The Dawn of a New Era

Abstract

The new civilian prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, whom the Shah appointed from the opposition ranks ahead of his exile in mid-January, became Washington’s best hope to prevent the collapse of the regime. The four-star General Robert Huyser was rushed to Tehran to maintain the cohesion of the armed forces behind the new prime minister. Bakhtiar showed courage and grit but his multifaceted strategy was undercut by Sullivan with the unwitting help of Huyser. Sullivan plotted to shorten the Bakhtiar interlude in favor of Mehdi Bazargan in an upcoming political setting that he likened to the Gandhi–Nehru model of governance in India. The ambassador set out to shift the loyalty of the military leaders to the pro-Khomeini camp. The departure of the Shah on January 16 deepened the rift within the military and paved the way for the eventual success of that strategy.

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1 Tehran, New Year, 1979

Tehran beganthe year 1979 in stupefaction with the breaking news of the impending departure of Mohammad-Reza Shah. The prime minister-designate Shapour Bakhtiar had just revealed to the press that he had a firm commitment from the Shah that he would leave Iran for a prolonged period within a month after a civilian government was installed.¹

Contrary to a lingering assumption, the appointment of Bakhtiar had taken Washington by surprise. Sullivan learnt about it not from the Shah, but through an already existing backchannel between Bakhtiar and the embassy’s Political Officer John Stemple; the latter and his hierarchical superior George Lambrakis were in contact with virtually all the opposition leaders outside the clerical camp.² Bakhtiar had broken the news to Stemple by telephone and set up a meeting for the following day, December 30.³ Discreet US backing must have been deemed indispensable while, in contrast, open support was tantamount to the kiss of death. In conveying the news to Washington, Sullivan urged that all demonstrative statements of support be avoided.⁴ Parsons and the French ambassador, Raoul Delaye, agreed with Sullivan that the sooner the Shah left the better the chances of Bakhtiar to succeed⁵; yet nothing on record suggests that the two were privy to Sullivan’s inner thoughts.

In Tehran, the news of the Shah’s departure was greeted with uneven enthusiasm. A sense of victory and reward in the revolutionary ranks was contrasted with disbelief and fear of the unknown among the downcast uptown folks; few shed any tears for a monarch whose 37-year reign was ending in disgrace.⁶ Many among the establishment figures now viewed the departure as a welcome prerequisite for return to normalcy.⁷ Even his boyhood friend, the influential General Hossein Fardoust was not distraught; he now dispensed defeatist advice to hordes of bewildered army comrades who dropped by in his office for guidance.⁸

The scene in the streets of Tehran was surreal. The hellish traffic had come to a near standstill. At 225,000 barrels a day, oil production met less than half the domestic needs, a fact graphically on display in front of the filling stations. Some mosques connected with the Rohaniat Mobarez managed to distribute kerosene, rice and sugar in popular neighborhoods. One such mosque sent word to the US Embassy that they wished to buy 10,000 tons of rice from the United States for distribution.⁹ Flight traffic controllers were on strike; they were replaced by the air force personnel, leading to the cancellation of most international flights. Pan Am-operated ad hoc 747 flights mainly for the evacuation of US nationals.¹⁰ The scene at Mehrabad Airport was otherwise reminiscent of the evacuation days in Saigon in April 1975.

Hawkish royalists were bitter about the Shah’s decision to leave; Ardeshir Zahedi organized a public relation event on January 1, inviting the press corps to the Niavaran Palace garden where the Shah made a public appearance accompanied by the Queen and the royal children and mingled with reporters.¹¹ The idea was to offset the drift of Bakhtiar’s announcement about the Shah’s departure. Zahedi was urging the Shah to go to Kish Island and let the military restore order with a firm hand. The fiercely loyalist Air Force Chief General Amir-Hossein Rabii joined by Navy Commander Admiral Kamal Habibollahi and the influential four-star General Tufanian were holding meetings they secretly referred to as “board,” but, as was made clear to Huyser shortly thereafter, no coup plan had existed, a topic that shall be probed in more detail later in this chapter.

The Shah was dismissive of all such temptations. When sounded out by Sullivan, he denied any coup plan existed; the “board,” he said, was set up at his own suggestion to do the needed contingency planning in the event that the Bakhtiar government failed.¹²General Oveissi was allowed to depart abroad on January 4. The general was incensed by the commander-in-chief’s spinelessness, “He is not from that father’s [Reza Shah] testicles”—a crude Farsi cliché for cowardice which he spat out on his way out of the palace when he bumped into Ali Amini.¹³ Another feisty advocate of crackdown, General Khosrowdad was given a command post in Kerman, way out of reach.¹⁴ The vacant top military slot of Chief of the Supreme Commander’s Staff was filled by a loyalist General Abbas Gharabaghi. Similarly, the Shah asked Zahedi to return to his post in Washington in part to prepare for the royal family’s planned sojourn in California. Queen Mother and some of the Shah’s siblings now lived there while the Crown Prince Reza was finishing his undergraduate air force pilot training at Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas.

