people from all over the country,” according to Hassanali Mehran.[10] He had a military cot in his office and sometimes spent the night there rather than going home to his family. At the same time, he believed in delegating authority to branch and division managers. As he wrote in a note toward the end of his career, “These days I don’t spend more than four hours in my office, and even much of that is spent reading the newspaper.”[11]

There was also something tragic about his demeanor. For the last couple of decades of his life, he was often inebriated, even as early as lunchtime. It was rumored that sometimes he was found lying unconscious on some street corner. He was also said to be selfmedicating his anxieties with opium. He was more than anything embittered by the fact that under duress he had been forced to make bad loans to cronies of SAVAK leader General Nasiri, and that one of those loans was being used by Hojabr Yazdani to buy employee stocks and prepare a hostile take-over of the bank. Of course, Yazdani used the same tactics to try to get loans from other banks. In some cases, as with Mehdi Samii, when the bankers were self-assured and honest, they successfully resisted these pressures.[12]

When the shah finally intervened, and Yazdani was forced to give up his effort, the extent of dubious loans became known, and Moffarah was forced to give up the leadership of the bank he had built. A member of the bank’s board took over in place of Moffarah. He was only sixty-four years old when he died in his home in Tehran in October 1984. The official cause of death was a heart attack[13] —but it might be more accurate to say he died of heartbreak.

When the Islamic Revolution came, BSI, like all other banks, was “nationalized.” Even then, long after Moffarah was no longer on the scene, rumors of the bank’s connection with the secret services of the new regime haunted BSI. In 2005, the United States imposed a ban on BSI bank transactions, “insisting that Iran is channeling funds to Hezbollah in Lebanon through the bank.”[14]

Mohsen and Reza Moghadam[1] embodied the trajectory of the Iranian economic elite’s transition from traditional mercantilism to modern industry and finance. The brothers came from a prosperous old family, whose name conjured commerce and industry. Of the two brothers, the younger, Reza, was the better known. He was recognized widely and respected as a competent, committed, incorruptible, and deeply disciplined technocrat and a dependable financier. Mohsen, on the other hand, carved out a niche for himself as a pioneer industrialist, responsible for bringing modern industrialized housing to Iran. In the last years of Mohsen’s short life, the brothers joined forces to create a new bank called the Development and Investment Bank of Iran—a private bank they created with help from investors ranging from prosperous Iranians to such prominent international financial institutions as First Boston Corporation, Dresdner Bank, Mellon Bank, and Long Term Credit Bank of Japan.[2]

Mohsen Moghadam was born in Tehran on November 1, 1920 (10 Aban 1299). His father was a member of the bazaar. Like many merchants of his generation, the elder Moghadam also had large real estate holdings, in his case near the city of Gazvin. Mohsen went to school in Tehran, graduating from the School of Commerce—an institution that opened in the early part of the century and was the closest Iran came at the time to having a professional business school. After graduation, destined like most men in his generation to follow in their father’s footsteps, he joined the family business. For the rest of his life, there was a hint of regret in him about never having gone to college. Gradually, with seed money, apparently partly provided by his father, Mohsen set out on his own. Among his early business activities was the export of cotton to markets outside Iran. He was a man of exceptional qualities—punctual and punctilious, disciplined and gregarious.
He was deeply attached to his family, as much to his parents and siblings as to his own wife and children. To his younger siblings, particularly after the death of their father, he was a father figure. To his parents, he was a doting son, showering them with unfailing devotion. He was keen on ensuring that his children would receive the best education possible and never spared any expense for it. Cinema and skiing, as well as spending time with his children, were among his favorite pastimes. Travel to the Caspian coast was another. All his life he was a hardworking man of relentless energy, an early riser with a rigorous rhythm to his daily life. He was known for his ability to bring focused discipline to every project he undertook. The cleanliness of everything about him—from his car and office to his personal accoutrements—were legendary, and almost an obsession with him.[3] He was religious, but his piety was strictly private. He was never involved in politics and held enlightened views, particularly on such issues as the rights of women and the treatment of children.

His attitude toward women was most evident in his choice of a wife. Although it was a traditional marriage, arranged by the elders of the family, his wife was anything but traditional. Her name was Houri Mostofi, and she was a woman of unusual independence, erudition, and ambition. She came on her paternal side from a family of courtiers and intellectuals. Her father, Abdollah Mostofi, was a prominent man of politics and letters, and his memoirs are considered an indispensable guide to the social history of the end of the Qajar period and the first three decades of the Pahlavi era.[4] On her maternal side was the Ardalan clan, who for centuries had ruled the Kurdistan region of Iran. Houri’s mother was a formidable presence in the family and was called Shah Joon—short for “dear princess.”

Houri had just begun teaching French in Tehran’s most famous all-girls high school when she married Mohsen. It was as much a credit to his enlightened views as a sign of her assertive character that she never quit working. Working women, particularly among the affluent classes, were a rarity, even an oddity, in those days. But Houri insisted not just on keeping her job but on continuing her education. Eventually she received her doctoral degree in French literature. Using the combination of her own family name and her newly acquired status as an educator and the wife of a prominent businessman, she was a forceful presence in Tehran society. Attending to her social functions meant less time with her family, but her husband more than compensated for her absence by spending more time with their children. All her life she has studiously kept a daily journal, in French, chronicling everything from the mundane details of daily life to her views on the more existential questions of life.[5]

Eventually the tensions of their unusual marriage manifested itself in her private life with Mohsen. About ten months after their marriage they had their first child, a girl named Maryam. They went on to have two more children, a girl named Ladan and a son named Hamid.[6] Mohsen was intimately involved in raising the children and, in contrast to the macho culture of the time, was even likely to change diapers, but he was ultimately a private man. His penchant for privacy was in sharp contrast to his wife’s desire to assert herself in Tehran society, and the contrast made for considerable tension, even estrangement, in the house.

Before the estrangement, the relationship between husband and wife was close. Mohsen consulted with his wife on all matters, including business.[7] But by the mid-1950s, as his business expanded from mercantalism to industry, and from investment in land to building industrialized houses, Houri’s place as her husband’s chief confidante was gradually supplanted by Reza, Mohsen’s younger brother, who had just returned to Iran after about a decade in America.

Reza Moghadam was not just his brother’s closest confidant, however. He is often praised as a key member of a small group of bankers and economists, planners and technocrats who masterminded the incredible economic progress in Iran during the 1960s, before the sudden surge of petrodollars led to bloated development and ultimately to the revolution. Like others in this group, he had been recruited to work for the Plan Organization under Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj.[8]

Reza was born on July 1, 1926 (9 Tir 1305) in the city of Tehran. The family in those days lived near Sepah Square, a neighbor known to house the old moneyed merchants of the bazaar. He went to school in Tehran—first to Khayam and then to Sharaf School— and was always among the top students of his class. His forte was literature, and he had a decided aversion to the vagaries of politics. The family was traditional, and thus “college education,” Reza remembers, “was still not that common for young men like me.”9 Reza decided to defy this tradition and opted for college education. In 1945, on the day World War II ended, he set out for America. By the time he arrived on its shores, he had been on the road for three months, traveling from Tehran to Alexandria in Egypt, and from there to a boat headed for the new continent.

In the United States he first enrolled in a language school called American International College. After a year, during which he mastered English, he transferred to a small liberal arts college in New Jersey called Upsala College. Like its namesake university in Sweden, it was established and managed by a Protestant denomination. In those days, Iranian students coming to America often used the good offices of nonprofit organizations whose mission was facilitating the process of finding and applying to the right American university. Reza’s choice of institutions in the United States was dictated by the kind of advice he had received from one such organization in Iran.

He completed his undergraduate education in three years (1946–49), after which he was accepted to Stanford University’s graduate program in economics. Within four years, he had finished all required courses and had passed all necessary exams for his doctoral degree. At Stanford at that time, there were only a few other Iranian students. One of them was Khodad Farmanfarma’ian. The two became friends, and when they returned home they often worked together in crucial posts dealing with the economy.

As soon as Reza finished his required courses in 1953, he decided to return to Iran and write his dissertation there. He arrived early in 1953, when Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was still in power. Moghadam, though never involved in politics, was favorably disposed toward the prime minister and his nationalism. When the coup of August 19 took place, Reza Moghadam was disheartened enough that he decided to leave Iran. “I couldn’t stand the way they were treating Mossadeq,” he said.[10] He moved back to the United States and before long began to work at the IMF as an economist, with Middle East as his primary area of interest.

He also resumed work on his doctoral dissertation on Iran’s trade policy.[11] His findings on the trajectory of trade between Iran and the Soviet Union, England, and Germany shed important light on some controversial aspects of Iran’s modern history. In the case of the Soviet Union, for example, his data showed that as soon as Teymourtash, reported to have been a close ally or agent of the Soviet Union, fell from grace, Iran’s total trade with that country declined rapidly.[12] His figures on Iran’s trade with England, on the other hand, show that contrary to the common perception of Reza Shah as a tool of the British Embassy, Iran’s trade with that country declined. In 1920, 73 percent of Iran’s total foreign trade was with England, whereas in 1940 that figure was less than 8 percent.13 One of the main beneficiaries of this change was Nazi Germany. Work on the dissertation was finished in July 1956, and within months Reza was on his way back home.

Although he had written his dissertation under the tutelage of a famous Stanford professor, Tibor Scitovsky,[14] in Reza’s own mind he was intellectually most indebted to Paul Baran,[15] another famous Stanford economist, known for his theories of development and dependency. Eventually, in spite of Baran’s reputation as a Marxist economist, Moghadam invited him to Iran, where he gave a seminar for some of the most important economists of the country.[16]

It was perhaps this interest in Baran that dissuaded Reza from entering the private sector upon his return home. Back in Iran, he chose to enter government service, soon establishing himself as one of the most competent, honest, hardworking, no-nonsense technocrats of his generation.
Not long after his return, he joined a group of like-minded technocrats, mostly graduates of American universities who were dedicated to the idea that they “must do something for the development of the country,” and that they must help support one another in their future careers. Those were the days when the idea of dowreh, or cliques or groups, as embryos of political parties was in vogue in Tehran. The dowreh that Moghadam belonged to happened to be one of the most powerful of its kind and was essentially composed of graduates of American universities.[17]

In Reza’s case, his first important job was as an economist on the High Economic Council headed by Hassan-Ali Mansur. The council met regularly in front of the shah. Moghadam, according to his peers at the time, was not interested in titles and the pomp of office. He simply wanted to help move the country out of its morass of poverty and underdevelopment, and thus when Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj asked him to join his team at the Plan Organization, Moghadam readily agreed.18 He was partially responsible for the development of the Third Economic Plan and acted as an advisor to Ebtehaj. By all accounts, Moghadam was a man of impeccable discipline and high moral standards. More than once he refused to sign decisions or orders he found unacceptable. For example, he was a critic of Iran’s military expenditure, and as a “rule refused to sign any document dealing with funding for it.”[19]

Moreover, whenever he saw a shady deal, regardless of who was behind it, he did not chose the safe path of benign neglect, favored by many other honest technocrats, but actively opposed it. For example, when he discovered that a plan to develop a microwave communication system for the country was going to cost Iran almost 250 percent above international prices, he adamantly opposed it, knowing that someone as powerful as Assadollah Alam was behind the crooked deal.[20]

These bureaucratic battles finally took their toll, and Moghadam left the Plan Organization. In his few months as deputy secretary at the Ministry of Commerce, he tried to end the system in which each year the government decided the list of commodities that could be freely imported and set the quota for others. Moghadam found the system cumbersome and prone to corruption and cronyism. He wanted it replaced with free markets. But such a new system obviously endangered the lucrative monopolies enjoyed by special interests, who joined forces and, using a combination of coercion and sycophancy, tried to abort the changes and get rid of Moghadam. They succeeded, and soon Moghadam had a new job. He was “present at the creation” of the Central Bank of Iran, where he worked for three years. He was seen by the staff and even by the governor not so much as a deputy but as a co-manager. He had developed the legislation authorizing the creation of the bank.[21]

While he was entangled in this complicated web of intrigue and economic innovation and change, his personal life was also changing. Since returning to Iran in 1956, he had lived with his parents. But his days as a confirmed bachelor came to end when, in 1959, in one of the meetings of a group of Iranian alumni of American universities, he met his future wife, Maryam Vosough. Like Moghadam, she came from a prominent family. Her family had produced many generals, ministers, and prime ministers. Reza and Maryam decided to marry, but in a subtle nod to tradition and to their parents, they went through the traditional process of marriage, allowing their parents to meet ceremonially and agree to the terms of the wedding. They were wed in December 1959. Less than four years later, their lives took a dramatic turn.

Moghadam had a particularly good working relationship with Ali Amini, and not long after the latter was replaced as prime minister, Moghadam decided to leave Iran. The country, he believed, had taken a turn for the worse, and he was convinced that he “would never work in Iran again.” He arrived in the United States in 1963 and immediately went back to a job at the IMF.

In the course of these years, his brother’s business had also been changing and expanding. In 1956, Mohsen took a big business leap and entered into a partnership with a British company; using loans backed by the Iranian government, he established the Iran Reema Construction Company, credited with being the first factory for prefabricated houses in Iran. Reza, on his way back to Iran at the time, had, at his brother’s behest, conducted some of the negotiations for the partnership in London.

There was at the time a severe shortage of affordable housing in Tehran. The middle class was on the rise, and the bureaucracy was rapidly expanding. The combination of these factors should have created a robust market for the kind of low-priced houses Iran Reema could build. But the market was seriously curtailed by the fact that there was no system of easy mortgage loans in Iran. The late 1950s and 1960s were also a period of a massive military buildup in Iranian society. Iran Reema’s factory went into full production when it received contracts from the military for hundreds of houses for officers and enlisted men at military bases in Tehran.

Other government contracts allowed Iran Reema to build several thousand small apartments in what became the city’s first low-cost housing development. But government allocations, particularly in the military, were in those days notorious for allegations of corruption and kickbacks. Staying clear of these shady practices was an uphill battle for Mohsen and his company. Moreover, the rapid expansion of his business enticed Mohsen to begin looking for investment opportunities outside Iran. For a short while, he entered into a partnership with Sedco of Texas—with John Connally as a partner—for building offshore platforms.[22] In spite of many entreaties by Mohsen during this period, Reza refused to join him in the company and worked for the IMF while living in the United States.

By 1969, home beckoned Reza again. With the sudden surge of oil revenue, Iran was poised to take off economically, and by the late 1960s Iranians living in the West were tempted to return home, while new graduates rarely hesitated to return to Iran. Moghadam was part of this trend. Furthermore, in his own mind, his return home had another reason. As an Iranian, he believed, “We are all romantics. We each have a touch of nostalgia in us.”[23] He went back to Iran and immediately took over as the deputy director of the Plan Organization.

His clear sense of fiscal responsibility, his faith in the virtue and necessity of longterm planning, his belief in the power of free markets, and finally his aversion to military expenditures put him on a collision course with the shah.

In late 1972, planning for the Fifth Development had begun. Reza was among its chief architects. Then the price of oil, and thus Iran’s income, suddenly increased dramatically. The shah, according to Moghadam, “could not tolerate economic discipline.” He wanted to use all the revenues to expedite the country’s economic growth. Rapid growth, the shah firmly believed, could be purchased, and infrastructural problems could melt away with the power of money. Moghadam was among those who cautioned against too rapid a growth and were mindful of bottlenecks that had resulted from years of neglect and poverty. They believed that these structural bottlenecks would definitely impede rapid development. He was one of the chief authors of a report predicting “a social and political explosion” if government priorities did not change. They advocated spending less money on the military and more on social expenditures, and they supported fiscal responsibility.[24]

Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, as prime minister and head of the Supreme Planning Council, was reluctant to submit such a report to the shah. Eventually it was left to Moghadam to deliver the sobering news. In a now famous meeting in the city of Ramsar, halfway through Moghadam’s report, an angry shah snapped. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he asked, then angrily marched out of the room. Everyone knew that Moghadam’s days in the government were numbered.

Moghadam did not relent. Within hours of the incident, he sent a complete copy of the report to the court. He had spoken truth to power and had at the same time sealed his fate. Before long, he left the Plan Organization and government service altogether. The private sector and a partnership with his older brother was now his only option.

Initially, after consultation with Mohsen, who had long years of experience in the housing market, the brothers decided to launch a savings-and-loan institution in Iran. But soon they succumbed to what seemed like insurmountable obstacles on the path to such a simple innovation. Instead, they created a commercial bank that served only businesses. It was more like a venture capital firm than a traditional bank, providing debt and equity for big industrial projects. Mohsen provided the initial seed money and took on the role of chairman of the board; Reza was named the president. They called it the Development and Industrial Bank of Iran. The bank soon developed a reputation as one of the most efficient institutions of its kind and free from corruption. In the days after the revolution, it was declared to have the highest net valuation of all private banks in the country.[25]

Nature and politics, however, drastically changed the brothers’ fortune and fate. On July 26, 1973, Mohsen Moghadam died of an undiagnosed liver disease. The failure to diagnose it was particularly shocking because his attending physician was one of the world’s top experts in the field and had been flown in from the United Kingdom. Mohsen was only fifty-three years old when he died. Seven years later, his property, as well as that of Reza, were expropriated in the frenzy that followed the revolution. Their total assets were estimated to be near one hundred million dollars. For Reza, the revolution had other consequences as well.

The revolution was only a week old when two armed men arrived at the bank’s headquarters and asked Reza to come along with them “for a few questions.” He was taken to the infamous Alavi School, the residence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the headquarters of the revolution. Reza had been there only twenty-four hours when he began hearing the unmistakable sound of a firing squad. The school’s rooftop had become the dread location where dozens of leaders of the ancien régime were executed in the early days of the revolution.[26]

During the first session of interrogation, it soon became clear that there were no specific charges against Reza. “I think they have brought you here by mistake,” the young interrogator said. Moghadam told him that he had stayed away from political appointments. “I was just an economist and a manager,” he said. And he was right. During the days of Amini, Reza was offered the job of minister of commerce. Much to Amini’s surprise, Moghadam refused, suggesting, “I am still too young, and need to gain more experience before I can accept such an appointment.”[27] That decision might well have saved his life.

Five days after the first interrogation, his name was again called out. He grew anxious and concerned. By then the ritual of having names called out by guards had become fraught with danger. Sometimes those called out were freed, and other times they were headed for the firing squad. Where Reza was going, he did not know. He was taken to a bus that eventually stopped at another prison, where he joined other prominent members of the shah’s regime. But he stayed there only twenty-four hours. Again his name was called, but this time he was taken to the front door and set free.

A few days after his release, all banks in Iran were nationalized. Reza began thinking about leaving Iran. This was no country for men like him, he concluded. But he had to bide his time. Much to his surprise, around March 21, the Persian new year, the new head of the Central Bank called him and offered him the presidency of the Industrial Development Bank. After some initial resistance, he finally decided to agree. But the presidency, he knew, would be only a means, not an end. His goal now was to leave Iran.

Three months after taking over as president, he was sent to London on bank business. Once there he sent back his resignation. It did not take him long to find a job at the IMF. After a few more years at the fund, he retired. He now lives with his family in London. Mohsen’s children and his wife also left Iran and began to fashion new lives for themselves in the United States. Hamid became one of the most successful businessmen of his generation in America. He helped create and now runs a multi-billion dollar company.

In an age marred by rumors of corruption, he was universally recognized and respected as a man of impeccable honesty. In a time when sycophancy was a sure ticket for social climbing, and for acceptance to the inner circles of the court, he was relentlessly honest and refreshingly free from the bombast of sycophants. In a period when kissing the hand of the king—and for a while, even kneeling in front of him—was a mandatory ritual for every Iranian official, he was polite to a fault but unbending in his refusal to kiss the hand of the man he loyally served. His name is Mehdi Samii, and he is one of the most respected public figures in Iran in the second half of the twentieth century.[1] He is also considered one of the chief architects of Iran’s rapid economic and industrial growth in the 1960s.[2]

Samii was more than anyone else responsible for creating Iran’s Central Bank. The fact that the bank was a relatively independent institution, free from corruption and political interference and unusually efficient, has been attributed to his early leadership. In the words of Hassanali Mehran, who was himself at one time the governor of the Central Bank and was also known for his honesty and efficiency, “somehow Samii managed to even influence the way phone-operators worked: they were always the most polite of any government bureaucracy.”[3] The key to the mystery might well be, at least partially, in the quality of the man Samii is.

Although a banker and a man of finance for much of his life, he has the demeanor of seasoned diplomat and the solemn presence of a statesman. His careful way with words, his invariably well-pondered, meticulously crafted, usually parsimonious responses to every question, his self-effacing humility, his subtle sense of humor, his photographic memory, his impressively varied and vast erudition, his unfailing attempt to find a territory of shared values with his interlocutor, his almost physical aversion to radical, polarizing ideas and gestures, his charismatic skill as a raconteur, his politeness, particularly with those who serve under him, and the pluralism of his interests as a true Renaissance man, have worked to make him one of the most highly esteemed public figures of his time.

Mehdi Samii was born on the July 24, 1918 (Mordad 1297) in one of Tehran’s oldest and most prominent neighborhoods. On both paternal and maternal sides, he came from a long line of courtiers and scholars. His maternal grandfather, Adib-al Saltaneh, was, for two years beginning in 1934, Reza Shah’s minister of court. He was also a poet and a trained calligrapher. One collection of his poems was published during his lifetime, but another collection, in his own calligraphy, remains unpublished.4 His father was educated first at St. Petersburg’s military academy and then at Geneva, where he received a degree in law and returned to Iran as a government functionary. For a while he was the head of the newly established Bureau of Roads.
Mehdi was the second child of a family of five siblings. His family, along with his grandfather and other relatives, lived in a big compound, divided between an andaroun, saved for the family, and a birun, where visitors were received. Samii was in elementary school when his father finally rented a house of their own near the moat that encircled Tehran in those days. The moat was a sad remnant of Nasir al-din Shah’s journey to Europe. Dry like the arid deserts that surround the capital, in the better neighborhoods the moat was a playground for children; in poorer sections of town, it had become a hangout for dope fiends and pederasts, gypsies and musicians.[5]

As a child, Mehdi was a student of sterling academic standing but was physically weak. He often caught colds; he also suffered from a disease that had left a lesion on his face. When modern medicine proved ineffective, he decided to take matters in his own hands. He accepted the offer of a traditional herbalist—an attar, in the Persian lexicon of the time, or what in Shakespeare’s England would have been called an apothecary—to take care of the problem. The only result of the herbalist’s concoction was a permanent scar on Mehdi’s face.[6]

His parents were angered by their young son’s decision, but both father and mother were averse to the idea of physical punishment. In fact, they treated their children, particularly Mehdi, with respect and dignity. Mehdi’s decision to take his illness in his own hands was, in fact, part of a larger picture. He was from early childhood stubbornly independent and intolerant of overbearing authority. On several occasions, he challenged teachers as well as schoolyard bullies.7 Later in life, his intolerance of unjust authority showed itself in the form of skirmishes with the many petty tyrants that infest the landscape of any large bureaucracy.
All through elementary and high school, Samii was at turns naughty, insolent, and rebellious. One of the few teachers who intimidated him was a man of unusual height called Seyfaddin Shehab. Whispers had it that he had been thrown out of the army because he was taller than Reza Shah![8] His forte, however, was French, and he instilled in the young Mehdi a love of French language and culture. The other love of his youthful years—this one unrequited—was a married woman. He was all of eleven years old at the time and had learned all he knew of love from the novels he rented from a local bookstore.

He has been a voracious reader all his life, omnivorous in his tastes and sensibilities. As in all he does, he is also a careful reader, bringing an accountant’s meticulous care for detail to his reading experience. Shakespeare and histories of World War II, of which he is a buff, along with economic reports, novels, and classics of Persian literature, have been the primary subjects of his lifelong attachment to books and reading.[9]

He was a student at Sharaf high school and helped organize a “cultural and literary society” whose goal was to invite interesting speakers to the school.

Those curiosities, hand in hand with his active imagination, led him, throughout his early years, to become preoccupied with visiting three faraway lands: Chile for its unusual elongated shape, France for its rich culture, and Norway for its exotic uniqueness. In later years, he added New Zealand to his lands of fantasy.[10] The end of school meant a chance to visit one of those lands. He had his eyes set on France. His reading of Balzac, Stendhal, and Malraux had only augmented his love of France. But that year the government cancelled its long policy of sending students abroad. Disgruntled, he decided to join the navy as a way to travel the world. His parents did not have the financial means to pay for his European education. But before his military fate was sealed, he participated in a competition for scholarships at Iran’s National Bank. He was one of the handful of people who passed the test. Another winner was Ishag Eprim, who became his lifelong friend and who played a crucial role in the history of Iran’s communist movement, before becoming an acclaimed Oxford don in economics.

Mehdi and his friend Eprim were pleasantly surprised by the composition of the group chosen for the scholarship. There were students from all over the country, and from all different social classes. They were also from different religions—a member of the Bahai faith, a Jew, a few Muslims, a Christian, and a Zoroastrian. Merit and no other consideration had clearly been the criteria for selection.[11] To Mehdi’s consternation, the bank sent him to England, not his beloved France, and demanded that he study accounting, not his desired economics or politics.

He arrived in London on the night of December 1, 1936, and in the course of a few years he became one of the handful of Iranians who were chartered accountants in England. In Iran he became one of the founders and the first president of the Iran’s Association of Certified Public Accountants. In London, he also pursued his own avid intellectual curiosities. He registered as a student of economics in the London School of Economics and took classes with Harold Lasky, the famed Fabian social theorist. Indeed, Samii was keen on receiving a degree in political science, but Iran’s ambassador at the time, TaghiZadeh, refused to extend Samii’s stay.[12]

Samii finished his accounting degree in 1944 and became a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Through a long, circuitous road that took him to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, he finally arrived in Iran in early 1945. He immediately began working at the National Bank (Bank Melli Iran), as was required by the terms of his scholarship. Working at a bank in those days was not, however, commensurate with his rebellious spirit. Iran was experimenting with an unusual period of democracy, and Samii by temperament wanted to join the fray. The way he dressed, in golf jackets and shirts and even, sometimes, golf shoes, was one aspect of his rebellion. He also became one of the founding members of a union for the employees of the bank. The union was something of a front for the communists and not surprisingly caused the ire of the bank’s stern and storied governor, Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj. Samii was joined by Eprim in his union activities. The bank responded by exiling Samii to Zahedan, a city in the south known in those days for the heat and humidity of its disease-infested summers and the absolute aridity of its cultural landscape. The city was also the hub of a vast network of smuggling activities, and thus an important center of banking. Samii toyed with the idea of resigning, but eventually, under family pressure, agreed to accept his sentence of exile. His friend and “accomplice,” Eprim, resigned and soon after set out for England, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Once in Zahedan, instead of wallowing in self-pity—he was, after all, one of the country’s only chartered accountants, sent to a small office far away from the center of banking—he decided to make the best of the experience. He organized a soccer league and spent many hours reading. After six months, he returned to Tehran. There calamity awaited.

In March 1946, Mehdi’s only sister was married; less than six months later, she died of a mysterious illness. She was only twenty-one years old. All her life she had been particularly close to Mehdi, and her death had a lasting influence on him. Her closest friend, in whose arms she literally passed away, was a beautiful woman of singular independence, joviality and intelligence, competence and assertiveness. Her name was Badri Ajoudani. She was married to Ahmad Ajoudani, himself an army officer of impressive erudition and civility. Later in life, Ajoudani developed an affinity for pre-Islamic Persia, the Mithraic religion, and a prose free from Arabic influences.[13]

At the wake for Samii’s sister, a beautiful, lifelong friendship was born between Samii and Badri Ajoudani. It eventually also included her husband.

Samii continued to work for the bank until 1959, rising in the ranks to the position of vice governor. During the Mossadeq years, when Iran nationalized the oil industry, Samii was sent to the oil-rich provinces as the chief auditor and accountant of the newly created National Iranian Oil Company. Among his sensitive duties was auditing the books of the hitherto British-controlled oil company. This important assignment was the result of a number of independent contributing factors. On the one hand, Samii had by then already established his reputation as a man of impeccable honesty. Furthermore, he was one of the country’s only CPAs.[14] Finally, he had several trusted friends in the ranks of Mossadeq’s National Front. These friendships were to figure prominently in Samii’s life a quarter century later, when the monarchy was facing its most serious crisis.

In 1954, Samii returned to the National Bank and for the next four years he played a crucial role in developing a set of laws that regulated Iran’s banking system. He was, for example, one of the authors of the Monetary and Banking Act of 1954. In this effort, he was helped by a French economist named Henri Camerlynk, who had come as an advisor to the Iranian government and played a crucial role in convincing the government to allow the development of private banks in Iran. The Monetary and Banking Act of 1954 paved the way for this important economic development. At the same time, in 1956, Samii helped draft the famous and controversial Law for the Encouragement and Protection of Foreign Investment in Iran. For many economists, this law was the first major and necessary step by the shah’s government to attract much-needed foreign capital to Iran. According to its detractors, invariably from the ranks of the Left, the law “opened” Iran’s market to “imperialism.”

With the passage of the bill, American banks, particularly Chase and Lazard Frères, became interested in investing in Iran. After long, protracted discussions in which Samii was the lead Iranian negotiator, an agreement was reached to create a jointly owned bank called the Industrial and Mining Development Bank of Iran. Eighteen different banks invested in this venture, and Samii was named its associate managing director. Throughout his career, he had been an advocate of using Iranian managers and technicians, and this time he insisted that he should be paid the same salary as his American counterpart. His salary came to close to 17,500 tooman ($2,500)—an astronomical figure by late 1950s Iranian standards, where a university professor had a salary of less than 2,000 tooman.

The development of private banks and the gradual growth of the economy necessitated the development of a central bank. Hitherto the National Bank had been performing most of the functions of such a bank. Samii played a crucial role in developing the law, empowering the new bank, and writing its bylaws.

His first chance to become a minister came in 1960 when Sharif-Emami was named prime minister and offered Samii the post of minister of agriculture. Samii refused, as he had developed a particular aversion to Sharif-Emami and his alleged financial corruption during negotiations to create the Industrial and Mining Development Bank. A few months later, in 1961, the new prime minister, Ali Amini, offered Samii the post of minister of commerce in his new cabinet. To help convince Samii, Amini had used as his emissary an old friend of Samii’s who had been connected to the National Front. Again Samii refused.[15] He was enjoying his life away from the bruising bustle of politics.

But his happy days of private-sector banking came to an end when he was offered the post of governor of the Central Bank in 1963. In some ways, though he had never worked there, it was akin to going home. He had been a midwife in the creation of the bank and was now asked by Assadollah Alam to help it grow. Before accepting, he stipulated a couple of conditions, and both were accepted. One was about his salary, and the other about his freedom to choose his associates. He warned he would accept no interference in his choice of vice governors and kept true to his promise when he offered the post to Khodad Farmanfarma’ian, who was rejected by SAVAK. Samii stood his ground and Farmanfarma’ian was appointed.

Samii’s tenure at the bank lasted five years. In 1970, he would come back to the bank for another one-year term. He laid the groundwork for the creation of Iran’s first Stock Exchange. He was a powerful governor who would not allow encroaching ministers to dictate policy or interfere with the bank’s monetary policies. Foremost among the ministers with whom Samii clashed was Jamshid Amuzegar. As a powerful minister of finance, Amuzegar felt he had a supervisory role over the bank. It took much struggle before Samii eventually disabused him of that notion. The bank, Samii argued, must be independent of political influence. According to Samii, he was helped in establishing this crucial pattern by the tradition set by Reza Shah and followed by his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. Both monarchs understood the sensitive nature of the country’s banking system and generally eschewed interfering in the bank’s policy-making functions.

Samii also set up a program in which the bank would choose twelve of the country’s brightest students each year and send them, with full scholarships, to study abroad. The only stipulation was that they had to agree to work at the bank after graduation for a period proportionate to the number of years they had received the scholarship. Some of Iran’s best economists and bankers—people like Hashem Pesaran, who is now a professor of econometrics at Cambridge—were students chosen during the Samii years.[16]

A number of other changes were also made during the Samii tenure. He helped establish a new college dedicated to teaching banking and finance. He set up a café for the employees where management and simple clerks ate in the same setting and stood in the same line. He purchased a number of paintings by Persian masters—Sohrab Sepehri, Bahman Mohasess, and Parviz Tanavoli—to decorate the walls. But humility was easily his most endearing quality. He treated everyone, particularly those in menial jobs, with utmost dignity and respect. His humane qualities were probably one of the many factors that saved his life in the mayhem that followed the victory of the Islamic Revolution.[17]

But back in his days as the governor of the Central Bank, Samii had become one of the shah’s most trusted advisors in financial and sometimes political matters. He told the monarch the truth, and as he never tires of repeating, he was never reprimanded or punished for doing so. “He would listen,” he says wistfully, “you could reason with him.” As a result of the trust that was gradually built, the sensitive role of arranging financing for all of Iran’s military purchases was, on the orders of the shah, placed in Samii’s hands. Even when he moved from the Central Bank to become managing director of the Plan Organization, he was still responsible for “military credit negotiations with the United States.”18 As an American Embassy note makes clear, in matters military, throughout the 1960s Samii was the shah’s “Chief Financial Advisor.”19 As the memorandum of a conversation in Washington on December 6, 1968, shows, when Amir-Abbas Hoveyda came to the United States and met with Dean Rusk, then secretary of state, to discuss Iran’s future military budget, neither Hovedya nor Hushang Ansary, Iran’s ambassador to the United States at the time, said a word. Instead, it was Samii who handled all the negotiations.[20]

A few months earlier, when the shah had visited Washington and complained about the possibility that Iran had paid too much for its newly acquired F-4 aircrafts, it was again Samii who was put in charge of negotiating with the U.S. Defense Department and resolving the problem.21
In fact, as the shah’s appetite for military hardware knew no limits, and as the United States was worried about the effect of his military purchases on social programs and on the long-term stability of the regime, a tripartite committee composed of the U.S. ambassador, Iran’s prime minister, and another representative from Iran was set up to monitor the shah’s purchases. Every year, the committee would meet and the Iranian side would have the task of convincing their American counterpart that Iran had the power to service the debt that was to accrue with the new military purchases. From its inception, Samii was Iran’s representative to that committee, and it was his job to give all the relevant data to the Americans.

In 1972, Samii suddenly noticed that the work on financing that year’s purchases was not referred to him. By then he was a “roving ambassador” on economic issues and worked as an advisor to the prime minister, Hoveyda. As it turned out, his removal had been a punishment. He had the temerity to question the wisdom of yet another order for two thousand new tanks by the shah.

Some have argued that the reason he was removed had more to do with kickbacks and corruption than policy disagreements. According to this theory, as the size of Iran’s orders increased and as the income from oil allowed for the purchase of more and more arms, Samii, with his notable and unbending honesty, was an “obstacle” and had to be removed. His replacement developed a reputation for dishonesty, as did Toufanian, the Iranian general in charge of these procurements.
Financing the military purchases was not the only delicate task the shah entrusted to Samii. When in 1966 the shah decided that the time has come for a much-delayed coronation ceremony, it was Samii who was put in charge of the complicated celebrations. Everything from finding the designer for a new crown for the queen to the mise en scène for the event was his responsibility. As diplomatic reports of the time indicate, Samii managed it with singular success and without even a hint of financial shenanigans. The media coverage of the coronation and the popular response to it in Iran and around the world contrasts sharply with the later infamous bash celebrating twenty-five hundred years of monarchy. Rumors of massive financial corruption and of excessive expenditure on frivolous items cast a devastating shadow on those celebrations. Ironically, Samii was never commended by the shah or the queen for his services during the coronation, and, adding insult to injury, he was not invited to the twenty-five-hundred-year celebrations.

By 1972, after another one-year term as governor of the Central Bank, and after two years as the director of the Plan Organization, Samii was relieved of his duties. It is reported that the shah told Hoveyda that “Samii lives by his salary and you must immediately find another job for him.”22 He was thus appointed as “advisor to the Prime Minister on International Financing” with an ambassadorial rank. In less than two years, he grew dissatisfied and asked to return to the private sector. In 1973 he became the president of the Agricultural Development Bank, and remained in that capacity until the revolution.

But his life as an eminent and respected statesmen trusted by the shah was never directly correlated to his official capacity. Early in 1972, he was summoned to the court. The shah talked to him frankly about his anxieties about the future and about the question of transition of power to his son. We lack institutions that can manage this peaceful transition, the shah told him. He added that the current two-party system had failed, and that he wanted Samii to establish a new, genuine political party. Samii demurred, arguing that he knew nothing about party building. The shah was not convinced. “In all I do,” he told the shah, “I move slowly and with deliberation. I also must have freedom of action.” The shah answered that he would give Samii both time and freedom. Samii finally accepted and began the challenging work of creating a group ex nihilo.

One of the first questions raised by Samii at that meeting was whether he could be allowed to establish contact with the mullahs who were by then increasingly estranged from the system. In a tone that was at once cautionary and sardonic, the shah said, “You don’t know these mullahs, but you can contact them if you want.” The meeting ended with the stipulation that henceforth the shah would meet with Samii once every two weeks to discuss the progress in creating the party.

Samii immediately began to recruit men of impeccable reputation to join his party. His strategy was to find a coterie of ten men of unimpeachable character who would set the tone and character of the new party. Negotiations with the shah on what aspects of his power and what elements of politics should be considered outside the limits of the party’s purview continued for about six months. But suddenly two of the ten members decided to resign. Samii knew them to be particularly close to the court. Their resignation was a signal that the shah had changed his mind. A party of respectable men of politics was apparently no longer part of the king’s strategy for the future. Samii believes that the sudden surge in the price of oil had convinced the shah that he could buy the allegiance of the rising middle class. Even more devastating for the country was the king’s decision two years later to establish a one-party system. In other words, instead of opening the system with a genuine party led by men like Samii—in addition to the two politically moribund “official” parties—he opted for the disastrous idea of a one-party system. The revolution was then only months away.

As the crisis worsened, Samii’s old ties to members of the opposition became useful. He tried to act as an intermediary for crucial meetings between the leaders of the secular opposition and the shah. But for reasons that were hard to fathom, most of the leaders of these ostensibly secular democratic parties had already made their decision to side with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his revolution. When the revolution came, its fury and frenzy burned many of these erstwhile democratic leaders. And the fire almost consumed Samii, too.

A few weeks after the victory of the revolution, in one of the sweeps of offices and buildings by Revolutionary Guards, Samii was arrested. A combination of factors—from a favorable intervention by Mehdi Bazorgan, the prime minister of the Provincial Revolutionary Government, to the forceful presence of Badri Ajoudani, who defiantly refused to leave the prison without Mehdi Samii—worked to release Samii and afford him the right to leave Iran. Before long, he left Tehran for London. After about four years, he moved to Los Angeles, where he shared a small apartment with Badri Ajoudani and her husband. The simplicity of the apartment is in jarring contrast to the building’s name. It is called Marie Antoinette.

Hoseyn Amanat
Mohsen Forughi
M. Reza Moghtader
Hushang Seyhun

Hoseyn Amanat was the wunderkind of modern Iranian architecture. He was just out of college, still living in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ home, when he won the most prestigious architectural competition of his generation. His design, completed within the two-month deadline and finished at the end of forty-eight hours of almost incessant work, was chosen for a building that was initially intended to celebrate twentyfive hundred years of monarchy. But the structure, called Shahyad—yad is Persian for memory—not only became the icon of Tehran and Iran but was inexorably transformed into the most recognizable symbol and metaphor of the shah’s era and his vision for Iran. Amanat was twenty-two years old when he won the design competition.

As an iconic structure, Shahyad became the subject of some satire and considerable criticism. Inflated stories about its allegedly exorbitant cost and about massive financial malfeasance among those involved in its construction made it one of the favorite subjects of the opposition’s campaign of whispers and gossip. In fact, according to Hoseyn Amanat, the entire structure cost nearly 8 million tooman (a little more than $1 million). The sum seems particularly paltry when we remember that a few years later, when the shah went on what the CIA called his “lending binge,” Iran gave away almost 1.3 billion dollars.

But even those who did not subscribe to sundry financial allegations used Shahyad to poke fun at the shah’s regime. In Ebrahim Golestan’s subversive Mysteries of the Ghost Valley, the nouveau riche “man” builds a phallic monument to his own grandeur, and the structure mischievously but unmistakably conjures the image of Shahyad.[1] In fact so enduring has the iconic influence of Shahyad been that even after the revolution, when the building—like every other site bearing a name from the ancien régime—was renamed Azadi, or Freedom, it continued to be identified with the shah and his days. As nostalgia for the past has increased in recent years, a touch of romance and a hint of reification have come to surround Shahyad. Not a week passes that Amanat does not receive some note about his role in the building. Sometimes it is a technical inquiry, other times it is professional praise, often from students of art and architecture.2 But neither the shah’s desire to build the monument, nor the public’s response to it, are unusual in the larger context of Iranian history.

For much of Iran’s history, monarchs tried to leave their mark on the nation’s memory and on history by erecting monuments to their own grandeur. Tag-e Kasra, easily the largest arch of its time, was a tragic reminder of Iran’s lost pre-Islamic imperial grandeur. Isfahan had its majestic mosques and its Nagshe-Jahan (map of the world), a large square designed according to the relative topography of power between the mosque, the bazaar, and the court—the traditional pillars of power in Iran. It continues to be a reminder of Shah Abbas and his grandeur. Finally Nasir al-din Shah ordered the construction of Shamsal-Amare, Tehran’s first modern building, which had on its façade the city’s first public clock. Each of these monuments capture in the pithy and permanent alphabet of architecture the geist and ethos of their time. Shahyad was no less eloquent in its cultural semiotics. It heralded a Tehran transformed by changing times. It creatively bridged the city’s tormented past to its triumphant mood about its future.

Tehran is said to be eight thousand years old; but as a modern city and capital of the country, it is but a novice. Caught in the crosscurrents of history and marauding tribes and armies, the original inhabitants of this small village in medieval Iran built their homes underground, thus the name “Tahran,” or, literally, “Undergrounders.” When enemies came, as they did in 1220 to destroy Rey, Tehran’s grand and prosperous neighbor, the troglodytes of Tehran, “took refuge in their subterranean homes, and came out only when they felt safe.”3
By 1971, when the construction of Shahyad was completed, Tehran was fired by the power of petrodollars. The shah’s new and vigorous “open-door” policy meant to encourage the world to visit and invest in Iran. It was a city enamored of America and obsessed with its own past. Shahyad became the perfect metaphor for the many cultural paradoxes that were the rapidly changing Tehran. It was, not incidentally, built at the point where Eisenhower Avenue ended and the road to the airport began.

It had simple pre-Islamic arches reminiscent of Tage Kasra, along with ornate Islamic domes decorated with sophisticated arabesque designs. Shahyad had, like the city it represented, its own “underground.” Rooted and grounded, yet defiantly high-flying and open to the world, Shahyad was a gateway to the future and a grand celebration of the past. In Shahyad, like other artifacts of the modernist age, form was content, and the building’s form cleverly drew inspiration from its symbolic function.

Designing Shahyad made Amanat an overnight sensation in Iran. A few years after winning that competition, he was chosen to design some of the most sacred sites of the Bahai faith. In 1972, for example, he was invited to design and build the Seat of the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, the administrative headquarters for the Bahai faith. Less than a decade later, he was asked to design the Bahai Temple of Faith in Samoa. These temples, built around the world, are dedicated to the idea that religions that claim to come from the same divine source are ultimately united in their ethos and ends. Amanat went on to design several other important Bahai sacred sites and structures, including a series of buildings on Mount Carmel. They were a radical departure from his unique form of modernism and were recognizably inspired by the Greek classical tradition of graceful parallel columns and serene surrounding gardens. While winning the Shahyad competition was simply a sign of the precocious maturity, simplicity, and sophistication of his style, his dedication to building the Bahai sites were rooted in his unfaltering devotion to the religion.

Hoseyn Amanat’s family had a storied dedication to the new faith. Both his parents came from families that had been early, dedicated converts to the Bahai religion. He was born on March 18, 1942 (27 Esfand 1320). His father was a merchant of the bazaar who eventually branched out into industry, establishing one of Iran’s first factories producing heavy canvas. He also invested heavily in real estate, and by the time of the 1979 revolution, he was a rich man. But he was also deeply dedicated to the cause of the Bahai religion. His family had been one of the many Jewish families in the city of Kashan who converted to Bahaism. The father had been, in his youth, something of a scholar manqué. He had studied Jewish, Christian, and Bahai theologies closely. From a reading of chapters in the Bible promising the return of a messiah, he, along with his parents, had come to conclude that Mohammad Bab, the prophet and founder of the Bahai religion, was the promised messiah, and Bahaism the promised faith of redemption.

Because of the tenacity of the family’s identification with the Bahai religion, they were forced to leave Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution and settle for a life of exile. Their entire wealth, valued in millions of dollars, was, because of their unabashed religious affiliation, confiscated by the Islamic regime.[4] The father spent the last ten years of his life nurturing his hitherto dormant scholarly desires. After years of research, he wrote a lengthy, multivolume account of the lives of the Jewish families in the city of his birth, Kashan, who had converted to Bahaism at the turn of the century. The book has not been published. If the father’s scholarly ambition has remained a family secret, one of the sons, Abbas Amanat, has already established his reputation as the most authoritative historian of the early rise of the Bahai faith and of the Babi movement.[5]

Hoseyn was the oldest child of the family. He first enrolled in a school near their family home, but after three years he was transferred to a better school, far away from home. Then he went to Alborz high school. Throughout his school years, he was among the top four or five students in his class. He also engaged in a number of extracurricular activities. While photography was, from an early age, his avocation (he had his own darkroom), foreign languages soon became his passion. By the time he finished high school, he was a polyglot. In fact, the foreign-language school he attended used him to showcase their ability to teach language. On one occasion he appeared on stage and conversed with Professor Varasteh, the school’s founder, in German, English, French, and Turkish. Amanat had also studied some Arabic, as he wanted to read sacred Bahai texts, which are often steeped in Arabic terms.

In spite of these many intellectual affinities, a formative part of Amanat’s identity was his faith. Although in his high school years Iran was caught in the passion of politics, he steered clear of political engagement. “Our faith,” he said, “forbids us to engage in politics. Little can be changed through politics. Changing our ways of thinking is our biggest challenge, and the only way to change the world.” He particularly appreciated the Bahai belief in the unity of humankind, the “idea that we are all leaves of the same branch, fruits of the same tree.”[6]

After high school, he participated in the dread university entrance exam. At the same time, he began to contemplate going to Europe or America. His father wanted him, as well as his other sons, to join him in his business. Hoseyn had other ideas. His scores on the national entrance exam were high enough that he could enroll in Tehran University’s School of Engineering. In those days, acceptance to that school was, after the School of Medicine, the most coveted prize in the Iranian university system. At the same, he registered in the School of Art and Architecture. The decision was more on a whim than willful design. By accident one day early in the school year, he accompanied one of his friends to a studio in the School of Art and Architecture and liked what he saw. “Designing, and doing what architects call ‘rendering,’ appealed to me,” he said.

