King of Kings

PREFACE

“The Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s. . . . There will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” —secret CIA report, “Iran in the 1980s,” August 1977, five months before the start of revolution

At about 10:20 on the morning of November 15, 1977, two Sikorsky Sea King helicopters came in low across the Potomac River and made for the flat grassy expanse at the southern base of the Washington Monument. The green- and-white helicopters with their military insignia were part of the presidential fleet known as HMX-1, and on board the lead aircraft was the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, together with his wife, Farah, and a small royal entourage. The primary purpose of the trailing helicopter was to serve as a decoy.

Waiting alongside the helipad were half a dozen black limousines, along with several Secret Service vehicles and a phalanx of motorcycle police outriders. For security reasons, only a handful of officials knew which limousine would transport the shah to the White House, a mere half a mile away. It was the Iranian monarch’s twelfth visit to the United States since assuming the imperial throne thirty-six years before. Over the course of those visits, he had met at the White House with six different American presidents, beginning with Harry Truman. He was now about to meet his seventh: Jimmy Carter.

The shah had been apprehensive about this trip, and for two good reasons. In winning the presidency the previous year, Carter had campaigned on a reformist, clean-government platform. This included, the former governor of Georgia promised, a new emphasis on protecting human rights around the world and a critical reexamination of American arms sales to dictatorial regimes. Both these promises cast an uncomfortable spotlight on Iran. In recent years, a number of organizations had harshly assailed the shah’s regime over its human rights record, and Iran was far and away the largest purchaser of American weapons systems, accounting for nearly half of all such sales in recent years. Senior Carter administration officials had quietly offered the shah reassurances that these high-minded pledges did not apply to him, but the Iranian leader was understandably anxious to hear this from the president personally.

This was joined by a more immediate concern. By 1977, some fifty thousand Iranian students were studying at colleges and universities in the United States, and in recent days a sizable portion of them—as many as four thousand, by some reports—had begun converging on Washington to protest his visit. While overwhelmingly young leftists, their numbers were augmented by a smattering of older Iranian dissidents and exiles, as well as American human rights activists, and they had vowed to give the shah a noisy and embarrassing reception. In fact, they had already put the monarch on notice the previous day, when he had stayed at the preserved colonial village of Williamsburg, Virginia; during the night, the royal couple’s sleep was interrupted by chants from several hundred anti-shah demonstrators gathered a short distance away. Lending their appearance a disquieting quality, many concealed their faces behind paper masks, necessary protection, they claimed, against identification by the shah’s secret police.

In anticipation of the unpleasantness likely to play out in Washington, the Iranian government had reportedly arranged for hundreds of pro-regime members of the Iranian American community to be flown or bused into the capital, including Iranian air force cadets undergoing training at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. Along with banners extolling the shah’s leadership and U.S.-Iranian friendship, the pro-shah organizers had distributed two-sided solidarity flags: the U.S. emblem on one side, the Iranian on the other. By midmorning, a forewarned D.C. police force had isolated the two factions on either side of the Ellipse, the great lawn stretching just below the White House, but it made for a tense scene; penned behind flimsy strips of snow fencing about five hundred feet apart, the two groups hurled insults at each other through megaphones, their volume and intensity growing as the time for the shah’s scheduled arrival at the White House drew nearer.

That morning found me on the Ellipse as well, strolling among the police and the handful of reporters occupying the no-man’s-land between the two sides. I was eighteen years old and employed at the Treasury Department headquarters building, immediately adjacent to the White House, as a special aide to the secretary of the Treasury. The nice-sounding title notwithstanding, I was essentially an errand boy, and because the secretary at the time, W. Michael Blumenthal, required very little in the way of erranding, I spent most of my working hours strolling about the city in search of something interesting to do. On the morning of November 15, 1977, nothing looked quite so interesting as the spectacle unfolding on the Ellipse.

At about 10:30 a.m., the shah’s motorcade swung through the iron gates of the White House and came up its semicircular drive, an occasion marked by the start of a twenty-one-gun salute. In hindsight, this customary honor for a visiting head of state might have been a mistake, for the anti-shah protesters on the eastern side of the Ellipse seemed to interpret it rather like the firing of a starting gun. In an instant, hundreds broke through the snow fencing holding them back and began a charge across the great lawn for their opponents. While some of the pro-shah supporters started to flee in panic, a number of the younger men in their midst—the military cadets, judging by their builds and crew cuts—grabbed up whatever potential weapons lay close at hand and similarly rushed forward to battle. Suddenly no-man’s-land, rapidly shrinking as it was, didn’t seem such a great place to be.

For the next two or three minutes—it felt longer at the time—the Ellipse was the scene of a kind of massive street brawl, fists and feet flying, people sent tumbling or running or crawling, such that it was quite impossible to determine who was getting the better of whom. Nor could I be certain of the affiliation of the demonstrator who struck me across the back with a wooden stave with such force it sent me momentarily to the ground, although the power of the blow led me to suspect one of the more physically fit military cadets over some leftist graduate student. When finally the police rushed in with tear gas and billy clubs, there were already a good number of injured scattered about the lawn.

For the ceremony welcoming the shah to the White House, a rostrum had been erected on the South Lawn, before which several hundred invited guests were gathered to hear his and the president’s opening remarks. In hindsight, this tradition, too, was probably a mistake, for no sooner had the two leaders, along with their wives, mounted the stage than the first wafts of the tear gas discharged on the Ellipse began to envelop them. In a famous series of photos taken at the time, both couples try to maintain dignified poses as tears stream down their cheeks.