Most believed and some dared to tell the Shah to his face that if he left, there would be no return. Gharabaghi recalled having struck a sensitive cord when he told the Shah that his departure would bring about the collapse of the armed forces.¹⁵ None was aware of the Shah’s medical condition.

For all intents and purposes, Mohammad-Reza was a checkmated king.

2 Bakhtiar, the Bird of Storm

Shapour Bakhtiar had more reason to spurn the Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty than any other secular oppositionist leader in the field. His father—a recalcitrant Bakhtiary warlord known for his honorific title Sardar Fateh (“victorious commander”)—had fallen victim to Reza Shah’s tribal purges and was executed in 1934.¹⁶ In the late 1950s, Bakhtiar had himself spent time in the Shah’s prison for pro-Mosaddeq activism in a group known as nehzat’e moqavemat’e melli (“the National Resistance Movement”) in association with Mehdi Bazargan and again for the same cause under the premiership of Ali Amini in the early 1960s.

Born in the wilderness of Zagros heartland to a proud pedigree of tribal aristocracy, Bakhtiar blended tribal mannerism with the superior intellectual attitude of the Parisian Rive Gauche, having spent his formative years in France; French culture had in effect pervaded his mind to the limit of divided loyalty, making him the most accomplished Francophile Iranian politician as Sullivan also observed.¹⁷ In wartime France, he had enlisted in the French army and during the Nazi occupation he had run secret errands for Félix Gaillard—a friend active in the French Resistance who became the youngest French Fourth Republic prime minister before his accidental death in 1970.¹⁸ While studying at the Sorbonne, Bakhtiar had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Paul Valéry and the philosopher Henri Bergson, completing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the renowned international jurist Georges Scelle (Fig. 16.1).¹⁹

Fig. 16.1

Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, January 1979. (Source: Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

In his post-mortem accounts, Bakhtiar described the conditions he inherited in January 1979 as a society in the throes of metastasized cancer; shirking responsibility, he said, was tantamount to treason.²⁰ Still, he was not bereft of hope even optimism as he set about forming a government on New Year’s Eve. His game plan was to rally the liberal opposition, secure the blessing of moderate in-country ulama and obtain effective control of the military once the Shah left as a clout, which should permit him to enter into dialogue from position of strength. He confided in Stemple that he had secured support from Ayatollah Shariatmadari through an emissary and was meeting Bazargan to arrange for his support. The Shah, he said, would reign, but not rule.²¹

In effect, the shah had agreed to several formerly taboo preconditions, but his prerogatives as commander-in-chief had not been questioned.²² Refusing to transfer that prerogative for the ailing Shah on the verge of permanent exile must have, plausibly, been a matter of principle mainly to ensure that his son would not be deprived of that cardinal prerogative. In contrast to Sadighi before him, Bakhtiar had agreed with the Shah’s departure plans²³; yet nothing on record confirms that Bakhtiar had demanded and secured the Shah’s departure as it politically suited him to advertise. The timing of the departure was not precisely set; it was understood to be “at some point after” the formation of new government.²⁴

For the first time in the post-Mosaddeq era, the two houses of parliament cast a preliminary vote of inclination for the nomination of Bakhtiar on December 31. For him, these formalistic motions were meant to convey a message that the rules of the game had changed. The government platform was devised to echo what Bakhtiar believed was the wish list of the public opinion across the ideological spectrum, moderate clerics included.²⁵ Other than an assortment of political freedoms, the platform called for the dismantling of the SAVAK, the phasing out of the martial law, the release of remaining political prisoners, the prompt prosecution of the “plunderers and violators of the people’s rights” and the compensation to persons or families of victims of atrocities committed by the state organs.²⁶ The platform also vowed, “To set up a framework for close cooperation between the government and the clerical-estate in a manner to enable the high ulama to oversee the good conduct of state affairs.” The vague formulation did not amount to full restitution of the long-abandoned constitutional provision for legislative oversight by ulama, but went a long way to legitimizing clerical meddling in temporal affairs. Bakhtiar had had to dampen his own enthusiasm for laïcité, unvendable in the existing climate of opinion. His underlying assumption was that if people were offered what they had clamored for but denied over the past quarter of a century, the revolutionary fervor would gradually subside. Sullivan described him as “quixotic.”²⁷

The first hitch emerged when the morning after receiving the Shah’s offer he contacted his National Front peers. He had hoped to fill his cabinet posts with political heavyweights from pro-Mosaddeq ranks on the strength of having obtained the Shah’s pledge to depart. The premature leak of the news of the Shah’s departure was presumably intended to clear the air for that encounter.²⁸ Sanjabi had already torpedoed Sadighi’s attempt to form a government; he was not about now to let his junior partner circumvent him. The meeting had not gone smoothly, even if the truth of what in effect happened is mired by contradictory accounts by the participants—immaterial in retrospect.²⁹ What left an imprint in the course of events were the punitive steps against the prime minister-designate that followed. In a special convocation of the Central Committee of the National Front on the next day, December 30, Bakhtiar was expelled from the National Front and stripped of his position as First Secretary of the Iran Party.³⁰

