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Asian Affairs
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REVISITING THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SHAH OF IRAN

Ivor Lucas Available online: 10 Nov 2009

To cite this article: Ivor Lucas (2009): REVISITING THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SHAH OF IRAN, Asian Affairs, 40:3, 418-424 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03068370903195204

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Asian Affairs, vol. XL, no. III, November 2009

REVISITING THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SHAH OF IRAN

IVOR LUCAS
Ivor Lucas was head of Middle East Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Ofce at the time of the fall of the Shah. He was Chairman of the Editorial Board of Asian Affairs from 1995 to 2002 and remains a frequent contributor. Chapter 13 of his memoir A Road to Damascus (The Radcliffe Press, 1997) contains some additional details of these events.

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Introduction
February 2009 was the 30th Anniversary of the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini at the head of the Iranian Revolution. The Anniversary prompted a number of retrospective contributions to history. It also coincided with the release under the 30-year rule of British ofcial papers on the lead up to the fall of the Shah, Reza Pahlevi. The Times reported these under the headline Ambassador ddled over Thatchers hair while Tehran burnt with Islamic revolution, and asserted that Months after receiving assurances from Sir Anthony [Parsons] that the Shah would not be overthrown, the British Government looked on aghast as revolution swept through Iran in early 1979. This is not entirely fair to either party, although credit was given to Parsons for later admitting errors of judgement.1 In advance of the likely release, under the 30-year rule, in January 2010 of the detailed and thorough report on the episode which was written by an independent Foreign and Commonwealth Ofce (FCO) ofcer in December 1979, it may be of interest to record how these events were seen from the vantage point of the FCO department dealing with them at the time. While the FCO cannot claim to have shown impeccable judgement, it was not taken completely by surprise.

The events
The authors watch as the Head of the Middle East Department began in January 1975. Among the factors which had shaped events in Iran up till then were the Shahs reforming tendencies, rst manifested in the Shah-people or white revolution of 1963 and later in his quest for what he called the Great Civilisation: to make the country by the end of the 1980s a modern industrialised power of the second rank. Both ambitions had been pursued at the expense of civil and political liberties and without the approval of the religious
ISSN 0306-8374 print/ISSN 1477-1500 online/09/0304187 # 2009 The Royal Society for Asian Affairs http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/03068370903195204

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fraternity. But opposition had been largely muted so long as the oil-based economic boom maintained its momentum. The boom reached major proportions after the dramatic price rise initiated by the Shah himself in the early 1970s and accelerated following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Unfortunately the authorities in Tehran mishandled things by embarking on over-ambitious development plans. By 1976, these were generating serious ination, congestion in the ports, administrative and manpower blockages, a massive exodus from the villages to the towns and widespread corruption. At the same time world recession and ination, and the consequent oil glut, had falsied the assumptions of buoyant oil revenues on which the expanded development plans had been based. The consequent slowing-down of the economy coincided with the Shahs introduction of limited measures of political liberalisation, in particular allowing greater freedom of expression and easing the treatment of political prisoners. Thus economic discontent, especially among the under-privileged and rootless urban proletariat and the disillusioned middle class, combined with wider and louder criticism of the authorities to produce a situation by August 1977 in which the Shah felt obliged to jettison his trusty Prime Minister of 12 years standing, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, and to replace him with a technocrat, Jamshed Amuzegar, hitherto Finance Minister and Irans principal spokesman in OPEC. Dr Amuzegar grappled successfully with the economy, reducing ination and stabilising the situation generally, albeit at a lower level of activity. But pressure for further political liberalisation continued, and for a number of reasons the Shah bowed to it to some extent. He recognised the need to establish broadly-based and effectively functioning political institutions by the time he planned to hand over to his son some time in the 1980s: Crown Prince Reza was then 18, and his father, as we now know, was already suffering from incurable cancer. The Shah genuinely believed in controlled liberalisation as part of the Great Civilisation, and was not insensitive to foreign opinion in general and the human rights concerns of certain of his allies in particular. Finally, his experiment in a single-party system in the shape of the Rastakhiz, or Resurgence, Party set up in March 1975 had been a failure. At this point a development occurred which Amuzegar proved unable to handle. Hitherto the active opposition to the Government had come largely from the intellectual left writers, journalists, lawyers and academics who criticised the autocratic basis of the regime and wanted to move farther and faster along the path of Western-style democracy and social progress. This was to some extent exploited by the underground and proscribed Tudeh, or Communist, Party. But from the beginning of 1978 the main opposition role was increasingly assumed by religious elements that, while they certainly contested the legitimacy of the Shahs rule, stood for precisely the converse of what the liberal opposition wanted. They believed that the Shah had already moved too far and too fast in his pursuit of modernisation, to the detriment of the countrys traditions and the neglect of its Muslim faith. They preached a return to the fundamental precepts of Islam; demanded the revival of the