Concluding the embarrassing display on the South Lawn as quickly as possible—Jimmy Carter would later joke that it was one of the shortest speeches he ever gave—the two couples retreated to the healthier air inside the White House. As Rosalynn Carter led Farah and her entourage off for a coffee reception and traditional “ladies’ tour” of the White House, the two heads of state proceeded to the Cabinet Room, two doors down from the Oval Office. For this meeting, the shah was joined by only two advisors, in contrast to the array of American officials who sat oppo site: President Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and several other senior State Department officials.

Also seated at the table was the chief National Security Council (NSC) officer in charge of Iranian affairs, a forty-two-year-old navy captain named Gary Sick. Although he had carried the Iran portfolio at the NSC for two years, Sick was seeing the shah for the first time. “My first thought was how delicate he seemed,” he recalled. “Very elegant, very refined, with this ramrod-straight posture, but the overall impression was of someone rather delicate. From all I’d read about him, all the newsreels I’d watched, I don’t know that I was quite prepared for that.”

There is often a platitudinous quality to these preliminary White House meetings with foreign heads of state, pleasantries combined with an overview of matters to be addressed in more detail later. While the November 15 meeting contained an element of this, it also proved unusually substantive. Several times President Carter stressed that he not only appreciated America’s “special relationship” with Iran but wished to find ways to strengthen it further, a tacit sign that the shah would hear few concerns from the new administration over Iran’s human rights record or profligate arms purchases. For his part, the Iranian king repeated a promise not to seek an increase in oil prices at the upcoming meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), welcome news from the man who’d long been the chief agent of such hikes.

Throughout the ninety-minute meeting, Gary Sick was struck by the shah’s commanding manner. “On our side of the table, there was a lot of informal discussion back-and-forth, but I can’t recall the shah even looking at the two guys he was with; they certainly didn’t have speaking parts. But this was his element: the planned meeting, the laid-out agenda. I found him very impressive, just thoroughly prepared on whatever topic came up.”

Despite the wariness with which the shah had approached this state visit and the chaos accompanying his arrival, it quickly became evident that he and Carter enjoyed a personal rapport, so much so that by the time he and the shahbanou left Washington the following afternoon, the king was in an ebullient mood. To an American diplomat he remarked that the visit could not possibly have gone better, while to a palace advisor he allowed that it was one of the most fruitful trips he had ever made to the American capital. Back in Iran, the state-controlled media carried banner headlines extolling the King of Kings’ triumphant foray abroad, while the consensus in Carter’s White House was that the two days of meetings had been a tremendous success, a further strengthening of the long- standing American-Iranian alliance.

Yet the occasion posed a couple of troubling questions should anyone have chosen to take notice. The violent demonstrations of November 15 had left well over a hundred injured, including twenty-nine policemen, making it the worst day of civil unrest in the nation’s capital in nearly a decade. Fistfights between the warring factions had extended even into the city’s emergency rooms, requiring hospital security guards to segregate pro- and anti-shah demonstrators awaiting medical treatment. Many of the estimated four thousand Iranian students who had come to Washington to denounce the shah were drawn from their nation’s middle and upper classes, and if this was the outlook of those who had most greatly benefited from his rule, what might it say about those inside Iran who lacked such privilege? And while most of the anti-shah demonstrators identified as leftists, they had been joined by members of several conservative Muslim religious groups, so that interspersed with the placards decrying the monarch as a right-wing fascist and American lackey were others accusing him of betraying Islam. Some of those in this latter category carried placards bearing the likeness of one of the shah’s bitterest critics, an aging cleric virtually unknown outside Iran named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. When was the last time that Washington, or any nation’s capital, saw secular leftists and religious fundamentalists march together in common cause?

But no one did take notice—at least no one in a position to do something about it. Instead, no sooner had the shah departed Washington than White House aides set to planning President Carter’s reciprocal visit to Iran, scheduled for a mere six weeks later, the better to capitalize on the progress being made. At this second meeting, Carter repeated the praise he had showered on the king at the White House, noting that “thanks to the leadership of the shah, Iran is an island of stability in a troubled region.”

Once again, it was almost as if some psychological starting gun had been fired, for within days of Carter’s fulsome tribute there occurred inside Iran the first significant anti-shah protests in over a decade. Initially, these demonstrations were small and easily scattered, but within a few weeks they had metastasized and turned violent. Still, few took notice. By the spring of 1978, protesters had taken to the streets of almost every Iranian town of any size, their cause now imbued with a distinctly religious tilt, but it was only then, six months after his likeness had appeared on demonstrators’ posters in Washington, that The New York Times thought to identify the shah’s chief nemesis, Ruhollah Khomeini, for the first time while managing to get his first name wrong. But still it got worse, and still very few grasped the extent. By that December, with Iran paralyzed by strikes and sliding toward civil war, the death toll from its street battles now reaching into the thousands—into the tens of thousands, according to the opposition—President Carter could still profess full confidence in the shah’s ability to right the situation and persevere. And then, just weeks later, the once unimaginable: After thirty-seven years, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, was simply no more, cast into a wandering exile as his regime was engulfed by a revolution few saw coming and none knew how to stop.