The ensuing cabinet selection process was eventful. The two Mosaddeq sons, Gholam-Hossein and Ahmad, shied away³¹; their presence would have made a major psychological impact. So did Seyyed Ahmad Madani a plucky Navy Admiral purged years earlier for his pronounced anti-regime sentiments. Yahya Sadeq-Vaziri, a respected Kurdish judge appointed at the Justice Ministry, quickly resigned. Mohammad Derakhshesh, the influential leader of the Teachers’ Union, had been earmarked for the education portfolio but he disdainfully declined the post. He decried the cabinet as a group of “fourth rate unknowns” while anointing the new minister of education as a SAVAK agent.³² In a paradox, Bazargan’s Freedom Movement did not immediately join the boycott, adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude.³³ Bazargan feared a military coup might occur, especially if Bakhtiar failed to form a government; he was not therefore averse to letting second echelon figures in his movement join Bakhtiar’s cabinet.³⁴ It is also a fact that between the two a residue of sympathy, rooted in their post-Mosaddeq activism in the 1950s that had landed both in prison had lingered on.³⁵

The severest blow came when the prestigious ex-chief of the supreme commander’s staff, General Fereydoun Djam, declined the offer to serve as War Minister. Djam, who had fallen out with the Shah in 1971 and had been assigned a diplomatic sinecure in Madrid, was slated to act as the lynchpin to hold the army united behind Bakhtiar after the Shah’s departure. The general, however, considered the War Ministry as an empty shell stripped of all operational responsibilities as a result of the Shah having kept the army detached from the executive branch. The circumstances of his refusal to join the Bakhtiar government would later intrigue and divide historians and deserve a separate re-examination; suffice it to say that for Djam the political conditions had been let to degrade beyond repair and calling him back to assume responsibility was ineffectual and doomed.³⁶ The Bakhtiar cabinet thus composed of second-ranking officials and technocrats was presented to the Shah in a somber televised ceremony on January 6. In a brief statement the Shah confirmed he would soon be leaving the country for medical treatment and rest.

Meanwhile a relative calm had deceptively set in Tehran in the countdown to Khomeini’s verdict, which was uncharacteristically late. The opposition was petrified by the perceived imminence of a military coup, which might have arguably caused the delayed reaction, yet the verdict fell on January 7 in a strong denunciation of the Bakhtiar government. The population was called upon to disobey the government and refrain from paying taxes or utility bills; the government employees were to prevent the new ministers from taking up their seats; preachers should declare from pulpits that the Shah was deposed and the government and the parliament were illegal. He warned that unless the whole nation responded to his call, the ongoing conspiracies might succeed.³⁷

Bakhtiar, for his part, embarked on a charm offensive to cultivate the non-indoctrinated intelligentsia. He multiplied defiant media appearances to project the image of a leader of a different vintage. In one such appearance, he recited a verse from a renowned living poet, Ra’adi Azarakhshi, rich in symbolic defiance: “I am the Bird of Storm, undaunted by Winds; a Tide that would not flee to the Shore.” The powerful metaphor of the “Bird of Storm” left a mark and became a hallmark of his 37 days in power. At present, he knew that the outcome of the yearlong standoff hinged on the attitude of the armed forces. Ambassador Sullivan was even more conscious of the weight that the military carried in the complex power equation and set out to steer events to comport with his roadmap (see “Ambassador’s Roadmap” in Chap. 14).

2.1 Ambassador Sullivan: A Redux

For Washington and its Western allies, the fledging civilian government was the last best hope to keep Iran off the Soviet orbit. For that, Carter had assigned General Huyser to chaperone the military in support of Bakhtiar. His ambassador in Tehran had a mind of his own. Sullivan’s “Moment of Truth” dispatch on January 3 had made the intended dent in Washington but three other components of his roadmap had yet to be tackled. A direct channel of dialogue between Washington and the Ayatollah was needed urgently to prepare the terrain for future harmonious rapports with the new order. This was arranged in complicity with Secretary Vance who earmarked Ambassador Theodor Eliot for the purpose (see Chap. 17 for details). Another factor of overriding importance was the prevention of all drifts and detours that could hamper an orderly transfer of power to a new regime. In early January, such drift could only come from a military coup. There is little doubt that the sounding of the alarms about an impending coup by a “board,” even specifying January 12 as the D-Day in that dispatch, was a deliberate hype. The identity of the tipster remained a mystery to which not even Huyser, in his meticulously detailed memoirs, make a reference.³⁸ With the help, if not complicity of Secretary Vance, Sullivan set out to circumvent all temptations for a putsch and, as will be seen below, an attempt was made to modify the terms of reference of the Huyser mission to close all loopholes that may allow the general to abet a coup by the military leaders. Sullivan might have gone as far as resorting to blackmail against the military leadership to forestall all adventurous attempts on their part. The well-briefed Tehran correspondent of the New York Times, R.W. Apple Jr., wrote in his column on January 8, that the US Embassy had severely warned the top military brass earlier that week to the effect that, “Any precipitate action might lead to a cutoff in American supplies,”³⁹ a point on which the Shah made a sore remark in his post-Revolution memoirs.⁴⁰

