Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on the 26th of October 1919 in Tehran, the eldest son of a Brigadier-General who had not yet become king. He died in Egyptian exile on the 27th of July 1980-18 months after the revolution that ended his dynasty. Between those two dates stretched 37 years as Shah of Iran, a rule so contradictory that it still resists easy judgement: a king who spent billions on schools and hospitals yet presided over systematic torture; a man who nearly tripled his country's real GDP per capita while his own courtiers called him weak-willed and cowardly; a monarch who would rather go into exile than fire on his own people, and yet whose secret police became a byword for brutality.

  How did the nervous, jittery boy photographed standing beside his domineering father grow into the man who would build the fifth-strongest military on earth and dominate OPEC? What drove him to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy in a spectacle that observers said surpassed Hollywood? And what made a man with so much power leave it all behind in January 1979 without a fight? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Father's Shadow

  ›

  Reza Khan, who became the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, was described by his own son in a book called Mission for My Country as "one of the most frightening men" he had ever known. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, writing in Shah of Shahs, recalled being struck by old photographs of the two men: Reza Khan appearing utterly self-confident in his uniform, while Mohammad Reza stood beside him looking nervous and jittery.

  The elder man's parenting philosophy was brutal in its logic. Reza Khan believed that showing love to a son caused homosexuality later in life, so he withheld affection deliberately. He always addressed Mohammad Reza using the formal shoma, meaning "sir", and expected the same formality in return. He kicked subordinates in the groin when they disobeyed him. Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani concluded that the boy grew up deeply scared and insecure, lacking self-confidence.

  The women of the household provided what the father refused. Mohammad Reza's mother, Tadj ol-Molouk, was assertive and intensely superstitious. She sacrificed lambs to ward off evil, clad her children in protective amulets, and consulted soothsayers who interpreted her dreams as proof that destiny had chosen her son for greatness. His twin sister Ashraf later wrote that no matter how far she reached in life, "always, the centre of my existence was, and is, Mohammad Reza." American psychoanalyst Marvin Zonis concluded it was "from women, and apparently from women alone" that the future Shah received his psychological sustenance as a child.

  When Mohammad Reza was proclaimed Crown Prince on the 24th of April 1926, the day before his father's coronation, the formality of his upbringing intensified. He was taken from his mother and sisters to receive a "manly education" from officers selected by Reza Khan, and everyone, including his mother, was now required to address him as "Your Highness." Zonis's verdict on this contradictory upbringing was that it produced a young man who masked low self-esteem and indecisiveness with "masculine bravado, impulsiveness, and arrogance" and who remained "both gentle and cruel, withdrawn and active, dependent and assertive, weak and powerful" throughout his life.

• 3. Education and the Making of a Francophile

  ›

  On the 7th of September 1931, an 11-year-old Crown Prince left Iran for Switzerland and the Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school chosen on the recommendation of Abdolhossein Teymourtash, the Minister of Court. His first day at Le Rosey established something important: when Mohammad Reza demanded that fellow students stand to attention as he walked past, one of the American students beat him up. He quickly learned that deference was not automatic outside Iran.

  School records from Le Rosey note that his principal problem as a football player was his "timidity"; he was afraid to take risks. He was educated in French, and in articles he wrote for the student newspaper in 1935 and 1936, he praised Le Rosey for broadening his mind and introducing him to European civilisation. He stayed four years before returning to Iran to complete his high school diploma in 1936, then enrolled at the military academy in Tehran, graduating as a Second Lieutenant in 1938 and being quickly promoted to Captain.

  The most consequential relationship formed at Le Rosey was with a teacher named Ernest Perron. Perron introduced the Crown Prince to French poetry, and Chateaubriand and Rabelais became Mohammad Reza's favourite French authors. When the Crown Prince returned to Iran in 1936, he brought Perron with him and installed his best friend in the Marble Palace. Perron lived there until his death in 1961, functioning officially as a private secretary but holding the behind-the-scenes power of a senior advisor.

  After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the new regime published a best-selling book alleging a homosexual relationship between Mohammad Reza and Perron. Marvin Zonis dismissed this as long on assertion and short on evidence, pointing out that the deeply homophobic Reza Khan would never have allowed Perron into the Marble Palace in 1936 had he believed any such thing. The episode nonetheless shows how quickly Perron became a focal point for those who resented his influence on the Shah.