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1906 constitution when (after a similar movement against the monarchy) provision was made for a committee of ve mullahs to exercise veto powers over all legislation; and were deeply hostile to the Shahs Ataturk-type secularisation policies and to the Westoxication of Iranian society. They reected the Iranian tendency to dislike and distrust foreigners, which had been accentuated by the inux of large numbers of Americans and Europeans in the wake of the oil boom and which also found expression in the persecution of the Jewish and Bahai communities. Although the Ayatollahs professed the Shia version of Islam their appeal was a broader one in the light of the world-wide revival of Islamic self-consciousness and self-condence, and of a renewed regard for traditional values, which had been a feature of Muslim societies since Allah had blessed the faithful with the gift of oil. They undoubtedly commanded wide respect throughout Iran, where Shia Islam was the state religion and the faith of 90 per cent of the population. The rising tide of opposition in 1978 began with demonstrations in the holy city of Qom in January, against what was believed to be an ofcially-inspired newspaper article critical of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile in Iraq since 1963. These disturbances resulted in a number of casualties, and set in train a recurring 40-day cycle of riots, violence and deaths, reecting the 40-day Muslim period of mourning. The cycle reached its climax during the fasting month of Ramadan (early August to early September in 1978), when the crowds gathered in the mosques to hear inammatory sermons some of them by Khomeini on smuggled tapes and then debouched on to the streets to damage and destroy in particular such symbols of Western civilisation as cinemas, banks, restaurants and casinos. The culmination of these troubles was the gutting of a cinema in Abadan on 19th August with the loss of some 400 lives. By this time the liberal and religious streams had come together to form a current which was soon to become a ood sweeping the regime away. For the moment the Shah tried to stem the tide by further concessions to public opinion. In June he had replaced the head of the hated security police (SAVAK). On 5th August free elections had been promised for June 1979 and the ban on political parties lifted, with the result that a score of owers bloomed. Now, on 26th August, the Shah dismissed Amuzegar after a year in ofce and appointed the more traditional gure of Jaafar Sharif-Emami as Prime Minister, with a belated mandate to open up a dialogue with at least the more moderate of the religious leaders. Sharif-Emami announced measures designed to appeal to them: casinos were to be closed, the Islamic calendar was reinstated, and pledges were made of adherence to the tenets of Islam. Simultaneously, to placate the other wing of the opposition, press censorship was relaxed, the intention to hold free elections reafrmed, and a fresh purge of corrupt practices promised. Less admirably, action was taken against certain minority groups, especially the heretical Bahai sect. Despite all this, demonstrations continued and displayed a new and bolder hostility to the Shah himself.2 Late on 7th September, probably on the