Finally, for the smooth transfer of power, it was vital that the military be brought to switch its loyalty from the Shah to the opposition, a delicate undertaking that Sullivan attempted by manipulating the less astute General Huyser, as will be explained in the next section. 

3 General Huyser’s Mission to Tehran

The mission, it will be recalled, was decided by President Carter in a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on January 3. The idea of sending a senior US military officer to prop up the Iranian military was already in the cards of the Pentagon, though it assumed great urgency when it became clear that the Shah would leave the scene.⁴¹ Huyser had been a frequent visitor to Tehran over the previous years and was friend with top commanders. He was instantly chosen when his name was brought up by Acting Defense Secretary Charles Duncan.⁴²

Huyser recalled having been woken up at 2 a.m. on January 4 to be told of the president’s orders.⁴³ Traveling in the cockpit of a C-141 oil cargo plane, the hustled four-star general had forgotten to take his passport; he was filtered through incognito at Mehrabad Airport the same afternoon following a dicey landing; as noted, the tower was being manned by the air force personnel due to a strike by flight controllers.⁴⁴ Neither the Shah nor the prime minister-designate had been officially notified.

In his widely read column in the New York Times, James Reston wrote on January 4, “The Carter Administration is now concentrating its efforts on maintaining the unity of the Iranian armed forces behind the new civilian government headed by Shapour Bakhtiar. For this purpose, President Carter has sent Gen. Robert E. Huyser […] to Teheran in the hope of avoiding any break in the ranks of the Iranian officer corps.”⁴⁵ Sullivan learnt of the mission through an angry phone call from Huyser’s direct boss, General Alexander H. Haig. A Nixonite, the Allied Supreme Commander was ranting because, like other republican leaders in Washington, he believed Carter was selling the Shah short.⁴⁶ The Huyser mission, he complained, was to impose a transfer of loyalty by the Iranian military from the Shah to the civilian (Bakhtiar) government.⁴⁷ Sullivan was upset for a different reason; he saw a parallel line of communication with Washington and angrily demanded that Huyser coordinate his actions and his reporting to Washington with the embassy.⁴⁸ In Tehran, memories of the Ajax coup and parallels with General Schwarzkopf’s mission in August 1953 were immediately evoked.⁴⁹ Moscow raised its voice to protest against US fleet deployment in the Indian Ocean and General Huyser’s mission to Tehran.⁵⁰

3.1 Huyser’s Mandate

While still in Stuttgart, Huyser had had to insist on receiving written instructions given the sensitivity and controversial task on which he was about to embark.⁵¹ Even then, he received a text labeled “Draft.” Therein, Huyser was directed to impress on the military leaders President Carter’s concern for a strong, stable government, friendly to the United States. “The Shah’s effort to establish a civilian government,” the text stressed, “appears to be the most likely prospect for a strong stable government.” The mention of the Shah must have been meant to sugarcoat the advent of Bakhtiar and the assigned task to Huyser to bolster it. The text went on, “The Iranian military today have a role of overriding importance to the future of Iran. They can only carry out this responsibility if they remain cohesive and work closely together. No Iranian military leader should leave Iran now. As the Iranian military move through this time of change they should know that the US military and the US government from President down remain strongly behind them.”⁵²

Brzezinski and Vance had sharply contrasted interpretation of the text. Brzezinski wanted it to flash a green light to the military to stage a coup while Vance saw the mandate aimed at preventing all wayward moves that could undermine the new civilian government. Vance had the advantage of controlling the diplomatic missions abroad and moved to tighten that control. In a revelatory secret message on January 2, he advised the ambassador in Tehran to feel “no inhibitions” in continuing his contacts with key military officers, either in active duty or retired, directly or through the MAAG chief General Philip Gast.⁵³