For a while, he continued attending classes in both schools, but the university registrar’s office eventually noticed his unusual status. He was forced to choose, and by then he was convinced that the School of Engineering, with its bevy of devout revolutionaries and its dour intellectuals infatuated with a cult of poverty, was no place for a young man of his cosmopolitan temperament. The School of Art and Architecture, on the other hand, was reputed to be a den of modernists.7 Hoseyn saw in his peers a passion to learn about the most recent trends on the international scene. Also, under the direct influence of Hushang Seyhun, the school’s dean, students were deeply steeped in studying, preserving, and promoting classical styles of Persian architecture. Not surprisingly, Hoseyn chose architecture, and in 1966 he graduated at the top of his class. As was customary, he received his prize from the shah. It would not be their last meeting.

Architecture students were required to submit as their final thesis a project of their choice. Hoseyn designed a resort on the coast of the Persian Gulf. In preparation, he traveled widely in the area, and his design integrated the natural contours of the territory. The project suggested that the Persian Gulf area, until then seen only as an arid reservoir of oil, offered great untapped possibilities for tourism. A jury of faculty chose Hoseyn’s design as the best of that academic year. The shah, too, on his visit to offer prizes to the topgraduating students, was keenly interested in both the idea and the design of the resort. Ironically, the runner-up design was for a new seminary in the city of Qom. Before Iran’s plans for turning the Persian Gulf into a tourist haven could become reality, seminarians, led by an exiled ayatollah, helped ferment the revolution of 1979. Hoseyn had won the jury
judgment; but the losing competitor had, maybe unwittingly, tapped into alternate forces of Iranian history.

Even before his graduation, Amanat had planned to continue his graduate work in the United States. He was accepted at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s prestigious school of architecture. When he received his prize from the shah, the king asked him what his plans were. “I am leaving for America soon,” Amanat said. A gruff and glum shah retorted, “What is so hot about America that all of you want to go there?” Hoseyn was surprised by the comment but remained committed to his plans.[8]

A few days later, on September 1, 1966, he saw a small advertisement in the corner of the Etela’at, one of Tehran’s daily papers. It announced a competition for the best design for a building commemorating the monarchy. Apparently, Sardar Afkhami, one of the queen’s favored architects, had earlier been asked to submit a design for the building.[9] The shah however, had rejected it and ordered an open competition.

In describing the process of arriving at his final design, Hoseyn said, “As is always the case with my buildings, it begins with a vague, ambiguous idea.”[10] By the time he focused and filtered the ideas mulling in his head, he had less than three days left to put the concept to paper. He worked incessantly and solicited the help of some of his classmates. His bedroom in his parental home doubled as his studio. On the designated deadline hour, without a moment to spare, he turned in his plan.

His idea called for a tower that would conjure Tag-e Kasra but symbolically represent the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Around the central building, in the vast surrounding space, each of the great dynasties of the past would be represented by a small yard. Only after going through the past dynasties would a visitor arrive at the monument that stood at the center of the edifice and symbolized the rule of the shah and his father. The grand, curved, apparently supple marble pillars of the monument afforded it the air of a majestic curtain flowing in the breeze. On one side, it lifted the cover of mystery and opened vistas into Iran, while from the opposite vantage point, it opened a wide window to the world waiting outside.

A few eventless weeks passed, and Amanat continued his plans to leave for Illinois. In the meantime, he had designed a house for a friend. One day, as he was on the site talking to the friend, his mother arrived in her car. She looked agitated. “You better come home,” she said, adding in an excited tone that his design had won the competition.

At home, Amanat realized that the jury—which included his one-time teacher, Hushang Seyhun, and Mohsen Forughi—had chosen his design but that the final choice would have to be made by the shah. On the designated day, Amanat and the other finalists were called to the court. They each had to explain their ideas to the shah and the queen. To Amanat’s great joy, the shah confirmed the jury’s choice, but his joy was soon tempered by the realities of bureaucratic and professional corruption and jealousies.

It took about a year before Amanat was actually given a contract to supervise the construction. The long unexplained wait made him despondent. He solicited help from his friends and family. He even decided to seek help from his famous high school principal, Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi, who was by then rector of Aryamehre University. While offering to help Amanat get the contract, he asked him to design a new library for the university. That library was the first building Amanat actually designed and built in Iran.[11]

Finally, the contract for Shahyad was signed, and, along with Mohsen Forughi, Amanat was given the job of supervising the construction process. The two men were paid a total of 525,000 tooman ($70,000 at the time).12 The crucial technical task of laying the cement foundation was given to a firm who had just established its international reputation by helping build the famous Sydney Opera House.

After Shahyad, Amanat went on to build a number of other buildings, including libraries and museums, and Iran’s embassy in China. He also began work on the Bahai sacred sites. In the meantime, his private life was changing as well. In 1975 he married Shahnaz Alai. In quick succession, they had three children—two boys and a girl.

Like a deus ex machina in a play, the revolution suddenly changed the arc of Amanat’s life. In November 1979, his wife was pregnant with their son and longed to go to Europe to be with her mother for the delivery. About that time, papers began attacking members of the ancien régime. One paper took aim at Amanat, charging him with a variety of sins. He feared that it was only the beginning of an orchestrated attack and became concerned for his safety. He decided to accompany his wife to Europe and wait out the storm.

What began as a temporary journey gradually turned into permanent exile. After about two years in Europe, Amanat and his family migrated to Canada, settled in Vancouver, and founded an architectural firm that continues to undertake major projects around the world. In spite of many impressive accomplishments in the last two decades, Amanat is still best known as the architect who built Shahyad.

SOME ARE BORN TO HISTORY,othersworktoachieveaplaceonthis“stageoffools,”[1] and still others have a historic life thrust upon them. Mohsen Forughi was born to history, achieved much of historic value, and occasionally had his place in history thrust upon him. His father was the legendary Mohammad-Ali Forughi, and his brother, Mahmoud, was an accomplished diplomat.[2] Mohsen worked hard to achieve a place for himself in the history of Iranian art and architecture. If his own accomplishments were not enough, he was also “present at the creation” of some pivotal moments in modern Iranian history. When, for example, his father, Mohammad-Ali Forughi, drafted the letter of resignation for Reza Shah, it was Mohsen who used his camera in lieu of a copying machine to make a copy of the historic document.[3] Mohsen’s recollections of his father’s last year offer fresh insights about a key period of modern Iranian history.[4]

All his life Mohsen worked to entangle his life with the historical. His vocation was architecture, and his avocation was art collecting, and in both arenas he accomplished much. As early as 1961, when R. M. Ghirshman, the great scholar of ancient Persia, organized an exposition in Paris called “Seven Thousand Years of Art in Iran,” many of the most important artifacts of the 1,167 on display belonged to Mohsen Forughi.[5] Later, his collection of Sasanian seals merited a full study by Richard Frye, a leading American scholar of ancient Iran.[6] But statues and horses, dishes and coins were also part of his storied collection. The title of an exhibit of Forughi’s artifacts in Tehran offered a sense of the historic breadth of his collection. The exhibit was called “The Forughi Collection: A Selection from Iranian Artifacts from the 2nd Millennium b.c. to the late 18th Century a.d.”

Mohsen Forughi was born in Tehran on May 14, 1907 (23 Ordibehesht 1286). He was the second of his famous father’s six children. In his own words, one of the most traumatic experiences of his early years was the death of his “loving and caring” mother. She had consumption, and on the orders of her attending physician—a British doctor who worked at the embassy and attended to the medicals needs of British diplomats and their families—she was isolated from the rest of the family. A house was rented for her in the Golhak part of Tehran—closer to the fresh air of the mountains that overlook Tehran—and she lived in an isolated room of the house. The children, accompanied by their father, visited her once a week. They saw her only though windows, and watching her always tearful eyes was hard to bear for the young Mohsen.[7] She was only thirty-two when she died, and her husband, in deference to her memory, never married again.

Mohsen went to school in Tehran, and after finishing his traditional early schooling, he enrolled in the teacher’s college that had been created by his uncle, Abolhassan Forughi.8 He studied there for seven years, taking courses in theology, literature, Arabic, French, and mathematics. Some of the country’s future leaders, including Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman, were Mohsen’s classmates.

Early in 1927, accompanied by his father, who had just resigned his post as prime minister, and one of his brothers, Mohsen set out for Europe. They traveled by car and train through the Soviet Union. In the course of their long journey, their father tried to teach his green children the ways and habits of Europeans, “including their table manners.”[9]

Father and sons settled in an apartment in Paris, and the first person to visit them there was the eminent scholar Allame Mohammad Qazvini. While his father was there, he and Mohsen met with Qazvini on an almost daily basis. And when Mohsen’s father was leaving to take his post as Iran’s new ambassador to Turkey, he “ordered [his son] to go to Qazvini’s house every Sunday.”[10] The practice continued for the next twelve years, the entire period of Mohsen’s stay in Paris. Moreover, every Friday afternoon, Qazvini held a literary salon in his house. The Iranian cognoscenti who lived in Paris or were passing through the city in those days aspired to take part in these gatherings. Mohsen was a regular attendee. In his own words, he learned much about Iranian literature, history, philosophy, and even architecture from his mentor. In 1939, as World War II was beginning, Forughi returned to Iran in the company of Qazvini. Mohsen by then carried the title of Mohandess, or engineer, although his education afforded him the right to use other titles as well.

He had begun his studies in Paris by enrolling in the math department at the university, but after three years, he had a change of heart. Art and architecture beckoned, and he entered the famous Beaux-Arts, easily the most prominent school of architecture in France at the time. He took courses in architecture, engineering, and urban design and received a doctoral degree in architecture and design. After graduation, he worked for a French firm specializing in designs of big governmental buildings.

From the moment of his graduation until his death, Mohsen’s life was consumed by his passion for creating and collecting art. Not only were his father and Qazvini both interested in Iranian art, but what further spurred Mohsen into the world of collecting ancient Persian artifacts was his and his father’s close friendship with Arthur Pope, the great American scholar of Persian antiquities and the author of a monumental study of Persian art. In a letter quoted in a controversial source on America’s role in “plundering” Iranian antiquities, Pope refers to Mohsen as his “representative” in Iran.[11]

The friendship had begun before Mohsen went to Europe. In April 1925, the elder Forughi arranged for a speech by Pope in Tehran and made sure that Reza Khan, soon to become the king, was in the audience. The future king was smitten with Pope’s love of Iran and knowledge of antiquities. Pope’s life was changed after this meeting, as both Reza Shah and then his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, became generous patrons of Pope. Mohsen Forughi was also tied to Pope for the rest of his life. Before he died, Pope had asked to be buried in Isfahan, and when the shah granted his wish, Pope worked with Mohsen Forughi to design a mausoleum for himself and his wife. The building, inspired by the Persian architecture of about a thousand years ago, stands on the shores of Zayandeh River, overlooking the famous Khajou Bridge in the city of Isfahan, and is considered one of Forughi’s most important buildings.[12] The two domes in the structure symbolize the fact that Pope and his colleague and wife, Phyllis Ackerman, are both buried in the mausoleum.

When Mohsen returned to Iran in 1939, he was one of the first Western-trained architects in Iran. He began to teach, first at the Teacher’s College and then at Tehran University’s College of Engineering. There was still no school of architecture or fine arts in Iran. Forughi played an important role in the creation of such a school, helping the French archeologist and art historian Andre Godard to launch the school and develop its curriculum. After Godard retired, Forughi was named dean of the school and remained in that important position for fifteen years. During those years, he was deputy director of the Society for National Heritage, led by Godard. The society was instrumental in finding, establishing, and preserving many historic buildings. The study of these buildings, encouraged by Forughi and Hushang Seyhun, who taught design at the school of architecture, played a crucial role in reviving interest in traditional Iranian architecture and design.

Forughi’s role in establishing the field of architecture in Iran went beyond his academic or bureaucratic appointments. He was one of the founding members of the first professional association of architects in Iran, created in 1944, and one of the founders of the first serious journal dedicated to the academic study of architecture.[13]

Besides teaching, Forughi was active in designing new buildings—some private, others public. About a month after his return home, Mohsen was hired as the engineering and design consultant for the Melli Bank of Iran, and in that capacity he was involved in the design and construction of many new branches for the bank—the most famous being the branch at Tehran bazaar. His collaboration with the bank continued for almost four decades.

Another of his appointments in the bureaucracy took place in 1959, when he was named a member of the committee formed to plan the famous celebration of twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran. Forughi was in charge of all construction projects related to these controversial celebrations. In the case of the famous Shahyad monument, designed by Hoseyn Amanat, Forughi was the supervisor of the project and together with the architect was paid 52,500,000 rials (close to $70,000) for their supervisory work.[14] Sources in the Islamic Republic have claimed, without offering any specific evidence, that not just in this building but in many other contracts with the government, Forughi overcharged for his services. One can’t but wonder whether this allegation, his belated ministerial appointment, or his role in designing controversial buildings accounted for difficulties with new regime after the revolution.[15]

During this period, Forughi designed not only many private homes and villas, but also a large number of famous public buildings like the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University, the central offices of the Ministry of Treasury, Reza Shah’s mausoleum, a mausoleum for the poet Baba Tahar, and the new Senate building. While the architectural quality of these buildings is a matter of controversy, with some architects suggesting that they lack any historic value,[16] there is no doubt that the Senate building was, for Forughi, the most controversial. He built it in association with other engineers and architects, and in 1962, when the government of Amini launched an anticorruption campaign, it was alleged that Forughi had overcharged the government. He was imprisoned but eventually absolved of all wrongdoing. The charge of corruption, whispers had it, belonged to one of his more notorious partners, whose name and reputation were invariably mixed with allegations of corruption.

Not long after being cleared of all charges, Forughi was named a senator and began serving in the building that he had designed and that had landed him in jail. He served for three consecutive terms, and in 1978, when Sharif-Emami was charged with forming a “government of national reconciliation” to stem the tide of discontent, Forughi served as minister of culture in that short-lived and beleaguered cabinet.

All through those years, Forughi was active in preserving old buildings and collecting artifacts of ancient Persia. He had a special affinity for old mosques, and it is estimated that he had a hand in preserving at least 250 such old buildings.[17] The simple house he shared with his French wife, whom he had married in 1939, and their two children was akin to a museum. He was also an amateur but avid painter, leaving behind a number of oil canvases and pencil drawings. The Islamic Revolution ended his long years of architectural preeminence. He was once again put in prison and spent several months in the hands of the new Islamic revolutionaries. One of his most famous designs, the Reza Shah Mausoleum, was destroyed with great fanfare by Khalkhali, the infamous “hanging judge,” who later claimed he had spent millions of dollars on the demolition.

After being released from prison, Forughi spent the last couple of years of his life in retirement. Shortly before his death, he donated his entire collection of antiquities, half a century in the making, to the Islamic Republic of Iran. He spent some of his last years recounting his memories of his father, particularly when, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iran by Soviet and British forces, the latter was picked to become the prime minister. On October 6, 1983, Mohsen Forughi died, maybe as much from heartbreak as from the wear and tear of three-quarters of a century of an eventful life. He is buried in Tehran.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an aesthete as a person with a “great understanding and appreciation of what is beautiful, especially in the arts.”[1] M. Reza Moghtader, or Manu, as he is affectionately known to his friends, is a true aesthete, with a connoisseur’s sense of the sublime. If architecture appears at the perfect conjunction of technique and aesthetics, of functionality and form, of the human attempt to capture the comforts of paradise lost and the practical need for organic existence, then Moghtader was a master of form and function, of blissful designs that were organically connected to their environment and afforded the users the luxury of easy functionality combined with aesthetic pleasure. His style was unmistakably Iranian and traditional, while unobtrusively global and modern.

More than popular fame, Moghtader developed an impeccable reputation among his peers, and among the cultural cognoscenti of his generation. Combining the impressive erudition of a scholar and the discerning eye of an astute critic, he has written on a variety of subjects—from the gardens of Persia to the life and times of Iran’s first foreign-trained architect. The primary focus of his research, however, always remained Persian architecture.

He is an architect’s architect and an intellectual’s intellectual. Beneath his unfailingly polite and decorous demeanor there lies a fantastic and self-effacing sense of humor. The legendary story of his first audience with the king is—in his rendition—a marvel of wit and a testimony to his eye for the absurd, even in the midst of ritual and grandeur. He was told to dress in formal attire for the audience. Attired in a borrowed, ill-fitting tuxedo, top hat in hand, he arrived at court. He was accompanied by his business partner of the time, a daintily coifed lady in a full-length fur coat. In the heat of the Tehran summer, they drove fifteen miles to reach the palace, sweating and nervous. Eventually they convinced the bemused guards to allow their rented pick-up truck, with an elaborate architectural model in its bed, to enter the palace compound. His joy in recounting the tale, and the satirical texture of his narrative arc, underscores his ability to laugh at himself and the world—always a sure sign of a great artistic sensibility.[2]

M. Reza Moghtader was born in Tehran in 1931 (1310). His father was an intellectual manqué, a translator for military advisors at the Officers Academy, with the rank of general. He also wrote the first book on Iran’s military history. Finally, he was a friend to some of Iran’s most iconoclastic, nationalist intellectuals—Zabih Behruz, for example, was among this circle of friends. As was the practice of the time, the group often gathered in cafés and whiled away the afternoons talking of Iran’s glorious past. Manu occasionally accompanied his father to these gatherings and thus was steeped in intellectual discourse from his youth. Moreover, his father had a small library at home, affording the young Reza a window to the infinite world of ideas.

For high school, Manu enrolled in Alborz, where he and a couple of his friends pursued their passion for painting. He had by then learned of Picasso and modernism and tried, in vain, to convince his art teacher—who was oblivious to modern developments and devoted to the classicism of his teacher, Kamal-al-Molk[3]—that cubism and other new forms of experimental painting were legitimate forms of art.[4]

In 1950, after finishing high school, Manu went to Paris. He was initially intent on pursuing a career in painting. But after arriving, he changed his mind and entered the country’s most prestigious school of architecture. He worked with some of France’s bestknown architects of the time.[5]

In 1954, he went back to Iran for the summer. By way of sightseeing, he visited the city of Isfahan. The journey turned out to be formative to his aesthetic sensibilities. Isfahan’s mosques and gardens, the grandeur and beauty of its architecture, impressed him. No less impressive, in his mind, was the simple but functional beauty of some of the traditional designs in the villages he visited on the way. What he saw in the village of Moorcheh-khort, for example, convinced him that there was much that was redeemable in the hitherto-ignored traditional forms of Iranian architecture. When in Europe, he had been most impressed with the sublime beauty of Florence. In Isfahan he saw a city no less beautiful. Something ineffable, he felt, connected the two cities.[6] Finding that ineffable common sense of beauty has remained a defining passion of his professional life.

When he returned to Paris to resume his studies, he took the first concrete steps to capture, and render functional, this common aesthetic sense. He designed a school for the blind, taking his inspiration from the traditional architecture he had seen in the city of Isfahan. His professor dismissed the design as simplistic and tried to dissuade him from completing it. But Moghtader continued his work and ultimately submitted it as his graduation project. The design was then entered in the annual competition held at the university. Much to his own surprise—and to the chagrin of his professor—Moghtader’s design won first prize, given by France’s Ministry of Education (Prix de Meilleur Diplome, Ministere de l’Education Nationale France).

In 1956, not long after winning the prize, Moghtader returned to Iran. He found working conditions not altogether hospitable for new architects. The Plan Organization, in charge of nearly all major public construction projects in the country, had, under AbolHassan Ebtehaj’s iron hand, insisted on giving all the big jobs to European and American consulting firms. One of these firms, a French company named GICOF, hired Moghtader as an architect.7 In the meantime, his award-winning design did not remain on paper. He learned, by accident, that in fact a school for the blind was being built in Iran. He offered the design, only to learn that the entire effort was being organized by a charitable organization. Thus his first work as an architect became his first major act of philanthropy.

By this point, he was married. His wife, Goli Bozorgmehr, was herself an art aficionado. She eventually established a gallery and helped promote some of Iran’s young and upcoming artists.[8]

In 1960, the government of Iran changed its policy and allowed Iranian companies to bid for every contract. Moghtader joined two other architects—Constantin Andreef and Nektar Papazian—in creating a new firm. Most of their early work consisted of commissions to finish projects already initiated by foreign companies. The first new competition they won was for the design of the Iranian National Oil Company’s pavilion at the Tehran International Fair of 1960. In those days, Moghtader also designed a number of houses for eminent Persians.

The new company lasted only a few years. In 1967, as the result of another change of governmental policy, a number of mergers and consolidations took place in the construction industry. Moghtader, along with two other prominent architects, Owrang Dana and Manouchehr Mohammedi, founded a new firm, and using the first parts of their names, they called it MODAM. Dana was himself a prominent architect, with extensive contacts with Iran’s intelligentsia, while Mohammedi, known for his affable and congenial demeanor, had many friends in positions of power.

While the firm built a wide array of buildings, Moghtader developed a specialty in designing academic institutions. He designed buildings at the University of Shiraz, the University of Isfahan, the University of Tabriz, and Tehran University. Most of Tehran University had been built under Reza Shah, when a Germanic Nazi neoclassicism, aping the grandeur of the Greco-Roman tradition, was the dominant style. Moghtader’s style, most famously evident in his design for Tehran University’s Faculty of Economics, reverted to forms and spaces that were unmistakably Persian in origin but functionally modern in form. Another of his great innovations in these buildings, arguably rooted in his passion for painting, was to insist on using paintings—many of them neglected masterpieces of modern Iranian artists—as part of the design of the buildings. Sculptures by Parviz Tanavoli, paintings by Hoseyn Zenderudi and Bahman Mohasess, and tile and other decorative work by a number of other artists became parts of the signature of a Moghtader design.

Throughout his career as an architect, Moghtader continued to paint as well as to pursue his passion for photography. He traveled extensively throughout Iran and took thousands of pictures of old neighborhoods and buildings, gardens, and some of the architectural masterpieces of Iran. As he readily admits, the initial inspiration for these expeditions came from Hushang Seyhun, the dean of the school of architecture. In many of his journeys, Moghtader was accompanied by literary and artistic figures like Seyhun, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ebrahim Golestan. Many of the photos he took on these trips were published in Iranian magazines and journals of the time. Some were published in exile, in 1998, in a book on Persian gardens.9 Exhibiting these pictures, deconstructing the fine aesthetic virtue of each building he captured in them, still conjures in him, despite a quarter of a century of exile, a contagious passion for the hidden treasures of Iran.[10]

He was, in a sense, one of the key figures in the radical turn in Iranian architecture. Advocates of this new school argued for a new look at traditional Iranian forms, structures, spaces, and material. Bricks and adobe, curved roofs, arcs that were at once functional and decorative, and private gardens and ponds all came back in fashion.[11] Even Iranian structural innovations like the passive cooling system,[12] in which air, even water, is kept cool without any input of energy, and which is commonly used in the arid parts of Iran, not only became the subject of new scholarly and artistic inquiry but were sometimes used in modern buildings.

By the early 1970s, Tehran was becoming a mecca for some of the world’s most renowned architects. Big projects and handsome rewards attracted some of the luminaries of architecture. Figures from Philip Johnson to I. M. Pei converged on Iran.[13] Rumors of corruption, of big payoffs and kickbacks, haunted the construction industry. But even faced with rivalry and competition from world-class architects, Moghtader and his firm continued to win prestigious competitions and profitable projects. Moreover, in deciding who won these projects, there was, Moghtader believes, no more corruption in Iran than in any other country. There was a division of labor among the three main partners of the firm. Moghtader and Owrang Dana were essentially responsible for the aesthetic aspects of the projects, while Mohammedi, with his outgoing and gregarious ways, was in charge of landing new jobs and commissions. The combination worked. What had begun in 1967 as a company of seven employees had, by the time of the Islamic Revolution, about two hundred.[14]

The Islamic Revolution brought to a near standstill the work of the firm. After a year and a half, when much of his time was spent fending off the increasingly belligerent forays of the revolutionary committees into the work of the firm, Moghtader begrudgingly accepted the fact that the firm he had worked so hard to build could not be saved. A man who was no architect, who had no training as a manager, and whose sole qualification seemed to be his public display of apparent piety, was named the new head of the company. Moghtader dejectedly migrated to Paris, where he immediately joined one of the most prestigious firms in the city. Michel Ecochard, a famous architect who had worked with Le Corbusier, headed the firm.[15] The two had met when they worked together on the Master Plan for the city of Tabriz.

In exile, Moghtader continued to lecture and write on different aspects of Iranian architecture. In 1981, he published a monograph on the history of ganat (a sophisticated Persian invention for carrying and conveying water over long distances) and the patterns of water preservation in Iran.16 The drudgeries of exile, even formidable health problems, have done little to dampen his passion for the world of art and architecture. Through lectures and seminars, essays and exhibits, he continues to search for that ineffable quality that made Isfahan consanguineous with Florence.

For some, art is a vocation; for others, an avocation. For a few, it is an existential exigency—not a means to an end, but the end of all means, not a tool for survival but the very reason for existence. Hushang Seyhun is this rare breed of man. He has lived in, for, and through art all his life. His earliest memories of his childhood are mingled with his attempts to draw. “As soon as I knew who I was,” he said, “I knew I wanted to be an artist. It never occurred to me to be anything else.”[1]

He was born in Tehran on August 22, 1920 (31 Mordad 1299) to a cultured family steeped in music. His father taught violin; his mother played the tar. Mirza Abdullah, one of the most influential figures in the history of Persian music, was his grandfather, and Ebadi and Shahnazi, tar and sitar maestros, were his uncles. “I was raised with music in my ears,” he said.[2]

He was about three when he discovered his passion for painting, and only a young boy when he decided he wanted to become an artist. Contrary to the common ethos of Persian families, who would usually try to dissuade their children from a life in the arts, Seyhun’s parents encouraged him to “follow his bliss.”[3]

He finished high school in Tehran. He was a good student, but his forte and preoccupation was painting. Fortune came to his help when, after high school, he read an advertisement in one of Tehran’s daily newspapers for a new college of arts and architecture. It was called Honarkadeh (house of the arts). Much to the consternation of the clergy, the new college was housed in what had been the storied Marvi Seminary. The college was the brainchild of the minister of culture, Esmail Merat, but it was the stern secularization policies of Reza Shah that allowed the government to evict the mullahs from the seminary and put a modern art college in its place. Where mullahs once taught Shiite sharia, French professors now talked of Modigliani and modernism. The legendary Monsieur Andre Godard ran the school, and the language of instruction was French. Among the professors was the famed scholar and artist Maxim Seroux, the author of a classic study of caravansaries in Iran.[4]

Seyhun stayed at the school for four years and earned a degree in architecture. During that time, the country had been undergoing important changes. In his second year, with the fall of Reza Shah, the mullahs, emboldened by Mohammad Reza Shah’s conciliatory policies toward them, demanded their old seminary back. They got their wish, and the art college, left homeless, moved to the basement of the Faculty of Engineering in Tehran University.

This turmoil was part of the political upheaval in society at large. But it was of little interest to Seyhun. “Politics never interested me,” he said, “I was happily preoccupied with art.”[5] In a country in which intellectual discourse was saturated with politics, his apolitical disposition was a sign of his self-assured independence of mind. He was the school’s top student and a favored protégé of Godard.[6] At the end of the war, the French government gave a handful of art and architecture scholarships to promising Iranian students, and Godard was put in charge of the selection process. Seyhun was one of the students he selected. (Jalil Ziapour, who went on to become a prominent painter, was another scholarship recipient.)

Seyhun had shown his precocious talent in a surprisingly large number of fields in the visual arts. He had experimented with abstract expressionism, calligraphy, and pencil drawings and had even pioneered a new technique of using felt to create artwork. He had won a number of prestigious awards and competitions. When the Iranian government decided to give a medal to commemorate the Tehran Conference, Seyhun, though still an undergraduate student at Honarkadeh, won the competition to design it. Four other medals given by the Ministry of Culture for outstanding service were also designed by him.

Even more impressive was Seyhun’s success in winning two of the most important architectural competitions of the time. The Iranian Association of Historic Monuments decided to build a memorial to Ferdowsi, Iran’s great epic poet. Seyhun won the award with a design that drew its inspiration from the classical monumentality of pre-Islamic Persian architecture. It was the harbinger of a paradigm change in Iranian aesthetic sensibility that was to bloom a full two decades later.[7]

While he was a student at Honarkadeh, Seyhun won another competition, this time for a monument to Ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna, Iran’s great Aristotelian philosopher of the late Middle Ages. Although Seyhun had won the French government scholarship, he was reluctant to go, for he was understandably bent on taking up the Ibn Sina project. But the funds for the project were not yet available.

Seyhun ultimately went to Paris with his mentor’s assurance that he would be brought back to Iran as soon as the Avicenna project was ready to commence. In Paris, embarking on his work at the college turned out to be more complicated than he had imagined. Although he had taken an architectural degree in Iran, the French authorities refused to accept any of his credits and insisted that Seyhun begin again as a freshman. He was disheartened and contemplated returning to Iran. But as often happened in his life, serendipity came to his aid. A competition for advanced students was announced at the school, and Seyhun, unbeknownst to the school authorities, entered. His design was recognized as one of the top twenty. That success compelled the school to accept him at the advanced level. Moreover, Seyhun’s experience established a precedent at the school that helped future Iranian students who went to the college.[8]

In 1948, another piece of serendipity helped Seyhun. About the time he finished his course of study, he heard from Godard that the necessary funds for the Ibn Sina monument had finally been procured. He returned to Iran and immediately established his own firm. While completing the memorial, he also began accepting private commissions. He designed a small clinic for Dr. Farhad, one of Tehran’s eminent physicians of the time, for example. At the same time, Godard, who was now the Dean of Tehran University’s College of Art and Architecture, invited Seyhun to join the faculty, thus beginning Seyhun’s long and distinguished academic career.[9] In November 2005, about a hundred of his students from all over the world organized an evening in Dubai to celebrate Seyhun’s more than fifty years of teaching and mentoring.
Seyhun’s most important contribution as an artist, architect, and teacher, was his role in the emergence of a new kind of cultural and aesthetic modernity in Iran. In the mid–twentieth century, as trained architects began to arrive in Iran, they designed buildings that emulated in their fundamental architectural language the work of Western architects. Whether they trained in France and followed the Beaux-Arts tradition, or in America, where they were inspired by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright or Philip Johnson, the impulse to imitate the West was the same.

This emulation of Western styles of modernism was not limited to architecture. The first generation of Persian modernist painters were hardly distinguishable in style from their German, French, or Spanish counterparts. These early Iranian advocates of modernity essentially copied the Western masters because they believed that there was nothing redeemable in Iranian tradition, and that only by emulating and accepting Western values and forms could a bright future come to Iran.

But by the late 1950s, in nearly every aesthetic domain—from the theory of the novel to painting and architecture10—a new vision of modernity began to emerge. A new paradigm of the past, which wanted to appropriate what was useful from the past while discarding the anachronistic, began to emerge. Iranian modernity, according to this paradigm, could only come from Iranian tradition. Artists and architects, as well as writers and poets—from Hoseyn Zenderudi and M. Reza Moghtader to Ebrahim Golestan and Hushang Golshiri—began to experiment with new forms of modernism that absorbed, while critically changing, all that was aesthetically, formally, and philosophically part of the Iranian tradition. In the field of architecture, Seyhun was one of the central figures in this historic transition.

In 1961, he replaced Mohsen Forughi as the dean of the College of Art and Architecture at Tehran University. His tenure lasted seven years. He used the period to bring about important changes in the curriculum of the college. One of his favorite subjects was traditional Iranian architecture; he taught a class on the subject. His lectures, as well as his drawings of great buildings, were published in French and Persian.11 In his own mind, his most important contribution to architecture was to inaugurate the practice of requiring all students at the university to travel throughout Iran and visit old and new buildings in villages and towns, marking grand monuments of the past as well as the simple adobe structures of the poor. He bought a special bus for these trips and often accompanied the students on their journeys of discovery. After the first year, he also invited an official of Iran’s Department of Antiquities, and as a result, many important but hitherto ignored buildings were placed on the list of historic sites and marked for preservation. The fact that Queen Farah had been a student of architecture and had developed an avid interest in preserving historic sites was of enormous help to Seyhun. The students were asked to draw architectural sketches of each site, and these drawings were archived in the Antiquities Department.

While Seyhun continued his teaching and pursued his work at the architectural firm—designing at least 150 private homes, two cinemas, several factories, and many other buildings—he was also active as a painter. By the mid-1970s, he had achieved an international reputation, and his works have been shown in Iran and around the world— including an exhibit at the University of Massachusetts, where his paintings hung alongside those of Picasso and Dali.[12]

One of his most acclaimed exhibits took place in Tehran, at the Iran-American Society. Called “Lines in Nature and Imagination,” it included drafts of his architectural designs, as well as his pencil sketches. He also experimented with a new form in which elaborate designs were built from a multitude of simple fine lines—a sort of two-dimensional, black-and-white pointillism. Whether designing pottery or painting a bird, he combined traditional motifs with innovations in form.

Not only was art his vocation and avocation, but his private emotional life was also inseparable from the world of art. In 1952, he married M’asoume Nousheen. She was an accomplished painter herself. She went on to establish the Seyhun Gallery, and for almost three decades the gallery remained one of the preeminent houses for exhibiting modern art in Iran. With his work as an architect and an artist of myriad accomplishments, and with her paintings and gallery, the name Seyhun came to conjure modernism and a refined aesthetic in the mind of the urbane Iranian.

The revolution forced Seyhun into a life of exile. He moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to paint, draw, design, lecture, and write. In 1989, the city of Los Angeles recognized his service as a “father of urban modernism.” Although he nostalgically recalls times past, he has, he says, no desire to see an Iran debased by obscurantism. “The land I knew and loved,” he says wistfully, “has fallen prey to the revolution.” But at home or in exile, he has always lived in his art. Today, images of the past—copies of his painting, photos of his buildings—nourish his nostalgia for the land he loved and lost.

Hashem Naraqi
Hojabr Yazdani

Mechanized Agriculture, run according to modern methods of industrial management, had long been a dream of the shah’s. From the late 1950s, the Israelis had offered their considerable expertise in the field. They had, in fact, begun successful projects near Gazvin, not far from Tehran, and another in Jiroft, in the southern provinces of Iran. But the shah was searching for an Iranian fit for the job, and in Hashem Naraqi he thought he had found the man who could turn the dream into reality.

The stage for the realization of the dream was set in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. There, from the mid-1950s, a vast project to turn the area’s hitherto arid lands into farmland had begun.[1] With the participation of an American company called the Development and Resources Corporation, headed by David Lilienthal, and with financial backing from the World Bank, the Plan for the United Development of the Natural Resources of the Khuzestan Region was created.[2] A central element of the plan was the construction of a big dam on the Dez River. The project was modeled on the famed and fabled American Tennessee Valley Authority, of which Lilienthal had been a director. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj had been an early advocate of the plan. Ironically, when he fell from grace, it was used against him, with prosecutors claiming that he had given an illegal no-bid contract to his friends in America.[3]

By the time the project neared completion in the mid-1960s, an important change had been made in the initial plans. As envisioned by the World Bank and Lilienthal, the dam would lead to a sophisticated system of irrigation canals, eventually covering close to two hundred thousand acres. Some of that land had been in the hands of small farmers who eked out a miserable living using traditional methods of farming and often suffered from water shortages. A system of incentives was set up to convince the farmers to change their way of farming and to follow modern methods of crop selection, rotation, and marketing. In fact, the process had already begun, with considerable success, when the Iranian government suddenly changed its policy.[4]
They did so for a variety of reason, including the shah’s infatuation with big industrial farms, which was shared by Mansur Ruhani, the minister in charge of the Khuzestan development project.[5] The focus of the new policy was to help create new large agri-industrial complexes in the area under the Dez dam. Small farmers were bought out, resettled in houses, and hired as day laborers for the new agri-industrial companies. Hashem Naraqi, the only Iranian to establish such a company successfully in America, emerged as an ideal candidate to set up a similar one in Iran. One of his childhood friends, General Hassan Alavi Kia,[6] recommended him to Ruhani. Even earlier, Ebtehaj had tried to entice Naraqi to return to Iran, but his efforts had come to naught. This time, Ruhani consulted with the shah, and once he had consented—the shah had heard of Naraqi during one of his trips to California—Naraqi was invited back to Iran.[7] Thus began his brief but tumultuous tenure in Iran as the steward of one of the country’s most famous agribusinesses.

Hashem Naraqi was born in 1919 in Tehran and raised in the city of Hamadan. His father was one of the city’s richest merchants. He had three wives, and with each he had, improbably, six sons and a daughter. In those days, Hamadan was one of the country’s most prosperous cities. It was at the crossroads of the trade routes between Europe and India, as well as the Persian Gulf and Russia. The city also had notoriously cold winters, and the towering mountains that surrounded it virtually isolated it for almost half the year. The rich families ruled the city with a combination of authority, compassion, and ritual, and Hashem’s father was a respected member of this group. His wealth was in the many villages he owned.
From early childhood, Hashem showed an affinity for farming. After school, he would often work in the yard of his family home, trying to grow a variety of herbs. Even on his sprawling estate in California, he was no less keen on cultivating everything from Persian cucumbers to Persian basil. The harvest of these crops was for the consumption of family and friends.
Hashem was seventeen when his father died, and the family properties were divided amongst the many surviving siblings. He wanted to continue his father’s tradition and become a farmer. His grandfather, with whom he had a very close relationship, advised him to “learn new things” and forgo the temptation to follow in his father’s footsteps.[8]

Heeding his grandfather’s advice, for a while he worked with a mechanic and learned the rudiments of the trade. At the same time, he was on his own, trying to manage his share of his father’s landed fortune. In spite of his love of farming and his desire to excel in the field, he soon grew disgruntled. Disagreements with the partners he had taken, unhappiness with the government’s wartime program of forced requisition of wheat at set prices, and his dismay at the poverty that engulfed the countryside, gradually turned him away not just from the villages, but from Iran. “I could not live there,” he remembered wistfully, “because there was no justice.”[9]

In fact, when his father died, Hashem had been living in Tehran, and, in 1940, just a few months before the Allied invasion of Iran, he decided to purchase a large warehouse full of tires. It turned out to be a wise investment. When the war came, the price of tires suddenly skyrocketed, and Naraqi made his first, albeit small, fortune. By then he had
fallen in love and married a woman from the Razavi family, another of the Hamadan’s propertied clans.[10] But busy as he was with all these endeavors, America still beckoned.
He had been six years old when his father went to the United States and established a successful business importing Persian rugs. As he witnessed Hashem’s entrepreneurial skills and noticed that he was growing increasingly disgruntled with the political reality of the country, he advised his son to leave Iran and settle in the United States. In 1943, Hashem made the unusual decision to apply for a permanent resident visa for the United States. After a wait of a year and a half, his application was approved. “I knew no English,” he said, “but I knew I could make it in the States.”11 Emigration to the United States was, in those days, an anomaly for Iranians.[12] When he arrived, there were no more than thirteen hundred Iranians living in the country.[13] The exigencies of war meant that it took him eight months to travel to America—from Basra to Bombay, and from Bombay to Marseilles and New York.[14]

His marriage to his first wife had come to an end, and he had fallen in love and married an Armenian woman whose family lived in Hamadan. Before their departure for America, they had their first child, a boy called Wendell, after Wendell Wilkie, who had lost an election to Franklin Roosevelt. Even today, after almost fifty years of living together, there is in their relationship a palpable air of affection and attention.

In New York, he worked for a company partially owned by an Iranian businessman. But he was not happy there and, before long, set out for California and with a small amount of capital started his own farm in the agricultural heartland of the state. He was, by all accounts, a man with incredible stamina for hard work. No work—from driving the tractor to packaging boxes—was beneath his “dignity.” He also had a keen eye for business opportunities. By the mid-1950s, he had come to lead one of the largest farming companies in California.

Living and farming in California meant that Naraqi’s contact with Iran, even with his family living there, was at a minimum. Visits by his childhood friend General Alavi Kia were his main connection to life in Iran and Hamadan. All that changed in 1966. As suddenly as he had left Iran he was hurled back into the center of its contentious politics and rapidly growing economy. Aside from the recommendation of the general and the important fact that the shah knew of his successes in California, his close and long friendship with Prince Abdolreza might have also been helpful in landing him the plum assignment of developing fertile, well-irrigated lands in Iran.[15]

It all began with a phone call from General Alavi Kia, telling him of a golden opportunity in Iran. Contrary to past entreaties, this time Naraqi accepted. His return was one of the many indications of a small but important pattern. If the problem of most underdeveloped countries has been their inexorable loss of their intellectual, even financial capital to the lure and security of America and other developed countries, in the early 1970s, it was the Persian lure that enticed many hitherto adamant exiles to return home. Naraqi was surely the wealthiest of this group who were returning in the late sixties and early seventies.

Naraqi had big plans of his own. He asked for, and received, permission to bring along four other prominent American businessmen as potential investors. Two were, like him, big farmers in California; the third represented Holiday Inn. Hashem envisioned a chain of motels for Iran. The fourth owned a large grocery chain in California and was interested in the possibility of developing a similar grocery chain in Iran. Only one of the men was convinced that Iran offered the right atmosphere for future investment opportunities. His name was Les Harringer, and he was a successful citrus grower in California. Along with Naraqi, they soon established what came to be called Agro-Industry of Iran.[16]

Not long after his arrival, Hashem got his ardent wish granted; he had an audience with the shah. In the meeting, the monarch encouraged Hashem and his work and insisted on the necessity of developing modern agri-industrial businesses in Iran as rapidly as possible. But Iran in 1960s was far different from California. To his credit, Naraqi immediately recognized his own shortcomings. To alleviate them, and to navigate his way around the Iranian entrenched bureaucracy better, he offered General Alavi Kia, the once-powerful deputy director of SAVAK, a seat on the new company’s board of directors. Furthermore, he made sure everyone knew that the general was his closest advisor.

Naraqi had left his wife and children in California. In Tehran, he lived in the newly established Hilton Hotel and spent much of his time with the general. Furthermore, taking a page out of the American business tradition of hiring civil servants with expertise and authority in areas of the company’s interest, Naraqi lured away Asghar Ajdari from the government office directly responsible for oversight of the new agri-industrial business and made him the director of all the company’s operations.

In return for a nominal rent, Naraqi was given twenty thousand acres of prime farming land in Khuzestan. One of his first innovations was also the most controversial. It could have sealed the fate of his investments. He decided to produce asparagus in Iran and export it to European markets. But few in Iran had ever heard of this vegetable. The opposition inside and outside Iran immediately began a propaganda campaign, talking about asparagus as the exotic food of the rich, saying that the Khuzestan development project had become yet another means of serving the rich and disenfranchising the poor. Furthermore, asparagus needs to reach the market soon after harvest, and unless the markets are nearby, airplanes are needed. But the only airport in the vicinity was in the city of Dezfool on an Iranian air force base, and the commander of the base, General Naimi Rad, was no friend of Hashem’s.[17]

In spite of its tarnished image as an “asparagus farm,” the truth was that the bulk of the Naraqi farm was given to the production of wheat, citrus, cucumber, peaches, and other like products. The farm was highly mechanized, employing no more than hundred full-time employees. At harvest, the number of employees increased. When word of its diversified products reached the market, as when it offered the first winter tomatoes and cucumbers, Naraqi began to pay more attention to new investments. He began to invest in a wide variety of other fields—from an aluminum factory to a housing development.18 By 1971, he was one of the most active and diversified entrepreneurs in Iran.

His star began to fall just as rapidly as it had risen. The first blow came with the death of his son Mohammad in 1970. This son had been, since the mid-1960s, a pioneer in the business of collecting, producing, and marketing Persian handicrafts. By the time of his death, Persian handicrafts had become the fad of Tehran’s radical chic. One night, as Mohammad was driving home from a party, a truck began to chase his car. His fiancée suggested they speed away. But Mohammad insisted on challenging the truck. Eventually, his car was sideswiped and Mohammad was badly mutilated. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Rumors immediately spread in Tehran about foul play. Naraqi himself entertained the idea, and his worst fears were confirmed when, to everyone’s astonishment, the drivers of the truck were exonerated and released from prison.[19]

In his increasingly anxious mind, the next warning, even more serious than the first, came when General Hoseyn Fardust made an apparently innocent request to borrow the machinery used on Naraqi’s farm. Learning of the enormous opportunities to make money in Khuzestan, Fardust had formed a partnership with General Ne’matollah Nasiri, the head of SAVAK, and they had rented land not far from Naraqi’s farms. When Fardust was told by Naraqi and General Alavi Kia that the machinery he wanted to borrow was not available, he grew visibly angry and took a threatening tone. A few weeks after the incident, a small incendiary bomb exploded in the toilets on the upper floor of the building where Naraqi’s company had its headquarters. He was convinced it was set by SAVAK and was meant as a warning. General Alavi Kia tried to convince him that the bomb had nothing to do with their company, but Naraqi could not be convinced.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a comment by Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. One night at a party at Prince Abdolreza’s house,[20] Hoveyda angrily said to Naraqi, “You have made enough money in Iran. Why did you betray us by taking our pistachios trees [to California]?” Naraqi protested, suggesting that a professor at the University of California, and not he, had been responsible for the transfer of the trees, which had cost Iran millions of dollars in revenue.[21] In fact, he had been among those who had surreptitiously taken pistachio seedlings, hidden in large cucumbers, to California. A few days later, without telling too many people, Naraqi boarded a Pan Am flight and went back to California. “I left with only my briefcase,” he said.[22] As it turned out, for several months he had been selling his stakes in numerous companies in which he had invested in Iran. He sold the farm to two shady businessmen.

A few years after his departure, Iranian papers carried the news that prosecutors in Tehran had issued indictments against Naraqi for embezzling several million tooman through fraudulent loans. They threatened to put him on trial in absentia if he refused to return.[23] The Islamic Revolution was by then only a few months away and, understandably, Naraqi did not return.

He lived the rest of his life on a sprawling estate on a beautiful road, in the heart of California farming country. The compound combines manicured gardens filled with exotic trees and plants with vast orchards and open vistas. In fact, driving to his house, one is for miles surrounded by signs bearing his graceful family logo. In his last years, he invested heavily in real estate. He was also one of the founding directors of the Aflac Insurance Company. His activities, as well as his acts of philanthropy, no longer have any ostensible ties with Iran. Yet, in the private gardens of his big estate, he has grown special cucumbers. With obvious joy in his eyes, he told me, “The seeds are from Iran. It tastes just like those we had in the old country.” He died in 2005, at the age of eighty-eight.

“We were driving to Tehran,” he said, “and we saw a half-built mosque on the side of the road. We told the boys to stop. We always traveled in two cars, with armed boys in both. You know we had special permits to carry guns.” I knew, I told him. That was, in fact, part of his legend, or infamy—as was his gaudy taste in jewelry, his propensity for profanity, and his insistence on wearing part of his wealth on his fingers and around his neck.