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prompting of the armed forces, martial law was proclaimed in Tehran and 11 other major cities. The following day, whether in deance or ignorance of the proclamation, crowds assembled in Jaleh Square in the capital, and troops opened re with considerable loss of life, ofcially stated at the time to be 58 but later admitted to be more and popularly believed to be greatly in excess of the ofcial gure. This catastrophe was to prove a milestone on the road to revolution. Hardly had the Iranian public recovered from it when it was visited on 16th September with the natural disaster of a major earthquake at Tabas. The Governments attempts at relief operations were upstaged by those of the religious authorities. The regimes credit sank so low that SharifEmami, speaking in a televised Majles debate in which the martial law legislation was approved, remarked ruefully that he would not have been surprised had the Government been charged with responsibility for the earthquake. The imposition of martial law was accompanied by a continuing conciliatory mood on the part of the Shah and his Prime Minister. This served only to encourage the outbreak of widespread strikes for higher wages, which were promptly granted. Further stoppages were called with political demands, among them the return from exile of Ayatollah Khomeini who, expelled by Iraq and denied entry by Kuwait, was now ensconced outside Paris, blandly ignoring the French stipulation that he should not engage in political activities. By the end of October the strikes had spread to the oilelds. Faced with this ominous development, and a renewal of disturbances in the towns, the Shah tried to persuade some of the opposition National Front leaders to join an administration. This failed, evidently on Khomeinis instructions, and after more violence in Tehran on 5th November, including an attack on the British Embassy, the Shah appointed the following day a predominantly military government under General Azhari. Still this did not herald a period of repression. The Shah adopted a moderate even apologetic tone on television, and accompanied it with the disreputable gesture of having the faithful Hoveyda (a Bahai) arrested. Strikes and demonstrations were now reinforced by power cuts in Tehran: the economy was being wrecked. On the occasion of the important Shia festival of Muharram on 10th and 11th December peaceful marches of some one million people through the streets of the capital attested to the oppositions strength even more than the earlier violence. Nevertheless this was resumed later in the month: morale in the security forces showed the rst signs of cracking and oil production plummeted again. The Shah made a last-ditch appeal to the National Front politician, Shahpour Bakhtiar, to form a government. Bakhtiar agreed, on condition that the Shah left the country. A fateful period of ten days then elapsed between the Shahs acceptance of this condition and his fullling it, which effectively undermined Bakhtiars position by making it appear that he was the Shahs man. The Shah left, ostensibly on holiday, on 16th January 1979, and in the nal denouement Khomeini returned in triumph on 1st February, declaring the Bakhtiar administration null and void. When shortly afterwards the latters military support disintegrated in an internecine confrontation the new order had arrived.

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Events seen from the Foreign and Commonwealth Ofce

Back in 1975 we had, on any rational calculation, no cause for alarm. The farthest we went was to scrap a defensive brief highlighting the better side of the regime on the grounds that there was a danger of going overboard in defending Iran. In certain ministerial quarters factors of instability began to give rise to concern at the beginning of 1977. Economic problems led the department to comment in April that further serious setbacks to the Shahs plans could change the mood of Iranian society from passive acquiescence to active resentment. The level of anxiety rose perceptibly following the Qom disturbances in January 1978 and their aftermath, when we noted that if popular opposition became a widespread phenomenon the will to rule of the Shah himself might be sapped. As the 40-day cycle continued, we posed the question how long it could go on without the Shah either cracking up or cracking down. In midAugust we sounded alarm bells at under-secretary level, and early in September recommended that Ministers be warned of the gravity of the situation. On the day of the Jaleh Square massacre that month we had an interesting discussion with the Ambassador (who was about to return to Tehran from his summer leave) about whether the Shah was facing the greatest challenge to his authority since the opposition to his White Revolution in 1963, or since he was forced into temporary exile by Mossadegh in 1953. We tended to the gloomier view, and after reviewing the situation at his post a few days later the Ambassador expressed himself in much the same terms. In early October we commented that if the opposition steamroller continued on its path the dynasty would be lucky to survive until Christmas. A month later, following the establishment of the military government in Tehran, we saw the unfolding drama as an inexorable Greek tragedy and found it difcult to see how the Shah was going to get out of the corner into which he had painted himself. While the record would not sustain any claim to prescience, it does perhaps show that distance lent disenchantment: in London we were sometimes as optimistic as our colleagues in Tehran, but never less pessimistic. Such differences as there may have been in analysis, however, were seldom reected in recommendations on policy for the simple reason that we did not have much choice. Iran had inherited Britains mantle as protector of security and stability in the Gulf. At the time, there owed through this vital waterway 70 percent of Japans oil imports, 60 percent of Western Europes and 44 percent of the United States. Iran was a regional pillar of the Central Treaty Organisation and her 1200-mile border with the Soviet Union formed an important barrier to any thoughts the Kremlin might have harboured of expanding to the warm-water ports of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Finally, Iran had become not only a signicant source of oil but a major export market, not least for defence equipment. In short, we had a good thing going with the Shah. We were perhaps overapprehensive of spoiling it by frank speaking on topics like human rights and liberalisation (though admittedly it was none too easy to tell the Shah how he