The first hitch Huyser faced upon his arrival in Tehran was to learn that his mission had been placed on hold on the order from the Secretary of State.⁵⁴ In a cryptic message Vance directed Sullivan, “You should go ahead and tell General Huyser about your conversation with [the] military representative [in the] afternoon of January 4. Please tell him it is because of that conversation that he is not to see any Iranian military figures until he receives further instructions […].”⁵⁵ Clearly, the purpose of putting the mission on hold was to forestall any misstep resulting from the interpretation of the general’s mandate. Somehow, the impression that a coup was in the offing had not been dissipated. Vice President Mondale and Secretary Vance now wished Carter to agree to amend Huyser’s mandate, making it crystal clear that the United States opposed a coup d’état by the military. By then, the president and his National Security Advisor had left to attend the summit in Guadeloupe. Brzezinski recalled having been summoned to Carter’s cottage at the Hamak Hotel where the president was on an animated telephone exchange with Vance and Vice-President Mondale.⁵⁶ Prodded by Brzezinski, Carter “took a very firm line,” telling Vance that he did not wish to “water down Huyser’s instructions.” Brzezinski had warned him of “massive historical responsibility” if he prevented the military and the Shah from doing what they had finally decided to do. The president also directed Sullivan to ascertain the Shah’s attitude regarding the putative coup. Clearly at that point, Carter was ready to accept a pro-Shah coup and step back from the decision adopted the previous day at the NSC which, it will be recalled, enjoined the Shah in diplomatic language to leave the scene.⁵⁷ The president’s backtracking from that decision is confirmed in his personal diary entry dated January 4, 1979 where he recorded his conversation with “Fritz” (Mondale) and Cy (Cyrus Vance): “Cy wanted to stop any such move [a coup] but I insisted that we retain our relationship with the shah and the military—our only two ties with future sound relations with Iran” (emphasis added).⁵⁸

The conclusion of this episode remains somewhat fuzzy. Sullivan did see the Shah on January 5, but the full record of the audience is not found among the released archive files.⁵⁹ A partial report dated January 6 covers matters unrelated to Carter’s instructions.⁶⁰ Still, going by memoirs of Secretary Vance—confirmed in Carter’s diary—the Shah denied that any coup plan had existed; the “board,” he said, was set up at his own suggestion to do the needed contingency planning in the event that the Bakhtiar government should fail. A State Department White Paper suggests that in the course of that audience Sullivan had conveyed the president’s original message whereby the president agreed with the Shah’s departure plans.⁶¹ It is safe to assume that once the existence of a coup plan was firmly denied and the Shah reaffirmed his intention to depart, the retraction of the earlier recommendation had lost its purpose.⁶² From then on, a coup d’état became an option to be resorted to as a last recourse in the worst-case scenario. In the volatile conditions of those days, however, definitions of what the best- and worst-case scenarios were had become somewhat fluid to the eventual detriment of the Bakhtiar government.

3.2 Interface with the Top Iranian Generals

Over the next 28 days up to his departure from Tehran on February 3, Huyser held daily sessions with the top five Iranian generals at the Supreme Commander’s Staff headquarters in Lavizan. A suburb village just south of the Niavaran Palace, the Lavizan military compound also housed the US Advisory Mission where Huyser set up office in General Gast’s quarters. The trajectory from the Embassy to the compound was often filled with protesters, posing a potential threat to the life of the general whose presence in Tehran was known and provocatively advertised by Moscow. Huyser was surprised to observe that the Soviet press was aware of minute details of his daily program.⁶³

On the Iranian side, General Abbas Gharabaghi, recently assigned to the top military post, was expected to lead the military through the post-Shah phase of the crisis. His other interlocutors were the Navy chief, Admiral Kamal Habibollahi, the newly appointed ground force commander, General Abdol-Ali Badrehi, Air Force Chief General Amir-Hossein Rabii and the influential General Hassan Tufanian who, under the bland title of Deputy War Minister, handled the multi-billion military procurements in close association with the Shah.

Husyer found his interlocutors downcast and distraught by the impending departure of the Shah: “They almost worshipped him.”⁶⁴ He also noted an open hostility toward Ambassador Sullivan, finger-pointed for the Shah’s decision to depart.⁶⁵ This point was hotly debated when on January 10 the English-language press in Tehran published an intriguing piece on the US policy shift, claiming that officials in Washington had confirmed that the United States had advised the Shah to temporarily leave Iran. The New York Times columnist, James Reston, and the daily’s Tehran correspondent, Raymond W. Apple Jr., had both published similar pieces in previous days.⁶⁶ Clearly, Sullivan in Tehran and the Iran Policy Group at the State Department sought to draw credit for the upcoming departure of the Shah as part of a design to ingratiate Washington to the Ayatollah and the opposition.

Huyser was keen to prop up their morale and dispel vague temptations among them to abandon their posts and leave the country. They were strongly urged to remain and were assured of America’s unflagging support. The expectation frequently expressed to Huyser was that the “omnipotent America” should be able to silence Khomeini and pressure Britain to stop the hostile BBC broadcasts.⁶⁷ They all believed that the clergy was being manipulated by communists who would eventually prevail should matters were allowed to deteriorate further.