We told the boys to find the mullah responsible for the mosque. After a while a man appeared. “Why haven’t you finished the building?” we asked. The mullah said they had run out of money. “How much do you need?” we asked. He said about three hundred thousand tooman. We always carried a couple of million in cash in the trunk for special emergencies. I told one of the boys, “Give this man five hundred thousand.” The mullah’s face turned red and white. “That is so generous, sir. Who are you?” I told him, “I am Hojabr Yazdani.” The mullah’s color changed again. “The Hojabr Yazdani?” he asked. We told him we are the one. The bastard didn’t even wait a minute. “Sorry, we can’t accept that kind of money for a mosque.”[1]

By the time he had come to this part of the story, he had a smile of self-assurance, an almost beatific look of a selfless philanthropist, on his rotund face.

Seeing the incredulous look on my face, he ended the story by adding that eventually the mullah’s “higher-ups” accepted the money. My incredulity was not caused by any detail of his story. Every aspect, even the refusal of money by a member of the notoriously greedy class of mullahs, was, in light of his reputation, believable. What was surprising was the fact that he recounted the story with pride and aplomb, altogether unaware or oblivious of what it betrayed about his reputation in Iran. I knew he had deservedly developed the reputation of man with an insatiable appetite for fame and fortune, even at the price of infamy. Nevertheless, I was not prepared for the story he told me.

I met Hojabr Yazdani in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, in his house in the most fashionable neighborhood of the city. High walls, barbed wire, and armed guards were par for the course in this area. The sprawling Russian Embassy compound, whose high walls and surveillance cameras called up the image of a prison, was located right around the corner.
Yazdani had suggested he send a car to take me to his house. As I waited in the lobby of the hotel, a Rolls Royce pulled up. Three men, all clad in black, all Persian, got out and walked toward me. “We come from Mr. Yazdani,” they told me. As we wound our way through the streets of the city, I was informed that I was sitting in “one of the only two Rolls Royces in the country. The other belongs to the president of the country, who is a close friend of Agha.”[2]

Before long, the driver, clearly the senior member of the crew, who had worked for Yazdani for almost forty years, honked the horn in a peculiar rhythm that was clearly a code. I knew we had arrived. Soon the iron gate of the large walled compound was opened. Under the light I could see a man standing near a ferocious dog who barked in agitation. The house, the guard, and the demeanor of the “boys” were clearly resonant of Don Corleone and his house in New York.

As I was about to get out of the car,one of the men who had come to pick me up began to tell me about the place we had entered. It had three buildings, he said, with twentytwo bathrooms. “In the old days,” he said wistfully, “there were people staying in all three houses.” I had heard, before coming, that things had not been going well. The bank Yazdani had bought in Costa Rica—“the second largest in the country,” he told me—had gone bankrupt. Many people suspected not just mismanagement, but malfeasance. He had invested much of the bank’s capital in coffee fields he had bought at a premium price, and after the worldwide price of coffee nose-dived, the bank went under. Thousands of small farmers and poor workers had lost their life savings.

“He rarely gets out of the house,” I was told by one of the “boys.” Others told me that he was in semi-hiding from the law and from the angry investors who had lost their money. I had also heard of a recent brush with disaster. His son had been kidnapped and then released after some eleven months. Many in San Jose thought that he had organized the kidnapping himself. “It was a ploy to get sympathy,” some suggested, while others claimed that he used it as a ruse to get money out of the bank under the pretext of ransom. The truth may never been known.

We climbed a few well-lighted stairs, and a portly lady, well dressed, with vestiges of her youthful beauty still etched on her face, opened the door. “I am Mrs. Yazdani,” she told me. I knew that he had two families and wives—one living in Costa Rica and the other in the United States. I was led to a large, eerily spare room, with a strangely eclectic mix of furniture. In one corner, there were a couple of couches and chairs in the Louis XIV design; on the wall, there hung a beautiful small silk Persian rug. The floor was, surprisingly, covered with a strangely shaped machine-made replica of a Persian carpet. An absurdly ostentatious fin de siècle armoire stood in another corner. The walls were bare, save for a large looming oil portrait of Hojabr Yazdani.

The man sitting under the painting was now but a shadow of his earlier self. He was sitting quietly in a chair, wearing a heavily starched shirt, no tie, and a dark pair of pants. There was about him nothing out of the ordinary, except for a protrusion in his belt, right under his left arm. The roundness of his face, the aged look of his countenance, the scars on his forehead, and his bald head all seemed benign next to the pearl-handled gun that peered at me from his bulging belly. Later than night, when finally the icy formalities had melted, I dared asked him, “Why the gun?” He asked me to turn off the tape recorder, and then said, in a voice than had more melancholy than menace, “I keep this because it is my only friend. It does everything you ask. I take it with me even to the bathroom.”[3]

As we entered the room, his wife had told me that he was hard of hearing, and that his eyesight was also rapidly weakening. “You have to shout for him to hear,” she said. As he sat there staring at a dark window and an empty wall, I said hello. He did not move or respond. Then his wife shouted at the top of her lungs and only then did he turn and get up to greet me. “We have to eat first,” he said, and then ordered one of the “boys” to go get “the khanoum (lady).” But Mrs. Yazdani objected and suggested that tonight they should send a meal to her room. Then in a barely audible whisper she said to her husband, “She can’t control her food, and it will be embarrassing in front of our guest.”[4] But he was adamant. “I will not eat without her,” he declared in a tone that clearly implied the end of the discussion.

Before long, an older woman, disheveled and dressed in a dirt-soaked nightgown, appeared. One of the “boys” held her arms. She was led to a chair at one end of the table. Hojabr greeted her with a heroic but failed attempt at joviality. Dinner was served; it was simple and bereft of ostentation. It soon became apparent why his wife had wanted to hide the old lady. She could not control her visibly shaking hands and facial movements. Rice and soup slid off her spoon on to her dress and the table. She said nothing throughout the evening and soon after finishing her meal asked to be led back to her room. On the way back to the hotel, once again sitting uncomfortably in the front seat of the Rolls Royce, I asked about her. One of the “boys” told me she was the mother of one of Yazdani’s employees, and that he had promised to take care of her. This tenderness was a side of him that has invariably been obscured by the heavy fog of rumor and the reality of Yazdani’s eccentric, adventurist character.
Even his own eating style was in sharp contrast to the notorious chaos of his character. Every item on the plate—rice, salad, and stew that night—had to be kept strictly apart. He began at one corner and ate his way around the plate.

After dinner, he invited me to join him in a more quiet room. It turned out to be his bedroom. The silent glare of a television, tuned to one of the Persian programs broadcast on satellite from Los Angeles, could be seen in one corner of the spacious room. Three pictures adorned the walls. I recognized two of them. One was of Dr. Abdolkarim Ayadi, the other of General Ne’matollah Nasiri.

A few minutes after we began our conversation, he beckoned one of the “boys” and ordered him to “make the call.” He also asked me to turn off the tape recorder. The young man walked to the phone, dialed a number, said he was calling on behalf of “Agha,” listened intently, jotted down something, and then repeated a few numbers. My curiosity was certainly aroused. This must be some secret code, I thought. Maybe he is trying to show his importance, I guessed. The young man walked over and handed Yazdani a sheet of paper. He took it, then pulled from his shirt-pocket a small notebook and jotted something down in it. If drama was what he intended to create, he had certainly succeeded. But lest I appear nosy and lose his trust, I kept silent. But then the end of the drama came, and it was certainly strange and unexpected. “These are the numbers that won in the California lottery tonight,” he said. He went on to add that he plays every week, and “I always play number thirteen.”[5] There had been, he declared, more than a hundred million dollars in the jackpot this week, and while this week the numbers had not rolled his way, he had hit many a small jackpot.

Hojabr Yazdani was both an aberration and a symbol of an age when Tehran was a veritable El Dorado and the cult of conspicuous consumption, gaudy architecture, and even gaudier personal taste were part of the dominant ethos of the time. He personified all the excesses, the corruption, and the cronyism that was the dark side of this El Dorado and that ultimately helped end the good times. Surely, in retrospect, the opponents of the regime might have exaggerated this dark side, but in him and his odyssey they invariably found convincing evidence for their claims.

He was born in August 1934 (13 Khordad 1313). His birth certificate was number 113, and, as he gleefully adds, there are “thirteen letters in the English rendition of my name.”[6] Nevertheless, all his life, oblivious to the cultural obsession with the ill omens of the number, he has had an affinity with the number thirteen. He had thirteen rings on his hands, thirteen cars, and the last two digits of all his bank accounts are 1 and 3. He had two wives and ten children, making the total number of family members thirteen. He also had thirteen bodyguards. But the dark omen of the number finally seems to have caught up with him, as it was the thirteenth of the month when his meteoric rise to power and wealth came to an abrupt end.[7]

Love of the number thirteen was not the only unusual aspect of his early life. He was born in the small town of Sangesar, easily one of the more unusual in Iran. For centuries, the town has been known as the center of sheep ranching. The people there speak a language, not a dialect, that is linguistically an anomaly, a relic of the distant past, and unshared by any other town near or far. The town is about an hour-and-a-half drive from the hot, arid desert, but it is lush with towering poplars and walnut trees, and perched on often snow-capped mountains. Half of the town are devout Muslims, while the other half are Bahais. Hojabr’s family was one of the prominent Bahai families in town. His father was a sheep rancher of some wealth. By his own reckoning, much of his childhood was spent at the house of Mrs. Ayadi, Dr. Abdolkarim Ayadi’s powerful, devout mother. “She was like a mother to me,” he said. “I spend most of my childhood at her house. That is why General Ayadi was so close to me.”[8]

Hojabr was a decidedly mediocre student in school. He was far more interested in wrestling and riding than in academia. It was only at the behest of his father that, after many trials and tribulations, he finished high school. Much of his schooling was done in Tehran, where his father had moved the family. No sooner had he finished high school than his father arranged for him to marry. He agreed to it, but then a few years later, he married a second time, living as a bigamist for the rest of his life. Ironically, though he was a member of the Bahai faith, his second wife, A’zam Jadali, was the granddaughter of a Shiite cleric. Their religious differences, they both told me, never became a problem in their life together.

He also joined his father’s business after finishing school. The shortage of water and grazing land, and the occasional droughts that decimated the animal population, made sheep ranching a high risk business. The fact that they dealt with slaughterhouses, which were notorious for the gangs that controlled them, made the business even more dangerous. But Hojabr was nothing if not adventurous and a risk-taker. In the late 1960s, when a bad drought destroyed all the grazing lands in Afghanistan and the eastern provinces of Iran, Yazdani invested much of his money in buying, at a small fraction of their full price, thousands of lean and sickly sheep. When the full force of the drought was known, there was a rapid rise in the price of sheep. “I had paid twenty tooman for a sheep, and it was now worth four hundred tooman.” He had managed to keep most of his sheep alive by transferring them to more hospitable climes or by purchasing feed for them from other localities. “When 1970 came,” he said with obvious glee and his characteristic habit of exaggeration, “I had two hundred million tooman in cash in my hands.”[9]

Critics, of course, give a less sanguine account of his sudden wealth. His sheep survived, they say, because he forcefully—relying on the power of his patrons—usurped the lands of peasants and other ranchers. His two patrons were General Ayadi and General Nasiri.[10] Furthermore, critics allege that Yazdani used Ayadi to get an agreement to provide meat to the Iranian armed forces at exaggerated prices. This was the same year, 1970, in which SAVAK was desperately trying to kill General Bakhtiyar, who was living in Iraq at the time and had become a vocal adversary of the shah. When SAVAK agents finally did kill him, it was widely rumored that Yazdani had been instrumental in moving agents across the border into Iraq, disguised as shepherds. When I asked him about his purported role in the affair, he smiled, and in a blatant attempt to create a coy mystery, he said, “Well, that stuff we still can’t talk about.”[11] In the three-volume history of General Bakhtiyar’s life and death, published by the Islamic Republic of Iran and based on SAVAK documents, Yazdani’s name is not even mentioned.[12] Furthermore, when I asked Parviz Sabeti about the successful assassination, although he took the “official” line that “I know nothing about the matter,” he did add, in a decided tone of sarcasm, “I can tell you categorically that Hojabr had nothing to do with it.”[13]

The death of Yazdani’s father in 1971 added to his wealth. “He left me seven boxes full of coins, and eight million tooman cash,” he claims. Clearly, he had a difficult relationship with his father. “You know, I was thirty-eight years old,” he said, “and I could still not sit in front of my father without his permission.”[14] In any case, the father’s death seems to have unleashed all of Yazdani’s considerable pent-up energies. He burst on the burgeoning Iranian economy of the time with a bang.

One of his first acts was to move against another rancher from Sangesar. The man had been renting a vast grazing field from one of the shah’s brothers, and Yazdani offered the prince twice the normal rent and made the field his. The rancher, incapable of fighting the prince, decided to take revenge on Hojabr. For a few months, a veritable gang war, reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, raged between mercenaries of the two camps. Occasionally it even spilled into the streets of the capital.[15] “We could never venture out alone,” one of the “boys” told me, “lest we fall into the hands of the other gang.” A couple of Yazdani’s men apparently lost their lives.

By the early 1970s, his flashy style, his conspicuous consumption of expensive houses around the city, his reputation for extravagance, and stories of his gangs and their fights in and around Tehran with other gangs that controlled the meat market in the country, had made him a notorious legend and something of a pest. The well-known fact of his Bahai faith, and of his no less well-known special relationship with General Ayadi and with General Nasiri combined to make him a favorite target of the opposition. Even to the Bahais themselves, he was something of an embarrassment and a liability. Relatives of General Ayadi, for example, try to distance him from Hojabr, saying that Hojabr falsely spread rumors of his close ties to the general.[16] The facts, however, do not seem to support the family’s claim. When, in 1972, some farmers and sheep ranchers near Sangesar complained to the Royal Inspectorate that Yazdani had been confiscating grazing land in the area, a team of investigators were dispatched to the scene, and they decided that Yazdani had been in breach of the law. But the investigation ultimately came to naught after Ayadi interceded on Yazdani’s behalf.[17]

As his wealth and infamy grew, so did his gargantuan economic appetites. By the late 1960s, ranching, never a particularly esteemed profession in the social hierarchy of the time, no longer satisfied Yazdani. The Persian word for the profession, chubdar, had developed an aura of brutality, primitiveness, and crass behavior. Hojabr’s new ambitions knew no bounds. He had ample cash on hand, he enjoyed the support of two of the most powerful men in the country, and the opportunities for industrial development were almost endless. He first used his cash to buy factories. Before long, he was in possession of three of the most productive sugar factories in the country. He also began investing in real estate and purchased the famous Elghanian mall from the Elghanian brothers. It had been the first of its kind in the city, but by the late 1960s it had developed a reputation as a hangout for drug dealers. Yazdani set out to renovate the place; he hired more than thirty new security guards and cleansed it of all undesirable elements, giving it a new lease on life.

Some of his wealth he shared with his protectors. He admits giving a three million tooman ($400,000) “loan” to Nasiri and buying the general’s villa near the Caspian Sea at a price far higher than its fair market value. “I paid him twenty-one million tooman for it,” he said, admitting that it was considerably above market value. He claims he never paid Ayadi any money. “He was like my father,” he proudly declaims.[18]

The tale of his foray into banking was another instance of how he enjoyed the support of both Ayadi and Nasiri. In 1975, as the private banking fad was in full flare in Iran, Yazdani began buying shares of the Saderat Bank of Iran.[19] The bank was known for its innumerable branches in almost every small town and village in Iran. It was surely the largest and most popular bank in Iran. By 1978, it had more than eighteen thousand employees around the country. No sooner than word of Yazdani’s interest in the bank got out than the clergy—even traditionally conservative ayatollahs like Mohammad Reza Golpaygani and Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari—began agitating against it. They threatened to organize a boycott and eventually it became clear that Yazdani’s purchase of the bank would push the banking system to a crisis.[20] He was dissuaded from it, but only with the promise that he would be able to buy other banks.

About the same time, the Central Bank’s new governor, Hassanali Mehran[21] realized that Yazdani had found a cheap new way to “purchase” banks. He had mastered and “improved” a system that bankers called “floating.” He had bribed bank managers to delay depositing his checks, and by the mid-1970s he had allegedly close to one billion tooman of bad but not yet cashed checks in the hands of different banks. He had, in a sense, found a clever way to achieve what in the parlance of modern business is called a “leveraged buy-out.” With the money he got from a bank through an insufficiently funded but not yet cashed check, he purchased shares of that bank, and then with money from another check, from another bank, covered the first check when it was finally cashed by the cooperating manager.

Mehran discussed the problem with the prime minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who immediately asked Yazdani to come to his office. In a surprisingly stern tone, Hoveyda told Yazdani that he has been making good money in the meat market and through his other adventures and that he should leave the banking system alone. A couple of days after the meeting, the governor of the bank received a letter, harsh in tone, from the court, admonishing the bank for making unnecessary trouble for an upright, hardworking entrepreneur like Hojabr Yazdani.[22] Soon after the letter was received at the bank, Yazdani went back to the office of the prime minister, opened the door used by Hoveyda’s chief of staff, and defiantly flicked his finger and told the shocked chief of staff, “Here, tell your boss I got the bank.”[23]

He immediately began a hostile takeover of the Iranian bank built originally by AbolHassan Ebtehaj and his wife, Azar. He had been paying three times the market price for shares. When the Ebtehaj family learned of his intentions, they decided to ask Ayadi for help. Yazdani’s unusual style as a banker, his penchant for profanities, his willingness to change interest rates to fit the demands of wealthy customers, and his practice of making loans on personal whims—and often to himself—were at odds with the sedate banking culture instilled at the Iranian Bank by Ebtehaj and his wife. Hoping to salvage the bank, Azar went to meet Ayadi. When she told him of her problem, his answer was simple and dismissive. “He has money and he wants to buy these shares. Is there anything illegal about this?”[24] Before long, Yazdani agreed to buy out the Ebtehaj family shares, too, at thirty-five million dollars, a price much higher than their market value. The Tehran Stock Exchange initially blocked the deal, suggesting that the price was unnaturally high. Ebtehaj claimed that the unusual intervention of the stock market was at the instigation of his foes, including Hushang Ansary, yet he made no effort to explain why the latter would benefit from blocking the deal.[25]

After taking control of the Iranian Bank, Yazdani set his eyes on the Agricultural Bank. One morning around eight, armed men appeared at the door of Mehdi Samii, the venerable director of the bank and one of the most respected bankers in Iran. They turned out to be the “boys” guarding Yazdani. In his inimitable way, he tried to intimidate Samii by mentioning the fact that he had the full support of General Ayadi and General Nasiri in his endeavor to receive a large loan from the bank. This time, however, he had picked the wrong foe. Samii refused to comply and eventually succeeded in refusing the loan to Hojabr.

By 1978, as the situation in the country deteriorated, Yazdani was among those arrested by the shah’s regime in the hope of turning back the surging tide of revolution. Ironically, he was arrested on the thirteenth of the month of Mordad. With an almost childlike glee in his eyes, he showed me a report from the American Embassy in Iran stating that Yazdani had been arrested and that the highest bond in Iran’s history had been set for him, but within minutes he had raised the money, all in cash. He also took pride in the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini had singled him out, on more than one occasion, to cast aspersions on the shah’s regime. But by the time the bail was set, Yazdani had lost his base of power. Nasiri was no longer the head of SAVAK, and Ayadi was keeping a low profile, as he had become the subject of occasional criticism by the mullahs. In spite of having the bail money available, Yazdani was told, “It is better that you stay.”

In prison, he lived a life fit for a king. He bought the allegiance of the guards as well as his cellmates. To the latter, he made the generous offer to pay all their debts and damages and to procure their freedom. He befriended Colonel Hariri, the warden of the prison, and through him, rules and regulations were bent and broken in his favor. As the situation worsened outside, he repeatedly sent a message to the shah indicating his willingness to “head for the hills, organize an army, and come back and take the city for the shah.”[26]

None of his offers was taken seriously or accepted. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was, in fact, part of the problem for the shah and thus could hardly be the solution.

On the day of the revolution, his “boys” came to the prison with guns, a big utility vehicle, and several sedans. In collusion with the warden, they rammed through a wall. Yazdani and the warden were waiting on the other side. Within seconds, both disappeared into the cars. Three months after the revolution, the newspapers were still writing about Yazdani. In April 1979, there was an article in Keyhan entitled, “The Deposed Shah Cheated Hojabr of Six Hundred Million Tooman.”[27] The article reports, rightly as it turns out, that Hojabr was still in Iran, hiding in the city of Sangesar. The article claims that Hojabr bought from the shah a property valued at nine hundred million tooman, only to discover days later that there was a six-hundred-million-tooman debt that went with the property. While the claim about the deal seems bogus, the sheer magnitude of the figures is a telling indicator of the kind of image people had of Yazdani.

After spending a few months in the mountains off Sangesar, he used a false Turkish passport to leave Iran and eventually arrived in the United States. From there he went to Costa Rica, where the country’s strict laws against extradition made it a safe haven. He befriended the country’s leadership, including the president. Before long, he bought a bank. It is not clear how much of his vast fortune he succeeded in transferring out of Iran before it was all confiscated. He had often told his friends and peers that capital must stay in Iran, thus it is not hard to believe his claim that he left behind most of his wealth.

Aside from banking and some politics—for a while he tried to convince the shah and then Prince Reza to declare a government in exile—he spends his time attending to his large family, traveling between the United States and Costa Rica. For more than a decade, the colonel who had helped him escape prison lived as his guest at his house. In later years, when the son of Mohsen Rezai, then head of the Revolutionary Guards, escaped Iran, he spent six months in Yazdani’s house. “Did you know the Rezai family before?” I asked. He said no. When I asked why the son had chosen to come to him, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know. I guess he didn’t have a better place to go.”[28]

Abbreviations

FIS Foundation for Iranian Studies, Bethesda, Md., Oral History Program, www.fis-iran. org/index.php/oralhistory

FRUS U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: GPO). Individual volumes are cited by date and volume number. See www.state.gov/r/ pa/ho/frus/ for information about specific volumes.

IOHP Harvard University Iranian Oral History Project, Cambridge, Mass., www.fas.harvard. edu/~iohp/

JFK John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass.

NA National Archives, Washington, D.C.

NSA National Security Archive, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C. PRO Public Records Office, London

From Rags to Riches to Revolution: The Iranian Economy, 1941–1979
1. James Davies, “The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Expectations as a Case of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion,” in Violence in America, ed. Ted Gurr et al. (New York: Sage Publications, 1989), 671–709.
2. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
3. Every study of the social backgrounds of the opposition activists—from Ervand Abrahamian’s study of the Mujahedeen Khalg to other studies of the Left—confirms this proposition. See Ervand Abrahamian, Iranian Mujahedeen (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998).
4. “Industrialist Pessimism,” Dec. 27, 1978, item no. IR01962, NSA.
5. The best account of these realities can be found in what is often referred to as the “Hurley Report.” Hurley was FDR’s personal emissary to Iran, and his report to the president offers a succinct summary of the Iranian economic and political situation. See my “Hurley’s Dreams,” Hoover Digest, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
6. U.S., Country Report: Iran, 2003, http://countrystudies.US/Iran/63.htm.
7. Other sources have given the number of factories in 1941 at 482, with 118 textile factories, and 54 chemical. See Firouz Tofigh, “Development of Iran: A Statistical Note,” in Iran: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Jane W. Jacqz (Aspen: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1976), 65.
8. U.S., Country Report: Iran.
9. Firouz Tofigh, “Development of Iran: A Statistical Note,” in Iran: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Jane W. Jacqz (Aspen: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1976), 65.
10. Mohsen Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1988), 57–77. 11. Jahangir Amuzegar, Iran: An Economic Profile (New York: Middle East Institute, 1977). 12. Ali Mohammadi, ed. Iran Encountering Globalization: Problems and Prospects(London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 184.
13. “Iran: A Valedictory Dispatch,” Jan. 18, 1979, PRO, BT/241/3046.
14. “Iranian Internal Situation,” Sept. 19, 1978, PRO, BT/241/3045.
15. Julian Bharier, Economic Development in Iran, 1900–1970 (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1971), 38.
16. In his informative memoirs, Israel’s ambassador to Iran, Meir Ezri, offers an account
of these negotiations. See Meir Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 1, trans. Ebrahim Hakhami (Jerusalem, 2000).
17. Alinaghi Alikhani, Siyasat va Siyasatgozariy-e Egtesadi dar Iran, 1350–1340 (Ideology, Politics, and Process in Iran’s Economic Development, 1960–1970), ed. by Gholam Reza Afkhami (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 2001). For much of the book, Alikhani offers his thoughts on the nature of the strategic plans for the growth of the private sector in Iran.
18. See the chapter on the Lajevardi family in this book for their views on business, as well as for details of the presidential letter.

INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE

The Amid-Hozour Family
1. Leila Abu-Laghud, a scholar of Arab societies, and Farzaneh Milani, who has studied Iranian women, are both advocates of this theory.
2. Alikhani, Ideology, Politics, and Process, 71.
3. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, July 3, 2002.
4. Esmail Amid-Hozour, interviewed by author, Woodside, Calif., July 18, 2002. Needless to
say, all ideas about oil negotiations ended up being credited to the shah, as he was the only person allowed to talk with authority on these matters.
5. Ibid.
6. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, Aug. 10, 2003.
7. For a detailed account of the bazaar structure and the location and status of the differ-
ent timchehs, see Ja’far Shahri, Tarikhe Ejtemaiy-e Tehran [Social History of Tehran] (Tehran: NP, 1369/1990).
8. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, Aug. 10, 2003.
9. Hashem Amid-Hozour (Amidi), “Tarikhsheye Baradarane Amid Hozour” [History of the Amid-Hozour Brothers]; a copy was given to me, courtesy of Hashem Amid-Hozour Amidi.
10. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, July 3, 2002. 11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Esmail Amid-Hozour, interviewed by author, Woodside, Calif., July 18, 2002.
16. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, July 3, 2002.
17. Various lists were published at that time, detailing, often erroneously, who had taken how
much. But the fact of the mass exodus of capital is confirmed by reliable bank officials of the time. Hashem Pesaran, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Oct. 11, 2004.
18. Hashem Amidi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, July 3, 2002.
19. Esmail Amid-Hozour, interviewed by author, Woodside, Calif., July 18, 2002.

The Arjomand Brothers
1. For personal reasons, the people who told me this story did not want their names mentioned. Eskandar Arjomand confirmed the story but downplayed its significance in his own distinctive humble manner.
2. The Aras River is in the northernmost corner of Iran and constitutes part of the border with what was in those days the Soviet Union.
3. Siavosh Arjomand, “An Autobiographical Sketch of Siavosh Arjomand,” courtesy of Siavosh Arjomand. I also interviewed Siavosh Arjomand in New York and asked about a few details of his life not covered in the essay.
4. Mehdi Samii talked about his group including Bahais, Assyrians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and, of course, Muslims. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by auhtor, Los Angeles, Apr. 3, 2004.
5. Khalil Arjomand; an essay about his life prepared by way of eulogy was provided to me courtesy of Eskandar Arjomand.
6. Eskandar Arjomand, interviewed by author, New York, Aug. 14, 2002.
7. In his autobiographical sketch, Siavosh gives a slightly different version of the cause of his brother’s death, saying that he died “when he was testing a machine.” See Arjomand, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 2.
8. Many have written about Ford’s unusual style of management, among them Antonio Gramsci in State and Civil Society. I translated the book into Persian in 1980. It is now in its ninth printing.
9. Eskandar Arjomand, interviewed by author, New York, Aug. 14, 2002.
10. Ibid.
11. The International Who’s Who of Intellectuals (Cambridge: International Biographical Cen-
tre, 1997) mistakenly indicates that in Tehran he received his master’s degree in engineering. In fact he finished his bachelor’s degree.
12. International Who’s Who of Intellectuals, vol. 5. 13. Arjomand, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 10.

Morad Aryeh
1. Many sources, from Raffie Aryeh to Aredeshir Zahedi, have confirmed the story.
2. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 1, 203.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. I asked Uri Lubrani, one of Israel’s ambassadors to Iran, about these stories, and he
indicated that all of this happened before he arrived in Tehran and that he himself had a good relationship with Aryeh. Uri Lubrani, interviewed by author, Bahamas, June 1, 2007.
5. Raffie Aryeh, phone interview by author, Oct. 26, 2006.
6. Logatnameye Dehkhoda (Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1337/1958), vol. 1, 446.
7. David Menasheri, “The Jews of Iran: Between the Shah and Khomeini,” in Anti-Semitism in
Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2002), 356.
8. Ibid., 358.
9. Shamuel Kamran, “Tarikhe Sazmanhaye Yahudi Irani” (History of Jewish Organizations of Iran) in Terua: The History of Contemporary Iranian Jews, (Beverly Hills: Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1996), vol. 1, 120–22.
10. Ibid., 203.
11. Sazmanhaye Yahoudi va Seyhonisti dar Iran [Jewish and Zionist Organizations in Iran] (Tehran: Institute for Political Studies and Research, 1381/2002), 216.
12. Raffie Aryeh, phone interview by author, Dec. 6, 2002. 13. Raffie Aryeh, phone interview by author, Oct. 26, 2006. 14. Raffie Aryeh, phone interview by author, Dec. 6, 2002.

The Barkhordar Brothers
1. For a brief account of his life, see Bager Mortazavi, Siavashun (Cologne: B. M. Drucker, 1378/1999), 54–60.
2. By way of disclosure, I must mention that Abbas Barkhordar was a close friend of mine, and some details of his life I witnessed firsthand.
3. I have pieced together details of this aspect of his life from several interviews with his comrades and his friends and family.
4. Mortazavi, Siavashun, 58–60.
5. Farhang Mehr, correspondence with author, May 2006.
6. Ibid.
7. Hamid Barkhordar, correspondence with author, May 2006.
8. Bharier, Economic Development in Iran, 188.
9. Farhang Mehr, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Nov. 2005.
10. See the chapter on the Lajevardi family in this book for the history of the Harvard Business
School in Tehran.
11. Farhang Mehr, correspondence with author, May 2006.

Hadj Habib Elghanian
1. Sazmanhaye Yahoudi va Seyhonisti, 216.
2. For an account of the lives of these Jews, see Avi Davidi, “Bachehay-e Tehran” [The Children of Tehran], in History of Contemporary Iranian Jews, ed. Homa Sarshar (Beverly Hills, Calif., Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1997) vol. 2, 211–21. I am grateful to Jaleh Pirnazar, who brought the article to my attention.
3. Ariye Levine, “Habib Elghanian va Jame-ye Yahoudi-ye Iran” [Elghanian and the Iranian Jewish Community], in Sarshar, History of Contemporary Iranian Jews, 173.
4. Carmel Elghanian, phone interview by author, Nov. 9, 2005. 5. Levine, “Habib Elghanian,” 169.
6. Ibid., 159.
7. Carmel Elghanian, interviewed by author, Nov. 9, 2005.
8. Ezri, Yadnameh, vol. 2, 237.
9. Ruhollah Kohanim, Ganjineye Talai [Golden Treasure] (Los Angeles, 2003), 63.
10. Ibid., 62.
11. Walter Benjamin, arguably one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century,
writes of the Paris arcades as the most meaningful sign of the rise of a new stage of capitalist development. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).
12. Levine, “Habib Elghanian,” 172.
13. Assadollah Alam, Yadashthaye Alam [Alam’s Diaries], ed. Alinaghi Alikhani, vol. 5 (Bethesda: Ibex, 1993, 192.
14. Mahnaz Elghanian, interviewed by author, Nov. 5, 2005. 15. Levine, “Habib Elghanian,” 166.
16. Carmel Elghanian, interviewed by author, Nov. 2, 2005. 17. Ibid.
18. Levine, “Habib Elghanian,” 167. 19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 177.
21. Ibid., 176.
22. Keyhan at the time published the text of the indictment; Keyhan, 3 Mordad 1358/ Aug. 22, 1979.
23. Freemasons, Rotarians, and Lions of Iran (Tehran, 1377/1998) claims to have the lists of these lodges and alleges that Elghanian was a member. Also see Sazmanhaye Yahoudi va Seyhonisti, 119.
24. Eliz Sansarian, Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 113. 25. The text of HR 267 can be found in the online library of the U.S. House of Representatives. 26. Sansarian, Religious Minorities, 112.
27. When a relative of his became involved in a lawsuit in the United States, he estimated the
total value of the confiscated properties to be about $113,530,000. 28. Keyhan, 3 Mordad 1358/ Aug. 22, 1979.

Rahim Irvani
1. James Joyce’s “The Dead” is part of Dubliners and available in anthologies and online. A brilliant film version of the story was John Huston’s last work.
2. In his Social History of Tehran, Ja’far Shahri has provided a brilliant account of this business in its early development. See Tehran Gadim [Old Tehran] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1355/1976).
3. For his daily habits and characters, I have relied on his wife, Zinat Irvani, phone interview by author, Nov. 25, 2006, and his lifelong friend Ebrahim Golestan, with whom I have talked on numerous occasions.
4. Zinat Irvani, phone interview by author, Nov. 25, 2006.
5. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, London, Nov. 28, 2006.
6. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, Oct. 28, 2004.
7. Ibid.
8. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, Nov. 28, 2006.
9. Zinat Irvani, as well as Irvani in his letter to officials of the Islamic Republic, offers these
figures. Even in Iran, a reformist paper, Sharg, wrote a favorable review of Irvani’s work and lauded his accomplishments.
10. Zinat Irvani, phone interview by author, Nov. 25, 2006.
11. Mohammad Yeganeh, IOHP, Apr. 20, 1985, tape 4. A copy of the transcript of the interview was given to me, courtesy of Hassanali Mehran.
12. The creation of the company began a small controversy in the United States. See The Nation, Dec. 3, 1977, 580. The author of the article calls the establishment of the company “shameless.”
13. Mrs. Irvani confirmed the fact that the contract was received by National Shoes and that Safeer was instrumental in securing the deal.
14. Zinat Irvani, phone interview by author, Nov. 25, 2006.
15. Ibid.
16. The text of the letter was published in Etela’at, 29 Mehre 1384/Oct. 22, 2005. 17. Keyhan, 18 Esfand 1357/March 1978.
18. Etela’at, 29 Mehre 1384/Oct. 22, 2005.

Abdurrahim J’afari
1. The first book I ever translated into Persian was published by Amir Kabir. The book was published in 1978; it was Karl Kautsky’s Foundation of Christianity.
2. Abdurrahim J’afari, Dar Jostojouy-e Sobh [In Search of Dawn], vol. 1 (Tehran: Roozbehan, 1383/2004), 374.
3. Abdurrahim J’afari, phone interview by author, Nov. 28, 2005.
4. UNDP, Arab Human Development Report, 2003 (New York: UNDP, 2004).
5. J’afari, Dar Jostojouy-e Sobh, 721.
6. Abdolhoseyn Azarang and Ali Dehbashi, Tarikhe Shafahiy-e Nashre Iran [Oral History of
Iran’s Publishing Industry], (Tehran: Gognus, 1382/2003), 41.
7. In many places in the two volumes of Dar Jostojouy-e Sobh, J’Afari laments the relative ease of other investments.
8. J’afari, Dar Jostojouy-e Sobh, 8. 9. Ibid., 11.
10. Ibid., 20.
11. Ibid., 76.
12. Ibid., 316.
13. Ibid, 953.
14. Ibid., 20.
15. Abdurrahim J’afari, phone interviewd by author, Nov. 28, 2005.
16. My translation of Master of Margarita, now in its seventh printing in Tehran, was published
by J’afari’s son.
17. “Majma’e Bozorgdashte Abdorrahim J’afari” [J’afari Commemoration], Kebat-e Hafte, no.
181, 23 Khordad 1383/Aug. 2004, 4. 18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 5.

The Khayami Brothers
1. Mahmood Khayami, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 15, 2004.
2. Fateme Sudavar, whose father had at one time employed the Khayami brothers, talked of her mother’s “snobbish dismissal of the Khayamis as ‘machine-washers.’” The snobbery of course cost the Sudavars dearly, as they refuses partnership with the Khayamis, who went on to make a fortune of fantastic proportions. Fateme Sudavar, phone interview by author, Nov. 15, 2006.
3. Reza Fazel, phone interview by author, Nov. 13, 2006.
4. Ibid.
5. “Khayamis,” Keyhan, no. 992, Bahman 1382/Feb. 2004.
6. Mahmood Khayami, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 15, 2004.
7. Ahmad Goreishi, who is a close friend of the Khayami brothers, talks of their unusually
close ties with the workers. Even today, Goreishi said, a quarter of century after the revolution, they sometimes call him and ask for help.
8. “Khanevadeye Samimiye Iran National” [The Close Family of Iran National], Omid Iran, Aban 1350/Oct. 1971, 5–6.
9. Ardeshir Zahedi be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [Ardeshir Zahedi According to SAVAK Documents] (Tehran, 1378), 112.
10. Reza Fazel, phone interview by author, Nov. 13, 2006. I also talked to Mr. Fazel at some length in a visit to Montreal, where he lives.
11. Reza Fazel, phone interview by author, Nov. 13, 2006.
12. Mahmood Khayami, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 15, 2004. 13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.

The Khosrowshahi Brothers
1. Ja’far Shahri, in his monumental Tarikh Ejtemaiy-e Tehran, has offered vivid examples of these attacks and the rhetoric used by the mullahs to incite people to riot.
2. Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 6, 2002.
3. Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi and his wife and children were among the few Iranian families who successfully won a judgment against the government of Iran in The Hague. In papers submitted for that trial, the value of the company’s assets is estimated at $150 million. For the announcement of the award, see White House Office of the Press Secretary, Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, Nov. 18, 1994, NA.
4. KBC Industrial Group Review, Apr. 1977. The purpose of the review was to furnish information to companies that were interested in doing business with KBC.
5. Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 6, 2002.
6. Ibid.
7. An English translation of the letter has been provided in one of the company’s brochures.
See Annual Report, Alborz Investment Corporation, 1976–77/2535. 8. Ibid.
9. Dr. Nasrollah Khosrowshahi, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 6, 2002.
10. Kazem Khosrowshahi, Yadashthaye Kar-Afarini: Bar Ma Che Gozasht [Notes on Job Creating: What Befell Us] (Tehran: Farzan, 1382/2003).
11. Ibid., 23.
12. Ibid., 27–29.
13. Ibid., 30.
14. KBC Industrial Group Review, 5.
15. Khosrowshahi, Yadashthaye Kar-Afarini, 22–25.
16. Ibid., 19.
17. Rich 100, 2003–4 ed.
18. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, Nov. 18, 1994f, NA.

The Lajevardi Family
1. “An Entrepreneurial Elite That Came Up from the Bazaars,” Fortune, Oct. 1974, 148.
2. Ibid.
3. Fereydoon Shirin-Kam Chouri, Khandane Lajevardi (Tehran, ND), 6. This study was com-
missioned by the Budget Committee of the Islamic Majlis. 4. Ibid., 7.
5. Mohammad Gholi Majd, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917–1919 (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 2003), 1.
6. Two people, both descendents of the bandit, have tried hard to rehabilitate him as a revolutionary. Amir Hoseyn Arian-Pour, a self-styled Marxist sociologist, and Ehsan Naraqi, the colorful political personality, have led the quixotic rehabilitation charge.
7. Manouchehr Farhang, Zendegi-ye Hadj Seyyed Mahmood Lajevardi (Tehran, 1353/1974). This biography was published in a small number by the family and only given to friends and relatives. I have a copy, courtesy of the kindness of Habib Lajevardi.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. Chouri, Khandane Lajevardi, 22.
10. Habib Lajevardi, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003.
11. Chouri, Khandane Lajevardi, 9–15.
12. Farhang, Zendegi-ye Hadj Seyyed Mahmood Lajevardi, 4.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. Habib Lajevardi, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003.
16. Ibid.
17. Farhang, Zendegi-ye Hadj Seyyed Mahmood Lajevardi, 27.
18. Ibid., 32–37.
19. Ibid., 38.
20. Ibid., 28–32.
21. Ibid., 39.
22. Habib Lajevardi, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003.
23. Farhang, Zendegi-ye Hadj Seyyed Mahmood Lajevardi, 49–50.
24. Ibid., 50.
25. Chouri, Khandane Lajevardi, 6.
26. Farhang, Zendegi-ye Hadj Seyyed Mahmood Lajevardi, 63.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. Ibid., 73.
30. Chouri, Khandane Lajevardi, 6.
31. I have interviewed several managers who worked for the company, and they all share their
admiration for the company and its owners. For example, Reza Zahedani, interviewed by author, Davis, Calif., Sept. 12, 2003.
32. Habib Lajevardi, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2003.
33. Ibid.
34. Several industrialists have told me of their assessment. For example, Esmail Amid-hozour,
interviewed by author, Woodside, Calif., Oct. 12, 2003.
35. Gassem Lajevardi, interviewed by author, 2002. I spoke to him, at great length, on the phone. 36. Ibid.
37. Gassem Lajevardi, Speech to the Senate, official transcript of Senate Proceedings, 2535
(1355)/1976, 195.

Bager Mostofi
1. I first saw a copy of the family tree at the house of Abolfath Ardalan.
NotestoPages646–52 | 1101
1102 | Notes to Pages 652–57
2. Nasrin Rahimieh, Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2001), 74.
3. Dr. Mostafa Alamuti, “Mohandess Bager Mostofi” [Engineer Bager Mostofi], Nimrouz, 2 Esfand 1381/Dec. 2002.
4. One of his daughters, Nayer Mostofi Glenn, took on the task of translating the heavy tome into English. See Abdollah Mostofi, The Administrative and Social History of the Qajar Period: The Story of My Life, 3 vols., trans. Nayer Mostofi Glenn (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1997).
5. Mostofi, Administrative and Social History of the Qajar Period, vol. 3, 1177.
6. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62035.
7. Houri Moghadam Mostofi, interviewed by author, Nice, France, Aug. 14, 2004.
8. In several interviews in San Francisco, Houri Mostofi Moghadam kindly provided me with
some details of her life, as well as glimpses of her journal.
9. Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 101.
10. Some in his family suggest that he objected to the limited time allotted for an exam and was
thrown out of the class by the professor. Houri Moghadam, interviewed by author, Nice, France, Aug. 14, 2004. His family obituary, prepared by Nayer Glenn, simply declared that “unfavorable circumstances forced him to leave the college.” “In Memoriam,” courtesy of Houri Mostofi Moghadam.
11. Bager Mostofi, Times (London), Dec. 15, 2002.
12. Bager Mostofi, San’at Petro-Shimiy-e Iran [The Evolution of Iran’s Petrochemical Industry] (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 2001), 4.
13. Ibid., 4–5. 14. Ibid., 6–15. 15. Ibid., 14–15. 16. Ibid., 26.
17. Ibid., 100.
18. The National Petrochemical Company has a Web site where the history of the institution as well as facts and figures about their operation can be found. See http://www.NIPC.net/about. historyen.htm.

Abdul-Hussein Nikpour
1. By way of disclosure, I want the readers to know that my father, Mahmood, worked for Nikpour for a while in his youth. When I was five or six, I met the man once at his house.
2. Some of my childhood summers were spent in this timcheh, as my father also had an office in it. The simple offices, often composed of a desk and a few chairs, clearly belied the nature and size of the financial transactions that took place there on a daily basis. At the same time, the sedate silence in the offices was in sharp contrast to the bustle on the first floor and outside, where old and young men, carrying heavy loads on their bent backs, warned pedestrians to step out of the way, and peddlers and hawkers—who served everything from tea to barbecued beets—offered their wares and services at the top of their voices. Watching the hustle and bustle of the place was the favorite pastime of my childhood summers.
3. Masoud Behnoud, Az Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar [From Seyyed Zia to Bakhtiyar] (Tehran, 1369/1990), 278.
4. Jahangir Taffazoli, Khaterat-e Jahangir-e Taffazoli [Memoirs], ed. Yagoub Tavakoli (Tehran: Daftar Adabiyat-e Engelab-e Eslami, 1376/1997), 58.
5. Ibid., 52.
6. Manuchehr Nikpour, interviewed by author, Philadelphia, Nov. 12, 2005.
7. Bagher Ageli, Nakhost-vazirane Iran [Iran’s Prime Ministers] (Tehran: Javidan, 1374/1995),
615.
8. Manuchehr Nikpour, interviewed by author, Philadelphia, Nov. 12, 2005. 9. Behnoud, Az

Seyyed Zia ta Bakhtiyar, 355.
The Rastegar Brothers
1. Ali Ebrahimi was one of these partners. He told me about Reza Rastegar’s habits of carefully reading the reports and always asking probing questions. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 26, 2003.
2. In a brief biographical sketch of Morteza Rastegar, his son refers to the father’s love of the title.
3. Nader Rastegar, on the family foundation Web site.
4. Ali Rastegar, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 26, 2003.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. That is how the Web site for the Institut Pasteur describes its mission. See www.pasteur.
fr/english.html.
8. Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power (London:
I. B. Tauris, 1998), 32.
9. Ali Rastegar, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 26, 2003. 10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.

The Rezai Brothers
1. Assadollah Alam, Yadashthaye Alam [Alam’s Diaries].
2. I had heard of the bribe paid to a member of the royal family from two reliable sources: a “high ranking security official” told me about a report SAVAK prepared on the subject; Darius Homayun, who was in charge of preparing the list of candidates and had insisted on keeping Rezai’s name out, also told me of the three million tooman payment. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Geneva, June 16, 2003.
3. Eric Rouleau, “L’Iran a L’Heure de L’Embourgeoisment,” Le Monde, Oct. 5, 1973. 4. Ali Rezai, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 21, 2002.
5. Ibid.
NotestoPages658–67 | 1103
1104 | Notes to Pages 668–76
6. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002. In deference to the family of the lady, I have withheld her name.
7. The strange tale of the theater owner was recounted by Ebrahim Golestan in an interview with the author, Dec. 6, 2003.
8. Ali Rezai, “Ma’den Kari” [Work on Mines], an unpublished memoir, courtesy of Ali Rezai, 62.
9. Ali Rezai, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 21, 2002.
10. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2004.
11. The estimate of the values of Mahmood’s wealth was provided by Ali Ebrahimi, who was
in a perfect position to know. He was the deputy managing director of the mine, and when it was nationalized, Mahmood, who was also Ebrahimi’s uncle, asked him to dissolve the Kerman Copper Corporation, the legal owner of the mine. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2004.
12. “Biweekly Economic Report,” U.S. Embassy in Tehran to State Department,” A-451, Jan. 12–Feb. 5, 1975, 4–5, NSA.
13. “Ambassador Allen’s Interviewed by the Shah,” U.S. Embassy to State Department, Nov. 18, 1965, NSA.
14. U.S. Embassy to State Dept., Aug. 31, 1965, in U.S. Dept. of State, FRUS, 1964–68 vol. 22, 169.
15. Ibid., 322.
16. The contractor, Amir Malekyazdi, chronicles this battle in his memoirs, and he also described it in correspondence and interviews with me. I have also heard versions of the story from several people directly involved with the commission entrusted with solving the problem—Majid A’lam and Kazem Jafrudi have both described the problem at some length.
17. Gah-Nameye Panjah Saley Shahanshahi Pahlavi [The Fifty Year Chronology of the Pahlavi Monarchy], (Paris, ND), 2393.
18. I interviewed Soraya Lashai, who was his chief executive secretary and ran his office. Ali Rezai also described the workings of his office to me.
19. Ali Ebrahimi provided a fantastic image of a ballot-stuffing day.
20. He suggests that he was taken to meet with General Fazlollah Zahedi, where he was thanked for his services, and on that day Aredeshir Zahedi took him to see the general. Aredeshir Zahedi does not have a recollection of such a meeting, nor does he deny that it could have happened. “A lot of things were happening on that day and I might have forgotten this meeting,” he said. Aredeshir Zahedi, interviewed by author, Montreux, Switzerlant, July 17, 2004.
21. Darius Homayun, interviewed by author, Belmont, Calif., Dec. 2003. He was one of the leaders of the party. I confirmed the story from at least two other sources: the “high ranking security official” and Dr. Farokh Mostofi, chief of staff to Hoveyda in his capacity as the first secretary of the party.
22. Ali Rezai has kindly provided me with a detailed handwritten account of these meetings. 23. Ibid., 22.
24. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2004.
25. Ibid.

