Books

Cyrus or Chaplin?

Gavin Young

The Pride and the Fall: Iran 1974-1979 Anthony Parsons (Jonathan Cape £8.95)

What can we do?', the Shah murmured

in a distressed way as we crouched Side by side like a couple of sheep on the floor of his small son's bedroom. In that Position I found a constructive answer hard to come by, particularly as the child was Shying toy bricks at us.

The Queen stood by, wringing her beautiful hands, explaining that it was the nanny's night off and the four-year-old Prince refused to go to bed. She had had to call for help to his father who was giving me tea and an audience in the old palace's draughty sitting-room downstairs, talking, over a samovar, of 'his Kurds'. The successor to Cyrus the Great rose to the challenge, possibly, I thought, inspired by Chaplin's film, The Great DictatOr. He seized a school globe from a corner and twirled it frantically, calling to his son in °ck alarm, 'My God, where is your coun- try, darling? Whatever happened to it? Has II. been stolen?' Thus lured from his bar- ricade of toys, the boy was easily captured and swept into his mini-four-poster. And s,00n, amid the draughts and dust downstairs, the Shah's shy voice was ex- P,laining his plan to turn poor, lethargic Persia into an Aryan Japan. This was in the early 1960s. By 1974, When Sir Anthony Parsons became British Ambassador in Tehran, charming domestic ,scenes such as this had long been replaced dy stiff-necked protocol among the chandeliers and glowing carpets of the TO_ Lich Swhah

grander Saadabad Palace. The 's plan,

fast running out of steam, 1.;Inild soon destroy its inventor. And in the much confused monarch was ask- lug °nee again, 'What can we do?' — this idne of Sir Anthony, who was as much at a Oss for a constructive answer as I had been on the nursery floor. What advice could he have given? Could any British ambassador have done anything to save the Peacock Throne? These ques- tions have bedevilled Sir Ant- ntnlY since he left Tehran for the last time, °n1Y a few days after the Shah himself flew away from a capital erupting in paroxysms vi joy to see him go.

They also explain this absorbing book,

written, Sir Anthony says, to exorcise the :IentorY of 'the most compelling diplomatic „xPerience of my life'. It reinforces the no- tion

alitythat money-grubbing more than or

cletermi, or even common-sense, too often nes British foreign policy, par- ticularly in the Third World. 'We could see what was happening, but we got the meaning wrong', is the theme of Sir Anthony's sad song. Well, there was plenty to see. By the time he got to Tehran in 1974, Iran was visibly in the grip of a megalomaniac's fantasy. Once placid, dus- ty, unattractive Tehran had become a gold- rush town, a sort of Dawson-City-in-Asia. In frantic pursuit of the Shah's fast- dwindling oil billions, Western businessmen were Jumbo-ing in, briefcased puppets on an endless moving belt, fighting for a chance to bribe receptionists for hotel rooms. Royal princes, dukes and such like had been roped in from every corner of Europe to peddle anything from computers to helicopters. Sir Anthony's embassy was clogged with our eager bargain-hunters.

In accordance with the Shah's plan to turn Iran into Japan, concrete airstrips, pylons, steel mills and nuclear reactors sud- denly blanketed Iran's threadbare moun- tains and deserts. Petrochemicals poisoned the rivers. Petrol fumes befogged its towns, where civil servants grappled with plans for industrial complexes, trade fairs, con- ferences on everything from education to Mithraism. Even the golden domes of Isphahan were threatened by the dust and smoke of no less than 17 satellite towns.

Just as bad (perhaps worse), foreign technicians (mostly American) crowded in, too; there weren't enough trained Iranians. They brought wives and kids; imported food, supermarkets, clubs and bars soon followed. So did bar brawls and impossible

rents. Tehran began to remind one more and more of wartime Saigon — even to the loudspeakers at the airport blaring out, 'This way all American military personnel', and American disc-jockeys dishing out Western pop music over the US forces local radio network.

It was a crazy situation, rife with unreconcilable contradictions. On the one hand, the Shah lost no opportunity to decry 'decadent' Western culture. On the other, he had in effect sanctioned a kind of American occupation. Naturally, the Muslim clergy railed against these raucous infidels, and they were equally outraged by the Shah's obsession with the pre-Islamic Iran of Cyrus the Great. The Shah's moderate critics were silenced by intimida- tion. The leftists began to assassinate American colonels and agents of the Shah's much loathed secret police organisation, Savak. Of this multi-million dollar tangle, the Shah was sole producer, director and star.

To me, at this time, he seemed obsessed, even mentally unhinged. Now, when he talked in private of his Vision for Iran, he stared at the wall, his face as blank as the cliffs of Persepolis. His voice, normally soft, almost effeminate, became an intense, montonous drone,'.., entering a great era

... Iran ... the most sophisticated Asian nation after Japan ... A serious country ... serious.' He might almost have been programmed. Was this the once hesitant human being I'd seen on his hands• and knees in his son's bedroom?

