Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (9 page)

Ghotbzadeh was assigned to
Newsweek.
A broad-chested man with swarthy good looks, he was one of Khomeini’s closest aides, “like a son,” the ayatollah told me later. Ghotbzadeh had briefly attended Georgetown University, carried a Syrian passport, and had been banished from Iran years before because of his political activities against the Shah. He used an elegant apartment in the sixteenth
arrondissement
lent to him by a friend as a command center for the Shah’s opponents in Europe. He did not drink alcohol, but he did wear well-tailored three-piece suits and ties, and smoked a pipe. His favorite place to meet was La Closerie des Lilas, a Left Bank hangout once patronized by Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

It was Ghotbzadeh who steeped me in Iranian politics, even if he seemed to know little about Islamic law. And it was Ghotbzadeh who flirted with me, even as he lectured about the strict sexual morality that would exist in an Islamic Republic. “Sadegh, you said fornication between unmarried adults would be prohibited in an Islamic Republic,” I joked once, turning him down as politely as I could.

“But this is Paris,” he replied in his silky voice. “And there is no Islamic Republic here.”

It was the mildest and the idlest of flirtations. Ghotbzadeh soon fell passionately in love with Carole Jerome, who later told the story of their romance in a touching memoir.

It was also Ghotbzadeh who arranged my first private interview with Khomeini. I was required to submit my questions in writing—a process that makes any journalist queasy because it makes follow-up questions more difficult to ask and gives the interview subject a chance to prepare answers in advance. So I kept the questions vague. When the day arrived, I waited five hours in the damp cold outside Khomeini’s house. There was no Persian hospitality here.

Eventually, Ghotbzadeh admitted me into the ayatollah’s house. I was wearing a loose-fitting Missoni knit dress that would probably not be allowed on the streets of Tehran today. I was told to take off my coat, cover my head, and take off my shoes, Persian style. No matter that the floors in the foyer were cold and damp. I was escorted into a small, unlit room, unfurnished except for rough tribal carpets that clashed with the garish pink-and-blue-flowered wallpaper. No independent interpreter or photographer was allowed.

As I entered the room, Khomeini was already seated cross-legged on the floor, his hands folded in his lap, next to a fireplace and leaning against the wall. I was positioned a safe fifteen feet away. He didn’t shake my hand. He didn’t even stand to greet me. Ghotbzadeh did the translating. During the forty-five-minute interview, Khomeini smiled only once, when his young grandson ran into the room and jumped into his lap, prompting the ayatollah to warmly embrace him. And I caught the ayatollah looking at me at one point. We probably viewed each other in the same way: as a curiosity. I was, after all, the first woman and the first American to interview him.

Khomeini mumbled in Persian in a barely audible monotone. He accused the Shah of destroying the economy, giving away the country’s oil to the industrial powers, reducing agricultural production to provide a market for American goods, subjecting the military to foreign leadership, massacring thousands of dissenters, and destroying freedom of expression. He didn’t seem to believe he would go back to Iran, at least not for a while. But that didn’t mean he wanted to stay in France. Khomeini stayed in the village, determined not to be tainted by what he believed was the corrupting influence of Western culture. His goal was to stay in France only as long as it took to find a Muslim country closer to home. Syria was one possibility, Algeria another. The Shah would have to be out of power before he would try to return home, he said.

In other words, Khomeini didn’t have a master plan for the future. Rather, with the help of his aides, he improvised. Day by day, ideas were formulated, assignments were given, committees were appointed. His answers about what his government might look like evaporated into an Islamic mist as he called himself the symbol of the people. “I talk their language, I listen to their needs; I cry for them,” he told me.

I interviewed Khomeini again—for a shorter time—just a few weeks later, when the fall of the Shah seemed imminent. This time, Khomeini was more than just a media curiosity. Once again Ghotbzadeh did the translating.

“What will your role be in a future Islamic Republic?” I asked.

“I will not have any position in the future government,” Khomeini said. “I will not be the President or the Prime Minister. I will be some sort of supervisor of their activities. I will give them guidance. If I see some deviation or mistake, I will remind them how to correct it.”