Habib Sabet
1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1992).
2. For a study of the Bahai faith as a sign of modernity, see Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998).
3. Newsweek, Feb. 22, 1975, 48.
4. “The Sabet Group” company profile (c. 1975).
5. Habib Sabet, Sargozasht-e Habib Sabet [Memoirs of Habib Sabet] (Los Angeles: Habib Sabet,
1993). I was provided with a copy of the book courtesy of the Sabet family. Sabet writes of the improvement in health on page 237; he quotes the minister of health, Jahanshah Saleh, telling the Parliament of a 60-percent reduction in a variety of diseases.
6. Many accounts of these attacks have been written. See, for example, Mohammed TavakoliTargi, “Anti-Bahaism and Islamism in Iran, 1941–1955,” Iran Nameh, vol. 19, nos. 1–2 (Winter and Spring 2001), 79–125. There is some evidence that the shah allowed these attacks when the clergy blackmailed him by obtaining photos of Queen Soraya in a bathing suit on an American beach. Abbas Milani, Peacock Prince (forthcoming).
7. Iraj Sabet, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 11, 2002.
8. Ibid.
9. Sabet does not mention the price in his memoirs. I learned it from another informed source.
The government’s negotiator on the purchase was Hushang Ansari. I was told of the price in an interview with Maryam Panahi, Dec. 11, 2002.
10. Sabet, Sargozasht-e Habib Sabet, 1–12. 11. Ibid., 22–42.
12. Ibid., 17–21.
13. Ibid., 34–36.
14. For a fascinating account of the arrival of bicycles to Tehran, see Shahri, Tehran Gadim, 24. 15. Sabet, Sargozasht-e Habib Sabet, 55–58.
16. Ibid., 58–65.
17. In an October 1974 profile of Sabet, Fortune magazine writes of his knack for knowing and
predicting the taste of the public and catering to it. See “An Entrepreneurial Elite,” 148. 18. Iraj Sabet, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 11, 2002.
19. Sabet, Sargozasht-e Habib Sabet, 134–56.
20. Ibid., 105–10.
21. In many sections of his memoirs, Sabet points to these contacts. 22. Iraj Sabet, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 11, 2002.
23. “An Entrepreneurial Elite,” 148.
24. Ibid., 49.
25. Ibid., 148.
26. While the telegram of condolence from the Beyt-ol Adl—the highest institutional authority of the Bahai faith—mentions Sabet’s “peerless efforts in acquiring Tehran’s holy places” (see Sabet’s Memoirs, 292), Sabet’s son thinks that, in his father’s mind, his singular accomplishment in this area was the purchase of Siahchal. Iraj Sabet, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 11, 2002.
27. Iraj Sabet, interviewed by author, New York, Dec. 11, 2002.
28. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works, vol. 1, Poems, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 102.
29. Sabet, Sargozasht-e Habib Sabet, 290.
30. “Habib Sabet Dead: An Iranian Altruist and Industrialist, 86,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 1990.

The Sadat-Tehrani Family
1. Roknaddin Sadat-Tehrani, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 14, 2004.
2. Shahnaz Sadat-Tehrani Amidi, interviewed by author, Aug. 6, 2006. She is the daughter of Seyyed Jalal.
3. Roknaddin Sadat-Tehrani, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 14, 2004.
4. Azi Hariri, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Aug. 5, 2005. She is Seyyed Jala’s doting granddaugther.
5. None of the family members wants to talk about these tensions.
6. Roknaddin Sadat-Tehrani, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 14, 2004.
7. Ibid.
8. Peter Drucker was born in Vienna and arrived in the United States in 1937. He taught at
NYU’s Graduate School of Management. He wrote more than thirty-five books, among them his classic, Practice of Management.
9. Roknaddin Sadat-Tehrani, interviewed by author, Cannes, Aug. 14, 2004.
10. For a discussion of the committee, see my Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2000).
11. By way of disclosure, I should mention that I am a member of the committee that selects the winners of these scholarships each year.

The Sudavar Brothers
1. Fateme Sudavar, phone interview by author, Nov. 8, 2006.
2. Ibid.
3. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-Communist Manifesto (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960). Rostow talks of five stages, from tradition to high mass consumption.
4. Fateme Sudavar, phone interview by author, Nov. 7, 2006.
5. Ibid.
6. Kaveh was one of the Iranian diaspora’s best magazines. It advocated modernity; it was also pro-German, anti-British, and anti-Soviet. I have written an essay about their ideology.
7. Several of Iran’s most successful industrialists began their careers with the Kataneh broth-
ers. Among those are the Sudavars and the Sabet family.
8. I have not seen this report but was told about its existence and content by two of Samad Sudavar’s children. Fateme Sudavar (phone interview, Nov. 8, 2006) and Abolala Sudavar (interviewed by author, Houston, Nov. 10, 2006).
9. Abolala Sudavar, interviewed by author, Houston, Nov. 10, 2006.
10. Abolala Sudavar, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002.
11. Ibid.
12. See Layla S. Diba, ed. Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925 (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1998).
13. Abolala Sudavar, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002.
14. Ibid.
15. Examples of these works are Abolala Sudavar, The Aura of Kings: Legitimacy and Divine Sanction in Iranian Kingship (Costa Mesa, Calif. Mazda: 2003), and Fateme Sudavar Farmanfarma’ian, “James Baillie in Meshed,” Iran 34, (1996): 101–15.
16. In his Web site, www.soudavar.com, there is special category for lawsuits against the government of Iran and another for lawsuits against the U.S. government.
17. Abolala Sudavar, Art of the Persian Courts (New York: Rizzoli, 1992). CONSTRUCTION

Majid A’lam
1. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 15.
2. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” Dec. 1943, PRO, FO 371/40224.
3. Majid A’lam, interviewed by author, San Diego, Sept. 10, 2003.
4. Ibid.
5. Bagher Ageli, Sharhe Hale Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran [Biographies of the Political
and Military Elite of Contemporary Iran], vol. 1 (Tehran: Elm, 1380/2001), 141.
6. Hoseyn Fardust, Khaterat-e Fardust [Memoirs] (Tehran: Etel’at, 1370/1981), vol. 1, 215.
7. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, 141.
8. Majid A’lam, interviewed by author, San Diego, Sept. 10, 2003.
9. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 296–97.
10. Majid A’lam, interviewed by author, San Diego, Sept. 10, 2003. For the last hour of the
interview, his wife, Iran, also participated in our discussions.

Ali Ebrahimi
1. Many of the technocrats I interviewed told me about this change of attitude. Even the U.S. government realized this change. In a special report prepared for Senator Robert Kennedy, reference is made to the rise of “a new man” in Iran. JFK Presidential Library, “The New Man and the Challenge to American Policy in Iran,” 1967, JFK Archive.
2. For a brief account of the city’s history, see Logatnameh Dehkhoda (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1356/1977).
3. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002.
4. Ali Rezai, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 21, 2002.
5. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002.
6. Ibid.
7. He has kindly provided me a copy of the essay.
8. President George Walker Bush is among the local luminary members of the club. One day,
when Ali’s son was about five years old, he, along with his father, ran into a towel-clad President Bush. The young Ebrahimi was introduced to the president, who, in an attempt to engage in benign banter, told the young boy, “So I hear you are half Iranian, half American.” He paused and then went on to ask, “Tell me, which half is Persian?” Flummoxed by the question, frightened by the solemnity of the moment, the boy thought for a second, and then pointing to the lower half of his body he said, proudly, “this half.”
9. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 20, 2002.
10. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 27, 2002.
11. For a discussion of the rise of technocrats and their “deal” with the shah, see Milani, Persian Sphinx. In the chapter on the “Progressive Circle,” I have discussed this implicit covenant.
12. Documents pertaining to this case can be found in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Li-
brary Archives. There are many pages of documents in the file regarding the student question. 13. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 27, 2002.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Dec. 4, 2005.
19. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Aug. 27, 2002.
20. Ali Ebrahimi, interviewed by author, Houston, Dec. 4, 2005.
21. In interviews with Ali Rezai, he told me about the help he has been receiving from Ali.
Without Ali, he said more than once, he would have not survived.
22. For the official report of the judgment, see the White House Press Office Report, NA; it
indicates that the first award paid to Ebrahimi is “$5,265,697.00 plus interest.”
23. The other families are the Eriye family, the Khosrowshahi family, and Hormoz Sabet.

Hamid Ghadimi
1. Ohran Pamuk recounts this fascinating tale in his novel about the history of painting and miniature in Turkey and Iran, called My Name Is Red.
2. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
3. Ibid.
4. On numerous occasions I have talked to Mrs. Ghadimi, and she has repeatedly talked of her
love for Paris and of the French. Mrs. Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
5. In the Persian language, two different words are used to distinguish a pre-college student from a college student. The former is called daneshamouz—one learning knowledge—while the latter is called daneshjoo—one who seeks knowledge. One is a passive recipient of knowledge, whereas the second seeks it out of his or her own volition.
6. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 1, 2002.
7. For an Iranian account of the contract and it’s controversies, see Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, Khaterat-e Abolhassan Ebtehaj [Memoirs of Ebtehaj], vol. 1 (Tehran: Elmi, 1375/1999), 351–52.
8. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 1, 2002.
9. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Jan. 29, 2005.
10. On page 234 of the book called Pahlaviha [The Pahlavis], a copy of a balance sheet pur-
porting to be from the Princess Shams’s office indicates that she owed the National Construction Company—Sherkate Meli Sakhteman—296,199,439 rials. See Pahlaviha [The Pahlavis], vol. 2 (Tehran, 1378/1999), 234. As the book is published by the Islamic Republic, and as all that is published by the regime must be accepted only after independent verification, I checked with him about the numbers, and he confirmed that it was indeed the figure, to the last dime. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
11. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 7, 2002.
12. Abdol-Reza Ansary was a member of that committee. Ansary, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2004.
13. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Jan. 29, 2005.
14. Ibid.
15. I first met Hamid Ghadimi at a party at Ebrahim Golestan’s house. He showed all of these
qualities not only in the course of the day, but in subsequent meetings. Golestan talks of him as an impressive man, bereft of bombast, honest and dependable. Golestan, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 9, 2002.
16. By way of disclosure, I must add here that he has generously helped me in my project of writing the life of the shah.
17. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, London, Oct. 1, 2002. 18. Ibid.

Akbar Lari
1. Akbar Lari is the chief sponsor for the project that led to the completion of Eminent Persians. He was the chair of the board of advisors who helped with the task of selecting the 150 eminent men and women whose lives make up this narrative. It was the decision of the board that they could not include themselves in the list. Their inclusion or exclusion was left entirely to me. Akbar Lari was in fact insistent that I didn’t include him, and his partner, Ali Ebrahimi, in the list. Their inclusion here is solely my decision. They represented a new generation of builders and engineers who brought a new spirit of hard and honest work to the often maligned construction industry.
2. With great effort, Lari prepared a Lari family tree, mapping out the names of seven generations of Laris. The actual tree was written by a famous calligrapher.
3. Akbar Lari, interviewed by author, New York, Nov. 4, 2006.
Notes to Pages 712–17 | 1109
1110 | Notes to Pages 718–27
4. For a brief history of the city, see Logatnameh Dehkhoda, vol. 50, 176.
5. For a description of the house and its unique qualities, see Khanehaye Tarikhi Yazd [Yazd’s Historic Houses] (Tehran, 2003).
6. Lari family tree, courtesy of Akbar Lari.
7. Akbar Lari, interviewed by author, New York, Nov. 4, 2006.
8. Ibid.
9. I have seen a copy of his high school diploma, indicating his overall average and his grade
for citizenship.
10. Akbar Lari, interviewed by author, New York, Nov. 4, 2006.
11. Hamid Ghadimi, interviewed by author, Oct. 7, 2002, London.
12. For an account of these “favorites” see the chapters on Mohammad Khatam and Amir
Malekyazdi in this collection.
13. I have interviewed Ali Ebrahimi on several occasions. See the chapter on his life in this
book.
14. Akbar Lari, interviewed by author, New York, Nov. 4, 2006. 15. Ibid.

Amir Malekyazdi
1. I interviewed several of his peers, and their consensus was the points mentioned above. Among those interviewed were Manuchehr Mahamadi, Akbar Lari, Ali Ebrahimi, Rajid A’lam, and at least one member of the committee that adjudicated the claim of his critics, Senator Kazem Jafrudi.
2. Amir Malekyazdi, correspondence with the author. I met Malekyazdi in Paris in early October 2002. He only agreed to respond in writing to my written questions. The letter he sent has no date but was probably sent in late 2002 or early 2003.
3. I interviewed Rezai in Costa Rica; see the chapter on the Rezai brothers. 4. Amir Malekyazdi, correspondence with the author.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Amir Malekyazdi, Nim Garn Talash [Half Century of Struggle], (Paris: Amir Malekyazdi, n.d.), 25.
8. Amir Malekyazdi, correspondence with the author. 9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Malekyazdi, Nim Garn Talash, 40.
12. Ibid, 45–46. 13. Ibid., 49.
14. Ibid., 37.
15. Ibid.
16. Amir Malekyazdi, correspondence with the author. 17. Ibid.
18. Malekyazdi, Nim Garn Talash. 19. Ibid.

Fereydoon Rabii
1. In the discussions about who should be included in Eminent Persians, there was consensus that he had a crucial role in the development of an electronic industry in Iran.
2. For an example of his kind of research, see “Maxima, A Balloon-Borne Experiment,” University of California, Berkeley, Campus News, May 2000.
3. Logatnameh Dehkhoda, vol. 45.
4. See the chapter on Mojtahedi for a discussion of the school and its history.
5. Fereydoon Rabii, phone interview by author, Nov. 17, 2006.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. In the Web site prepared by Arjang’s children and Fereydoon Rabii (www.arjangi.net/Ras-
sam/), a brief biographical sketch of him, as well as reproductions of some of his work, are made available.
10. Virginia Woolf, the great Victorian writer, wrote a famous essay called A Room of One’s Own, outlining what it would take for women to establish and maintain their independence. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).
11. Logatnameh Dehkhoda, vol. 8.
12. James E. Brittain, “Scanning the Past: A History of Electrical Engineering,” http://ieee. cincinnati.fuse.net/reiman/05_2001.htm.
13. Fereydoon Rabii, phone interview by author, Nov. 17, 2006. 14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.

BANKS AND FINANCE

Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj
1. Francis Bostook and Geogfrey Jones, Planning and Power in Iran: Ebtehaj and Economic Development under the Shah (London: Routledge, 1989), 77.
2. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 4, The Road to Change, 1955– 1959 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 216.
3. Ibid., 83.
4. “Report on Personalities in Persia,” 1940, PRO, FO 371/24382. 5. “Leading Personalities in Persia,” 1947, PRO, FO 371/62305.
6. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 454.
7. Azar Ebtehaj, interviewed by author, London, June 20, 2003. 8. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 238–39.
Notes to Pages 727–36 | 1111
1112 | Notes to Pages 737–42
9. Azar Ebtehaj, interviewed by author, London, June 15, 2005. 10. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 7.
11. Ibid., 12.
12. Ibid., 17.
13. Ibid., 52.
14. The many letters written by different parties in the affair were published in pamphlet form by the bank. It has been reprinted as Appendix C in the second volume of Ebtehaj, Khaterat.
15. Those two employees were Samii and Kheradju.
16. Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and Its Aftermath (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1992), 87.
17. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 251.
18. Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle, 230.
19. Azar Ebtehaj, interviewed by author, London, June 15, 2005.
20. “U.S. Ambassador in Tehran to State Department, September 18, 1953,” in FRUS, 1952–54,
vol. 10, 801.
21. “U.S. Ambassador in Tehran to State Department, June 11, 1954,” ibid., 1028.
22. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 30, 1981.
23. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. 4, 180. I also interviewed Burke Knapp, who lives in a retirement
home near Stanford University. He talks of Ebtehaj as Iran’s “most capable politician and banker.” Knapp, interviewed by author, Palo Alto, Calif., Dec. 4, 2005.
24. “Dispatch from the U.S. Embassy in Iran to the Department of State, March 11, 1957,” in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 911.
25. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. 4, 216.
26. “Memorandum from the Deputy Director of the Office of Greek, Turkish and Iranian Affairs, May 17, 1956,” in FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 10, 817.
27. “U.S. Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, January 23, 1957,” ibid., 880.
28. Gholam Reza Afkhami, ed. Omran-e Khuzestan [Khuzistan’s Development] (Washington, D.C.: Bunyad-i Mutala’at-i Iran, 1993), 130.
29. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. 4, 253.
30. “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State, Washington, December 2, 1958,” FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 12, 515–617.
31. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 30, 1981.
32. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 5, The Harvest Years, 1959–1965 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 27.
33. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 30, 1981.
34. Ibid.
35. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. 5, 264.
36. Alireza Arouzi, interviewed by author, London, June 19, 2002. Arouzi was Ebtehaj’s ad-
opted son. He was Azar’s child from her first marriage.
37. Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, IOHP, Nov. 30, 1981.
38. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 6, Creativity and Conflict, 1964–1967 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 496.
Azar Ebtehaj, interviewed by author, London, June 15, 2003.

Abolqassem Kheradju
1. Mehdi Samii, for example, a banker himself, considers Kheradju one of the best financiers of his generation. Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 14, 2003.
2. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors, Industrial and Mining Development Bank of Iran, March 1975. I was provided a copy of this report by Mr. Esmail Taie Tehrani.
3. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984.
4. Fereydun Mahdavi, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 12, 2004. See the chapter on him in this collection.
5. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984.
6. Alikhani, Ideology, Politics and Process, 84–88.
7. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984.
8. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 106–8.
9. Ibid., 106–97.
10. For Eprim’s life I am indebted to several interviews with Ebrahim Golestan, a close friend
of his.
11. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 107.
12. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984. 13. Ibid.
14. Fifteenth Annual Report, 10–12.
15. Alikhani, Ideology, Politics, and Process, 84–86. 16. Fifteenth Annual Report, 15–35.
17. Abolqassem Kheradju, IOHP, Dec. 14, 1984. 18. Ibid.

Mohammadali Moffarah
1. Moffarah family members, many of them living in Tehran, kindly answered my questions through correspondence. Letter to author, Dec. 17, 2006.
2. Accounts of the initial days are based on a report given to the bank’s board in a meeting in Shiraz in 1975. The Moffarah family kindly provided me a copy of the report.
3. Bharier, Economic Development in Iran, 247.
4. The bank’s financial reports are available on its Web site. See http://www.saderbank.com/ edefault.aspx.
5. Ibid.
6. Moffarah family, letter to author, Dec. 17, 2006.
7. On an average year, overhead expenses totaled less than 10 percent of the bank’s total bud-
get. See Report to the Board, 1975, 4. A copy of the report was provided to me courtesy of the Moffarah family
8. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1515–16.
1114 | Notes to Pages 750–56
9. Moffarah family, letter to author, Dec. 17, 2006.
10. Hassanali Mehran, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Nov. 22, 2006.
11. Moffarah family, letter to author, Dec. 17, 2006.
12. Mehdi Samii described to me Yazdani’s pressure tactics to get a loan from Samii’s bank. In
that case, too, Yazdani used the names of Dr. Abdolkarim Ayadi and General Ne’matollah Nasiri as his patrons. But with Samii, the names conjured no fear. See the chapter on Samii in this book.
13. Ageli, Sharhe Rejale Siyasi va Nezamiye Moaser Iran, vol. 3, 1515–16. 14. See http://www.forbes.com/markets.

The Moghadam Brothers
1. His full name is Gholam Reza, but he is generally known as Reza.
2. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
3. Houri Moghadam, interviewed by author, San Francisco, Mar. 12, 2003.
4. An English translation of this memoir is available. The project was underwritten by Hamid
Moghadam. See Mostofi, Administrative and Social History of the Qajar Period.
5. She kindly provided me a chance to read much of two of her volumes. They are all handwritten
in the same kind of large notebook. She has begun preparing an edited synopsis of the volumes.
6. By way of disclosure, I must inform the readers that Hamid Moghadam endowed the program and the directorship of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. I am the first
Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies.
7. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
8. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 120.
9. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
10. Ibid.
11. Gholam Reza Moghadam, “Iran’s Foreign Trade Policy and Economic Development in the
Interwar Period,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford Univ., July 1956.
12. Ibid., 202, table 40.
13. Ibid., 46, 68.
14. Skitovsky worked on a variety of subjects, from welfare economics to the requirements for
development. His most famous book is generally thought to be The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Common Dissatisfaction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).
15. Paul Baran was particularly well known as a leftist economist whose Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957) was a classic in the field of political economy.
16. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
17. For the idea of the dowreh and its significance, see Marvin Zonis, The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971). For Moghadam’s group, see Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 250–54.
18. Ebtehaj in his memoirs, Moghadam in his interview with author, and Farmanfarma’ian in his oral history interview listed above confirm this version of events.
19. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 122.
20. Ibid., 186.
21. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
22. Hamid Moghadam, interview with author, San Francisco, March 10, 2003. 23. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
24. Ibid.
25. Hamid Moghadam, interview with author, San Francisco, Mar. 10, 2003. 26. Reza Moghadam, interviewed by author, London, Mar. 10, 2003.
27. Afkhami, Ideology, Process, and Politics, 158.

Mehdi Samii
1. Students who were chosen by the Central Bank of Iran during his tenure for scholarships abroad still, more than forty years after their selection, try to meet with Samii regularly. Many look upon him as a kind of avuncular figure. Hamid Baghshomali is one of these students (interviewed by author, San Francisco, Oct. 22, 2003). On numerous other occasions, he has talked to me about how his peers feel about Samii.
2. For example, see Afkhami, Ideology, Politics, and Process, 85.
3. Hassanali Mehran, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Dec. 9, 2002.
4. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 15, 2003.
5. For an account of this moat, and its genealogy, see my Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity
In Iran (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2004), particularly the chapters on Nasir al-din Shah (51–63), and Shahri (83–93).
6. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 15, 2003.
7. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Nov. 1, 2003.
8. Ibid.
9. I learned firsthand the value of his close and careful reading of texts. He agreed to read, in
advance, parts of The Persian Sphinx, and his suggestions and corrections were impressive proof of his erudition and his close attention to detail.
10. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Apr. 3, 2004.
11. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 18, 2004
12. Ibid.
13. I learned of his erudition both from Ebrahim Golestan and from reading some of his writ-
ings. His major work was an attempt to write in pure Persian one of the classics of Persian literature,
Kelile va Demeneh.
14. I have talked to several employees of the bank and the oil company, and they all tell more or less the same story; for example, Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, London, June 11, 2004. Golestan has been a lifelong friend of Samii’s.
15. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 15, 2003.
16. Hamid Baghshomali, interviewed by author, San Francisco, Oct. 22, 2003.
17. On the day zealots attacked the bank where he was working, it was the workers and the
lower-ranking employees who shielded Samii and whisked him out of the building. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 18, 2004.
18. “Memorandum of Conversation,” Washington, D.C., December 6, 1968, FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 22, 574.
19. Ibid., 205.
20. Ibid., 574–76. On the American side, in addition to Rusk, others of the U.S. delegation talked. On the Iranian side, Samii is the only one quoted saying anything of substance.
21. Ibid., 534.
22. Mehdi Samii, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Mar. 15, 2003.

ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING

Hoseyn Amanat
1. For a discussion of the film and how it was made, see the section on Ebrahim Golestan in this book.
2. Hoseyn Amanat, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 9, 2005.
3. Milani, Lost Wisdom, 84.
4. Much of the wealth was in the form of vast properties around the country. Apparently one of
the brothers actually came up with the figure of $50 million as the value of confiscated properties. 5. Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–
1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989).
6. Hoseyn Amanat, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 7, 2005.
7. Hushang Seyhun was at the time the dean of the school of architecture. Interviewed by au-
thor, Vancouver, Nov. 8, 2005.
8. Hoseyn Amanat, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 7, 2005.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Pictures of the building are available at Amanat’s professional site. See Amanatarchitect.com. 12. Bazme Ahriman: Jashnhay-e Do Hezar-o Pansad Saleh Shahanshahi be Ravayat-e Asnad
SAVAK [Demon’s Delight: The Twenty-Five Hundred Years of Monarchy Celebration According to SAVAK Documents], 4 vols. (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1378/1999), vol. 3, 215.

Mohsen Forughi
1. King Lear, 4.6.187.
2. See Khaterat-e Mahmoud Forughi [Memoirs of Mahmoud Forughi], ed. Habib Ladjevardi (Tehran: Ketab-e Nader, 2004). Although published in Tehran, the book is in fact the transcript of the Harvard Iranian Oral History Project’s interview by Mahmoud Forughi.
3. Forughi, Khaterat, 52.
4. Dr. Bagher Ageli has collected these insights into a book. See Dr. Bagher Ageli, Zoka-alMulk-e Forughi va Shahrivar 1320 [Forughi and the Events of 1941] (Tehran: Elm, 1367/1988).
5. For an Iranian government report on the exhibit, see Bazme Ahriman, vol. 1; for a scholarly appraisal of some of the Forughi artifacts, see Philippe Gignoux, “Coupes Inscrites de lat Collection Mohsen Forughi,” Acta Iranica, no. 4 (1975): 269–76.
6. R. N. Frye, ed., Sasanian Seals in the Collection of Mohsen Foroughi (London: Jund Humphries, 1971).
7. Ageli, Zoka-al-Mulk-e Forough, 29.
8. Ibid, 10.
9. Ibid, 31.
10. Mohsen Forughi, “Yadi az Mohammad Qazvini” [In Memory of Qazvini], in Yadnameye
Allame Mohammad Qazvini, ed. Ali Dehbashi (Tehran: Ketab-o Farhang, 1378/1999), 231.
11. Mohammad Gholi Majd, The Great American Plunder of Persia’s Antiquities, 1925–1941
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003), 43.
12. Talmin Grigor, “Acculturating the Nation: The ‘Society for National Heritage,’ and the
Production of Public Monuments in Modern Iran,” Ph.D. diss., MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
13. Mostafa Kiani, Me’mariye Doreye Pahlavi [Architecture in the Pahlavi Era] (Tehran: Ketab-
o Farhang, 1379/2000), 225.
14. Bazme Ahriman, 215.
15. Ibid., 31–34.
16. See for example S. Hadi Mirmiran, “Public Building in Iran: 1920 to the Present,” unpub-
lished manuscript. A copy of the manuscript was provided to me courtesy of the author. 17. Ageli, Zokaol Mulk-e Forough, 9.

M. Reza Moghtader
1. Oxford American Dictionary (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980).
2. I first heard the story from Ebrahim Golestan. Moghtader also kindly recounted the story when I asked him about it.
3. Kamal-al-Molk was Iran’s most famous early-twentieth-century painter. He traveled to Europe, spent months at the Louvre, and brought back with him only the classical Renaissance style of representational, “realist” painting where the job of the artist was to hold a mirror up to nature. Although he had been in Europe at the time when such formal innovations as Impressionism and Expressionism had appeared, he returned home oblivious to these developments.
4. “Molagat Dar Kafe, Goftegouy-e Kamran Diba ba M. Reza Moghtadar” [A Meeting in a Café: Kamran Diba in Conversation with M. Reza Moghtader], Me’mar, no. 11 (Winter 1370/2002): 57.
5. Ibid., 58. He mentions among his teachers Gromor-Arretch, Perret-Chevalier, and Perret Auguse.
6. Ibid., 59.
7. Ibid., 58.
8. Ebrahim Golestan, interviewed by author, London, Dec. 20, 2005.
9. M. Reza Moghtader et al., The Persian Garden (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1998). 10. M. Reza Moghtader, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 12, 2002.
Notes to Pages 777–84 | 1117
1118 | Notes to Pages 784–93
11. For further discussion of this return of tradition, see chapters on Hushang Seyhun, Hushang Golshiri, Ebrahim Golestan, and Hoseyn Zenderudi.
12. For a discussion of these natural coolers, see Mehdi Bahadoor, “Passive Cooling Systems in Iranian Architecture,” Scientific American, Feb. 1978, 144–52.
13. In talks with me, Moghtader discussed this convergence. I have also learned of its extent in discussions with Mina Marefat, an erudite art historian and architect who has studied and written about the history of modern Iranian architecture. Mina Marefat, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C.: Dec. 9, 2003, and on other occasions by phone.
14. M. Reza Moghtader, interviewed by author, Paris, June 24, 2002.
15. Ibid.
16. UNESCO, “La conservation de l’eau sur la plateau Iranienne” (Paris: UNESCO,
1981).

Hushang Seyhun
1. Hushang Seyhun, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 9, 2005.
2. Ibid.
3. “Follow your bliss” was the motto of Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist.
4. The book was first published in French and then translated into Persian.
5. Hushang Seyhun, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 9, 2005.
6. For a brief account of Godard’s life, see the article about his life and work in Encyclopedia
Iranica. See also Majd, Great American Plunder of Persia’s Antiquities.
7. For further discussions of this paradigm shift, see chapters on M. Reza Moghtader and the
Farmanfarma’ian family.
8. Hushang Seyhun, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 9, 2005.
9. Some of his students became prominent architects, and they told me about Seyhun and
his influence at the school. Iraj Kalantari, interviewed by author, Palo Alto; and Hoseyn Amanat, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 8, 2005.
10. See the chapters on Golestan, Golshiri, and Amanat.
11. The Persian was called Negah Be Iran [A Look at Iran] (Tehran, n.d.); the French title was Regards Sur l’Iran (Paris: La Déesse, 1974).
12. Hushang Seyhun, interviewed by author, Vancouver, Nov. 9, 2005. AGRICULTURE

Hashem Naraqi
1. For an extensive discussion of the history of the project, see Afkhami, Khuzistan’s Development.
2. For an account of these early negotiations, see Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 1, 403. The chief negotiator for the World Bank was Burke Knapp. I interviewed him about the deal, and his negotiations, in Palo Alto, Oct. 2004.
3. For an account of these accusations, and his response to them, see Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 2, 460–85.
4. A case in point was the story of a brigand named Ghafari. Authorities with the Development Project convinced him to take a small piece of land, and they tutored him in the modern ways of agriculture. He gave up his life of crime to become one of the most successful small farmers of the region. I was told of his story by Abdol-Reza Ansary, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 30, 2004.
5. Abdol-Reza Ansari, interviewed by author, Paris, Aug. 11, 2004. I also consulted him on some of the more technical aspects of the project.
6. General Alavi Kia had been, along with Generals Hassan Pakravan and Teymur Bakhtiyar, one of the founders of SAVAK. In 1961, when Bakhtiyar was dismissed and exiled, Alavi Kia was also stripped of much of his power on suspicion of having close ties with him. Alavi Kia was named the head of SAVAK operations in Europe. Six years later, when the shah visited Germany and was met with massive student demonstrations, Alavi Kia was summarily dismissed and retired—again on suspicion of complicity with Bakhtiyar. He came to Tehran looking for employment, and no sooner had Naraqi returned than the general was named the manager of the new agribusiness; he worked in that capacity as long as Naraqi owned the company. Alavi Kia was, like Naraqi, born in Hamadan. All his life, Alavi Kia has been an avid fan of Persian classical music and some of the greatest masters of the Persian classic music in the twentieth century were his close friends. His collection of recordings from some of the private sessions, where these masters got together and played in virtual “jam sessions,” is a rare and valuable collection. Although he was much maligned by the shah, the general still, a quarter century later, refuses to take cheap and nasty shots at the shah.
7. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Oct. 15, 2003.
8. Hashem Naraqi, interviewed by author, Modesto, Calif., Sept. 28, 2002.
9. Ibid.
10. General Alavi Kia, phone interview by author, Oct. 15, 2003.
11. Hashem Naraqi, Modesto, Calif., interviewed by author, Sept. 28, 2002.
12. According to official figures, in 1921–30 there were 241 Iranian immigrants to the United
States and no asylees; in 1931–40 there were 195 immigrants and 118 asylees. See Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Office of Immigration Statistics, 2003).
13. Ibid.
14. Hashem Naraqi, interviewed by author, Modesto, Calif., Sept. 28, 2002.
15. He had known Abdol-Reza long before his return to Iran. Indeed, when the daughter of the
prince visited California, she stayed with Naraqi’s family.
16. I have consulted both Hashem Naraqi and General Alavi Kia about the early days of busi-
ness in Iran.
17. Abdol-Reza Ansary, interviewed by author, Paris, Oct. 31, 2004.
18. Ibid.
19. I have heard the story from three different sides. Both Naraqi and Alavi Kia told me of that
night’s events. The two had gone to the morgue to identify the badly mutilated body. I also heard the story from Keyvan Khosravani, who was a close friend of Mohammad.
20. General Alavi Kia, phone interview with author, Oct. 15, 2003.
21. I have heard accounts of this discussion from Naraqi as well as from General Alavi Kia, who was also present when the encounter took place.
22. Hashem Naraqi, interviewed by author, Modesto, Calif., Sept. 28, 2003. 23. Etela’at, no. 10053 (27 Dey 2536/Jan. 17, 1978).

Hojabr Yazdani
1. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
2. Agha is a relic of the feudal past, a title usually used to refer to aristocratic masters. In politics, Mohammad Mossadeq was referred to as Agha by his friends, admirers, and colleagues. The three people in the Rolls Royce were employees of Yazdani from his days in Iran. He is, by all accounts, extremely faithful to his friends and employees. They have a kind of love/hate relationship with him. Some of his other employees contacted me and told me much about their agha and for understandable reasons did not want their names mentioned.
3. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
4. Mrs. Azam Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Keyhan, 21 Farvardin 1358/Apr. 1959, 7.
8. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
9. Ibid.
10. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 375.
11. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
12. Sepahbod Teymour Bakhtiyar be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [General Teymour Bakhtiyar
According to SAVAK Documents], 3 vols. (Tehran: Markaz Baresiye Asnade Tarikhiye Vezarate Etela’at, 1378/1999).
13. Parviz Sabeti, interviewed by author, Los Angeles, Sept. 2, 2003.
14. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
15. “The boys” in his entourage told me about those battles and the casualties they
caused.
16. In private correspondence with the author, Mrs. Rasekh, niece of Ayadi, categorically re-
jects the idea that there was any close relationship between her uncle and Yazdani.
17. Fardust, Khaterat, vol. 1, 375.
18. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.
19. For an account of the bank, see the chapter on Mohammadali Moffarah in this book.
20. SAVAK prepared a report on the subject of these agitations and even referred to the fact
that bank employees sent a delegation to visit the ayatollahs and plead their case, all to no avail. See Engelabe Eslami be Ravayate Asnade SAVAK [The Islamic Revolution According to SAVAK] (Tehran, 1376/1987), 305.
21. Hassanali Mehran was one of the most successful members of a new technocratic elite that was, in the 1970s, rising fast in the structure of power in Iran. He was educated, honest,
hardworking, and disciplined. In every stage of his meteoric rise, he showed himself to be a great manager and a trusted banker and economist. His impeccable sense of humor has been, all his life, a delightful addition to his intelligence and honesty.
22. Hassanali Mehran, interviewed by author, Washington, D.C., Dec. 9, 2003. 23. I have recounted this story in The Persian Sphinx.
24. Ebtehaj, Khaterat, vol. 2, 554.
25. Ibid.
26. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002. 27. Keyhan, 21 Farvardin 1358/Apr. 1959, 7.
28. Hojabr Yazdani, interviewed by author, San Jose, Costa Rica, Aug. 23, 2002.

Caliban’s Curse: Culture Wars in Iran, 1941–1979

Literature
Mehdi Akhavan-Sales
Jalal Al-e Ahmad
Samad Behrangi
Forugh Farrokhzad
Ebrahim Golestan
Hushang Golshiri
Sadeq Hedayat
Zabihollah Mansuri
Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi
Sohrab Sepehri
Ja’far Shahri
Nima Yushij

Scholarship
Allame Dehkhoda
Badi’ozzaman Foruzanfar
Suleyman Haiim
Mohsen Hashtrudi
Allame Mohammad Qazvini

History
Zabih Behruz
Abbas Egbal-e Ashtiyani
Ahmad Kasravi

Education
Mohammad Bahman Beyqi
Farhang Mehr
Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi
Parviz Natel-Khanlari
Dr. Farrokhru Parsa
Dr. Ali Sheikholislam

The Arts
Googoosh
Marcos Grigorian
Samuel Khachikian
Loreta and Nushin
Arby Ovanessian
Abolhassan Saba
Parviz Sayyad
Alinaghi Vaziri
Gamarolmoluk Vaziri
Hoseyn Zenderudi

Medicine
Yahya Adl
Dr. Fereydun Ala
Dr. Abdolkarim Ayadi
Dr. Ebrahim Chehrazi

Athletics
Gholamreza Takhti

Philanthropy
Hadj Hoseyn Malek
Hadj Mohammad Nemazee
Arbab Rostam Giv

Introduction To Culture

Globalization came to Iran as early as 1941. Iran’s Prospero was an army of Soviet commissars and American engineers, British spies and their Indian Churkas, a bevy of German agents, recently released political prisoners, newly returned Iranian youth who had studied in Europe, and a battalion of long-dormant and newly emboldened clergy. Together they suddenly hurled a bruised, benighted, but old and proud Persian culture into the tumult of the twentieth century. A culture war for the very soul of Iran was thus joined.

Culture became the vibrant virtual stage where what one social scientist calls the “drama of modernization”[1] played itself out. Every discursive realm, from poetry and painting to sermons and stories—indeed language itself—became at once an “instrument” and a locus of contention in a culture war between different narratives of selfhood and individual and collective identity.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his small band of cohorts criticized nationalism and denigrated individualism as a ploy of colonialism. Instead, they advocated “brotherhood” in an internationalist umma, or spiritual community of believers. As early as 1944, with the publication of his Kashef-al-Asrar (Solving of Mysteries), he offered a paradigm of politics and culture that fought on two religious fronts.[2] On the one hand, he took issue with clerics who advocated a “quietist” interpretation of Shiism. This “quietist” attitude, advocated in those years by Khomeini’s mentor and teacher, Ayatollah Abdul Karim Hairi, and in later years articulated by the likes of Ayatollahs Hoseyn Boroujerdi and Seyyed Kazem Shari’atmadari, took the position that the clergy must limit their intervention in politics and instead attend to the spiritual demands of the flock.

On the other hand, Ayatollah Khomeini fought against Islamist reformists—figures like Ali Akbar Hakamizadeh, and, in later years, Ali Shari’ati—who wanted Shiism shorn of its superstition and anachronistic rituals. In his attempt to fight these two Islamic tendencies and at the same time struggle against the Pahlavi regime, Ayatollah Khomeini supported the attempts of Navvab Safavi to develop a network of Islamic terror to help bring about the ultimate goal of an “Islamic government.”[3] While the regime was busy fighting the cultural influence of the Left, and while the Left, ever self-congratulatory in its exaggeration of its own importance and influence, flirted with the clergy as “allies” in the anti-imperialist struggle, Khomeini and his cohorts worked quietly to enhance their own influence and strengthen their labyrinthine network of groups, mosques, neighborhood “mourning” committees, even professional organizations. They used this vast network to expound and expand their vision.[4]

A second narrative, no less dismissive of individualism and nationalism, was advocated by the likes of Nour-al Din Kianouri, Maryam Firuz, and Khosrow Ruzheh. Helped in the beginning by the occupying Red Army, and in subsequent years by the Soviet “Big Brother,” they too promised membership in an “international” community of “comrades” defined by their collective unity in the “class war” that, according to their vision, shapes not only global developments but the contours of every nation’s history.

A complex set of sociocultural factors—from proximity to the Soviet Union to the many startling similarities between Shiism and dogmatic Marxism[5] —allowed this narrative of despotic Marxism to succeed in overshadowing, if not obliterating, the social democratic ideas of people like Khalil Maleki.[6]

In the 1960s, as it became increasingly clear that Maleki’s style of politics was ineffective in an increasingly authoritarian Iran, and as it became overtly clear that the Iranian proponents of Soviet Marxism were in fact a “fifth column” of the Soviet Union, a new brand of Marxism, inspired by Cuba’s revolution and enamored of individual acts of violence, bravery, and martyrdom as a trigger for mass action, became a dominant political and cultural narrative within the Marxist paradigm. Hamid Ashraf was the icon of this influential movement.

A third cultural paradigm was advocated by a wide variety of poets, scholars, and historians—from Nima Yushij, Allame Mohammad Qazvini, Ebrahim Golestan, and Allame Dehkhoda to Forugh Farrokhzad, Abbas Egbal-e Ashtiyani, and Sadeq Hedayat. Although they were divided in their aesthetic sensibilities, they all championed the idea of citizenship in a modern, democratic polity where individualism was the focus and the rule of law the only mode of adjudicating differences. Identity would, in this paradigm, be at once individual and national. Although often ignored by the Pahlavi regime and dismissed by the opposition, the literary and scholarly efforts of this group accomplished more to cement a sense of Iranian cultural identity than the other competing paradigms. Nima, Forugh, and other poets advocated this vision while radically innovating the structures of classical Persian poetry, while Hedayat, Golestan, and others blazed new trails in the genres of the novel and the short story. Scholars like Qazvini introduced to Persians rigorous methods of textual analysis while Dehkhoda produced a monument to the Persian language in his lexicographical dictionary, which rightfully bears his name.

Finally, the fourth cultural narrative promised a “Great Civilization” only if the population acquiesced to passive receptivity of patrimonial largesse bestowed by what
Richard Helms called a “modernizing monarch.” The shah and a bevy of bureaucrats like Amir-Abbas Hoveyda were the advocates of this vision.[7]

In the last decade of the Pahlavi rule, this stern political paradigm, inspired by the cultural sensibilities of the queen, was accompanied by an active patronage of cultural experimentation and orchestrated attempts to preserve hitherto ignored elements of Persian tradition. Everything from establishing an office entrusted with finding and preserving classics of Persian music to attempting to locate and renovate gems of architecture came under the purview of the queen’s cultural policy.

From World War II to the advent of the Islamic Revolution (1941–79), the contours of Iranian culture were shaped by the often open, sometimes covert, battle between these four distinctive paradigms.

Beginning in 1941, a chaotic and confusing, fluid and experimental decade of pluralism experienced the contentious rise and the constant battle among these four narratives. What followed were two decades of worshipful emulation of all that was Western. From music and architecture to painting and poetry, there was a rush to reproduce in Iran the styles and forms that were popular in the West. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Iran witnessed an eventful age of “return” to native roots. A period of soul-searching and cultural self-assertiveness thus began. Muscled by petrodollars and a period of rapid economic growth, partially enabled by Queen Farah’s elective affinities with Persian tradition, and finally empowered by strong segments of the opposition who had grown disgruntled by what they perceived as the government’s purposeful propagation of Western values, a strong movement of “return” changed the Iranian cultural landscape. From Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s influential albeit sadly superficial Westoxication, to Ali Shari’ati’s call for a return to an “authentic” self, the idea of “return” was by the mid-1970s a fad. Translations of works by Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre added theoretical ammunition to this cultural turn. Ehsan Naraqi’s interventions in the debate—in the form of a couple of books and a television program in which he interviewed different intellectuals on the theme of identity and return—indicated something like an official sanction for these debates. If in the economic field this “age of return” brought about the renewed hegemony of the once dominant traditional merchants of the bazaar, and in the cultural domain it entailed discovering and using hitherto overlooked tropes and traditional techniques, in the concomitant political field “the return” brought about the medieval form of governance known as valayate fagih, or rule of the juriscouncil.

Hitherto, scholars and critics have all but unanimously praised the “cultural” return and lamented and chastised the economic “return,” but they have uniformly failed to see the inevitable connection, the structural unities among the “returns” in the cultural, economic, and political domains. Ayatollah Khomeini was thus as much a part of the “return” as the rightfully celebrated paintings of Hoseyn Zenderudi and the architecture of Manuchehr Moghtader. The craving for “return” came after nearly fifty years of a relentless attempt to fashion, or “engineer,” a new Iranian identity befitting the “modern” age.

The sixteen-year long reign of Reza Shah (1925–41) was the prime example of the individual “social engineering” of this path. Out of the filaments of a ravaged past, he scripted into existence a new “national state.”8 In this Herculean task, it was not only the “state”—often to the detriment of the “nation”—that played the formative role. But within the state structure, often it was the will and whim of the monarch that defined the policies and priorities of the state.

Although Reza Shah prided himself in saving Iran from the clutches of Bolshevism,[9] his modernizing ethos was hauntingly similar to that espoused by Stalin: modernize the economy, he believed, and the cultural and political fields will inexorably follow. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, very much followed the same “economist” paradigm. Stalin seemed to recognize the consanguinity of his style with the Pahlavis when in 1943, during the Tehran Conference, he praised the shah and “advised him to keep a strong hold over his people.”[10] In other words, in actualizing the economic “miracle”—whether “socialist” or “capitalist”—political despotism is necessary.

In Reza Shah’s ethos, the power of the clergy was one of the main obstacles on the march to modernization. He thus moved energetically and forcefully to marginalize their role and minimize their authority. He eliminated the clergy’s chief source of income by secularizing the notoriously corrupt, mullah-run judiciary and curtailed their cultural hegemony by creating modern schools in place of traditional mektabs. Usually limited to boys of the elite, these mektabs combined Qur’anic learning with readings from classics of traditional Persian literature, particularly the works of Sa’di. Learning by rote was the method, corporal punishment the preferred tool of pedagogy. Reza Shah not only eliminated this bastion of clerical authority by secularizing the educational system, but, much to the consternation of the clergy, he also promoted the education of girls. Aliasgar Hekmat, for many years the minister of education under Reza Shah, played a critical role in the task of modernizing Iran’s educational system. Some of the eminent men of the shah’s period who were educated during his reign underscore the stark difference between the school curricula in the two periods: one was decidedly secular, the other tinged with a strong dose of Sharia. Alinaghi Alikhani is a prime example of such a man.