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should be running his own country when he was busy lecturing us on how we should be running ours); and dire prognostications that to do so would lose us the next contract were not borne out in the event. The judgement we did get broadly correct was that any conceivable successor regime was likely to be inimical to our interests as well as being worse for Iran. The prospects for comparatively efcient administration and orderly progress would be poor; a force for regional stability would be removed; a barrier to Soviet expansion could be breached; and a major British market might be lost. We should, on the other hand, score few points by changing to another horse, even if a suitable runner could be identied, and our other friends in the area would be discouraged and demoralised were we to try. The prescription therefore tended to be support for the Shah, warts and all, while occasionally offering treatment for the warts. Our public stance in the early stages, when questions were being asked about the British association with an apparent tyranny, was that the Iranian authorities were well aware of the British Governments views on human rights but that diplomatic representations were likely to be counter-productive: unless British subjects were involved we had no standing to intervene in Irans internal affairs and such action would be resented. Later on we were able to take the more positive line that the Shah was trying to liberalise his regime and deserved encouragement rather than criticism, which in any case should take account of the different historical background in that part of the world an argument which the Shah himself tended to undermine by his frequent claims that Iran was already in the European league. Towards the end we were saying that the Shahs regime, whatever its shortcomings, was the best bet for achieving the kinds of objective our correspondents wanted. At no time did we openly criticise the Shah. In mid-1978, there was consideration at ministerial level as to whether we should distance ourselves from the Shah. But in the absence of any better alternative, the conclusion was the warts and all prescription mentioned above. The same question was put in the early autumn, when the decision remained that from the point of view of both stability and liberalisation the success of the Shah remained the best outcome. On 16th October, a robust TV interview was recorded by the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, but, crucially, it was not broadcast until a week later, during which time the Shahs position had seriously deteriorated. So the assertion that you dont back off when your friends are in trouble raised a few ofcial eyebrows and was the last of its kind. It may have prompted the subsequent moratorium on public expressions of support for the Shah, justied mainly on the grounds that they would be unhelpful to him as well as being unpopular at home. Thereafter the ofcial line altered perceptibly from one of supporting the Shah personally to one of encouraging stable government under the constitution, and this virtual neutrality remained the watchword until the Shah fell a few weeks later. The other side of the coin was that we had to defend the BBC against absurd Iranian allegations that its Persian Service was encouraging the opposition. To his credit the same Foreign Secretary insisted that the principle of the BBCs independence was paramount.

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The religious dimension of the decline does not feature largely in this account of reactions in Whitehall.3 This is partly because in Tehran there was a long-standing self-denying ordinance about contacts between the Embassy and the religious fraternity, based on the belief that they would prejudice our relationship with the Shah. In London, however, there was generally growing concern about the Islamic Revival throughout the l970s, and not least in those departments responsible for the Middle East. A number of studies dealt with the subject. The non-ofcial World of Islam Festival in 1976 sought to publicise a positive image of the religion, and achieved considerable success in that aim. It was an unhappy irony that within three years much of the good the Festival had done was undermined by the effect of the Khomeini regimes excesses: much western opinion began to correlate Islam with extremism in doctrine and deed, despite many Muslims themselves arguing that Khomeinis theocracy no more represented Islam than the Inquisition had represented Christianity. The fact remains that in the Iran context we underestimated the strength and the appeal of the Islamic factor until a very late stage. Curiously enough, although the Americans fared no better in this respect, it was a White House staffer, Gary Sick, who later put the key point rather well: Khomeini did not cause the revolution, but it is no exaggeration to say that he single-handedly transformed an inchoate reform movement with limited objectives into a genuinely revolutionary experience with its own unique ideological content.4 It is a tting epigraph to a fascinating episode.
NOTES
1. Parsons principal apologia appeared in his book, The Pride and the Fall: Iran 1974 1979. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. 2. Since this article was written, the re-election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2009 evoked widespread protest demonstrations. It is a remarkable historical irony that those who opposed (and nally deposed) the Shah 30 years ago should now be getting such a taste of their own medicine. 3. Further comment on the religious aspect of the Fall of the Shah is to be found in the authors article 1979: Year of Destiny in the Middle East. Asian Affairs Volume XXXV Number 1 March 2004 pp315. 4. Gary Sick, All Fall Down: Americas Fateful Encounter with Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985. Sick also quotes an exasperated State Department ofcial as remarking after the revolution: Whoever took religion seriously?