The World

At a meeting in Algiers in March 1975, the shah pulled off a coup when Saddam conceded Iranian control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in return for abandoning the Kurds. Success discourages reform, and the shah was triumphant. By July the following year, Alam was desperate: ‘We claim to have brought Iran to the verge of a Great Civilization, yet it’s hit by power cuts and we can’t even guarantee water in the capital …’ The shah denied it all: ‘The only thing wrong with the economy is the extraordinary rate at which it’s growing.’

Power is corrosive; the shah had been playing the game since 1941, almost forty years. ‘There’s no firm hand on the tiller,’ warned Alam, ‘the captain is overworked.’ Meanwhile, ‘The People want more than material progress, they demand justice, social harmony, a voice in political affairs. I’m gravely apprehensive.’ But by January 1977 vast revenues had been frittered away. ‘We’re broke,’ said the shah to Alam.

One of the shah’s Swedish lovers got food poisoning, but when the court minister sent the royal doctor he went to Alam’s ‘French girlfriend’ instead. ‘His Majesty nearly wept with laughter.’ But Iranians were not laughing. Millions of peasants had poured into the cities where, anchorless and impoverished, neglected by venal elites, they turned to traditional mullahs and listened to tapes smuggled in from Ayatollah Khomeini in Najaf that called the shah ‘the American serpent whose head must be smashed with a stone’. Now Saddam offered the shah the head of Khomeini: the king of kings rejected the offer. Saddam expelled the ayatollah.

Khomeini sought refuge in Paris. The French president Giscard d’Estaing consulted the shah, who did not object. In October, Khomeini settled in Neauphle-le-Château, a Parisian suburb. His media appearances, sitting berobed under an apple tree, the antithesis of the gold-braided flash of the shah, were managed by an alliance of educated liberals, Shiite moderates and leftist revolutionaries, trained by the PLO in Lebanon. Each believed they controlled the old man. None did.

The shah discounted the threat, calling his opposition ‘a few corrupt scoundrels’; SAVAK continued arresting and torturing suspects. But the trouble with a one-man regime is that it depends on the survival of one man: the shah, feeling exhausted, was secretly diagnosed with lymph cancer, while his trustee Alam was himself dying of cancer. Treated with steroids, depressed and passive, Shah Mohammad vacillated. He ignored the start of regular demonstrations and fundamentalist attacks. Then in August 1978 a fire at the Rex Cinema in Abadan, started with petrol, incinerated 420 people – the doors were found to be locked. It was a provocation by Islamic terrorists, and it worked: SAVAK was blamed, and the protests snowballed.

The sick shah lost the will to fight, refusing to shoot protesters. But he consulted his ally, America, where the backlash after Watergate had washed into the White House an inexperienced, sanctimonious and toothsome Democrat, Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia. Carter was the anti-Kissinger, but his mere presence weakened American power. He signalled that he did not support the shah, while Khomeini’s envoys confided that the ayatollah would never threaten US oil. As millions seethed in the streets, the shah was astonished by the American betrayal and struggled to find anyone who would become premier; as his army wilted, his monarchy crumbled like rotten wood. On 8 September 1978, security forces fired on mass protests, killing around 100: Black Friday provided martyrs and momentum.

On 16 January 1979, the Shah, frail, pale, yet straight and dignified, boarded his plane as a young officer fell to his knees to kiss his hand, and Farah, sedated, wept silently. The shah flew to Egypt where Sadat welcomed him. Two weeks later, on 1 February, Khomeini took off from Paris on a plane filled with his leftist advisers and American news journalists who asked him how he felt. ‘Hichi’ – Nothing – he replied, rejecting American sentimentality and instead expressing the mystical grandeur of God. Six million people – one of the largest crowds ever – almost crushed him as his convoy drove to the Martyr’s Cemetery, where he had to be rescued by a military helicopter. ‘I will decide the government,’ he told the crowds. ‘I will punch this [provisional] government in the teeth.’ The decisive moment came fast: his secular allies had arranged for him to stay in the Refah girls’ school, but the next morning the mullahs, allies and former pupils, burst in and conveyed Khomeini, now hailed as the infallible imam, to their headquarters.