A fervent nationalism, fueled by fact and fantasy and founded on the glories of preIslamic Persia, was another common characteristic of the ethos of modernization of Reza Shah and his son. A sense of national pride, secular in nature, monarchist in form, was systemically inculcated in the minds of Iranians. The writings of Zabih Behruz and Sadeq Hedayat provided some cultural texture to this nationalism, and the Achemenian style of architecture in Reza Shah’s period—evident in the headquarters of the police and the new national museum—and Mohammad Reza Shah’s lavish celebration of twenty-five hundred years of monarchy tried to give this nationalism a monarchic and pre-Islamic subtext.

Ironically, all through this orchestrated emphasis on monarchy as the form of government organic to the Persian identity, no effort was ever made during the entire half-century of Pahlavi rule to articulate in theoretically cogent terms the political and cultural virtues of monarchy as a political system. Political theory is often one of the first victims of a despotic culture. A central element, arguably the most self-destructive aspect, of any modern despotism is its divorce from public accountability and the concomitant disregard for the views and voices of the public. Coercing people into submission is invariably deemed more important than convincing them of the values of citizenship in a polity founded on consensus. Of all the fields of cultural production, political theory is the domain in which the entire Pahlavi era failed to produce a single eminent man or woman.

A critical element of this nationalism was the belief that Islam’s arrival in Iran caused a major breach in Persia’s rich cultural legacy. Paisley, they say, so prevalent in Persian design, is a metaphor for the beleaguered and bifurcated soul of Persia after the defeat at the hands of the “Islamic hordes.” The cedar, the paradisial tree planted by Zarathustra, was, in the words of Hushang Golshiri, beaten and bent by the invading Arabs into the archetypal paisley.11 This bifurcation has, in fact, manifested itself in everything from language to architecture. In each, a chasm divides the outer surface from the inner soul. In language and demeanor, zaher, or appearance, is often much at odds with the real intent or desire, or baten. Parallel to this linguistic dualism and its incumbent tradition of dissimilation and complicated rules of honorifics (or ta’rof), in architecture, too, we find a divide, no less jarring, between andaroun, or inner sanctum, and birun, or face and façade of the building: the first is inward in its focus and isolated from the gaze of the intruder, while the second, often windowless and high-walled, offers the persona of the building. In traditional Iranian architecture, in which ostentatious displays of wealth could beget the envy of others and the dangerous greed of the invariably bankrupt rulers, façades were austere while the andaroun was rich and ostentatious. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, this architectural dualism continued to shape the modern Iranian family house. Complicated by the ethos of conspicuous consumption, this dualism reappeared in reverse in houses separated into the “private” quarter and the “guest” section, the latter as rich in decor and large in proportion as the family’s wealth would allow.

Modern architects like Aziz Farmanfarma’ian began by introducing modern buildings inspired by American and French masters. Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright were very much in vogue. In their designs, open vistas and windows, albeit enclosed behind high, impenetrable walls, began to transcend this dualism. Even in the early 1970s, when architects began to bring about a “return” to traditional designs and native raw materials, like brick, their houses and buildings were modern in the sense of eclipsing, if not obliterating, the dualism between andaroun and birun.

The first sign of these dramatic cultural changes began in 1941, with the forced abdication of Reza Shah. In his absence, the political and cultural landscape in Iran changed dramatically. If it is true, as Charlemagne claimed, that to learn a language is to possess a soul, then World War II began to change “the other soul” that Persians wanted to master. Gradually English supplanted French as the language of power. Well into the mid-1950s, French remained the language of culture and learning. Many of the country’s elite—from Nima and Sadeq Hedayat to Queen Farah and Allame Qazvini—had been trained in French. But beginning in 1941, and reaching its climax in the 1960s, a disproportionately large number of technocrats, managerial elites, physicians, and the cultured elite spoke English or had been trained completely in America. A persistent battle between the European-trained elite, particularly those educated in France, and those trained in the United States became a staple of the Iranian cultural landscape.

Change in the dominant and most desired foreign language was only one aspect of the radical cultural changes that came about with the abdication of Reza Shah. Arguably the most important and certainly the most consequential change came about as the result of differences between Reza Shah and his son in their perspectives on religion. No sooner had the young shah come to power than he sent an emissary, with a substantial amount of cash, to entice Ayatollah Hoseyn Gomi back to Iran.12 A few years earlier, the same ayatollah had, in protest of Reza Shah’s anticlerical policies, left Iran and chosen a life of exile in Najaf. The young shah earnestly believed that all mullahs are “royalists at heart [sic!]”—and knew full well that Islam would not survive without the monarchy. To the consternation of fervent nationalists like Ahmad Kasravi, and in spite of the objection of even the British embassy,[13] the shah brought the ayatollah back and afforded him a hero’s welcome.

Gomi arrived in Rey, a poor and religious suburb of Tehran, in June 1942. In the tenth century, Rey had been a grand city and a center of science and commerce. By the 1940s it was a poor, derelict township that survived on its status as the seat of a shrine. Iran’s landscape is literally strewn with thousands of such shrines, each claiming some link to the prophet and his progeny. The day after Gomi’s arrival, local police in Rey reported that no less than one hundred thousand people had already come to pay their respects to the returning ayatollah.[14]

A few days later, in a harshly worded letter to the prime minister, the ayatollah declared that the shah had already promised to rescind Reza Shah’s policies and allow women to wear veils; return religious endowments “to their original use”; introduce religious teachings in schools and make daily prayer compulsory; and, finally, to end “coeducational” schools. The prime minister wrote back to report that the government was granting the ayatollah’s every wish, including the “separation of girls and boys.”[15] Thus began the shah’s new strategy of appeasing the clergy. By then he was convinced that his main enemies were the communists, and that in his battle with this formidable foe, the clergy were his strategic allies. Even in his Answer to History, written in exile after the revolution, he insisted that the communists were the real instigators and the victors in Iran.[16] But one could easily argue that the revolution was the result of his skewed cultural politics on the question of religion. Bringing Gomi back to Tehran in 1942 was only the first step in that policy.

A few years later, when Ayatollah Boroujerdi came to Tehran, on his way to Gom and to becoming the most powerful cleric in Shiism, the shah broke with protocol and went to visit him in the hospital.[17] Furthermore, in those days, the shah took every opportunity to encourage the clergy to become more politically active. He lived to rue the day he made those pleas. In later years, Ayatollah Boroujerdi directly asked for a more substantial role for the clergy in shaping the increasingly sizable Sharia component of the school curriculum. The shah agreed.[18]

With every passing day, the clerics’ demands increased. By 1946, they wanted trains to make prayer stops along their routes. Again the shah concurred. A few years later, emboldened by his own role in the events of August 1953—when he sided with the royalists— Ayatollah Boroujerdi demanded the complete end of all activities by members of the Bahai faith. He wanted the shah “to stop [their] dangerous propaganda . . . close down all their offices . . . dismiss all government employees who admit being Bahai.”[19] To the consternation of the American and English Embassies, the shah eventually caved in and allowed an orchestrated, national attack on centers of Bahai activity. Even the attempt to start land reform was delayed until the death of Ayatollah Boroujerdi.

Contrary to the shah’s expectations, Boroujerdi’s death only brought about more militancy in the ranks of the clergy. In June 1963 Ayatollah Khomeini rose as the standard-bearer of this new mullah militancy. Soon, however, the clergy realized their weakness among the Iranian middle class. They knew by instinct what American policy wonks realized through close social analysis: that the cultural and political future of Iran was tied to the fate and allegiance of the rapidly rising middle class. Aware of their Achilles’ heel, the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini helped organize a new place to worship, called Hosseiniye Ershad, which catered to the educated urban middle classes and preached a “modern” interpretation of Islam.[20] Ali Shari’ati was the grand orator of this tradition. His efforts to create a favorable atmosphere for the eventual rise of the clergy was helped by such secular writers as Jalal Al-e Almad, who turned more and more religious in the last two decades of his life.
The austere, antimodern, anti-Pahlavi rhetoric of the clerics was also aided by the dominant ideology of the Left. The arrival of cultural “commissars” from the Soviet Union in 1941 begat literary and artistic criticism that closely followed the tenets of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhedanov and his “theory” of “socialist realism.” He was Stalin’s cultural czar, and Ehsan Tabari was the chief purveyor of his views in Iran. To these men, literature and all fields of culture in general were only tools for propagating “revolutionary” ideology. They were following, in a sense, Lenin’s infamous dictum about literature as “the fifth wheel” of the party propaganda machine. For many in a generation of Iranian critics, artists, and poets, the mantra became “committed” art. Many fine artists—like Sohrab Sepehri—were dismissed for engaging in “petit-bourgeois” frivolities, whereas mediocre talents who were brave political souls were lauded as prime examples of “committed” art.[21]

Ironically, the reality of censorship in much of this period played directly into the hands of this kind of “instrumentalized”22 attitude toward art and culture. When no room was allowed for free and open political discourse, such ideas were instead channeled into literature. In this respect, and many more, the Iranian experience replicated the experience of Russia in late nineteenth century.23 Indeed, the cultural impact of Russia and then the Soviet Union on Iran is a field in desperate need of research.

Censorship, Jorges Luis Borges tells us, is the mother of metaphor, and the pervasive presence of censorship in much of the postwar period meant that not only did a set of metaphors come to be used for referring to “forbidden” political realities—for example, “night” and “winter” for oppression—but many frustrated political activists rechanneled their energy into art and became mediocre, albeit often praised, “artists.” Often lost in their midst were genuine artists like Ebrahim Golestan, Forugh Farrokhzad, Sohrab Sepehri, Arby Ovanessian and Ja’far Shahri, who disregarded the shibboleths of the age and created genuine art, free from the bombast of ideology. On the other hand, the works of Samad Behrangi are the best example of “committed” art.

Samad’s simple, often simplistic, stories reduced the world into the Manichaean polarities of good and evil. He advocated, indeed praised, the power and legitimacy of purgative violence when used by the “good” poor against the “evil” rich. His most famous story, The Little Black Fish, ironically published and made into an international bestseller by the regime’s own Organization for the Intellectual Development of Children and Youth, headed by Lili Amir-Arjomand, was an early manifesto for the influential antigovernment Marxist guerilla movement that developed in the 1960s. In the story, the defiant action of the hero—the little black fish—is the trigger that ignites the dormant discontent of the oppressed and intimidated masses. Many poets and writers, like Ahmad Shamloo, aspiring to the mantle of “progressive” artist, eulogized this kind of political persuasion. Their poems and stories became vehicles for ideological propaganda.

Of course, for every Shamloo, enamored of “committed” art and the popularity it begot, there were in those years many self-effacing scholars, poets, historians, writers, and musicians who worked hard to create cultural artifacts of enduring value. Music was at once one of the most contested battles in the culture wars and a field in which many genuine artists struggled with the traumas of transition.

Persian music, it was commonly believed, could not be written down. It was too improvisational to lend itself to the rigors of notation. Furthermore, its vast repertory of dastgahs and radifs were too numerous, and too nuanced in sound, to be written down.[24] But, in fact, since the early part of the twentieth century, Persian music had been written down. Colonel Vaziri was the most ardent champion of this idea. He also believed that large orchestras, new instruments, even structural changes to traditional Persian music were necessary to revitalize the old, outmoded music. His disciple, Abolhassan Saba, continued on this path, but in a far more modulated manner. At the same time, people like Fuad Ruhani, Monir Vakili, and Farhad Meshkat worked hard to introduce Western classical music and opera to Iranian audiences.

Abolhassan Saba believed in the value of tradition as well as the need for renovation. His defense of tradition was not without its detractors. Some argued that the sheer weight of this tradition, its habits of learning by memory and from a master, have killed many individual talents. They pointed to the fact that “Western music often produces infant prodigies,”25 but Persian tradition forbids such genius from blazing new paths. Saba, though cognizant of the value of notation, harmony, and contrapuntal music, worked tirelessly to preserve the best of traditional Persian music. At the same time, he also looked for musical genius in the hitherto-ignored fields of folklore, religious chants, and passion plays or ta’ziye. The moderate modernizing path he followed was later followed by such vocal geniuses as Gamarolmoluk—herself a child prodigy, and the first woman ever to perform in a solo concert in Iran.

Not all musicians were happy with renovating tradition or with emulating established structures of classical music. In the 1960s, a whole new generation of artists, empowered by the rise of television, created a very popular new genre of music that seemed to be formed at the junction of Greek, Turkish, and Armenian music, as well as the whole tradition of Western popular music. Even hints of jazz and rock crept into this new wave. Another child prodigy by the name of Googoosh was the unquestioned diva of this new genre.

Fields other than music also witnessed a similarly profound process of soul-searching, innovation and “return.” Parviz Sayyad, himself the child of a father who was a master of religious plays, took the traditional forms of ta’ziye and fashioned out of them a modernist interpretation that attracted the attention of many of the theater world’s most innovative directors and playwrights. Sayyad worked hard to preserve these traditional plays and also created for television some of the most memorable characters in modern Persian media. His Samad—a guileful peasant, ill at ease in the new urban surroundings but more than willing to milk it for all he can—is uncanny in its brilliance in capturing the pathos and pathologies in the “drama of modernization” that social scientist had been writing about.

A generation of genuinely modern scholars—from Allame Qazvini and Badi’ozzaman Foruzanfar to Iraj Afshar and Zoka-al Mulk Forughi—took up the arduous, often thankless work of finding, editing, and annotating the hundreds of textual traces of the Persian tradition. Together, their recovered texts constituted the rudiments of a common canon. In the tormenting journey of “return,” these texts provided a road map.

Another flourishing cultural field that had no “tradition” to mine or to reject was the nascent Iranian cinema. Although the first movie house—showing imported silent films— was established in Tehran in 1907, it look less than sixty years for the first Iranian films to find their way into international festivals and to establish a now globally cherished tradition of high quality artistic films. The pioneering films of Samuel Khachikian paved the way for this evolution, but Ebrahim Golestan was surely the harbinger of the international reputation of Persian cinema. He was soon followed by Forugh Farrokhzad, with her precociously beautiful documentary, The House Is Black. At the same time, a genre of “film-farsi” developed, known for the crass and primitive quality of production, for the archetypal simplicity of its stories (rich girl meets poor boy, family objects, problems arise, all ends happily, with standard scenes in bars with singing and dancing girls and fighting hoodlums thrown in between), and for their enormous popularity among the urban poor. The great divide between these highly popular but critically ignored movies and the tradition of “art films” was in fact one aspect of the great breach between popular and high art. Not only the most-watched films, but the most-read books by authors like Zabihollah Mansuri, were ignored by the critics—even those espousing “populist” values—in favor of obsessive concentration on the works of “bona fide” intellectuals and artists. No wonder then that with the revolution and the sudden eruption of hitherto unknown sides of popular culture, the intellectual elite was as shocked as the Pahlavi regime at the divide that had separated them both from the people.

All movements of social and cultural change are measured by the quality of changes they bring to women’s lives. By this measure, postwar Iran witnessed a change of volcanic proportions when it came to the question of women. Some of the political parties that had emerged in the postwar “democratic interlude” (1941–53)[26] began to accept women in their ranks. A few advocated the right of women to vote, and a still smaller number, all in left-of-center parties, elevated women to leadership positions, albeit token ones. Maryam Firouz was an example of such a woman.

Furthermore, women’s rights in Iran received a major boost as a result of the White Revolution, which afforded women the right to vote and to be elected to key political posts. To the consternation of the clergy, new laws gradually but inexorably were passed— from the end of polygamy to a far more equitable family law—that arguably gave Iranian women more rights than the women of any other Muslim country. Farrokhru Parsa, the first woman appointed to the cabinet in the history of Iran, became the symbol of these changes, and paid with her life for this honor.

The cause of women was particularly enhanced by the brilliant, defiant, and relentless iconoclasm of Forugh Farrokhzad, the most influential poetess of Iran’s large and celebrated poetic tradition. Her tormented life—her constant experimentation, her avid curiosity about the traditions of Iranian and Western poetry, her deep affinity for Iran, her tragic end—is the most dramatic metaphor for the culture wars that defined Iran between 1941 and the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Literature
Mehdi Akhavan-Sales
Jalal Al-e Ahmad
Samad Behrangi
Forugh Farrokhzad
Ebrahim Golestan
Hushang Golshiri
Sadeq Hedayat
Zabihollah Mansuri
Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi
Sohrab Sepehri
Ja’far Shahri
Nima Yushij

In the age-old struggle to transcend the dogged dualism that has plagued Iranian culture for a millennium, the poetry of Mehdi Akhavan-Sales occupies a unique position. His hopelessly romantic disposition, his eclectically creative style, and his uncompromising dedication to Zarathustra lend his opus a taste, texture, and significance all his own. In the century-old battle to fuse the rich legacy of Persian poetry—with its strict rules of aruz dictating the rhyme, rhythm, and meter of every line—and the free experimentalism of modern poetry, few if anyone can match Akhavan. Finally, in capturing the morose melancholy of a whole generation of intellectuals who felt treacherously betrayed and dangerously bereft of hope in the aftermath of the fall of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, no one has been as successful as Akhavan-Sales. Apparently with no irony intended, he had by then come to use the nom de plume of Omid, or hope. Of course, the irony was not lost on him. In a quatrain, he wrote, “more despondent than all, you are, and yet your name is Omid,” and he ended the poem with a happy promise that the “end of a dark black night is always the bright morning.”[1]

He is that rare breed of poet whose fame among the populace was more than matched by his reputation among his peers and contemporaries. He lived in an age when political valor and ideological commitment had replaced aesthetic innovation and individual talent as the ultimate measure of intellectual acclaim. For most of the artists and intellectuals of this era, whose celebrity was caused more by their valor than the value of their work, time has proved to be an unforgiving enemy. With every passing day, their fame wanes, their reputation suffers, and oblivion, or exile to the anonymity of a footnote in the cultural history of the time, seems their fated destiny. For a small minority, however, time has been a friend and ally. With every passing year, their lasting value and their prominence and permanence in the pantheon of Persian arts and letters is more universally acclaimed. Akhavan-Sales, though well-known in his time, has become more and more famous with every passing day. Other great living poets declare, with no trepidation, his immortality.

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales was born in February 1928 (Esfand 1306) in the city of Meshed, in the region of Khorasan. He was all his life particularly proud of his home region’s literary reputation. Oftentimes, he would even add Khorasani—Persian for a man from Khorasan—to his nom de plume. What Ireland has been to the history of twentiethcentury English letters, Khorasan was to the glory days of Persian poetry and prose in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Akhavan-Sales delved deeply into this rich tradition. He was, in a sense, the best example of Eliot’s dictum that poetic genius is never enough to create great works of poetry. An equally important ingredient, Eliot said, is the poet’s total immersion in the poetic tradition he works in. Only by learning and then transcending that tradition can a genuine work of genius be created.[2] Although Akhavan-Sales lacked any serious formal academic training, he had a scholar’s eye for detail and a poet’s “magic” way with words and their meanings. In the smithy of his creativity and indefatigable sense of discipline, genius combined with erudition to create a body of work that is unique for its innovations yet rich and redolent with its echoes of the past. His own personal past was hardly a helpful trajectory for the life of such a poet and a scholar.

Akhavan was educated in a technical school and trained to be an ironsmith. He entered the honarestan (technical school) in 1941 and graduated in 1947. In those days, high schools were the requisite stepping-stone to an academic or professional career, while technical schools were set aside for those with little prospects for a life of the mind and instead destined for a future of toil and manual labor. In elementary school, Mehdi’s grades were less than sterling, while in the technical school, his best marks were for citizenship and good behavior.

After graduation from the technical school, he decided to go back to high school to receive his diploma in literature.3 But his first job out of school was more technical than poetic and had to do with making knives. By then he had already begun his life as a poet. In fact, in his city of birth he was a member of a literary group—known as the Khorasan Literary Society—where members read aloud their own poetry as well as the great works of the past. While in Tehran Nima was creating a veritable revolution in Iranian poetry, members of the Khorasan society insisted on keeping alive the tradition of classical Persian poetry and its elaborate rules of aruz.

Among the “fellow-travelers” of this traditional Khorasan salon was a young mullah with a great voice for singing and a passion for poetry. His name was Ali Khamenei and he soon became a friend and fan of Akhavan.[4] In later years, when Khamenei became Iran’s “spiritual leader,” this early acquaintance proved important and might have saved Akhavan from arrest and prosecution.

On a Friday in February 1947, as Akhavan read one of his new poems, “there was talk of my poetic name, and the maestro [Abdolhoseyn Nosrat] suggested that I should name myself Omid [hope] and I accepted.”5 The structure of patriarchy, so evident in Iranian society at large, was here evident in the nature of Omid’s relationship with the master. But beneath this conformist persona there lurked a rebel, and it would take only a few months for that side of his character to emerge and leave its mark not just on his life, but on Iranian letters.
Eventually, Akhavan and a couple of his friends established a smaller literary group devoted to modern poetry and politics. By then, Iranian intellectual discourse was infatuated with Soviet Marxism. A new kind of “proletarian optimism,” as well as Leninist notions of art as the “fifth wheel” of the party’s propaganda machine, had begun to dominate intellectual discourse in Iran. In his attempt to fight despotism and colonial hegemony, Omid, like many of the leading intellectuals of the time, joined the new Tudeh Party. In Meshed, he rose rapidly in the ranks of the party’s youth organization and was soon named to its central committee.6 A year later, he set out for Tehran and a new teaching career. He was imbued with all the missionary zeal of a new convert. He was going to be a teacher, and he was going to make a revolution, and he was all of nineteen years old.

In Tehran, aside from teaching, he and a couple of his friends created another literary society. This time the focus was on politics and modern literature. As he learned the rudiments of Marxism and fell prey to its “scientific” aura, he set out to develop a rigorous mathematical formula that would empirically explain the structure of a poem and the process of its creation.7 Soviet Marxism in those days claimed to be a complete, universal science of society. Nothing, from the enigma of creativity to planning a society’s year-long consumption of cement, was deemed beyond this new science’s capacity. This absurd scientism was but a small interlude, an understandable youthful folly, in Omid’s otherwise long and never-ending search for truth, creativity, meaning, and salvation.

In fact it would be no exaggeration to claim that for much of his adult life, he was a Gnostic—consumed with the search for light and knowledge, salvation and truth, and firm in the Gnostic belief that such truths are ultimately inward, and unattainable. When the days of his infatuation with Stalin’s “laws of dialectics” came to an end, when he no longer conceived of all literature and culture as part of the “class struggle” and the “superstructure,” he aspired to those moments of epiphany when the barriers between the poet and the poem and between nature and humanity melt into a transcendental work of art. This lifelong Gnosticism was thus bracketed by the false certitudes of Soviet Marxism in his youth, and by his equally shallow attempt to arrive late in his life at a “universal truth” without ambiguity and tension. He called his self-concocted ideology “Mazdeyasht,” a brazenly eclectic combination of elements from Zarathustra and Mazdak with a small sprinkling of ideas from Buddha.

Of course even in his heyday of party activism, he showed a devotional commitment to poetry. Evidence of this poetic preoccupation came in 1950, in the form of a collection titled Arganoun. It immediately established him as one of the country’s most promising poets. At the same time, the book’s dedication “to all freedom-fighters”—a cold-war euphemism for Marxists and their allies—was a clear indication of his lingering affinity for Marxism.
A year before the publication of Arganoun, Akhavan traveled back to Meshed, where he married his cousin, Iran (Khadijeh). The couple soon moved to Tehran and rented a house in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. For the rest of his life, Iran was an unfailing source of comfort and security for him. Like the proverbial “good woman” of Iran’s strict patriarchic culture of the time, she spent the rest of her life attending to her husband’s needs and tolerating his many idiosyncrasies. After two years in Tehran, they had their first child. It was a girl, and she was named Laleh. Eventually, they would have five children—three boys and two girls. In 1974, the twenty-year-old Laleh drowned in the waters of the Karaj Dam, near Tehran. Those who saw Omid in the aftermath of the tragedy write of a man made catatonic by the force of grief.

But in 1951, the world was his oyster. He had established his reputation as a poet; he had learned how to play the setar and mastered the nuances of classical Persian music. From then on, music would play a significant role in his life, providing him not only with aesthetic pleasure, but with a better ear and a sense for the musicality of words and their sounds. He had also successfully dabbled in satire in an acclaimed column called Jahan in one of the capital’s daily journals.8 Indeed, an often overlooked aspect of his creativity was his ability as a satirist. His deft use of the vernacular, his encyclopedic mastery of Persian idioms, his irreverent use of the vulgar laxities of street language, and his prodigious memory and his uncanny ability to recollect an apparently endless litany of lines from different poems, all worked to provide his satirical essays their comic effect and unique timbre. His often ribald introductions to his collections of poems, particularly the one he wrote for The End of Shahnameh, [9] are fascinating examples of his satiric gifts.

By all accounts, he also had the gift of gab. He was a master storyteller who used his vast lexical reservoir, his sensitivity to words, his appreciation for tropes of fiction and the tricks of composing an engaging and engrossing narrative, to recount tales that were not just funny, but gripping.[10] In fact some have suggested that his knack for narrative and his passion for telling stories influenced his modern poems by freeing them from their line-by-line form and affording them a more comprehensive, storylike structure.

In poetry, of course, following Nima, he applied strict rules of parsimony, always having handy the famous “Occam’s Razor.” No superfluous words, nothing that did not independently contribute something to the narrative, found its way onto the austere but effusively rich landscape of his poems. In spite of his deep affinity for Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh, he once quipped that “were it not for the necessity of filling in the rhythm Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh could have been written in 30,000 lines instead of 60,000.”[11] Even late in life, when he returned to the more classical forms of Persian poetry and wrote poems that adhered to the rules of rhythm, there is in them the same hauntingly beautiful economy of words that is the defining characteristics of his modernist poems.

If it is true that Nima changed the face and fabric of poetry in Iran, it is also no less true that no one understood, applied, or explained Nimaic principles better than Akhavan. In fact one astute critic observes that because of Akhavan’s unmatched mastery of classical Persian letters, “he possibly even surpassed Nima in Nimaic poetry.”[12] His two books of
scholarship on the poetics of Nima’s poetry are generally considered “classics” and the best primers to the poetic intricacies not just of Nima, but of modern poetry in general.[13]
Along with Nima, Akhavan helped democratize the aesthetics of poetry. On the one hand, he broke with the tyranny of traditional bayt, “composed of two symmetrical halflines, each meticulously equivalent to its counterpart.”14 Furthermore, by leaving lacunae of meaning in his poems, particularly when compared to the often over-determined explanations of traditional poems, he invited, indeed all but demanded, the full participation of his readers in affording meaning to his poems.

This democratic turn in aesthetics, this challenge to a millennium of “authorial patriarchy,” this attempt to use modernism “as a pick-axe to destroy the historical edifice of . . . poet-fathers and literary ancestors”[15] was commensurate with the democratic turn in society. The postwar years saw a temporary end to despotism and a rise in the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. As it happens, Iran was not alone in this democratic fever. Historians now talk of a “second wave of democracy” that took place around the world in that decade. But Iran’s democracy was short-lived, and Akhavan paid a heavy price for his foray into politics. Soon after the fall of Mossadeq, he was arrested, along with hundreds of other communists and sympathizers of the nationalist movement.

It did not take him long in prison to recognize that the life of a political martyr was not for him. Poetry beckoned, but freedom had a price. The government required some gesture of contrition. Some prisoners “named names” but for him, befitting his life as poet, his token of penitence was a poem. At great risk and pain to himself, he protected the identity of his still-free comrades. To gain his own freedom, however, he agreed to publish a poem of compunction and regret. Those who paid any attention to the poem’s content soon realized that Akhavan, banking on the literary ignorance of his foes, had laced his poem of penitence with a heavy dose of poison. He wrote, “How long must I squander my life in prison / It is high time I think of something else. . . . No Majnoon [madman] am I to leave the gold-strewn landscape of my home / Only to farm in the land of Congur.” Congur was a discreet allusion to another poem and to the tormenting double bind faced by poets living in despotic societies. The conjured poet lamented the fact that he must either swear allegiance to Yazid or take up farming in the distant terra incognita of Congur.16 Yazid, the caliph who ordered the killing of Imam Hoseyn, the ultimate martyr of Shiism, is the bane of Shiites. Omid wrote this poem in 1953, but in the 1960s and 1970s it became the common trope of the shah’s foes to compare him to Yazid.

Poison pill or not, the poem had its desired effect. Omid was released, and less than two years later he published what many consider to be his masterpiece. It was a collection of poems entitled Zemestan (Winter), and the poem from which the book’s title was taken became iconic of an age of despair and distrust, describing a society of insular individuals drowning in the pathos of their own sorrows, defeats, and wounds.

Around 1954, Akhavan, with the help of a friend who was only known by the pseudonym Hoseyn Razi, started a new quarterly dedicated to publishing new works of poetry, fiction, and criticism. The journal did not last long; after a while, Razi left for Europe, and Omid began to work in Ebrahim Golestan’s new film studio. Many of the Iran’s leading intellectuals and artists—from Forugh Farrokhzad to Ghassem Sa’idi—also worked there.[17] Akhavan was exemplary in his work ethic. He was a punctual and dependable employee. His primary responsibilities included editing film scripts and supervising sound-track recordings for films. During his tenure, he supervised the sound tracks for at least three hundred documentaries. About that time, at the behest of the University of Leiden in Holland, he taped some twelve hours of poetry readings using his own voice, as well as those of Forugh Farrokhzad and Ebrahim Golestan. It is not clear what has happened to this rare recording.[18]

In 1959 Akhavan published his third collection of poems, called Akhare Shahnameh (The End of Shahnameh). It was a sign of the times that in spite of his stature as a major poet, he still could not find a publisher and was forced to use money borrowed from Golestan to bring it out.19 The book further consolidated his reputation as a wordsmith of impressive erudition, a poet of equal sensitivity to the aesthetics of the sublime and the mundane. As he makes clear in his jocund preface, his goal was to capture the pure poetic experience, regardless of existing conventions. At the same time, anticipating the attacks of his erstwhile comrades that he has fallen into the trap of “petit bourgeois defeatism,” he admits to his despair but adds that “false hope” is far more ignoble than “honest despair.”[20]

The 1960s and the 1970s were no less productive and eventful decades in Omid’s life. His third daughter was born in 1963, and his fourth book, Az in Avesta (From This Avesta) was published in 1965. The book marks the commencement of an increasingly strident stage of religious fervor in Omid. His new prophet was not Marx but Zarathustra. In a few years’ time, he would create his own creed and call it “Mazdeyasht.” More than anything else, it was, in his own words, an attempt to introduce elements of rationality and rigor into religious sentiments. His final published book, Tora Ay Kohan Boumo Bar Doust Daram (Oh! Ancient Land, I Love Thee) was considered, even by many of his most avid fans, vapid in content and derivative in style.21 His language, too, reflected his growing romantic reinvention of ancient Persia and its glories.

His private life was no less eventful in those years. In 1965, he was back in prison, this time less for political and more for carnal reasons. A neighbor, by profession a butcher, accused Akhavan of committing adultery with his wife. The judge, apparently something of a poetry aficionado, tried to find a quick, quiet, amicable settlement of the case. But Omid, in spite of the judge’s many entreaties, insisted on turning the trial into a tribunal on love and the banalities of social institutions and ethical mores that try to control and curtail love and passion, the most sublime of human sentiments. He railed against private property and conjured the words of philosophers and poet in defense of
his radical libertarian ethos. His eloquent treatise during the course of the trial had only one effect—it landed him in jail, where he spent the next six months. For his critics and foes, the story was an example of the poet’s sordid lifestyle; for his friends and admirers, it was yet another example of his high moral standards, his lofty libertarianism, and his willingness to pay the price for his ideas.22 He was, they said, the Socrates of Eros.

In the 1970s several new books by Omid were released. Numerous anthologies of his essays and old poems, collections of new poems, and children’s books were published. Furthermore, by the mid-1970s, he was a highly popular television personality. He had a one-man show in which he appeared on the stage dressed in his usual casual clothes, his long white hair, often disheveled, waving in the air, his eyes sometimes drowsy but more often beaming with a devilish jocundity and existential melancholy. As he gingerly walked around the empty stage, visibly giddy with the joys of poetry, he recited, from memory, and in his own inimitable style, the poems he had chosen for the night. There was a sonorous, soothing quality to his melodic voice that was made more appealing by his insistent use of the Khorasani dialect. Shajariyan, one of the most accomplished vocalists of the time, used one of Omid’s poems as the lyrics in a highly popular recording. The use of his poetry was significant in that, hitherto, classical vocalists had insisted on using classical Persian lyrics; Nima and Omid helped introduce traditional Persian music to modern poetry.

By 1976, Omid was finally allowed to begin teaching classical literature at the university. His courses were highly popular not just because of his iconic status and his humble and humorous demeanor but because they bridged a gap that had long separated poets and public intellectuals like him from the normally stolid circles of Iranian academe. After decades of living a bohemian life, invariably on the verge of want, financial security was finally at hand. He was by this time recognized as one of the twentieth century’s greatest Persian poets.

The Islamic revolution changed much in Omid’s life. He was one of the leading members of the newly revived Iranian Writers Union. But the early artistic and intellectual exuberance that came with the revolution soon gave way to an increasingly dour and despotic theocracy. His many declarations of fealty to his new half-Zarathustrian creed came back to haunt him. He was born a Muslim, and his declarations about his new creed were tantamount to apostasy, and Islam has no tolerance for such a change of faith. It has been suggested that his early acquaintance with Khamenei might well have saved his life. He was nevertheless forced to retire from all his jobs. Some of his books were banned, others faced delays and difficulties in receiving the requisite publication permits.

A short respite from these years of tension and anxiety came when, at the invitation of some of the leading academic institutions of Europe, he was invited to visit France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It was his first and last trip outside Iran. Everywhere he went, he met with a welcome worthy of an icon.

By then he had grown frail and fragile. The hardships of travel seemed unbearable. Although he relished the liberties of the West, he, like Ulysses, craved to go back to his Ithaca. No sooner was he home than he began to plan for new projects that included new anthologies of poetry. About two months after his return, he suffered a heart attack. He was immediately taken to the hospital, but efforts to save him were for naught. On the night of August 26, 1990 (4 Sharivar 1369) he died, leaving behind a brilliant legacy of poetry and essays. According to his wishes, he was taken to his beloved Khorasan, where he is buried near Ferdowsi in the city of Tus.

Jalal Al-E Ahmad was the epitome of a generation of Iranian intellectuals infatuated with ideological certitude and with the romantic notion of the intellectual as the perpetual outsider—a Prometheus with the light of knowledge, a “committed” and constant critic of the status quo. In the Russian literature of the nineteenth century, there are recurring images of this kind of committed intellectual. They are firm in their commitment to the narod or “folk,” dour in their disposition, bombastic in their discourse. They have a disdain for the joys of everyday existence and exhibit conspicuous attachment to the cult of poverty. But these Russian intellectuals were also infatuated with the cult of reason and believed in the omnipotence of science. In Al-e Ahmad’s case, he began his career as a devotee of the cult of Marxism as science but gradually drifted into the realm of religion and faith. Losing faith in the idea of the proletariat and the proletarian party as its savior, he began the apotheosis of Islam and its clerics as society’s new redeemers and as paragons of anticolonialism. Of course, Al-Ahmad saved for himself the role of the ultimate arbiter of who is a redeemer and who is a hopeless reactionary.

His full name was Jalal-al Din Sadat Al-e Ahmad—with the middle name of Sadat showing a claim of descent from the prophet or his progeny. He had a crucial role in affording Shiism legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian urban middle class and intellectuals. He has been considered, not without justification, one of the architects of the Islamic ideology that eventually paved the way for the victory of Islamists in the revolution of 1979.[1] During his life he was often praised as a lofty example of a “committed intellectual”—a concept he himself had a role in promoting. After his death, particularly after the calamitous turn of events in the Islamic Revolution, more and more people began to openly criticize his life and work.

The noted historian Fereydun Adamiyat, for example, wrote of Al-e Ahmad as the embodiment of the serious social malady of convoluted and confused thinking among intellectuals. “Whatever came to his clumsy mind,” wrote Adamiyat, “flowed onto his clumsy pen.” Al-e Ahmad’s books, according to Adamiyat, are “exercises in ignorance.”[2] In short, for Adamiyat, Al-e Ahmad was a symbol and a source of the intellectual malaise that has paralyzed modern intellectual life in Iran.

Al-e Ahmad was, at the same time, representative of a generation of artists and intellectuals who based their scant knowledge and their grandiose claims not so much on what they had read and knew, but on what they’d heard and felt, a generation who claimed to have simple and definitive answers to complicated social and historical problems. His most influential book, Westoxication—in which he chastises Iranian culture and intellectuals for what he considers their dangerous, self-loathing infatuation with all that is Western—was the best example of this mental habit. He had picked up the key concepts of this controversial attack on the West as a member of a circle in which another teacher of philosophy, Ahmad Fardid, pontificated on the fall of the Western society.

Fardid, himself famous as an “aural philosopher,”[3] known for the paucity of his written works, the grandiosity of his claims, the obtuse style of his discourse, and his excessive zeal for neologism, was the source of some of the most extreme attacks on the West and its bankruptcy. Fardid was himself a purveyor of the ideas he had read in the works of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In recent years, as the extent of Heidegger’s affinity with Nazism has become more clearly understood, more and more critics have tried to see whether there are structural affinities between Heidegger’s thoughts and the ethos of National Socialism. It is natural to ask whether in fact Al-e Ahmad’s early affection for Islamic despotism, and Fardid’s later attempts to offer a philosophical justification for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s absolutism, were also both more than simple matters of taste, or opportunism, and had their roots in some structural similarity of thought.[4]

In the case of Al-e Ahmad, he used the eclectic set of ideas he had heard or read to concoct a treatise full of high-sounding aphoristic proclamations and slogans that on close scrutiny seem vacuous or reactionary. For example, he declares the West morally and aesthetically bankrupt because the West has been preoccupied with “primitive art of Africa” and with jazz![5]

The unusual trajectory of his life was a fertile ground for his form of “enlightened” obscurantism. At the same time, it was a life lived with unflinching dedication to serving the people and fighting injustice and despotism. What he lacked in intellectual acumen or rigor he more than made up for with his unflinching dedication to his ideas and dogmas and his willingness to pay a high personal price for this dedication.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad was born in 1923 (1302) in Pamenar, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Tehran, known for its colorful residents, its proximity to the bazaar shops, and the continued domination of religious ways and values in its labyrinthine avenues—even at the height of the shah’s modernizing efforts. That religious atmosphere was certainly present in the early life of Al-e Ahmad. As he writes in his autobiographical sketch, “my father and my older brother as well as one of my brother-in-laws died men of the pulpit.”[6] His grandfather was also a mullah. Jalal’s father was known for “the stern unbending nature of his faith” and the pleasant timbre of his voice when he delivered religious sermons and recited passion stories. His mother, Amine Begum Eslambolchi, too, came from a family of theologians and simple mullahs. His parents had twelve children, only eight of whom survived. Jalal was the seventh child. The first six were girls.[7]

The family, under the strict tutelage of the devout patriarch, was deeply steeped in religious ideas and rituals. Jalal attended the Soraya elementary school in the poorer section of Tehran. As a student, he was known for his jovial disposition and his ability to mimic other people’s voices and styles of discourse. He was also known for his willingness to stand up to bullies in the school.[8] This characteristic, combined with his appetite for the limelight, meant that later in life, when he was famous, he was not only fearlessly self-assertive but often insistent on taking center stage, even when it meant that others would not get their fair share of time or attention. His demeanor in a meeting of a group of Iranian writers with Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, in which he dominated the discussion and overshadowed other members of the delegation, was characteristic of this combination of bravura and a craving for holding court.[9]

He had finished only elementary school when his father asked him to quit school and to train to take over his father’s job in the bazaar. Al-e Ahmad’s father had begun as a cleric and a notary public, but when Reza Shah pushed for limits on the number of clergy and began bringing them under government control, the father, Seyyed Ahmad, refused to comply—in Al-e Ahmad’s words, “he refused to accept labels and stamps and government supervision”[10] —and instead worked in the bazaar as a merchant. The father wanted Jalal to join him in trade. The ostensibly obedient son complied but at the same time, unbeknownst to his father, registered at a night school that had just opened at Dar al-Funun. After a while, he set out on his own. During the day, he took on an array of menial jobs—from assisting an electrician and a watchmaker to working for one of his brothers-in-law.

He finished high school in 1943 and immediately enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at Tehran’s Teacher’s College. With a writer’s panache for parsimonious descriptions of character, he writes of himself as “a young boy of one meter and eight centimeters height, shaven-head, and an agate ring[11] on his finger.”[12] He graduated in 1946 and was immediately hired as a teacher by the Ministry of Education. He also enrolled in the doctoral program at Tehran University and began studying for his thesis on the structure of A Thousand and One Nights. He never finished it. After a few years, he began to feel that “his own work was far more valuable and global than any university degree.”[13] Nevertheless, the fact that he never received an advanced degree not only meant that his mind lacked the rigors of academic scholarship, but it seems to have made him disdainful, if not envious, of those who had advanced college training.

His experiences as a teacher were formative for his fiction. Many of his stories draw directly from these experiences. One of his most acclaimed novels is School Principal[14] (published in 1958), and it draws directly from his time as a teacher. An early influence on his ideas rather than on his stories was his membership in the Tudeh Party. He joined in 1943 and worked in several of the party journals and magazines. Before long, he had climbed the party bureaucracy and was named to the leadership committee of the Tehran branch of the party. But the party was soon split along ideological lines, and on one side stood the towering figure of Khalil Maleki—Iran’s most influential Social Democrat and an indefatigable enemy of Stalinist totalitarianism. To his credit, Al-e Ahmad joined Maleki when he split from the party and stayed faithful to his mentor and friend for the rest of his life. Maleki was the subject of incessant and venomous attacks by Stalinists, yet Al-e Ahmad never wavered in his support. Late in life, when Maleki was pressured by the shah’s secret police and incessantly attacked by the opposition, Al-e Ahmad used his considerable influence to offer what solace and support he could muster for his mentor. Al-e Ahmad was, in fact, one of the activists in every organization led by Maleki. He was also an editor or one of the main contributors to the journals and papers published by the followers of Maleki.

Al-e Ahmad also cooperated with other prominent literary or social journals. He tried to launch a few of his own, but they all failed—some for financial reasons, most because they were quickly banned by the government. His first story, “Ziarat” (Pilgrimage), in fact appeared in Sokhan, one of the most esteemed literary journals of its time. For a while, he edited a new magazine launched by the newspaper conglomerate, Keyhan. He had initially chastised Ebrahim Golestan for even contemplating the idea of becoming an editor of the magazine. But then when the job was offered to him, or, by one account, after he campaigned for the job, he readily accepted it and had by then a whole theory on why his acceptance was just what a committed artist would do.[15]

Al-e Ahmad’s own writings were widely varied in their size, style, and genres. He wrote essays, short stories, novels, monographs, ethnographical essays, and reviews. All in all he published about twenty books. His style was characterized by an unusual economy of words and an elliptical syntax, where verbs were often eliminated by symmetry and there was structural syncopation that gave it a unique quality and timbre. It was, both during and after his life, emulated by many aspiring artists and essayists. He also translated some major works of criticism and literature. Among his translations are works by Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His scanty knowledge of French and English, and his even scantier knowledge of complicated concepts of philosophy and social theory, meant that his translations were full of gross errors. His stature in the intellectual community, and the predominant sense of tribal unity in that community, meant that for years few dared or desired to criticize the surprisingly poor quality of his translations. Since his death, this aspect of his work has been increasingly subjected to serious, often damaging, criticism.
Al-e Ahmad received some help from his wife on some of these translations. In 1949, he married Simin Daneshvar, the daughter of one of Shiraz’s most esteemed and enlightened families. They met on a bus coming from Shiraz and married not long after. Her
father was a physician and her mother something of an early feminist. Part of the price the mother was forced to pay for independence of mind was that she became a neurasthenic. Simin herself was highly educated and before long joined the faculty of Tehran University, where she taught for much of her life. She was also an accomplished writer. She had received a scholarship to study for a semester at Stanford University, where she was the student of the renowned California writer Wallace Stegner. Her Souvashoun is not only one of the best-selling novels of modern Iran, but it is the first novel published by an Iranian woman. It is also, according to Stegner, a first-rate, world-class novel.[16]

In spite of the fact that for the rest of their life together Simin carried more than her share of the economic burden of the household, in all things literary and political she deferred to her husband, Jalal. In her fiction, as well as in the eulogy she published after his death, she portrays him as an ideal husband, unbending in his intellectual honesty, his fearlessness, his moral probity, and his unending love for her. In Souvashoun, Daneshvar drew the hero from romanticized yet recognizable elements of Al-e Ahmad’s character, and thus began the apotheosis of her husband. She continued the process in The Dusk of Jalal, in which the narrative begins, “beautifully he died, as he had beautifully lived.” The rest of her eulogy is no less profusely praiseful of her dead husband. She even praises his religious turn, writing that it arose out of an existential necessity in him.

Contrary to the common perception that attributes this religious turn to his belated disgruntlement with Marxism, a religious flavor, if not fervor, is evident even in his first published works. For example, in his Paul’s Letter to the Disciples, he tries, rather unsuccessfully, to emulate the language of the Bible and suggests that this biblical text was intentionally hidden from the public eye because “it promised the arrival of the great religion of Islam.”[17] As he became more and more unhappy with Marxism, and after he witnessed the mass uprising of June 1963, which was fueled by religious frenzy, he became convinced that religion can not only play a crucial role in mobilizing the masses, but that Islamic forces were in the forefront of the fight for liberty and independence. He developed a new narrative of history in which secular forces were criticized for their ineptitude and their willingness to compromise, and in which he claims—with little attempt to offer any evidence—that the mullahs have been leaders of the fight against the cultural and political onslaught of the West. At about that time, he traveled to Meshed, where he met with a group of clerics, including an unknown young mullah named Ali Khamenei. In the meeting, he offered—by self-declared fiat—an alliance between Iranian intellectuals and the clergy.[18] By then his discourse and demeanor were more in the vein of a prophet than of a mere writer.

At the same time as his ideas were changing, he made several important trips that show his eclectic and iconoclastic political perspective. While it was fashionable in late 1950s and 1960s for Iranian intellectuals to offer sharp, critical views of Israel, Al-e Ahmad accepted an invitation from the Israeli government and traveled there. He also traveled to the United States, where he participated in a summer seminar at Harvard, and to the Soviet Union, where he was invited to a conference of anthropologists. On his deathbed, he was putting the final touches on his travelogues of those countries, as well as Europe. He had planned to call the collection the The Four Meccas. Of course he also traveled to Mecca, and his ecstatic account of that journey and of the rituals of Hadj are yet another indication of the power of his pen and the fervor of his faith in Islam.[19]

He also traveled widely throughout Iran. Everywhere he went, he carried a small notebook and a pencil in his pocket. He jotted down names and ideas, idioms and expressions he heard. Several of his most important books were accounts of his travels written in the style of an amateur ethnographer.