Predictions of doom notwithstanding, Huyser observed that there was no contingency planning either for a military takeover or for the restoration of vital services to bring the country out of its paralysis.⁶⁸ He pressed the group to set about contingency planning for the restoration of fuel supply, power, customs and communication services. Joint Supreme Commander’s Staff and MAAG teams were set up for such planning as to strengthen the prime minister’s hand in dealing with strikes.⁶⁹ The generals were well disposed toward the new prime minister, impressed by his grit and firmness,⁷⁰ all the more so as the Shah had ordered them to support the new civilian government.⁷¹

3.3 The Proselytization of Huyser

Sullivan failed to get Huyser’s mandate modified and had to resign himself to “a curious modus vivendi,” whereby Huyser would strictly deal with the military and other related matters while he, the ambassador, would cover contacts with the government, the palace and other civilian affairs.⁷² They would compare notes at dinner before reporting to their respective hierarchies on secure phones. Huyser would later express regret for having agreed to such division of responsibility that deprived him of direct access to the prime minister.⁷³ For now, he accepted Sullivan’s offer of hosting him at his residence when it became clear that his assignment length in Tehran was taking longer than he had originally anticipated.⁷⁴

Already during the one-day lull on January 5, the two had spent a full day discussing the prevailing situation. The ambassador had argued that the Shah was finished and the military had decayed to virtual paralysis. The contradiction in Sullivan’s assessment of the armed forces and his claim about the imminence of a coup remained unexplained, but Sullivan had also judged the experiment with Bakhtiar as futile and doomed.⁷⁵ Huyser was struck by the irony of having been rushed to Tehran on president’s order to bolster the Bakhtiar government while the president’s man in the field was talking of defeat before the game had even started.⁷⁶

Evidence nonetheless suggests that Huyser was impressed by the ambassador’s narrative and embraced a few key ideas. The next day, in his tête-à-tête with General Tufanian, he asked point blank if the military leaders had plans to contact anyone among of the opposition. Tufanian’s reaction was unequivocal. The opposition, he said, had no legal status that could allow such contacts.⁷⁷ The idea of contacts between the military and the radical clergy was central to Sullivan’s stratagem, yet he managed to sell the idea as a crisis management tool needed to avoid mishaps and miscalculations. Sullivan went as far as misquoting the Iranian generals in a dispatch to Washington on January 10. There, he attributed the desire for the military–clergy dialogue to the Iranian generals. The cable began by the phrase, “In view of urgent appeals from [the] Iranian military that we arrange relationship between them and Khomeini […].”⁷⁸ The Iranian generals had asked Huyser to stop Khomeini’s agitations by using American power and influence. They had employed terms such as “muscle” and “elimination”;⁷⁹ no word about a dialogue between them and the opposite camp had ever been pronounced. By then Huyser was fully on board. He confirmed his support for direct contacts with Khomeini to Defense Secretary Harold Brown who took strong exception to such contacts. To Huyser’s bewilderment, the secretary took time to read out the entire length of Washington’s cable instruction to Sullivan on December 28 as well as the terms of reference issued to Huyser on January 4.⁸⁰ The secretary reminded him that, if the support to Bakhtiar failed, “We must be prepared to take whatever action was necessary to ensure order.”⁸¹ Huyser was at a loss as he was not able to figure out in his own words where he had “tripped over his shoelaces.”⁸² He now made an attempt to ensure that his thinking was on the same page as that of Washington, but there again he seemed to have been shortchanged by the ambassador. In a long cable on January 12, Huyser relayed point by point what he understood of the message the president had wanted him to convey to his Iranian counterparts, but he also outlined several possible political scenarios in order to define under which conditions the United States could endorse a military takeover⁸³: a successful Bakhtiar government was evidently the most desired scenario, but its failure, he argued, need not automatically lead to a military takeover. In effect, his second-best scenario was another civilian government that would be “more acceptable to Khomeini and the religious faction and sympathetic to the West.” Huyser was clearly referring to a government headed by Mehdi Bazargan, a thesis that Sullivan had successfully inculcated in the mind of the less crafty general. Only if that second option also failed, exposing the country to a takeover by a hardline Islamic government under Khomeini or a communist force, should a military coup with decisive action to break the strikes and restore order be supported.

Sullivan had scored a point. The next day, January 15, he was advised in a secret message that, “[The] President and [the] Secretary [Vance] agree with [the] order of preference of these options as given in Huyser[’s] cable.”⁸⁴ Sullivan made his thoughts more explicit in his own separate dispatch: In scenario [B], a “follow-on civilian government” could come into being in Iran, “which would have the support of the military, but might call itself an ‘Islamic Republic’ and would enjoy the blessing of Khomeini. This is the thought that lies behind my urgent efforts to have the military and the religious leaders reach some understanding.”⁸⁵ The proverbial final nail came in a phrase in the same dispatch that read, “We must not rpt not [sic] become so fixed on supporting Bakhtiar that we would be perceived as resisting his departure in the same way as we have been perceived to resist the departure of the shah.” On January 14, Carter authorized a direct dialogue with the Khomeini camp in France.