Much earlier, I had even thought that perhaps this complex man secretly nursed a love for democracy — the hopeless, crossed love, it's true, of one species for another; of a tiger for a rose. Now, when I asked him about the chronic apathy, even hostility, of Iranian students for his Vision — most serious because, after all, it was designed

for them to inherit — the Shah sourly wav-

ed a dismissive hand. He waved it again at the mention of his total repression of political discussion which was the basis of that student hostility: 'Left-wing hooligans

Sir Anthony saw this and says he was worried. What could he do? Nothing, he decided — remembering a history of our meddling in Iran's affairs, the Shah was far too suspicious of the British to accept ad- vice from Her Majesty's Ambassador now. (The Shah had presumably pushed from his mind the fact that British and Americans restored him to the throne he had precipitately abandoned in the Mosaddeq crisis in the Fifties.) To alienate the Shah would risk — and here's the nub — 'losing a highly lucrative market' — Britain's largest export market at this time. Mindful of those contracts, Sir Anthony had also, he tells us, banned 'spying on Iran' in his embassy.

Was this a major reason why, as Sir Ant- hony admits, he accepted for so long the Shah's own image of himself as 'masterful,

knowledgeable, in control' [my italics]? If so, it was also a major error.

For his ban on spying meant, I suppose, that in estimating the Shah's strengths and weaknesses he was obliged to depend large- ly on intelligence provided by Savak. Yet Savak was well-steeped in the time- honoured Persian practice of soothing tyrannous monarchs with nothing but good news, and so Sir Anthony's ban may have deprived him of what he most needed — trustworthy information about the Shah's powerful and as yet unfocussed opposition.

I once asked the Shah: 'We know that Nasser's cronies shielded him from the har- sher facts of life. Are you sure you are not isolated, too?' After all, the great Persian writer, Sa'di of Shiraz, had filled half a book, The Rose Garden (1258 AD), with aphorisms on this subject: 'Dervishes ordered to bear ill-tidings to a padshah [king] would be wise to think twice before doing so' — that sort of thing.

The Shah laughed. 'Not me. I have so many different lines of information. And, unlike Nasser, I am personally very much in touch with my people.' A patent falsehood which I (like Sir Anthony) forbore to challenge. It was not, he says, until 1978 — the Shah's last year in power — that Sir Anthony realised his 'staggering remoteness from reality'.

I believe the Shah, deep down, never changed all that much. The timorous fugitive of the early Fifties, the delicate- voiced man I'd met in the. Sixties, still lurk- ed in 1974 under the chestful of medals, the imperious expression. He was only playing at being his jack-booted, Cossack father — and Croesus and Dr No and Goldfinger.

If there was ever a self-doubting dictator who needed advice, the Shah was one. But it is not clear why Sir Anthony had to write such a breast-beating book. What made him think he could influence anything, whatever he said? He is an experienced diplomat, but he is certainly not Lord Cur- zon. The Shah might just have heeded warnings from a British prime minister (though I doubt it — and the warnings would have been most unlikely with all those juicy contracts to worry about).

Surely only the Americans could have leaned on him. In many ways, he was their creation. They owned the technology he craved, and he was utterly dependent on them. He might have thrown a tantrum worthy of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes combined, but he had no one else to turn to. Why didn't they tell him to take it a little easier?

Most likely because successive presidents (and their advisers) naively took him at his own evaluation. Why else would the Americans have built up the Shah as their 'gendarme' in the Gulf with a super- sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar arsenal? In doing so, they showed that they shared his paranoia — and his misjudgment. For the Russians posed no threat to the Gulf, and Arabs mistrust Persians on principle. By seizing two Arab-owned islands and menacing Bahrain, the Shah angered and alarmed the West's Arab friends, bringing them, if anything, closer to America's bugbear of the moment, 'radical' (though non-Communist) Iraq.

What else but political naivety can ex- plain the fact that, in 1973, the ex-head of the CIA and then American Ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, elected to chair a much-publicised meeting of top CIA men in Tehran at the height of the Shah's repres- sion. Many more than those Iranians under torture in Ghassr or Evin jails remembered that the CIA had rebuilt Savak in the Fif- ties.

Apparently without a murmur, the Americans watched the Shah swamp his reluctant people with the unseemly bric-a- brac of materialism that is the West's most obvious export. Later, they would watch Sadat, too, go down the spout, similarly alienated from the poor of Egypt by Western flattery that induced him to fill his destitute country with boutiques, luxury goods, a snappily-dressed elite, even Sinatra singing under the Pyramids to an audience of international jet-setters. When political repression and imported idiocies like those are your lot, you don't have to be a Lebanese or Iranian car-bomber to think of

the West as the Great Satan. It is impossible to approve of Khomeini or Gadaffi, but it is very easy to understand why they have at- tracted such a large following. The tragedy of the Shah was that he lived a well-meaning fantasy, and that those who might have imposed a sense of reality (the Americans, not Sir Anthony) themselves showed scant appreciation of reality. Oa Arab proverb is apt: 'God has given ear" rings to those who have no ears'). BY the time the Shah, desperate, decided 10 swallow his pride and seek advice, it was too late — his army, for all its Americaa missiles and British Chieftain tanks, Was unable to cope with unending demonstra- tions and nationwide strikes. There are ira- portant lessons in all this. Much remains to be revealed about the nuts and bolts of the Shah's fall. But Sir, Anthony's short book is lucid aral fascinating; indispensable for anyone terested in Iran or the Middle East, or in the obsessed and uncertain mind of Shao Mohamed Reza Pahlavi — a moder,11„ Ozymandias, on whose cheek Weste”- friends lovingly planted the kiss of death..