He lived a simple life, without grandeur or luxury. His house in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in Tehran, and his seaside house near the picturesque town of Asalem in the Northern province of Guilan, were both small and free from ostentation. He considered himself an expert fireplace mason; in his own houses, as well as in those of some of his friends, he had built, with varying degrees of success, eleven fireplaces. The one he built for his friend Golestan, for example, had to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch by a professional.[20] For a while, he lived next door to Nima, the great poet, and the proximity led to close friendship between the two.

Al-e Ahmad was a chain smoker. While many in his generation of artists fell prey to the romantic notion of the artist as the suffering addict or alcoholic, he was averse to such excesses. He was an avid hiker and loved the theater. He often attended rehearsals for plays he had had a role in translating or bringing to the stage. He loved gardening and spent hours attending to his flowers, trees, and herb gardens at both his houses.

The narcissism of his demeanor and discourse, the selfish disposition he had toward those around him, even toward his relentlessly sacrificing wife, can easily be seen in a comparison between his posthumously published Tombstone for a Grave and Simin’s rendition of their relationship. While it is true that Al-e Ahmad never intended to publish Tombstone, and though the work has been praised for its candor and unusual honesty, including its willingness to delve into issues such as impotence, hitherto considered taboo for the macho culture of the time, the manuscript nevertheless shows Al-e Ahmad at his most misogynistic, selfish, and hypocritical self. He calls himself a pimp because he accompanied his wife to a male gynecologist. He talks of his wife as ayal—pejorative for wife—and treats her in the narrative as nothing more than chattel.

According to recently declassified documents of SAVAK, during the last years of his life Al-e Ahmad’s house and phone were bugged, his mail was intercepted, he was under constant scrutiny.[21] He was more than once forced to change his place of employment— from a high school to the Teacher’s College, from the Education Department to a new college, he was ordered dismissed, at each turn, by SAVAK.

Early in September 1969 he set out with his wife for a long vacation in their seaside cottage. During the day, from eight-thirty to eleven-thirty, he worked to finish the manuscript of The Four Meccas. On the morning of September 9, he woke up with a headache. As the day progressed, his health deteriorated. He complained of pain in all his muscles. By the evening of that rainy, gloomy day, he was dead. Rumors of foul play, with no basis in reality, immediately began to spread. A will survived him. Written on the eve of his journey to Mecca, and completed as part of the requisite rituals, he named a committee of four—his wife, his brother, and two friends, including Ebrahim Golestan—as executors of his literary legacy. His house and books he gave to his brother and wife, and his body was dedicated to the closest medical school that could use it for anatomy lessons. The will was contested and ultimately rejected by the courts, as it was shown to have been written while he was under the influence of alcohol.[22] In life, as in death, Al-e Ahmad was a man of paradoxes and ironies.

Samad Behrangi was an icon. Beginning in the late 1960s,he was, to a whole generation of Iranian students, the embodiment of a “committed artist,” at once folksy and fiery, humble and defiant, with works that were simple in form and optimistic in content. Ahmad Shamloo, himself known for his “engaged” poetry, called Samad “the awe-inspiring face of committed art . . . a giant of commitment, a Monster of commitment . . . a head of the hydra-headed monster of commitment.”1 Known generally and affectionately by his first name of Samad, the story of his life and the tale of his death has been woven from the same fabric of mythical confabulations that have shaped much of the modern political narrative in Iran.

Ironically, Samad’s fame was to some small measure the result of the work done by one of the Pahlavi regime’s own institutions. By the late 1960s, as Iran’s oil revenue was on the rise, Lily Amir-Arjomand, a childhood friend and confidante of Queen Farah, had taken over the leadership of what was called the Organization for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. She was a woman of high political ambitions, and a self-appointed “bridge” between the regime and the intellectuals of the opposition. Some of Iran’s top artists worked at the organization. It was exceptionally successful in bringing books, often through mobile libraries, to some of the most remote villages and townships of Iran. It also published an impressive array of children’s books—some works in translation, other original works by Iranian writers and poets. Surely the most controversial book it ever published was Behrangi’s Little Black Fish.

The Little Black Fish, like its author, Samad, appeared on Iran’s cultural horizon at the time when a new kind of radicalism was emerging in the country. Armed with theories imported from Cuba and spurred on by the many “wars of national liberation” in some sixty countries of the world, most notably in Indochina, small groups of Iranians, often bright students from the universities, began to attack the regime in a series of terrorist acts. This kind of dangerous radicalism, often leading to death, was founded on the notion that an individual act of heroism and sacrifice can be the trigger that is needed to bring the intimidated masses into action. Such action will show hitherto dormant people that the regime is not invulnerable and that it can be defeated. Cognition of this vulnerability, the argument goes, is necessary and sufficient to get the revolution started. Samad was not only intimately connected with some of the leaders of this movement, but The Little Black Fish, recounting the story of a fish whose defiance ultimately leads to the liberation of a colony of docile fishes, was a potent metaphor for the ideology of this movement.

Samad Behrangi was born to a working-class family of the city of Tabriz, in Azarbaijan, in June 1939 (Khordact 1318). He was the third of six children. Turkish was the language spoken in the region and in his family, and the fact that for much of his life speaking that language was strictly limited by the Iranian government was to become one of the central focuses of Samad’s life and work. He was educated in Tabriz first at the Panzdahe Bahman (Fifteenth of Bahman) elementary school and then at Tarbiyat high school.

In 1955, he entered the city’s Teachers College, and after completing a two-year program he received a certificate and commenced teaching. For him teaching was nothing short of a calling, particularly in the villages and poor sections of towns. With the unwavering zeal of a missionary, he traveled to faraway villages, often carrying in a backpack a handful of books he gave away to his needy students.

In the Teachers College he met the two closest friends of his life. One was Behruz Dehghani (1939–1973), like Samad an activist and an intellectual. He translated a few of Sean O’Casey plays and went on to publish many of Samad’s books. Behrangi turned out to be one of the leading members of the leftist organization called Feda’yan Khalg (martyrs for the masses). He was ultimately killed by SAVAK in prison. The other member of the “Three Musketeers,”2 as Samad and his friends had come to be known, was Kazem Sa’adati. He, too, was a member of the Feda’yan Khalg. His end was also violent; he committed suicide when the police came to arrest him. It has been suggested that Samad was also member of this militant underground organization.[3] Although Samad’s brother denies this claim, the possibility of Samad’s ties to this organization is further indicated by the fact that one of his favorite students, a young man named Monaf Falaki, joined the organization through Samad. With the help of these two friends, Samad created a newspaper of satire for the college. It was called Khandeh (Laughter).[4] We know these details from another of Samad’s close friends.

He was sixteen when he met Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi, a psychiatrist by training and a writer by vocation and avocation. The friendship, begun by accident in a Tabriz bookstore, was the beginning of Samad’s entry into the intellectual salons of Tehran. A romanticized narrative of that bookstore as something of a salon, where Samad and his friends often converged, has been written by Sa’edi. He wrote of their deep passion for the world of politics, of their tendency to make a fuss of the “insects of the world,”5 whose only crime was their apolitical nature. In one of his most famous short stories, Samad chastised this type—which he called “Mr. Chokbakhtiyar”—for their obsession with the mundane, material values of their world.
According to Sa’edi’s worshipful eulogy of Samad, he was jocund and humble, playful and serious. He was a dedicated teacher and a “committed artist.” But his ability to recruit men like Falaki, according to Sa’edi, was “no less great than his successes in writing.”[6] Samad never married, as his dedication to politics and pedagogy left little time for anything else.
Immediately upon graduation from the Teachers College, Samad began to teach in villages of Azarbaijan. The experience left an indelible and formative impact on his politics and his theory of pedagogy. His first published book was in fact primarily the result of these village experiences.[7] The book, called Kando Kavi dar Masa’el Tarbiyatiy-e Iran, brought him immediately to the attention of Iran’s intellectual elite and that of the dread secret police. Several elements of his ideology are clearly evident in this book. His most acerbic words are used to criticize any hint of American influence on pedagogy. He makes fun of texts in schools that foolishly emulate American books and rules. They talk of hot dogs and “homerooms” to students who live in villages with no electricity, go to singleroom mud huts that double as school buildings, and have never seen a hot dog in their lives.[8] He even criticized the American texts for banning corporal punishment. Sometimes, he suggested, a little bit of beating is just what the teacher needs to do to achieve the desired end.[9] In other stories, he praises “revolutionary violence” as purgative and liberating. Even children, he believed, must be taught to hate the rich and covet revenge. Some critics have detected a systemic anti-Americanism in this, indeed in the entirety of the Behrangi opus.[10] Others have seen in this collection of essays, as well as in his short stories and translations, an ethos that glorifies class hatred and violence, and simplifies into facile words the complexities of the world.[11]

His anti-Americanism did not, however, stop him from trying to learn the English language. Indeed, concurrent with his teaching assignment in villages, he entered Tabriz University and, after several years of part-time schooling, completed a bachelor’s degree in English. He had also, early in his career, begun to publish short stories, translations of Persian works into Turkish, and Turkish authors into Persian. He occasionally dabbled in poetry and had a few of his poems published. There were at least ten different pen names under which he published his work. They ranged from Gharangoush and Afshin Parvizi to Sad, Babak, and Behrang.[12] His first story was called Adat (Habit); it was written in 1959 and began by describing a teacher for whom teaching had become a habit, and students who had “bare feet . . . and their innocent eyes were sometimes wet” with tears.[13]

The grammar and vocabulary of the Turkish language, and the necessary freedom for the people of the Iranian province of Azarbaijan to speak it, was another common theme of his work. When in 1962 a small book of Turkish grammar was published, Samad wrote a favorable review of the book for Rahnamey-e Ketab (Book Guide), one of the more scholarly and decidedly “establishment” journals of the day.[14] He went on to write several other short pieces for the magazine, all about different aspects of Turkish language and literature. What shines through the short review is Samad’s deep attachment to what he calls his “maternal language,” and his intimate familiarity with its lexicon, syntax, and literary potential and accomplishments.[15]

In his own mind, one of his most important books was a short primer on teaching Turkish to first graders. All his efforts, and those of friends like Al-e Ahmad, to have the book published came to naught. The subject was politically sensitive, as it smacked of Turkish nationalist sentiment, and that was anathema to the shah’s government. Others consider the two-volume compilation of the folk-tales of Azarbaijan he wrote with Behruz Dehghani his most enduring work.[16] They write of his constant attempt to find new stories, words, aphorisms, and rituals. He always carried a pocket notebook, in which he entered his new discoveries. In 1965, the year he published the second volume of these folk tales, he also started a journal of literary and social criticism called Mahde Azadi: Adineh. Seventeen issues were published before the journal ceased its work. Samad wrote in the journal under the pseudonym Changiz Merati.[17]

Samad’s last book was no doubt his most successful. The Little Black Fish, published in a handsome edition with images drawn by Farshid Mesgali, was an immediate sensation. It won awards in Italy and Czechoslovakia; in Iran it was named the best children’s book of the year. In one of the famous reviews of the book, Manuchehr Hezarkhani praised it as the epitome of a “revolutionary literature.”[18] Ehsan Tabari issued the orthodox Marxist verdict on the book.[19] He praised Samad’s life and panned his ideology as pandering to the worship of “an isolated hero” bereft of ties with the masses. Some critics have pointed to the thematic similarities between Samad’s fable-like novella and two short stories by the Russian writer Chechedrin, who had also used a little “wise fish” to praise those who refuse to accept the status quo and swim against the tide of received opinions.[20]

On August 29, 1968 (7 Shahrivar 1347), Samad and one of his friends, Hamzeh Farahati set out on a trip they had planned a week earlier. What happened on that trip is, like Rashamon, the famous Kurosawa film, the subject of lingering controversy and conflicting narratives. His brother and some of his friends insist that Farahati’s version of events is selfserving and false. They suspect foul play and hint that Farahati might have been complicit in the crime.21 But according to Farahati, there is little mystery to the death itself.

On their trip, they were to join a third friend and visit villages on the banks of the Aras River. The other side of the river was the Soviet Union. Collecting folklore was the ostensible reason for the trip, but apparently it also had a political purpose. The third friend did not show up, and thus Samad and Hamzeh, who was in those days a conscript officer in the army, set out for the riverbank. It was summer, and it was hot, and they dipped in the water every day. Samad did not know how to swim and resigned himself to standing on the safer shoals of the river. Unbeknownst to Samad, the Aras, at least according to the local lore, was famous for its treacherous riverbed; one step is all that divides the safety of solid footing from the abyss of a hole and ravaging waters.

On the ninth, as was their daily habit, around noon they took a dip in a bend of the river located near a border post. Five Iranian soldiers were stationed in a small watchtower at the post nearby. Hamzeh was a seasoned swimmer and headed for the deeper part of the river. No sooner had he swam away than he heard the panicked sound of his friend calling for help. By the time he swam to where Samad had been, the waters of the river had already devoured him. Three days later, his body was found downstream, five kilometers from the scene of the accident. He was buried in a cemetery in his beloved Tabriz.[22]

Samad’s brother has contested this version of events. He alleges that the coroner’s report was tampered with and that even the tampered version refers to bruises and lesions on two places on Samad’s body. He also denies Samad’s membership in any organization.[23]

Opposition forces and figures close to Samad decided to turn him into a mythical figure. In order to have a more appealing pitch they needed him to die a heroic or at least mysterious death. Someone who did not know how to swim drowning in a river was hardly heroic or mythic. The fact that Samad’s companion on that trip was an army conscript provided the opposition with the perfect opening. No sooner had he died than rumors began about the “mysterious” conditions of his death. The Feda’yan Organization apparently made a conscious decision to make Samad into a myth and claim him as one of their martyrs.[24]

Jalal Al-e Ahmad was arguably the main culprit in the dissemination of this myth. As Samad’s close friend, Sa’edi, declared, “I don’t think it is true that SAVAK killed Samad. Samad drowned in the river. . . . It was Jalal [Al-e Ahmad] who started this rumor. . . . He was a myth-maker.”25 In an essay wrought with a subtle sense of sinister cynicism, Jalal began by reminiscing about the death of his young brother, of his father’s endless grief, and of the father’s desire to know the “real” cause of his son’s death. All eyewitnesses had testified that the son had simply “passed away.” But the father needed a “better” explanation. Eventually, someone brought back the news that the son was “poisoned” by the Sunnis—Shiism’s spiritual nemesis. The obviously fabricated “news” was a balm to the grieving father.

Al-e Ahmad then, perhaps unwittingly, usurped this coveted patriarchal posture and recounted his own grief at Samad’s death; he wrote of Samad’s virtues as a human being, and as a man of lofty and unbending principle, and, with a hint of derogation, as a “wandering peasant” (dahatiy-e sargardan) and a “gypsy.” He could not fathom the idea that Samad was dead, and thus, like his father, becalmed by the false report of a conspiracy to kill his son, he, too, would concoct a myth about the death of this “younger brother.”[26] As we learned later, he beseeched Hamzeh Farahati, the man who had been with Samad on that fateful day, to keep quiet about the truth and let the myth take hold of the public imagination.

Forugh Farrokhzad was both an icon. and an iconoclast. In every portrait of her, and in many of her poems, there is a haunting angst, a sadness that permeates the observer and the observed. This sadness is not the debilitating woe of defeat or despair; it is instead the empowering melancholy of a woman of destiny, cognizant of the Sisyphean task she confronts, yet sublimely assured of ultimate victory. In a culture obsessed with women’s chastity, where the image of woman vacillates between two charged extremes, Madonna and whore,[1] she was, by design, no Madonna. Instead, she embodied the reckless abandon of an adventuress, of a Dionysian spirit more than willing to pay the wages of “pleasurable sin.”[2]

Forugh’s rebellious life and early death, her precocious genius, her bouts of depression and her occasional use of drugs, her defiance toward those in power, her disdain for material gain, and finally, her firm conviction that her only salvation could come through art, all made her the perfect archetype of the romantic poet. But for several generations of Iranian women, she has also been a powerful symbol of liberation, the embodiment of a vision of equality between men and women, in particular because she freed the language of Persian poetry from many inhibitions and taboos.

Forugh was by far the most influential female poet in Iran’s rich thousand-year poetic tradition. Her poetry was as popular as pop art, and as subtle and sophisticated as “high art.” She had the unique capacity to appeal to the sensibilities of faddists, feminists, and charlatan critics, but also to pass the most rigorous standards of serious readers of her poems. One of her volumes of poetry has been called “the most significant document of contemporary Persian letters.”[3] In her work, the grammar of human emotion was forever changed in the Persian language.

Forugh’s emergence on Iran’s cultural horizon, with her unrelenting defense of the rights of women, brought her genius to bear at a critical moment in the century-long struggle by Iranian women for equal rights, and for an end to their cultural, physical, and political isolation. The movement surged in the years after World War II. Reza Shah’s decision to allow—indeed insist upon—women’s education, the emergence of leftist parties advocating women’s suffrage, the shah’s commitment to fostering the right of women to vote and to stand for office, and finally, Iran’s increased contact with the outside world, all added to the power and fervor of the women’s movement. The political opposition and cultural critics a few years later, obsessed with the struggle with the shah, embittered by their defeat in the events of August 1953, and imbued with a Manichaean view of good and evil, refused to acknowledge the important changes that had come about during the shah’s reign. They dismissed them as “superficial” and “bourgeois formalities,” bereft of substance. They simply could not fathom that a despotic shah could be, at the same time, an advocate of cultural modernity.

Women of the mid-1950s, hitherto denied the right to the aesthetic expression of their desires and dreams, finally gained that right, once and for all.[4] Of course, popular magazines of the time—for example, Omid Iran—were surprisingly open in their depiction of women. But these had about them a crass air of commercialism, a vulgar and soulless imitation of Western “popular,” even pornographic, magazines. In fact, many of the half-naked women depicted in the magazine advertisements of the time, and most of the feminine silhouettes used as mastheads for the serial novels about infidelity and adultery, clearly looked “European.” But Forugh’s assertiveness, and her erotic cries, had an entirely different sound. Critics talk of her as a “daring, often irreverent, explorer of a public language of intimacy.” They point to the fact that her self-assertiveness was “different from the self-effacing virtuousness of the ideal woman.”[5] Forugh’s language, like the language of all modern master poets, had a cathartic quality to it. It articulated the desire to purge itself of “all obstinate remnants of a ruined past.”[6]

A constant theme of Forugh’s poetry is her desperate search for the “lost half” of her soul. Plato was the first philosopher to advance the idea of humanity’s androgynous genesis. We were One in the beginning, and a wholesome humanity is one in which the masculine and the feminine—what Jung later called the animus and the anima—are united. For Plato, when we were torn asunder, gender differences were created, and we began a long, desperate search to find our “lost half.” Forugh often wrote of this desire: “We must search for our mates,” she wrote, “everyone has a mate, and must find one. . . . Life is nothing other than an attempt to heal this breach.” For Forugh as for Jung, sexuality is a pleasurable symbol of this union, of unity with the opposite—what philosophers and psychologists call the coniunctio. Finding that no human mate could fulfill the full range of her expectations, Forugh ultimately realized that poetry was “the mate that completes me.”[7] But her agonizing search for this union, her relentless effort to assert herself as a woman, became a beacon and a manifesto for generations of women engaged in the same struggle. She became their emblem. Little in her mundane past, except perhaps the early signs of her fearless impetuosity, would have foretold this iconic future.

Forugh Farrokhzad was born on January 5, 1935 (15 Dey 1313), in an old, middle-class neighborhood of Tehran. She was the third child of seven. Her younger brother, Fereydun,
would become a media personality, a forceful advocate of gay rights, and a fierce critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In exile after the revolution, he would be brutally murdered, apparently by agents of that regime. Her older sister, Pouran, after Forugh’s death, would assume the mantle of de facto executor of Forugh’s literary legacy.[8] Their mother, Turan, was a housewife, obsessive about domestic order and cleanliness. Their father, Mohammad, was a colonel in the Iranian army, a cold authoritarian altogether oblivious to his children’s emotional needs. The house was run on a strict military regimen, in which absolute obedience to every rule was required, and disobedience brought harsh punishment.[9] On the other hand, the father had a small library and encouraged his children to read. Forugh’s plaintive and pleading letters to him in later years, when she was already a published and accomplished poet, are reminiscent of the letter Franz Kafka wrote to his father. Like Kafka, Forugh expressed dismay over her father’s greed, over his disregard for her intellectual passions, and over his utter inability to connect to her emotionally.

She finished elementary school in Tehran and for high school entered Kamal-al Mulk technical school, where she wanted to learn sewing and to polish her abilities as an amateur painter. By then, she had already started writing poetry. Her juvenilia, never published, apparently followed the metrics of traditional Iranian poetry. But her aesthetic sensibilities did not manifest themselves just in poetry. Her visual talent manifested itself in a number of drawings, simple in line and elegant in composition. In the artwork that survived are several self-portraits. And she ultimately proved to be an accomplished film director and a budding actress of stage and cinema.

Forugh never finished school, dropping out when she was just sixteen to marry a man fifteen years her senior. His name was Parviz Shapur. He was a distant relative, a man of many eccentricities,[10] and a professional satirist whose forte was something he called “Caricalmator”—a word he coined by combining “caricature” with kalame, Persian for “words.” Caricalmator denoted a form that combined writing and verbal dexterity with drawing, all for the purpose of satire. He never made a living from his art. As an artist, he is a mere footnote in twentieth-century Iranian history.

As the soon-discarded husband of Forugh, however, Parviz Shapur is immortalized. To support himself and his family, he worked as a government employee, and his duties forced him to take his new bride to Ahwaz.[11] There, nine months later, they had a son. It was not long after, however, that the marriage came to a de facto end. Forugh left Ahwaz for Tehran in search of her career in poetry, leaving Parviz and her son behind. When they finally decided to divorce, Parviz was granted, as Islamic laws mandated, full custody of their son, Kami. Estrangement from her son would leave a permanent scar on Forugh’s psyche.[12] (Kami, who has suffered under the heavy weight of being the child of an icon, now resides in Tehran.)
In retrospect, Forugh found her decision to marry impetuous and stupid. Looking back in a letter to Ebrahim Golestan, the beloved companion of the last years of her life, she wrote, “I feel as though I have lost my life, and I know far less than I should at the age of twenty-seven. Maybe the reason is that I never had a clear life. That stupid and comical love and marriage when I was sixteen put the rest of my life on shaky foundations.”[13]

In a sense, Forugh spent the next few years, after her divorce, experimenting with life and art. For a short while she lived with her family, but soon her father, unable to stand his daughter’s growing reputation as a libertine, threw her out of the house.14 (In later years, when Forugh had become famous, her family, particularly her father, went out of their way to deny the serious tensions that had existed between Forugh and the rest of the family in those early years.)

She had a series of affairs with poets and writers, critics and editors. Her first such affair, with the editor of a magazine that published her famous poem about “committing a pleasurable sin,” ended in psychological disaster. When the man ignobly decided to write a short story that parodied Forugh, she had a nervous breakdown and ended up briefly in a psychiatric ward.

Nevertheless, she was already beginning to establish her reputation as a first-rate poet. By 1955, she had published her first collection of poems, Asir (The Captive). She published her second collection of poems, called Divar (The Wall), in 1956. Her third collection, Osyan (Rebellion), was published two years later, in 1958. While their content was revolutionary, defiantly and delectably describing the erotic desires and pleasures of women, the form generally followed existing patterns of modern Persian poetry. Her poems were praised for the honesty of their tone, the beauty of their structure, and the sublime simplicity of their imagery. More than anything else, they spoke in the voice of a maverick and rebel, a self-assured woman of infinite sensuality and tenderness, fully at home with the power and legitimacy of her eroticism, yet always in search of a new aesthetic. At the same time, as she herself admitted ten years later, these early works were experimental and had not yet found the depth of imagery, richness of language, and maturity of thought that characterized her later poems.

Even as they evolved, Forugh’s poems retained that early freshness. There is in her poetry, particularly in the mature poems of her last years, a natural, youthful simplicity and spontaneous originality. It stemmed from her feeling neither encumbered by the traditional metrics of Persian poetry nor seriously influenced by the modernist poets of the West. She had little English, and less French (it is touching to read of her doggedness in trying to plow through T. S. Eliot’s poetry, using a dictionary for every line). In short, hers was a voice of purely “felt” poetry. Some consider poetry an act of construction. It begins in a moment of epiphany and reaches maturity and sublimity only through the long and arduous struggle to build a perfect structure and find the perfect words. For others, poetry is more spontaneous: it begins and reaches its consummation in a moment of inspiration. While Forugh worked hard on editing her poems, they retain a shimmering spontaneity that affords them their unique aura.

Forugh was rigorously selective and self-critical. She wrote thousands of lines of poetry she never published. She describes buying cheap paper in bulk to use for her more experimental efforts. Yet out of these countless poetic experiments, bred of her passion to write, she chose to publish only about two hundred. Contrary to the practice of many poets, who when famous market even their silliest juvenilia, she remained a perfectionist in what she published. The result is a poetic oeuvre of impeccable integrity.

Forugh’s freedom from poetic tradition was similarly hard-won. In her poetry one can easily discern the dialectic of tradition and individual talent that is central to T. S. Eliot’s theory of poetry. In his seminal essay “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Eliot proposes that genius is never enough to create a masterpiece. Poets must also delve deeply into the tradition in which they are writing, and only in this way can they hope to transcend what has gone before them. In Forugh’s case, she delved eagerly into masters of the past like Hafez and Ghassem Sa’di and read deeply in the works of Iran’s modern poets—although she did not find Nima, the harbinger of poetic modernity, until late in her career.[15] Grounded in this tradition, she succeeded in creating a style that was uniquely her own.

As her literary reputation grew, Forugh became increasingly characterized as “aggressive, obstreperous or insulting.”[16] Vicious gossip, malignant rumors, and caustic criticism, deprecating her poetry and her life, plagued her. Even Shojadin Shafa, who wrote the introduction to Forugh’s first collection of poems (he later gained fame and fortune by becoming the shah’s chief speechwriter), felt compelled to write an apologia for the vivid eroticism of her poetry.[17] It was partly to escape this increasingly suffocating atmosphere that, in the summer of 1956, Forugh set out for Europe. Looking back at this departure, she writes of her desire to “be a woman, that is to say, a ‘human being,’” and that “others wanted to stifle and silence” her voice. She laments a life bereft of laughter, and suggests that she went to Europe to “create some distance between myself and this environment.”18
Forugh stayed in Europe for only two years before returning to live in Tehran. She writes often of her torn and bifurcated feelings toward Iran. She bemoans the fact that she was born “in a desolate land, full of despondency and despair. . . . I wish I was born somewhere else.” Yet in another letter, she confesses “I love our Tehran, in spite of everything. I love it and it is only there that my life finds a purpose and reason . . . those heavy sun-sets, those dirt roads, and those miserable miscreant corrupt people I love.”[19]

Once back in Tehran, she published a lengthy account of her travels in the literary magazine Ferdowsi. Rumors of her numerous affairs with men of different backgrounds continued unabated. But much changed in her life when, in 1958, she began to work in the studio of Ebrahim Golestan. Her first interview with Golestan was far from romantic—she was hired initially as a receptionist—but gradually their working relationship metamorphosed into the most storied love affair of modern Iranian literature.

Golestan was married and managed—with the cooperation of his wife—to maintain that marriage while openly conducting this intense love affair with Forugh. The tender and tense moments, the joys and tribulations, of this relationship became not only a favorite and incessant subject of gossip—often at the expense of Golestan—but also the theme of some of Forugh’s most famous poems. In one poem, for example, she writes,

My beloved
Is a simple man whom I—
In a fantastical benighted wonderland
Like the last remnant of a numinous religion— In the thicket of my breasts
Have hidden.[20]

Friends who knew the couple well, from Ghassem Sa’idi to Sadeq Chubaq, talk of a playful, albeit emotionally intense, and intellectually rewarding relationship. Golestan was, at the time, arguably the most cultured intellectual in Tehran, with an impressive command of English and French literature, an intimate knowledge of cinema and painting, and a love of words. These gifts he fully shared with Forugh. Critics have, on the whole, refused to acknowledge even the possibility that Golestan might have had an influence on her evolution as a poet, even as they unanimously concur that her work after 1958, when the love affair began, was markedly different, more mature, more political, and less personal. It is telling that Forugh laments, in one of her letters to Golestan, the fact that all her life, she had no mentor. “Everything I have, I have from and through my own effort.”[21] But with most of Forugh and Golestan’s letters not yet published, the full history of their relationship, and its impact on their work, has yet to be written.

Forugh’s work at Golestan’s studio had another important consequence for her career. She had, before arriving at the studio, developed a passion for cinema and had studied filmmaking in her first trip to Europe. In the course of the next few years, she made two more trips to Europe, focusing her attention and inquiries on different facets of filmmaking. This interest and study culminated in her twenty-minute documentary masterpiece Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House Is Black). Filmed during a twelve-day visit to a leper colony, and accompanied by a narrative—spoken by both Forugh and Golestan—that draws heavily on the Bible for both tone and texture, the film won numerous international awards. It is generally considered one of the earliest harbingers of the new wave of Iranian cinema, which has since captured the imagination of critics all over the world.[22]

The experience in filming this documentary had another, more personal consequence to Forugh. Tormented by her forced estrangement from her son, Kami, she adopted a young boy named Hoseyn from the leper colony. She writes of her delight in taking care of this newly adopted son, of the joy of combing his hair, while imagining it that of her natural son. After about two years of taking care of the child, however, she realized that the demands of her increasingly public role as one of Iran’s most prominent poets and intellectuals made attending to her maternal duties difficult. Eventually she asked her mother to take care of Hoseyn. (He now lives in Germany, and is interested in the world of letters.)

By the time she adopted Hoseyn, Forugh had become even more critically acclaimed. Her fourth volume of poetry, Tavalodi Digar (Another Birth) is recognized as heralding a new stage in her creativity. The language is more mature, the form more experimental, and the content far more social and philosophical than the earlier, more personal meditations of her first three volumes. This evolution continued in the fifth volume of her poems, titled Iman Biyavarim be Agaz-Fasli Sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a Cold Season). Even though these poems were written in a period when Iran was rocked by mass uprisings and serious social upheavals, Forugh chose to concentrate on the more fundamental problem of what it means to be a conscious, secular, and independent woman in an age still dominated by dogmas of faith and ideology, as well as by the misogyny so commonly found in human society. Fear of death, and the agony of finding meaning in a life bereft of metaphysical comforts about life and death, forms a central theme of her later poetry.

By the early 1960s, after her fourth volume was published, Forugh’s fame was beginning to reach beyond Iran’s borders. Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director, made a fifteen-minute documentary about her, and UNESCO commissioned another, lengthier documentary on her life. Fame and recognition had finally brought a fair degree of financial comfort to her life. Until then, she never had a “room of her own.” Indeed, from 1955 until the first years of the 1960s, she was at the mercy of her strident father for housing. Then Golestan asked his architect friend, Bijan Saffari, to build a house for Forugh. Although Golestan remained its legal owner, he wanted Forugh to live there and to consider it her own. The house was not far from Golestan’s home, where he lived with his wife, and close to his studio.23 In later years, Golestan’s son, Kaveh, an accomplished photographer, lived in that house—until he was killed in an accident, covering the war in Iraq for the BBC.

Forugh lived there alone with a maid. One day, in 1961, after what some have alleged to be a particularly bad fight with Golestan, she attempted suicide by taking a whole bottle of sleeping pills. Fortunately, the maid noticed her drowsiness in time, called for help, and saved her. But Forugh continued to be haunted by premonitions of an early death. She writes of her fears of a “premature death, of dying sooner than I think, and thus leaving my work unfinished.”[24]

Forugh was known for her love of fast driving. Speed, she said, was a “balm,” an “answer to my inner despair and darkness.”[25] She also had a reputation as a careless and reckless driver.26 On February 14, 1967, driving home from an errand that had taken her to the center of the city, she lost control of her car near Golestan’s studio and ran into a wall. The man who was with her in the car, an employee of the studio, ran and summoned Golestan to the scene. When Golestan arrived, Forugh was still alive. He took her to the nearest hospital, but they refused to treat her. So did a second. Eventually, a third hospital agreed to take her in. By then she was breathing with great difficulty. Less than an hour later, she was declared dead.

News of Forugh’s death led to a great outpouring of sympathy and expressions of loss. Eulogies, some in the form of poems by the greatest living Persian poets—Sohrab Sepehri, Shamloo, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales—others in essays, were soon published. Sepehri said of her,

She was grand
And she was of today
And she was related to all open horizons
And how well she understood the tone of water and earth.[27]

Shamloo, generally reticent in singing the praises of others, said of her, “And immortality / Shares its / Mysteries with you. . . . Graced be thy name!” Finally, Akhavan-Sales, who knew her well from working at Golestan Studio, wrote a long, brilliant eulogy, comparing her with Nima, calling her “our glory, our light, and the light of our eyes”—and even “that woman more manly than all men.”[28] Perhaps most telling of all were the words of the famously circumspect and erudite critic Massoud Farzad: “In my opinion, Forugh was in the same league as Hafez.”[29]

Western critics lauded Forugh’s work. James Buchan, in his acclaimed thriller A Good Place to Die, waxes eloquent about the singular brilliance of Forugh. Any society that produces such a poet, he suggests, is clearly an extraordinary one.

Golestan, by all accounts, was devastated by Forugh’s death. Friends worried for his very sanity and tried not to leave him alone.[30] Not long after her death he left Iran. “After Forugh,” he said, “there was little left for me to do in Iran.”[31]

Forugh’s apotheosis after her death, combined with her legendary sexual reputation, produced a small army of men claiming to have been her lovers, eager for the fame achieved through proximity to the famous. The silence of those who knew her and her secrets best—from Golestan to Sa’idi—allowed these rumors to fester. Many of her actions, normally condemned in others, were easily forgiven, even romanticized in her. As in the case of Sylvia Plath, all aspects of Forugh’s life became sacrosanct—her genius seen as license for any excess and responsibility. Plath’s husband, the eminent poet Ted Hughes, chose silence; Golestan also refused to talk about his life with Forugh, thus affording his critics and her fans complete license to mythologize her and, frequently, to demonize him. The comparisons with Plath extend beyond their deaths or their relationships with the men they loved. Even the substance and style of their poetry have been deemed similar.

The manner of Forugh’s death gave rise to all manner of myths. Some argued that it had in fact been a suicide. Others suspected foul play and, as usual, held SAVAK responsible. The reality, however, was more fantastic than all these imaginary scenarios.

No lurid speculation, no conspiracy theory, about Forugh’s life could match the drama of its actual circumstances. So with her death. The night before Forugh died, she and Golestan went to a restaurant. A fortune-teller was working there that night whose expertise was reading the dregs in a cup of Turkish coffee. She was known to Forugh and had told her fortune on previous occasions. Forugh called her over and asked for her fortune. But when the woman glanced into the cup, she rose rapidly and said she was in no mood to tell any more fortunes that night.

A few days later, the same woman encountered another client who knew Forugh. The fortune-teller asked after Forugh, saying she had seen danger and doom in the cup. The poet, she was told, had died. Mythic figures, after all, require mythic ends.

It is fitting that even in death, Forugh herself should have furnished her own myth with its most mysterious grace note. In her famous poem, “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a Cold Season,” Forugh had written of “those two young hands / buried under the incessant falling snow.” On the day of her funeral, when thirty-three-year-old Forugh’s body was interred at the famous Zahirodowleh cemetery near Tehran, the ground in which she was laid was, indeed, covered with fresh snow. It had fallen the night before, nature thus paying silent tribute to the poet by bringing the poet’s imagination to life.

Ebrahim Golestan is a man of myriad talents and the quintessential
intellectual of twentieth-century Iran. He has reached the apex of creativity in several genres. Even now, he continues to experiment with forging his own unique style in the genre of the memoir. He is considered one of the founders of modern Iranian cinema. He not only built the most well-equipped private film studio of its time, but his film Brick and the Mirror began a new path in Iranian cinema and helped put it on the international map. Before that time, movies made in Iran had been strictly local and were defined by mediocre scripts, repetitious and corny themes, poor acting, and primitive style. Henceforth, Iranian cinema would gradually become the darling of critics. Golestan’s Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley is arguably the most politically daring film of its era—and a veritable guide to the mangled path of modernity during the Pahlavi era. His documentaries, whether describing the crown jewels or the oil industry, combine terse and beautiful prose with stunning imagery. His attention to words has its roots in his abilities as a short-story writer.

In his youth he balanced his life as a champion runner with a highly successful career as a journalist and a photographer. Some of the most enduring images of Iran in Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq’s tumultuous era were seen from his lens. Golestan is also a theater director and a highly accomplished translator.[1] His new works, yet to be published, are a fascinating combination of memoir and history. Some critics have even suggested that he is, owing to his pervasive presence in the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, the archetypal beloved and easily the most cherished man in modern Persian poetry.[2]

Golestan is a man of many contradictions. He was only twenty-two years old when, in 1943, he was named editor of a staunchly Stalinist paper. In 1945, he translated into Persian parts of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) generally considered the most turgid of Stalin’s many historical fabrications and banal theoretical gibberish. Yet in the same period, in his essays and short stories, Golestan fought dogmatism. In the days when thousands of people, including many innocent Jews, in the Soviet Union, the mecca of Iranian Stalinists, were sent to concentration camps on the flimsy charge of “cosmopolitanism,” Golestan translated Hemingway and published an essay about him in Stalinist publications of the time. He read Shakespeare and translated—but never published—Macbeth into Persian.

In remembering Golestan’s attachment to Marxism, we must keep in mind that during the World War II years, and even after, many writers and artists saw Marxism as an effective weapon against colonialism and the Soviet Union as the only reliable bulwark against Nazi barbarism. The stench of the gulag had not yet reached the world. A utopian aura still surrounded the idea of socialism and helped hide the calamities of the real Soviet Union. But to his credit, Golestan soon realized the vacuity of the Stalinist ideology and the depth of corruption in the ranks of its Iranian followers. He chose to steer away from his erstwhile comrades, yet he also refused to join those who in those days wrote about “the God that failed.”[3]

More important, Golestan was at the center of many of Iran’s most important literary, political, and cultural movements in the second half of the twentieth century. In his private life he crossed paths with many of the more important and colorful personalities of his time. Idle or prurient curiosity about his private life, however, seems to have cast a shadow on serious analysis of his work. Except for two early enthusiastic reviews of his first collection of short stories by Massoud Farzad and Mojtaba Minavi, two of modern Iran’s most erudite critics, little of substance has been written about him.

To some critics, Golestan’s guilt was his wealth. Others blamed him for his relationship with Forugh Farrokhzad. One critic cast aspersions on his literary abilities because he offered his guests beer in frosted glasses! In the days when the cult of poverty was the common creed of Iranian intellectuals, Golestan was not only affluent but refused any pretence of poverty. His reputation as a distant, diffident, even arrogant man has long afforded him an aura of enigma and inscrutability. And leaving Iran before the Islamic Revolution and choosing a life of exile further undermined his image as a “committed” artist. In the cacophony of gossip and innuendo about his private life, there has been a conspiracy of silence about his work.

But Golestan’s contribution to modern Iranian letters is unique. His exceptional erudition, combined with theoretical sophistication, artistic creativity, a keen eye for detail, and the poetic beauty of his prose, have combined to place him on a high perch from which to see and prescribe the contours of modern Iranian culture. Golestan is equally at home with Hafez and Shakespeare. He has delved deeply into Iranian culture and Western civilization; he has assimilated the best of both but is awed by neither. Indeed, he is duly appreciative of the accomplishments as well as the weaknesses of both cultures. He views them both from the perspective of exile.

Ebrahim Golestan was born in 1921 in Shiraz, to one of the city’s most prominent families. His grandfather was an esteemed and defiant ayatollah—exiled by Reza Shah— and his father, a man of letters and politics and a member of the constitutional assembly that elected Reza Khan the king, for many years published a newspaper of liberal persuasion called Golestan. The father was at once an intellectual and a man of gargantuan appetite for the pleasures of life. Golestan’s mother was a woman of traditional values and sensibility, religious and unusually erudite. Young Golestan’s parental home was a veritable literary and political salon, and it was there that the young Ebrahim met, for the first time, many of the famous writers and poets of the era. Golestan also began to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about the world by devouring his father’s books. At the behest of his father, he learned French and was fluent in it before he left high school. At the same time, he was an avid athlete, holding a national record in track for many years.

He was educated first in Shiraz and then, in 1939, he was sent to Tehran. But the advent of the war had changed hitherto traditional Tehran. It had more ideological fluidity. Golestan soon joined the newly formed Communist Party and rapidly rose in its rank to become the editor of the party’s paper. From his early youth, he was keenly interested in photography; when he decided to leave the party, around 1946, he became a professional photographer. By then he had published his first collection of short stories. In 1954, when a consortium of Western oil companies took over the operation of the Iranian oil industry, Golestan joined the new company and was put in charge of making educational films. In 1959, after he had severed his ties with the consortium, he negotiated the buyout of the equipment he had purchased to make the documentaries. With this equipment, his studio became the most sophisticated center for filmmaking in Iran. At the same time, well into the late 1950s, he enjoyed a near-monopoly in the lucrative market of supplying film clips and photos to the increasingly large Western media and of assuaging the endless appetite of television for images of Iran.

In the early 1940s, his articles in the party press and the publication of his collection of short stories had already established his reputation as one of the country’s leading intellectuals and writers. He had married his cousin, Fakhri, and in the Iran of the time, the marriage of cousins was said to be made in heaven. His wife was an intellectual and soon became a political activist. Together they had two children. Their daughter, Leeli, became an artist and critic, and their son, Kaveh, established his reputation as a photographer and photojournalist. In 2003, tragedy struck the family when Kaveh, on assignment in Iraq with the BBC, was killed by a land mine. Golestan suffered the enormous grief in stoic silence.
His circle of friends in the postwar years included Sadeq Hedayat, Sadeq Chubak, and Fereydon Tavallali. In 1958, he began an intense love affair with Forugh Farrokhzad, which lasted until her premature death in 1966; theirs is the most celebrated love affair in all of modern Persian literature. His marriage continued in spite of the gossip that the tempestuous affair generated.

The gradual tightening of political screws in Iran convinced Golestan that he must leave Iran. All his life, he had been, essentially, an autodidact. He felt Iran could no longer satisfy his curiosity. In the late 1960s, he took a trip to France and, in his own words, spent some “six months just visiting museums and going to theaters and concerts.”[4] He
is a music and opera aficionado, and one of the attractions of the West has always been its rich culture of concerts and operas. After Farrokhzad’s death—friends talked of his debilitating grief[5]—he opted for exile. The only time he returned for any length of time was to make Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley. “I felt I owed the country this film,” he said.[6] Not long after finishing the film, he sold his studio—which had accrued much value as a result of the oil boom of the 1970s—and made his permanent home in England. His wife and two children stayed in Iran.

In fact, Golestan’s “exile” was first emotional and epistemological, then gradually geographical. “Iran,” he says, “is not just a geographical unit; it is a cultural state.” He insists, “my exile had taken place even when I lived in Tehran.”[7] He believes that “my country is as powerful and expansive as the culture that thrives inside me.”[8] He emphasizes that “cultures are not static; in fact, the realm of a culture is never a small corner of earth, or a dot on a map.” He refers to the republic of letters as “the active relations between vital intelligences.” He goes on to define culture as “the constant and dynamic” exploration of ideas.[9]

At the same time, he is deeply critical of the cultural fate that has befallen Iran. “Our culture,” he says, “has long since fallen into a state of decadence.” It has become “warped.”[10] Iran suffers from a kind of split personality. This schism, he declares, has impacted our minds, as well as our vision of the world. In its encounter with the inevitable modern experience, Iran, according to Golestan, faces a crisis of historic proportions. Iranians, however, are unprepared for the implications of this encounter. Instead, they “have clung to appearances,”[11] and lulled themselves with the false comfort of facile answers. In Golestan’s view, Iranians know neither their own culture nor that of the West. In trying to understand either culture, they often suffer either from silly grandiosity or poisonous self-loathing. They have forfeited the task of arriving at fair, judicious, critical, and informed judgments about themselves and the west. Golestan’s emotional and geographical distance from Iran afforded him the opportunity to arrive at radically different judgments.

Golestan maintains this distance even when he is writing about his own work. He describes himself as a “normal man of normal height and average intelligence . . . in an avenue of dwarfs.” He says of himself, “You wanted to see correctly; maybe you didn’t see correctly, but you saw honestly. . . . You knew that your attempts to see correctly, and consequently describe correctly, made you a stranger. It made you different and in your own mind it made you proud of yourself. Such pride was rueful; it was a pride that came as a result of the dwarfish nature of your surroundings; the surroundings were short, you were not tall.”[12]
While advocates of “committed art” and of “socialist realism” defended art that was simple and bereft of formal complexity, Golestan wrote stories that were as structurally complicated as the worlds they described. He believed that invariably there is just one right way to articulate an idea and image, and it is the responsibility of the artist to “work hard and honestly to arrive at this single form; other forms are characterless, and false.”[13] Through experience, he had come to recognize that “there is no difference between the shallow views of the Left or the Right.”14 One makes literature the tool of the party and history, the other wants it subservient to God, the king, the country, or the leader.

Golestan often pointed to the clear similarities between dogmatic Marxism and dogmatic faith. He noted that there was “a whole lost generation . . . [that] needed a fatherfigure, a Mecca.”15 He realized that both the Left and the Right see art as an instrument of ideology and refuse to accept its autonomy. Both think content is more important than form, and both prefer “a revolutionary content” to a creative form. Golestan, on the other hand, offers a different vision of the role of politics in literature. He believes that “being a revolutionary has nothing to do with the subject you choose; it has to do with how you develop a subject. . . . [How you] discover its essence”16 and give it a corresponding form.
Golestan’s life and work is a good example of the principles he advocated. In deciding his attitude toward the shah and his government, he paid no heed to attacks, or to the received opinion of the day about the duties of “committed intellectuals.” Instead, he took a more personal and pragmatic approach, working with those in government he liked, and criticizing those he disliked. In his view, some in the government showed considerable intellectual power and complemented that with respect for human dignity. In spite of being “caught in the strait-jacket of their time,” they were “committed to the comfort and dignity of the people in their community.” In the long run, they are far more effective in serving their country than “the impotent phrasemongers who, in desperation, incurable jealousy and malicious envy,”17 do nothing other than engage in futile and nihilistic negativism.