“So would you describe yourself as the future strongman of Iran, the ultimate power?”

“You may assume so.”

I asked him again to explain precisely how the new system would work. He became irritated. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe the answer wasn’t part of the prepared script. Maybe he was getting fed up with the spoon-feeding by his advisers. “I’ve already answered your question,” he said sharply.

And with those words, he stood up and left the room.

To some outsiders, Khomeini seemed a throwback to Iran’s medieval past. But the truth is that he embraced the use of modern technology in order to get his message out. A red-brick garage attached to one of the two houses rented by Khomeini was turned into a communications center. Heated by a small space heater, lit with a single light bulb, the garage became the duplicating room, where students made hundreds of cassette tapes of the ayatollah’s pronouncements. From the house they were transmitted by telephone to Iran’s thousands of mosques and then to the bazaars—the two ready-made networks for spreading revolution. Once on the streets of Iran, Khomeini’s message resonated with a population that had grown disenchanted with the rule of the Shah.

A king survives as long as he is successful, an Iranian saying goes. In other words, everyone loves a winner. And the Shah had come to look like a loser. Part of the problem was that the fifty-year-old Pahlavi dynasty did not have deep roots. It was so weak that it was nearly toppled in 1953. Two years earlier, the Iranian Parliament had voted to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which dominated the development and sale of Iranian oil. The twenty-seven-year-old Shah, facing rising domestic discontent, appointed the nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh as Prime Minister. The British government, with the support of all the major oil companies, responded with a global boycott of Iranian oil. Mossadegh amassed more power for himself, and he and the Shah struggled over control of the government. In August 1953, when the Shah attempted to dismiss him, Mossadegh’s followers took to the streets and forced the Shah to leave the country, raising fears in the new Eisenhower administration that Iran might get pushed too close to Moscow. America was not prepared to “lose” Iran as it had “lost” China four years earlier. So the CIA and the British orchestrated a coup that ousted Mossadegh. “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you!” the Shah told Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA. In the Iranian retelling of the story over the decades, the coup came to be seen as America’s original sin in Iran, as the Shah came to be seen as an American puppet.

In the twenty-five years that followed, the Shah created a system of government based on political repression, patronage, state control over private organizations, dependence on the United States, and increasingly autocratic rule. Drunk with oil money, he spent recklessly as he pursused a grandiose vision of Iran as one of the world’s great nations. But he was unable to share power, even with his most trusted advisers.

By the time the Shah tried to adapt, it was too late. The most traditional elements of Iranian society were turning against him. The thousands of mosques offered secure places to meet and plan protests. The bazaar was abandoning the Shah as well. The
bazaari
were conservative, deeply religious, and important financial backers of the religious establishment; they had long resisted the Shah’s concessions to foreign interests and had opposed his moves to secularize the country. Then riots in Qom in January 1978 touched off a cycle of mourning ceremonies and unrest in dozens of cities and towns. Clerics railed against the Shah in their sermons. The
bazaari
became willing converts, giving money to the families of demonstrators killed by the military and financing strikes and demonstrations. University students, from secular Marxists to deeply religious conservatives, joined in. By November, striking workers had paralyzed the economy.

Never loved, no longer feared, the Shah became isolated. Depressed, suffering from a cancer that he tried to keep secret, he lost the will to govern. He put his government in the hands of a caretaker Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, and fled the country. At the airport on January 16, 1979, the Shah broke down in tears as his officers seized his hand and kissed it. He headed for Egypt on a Boeing 707 with hundreds of pieces of luggage, including a box filled with Iranian soil. It was supposed to be a “vacation” of undetermined duration. He never returned.

Iran Radio’s announcement of the Shah’s departure set off an orgy of exultation. People throughout the country held spontaneous demonstrations of joy, distributing sweets and fruits, making bonfires with piles of his photographs, and cutting the Shah’s picture out of bank notes. In Tehran, they tore down an enormous bronze statue of Reza Shah, his father, on horseback. The head of another statue of the Shah’s father was used as a soccer ball. In cities like Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, the military stepped in, killing and wounding civilians.