3.4 A New Turning Point

Even before that exchange occurred, Sullivan had persuaded Huyser to get the military leaders to meet with the opposition. Bazargan and Ayatollah Beheshti were the intended interlocutors. Over the secure phone on January 13, he reported to Washington that “General Huyser put this [proposal] to [the] military who responded with alacrity” (emphasis added). He added that General Gharabaghi would inform the prime minister who would certainly approve.⁸⁶ Nothing on the existing records indicates, however, that Bakhtiar was made aware of the move or would have agreed to any such arrangement, keen as he was to keep the military under his wings and use them as leverage in his own bargaining with the opposition.⁸⁷ The word alacrity used by Sullivan was also false; it was contradicted both by Huyser and Gharabaghi in their respective memoirs. Huyser wrote, “Ambassador Sullivan had told me that such leading opposition figures as Bazargan and Ayatollah Beheshti were willing to meet with the military leadership; so I [Huyser] brought their names and telephone numbers with me to try to fix some meetings. The group [military leaders] was reluctant but eventually did make some calls” (emphasis added).⁸⁸ Gharabaghi’s narrative is even more explicit: “Huyser proposed to me to meet with the opposition citing figures like Bazargan and Beheshi and without waiting for my reaction he asked General Gast, his subordinate, to go get the telephone numbers […]; in the face of my refusal, General Huyser insisted, saying ‘it is very useful knowing what the opponents were saying’.”⁸⁹ Gharabaghi dutifully reported the conversation to the Shah who, in his Answer to History, reflects on the episode. On the verge of departure on exile, the Shah issued no firm orders against the move.⁹⁰

Sullivan’s efforts elicited a ringing endorsement from Vance, “We strongly endorse your efforts to bring the military and Khomeini forces together in a meeting in Tehran.”⁹¹ Ironically, at that point Ayatollah Beheshti was unsure about Khomeini’s support for these contacts and declined the invitation. As it was, Ayatollah Beheshti claimed security concerns to explain his refusal to meet the military on the proposed day. In relaying the news to Washington, Sullivan wrote, “Generals Huyser and Gast are currently whacking out with [the] military whether they will swallow their prestige and go to Beheshti house”.⁹² When clearance from Neauphle-le-Château was finally issued four days later, the Beheshti–Bazargan tandem met the SAVAK chief General Moghadam, but the subject matter had nothing to do with Sullivan’s midwifery efforts. They discussed the security arrangements for the upcoming pro-Khomeini march foreseen for January 19, occasioned by the fortieth commemorative day of the Karbala tragedy, the Arba’een.⁹³ Bakhtiar had authorized that encounter.⁹⁴

Sullivan remained unflagging in his resolve to bring the military to make amends with the clergy. For the Iranian military leaders, the intricacies of the decision-making process in Washington was not easy to fathom. Through their lenses, the Pentagon envoy, claiming to speak in the name of the US president, had now joined the ambassador to encourage them to accept the radical clergy as dialogue partner. In that same frame of mind, the hostile BBC Persian broadcasts signaled the complicity of Great Britain.

On December 11, Sullivan and Huyser met the Shah and made it clear that Washington expected him to leave promptly. Mohammad-Reza recalled in his memoirs, “All they were interested in was the day and the hours of my departure.⁹⁵ Tony Parsons, who during the final months of the crisis had accompanied Sullivan in every step of the way, had not lost the human touch. When he met the Shah on the eight to bid farewell—his five-year tour of duty in Tehran had come to an end—he could not hold back his tears, “The Shah put his hand on my arm as I dried up.”⁹⁶

4 Shah Raft

The final curtain fell on Mohammad-Reza Shah on a cold winter day, Tuesday, January 16, 1979. The royal couple, accompanied by a small retinue of aides and bodyguards, flew southwest by helicopter from the Niavaran Palace to Mehrabad International Airport for one final ride as emperor and empress on the royal plane, Shahin. The lavishly fitted Boeing 707—Iran’s equivalent of Air Force One—would take them to Aswan, Egypt, the first leg of their journey into permanent exile. The Shah and Queen Farah had spent harrowing days preparing their departure amid the death wish, the maddening sounds of revolt and the nocturnal din from rooftops in the outlying neighborhoods, all of which added to the feeling of abandonment. The two younger royal children—Ali-Reza and Leila, 13 and 9 respectively—were silent witnesses to the family’s reversal of fortune. The day before the flight to Aswan, an air force transport plane had flown the two children to join their older siblings in Lubbock, Texas. Both Ali-Reza and Leila would scupper their lives in later years.⁹⁷