Even though he agreed to work with some of those in power, Golestan never seems to have compromised his intellectual honesty or his rightful critical disposition. In fact, he sometimes used his privileged position to offer unusually harsh words or images in his work. His film Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley18 is the best example of his unusually harsh criticism of the highest authority, the shah. But his other works are often no less blunt in their critique. His film on Iran’s crown jewels is a good example of his approach. He writes of these jewels as souvenirs of closed minds “besotted by toys,” and he writes of “a history of three hundred years of indifference.”[19]

The pith and parsimony of Golestan’s descriptions can themselves be construed as one of his enduring contributions to Persian letters. His prose has often been praised for its beauty and precision. It is deeply democratic in nature; he uses the language of various strata of society to create polyphony in his narrative. His prose is also democratic because he demands the active participation of the reader in giving meaning to the text. He incorporates into his prose the poetry and music of a conversation, its crescendos, its omissions, and its silences. Just as the correct reading of a poem requires cognizance and command of its rhythm and meter, the correct reading and understanding of Golestan’s prose requires familiarity with its special rhythm and meter. In describing what he calls “clean prose,” he emphasizes that in writing such prose, the most important thing is “to take as our model the trend of an oral conversation, that has the effervescence of a living organism, and the liveliness of effervescence.”[20] He further notes that Persian writers have been aware of this trope for a good millennium. That is why he insists that the real root of his prose must be sought not in Hemingway, but in this rich legacy of Persian literature, in writers like Sa’di and Beyhagi.
There is another aspect of Golestan’s language that renders it particularly modern. Following in the footsteps of such early masters as Nezami, Golestan infuses some of his stories and films with startlingly frank and surprisingly beautiful descriptions of erotic desire.[21]

Contrary to the claim of critics who believe that writing about carnal desire, and, indeed, genres such as the novel and the short story, are Western, Golestan is among the handful of Iranian writers and thinkers who refuse to accept this Eurocentric notion. The art of storytelling, and the desire to write about desire, he believes, have existed in Iran from time immemorial. Stories can be found in every language; in fact, Persians have an unusually rich legacy of old stories but seem ignorant of their privileged literary legacy.[22]

Golestan is well aware of the intricate and intimate relationship between language and thought. He knows that “when the mind is not living . . . the stimuli and tools of the mind also fall into disuse, as they have in our case. Our language was impoverished by our mindlessness, and this poverty itself led to further mindlessness.”[23] Only by transcending the reification[24] of our mind and language can we begin to experience genuine modernity. Many of Golestan’s stories and films are explorations into the ebb and flow of this transcendence.

One of the most difficult obstacles on the way to this “transcendence” in Iran is the pervasive belief in a messiah. Disenfranchised people are commonly prone to a deep yearning for a savior who will come and lead them to a promised land. In several stories, Golestan tackles this problem and, combining his deep knowledge of Iran’s history and geography, its literature and the mores and manners of different social strata with his keen writer’s eye for detail, offers gripping, albeit sad, stories about the pervasive hold this kind of false hope has among Iranians. He writes, “Waiting means not living in the moment.”[25] He describes the lingering habit of some Iranians in small towns who, in anticipation of the expected Mahdi, saddle a horse “every day, early in the morning . . . in case the messiah arrives.”26 In another story, one of the characters laments this long futile wait, and defiantly declares, “When the messiah forgets to arrive” on time, when he delays his arrival long enough “that the horse is no longer a means of travel,” he, too, in return, reserves the right “to doubt his saving powers.”[27]

Religion has been the chief source of these kinds of messianic ideas, and Golestan offers a refreshingly bold and daring critique of its role in a short story called “Being or Being an Icon: Puppet Show in Two Acts.” The subtitle is itself a defiant indication of what the author thinks of religion. In the story, two brothers named Hassan and Hoseyn are waiting in the desert. Their father is with them. After a while their mother arrives astride a camel, riding with a man. Soon we learn that the stranger is not a “dirty dog of an Armenian,”[28] but a Frenchman. He turns out to be the inventor of the camera—one of the most potent metaphors of modernity. Gradually the intended identity of the other characters becomes clear.

Hoseyn, constantly complaining of thirst, unmistakably reminds us of Imam Hoseyn, one of the most venerable figures in all of Shiism and the ultimate martyr of a religion that defines itself, at least partially, by the power of its martyrs. The story of his battle with the army of the Caliph is the most powerful source of Shiism’s passion plays. Hoseyn had come to Karbala to claim the mantle of the prophet, and his army of seventy-two followers was decimated by the superior force of Yazid, the ruling caliph. But in the world of Golestan’s story, Hoseyn is called a “masochist” by his more rational brother. In one scene, the older Hassan tells his brother, “sometimes you make an ass of yourself, and sometimes you make an ass of others. You have passion, but you don’t have brains. It’s like you were born only to become a martyr; it makes no difference for what. A professional martyr. You are more of a martyr than a human being.”[29]

Golestan’s Hassan, on the other hand, offers views that could certainly form the kernel of a reformation in Islam. He is against the idea, promoted by the rest of the family, of making a business out of religion. He is a true advocate of spirituality, and an individualist, suggesting, “you have to depend on your own mind; your own intelligence; even if does not fit with that of others.”[30]

Golestan’s most controversial work was Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley. Looking back at the film thirty-five years after it was made, one cannot but be impressed with its breathtaking bravado and prescient historical sensibility. Worried that the film and the script might be confiscated by SAVAK, Golestan published the script in book form, and before releasing the film, he sent five copies of the published work to trusted friends for safekeeping.[31]

The film was finished in 1971, just as the shah’s modernizing push was reaching a feverish pitch and oil revenues had begun their sky-high trajectory. Golestan deftly satirized the consequences of Iran’s sudden wealth and predicted a revolution. In predicting the fall of the shah at the height of his power and glory, the film was not just bold, but prophetic.
By the time he finished Ghost Valley, he was ready not only to leave Iran permanently, but to sell his studio as well. He had purchased the relatively large compound in Darous, one of Tehran’s more fashionable neighborhoods, when it was still considered the “outskirts” of Tehran and therefore inexpensive. By 1975, with the sharp rise in the price of oil—and thus Iran’s revenue—the price of land in Tehran skyrocketed. His studio was by then worth a fortune. In fact, in its heyday, the studio allowed Golestan to offer employment to a long list of prominent intellectuals, poets, painters, scholars, and writers. At one
time, aside from Forugh, Akhavan-Sales and Esmail Ra’in worked there, and Ghassem Sa’idi used part of the building as his studio.

While Forugh began as the studio’s receptionist, she soon became Golestan’s favorite intellectual interlocutor and his partner in a passionate, intense, and incessantly observed love affair. Golestan was the producer for Forugh’s acclaimed documentary, The House Is Black. Close friends remember their partnership as often playful, sometimes tense, and mutually challenging. Their love was no different. But with her untimely death at a tragically young age, every fact and facet of her relationship with Golestan became the subject of rancorous debate and intervention by her real, or imagined, friends and family. Golestan’s aloofness, tinged with his habit of brutal honesty, came back to haunt him, in this case in the form of poisoned memories and disturbing assertions by the growing ranks of Forugh’s supporters and fans. He has maintained a studied, even stubborn, silence about his side of the story, allowing these rumors and hints to grow and fester.

All his life, Golestan has been a collector of art. As a gesture of friendship to some of his friends, he purchased their work, often long before the art world came to appreciate its worth and value. His impeccable taste and cultured sensibilities allowed him to choose the most important works of each artist friend. Today, he possesses what could be considered one of the most impressive collections of masterpieces of modern Iranian art anywhere in the world.

He is a voracious reader. But whether choosing books to read or friends to keep, he is highly selective. His appetite for poetry knows no bounds. He is as enthusiastic about Sepehri, Forugh, and Hafez as he is about Shakespeare and Eliot. He can cite thousands of lines of poetry in English and Persian, and a good line unwittingly brings tears to his eyes—as does any discussion of Forugh. He is no less passionate about the world of cinema and theater. His collection of films, more than a thousand strong, includes every masterpiece of modern cinema. His photographic memory helps him conjure at will scenes and dialogue from his favorite films and plays. His strong affinity for classical music, his intimate knowledge of modern masterpieces, his no less impressive mastery of modern theater, have made him a true Renaissance man.

He is a man with a contagious appetite for life and all it offers, while remaining at least outwardly stoic in response to its tragedies. A good bottle of wine—of which he is an experienced connoisseur—a walk in the green, rainy English countryside, where he lives in an impeccably restored nineteenth-century manor house, or a moment of quiet contemplation on the balcony of his small two-bedroom apartment in Nice, where he seems serenely happy, bring out in him an ebullient joy of living that is only subtly tempered by the melancholy that comes with wisdom, and with suffering the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” He is the highest embodiment of an eminent artist who has left an enduring and increasing impact on modern Iranian culture.

He was considered by many the best writer of his generation. Fiction was for him more than a mere vocation or avocation; it was an existential necessity. He believed that fiction is a primal urge rooted in the human soul. He seemed to experience life only as a story; for Hushang Golshiri, our acts of cognition, the core of our communications, and the ultimate structure of our affective responses to the world are all, in their narrative structure, nothing but stories. “No, I have no house,” he once said, “nor is there a roof over my head. What I write, this cursive mode from right to left, is the wall and roof of my house. It is under the curves of the letter N that I find my refuge.”[1]

Hushang Golshiri was born on March 15, 1938 (24 Esfand 1316), in a working class family in the city of Isfahan. He was the second child in a family of three. He offers a harshly critical, defiantly frank, but ultimately compassionate image of his childhood in his largely autobiographical novel, Djenameh,[2] or the Djinn Chronicle. His father was a taciturn, surly, and self-centered brick mason; his mother was a traditional woman, with no formal education but with a great native knack for narrative. In Golshiri’s rendition, she loved unrelentingly, but her ability to suffer the many inequities of life silently was bewildering. She was, in short, a Persian version of Chaucer’s Griselda, the ultimate patient suffering wife.]

Golshiri’s family was forced to move where there was work for the father. Some semblance of security was achieved only when the Anglo-Persian Oil Company hired him. The young Hushang was nevertheless forced to work, too, to help the family make ends meet. Before graduating from high school, he had held many menial jobs—factory worker, bazaar shop attendant, baker, and ditch digger. The rich polyphony of his mature fiction was in no small measure the result of the varied experiences of his youth.

He had his first “writing” job in 1958, but it hardly tapped his creative genius. He was a simple scribe in a notary’s office. The world of creative writing was not far away, however. He finished high school that same year and wrote his first short story. It has never been published. It was, in his words, “very raw.”[3] In this period he also dabbled in poetry. Soon, however, he gave poetry up and concentrated on fiction. His refusal to publish his juvenilia foreshadowed his future habits as a writer. He was a perfectionist who saw the realm of fiction as something sacred, worthy of only the best one could produce.

A year later, in 1959, Golshiri entered the University of Isfahan as a student of Persian literature. He earned his living by teaching in a small village in the suburbs of Isfahan. He had a lifelong passion for teaching that was matched only by his insatiable desire to learn and to write. When, in later years, the Islamic government banned him from teaching at the university, he turned his own house, then the living room of a friend, and finally a vacant room in someone’s office, into a virtual university, where he spent endless hours helping aspiring young writers to master the art and craft of fiction.

When he entered the university, he also joined a small literary society called Anjomane Adabi Saeb.4 It was there that he met Bahram Sadeqi, a writer of intricately complicated works of fiction whose novels’ aestheticism, as well as his playful character, left an indelible mark on Golshiri.[5]

But Iranian literature in those days seemed inseparable from politics and had little tolerance for a purely aesthetic view of art. Golshiri, too, was somehow drawn in, and in 1961 he was arrested on political charges. He spent some six months in jail. The prison experience turned out to be formative, shaping his aesthetic views for the rest of his life. His lifelong aversion to Soviet-style Marxism had its genesis in this prison experience, where he saw how “comrades” treated literature only as a tool of propaganda and a weapon in a pervasive class struggle. Criticizing Marxists and revolutionaries for their simpleminded approach to literature and for their opportunistic treatment of other humans became a leitmotif in some of Golshiri’s novels and short stories. Two of his best works, My Small Room of Prayer and The King of the Benighted,6 are prime examples of his formally sophisticated, politically defiant critique of the kind of literary sensibility that drew its inspiration from Soviet Marxism.

We also see elements of Golshiri’s genuinely democratic aesthetics. Rather than implicitly denigrating the masses by assuming them to be dimwitted and incapable of understanding a complex work of art, he trusts them to be part of the republic of literature. He invites the reader to play an active role in affording meaning to a text.

Once out of prison, Golshiri resumed his studies at the university and his literary activities at the Saeb Literary Society. But gradually and inexorably, tensions between the traditionalists and the modernists in the society led to a split. Out of the schism came the embryo of a new group that published a journal called Jonge Esfehan—one of the most innovative, experimental, and influential literary publications of its time. In the days when Soviet-style “realism” was the mantra of literary critics in Iran, Jonge Esfehan dared to think differently. It expounded on the literary theories of T. S. Eliot and the School of New Criticism. The journal championed the idea that in analyzing a work of art, form, structural cohesion, and aesthetic beauty were far more important than “revolutionary content.” Jonge Esfahan also introduced Golshiri—in fact, all of Iran—to the ideas and fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Golshiri published some of his earliest writings in the journal. The most enduring friendships and collaborations of his life, particularly with Abolhassan Najafi, a lifelong friend and mentor, were the result of his work with this journal.

Golshiri’s literary career radically changed in 1969, when he published Prince Ehtejab. The book established his reputation as a writer of formidable talent and promise. In fact the poetic, intricately parsimonious prose of Prince Ehtejab tries to capture the dying gasps of an anguished man, cursed with the power of memory, laden with the weight of a dehumanizing past, and faced with the challenge of a new species of self-assertive women; for him, as for Joyce’s Stephen Daedelus, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken.

Soon after the book’s publication, Bahman Farman Ara, then only a reputable film critic and the director of a couple of acclaimed short documentaries, traveled to Isfahan to convince Golshiri to give him the film rights to Prince Ehtejab. After forty-eight hours of intense discussions, Golshiri succumbed. The points of discussion were all artistic in nature and dealt with the problems of rendering the novel into a film. It is a measure of Golshiri’s commitment to his art, and a clear indication of the almost stoic world he lived in, that he gave the film rights to Farman Ara without receiving a penny as remuneration.

Golshiri and Farman Ara worked on a script, and after months of effort, they submitted a draft of the screenplay to the censor’s office in the Ministry of Culture. In those days—as now—no film could be produced in Iran without prior authorization by governmental bureaucrats-cum-censors. The script, as well as the “revised resubmit,” was summarily rejected. The problem, it turned out, was with Golshiri’s political reputation. The authors’ decided to change tactics rather than the substance of their work. They resubmitted the script under the innocuous name of Farideh Labbakhi-Nezhad, the full name of Farman Ara’s wife. This time the script was immediately approved for production, and, in fact, commended for its artistic merit. It took another three years to raise the onehundred-thousand-dollar budget needed to make the film. It turned out to be an artistic and commercial success. It won prizes in many prestigious festivals, beginning with the Tehran Festival in 1974, where Alain Robbe-Grillet, a member of the jury, had special words of praise for the original novel and the film rendition of it.7 This should have come as no surprise. The film had translated Golshiri’s demanding prose into a kind of Baroque cinematic style that mixed the brooding, languorous tension of film noir with a jarring, ruptured narrative structure reminiscent of Last Year at Marienbad.

Making Prince Ehtejab turned out to be a defining moment in the artistic career of not just Golshiri, but Farman Ara as well. His next film was also based on a work of Golshiri’s; it was called Tall Shadows of the Wind. Again Golshiri helped write the script. The film was completed in 1978. It could not, however, match the commercial or critical success of the earlier project. For the next twenty years, Farman Ara made no other films.

By then he had become a close friend of Golshiri, and when he finally did go back to filmmaking, his acclaimed Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine had at its narrative and emotional core the character of Golshiri himself. In writing about the film, Farman Ara said, “if I have a model for this character, it was Golshiri who was always in the back of my mind.”8 In Smell of Camphor, as the title forewarns, the character that resembles Golshiri dies. Golshiri was alive when the film was finished, and saw it in a private screening. If we remember that all his intellectual life Golshiri was tormented by the question of death; if we keep in mind that central to the emotional labyrinth of Prince Ehtejab is his fear of death and that the climax of the plot occurs when the Prince is informed of his own death; and, finally, if we remember how strongly, even superstitiously, Golshiri believed in the transformative power of art, then it cannot be hard to fathom how traumatic it must have been for Golshiri to witness his own death and funeral on the screen. As it turned out, the film was far more accurate than Farman Ara could have anticipated.

The success of Prince Ehtejab as a film and a novel did not translate into social or economical security for Golshiri. Although the book went into eleven printings while he was alive, financial comfort and freedom from monetary anxiety was not his. Only in the last couple of years of his life, with the receipt of revenues from his translated works and with the money from the literary prizes he had been awarded, dire financial want ended.

Furthermore, for many years Prince Ehtejab was out of print because Golshiri refused to succumb to the demands of the monarchist and Islamic censors. They each wanted a few scenes or words of the novel changed, and Golshiri would not accede to their demands. The Pahlavi regime objected to the book’s radical critique of traditional kings and their brutality. The prince of the novel, they assumed, was only a thin disguise for the shah. Golshiri’s other novella, called Jobe Khaneh, or The Armory, was censored because the heroine of the story, a drunken woman of lecherous demeanor, might remind the readers of Princess Ashraf.[9] The Islamic Republic, on the other hand, could not fathom Prince Ehtejab’s biting satire of the Shiite clergy, or its frank depiction of the depraved sexuality of the story’s protagonists.
Popular fame and critical acclaim did not bring Golshiri political security either. In 1973 he was again imprisoned for his activities against the shah’s regime. He spent another six months in jail, his civil rights were suspended for five years, and he was forbidden from teaching. There was thus little he could do in Isfahan; security forces were constantly on his tail. He moved to Tehran and sought refuge in the anonymity of a large city.

About this time, Golshiri had the first major romantic encounter of his life. The result, as always, appeared in the form of a novel called Christiane-o Kid or Christine and the Kid. The Christine of the story was a young Englishwoman who had been traveling in Iran. Her real name is Barbara Nestor, and she is now a member of the city council in one of England’s main urban centers and fondly remembers her years in Isfahan. The novel is brilliant in depicting the many subtle difficulties in cross-cultural affairs of the heart. In Tehran, Golshiri faced the problem of all early-blooming artists. Prince Ehtejab cast a long shadow over everything he published in subsequent years. Although he continued to write successful novels and short stories, everything was, to his consternation, compared to Prince Ehtejab and found wanting. Every time there was a short hiatus between his published works, Tehran’s literary circles were awash with rumors about the premature end to Golshiri’s career. He only had one novel in him, his detractors would sometimes gleefully claim. His collection of short stories, Namaz Khaneye Kouchak Man (My Little Prayer Room), published in 1975, and the novel Bareye Gomshodeye Rai (The Shepherd’s Lost Sheep), published in 1977 as the first volume of a planned but unfinished trilogy, did not end the speculation about his premature end. In fact, in his talk at the “Ten Nights of Poetry” at Tehran’s Goethe Institute, Golshiri did not indulge in the common practice of inciting the audience with stories and poems of blood and gore; instead, he delivered a sober message about the premature death of Iranian writers—how they all write their masterpieces early in their careers and then fade into a sunset of silence or mediocrity—that helped fuel the eagerness of his detractors to use his own theory to declare an end to his creative life.

In his collection of stories and novels, Golshiri never pandered to the lowest common denominator. He dared to be an iconoclast in both content and form. In the The Shepherd’s Lost Sheep, for example, he offered an insightful, critical, and compassionate image of intellectuals in modern Iran. In the short stories, on the other hand, he challenged many of society’s political and religious stereotypes about martyrs and heroes, villains and saints. And in content, his style was no less unique.

His prose was metaphoric. Borges was fond of saying that censorship is the mother of all metaphor, but for Golshiri, metaphor had a more ontological essence. There is in his style of writing an elliptical and allusive quality that is, he admits, based on Plato’s Theory of Forms. The theory is described most fully in the famous “Parable of the Cave.” In the Platonic realm, men and women are born with an equal and primordial knowledge of all Forms (or ideas), and acts of cognition, as well as experiences of epiphany, are nothing but a kind of reawakening. “I only hint and make fleeting references,” Golshiri said in a moment of self-deconstruction, “and I count on the innate knowledge of my careful readers to afford the words, and the story, their meanings.”10 His sparse style, his economy of images, the masterly crafted quality of every sentence, give his stories their innovative and demanding quality.

On the eve of the revolution, Golshiri published a novella that was unusual in style and uncanny in its historic prescience. The Tale of Hanging Until Dead of the Rider That Shall Come uses archaic and densely metaphoric language. The dominant motif of the work is the endemic messianic tendency in Iranian culture. We read about the unending desire of Iranians to await and embrace a redeemer who shall come and violently liberate society. Through the intricate maze of the story, Golshiri underscores the view that new revolutionary groups and creeds, in spite of their secular appearance, are but a new rendition of the same old tale of the messiah who has yet to come. The Hidden Imam of Shiism and the revolutionary proletariat of modern ideology are, Golshiri suggests, merely different moments in Iran’s lingering and passive expectation for a redeemer. In one scene, he describes, with dread beauty and chilling parsimony, how on designated nights some villagers in Iran saddle a horse for the anticipated Mahdi, and when the redeemer fails to appear, kill the innocent horse.

Golshiri was one of those rare writers who not only write good stories and novels, but can also cleverly describe and deconstruct the concepts of the art and craft of literature. Early in his career, he wrote essays on literary criticism and on the poetics of prose. In this work, too, he refused to repeat the shibboleth of the time about “committed art,” and about the origins of the novel. He and a handful of other critics dared offer the rudiments of an alternative theory. The dominant paradigm in literary criticism, both in Iran and in the West, holds that the novel as a genre is Western in origin and nature. Golshiri, on the other hand, was among those who argued that Iranian literature of the past was in fact a rich repository of novelistic tropes, and that it can, and should, be mined by Persian authors in their attempt to develop their craft. The Qur’an and the Persian gazal are both, in his view, brilliant examples of the kind of nonlinear narrative wrongly described as “Western.”
The Islamic Revolution brought many changes to Golshiri’s life. In the first months of the revolution, he was allowed to resume his academic career at Tehran University, where he taught creative writing. His new teaching tenure did not last long. As soon as the Islamic forces took control of the university, he was expelled.

More important, he met his future wife in those early months of revolutionary fervor. Her name was Farzaneh Taheri, and she was a beautiful young woman of precocious erudition, impressive command of the English language, and fierce independence. It was a measure of Golshiri’s character that instead of choosing a docile housewife as companion, he opted for an intellectual partner. She was herself a fine translator of everything from delectable renditions of Raymond Chandler mystery novels to Vladimir Nabokov. She has also been unfailingly committed to making Golshiri the best writer he could be, and to preserving his legacy. She became the first critic of everything he wrote and did. As he never tired of saying and writing, her presence in his life brought a level of security, intellectual community, and partnership that greatly enhanced his life as an artist. They had two children in their long and productive marriage—Ghazal and Barbad, himself now an accomplished artist.
With revolution also came the inevitable distractions of politics. Golshiri was intimately involved with the attempt to revive a writers’ union in Iran. He was fearless and tireless in the dangerous fight against the creeping despotism of the Islamic regime. He paid a heavy price for his opposition. His books were banned; he was even forced to go into hiding for a while. Nevertheless, his passion for writing, for nurturing new talent, and for editing literary journals went unabated. As soon as he could come out of hiding, Golshiri resumed his myriad literary activities. He helped launch several important literary journals and helped edit several others. He founded Karnameh, a literary journal that continued its work long after Golshiri’s premature death. He was also on the editorial board of Nagde Agah, where some of the most important essays of the time on literary and social criticism—including many of Golshiri’s essays—were published. Golshiri also wrote several more works of fiction, from the long autobiographical novel Jennammeh to several novellas, plays, and collections of short stories.

As translations of his work began to appear outside Iran—Prince Ehtejab, for example is now available in English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Kurdish—he was invited more frequently to major conferences and universities to talk about literature in Iran. He was also awarded several important literary prizes, including the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, the Heinrich Boll Fellowship, and the Helmann-Hammet Prize. While he used the fellowship and the residence in Boll House to finish his last major novel, Djenameh, his response to the Helmann-Hammet Prize was emblematic of his general attitude. He had been nominated for the prize with the understanding that should he win, his name would not be divulged. Past Iranian winners of the award had been persecuted by the Islamic regime. When he won, leaders of Human Rights Watch, responsible for the prize, indirectly contacted him and suggested that it would facilitate the work of future Iranian writers and poets if he accepted the award publicly. He did not hesitate for a moment. At great risk to himself and his family, he agreed.

The years of relentless anxiety and fear, of constant confrontation with an increasingly bellicose regime, and the grief of losing colleagues and friends to the Islamic regime’s “death squads” began to take their toll on him. Long years of abuse and neglect of his body had made him easy prey to predatory diseases. In early 2000, he was afflicted with what was diagnosed as a routine infection. Yet for reasons that are hard to fathom, physicians failed to treat the infection vigorously enough. It spread throughout his body rapidly, and on June 5, 2000, he died of meningitis. He was only sixty-three years old.

Sadeq Hedayat was a tragic man beset with tormenting, incongruent, dualities. He influenced a generation of Iranians as much by his art as by his life and death. In him the tangled roots of a dying aristocracy combined with his elective affinity for the masses to make an oddly incongruent but ultimately endearing artistic and political persona. His pedantic, at times petulant, nationalism, his erudite cosmopolitanism, his ontological despair at the contingent nature of existence, and his exuberant commitment to art as the only source of redemption, all worked to create a character of infinite complexity and iconic appeal.

He was an incurably private man who lived a minutely dissected public life. Those who knew him talk of his “special charisma, some inner light.”[1] His incorrigible shyness, particularly evident in his adult years and far more pronounced in the company of women, and the obsessively polite and decorous tone and style of his personal behavior, conveniently hid the intrepid radicalism, the rambunctious, even ribald, quality of many of his stories. The clever glitter of his piercingly large and observant eyes contrasted with the lean, sickly, and resigned countenance of his mature years. His disdain for Islam was matched only by his aversion to dogma in any guise.

Dualism even permeated the quality of his writing. Some works, such as The Blind Owl, are rightfully considered the apogee of Persian literary modernism. They display a perfectionist’s quest for creativity and beauty. Too many other short stories and plays, however, are embarrassingly devoid of aesthetic polish and betray dubious political sentiments.

Sadeq Hedayat was born on February 17, 1903 (27 Bahman 1281) in Tehran. His father and mother both came from families with solid aristocratic roots. Yet by the time of Hedayat’s birth, his father, though an eminent historian, was simply a government functionary of middle-class means. He was the last child of a large family and received his early education in Tehran’s Elmiye School. He then enrolled at the famous Dar alFunun, where some of his schoolmates remember him as jocund and playful, even a doodling prankster.[2]

An eye infection, the first ailment in a lifelong series of often debilitating physical problems, forced him to leave school for a year. When he was ready to resume his education, he went to Saint Louis, where he was immersed in the rigors of a French Jesuit education. The school had a formative influence on his love of French literature and his mastery of the French language. It is a measure of the school’s unique role that Iran’s two dominant literary modernists, Hedayat in fiction and Nima in poetry, were both students there. Both were, like much of the elite of the time, unabashed Francophiles. In fact, French cultural hegemony lasted well past the end of World War II. It was only in the early 1960s, long after Hedayat, that English became the lingua franca of commerce and culture in Iran.

Hedayat’s proclivity for writing, as well as the existential angst that characterized his literary voice, are evident even in his earliest writings. Some have suggested that he began writing early in childhood, when he single-handedly published a newspaper. He wrote the text by hand, used his own illustrations, and distributed the paper among the members of his family.[3] In 1914, he published a school newspaper and called it Neday-e Amvat (The Voice of the Dead). The title proved prescient in that fear of death and anxiety about the futility of a contingent life turned out to be the central leitmotif of the short stories, and the “two novels, a novella, two historical plays, a puppet play, a travelogue and a collection of satirical parodies”[4] that constitute his opus.

While still in high school, Hedayat entered a literary contest organized by a magazine called Omid and won first prize.5 By the time he graduated from St. Louis in 1925 (1304), he had already published a monograph called Ensan-o Heyvan6 (Humans and Animals), a rather strange narrative that uses an eclectic combination of ideas from European philosophers, the Qur’an, and Buddha to examine the differences between animals and humans and to lament man’s cruelty to animals. It has been suggested that the book, indeed Hedayat’s lifelong vegetarianism, resulted from a traumatic childhood experience where he witnessed the gruesome slaughter of a camel.7 Humans and Animals is also where Hedayat first waxes eloquent about the rights of animals, the cruelty and arrogance of humans who think they have the right to hunt, and the virtues of vegetarianism. In other words, the genesis of his more famous work, Fava’ede Giyah Khari8 (On the Virtues of Vegetarianism) must be sought in this rather obscure monograph.
In 1925, Hedayat received a government scholarship to study abroad. There was a caveat, however: he had to study engineering, and worse still, he had to do it in the city of Ghent in Belgium. Predictably, he lasted less than eight months. The damp and dark Belgium days and the dour curriculum combined to drive him to the edge of despair. His brief, two-page-long essay on death, called Marg (Death), mirrors his Ghent melancholy. It reads like an overture to the requiems that are his other, death-haunted major works. He writes of death as the ultimate source of humanity’s fears and anxieties. Death is the great liberator; it is mercifully eternal, whereas life is—to our torment and delight—finite.

After the eight-month agony of Ghent, Hedayat convinced government authorities in Iran to allow him to continue his studies in Paris. Even the joys of Paris and his newfound friends could not mitigate his melancholy. He transferred a couple of times to other schools and other cities, but to no avail. Civil engineering was simply not his forte. Even when he changed his field of study to French literature, he remained listless and melancholy. His unhappiness was more indigenous than induced by exile or the other harsh realities of the quotidian. Home beckoned, and in 1929 he finally decided to give up his scholarship and return home. He had not finished his degree, and sadly, in spite of his growing stature as Iran’s preeminent writer, he could never make enough money as a writer to survive. His failure to finish college ended up seriously limiting his employment choices and his opportunities for the rest of his life.

The Paris years are generally considered some of the most productive in Hedayat’s life. He published several books and stories. The first signs of an incipient nationalism, in the spirit of Zabih Behruz, began to appear in his works. Parvin Dokhtare-Sasan (Parvin, Daughter of Sasan), was a perfect example of this incipient nationalism, with its incumbent romantic notion of Persia’s grandeur before the calamity of the Arab invasion, and its embarrassing anti-Arab rhetoric.

The Paris years were emblematic of Hedayat’s life for another, altogether different, reason. In 1928, at the height of his creativity, he attempted suicide by trying to drown himself in a river. He was saved, only to try it, more efficiently, later.

Back in Tehran, he moved in with his family and began to work as a simple clerk in the National Bank (Melli). He hated the drudgeries of clerical work, but economic realities left him little choice. Indeed, for much of his adult life, he lived on the edge of destitution. Books and recordings were the two areas on which he splurged. He subscribed to the French literary magazine Nouvelle Observatoire, and through it learned of new books and then used his network of friends to procure those he desired.[9] Friends describe his room in his family home, which contained his bed, a couple of chairs, and a long wooden table with a gramophone on top. He loved Western classical music and had a passion for Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky.[10]

He was, by all accounts, without guile and intolerant of knaves. He was highly mindful of the sanctity of his solitude and famously selective about those he allowed into the coveted circle of his friends. He often met his friends in cafés, most often in the nowfamous Café Ferdows, and with this, the idea of holding court in cafés and tea houses became a fad. He had a gift for gab and a subtle sense of humor. He was also given to intelligent practical jokes.

He was a voracious reader with an almost sophomoric desire always to have in his possession the latest work of literature. Friends talk of his infinite generosity, and his utter lack of possessiveness when it came to money or any other worldly possessions, but they also say that when it came to books, he was possessive, even secretive. His desk was always devoid of books; he kept his reading material in a small locked wooden closet.[11]

He had read widely in French literature. He had also developed a particular affinity for pre-Islamic Persian culture and languages. In December 1936, he traveled to India to learn one of these languages. At the same time, he was there to witness the making of the first Persian film in the city of Bombay.12 After learning Avesta, he translated some old pre-Islamic texts into Persian. But clearly the most important event of his Indian sojourn, indeed of his life, was the publication of Bufe Kur (The Blind Owl), undoubtedly his masterpiece. It is here more than in any other work that Hedayat’s tragic vision permeates the form and content of the narrative.

The Blind Owl has been interpreted in a thousand and one ways. Some have seen it as an allegory of despotism; others see it as an exercise in transcending the agonies of existence and the dread of death through creativity.13 Art no longer mimics reality, but attempts to master it. Salvation can come to the protagonist only if he can make himself understood to his double, his shadow. If for Descartes we exist because we think, and if for Camus we exist because we rebel, for Hedayat we exist because we create. The Blind Owl exemplifies this creativity. It is a set of concentric images that cohere into an enormously complex structure in which the cosmic and the individual are united.[14]

Though it is not clear when he wrote The Blind Owl—some scholars argue that he had finished it while he was still in Europe—there is no doubt that he first published it in mimeograph form in Bombay. Later it was published in Iran, and eventually it was translated into many languages. It is arguably the most influential work of fiction in the pantheon of modern Persian fiction. Some of its characters—Pir Marde Khenzer Penzeri, for example—have taken on a life of their own and become permanent fixtures in the country’s symbolic capital. Its stream of consciousness structure has often been emulated by other writers, while critics have argued that a variety of writers—from Edgar Allan Poe to Rainer Maria Rilke—might have influenced his style. With The Blind Owl, Hedayat established his reputation as a novelist of vast erudition and daring formal experimentation.

By 1937, Hedayat was back in Tehran, once again in search of gainful employment. He was hired to work in an office trusted with the task of fostering Western musical methods in Iran. He was also a contributing editor of the journal published by that office, Majalleye Musigi (Journal of Music).

When World War II came to Iran in the form of the Anglo-Soviet occupation of the country and the forced abdication of Reza Shah, not only the country’s political atmosphere, but Hedayat’s life, changed. He was fearless in his criticism of Reza Shah, accusing him in several of his essays and short stories of a brutal, uncultured despotism. Although he was a close friend of several leading members of the Tudeh Party, including Khalil Maleki, Abdolhoseyn Nushin, and Bozorg Alavi; and although he was active in the PersoSoviet Society of Cultural Relations, commonly knows as VOKS; and in spite of many entreaties from the party, he never joined.15 His most famously political story, Hadji Aga, bears some superficial similarities to the party’s anticapitalist message. Party hacks and theorists praised it as the most “progressive” work of Hedayat and as proof of his affinity with the party. In fact, not only was he seriously averse to totalitarian ideology, but Hadji
Aga, with its deeply sardonic and cynical rendition of the poor and of intellectuals, was anathema to the Tudeh Party’s “proletarian optimism.”

Precisely in the years when many of the country’s leading writers and poets were joining the ranks of the Tudeh Party, Hedayat published two important essays that can be read as his political manifesto. One appears as his introduction to a translation of Kafka; the other is the preface he prepared for his edition of Khayam’s quatrains. Both essays leave no doubt of Hedayat’s tragic vision and his disdain for the false certitudes of totalitarian ideologies. The inscrutability of humanity was for him the ultimate source of literature and, at the same time, the insurmountable obstacle to genuine human relations. He lamented man’s isolation and wrote of humanity’s “utter loneliness,” and of life as an “endless nightmare” in which the torturer and the tortured are both “men without qualities.” He praised Franz Kakfa as the first writer who depicted “humanity’s despicable plight in a world without god.” Our freedom, he suggested, “is in our death. But we are also hopeful for this life.”[16]

The relative freedom that came with the collapse of Reza Shah’s reign allowed Hedayat to articulate more openly his particular disdain for Islam and Shiite clerics as well. His play Afsaney-e Afarinesh (Myth of Creation),17 first published in Paris in 1946 with the help of his friend Chahid-Nourai, was a truly daring satire on Biblical and Qur’anic genesis stories. His Be’satol Eslamiye (Islamic Mission), inspired by Ernest Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka, chronicles the missionary travel of four mullahs to Paris. Whereas Ninotchka satirized the shallow dogmatism of Soviet Bolsheviks, Hedayat lampoons Islamic clerics whose profession of faith is ingloriously subverted by the temptations of Paris and its Folies Bergere.

By the late 1940s, Hedayat was becoming increasingly disappointed about not just his life, but Iran as a society. Persian music and cuisine, Iranian scholars and politicians, and writers and poets of the past and the present became subjects of his ridicule. As one critic observed, he called Iran “a latrine [khala], a stinking abominable, filthy, stifling cemetery.”18 His private life was no consolation. He had not married, and by all accounts the only woman he was ever attracted to was a die-hard communist married to another die-hard communist.19 His writing, bereft of any tender rendition of love affairs between men and women, only reflects the emotional wasteland that was his private erotic life. Interestingly, the only moment of intimacy rendered with any semblance of tenderness takes place in The Blind Owl, between the male protagonist and the young brother of the woman he loves and hates.

Not only Hedayat’s life, but his death, too, have been enveloped in a mythical mist of romance and reprobation. Suicide is sacrilege in Islam—as it is in Judaism and Christianity. It is also, at least according to Albert Camus, a writer of some intellectual affinity with Hedayat, the “only serious philosophical question” or our age. It is, in the tradition of existentialism, an attempt at apotheosis, mortal humanity’s attempt to play God.

Hedayat not only attempted suicide once in his youth, but throughout his intellectual life he toyed with the idea of suicide as a remedy against the incurable and unbearable angst and pain that is at the core of our existence. “I am,” he once wrote in a letter, often forced “to remember the words about ‘to be or not to be.’ In a new world, I was born defeated, wounded and aged . . . this corrupt and mendacious world.”[20]

In late 1950, Hedayat began to plan for a trip to Europe. It clearly seemed to be a trip of no return. In the letters he wrote at that time, he betrayed an increasing sense of despondency. “Everything in this forsaken land produces exhaustion and despair. Anyway, I idle my life away and from every direction, be it left or right, I am under a constant barrage of attack and they all pretend that I am single-handedly responsible for every shitty step taken by anybody. Everyone demands of me to heed my social responsibility but nobody bothers to ask whether I even have the power to buy pen and paper? Do I have a bed to lie in and a comfortable room to live in? . . . In this shitty land, everything turns moronic.”21 He carefully collected from his friends all his own unpublished manuscripts and then in a fury reminiscent of Kafka, he burned them all. One of the manuscripts was called Rooye Jadhey-e Namnak (On the Damp Road), and its sad fate inspired a poem by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales.[22]

His old and trusted friend Hassan Chahid-Nourai beckoned Hedayat to come to Paris. But Hedayat was decidedly poor and defiantly proud. To defray the costs of his travel, he sold his books and records, his only worldly belongings. Whatever was left unsold, he gave away to friends and left for Paris.

There was no redemption there. By the time he arrived, Chahid-Nourai was on his deathbed. Hedayat’s attempt to travel to Geneva or London to visit two other friends came to naught. The news from Iran was despairing. Islamic terrorists had killed his brotherin-law, General Hadji Ali Razmara. His own attempts to secure for himself a teaching position had also failed. On April 9, 1951, his body was found in his small Paris studio. In a gesture fraught with dizzying layers of symbolic meaning, he closed all the doors and windows and ventilation shafts to the outside world; the tiny apartment became his tomb. Like the title of one of his own stories, he was “buried alive.” He turned the gas on and put his head into the oven. He is buried in Paris’s famed Père-Lachaise cemetery.

“A room of his own” he never had, yet he was easily the most prolific and arguably the most widely read journalist and writer of modern Iran. He was a “cottage industry” unto to himself, churning out thousands of pages every year. It is estimated that for the Khandaniha magazine alone, where he worked for many years, he wrote more than thirty thousand pages.[1] Still, he died a poor man, with nothing but a small apartment—purchased through the journalists’ union—to his name. He wrote or translated, by his own reckoning, more than fourteen hundred books.[2] A journalist who tried to compile a complete list has not been able to come up with more than about one hundred fifty volumes.[3] Their subjects ranged from science fiction and mystery novels to the biography of the prophet Mohammad and the collected works of Maurice Maeterlinck.

His childhood was rather uneventful. He was born in 1895 (1274) in the city of Sanandaj to a lower-middle-class family. He was the oldest son and had a brother and a sister. His birth name was Zabihollah Hakim Elahi, and only later in life did he take the nom de plume of Mansuri. His father was a government official and led the nomadic life of a transient bureaucrat. He had no love for literature and certainly made no effort to encourage his son’s literary talents and curiosities. Zabihollah’s first school was run by French priests and thus began his interest in the French language. When the family moved to Kermanshah, a physician in the city tutored the young Zabihollah in French. He was nineteen when his father died and supporting his family became his responsibility. He was hired as a translator for a paper, and thus began the most enduring career in the history of Iranian journalism.

His most popular books were clearly the historical novels in which he mixed a dose of history with a lot of imagination to create novels that were always hefty in length and engrossing in style. At a time when new books by important writers had an initial run of three thousand copies, reprints of his historical novels sold at least a couple of hundred thousand copies. Although he was an avid fan of French history and had come to know many of its major and minor characters, he was also a nationalist with a deep interest and attachment to the history and culture of Iran. His four-volume history of Iran, entitled The Eternal Land, covered Iranian history from the earliest settlements of the Plateau to the present. In his own inimitable fashion, it combined fact and fantasy, rendering it unusable as a scholarly source, yet it was very popular as highly readable mytho-history.

Maybe the strangest twist in his strange career is the fact that he was known to have published books as translations that were actually his own creations. Their alleged authors were, like the narratives themselves, the figments of his rich imagination. There is also no doubt that on numerous occasions he took a short article and turned it into a book of several hundred pages. It is famously reported that he serialized a popular book called The Journals of Tamarlane, in His Own Words. He claimed that it was compiled and edited by a prominent French scholar and a member of the esteemed Academie Française. It recounted in great detail the daily exploits of Tamarlane, in his own voice. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the country’s prime minister at the time, developed a keen interest in the serial and became curious about the book. He asked the editor of the magazine that was publishing the journal—Sepido-Siyah (Black and White)—to loan him the copy of the original in French. For many a week, Mansuri prevaricated, dodged, ignored the request, and eluded the editor. Finally, he was left with no choice but to produce the book. The alleged great tome of scholarship, the basis for the story that had by then run for sixty consecutive weeks, turned out to be a small monograph of little more than twenty pages, printed in a large font usually used for children’s books.[4]

On another occasion, he took an essay by Henri Corban, the renowned French scholar, on the subject of Mullah Sadra—the great Persian philosopher of the Safavid era—and turned it into a bulky narrative. To his credit, he made the ideas of the mullah, known for the difficulty of his prose, easy and accessible. The book, like everything else he wrote, was a best seller. When Corbin heard of “his” best seller in Iran, he became interested in meeting Mansuri. When told of Corbin’s wish, Mansuri is purported to have declaimed in a tone of uncomfortable surprise, “That is strange. I thought he was dead.” The meeting, of course, never took place.[5]

One can suggest several possible cultural sources for this trope of self-effacement. In an interview, Mansuri was asked why he insisted on translating, or more accurately, why he insisted on calling his work translation. He responded by referring to his early encounters with some of the great classics and how, “Faced with so many major works of genius, I thought of myself as too minor in comparison.”6 In fact, he was unfailingly humble in demeanor and in his sense of his own importance. He never referred to himself as an author or writer but in self-deprecatory terms like “mere scribe” or “writing wage-earner.”

At the same time, his attempt to emphasize the Western authorship of his works may well be related to the social malaise of the time that afforded undue value to all that was Western and denigrated as inferior and insignificant anything that was “native.” It mattered little whether the subject was a refrigerator or a short story. If it was made in the West, it was superior. Mansuri’s proclivity for claiming European authorship for works that were primarily his creation was, in this sense, a form of packaging and promoting his native commodity. He was apparently ready to “camouflage his self”[7] in order to cater to the society’s penchant for purchasing “imported” goods.

Finally, his self-denial might well have resulted from the conspiracy of silence that was in force about his work. In spite of being the most widely read writer in modern Iran, or, in the words of one critic, Iran’s sole “best-selling author,” he was not taken seriously during his lifetime. The few essays that were written about him were invariably critical, if not condescending.8 The only exception came from the Union of Iranian Journalists—an organization he had helped create and whose first president he had been—which dedicated a hall to his name and a night to celebrate his journalism. He lived to be ninety, and of those years seventy-two were spent in journalism. To the Iranian intellectual elite he was an oddity, a subject of ridicule, rather than an object of intellectual or artistic curiosity. Furthermore, Iran’s postwar culture of criticism had an almost obsessive preoccupation with what it called “high” or “committed” art. What people actually read—the authors, the magazines, all of popular culture—was virtually never discussed. Mansuri was at best merely an author of “pulp fiction.”

His peculiar style of translation, where he read a chapter or an essay then put it aside and began to re-create it in his own words and from his prodigious memory, afforded a certain legitimacy to this policy of silence about his work. On a couple of occasions, when his translations were subjected to rigorous examination, they were found lacking in precision or any pretense of fidelity to the original.9 Although French was his main language, he also translated from English, Arabic, even German. When translating from these languages, it was apparently enough for him, and for his readers, to give a general sense of what the original was about. He gave new meaning to the age-old dictum that all translations are acts of treason.

Mansuri, magnanimously oblivious of this conspiracy of critical silence, continued to write relentlessly until the last few days of his life and created what can only be called a gargantuan opus. He was a writer of ascetic habits. He woke up around four in the morning, and after a couple of hours for breakfast and dressing, walked to his work. He was an avid walker; even when he lived far from the magazine office where he worked, he insisted on walking there. He never had a briefcase and instead used a nylon shopping bag in which he put not only his papers and manuscripts, but his lunch or fruit as well.

For much of his life, he was a vegetarian. He was of middle height, with a boxer’s nose. He had indeed boxed in his youth and claimed to have been a national champion. Although he had a balding head and tiny eyes that hid behind his heavy eyelashes, for decades he insisted on using a photo taken during his youth when he seemed ensnared in the aura of the James Hadley Chase gangster novels he had been translating. In his beloved though belabored photo, he sports a homburg, tilted slightly to the right; he wears the dark suit that remained a habit of his lifetime, and a white shirt, another permanent fixture of his attire. A shadow on his left gives the photo an ominous air of mystery. Although he wore his dark suit to work everyday, once he arrived at the office of the magazine for which he worked, he took his pants off and sat behind his desk in his pajamas pants, white shirt, and an old threadbare tie. He had few friends, and even in that small circle he never talked of his private life. Few of his colleagues had ever met his wife or their two children.

He proudly declared that for forty-two years he had never set foot in a theater. Films are vapid, he said, because the quality of the writing is poor. He was an uncompromisingly private man, with no passion except writing. Writing seemed to be the elixir of his life, the ultimate refuge from all the difficulties and indignities daily life offered him. Nor was he ever a government employee, he proudly declared.[10] He once lamented, “I have never fallen in love,” since writing left no room for love.[11] In a culture where Bacchanalian excess and indulgence seemed like a requisite part of a writer’s life, no one had ever seen him drunk, or even drinking. He even refused coffee or tea. He once admitted to a colleague, however, that in his youth he had not only drunk but dabbled in opium as well. Soon, however, he realized that both were impediments to his work, and he quit.[12]

At work, he hunched over his creaky wooden desk, invariably piled high with magazines of different kinds and languages, and worked incessantly for fourteen to sixteen hours. All his life he wrote with a traditional metal-tipped pen that he dipped in his trademark blue ink. Editors who had worked with him for many years talked of never having seen him cross out a word or a sentence he had written. Since he was usually paid by the page, he developed a habit of writing in large letters, using just three to five words per line, and between ten to fourteen lines per page. Even his paragraph breaks were invariably arbitrary, driven less by grammar than by increasing the number of pages. Large letters and more than ample distance between words did not help to make his notoriously illegible handwriting easy to decipher. It was rumored that he wrote in a cipher that only typesetters could decode!