But in Tehran, the military commanders who had not already left their posts understood the new political reality. The 400,000-man army and the large police force were not equipped, trained, or organized to crush a popular internal rebellion. The commanders did nothing to stop the crowds. From then on, Iran was like a headless body, awaiting the arrival of the ayatollah.

Halfway into the flight to Tehran with Khomeini, Ghotbzadeh stood on the front row of seats, faced the crowd of journalists, and told us he had some bad news. “We have received a warning over the airplane radio that the Iranian air force has orders to shoot us down,” he said. Nevertheless, he added, the plane would continue on its course and try to land.

I had never questioned whether to get on the plane. Neither had my editors at
Newsweek
in New York. I did not have the responsibility of a husband or children yet and I did not think much about death in those days. Like other young foreign correspondents, I was still a vagabond, searching for the story that could be the center of my work.

My destiny, it turned out, was the revolution. Even then, I knew I had to go. My editors at
Newsweek
in New York agreed, although one did suggest I think twice because I might be raped. I reminded him that men could be raped too. Actually, the danger was worse than either of us knew. Years later, I learned that a number of the Shah’s generals, including General Amir-Hosein Rabii, the commander of the air force, had devised a plan to shoot down Khomeini’s plane. (A less drastic option, included in the plan, was to divert it to a remote part of Iran where the ayatollah could be put under arrest.) The generals took the plan to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the American National Security Adviser, seeking American approval. Brzezinski brought it to President Carter. The President, Brzezinski later told me, “wouldn’t have anything to do with it.” But that didn’t mean the Carter administration rejected the idea that the Iranians do it themselves.

Brzezinski went on: “The United States is not in the business of assassinating people. The question that is legitimate to ask is whether the U.S. is in the business of preventing other people from assassinating their own countrymen.” There was nothing to stop the Iranian officers from moving against Khomeini. But, said Brzezinski, “One of the problems with Iranians is that they often talked more than they did anything.” In the end, the Shah’s generals did nothing.

Journalists are always being manipulated, and they sometimes wittingly or unwittingly become part of the story. In retrospect, it isn’t unreasonable to think that this was one case where our presence may have changed history. Was our presence on the plane a factor in Carter’s decision? Would the Shah’s troops have been more likely to shoot down the plane if Peter Jennings, then a correspondent for ABC in London, had not been on board? Brzezinski insisted that our presence made no difference in the American decision. “The issue simply didn’t arise,” he said. Could I really believe that? Even today, I don’t know. What really mattered is that in the end the Iranian air force did not shoot us down, and we rode the ayatollah’s plane into history.

When morning came, I saw Damavand mountain from my window. On the ground, dozens of the Shah’s troops were waiting for us on the tarmac. The massive plane dipped and turned as it struggled to circle the airport at low altitude. Slowly, three times around. And then, without warning, after twenty-five long minutes, the plane touched down in the gray-pink haze of Tehran’s morning sky. When Khomeini awoke, he did not rush to the door. The journalists were ordered to get off first. Just in case. But there was no gunfire, only a roar of chants, shouts of joy from the crowds who had come to greet their leader.

While we were still airborne, Jennings and the ABC crew had been allowed to the front of the plane, and Jennings had sat down next to the ayatollah. As the plane entered Iranian airspace, Jennings asked the obvious question and Ghotbzadeh dutifully did the translating: “Ayatollah, would you be so kind as to tell us how you feel about being back in Iran?”

“
Hichi,
” the ayatollah replied. “Nothing.”

“
Hichi?
” Ghotbzadeh asked him. Even he seemed incredulous at the response.

“
Hich ehsasi nadaram,
” the ayatollah said for emphasis. “I don’t feel a thing.”

A generation later, Iranians are still debating what Khomeini meant. Did he really feel nothing? Or was he exercising what Shiite Muslims call
taqiyah
—dissimulation—in which one’s true feelings are hidden for some other purpose?