The Shah had remained thorough in seeing to all constitutional steps prior to his departure date. He wished to satisfy himself that all was done to keep the ship of state afloat before leaving the country on permanent exile. On January 13, the composition of the “Regency Council”—the body that replaced the Shah during his absence—was announced. Other than the five ex-officio members,⁹⁸ the Shah had wanted to include some lay oppositionist leaders, yet Karim Sanjabi, Mehdi Bazargan and Yadollah Sahabi all rejected the invitation.⁹⁹ So, for different reasons, did Ali Amini and Gholam-Hossein Sadighi.¹⁰⁰ Three well-reputed old-timers with whom the moderate opposition had no problem replaced them.¹⁰¹ The Shah had delayed his departure until the Maljes confirmed Bakhtiar. Parsons and Sullivan shrugged off those scruples as superfluous.¹⁰² Bakhtiar’s investiture was confirmed by the Upper House on January 15 and by the Majles the next day.¹⁰³ The royal couple waited at the airport until the now-confirmed prime minister, accompanied by the Majles Speaker, arrived by helicopter to bid farewell.

The parting was emotionally charged. The Shah lost his composure, tears briefly welling in his eyes, when an officer of the Imperial Guard fell on his feet, imploring him not to leave. The scene, captured on cameras, became emblematic of an era about to end. At Supreme Command Headquarters in Lavizan, the spectrum of emotions among service chiefs ran from sobbing to locker room raving. As they watched the takeoff on television screen, one officer lay his head on Huyser’s shoulder and wept. The navy chief Habibollahi, wisecracked, “When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”¹⁰⁴ The Shah had expressly banned all attempts by the military to contact him once he left the country—a departure from the routine practice on all previous occasions.¹⁰⁵ Clearly, he had wanted to sever the umbilical cord with the military. On January 13, he summoned the top brass to the Niavaran Palace and in the presence of Prime Minister Bakhtiar enjoined them to support the civilian government. General Garabaghi recorded the wording of that injunction, “The Prime Minister and the government that he has formed support the Constitution, hence, the army should support them.”¹⁰⁶ Mohammad-Reza had also signed a separate firman to stress the need for discipline and unity within the armed forces.¹⁰⁷

A week before his departure, the Shah signed a notarized document transferring all his possessions inside the country to the Pahlavi Foundation under the full control of the government. He ordered members of the royal family to do likewise.¹⁰⁸ It is not clear what the imperial couple packed to take along on that final trip. The Shah’s biographer, Abbas Milani, noted, “Five crates, enough to fill the second jet that was to accompany the Shah’s official plane, packed with valuables and personal belongings.” According to the same source, a trusted valet was flown to Geneva to deposit “the most valuable papers” of the Shah.¹⁰⁹

Though unsupported by hard evidence, Milani’s narrative is not implausible. It would be unreal to presume that the imperial couple would have contented themselves with family albums, favorite books and memorabilia, as hinted in Queen Farah’s memoirs.¹¹⁰ Yet it is also a fact that items of great value were left behind as the world-renowned Crown Jewels Museum vaults and Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art stand to testify. Queen Farah’s lavish personal jewelry collection included the Van Cleef & Arpels diadems and matching necklaces she wore at her 1967 coronation and 1971 Persepolis celebrations today form part of a five-centuries-old national treasure at Crown Jewels Museum of Tehran, while the collection of impressionist and contemporary art purchased under her patronage—a pet project she had cherished in the 1970s—is the envy of the world’s greatest curators. Priceless, they include works by Renoir, Pollock, Picasso, Kandinsky, Warhol and Giacometti, to name just a few.

In the streets of Tehran, the news of the Shah’s departure led to scenes of wild jubilation: “The whole city erupted in a paroxysm of joy and release,” wrote Parsons. For Huyser, it was a spontaneous paean of joy.¹¹¹ The two mass-circulation dailies ran the screaming headline “Shah Raft” (the Shah left). Popular exaltation, expressed with blowing horns and burned headlights, and dancing in the main streets of the capital brought the traffic to a standstill. Reminiscent of scenes in August 1953—when the Shah fled after the failed Ajax coup —crowds turned against symbols of the Pahlavi era. The bronze equestrian statue of Reza Shah adorning Tehran’s emblematic Sepah Square was overturned, so were Mohammad-Reza’s own statues elsewhere in the capital.

The Shah had narrowly escaped the fate of Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II. Had the thought of a captain abandoning a sinking ship crossed his mind? He must have remained alert to all conceivable risks even after the takeoff. He is known to have personally piloted Shahin and was in control while flying over Iranian airspace. Some observers later described the move as a security impulse.¹¹² True or false, his personal pilot, Colonel Behzad Moezzi, was later tagged as a sympathizer of the radical MKO opposition group. In July 1981, Moezzi piloted another air force transport jet—this time surreptitiously—carrying two high-profile fugitives fleeing the Islamic Republic for their lives; they were the deposed President Abolhassan Bani Sadr and the MKO leader Masud Rajavi.¹¹³