If the dictates of economy and the necessity of providing for his family drove his penchant for prolonging his narratives, it also cost him a fortune in the long run. He was forced to sell his books and stories by the page, forfeiting all future royalty claims on them. Furthermore, much of what he wrote was for the pages of Khandaniha, and in return for a monthly pittance, he relinquished all future rights to them.13 During the years after the revolution, when for reasons that have yet to be fully studied there was a frenzy of interest in all he had written, his royalties could easily have provided him with luxurious comfort. Instead, he received nothing from them, and thus until the last days of his life, even when his hands could no longer hold a pen, he was forced to work.[14]

Another of his famous tropes for making the narrative longer was explaining the obvious. Again, in the words of an editor who worked with him for many years, “if he wrote Paris, he would invariably add, usually in a parenthesis, capital of France, and if he wrote France, he would for sure add, a country in western Europe, a neighbor of Germany, where once the Gaelic nations ruled and de Gaulle was its president for a while.”[15] Of course, the range of his information and thus the variety of what he wrote about was truly encyclopedic in nature. In fact, encyclopedias were his constant companions. He read them voraciously and wrote about everything from the land reform in Guatemala to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to the life of a platypus.[16]

In all he wrote, what mattered to him most was narrative suspense, the ability to pull readers in and keep them interested in the next issue. Like Scheherazade, whose life depended on her ability to keep the king interested in the next night’s story, and who succeeded in keeping him guessing and anticipating for “a thousand and one nights,” Mansuri’s livelihood depended on his ability to bring readers back to the magazine or paper the next day or the next week. Brevity was not the soul of wit for him, but the wages of sin. By all accounts, few in the modern history of Iran can match his success. Many a magazine owed its very existence to his serials and essays. Rumor had it that Khandaniha, Iran’s equivalent of Reader’s Digest, was so totally dependent on his stories that the magazine publisher, Aliasqar Amirani, in anticipation of Mansuri’s death, had accumulated three sacks full of his unpublished manuscripts to run after he passed away. Before that eventuality, the revolution came, the magazine was confiscated, and the publisher was sent to the firing squad.
When he wrote on topics like science, medicine, or philosophy, or when he was creating his historic characters, Mansuri’s work was surprisingly well informed. In the words of a contemporary historian, “I could never quote his works, but I could also never do without them.”[17] His photographic memory allowed him to marshal an impressive array of minutiae that enriched his narratives and afforded them fascinating, highly readable backgrounds.

In the last three decades of his life he stayed clear of politics, but he had been an active nationalist in the aftermath of World War II. As he proudly declared, when Tehran was occupied, the Iranian radio station often read on a daily basis three of his political analyses. During the 1940s, he worked with several political papers. Among them was the controversial paper, Bakhtar-e Emrooz, edited by Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi. Contrary to his image as a man constitutionally averse to risks and confrontations, Mansuri worked with Fatemi all the way to the coup of August 1953, when Fatemi, who by then was also Iran’s foreign minister, was arrested and later executed. If in the early phase of his career he concentrated on mysteries and crime stories, and if in the next phase he became more interested in politics, the third and most productive phase of his career was given to writing historical novels and translating scientific tracts. He developed a keen interest in medicine, magic, and voodoo. It was in the heyday of his preoccupation with magic that he predicted the exact time of his own death. “I shall die when I am eighty,” he declared with the certainty of someone who knows the mysteries of “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”[18] He missed his own prediction by ten years.[19]

His favorite lines of poetry, the few words that best capture the troubled loneliness of his talented soul, were also, befittingly, among the oldest lines of poetry in Persian. Attributed to Roudaki, the first poet of Persia, the poem declares, “Alone, with a hundred thousand people / Alone, without a hundred thousand people.” This loneliness in the midst of a crowd, this craving for people while at the same time disdaining their presence, is surely reminiscent of the “Underground Man,” the character created by Dostoyevsky and iconic of the angst-obsessed intellectuals of the twentieth century. The image also captures the tormented, outwardly jocund and social, yet inwardly sad and solitary life of Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi, one of Iran’s most prolific writers and dramatists. He was, in the true sense of the word, a “public intellectual” in whom politics and art, vocation and avocation, converged onto a point of constant commitment and engagement. The exigencies of the era’s “culture wars” meant that he often worked fast to satisfy the increasing demand for his plays and short stories. The result is an opus that is disturbingly uneven in its literary value. As he lamented late in life, “I feel the whole lot of my work is misplaced and misguided, it has been written in a hurry, and published in a hurry . . . and I don’t say this out of some of humility.”[1]

He was born in January 1936 (Dey 1314) in the city of Tabriz to a family he describes as “slightly miserable, in other words poor.” The words he used to describe his birth reveal the tragic sense of life that lurked behind the façade of his jollity. He writes, “I was dropped on the brick2 in the first month of winter.”3 He was the second child. The first child had died when she was only eleven months old. By Gholamhoseyn’s reckoning, his first childhood memories were visits to his unknown sister’s grave with his father.[4]

His father came from a line of erstwhile servants of the Qajar court who had fallen on hard times. After a series of menial jobs, he landed a coveted position as a minor governmental clerk. The young boy was particularly attached to his mother. “I have never loved anyone as much as I love my mother,” he declared late in life.[5]

Gholamhoseyn was six years old when the Soviets attacked Iran and their planes bombed the city of Tabriz. His family, along with thousands of the city’s inhabitants, fled to the relative safety of the countryside. Living among peasants for the next few months, witnessing their poverty and resilience, left a lasting mark on Sa’edi’s young mind. Some of his most powerful stories and plays, and some of his more memorable characters, are derived from these early experiences of the life of peasants.[6]

By the time he was sixteen, he had become deeply immersed in leftist politics, and wrote for several of the local Leftist papers and journals. This experience helped shape another pillar of his politics: All his life he was a fierce advocate of the right of the people of Azarbaijan to learn, read, and speak their own native Turkish language.

He finished elementary and high school in Tabriz. After an initial failure in passing the strenuous entrance exam to the University of Tehran’s medical school, he eventually succeeded in entering Tabriz University’s medical school. But even then, his real passion was for the world of literature. For every book of biology, he later reminisced, he devoured ten books of fiction. His career trajectory—from a lukewarm attachment to medicine to passionate intensity for literature—mirrored the life of his literary alter ego, Anton Chekhov.[7]

He finished his medical degree in 1960 and left Tabriz for Tehran, where he wanted to become a gynecologist. He soon changed his mind and decided on psychiatry. His reason for changing his specialty, he suggested, was the greed he witnessed in his peers at medical school. He finished his training by writing a dissertation on the “Social Roots of Psychoneurosis in the Inhabitants of Azarbaijan.” The work was never published.8 He served his two years of conscript service in the psychiatric wing of a military hospital. Many of his patients later became characters in his stories.

In the early 1960s, for a while he worked with the storied Institute for Social Research, where many of Iran’s dissidents were allowed to work in research-related jobs. During his tenure, he wrote three monographs that became, each in its own right, classics. One details the social structure, mores, and manners of a small village. He brings to the task a scholar’s eye for details and a novelist’s knack for narrative. The second, Khiav ya Meshginshahr (Names of Cities), follows the same methodology as the first, only this time he brings a city to life, instead of a small village. Finally, his Ahle Hava (People of the Air) describes the mental habits and the ghost-ridden superstitions of some of the poorest strata of society in the southern parts of Iran.[9]

In 1964, he set up his own medical office in one of Tehran’s poorer neighborhoods, where he would treat poor patients for free. Sometimes he even paid them out of his own pocket. The office soon became a hangout for the city’s dissident intellectuals and writers. He began to write and publish works of literature at a feverish pitch. The first bad review of his early writing had a devastating effect on him. He contemplated suicide and went as far as finding the requisite amount of cyanide. Watching a beautiful butterfly, he wrote, saved him and led to a short-lived period of intense interest in the lives of butterflies.[10]

Eventually he resumed his literary activities. His nom de plume, particularly in his plays, was Goher Morad, literally meaning “essence of hope.” The name is an oblique reference to the title of a seventeenth-century book by an Iranian theologian.[11] Some critics praise Sa’edi as the playwright who “revived Iran’s immortal theatrical tradition.”[12] Jalal Al-e Ahmad praises some of his plays as “the best” of his generation. By the time Al-e Ahmad wrote these words, Sa’edi was already establishing his reputation as one of the leading figures in Tehran’s intellectual circles. In 1966, when the new prime minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, wanted to try to bridge the gap between the shah and the intellectuals, he turned to Sa’edi, offering him an invitation to visit his office.

Sa’edi discussed the matter with a number of his colleagues, including Al-e Ahmad. The meetings with the prime minister came to naught, but in the course of the meetings to decide whether to accept the invitation, gradually the idea took shape that Iran’s writers and poets should create a professional association of their own. Thus the Iran Writers Association was born.

Aside from engaging in backroom politics and theater, Sa’edi was also emerging as a fiction writer of considerable power and panache. One of his most famous collections of short stories was Azadaran-e Bayal (Mourners of Bayal). The book was praised for the power of its realism and for its success in capturing the tempo and texture of life for the simple common folks of Iran, particularly the peasants and their utter estrangement from the life of the country’s burgeoning urban centers.[13]

The book became a cause célèbre when one of its stories was successfully turned into the film entitled Cow. Directed by Darius Mehrjui, the film won many international awards and chronicled the dreary life of Mashd-Hassan, a poor peasant whose only valued possession in life is his cow. When it becomes sick and eventually dies, the owner is gradually metamorphosed into a cow. Mehrjui and Sa’edi worked together on writing the script for the film and then worked successfully together on at least two other successful films.
Their last joint effort, Dayreye Mina, became something of a political embarrassment for the Pahlavi regime. In a realistic style, bordering on the style of a documentary or of cinema verité, the film shows the underbelly of Tehran at the height of its oil boom. It portrays the sordid trade in blood; ruthless dealers and desperate sellers of blood are the stuff of the film. Manuchehre Egbal, in his capacity as the head of Iran’s Medical Association, worked hard but unsuccessfully to ban the film. There was apparently even discord in the royal family over it. The queen had insisted that the shah watch the film, and on the night it was shown, the shah stormed out of the theater, denouncing the film as the negativism of pseudointellectuals.[14]

The early 1970s were easily the height of Sa’edi’s fame. He shared a new medical office with his brother, located near Tehran’s infamous “Shahre Now”—the “New City” set aside for houses of prostitution. Just like his first office, this one became a literary hangout as well as a place where Sa’edi met many of the characters from the “lower depth” who inhabit the strange, often surreal, world of his stories and plays. Every literary journal and every theatrical group sought his work. His attempt to satisfy everyone led to a hurried quality in his writing. He would sometimes send publishers a story or a play he had written in one sitting without rereading it even once.[15]

On rare occasions, he even dabbled in psychiatry. For example, in the mid-1960s, he wrote an essay on lore found among certain poor people of Iran’s southern province. Using texts of social psychology, and his own knowledge of folklore and mythology, he tried to explain what is called a’l or a witchlike creature that appears as a “wan and weak woman and steals the liver of a mother who has just delivered a baby.”[16]

These scholarly forays were, of course, the exception. The rule was short stories and plays. Combining the realism of Chekhov, with ideas of “committed art” that came from the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of “social criticism,” Sa’edi wrote stories that were deeply critical of despotism and of the ruling Pahlavi regime. To escape censors, he often rendered his stories in simple metaphoric language. For example, his Dandil, immediately banned after its publication, was the story of a whorehouse near a military garrison. A new young virgin arrives at the house; she is the hope of the greedy owner for quick riches. He decides to set her aside for the new American sergeant from the garrison. On the expected day, the sergeant arrives, drunk, and after deflowering the virgin, leaves the whorehouse without paying. His only payment for the services rendered him was to urinate in the public square. It was hard to miss the political message of the story.

At the height of his popularity, in around 1975, Amir Kabir, the country’s most powerful publishing house, offered him a sum of twenty-five thousand tooman (about $3,500) to start a literary journal. After some initial trepidation, he agreed. He chose the name Alefba (Alphabet) for the journal, and the masthead was in his own polished calligraphy. The journal immediately became the most respected literary publication of its time. Some of Iran’s most notable intellectuals wrote for the journal. After publishing five issues, Sa’edi was arrested.

He spent about a year in prison. He was accused of having ties to radical groups. He was badly tortured and was forced to recant. By the time he was released from his hellish ordeal, his gradual but inexorable slide into an abyss of depression and paranoia had begun. Nothing, not even a revolution, or the trip he took to Europe and the United States, could cure him of the inner demons awakened in SAVAK’s prison.

In the West, he gave talks to generally receptive audiences in many universities. He defiantly attacked the regime in Iran and openly talked of the tortures he had experienced. But his friends noticed a change in him. He had become obsessed with SAVAK and some of its leaders. He saw their shadow everywhere. To calm his inner angst, he selfmedicated with alcohol. He had always been a serious drinker, but now he was drinking even heavier than before.

Of all the cities he visited, he felt most comfortable in London. He began to work with Ahmad Shamloo in publishing a journal called Iranshahr—a radical paper critical of the Pahlavi regime. Sa’edi wrote some of the journal’s most radical pieces. More important, in London he fell in love. He proposed marriage to a Persian woman, and when the offer was refused he became despondent. This time, his short-lived salvation came in the form of a revolution.
By the time he returned to Iran, the country was caught in political turmoil. Sa’edi immediately joined the maelstrom. One consequence of the prison experience was that his views on art and “commitment” had hardened. The notion that he had “shown weakness” and agreed to do a “show of recantation”—reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials—gnawed away at his soul. In compensation, he became even more strident in his radicalism, particularly after the fall of the shah’s regime. He wrote of the ancient regime’s policy of “deculturing” Iran and of attempting to kill genuine art and literature. In a sardonic tone, he criticized Peter Brook, the famed director, for coming to Iran to “arrange for the silly entertainment of the shah’s wife.”[17] He began to write for an underground communist paper, and once his authorship of those pieces became well known, he was forced to live underground. For several months he lived in Tehran in different friends’ houses. One day he colored his hair, the next he shaved his mustache. Gradually his mood deteriorated and he became more despondent.

The days of desperation and hiding had one redeeming result. During these times, his relationship with a woman named Badri Kaboli deepened. Most of the time, her house was his refuge. Eventually he decided to marry her. At her insistence and the urging of many of his friends, and with the help of Kurdish rebels, he fled Iran and arrived in Paris on March 31, 1982. A small bag was all he took with him from his past. His wife eventually joined him in exile.

In Paris, too, his mood was despondent. Before his wife’s arrival, he had no room of his own and spent nights camped out at different friends’ houses. He often wept, demanding that his friends arrange for his return to Iran. “What am I doing here?” he asked tearfully.[18] For a short while, his mood improved. With the help of other émigré intellectuals, he began to republish his journal, Alefba.[19] Ironically, like the first incarnation of the journal in Tehran, when he only published five issues, this time he succeeded in publishing only six issues of the magazine. And like the first Alefba, the exile version, too, was published strictly according to Sa’edi’s taste and sensibilities. To all advice and attempts at offering new ideas, he offered the same refrain: “Alefba is mine, and I run it the way I want.”[20]

During his exile, to the consternation of many of his friends, he also began writing for some of the politically radical and ideologically strident groups fighting the Islamic regime. His own deeply democratic temperament was at odds with the “ideological” despotism of these groups. Yet the memory of his recantation seemed to continue to haunt him all his life. A desire to recant his recantation drove him to many political commitments that were incongruent with his own vision and with his work as an artist.

Although writing was, in his own words, “the only thing that keeps me from suicide,” his many projects in exile did little to dissipate the sense of alienation he felt. After two
years in Paris, he wrote, “I feel deracinated. I think I am living in a post card. . . . I am constantly thinking of my homeland. . . . I am constantly dreaming of my homeland. Being abroad is the worst torture.”[21]

He could never reconcile himself to the realities of exile. He made no attempt to learn either English or French, or to assimilate into the French society into which he had chosen exile. Maybe more than any other émigré intellectual, he embodied Iranian culture’s tortured relationship with exile. The etymology and the invariably unhappy connotations and denotations of ghorbat, the common Persian word for exile, convey the culture’s troubled attitude. If in European languages a touch of romance, of affirmation and defiance is attached to the word, and if for Jews, the exile experience has become one of the chief characteristics of their historic identity, for Iranians the word for exile shares its root with the word for dusk. Nasser-Khosrow called it a “tarantula” while Sa’di, often praised as the window to the soul of the Persian nation, preferred death at home to long life in exile.

Sa’edi’s life in exile was the purgatory implied in these cultural definitions of exile. He wrote, an exile “is hopeless; he knows he is degenerating; he knows he has been mutilated; nay, a part of his body, a part of his soul, has been severed from him, and he can see how his uprooted roots are dying, just like a man with gangrene. An exile is a witness to his own death.”22 His last letters, written to his brother, are mirthless and full of desperation. He writes of his “humiliating exile,” of his urgent craving to go back to Iran, “whatever the cost.”23 Finally, the agonies of the soul and his irreverent abuse of his own body, in spite of numerous signs of sickness and disease, led to a worsening of his physical condition. Only when he began vomiting blood did he agree to go to the hospital. Even there he was so adamantly against treatment that hospital authorities were forced to tie him to his bed. He began having hallucinations and talked of his long-dead friends’ visit to the hospital. He died in a Paris hospital in January 1985 and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in the city.

I am from Kashan My life is not bad.
A piece of bread, a bit of wit and a pinch of taste. A mother finer than a tree leaf.
And friends, better than flowing water.
And a god who is nearby:
Enwrapped in these wallflowers, standing at the foot of that towering fir.
I am a Muslim.
My Mecca is a red rose
My prayer-mat, the spring, my prayer-stone the light . . .
I am from Kashan.
My profession is painting:
Once in a while, I make a cage of colors and sell it to you Maybe the song of the poppy encaged in it
Can refresh the heart of your loneliness.
What illusion, what illusion . . . I know
My canvas is lifeless
I know well, the pond of my painting is bereft of fish . . .
My father painted.
He also made tars, and he played the tar.
And his calligraphy was beautiful.
Our garden was in the shadow of knowledge.
Our garden was where feelings and plants entwined.
Our garden was the conjunction of the eye and the cage and the mirror. . . .
I drank water without philosophy.
I picked berries without knowledge . . .
Life was then a line of light and dolls. A heart full of freedom.
Life was then a pool of music.
I went to the party of the world:
I, to the desert of sorrows,
I, to the garden of mysticism,
I, to the enlightened veranda of knowledge, went I climbed the stairs of religion.
All the way to the end of the street of skepticism . . .
What things I have seen on this earth:
I saw a boy, smelling the moon.
I saw a door-less cage and in it, light was flapping its wings. A ladder on which love climbed to heavens.
I saw a woman grating the light in a pestle.
I saw a poet who addressed a lily: Thou
I saw a book, its words all made of crystal
I saw a paper made of spring.
I saw a museum far away from grass.
A mosque far away from water.
At the bedside of a despondent theologian, I saw a jog full of questions
I saw a mule, its load “purple prose”
A camel, its load an empty basket of “words of advice” . . .
I saw a train, it carried light
I saw a train, it carried theology, and how somberly it threaded I saw a train that carried politics (and how empty it moved) . . .
The city was palpable:
The geometric growth of cement, iron, stone. The pigeon-less rooftops of hundreds of buses. A florist having a sale of flowers . . .
I am from Kashan, but
My city is not Kashan.
My city has been lost.
With endurance, and with passion
A house on the other side of night I have built.
I am near the beginning of the earth.
I take the pulse of flowers.
I know the wet fate of water, and the green habits of trees.
My spirit flows in the new direction of things.
My spirit is but a novice.
My spirit is sometimes so overwhelmed it coughs . . .
I never saw two spruce trees fight one another. I never saw a willow sell its shade to the earth.
Wherever I am, let me be,
The skies belong to me.
Windows, thoughts, air, love, and the earth belong to me. What matters
If at times
The fungus of exile grows too?
Umbrellas we must close,
In the rain, we must walk.
Thoughts, memories, must experience the rain.
And let’s not ask where we are,
Let’s smell the fresh petunias of the hospital. . . .
To the sea shore let us go,
Throw our nets into the water
And take from it the fresh fragrance of water. . . .
Let’s be simple.
Be simple either in front of a bank counter or under a tree. It is not our calling to learn the “mystery” of the red rose, Maybe ours is only
To swim in the bewitching “inscrutability” of the rose. Let us pitch our camp behind knowledge. . . .
Maybe our calling is
Searching between the blue lily and the century And running after the song of truth.

All writing, they say, is autobiographical, and surely poems, as an intensely personal form of narrative, are no exception to this rule. Of Sohrab Sepehri’s invariably personal poems, none is as powerfully personal and as daringly autobiographical as the above, long poem, “The Water’s Footfall.”[1]

In the early years of the twenty-first century, as Iran is undergoing the pangs of a theocratic regime, as the dangers of the messianic proclivity so evident in intellectuals and poets before the revolution have become painfully clear, we are witnessing a veritable Sepehri renaissance. Essays, books, and electronic sites dedicated to his life and work appear regularly. Sepehri was also a painter of considerable accomplishments, and part of the renaissance has been the sharp rise in the value of his work. Ironically, the more that is written about him, the more his enigma grows.

Sohrab Sepehri is one of the most acclaimed poets and painters of twentieth-century Iran. Many of those who have written about him have pointed to the fact that his “paintings were poetic, while his poetry was visual, and his poetry and painting have both a common source, and that source is the kind of bewitching unity with nature he had attained.”[2]

It has become an article of faith that Sohrab Sepehri was born in Kashan. After all, he himself had declared at least four times in his greatest and best-known poem, “I am from Kashan.” But like most articles of faith, this one, too, is wrong. He was, in fact, born in 1928 (1307) in the city of Qom—today the epicenter of Islamic radicalism and at the time of his birth a small town of devout Muslims, greedy merchants, and many, many mullahs. Sohrab’s father was a clerk in the city’s telegraph office. He was also a man of many talents. He was a calligrapher, and a tar maker and player. Earlier generations of the Sepehri family had produced notable poets and historians of repute. Sohrab’s grandmother was a published poetess,3 and the grandfather of his mother, Mohammad Taghi Sepehr, was the author of Nasakhal-Tavarikh, an eleven-volume history of Iran.

Sohrab was a child when his father was paralyzed by a degenerative muscular disease. The burden of keeping the family together was left to his mother. She appears as an angelic figure in many of his poems. “The Water’s Footfall” is dedicated to the “silent nights of my mother.”

After some wanderings, the family settled in a big house with an opulent garden in the city of Kashan. His grandparents and uncles all lived in the same house. It figures in his childhood memories, and in the poems, as an idyllic house, full of love and art. He enrolled in the Khayam elementary school, and the first signs of his discomfort with crowds appeared in the fact that he was ill at ease at school. In his own words, “At school, I was afraid. At home, people were afraid of me. . . . I remained a child until I was eighteen.”[4] The allusion could also be to the fact that he had written no poems until he was eighteen.

About this time, he met a man named Moshfeg Kashani. He was a poet in the classical vein, and Sohrab adopted him as his mentor. With Kashani’s help and encouragement, he published his first collection of poems in the city of Kashan when he was nineteen years old. It was hardly noticed, not only because it was published in Kashan, at a time when Tehran was the center of all serious artistic activities, but also because it was mediocre in ideas and execution. It was called By the Grass, with the Solace of Love.

In 1948, not long after publishing his first book, written according to the strict rules and meters of traditional Persian poetry, Sepehri set out for Tehran, where he entered the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tehran University. It was a measure of Sepehri’s rather unique and often criticized paradigm of life and art that as the country was in the midst of political turmoil, he was obsessively involved in his own private world of painting and poetry. He thought in images and poetry and not in concepts and philosophy. More than a decade later, he declared:

I drank water without philosophy.
I picked berries without knowledge
I saw a train, it carried theology, and how somberly it threaded I saw a train that carried politics (and how empty it moved).

His lifelong aversion to radical politics brought him the wrath of critics and selfdeclared poet-laureates of the masses. Shamloo dismissed Sepehri’s works in harsh and uncompromising terms. Referring to a famous line from a Sepehri poem, in which the poet wrote, “Let us not muddy the water,” Shamloo said, “You know, it is hard for me to believe in this anachronistic mysticism. They are beheading innocent people up the stream, and I would stand by, a few steps away and just say, ‘Let us not muddy the waters.’ I think one of us, either he or I, was completely off.”[5]

Rather than political parties, Sepehri joined a small group of radical artists that called themselves, aptly, the Fighting Roosters Club. They were unabashed modernists, keen on
shocking the staid sensibilities of the traditionalists and their mass base. After four years, he finished his bachelor of fine arts degree in painting at the top of the class. All the while, concurrent with school and his art, he was also gainfully employed in a variety of clerical and teaching jobs. None suited his temperament. It took another ten years before he finally found the courage to cut all ties with bureaucracies and to try to make a living as an artist.[6] Although he became one of the most sought-after painters of his generation, and although for a while owning one of his paintings was the ultimate sign of intellectual and cultural “cool”—in 1968 even the prime minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, decided to give his American hosts a small painting by Sepehri instead of the customary Persian rugs and miniatures,[7]—and finally, in spite of the fact that Iran was awash in petrodollars in the 1970s, Sepehri died hardly an affluent man. In fact, only with the help of his friends could he afford the expenses of a medical journey to England to fight his pernicious disease.[8]
Before he gave up his government job, among the many jobs he had held was teaching at the same faculty from which he had graduated. In the 1950s, he made two relatively short trips, one to France and the other to Japan, both for learning and mastering new painting techniques, including lithography and woodcut. In 1961, he finally resigned his job and spent the rest of his short life traveling to the far corners of the world, from Africa to the Americas, winning prizes and recognition in increasingly more important museums, and successfully holding solo exhibits in respected art houses around the world. He never married.

He was incorrigibly shy. Crowds frightened him. He almost never participated in the first-night receptions for his exhibits. He rarely took part in any of the common intellectual gatherings of the time. At every possible occasion, he escaped to one of his favorite villages in the vicinity of Kashan. In one such escape to the village of Chenar (willow), near Kashan, “The Water’s Footfall” was born. He finished it in the summer of 1964.[9]

Indeed, not just crowds, but cities, too, seemed to make him uncomfortable. He described his love of these villages in another famous poem:

Meadows so vast
Mountains so high
What a smell of grass in Golestaneh
In this hamlet I was searching for something
For a dream perhaps, for a ray of light, a pebble, a smile . . . I was searching for the beautiful morning glory of wisdom[10]
His tormented views on the city of New York—where he spent seven months in 1970—are emblematic of his complicated attitude toward cities and toward American culture. On the one hand, he chastised New York as a “city of no birds and no trees. I have yet to hear a bird sing.”[11] He also had some words of praise for the city. “In New York, one can’t but grow. New York is not a place for hesitation and falling behind.”[12]

His attitude toward the United States was, at best, lukewarm. He admitted that he did not know the country well. “I have only gotten a whiff of this country. But there is something here that needs to be understood before it can be forgotten. . . . One can’t just snicker at this place. . . . The culture is not uni-directional. It is like a river splitting off into hundreds of streams. I have yet to see the entirety.”[13]

At the same time, by the 1960s, he had come to have a deeply critical disposition toward his native Iran. He called it a “land of low standards and of many mental maladies and of cultural prostitution.” He wrote of Iran as a place with a “good sun, and a good earth, and a few good people, and small brilliant pieces in an otherwise unwieldy cultural legacy.”[14] He also had harsh words for his fellow intellectuals. “Iran has good mothers,” he said, “and delicious foods and bad intellectuals and delectable fields.”[15] Art was the only way he had of coping with these disquieting realities.

Painting was, for him, at once painful and comforting. In words reminiscent of Plato’s description of what he calls Pharmakon—a poison and its own antidote—Sepehri wrote, “painting devours one’s time. It tires the mind. It all but kills the body. It is a delectable poison, begetting at once its own antidote and promising solace. On the whole, however, it is something of a curse.”[16]

Much the same dualism, the same agony of creation, existed for him in poetry. For Sepehri the limits of our ability to express our inner thoughts and sentiments, arising out of the innate limitations of language itself, made poetry at once frustrating and liberating. He wrote of his wish to go to a world where these dualisms ended, to a place where: “Inside the word morning / Morning shall come.”[17]

Some of his paintings, composed of only a few lines, have the beguiling simplicity and the dizzying depth, the quiet power and brazen beauty of a Japanese haiku;18 others exude the gray loneliness of a deserted but delectably beautiful Iranian countryside. There were different “periods” in his paintings. For a while, he drew his famous tree trunks. At another time, he was preoccupied with apples. Landscapes were his favorite subject in still another period. Ironically, in none does he depict human beings, save through the signs of their lives—a vase in a window, a house perched on a foothill. In his one self-portrait, he appears melancholy and bewildered, sad and curious.

He was always willing to experiment with new ways of painting, of seeing, and of writing poetry. He was, by constitution, averse to dogmas of any form. Once he came to America, for example, he realized that some rethinking of his styles, some “revaluation of values,” was necessary. “We have been badly raised,” he said. “Europe has given us its own kind of exuberance. We have learned to look only in a certain way. . . . But here in America, we have to be carefree. You need a kind of nakedness, and then once you begin, there are ample opportunities to grow.”[19]

This new way of seeing also extended to his poetry. Some have suggested that in his later poems there are similarities to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.20 Others talk of his
Sufi, Buddhist, and Pantheist tendencies. There is, however, consensus on one point. His vision of how to be in the world and how to see it were radically different than the “progressive” and “committed” theory of art that was dominant in Iran of the 1960s and 1970s. In that tradition, artists were messiahs, and their job was not to interpret, or to offer an aesthetic rendition of reality, but to change it. It was the paradigm of painting and poetry as protest and praxis. Sepehri, on the other hand, offered a different vision altogether. He wanted us to “be simple.” He believed it was not our “calling to learn the mystery of the red rose.” Instead we must accept the “bewitching inscrutability” of our world and try to find a way of living that is least damaging to nature, to ourselves, and to those around us.
He was a relentless advocate of introspection. Although he is accused by his critics of harboring an aversion to confrontation, he did advocate confronting our inner demons and delusions. In a sense his grief and anger is less at the injustices of the world than at the nature of existence, and it is shaped by the dread of death. He wrote: “Neither you shall last, nor I, open you teary eyes, death has come, open the door.”[21]

But more powerful than this morbid angst is the optimism of a pantheistic utopian. He believed in the Atlantis. He was convinced that “Beyond the seas there is a city / A boat must be built.”[22]

By the time he published his Eight Books, he had clearly established his reputation as one of the greatest poets and painters of his time. A kind of mysticism, a willingness to search for harmonious forms of being and seeing in the world, permeates all his works. Some critics even dismiss his mysticism as “shallow” and find it, disparagingly, akin to the “way hippies fell in love with their own tourist vision of the East.”23 But for others, like Ebrahim Golestan, he is, along with Nima, Forugh Farrokhzad, and Mehdi AkhavanSales, the embodiment of a perfectly poetic sensibility. “He was a poet, pure and simple,” Golestan said, adding that Sepehri’s character simply did not fit the dominant models of being an “artist.”[24]

The way he signed his paintings was a metaphor of his philosophy. Artists’ signatures on canvas are like credits in a film. They are as much a part of the aesthetics of the work as the film or the painting itself. They also tell us, often in ways more revealing than the work itself, about the relationship of the artist not just to his art but to the world. His unobtrusive manner of signing his paintings, invariably isolated in an almost forgotten corner of the canvas, and the elegant simplicity and beauty of his calligraphy, are all potent metaphors for his character and artistic persona. The signature blends into the landscape and becomes part of it. Often, you must search carefully to find it as it unfailingly has been woven into the fabric of the image. At the same time, in spite of his effort to hide his signature, once you discover it, its beauty becomes itself an aesthetic subject worthy of attention. In writing his name, he used one of the better known styles of calligraphy, Nastealig. In the morphology and topography of the signature on the canvas, coyly hidden but clearly important, subtle and beautiful, enigmatic but unmistakable, we see a metaphor of his character.

On April 21, 1980, after a long battle with leukemia, he died in a Tehran hospital, surrounded by a handful of close friends. The shy, self-effacing poet and painter of the 1960s and 1970s is today considered one of the most acclaimed artists of twentiethcentury Iran.

Tehran is an oddity. It is a city with a long history and a short memory.[1] It is that rare metropolis that lacks proximity to water. With its back to towering mountains and its vistas open to tormenting desert winds, it suffers in the metaphor of its own geography. Stranded in those mountains, there is the ghost of Zahak, the dark, foreign force of Iranian mythology. Another shady figure of the Shahnameh, Afrasiab, also once pitched his camp near Tehran.[2] As St. Petersburg was for Russian intellectuals such as Dostoyevsky “an anti-Christ,”[3] Tehran, too, at least in some of the modern literary imaginations of the last hundred years, has been nothing short of Dajal. From Tehran-e Makhof to the Blind Owl, it has become a genus of what has famously been called the “infamous city.”

But for Ja’far Shahri, Tehran was nothing less than his Ithaca. To it he felt the special obligation of a faithful son. With the zeal of a missionary, he set out to chronicle the city’s twentieth-century history. In a culture that betrays its engrained distrust of modern cities by naming its houses of ill-repute the “New City,” even his surname, Shahri, or the earlier version, Shahribaf, speaks of his deep affinity for the city. In the first he is a man of the city; in the second, “the weaver of the city.”

During the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Iran was experiencing an early, albeit aborted, renaissance,4 Tehran was a small village that lived quietly, almost surreptitiously, in the shadow of Rey, its grand and towering neighbor. An element of stealth, historians tell us, seemed encoded in the very etymology of Tehran’s name. In thirteenth-century texts, it is described as “a large village, in the vicinity of Rey, rich in verdure and orchards.”

Even Persian mythology helped underscore the importance of Tehran as compared to older grand cities, like Isfahan. Whereas Zahak’s ghost haunted Tehran, his nemesis, the folksy—some say even proletarian!—heroic figure of Kaveh, the craftsman who fought Zahak, had, according to legend, found his only true champions in Isfahan.[5]

During the Qajar era, when an enfeebled Iran fell prey to hegemonic colonial forces, Tehran was declared the capital, and ever since, its fortune has become inseparably entangled with the “elective modern affinities” of different Oriental despots.

The first two modern buildings in Tehran commissioned by Nasir al-din Shah, the “Pivot of the Universe,” are telling examples of these skewed and self-serving affinities. There was Toopkhaneh, a square whose military function, and the ominous echoes of its name, were reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin calls the “Haussmannization of Paris,” an attempt to use urban design to fight the barricades and make the city and the citadel more defendable in case of a popular uprising.[6] The second was Sham-al Amere, with the sound of its bells echoing all over the city and, according to Shahri, frightening the inhabitants. Eventually, the government muzzled the sound by wrapping the bell in heavy fabric. After a while, the clock atop the building failed to work altogether, but by then it was already part of an urban legend; its grooves and niches, people said, had become home to three stray owls. Not only were owls omens of evil in the common perception of Persians but according to the lore, the three owls of the clock only emerged from their hideout when something ominous was about to happen to the king.[7] Instead of becoming the tool for quantifying time, a preoccupation of modernity,[8] Tehran’s first public clock was a public nuisance and the locus of the occult beliefs of the capital’s inhabitants.

The city, newly walled and moated by Nasir al-din Shah, had dirt roads and mud houses, twelve gates, an open sewage system, nocturnal infestation by hooligans and bandits, and an inept attempt to turn teahouses into centers for a system of surveillance.[9] It began to change rapidly in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution. The threemonth reign of Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i in 1921 witnessed a concentrated effort to introduce the city rapidly to at least the accoutrements of modernity. The proposed changes included bringing gaslight and public hygiene to city streets and replacing with standard measures and weights the clumsily chosen stones hitherto used by shopkeepers. In Shahri’s novels as well as his Old Tehran and Social History of Tehran, we find detailed accounts of these proposed changes, as well as the popular response to them.

Tehran saw its fastest growth from an overgrown village into a metropolis during the Pahlavi era. In the last years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign, a veritable “urban crisis” engulfed the city, which was then dangerously divided between the rich and the poor, “the South and the North.”[10] By all accounts, the convulsions of the Islamic Revolution have also left their marks on the city. It is, in short, far from hyperbole to claim that the city has had a convoluted, complicated, often tortured history, and that the last hundred years of this history has found its match in Shahri.

Ja’far Shahri was a man of many talents, prodigious memory, and unrelenting stamina for creative work. He was born in 1914 (1293) in Oud-Lajan, one of Tehran’s oldest and most colorful neighborhoods, and he died in Tehran in November 2006. A few years before his death, he lost his eyesight and had no choice but to curtail his creative work. His infirmity coincided with a belated recognition of his writing. Although by then he had already written some twenty books, most of them about Tehran, he wrote in a bitter and woeful tone that “the little eyesight I had in one eye is now gone. But I still have much more to say. In fact, I had just begun writing when calamity happened.”[11]

In spite of his unusually rich contributions, he was all but ignored by his contemporaries. This strange fact is at least partially the consequence of modernity’s peculiar trajectory in Iran. The modern discourse of the intellectual in Iran had been, at least until a few years ago, shaped by the Russian notion of the intelligentsia. Shahri, with his aversion to politics and the bombast of ideology, his occasional tone of irony and satire, his proclivity for bourgeois comforts, hardly fits the dour, Procrustean persona of a “committed intellectual.”

By his own telling, fate and fortune had been unduly harsh and unkind to him. Born into a family of entitled wealth, his profligate father squandered the family inheritance, physically abused his mother (a nasty habit that Shahri, shamefully, picked up from his father), then abandoned his young son to his own devices. Suddenly Ja’far was exiled into the bowels of the “lower depth.” Using his native talent and his unrelenting desire to excel, he became something of an urban nomad, navigating his way through innumerable crafts and odd jobs, gradually fashioning for himself a life of comfort and leisure. He suffered Dickensian indignities at the hands of a jealous stepfather, cruel and cunning stepmothers, pederast bosses, crooked clergy, an adulterous wife, and even ungrateful children.

Throughout his travails, texts were his real homeland, where he lived his dream life away from the dreads of the quotidian. He invariably sought solace in words that comforted him as a writer and that enrapture us as readers now. His words have also become an indispensable compendium of facts, anecdotes, idioms, technical terms, mores and manners, the urban geography popular folklore, and cultural habits of Tehran in the throes of modernity.

What Walter Benjamin tried to do for nineteenth-century Paris in his famous and unfinished Arcade Project, Shahri more or less accomplished for Tehran. Benjamin wanted to write the “primary history” of Paris. Instead of focusing on the lives of “great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography,” he wanted to represent the city, through “the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history, the half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of the collective.”[12] Benjamin’s method was to “carry over the principle of montage into history. That is to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.”[13] His was, in short, the gaze of the flaneur, an urban detective, at home nowhere and everywhere.

Shahri was Tehran’s flaneur; he can help us “interpolate into the infinitesimally small”14 the grand sweep of history. His eleven-volume history of Tehran is history through montage. He captures, in a language that is staggeringly rich in detail and precision, the moment that many popular crafts and social institutions, avenues and neighborhoods in the city of Tehran began to get their first whiff of modernity. He writes with aplomb and authority about the days when European shoes first appeared in the Tehran bazaar, and then with meticulous care chronicles the changes brought about as a result of these developments. His rich description of the shoe trade is more than matched by his precise accounts of literally hundreds of other aspects of Tehran’s social history.

No less abundant in his books is the common lore of the people of the city. With his help, we overhear an older woman talk to a young girl about abortion around the time of World War I. “Are you sure you’re pregnant?” the urban shaman asks and adds,

Maybe you just have a cold in your stomach and that is why you missed your period. It could even be because of your weight. Heaven knows you put new layer of fat every day. Sometimes you might miss a period because you got too much phlegm in your system. Just eat a bunch of celery, and it’ll get it running again. Even if you are pregnant, it ain’t a big deal. Just buy a big bunch of parsley, squeeze the juice and drink it. . . . Aborting a child is nothing. I was an attar myself and know all the tricks. . . . There are other ways, too, you know. If you eat a small piece of Lahuri Nabat, the baby is sure to fall. If you don’t like that, drink the juice of a red onion, or boil some cow dung and drink that. There are even easier ways; take some rabbit shit, and burn it under your dress.[15]

In Shahri’s opus, more than any other writer, historian, or social critic of our time, we can find the most complete, albeit crudely cut crystal of the total experience of Tehran in the moment of its reluctant move toward modernity.

He wrote in different genres, and if we accept Hans Blumenburg’s notion that the core of modernity, its central tenet, is the self-assertive individual, then Shahri’s métier is a kind of subtle but forceful self-assertion concealed in all he writes. From poetry and memoirs to novels and short stories, from the social history of Tehran to a compendium on herbal medicine and the Persian occult, Shahri is always at the center of the narrative.16 Such self-assertion was, as Shahri himself deftly reminded us, at odds with the mores of the time. He criticized those social forces that worked against his—and by implication every individual’s—attempt to fashion an autonomous self for himself. He said that maybe

it is not all my fault; ever since I remember, they have done nothing but cultivate fear in my heart; every time I have tried to say something, they’ve shouted at me and this way tried to put me in my place. From my mother and father, to the teacher and the bully on the street-corner, and the local police on the beat, they’ve all been there to frighten the hell of out me; they are my bogey-men; because of them, every time I wanted to say something, even if it was just and reasonable, I would think twice before saying, and eventually end up saying nothing at all.[17]

Among these forces, he had particularly strong scorn for organized religion. In fact, a kind of anticlericalism was among the common themes of his books. While he considered himself a pious man, he had nothing but contempt for the mullahs. An embryonic,

inarticulate Protestantism, a desire to eliminate the clergy as the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of God and heaven, runs through his narrative. Recounting his pilgrimage to Mecca, he writes, “all of these weeping and wailing in Shiism has softened our heart. It has made us incapable of asking even the simplest questions. . . . Look at these farangis,[18] they have no Hoseyn to weep for, and if their tailor is so much as late for an hour in delivering their cloth, they raise all kinds of hell and seek a thousand and one kind of damages.”[19] He writes of these “turbaned men who like poisoned weed have grown in the garden of religion, and have sucked dry all of its healthy nutrients; I am talking of the poisoned weed who have learned by rote some passion story about Hoseyn and with it put on airs of a scholar.”[20] In language whose biting edge is reminiscent of Chaucer’s Pardoner, he wrote of the one clergyman who accompanied him on the pilgrimage as an adulterous lecher, a small-time crook, an opium addict, and a foul-mouthed charlatan.

Aside from his self-assertiveness and his demand for a religious reformation, another important element of Shahri’s narrative is the nature of his episteme, his logos, his theoretical point of departure. They all seem refreshingly eclectic, personal, and Persian, with no touch of Western theory in any of them. In recent years, theorists from Foucault and Edward Said to Walter Mignolo, Clifford Geertz, and Stephen Greenblatt have written about the hegemonic nature of all theories. They have demolished the myth of the nonintrusive, nonpolitical, nonhegemonic theory. All theory, for that matter all discursive practices, they have shown, partake of a “regime of truth” that is inseparably entangled with power. For those studying the question of modernity in Iran, one of the most vexing questions has long been finding the episteme, the discourse and theoretical vista that is free from the taint of what has been called the “colonization of language and memory” and can at the same time transcend the smug, self-referential, and dangerously self-satisfied nativism that tries to pass off its ignorance of the world as a sign of its privileged status. The challenge is finding an episteme that is cognizant of the “cultural dimensions of globalization,” an episteme deeply immersed in the specificity of the Iranian tradition and informed about the intricate theoretical and political debates in the increasingly global turn to modernity.[21 ]The answer, we are beginning to learn, might well lie in what Geertz has called “thick description,” in allowing the subject of our study to speak for itself. We need, in the words of Mignolo, a “dialogical understanding” that talks as much as it listens.[22]

Shahri, in the pristine, at times even primitive, quality of his episteme and narrative, might have inadvertently come to embody our purchase on the kind of “local knowledge”[23] we need if we are to begin understanding modernity in Tehran. He is that rare breed whose weakness as an intellectual, whose utter unfamiliarity with the West and with modern theories, has become his strength as a repository of Tehran’s history during a traumatic age. In him we can find a detailed, bare-bones account of a thousand and one aspects of Tehran’s social history. Neither the grand canvas of mummified theory, nor the totalizing temptations of metanarratives are his domain. Raw, savagely unforgiving details and anecdotes are his forte. His opulent opus is also redolent with the kind of frank carnality that Bakhtin finds in the liberating, subversive pleasures of the “Carnival.” Bakhtin also praises Rabelais for familiarizing us with “the curses, profanities, and oaths—and the . . . colloquialisms of the marketplace,” and of always remaining “with the people.”[24] Shahri’s novels and his multi-volume history of Tehran are not so much replete with Tehran’s “colloquialisms” as they are formed by them. At the same time, in Shahri we can find an exhaustive encyclopedia of Tehrani curses.

Shahri’s style, the poetics of his prose, is as idiosyncratic as are his stories and his characters. Indeed, there is at first glance a jarring, discomforting, prosaic quality to his prose that can easily be construed as a measure of the poor, unpolished quality of his writing, even a consequence of the fact that he was an autodidact who never completed any formal schooling beyond the fourth grade. On closer reading, nearly all his books have the quality of the experiment that Patrick Chamoiseau’s brilliant novels also try to capture. It is a style, and a language, that trods the unbeaten path “at the frontier of the written and the spoken word.” It tries to “evoke a synthesis, synthesis of the written syntax and of the spoken rhythm, of writing’s ‘acquiredness’ and of the oral ‘reflex,’ of the loneliness of writing and of the participation in the communal chant.”[25] Shahri, in most of his works, is Tehran’s collective chant; he has captured the echoes of the city’s bazaars and barracks, its teaand tenement houses. The exuberance of the voice often defies the constraints of the written page and is decidedly oblivious to rules of proper punctuation. It has the feel of an urban delirium. They must be read slowly as they are sometimes hard to fathom. Read out loud, they have the flow and tempo of the marketplace and the defiant texture of a carnival. Shahri was, in short, a master storyteller caught in the constraints of a written literature.

The art of the novel is founded on modernity’s epistemological individualism, and the hubris of humans partaking of God’s privilege of creation. The stuff of its narrative is the creative impulse of the writer. The dying art of storytelling is, in Benjamin’s words, “the ability to exchange experiences . . . experiences which are passed on from mouth to mouth.”[26] It is an art dependent on the epic faculty of memory, and the fruit of Shahri’s mastery of mnemonics has become a major treasure trove to be mined by those seeking to understand the travails of Tehran’s modernity.