Pact (renamed the Central Treaty Organisation
after Iraq’s revolution in 1958 and its subsequent
departure), characterising the Shah still more
as a lackey of the Anglo-American ‘imperialists’.
Iranian nationalist fervour could never reconcile
itself to the ‘Western’ Shah.
Yet the Shah, though he owed his assumption
of real power to American and British assistance in
1953, had every intention of asserting Iran’s inde-
pendence and creating a military base for new
greatness. As his rule grew increasingly dictatorial,
he appointed Iran’s parliament and imprisoned
politicians if they showed any sign of opposition.
He established the National Information and
Security Organisation, known as SAVAK, a secu-
rity police that collected information on oppo-
nents, often imprisoning, torturing and even
murdering them. American attempts to influence
the Shah and to persuade him to introduce demo-
cratic reforms, using economic and military aid
as levers, had little effect. The Shah made token
gestures in response. Western diplomats were by
no means ignorant of the Shah’s misrule, or of the
corruption of the court and its dependants, but
in Washington and London no alternative policy
to supporting the Shah was acceptable. If a
revolution should topple the Shah’s regime, the
country’s mass poverty would, so it was thought,
lead to a seizure of power by radicals and commu-
nists. The disturbed state of the Middle East
had already allowed the Soviet Union to establish
bases in Syria and Yemen; Iraq was uncertain and
Egypt unstable. So Iran was the bulwark protect-
ing the West’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf.
What the West did not foresee was the Islamic
revolution.
The public in the West was given a positive
image of the Shah. The handsome ruler seated on
his aptly named Peacock throne in beautiful uni-
forms looked every inch a royal and made it easy to
forget that his father, a dashing cavalry officer, had
seized power in 1921 to become the founder of
the Pahlavi ‘dynasty’. The lack of blue blood was
compensated for by pomp and circumstance,
which reached the height of folly when in 1971 the
Shah staged a sumptuous celebration attended by
international dignitaries to mark the anniversary of
‘two and a half millennia’ of the Persian Empire.
The pageant, staged to impress the visitors at
Persepolis, ancient capital of the Achaemenian
kings of Persia, cost tens of millions of dollars and
was televised worldwide. Nevertheless, he was
regarded as a firm friend of the West and as a
reformer who was dragging his people out of
the darkness of ignorance and prejudice into the
modern age.
As a reformer his record was flawed. Authori-
tarian and careless of political and human rights,
the Shah resorted to brutal repression to preserve
his power. In the early 1960s when the Americans
were pressing for reforms, the economy was
running into trouble and the National Front
politicians were growing in strength, the Shah
responded by arresting the National Front leaders
and, in 1963, organised a national referendum on
a comprehensive reform package. It included land
reform, a new election law including women’s
suffrage, a national literacy corps, profit-sharing
and the sale of factories to private industry. The
reforms were supposed to establish the Shah as
a popular leader and were presented as the Shah–
People Revolution. The referendum was rigged.
The most formidable opposition now came
from religious leaders and their followers, and for
the first time the name of one of these, Ruhollah
Khomeini, was heard. Students were killed when
paratroopers attacked the religious school of Qom
where he taught and preached. His re-arrest in
June 1963 sparked off an insurrection in Teheran
and other towns. The Shah ordered troops and
tanks to shoot on the demonstrators and declared
martial law. The number killed has never been
accurately established: the Shah’s government
claimed less than a hundred, but other witnesses
speak of thousands. Thousands more were impris-
oned. Ayatollah Khomeini was released, but after
persisting with his opposition he was, in 1964 at
the age of sixty-two, forced to leave Iran. It turned
out to be the Shah’s worst mistake. From his exile
successively in Turkey, Iraq and Paris, Khomeini
was able to send a stream of clandestine propa-
ganda into Iran, uncompromisingly condemning
the Shah as an American lackey and his efforts to
modernise and Westernise the country as contrary
to Islamic law. By the end of his fifteen years of
exile Khomeini was recognised by the masses as
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