• 4. A Kingdom Inherited in Wartime

  ›

  On the 25th of August 1941, British and Australian naval forces attacked Iran's Persian Gulf coast while Soviet forces invaded from the north. Operation Barbarossa had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that summer, and the Allies needed the Iranian rail network to ship arms to the Soviet Union. The Germans administering those railroads refused to cooperate, and neither Soviet nor British diplomats were willing to accept that.

  The Crown Prince, serving as his father's closest advisor, had blithely assured Reza Khan that nothing would happen. What happened instead left a permanent mark on him. On the second day of the invasion, Mohammad Reza watched Iranian military officers and soldiers all over Tehran strip off their uniforms and desert, despite not yet having seen combat. A group of senior generals then telephoned him to receive his blessing before holding a meeting on how best to surrender.

  Reza Khan's response was to attack his general Ahmad Nakhjavan with a riding crop, tear off his medals, and nearly execute him on the spot. It was Mohammad Reza who persuaded his father to have the man court-martialled instead. The collapse of the military Reza Khan had spent decades building humiliated his son, who vowed never to see Iran defeated that way again. That vow would later translate into spending that, by 1977, made the Iranian military the world's fifth-strongest armed force.

  On the 16th of September 1941, Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Foroughi announced Reza Shah's resignation to a special session of parliament. The next day, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Mohammad Reza took the oath of office. The British would have preferred to restore the Qajar dynasty, but the principal Qajar claimant, Prince Hamid Mirza, was a Royal Navy officer who did not speak Persian. The main Soviet interest was political stability to protect their supply lines. A frail Foroughi, suffering from angina, had been summoned from political disgrace to orchestrate the transition, setting aside his personal resentment of Reza Khan, who had sidelined him since 1935.

• 5. Oil, Coup, and the Road to Autocracy

  ›

  In 1951, the Iranian parliament voted unanimously to nationalise the oil industry, shutting out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was a pillar of Britain's economy. The prime minister who led that drive was Mohammad Mosaddegh, elected after the 1950 Iranian legislative election. At first, the Truman Administration sympathised with Iran. But by the time President Eisenhower took office, American officials had convinced themselves that communist infiltration threatened the government, a fear later described as "paranoid" by U.S. government officials reviewing the episode.

  Shortly before the 1952 U.S. presidential election, the British government invited CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. to London to propose a joint covert operation to remove Mosaddegh. Roosevelt returned to Iran on the 13th of July 1953, and again on the 1st of August 1953, for his first meeting with the Shah. A car collected him at midnight; he lay down on the back seat covered with a blanket as guards waved the driver through the palace gates. The CIA provided Roosevelt with a million dollars in Iranian currency to bribe the Shah. At the then-exchange rate of 1,000 rial to 15 U.S. dollars, that sum was physically bulky enough to fill a large safe.

  The first coup attempt on the 16th of August 1953 failed. The Shah fled to Baghdad and then Rome, where a British diplomat reported that he spent most of his time in nightclubs, describing him as a man who "hates taking decisions and cannot be relied on to stick to them when taken." It was his twin sister Ashraf, who had publicly questioned his manhood on more than one occasion, who visited him on the 29th of July 1953 to berate him into signing the decree dismissing Mosaddegh.

  On the 19th of August 1953, pro-Shah partisans bribed with $100,000 in CIA funds marched out of south Tehran and took control of the streets. Roosevelt gave General Zahedi $900,000 left from Operation Ajax funds. Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and had his sentence commuted by the Shah from execution to three years, followed by life in internal exile. The Consortium Agreement of 1954 brought foreign oil companies back into Iran's industry.

  In the years that followed, American and British diplomats sent reports back home calling the Shah weak-willed and incapable of decision. That contempt proved to be an unintended asset. Because elites did not fear him, they feuded among themselves once Mosaddegh was gone, and Mohammad Reza played one faction against another with increasing skill. In 1955, he dismissed General Zahedi, who had viewed himself as the real power in Iran. By 1957 he had also dismissed Zahedi's successor. The figurehead was quietly becoming an autocrat.

• 6. The White Revolution and Its Enemies

  ›

  In 1963, Mohammad Reza launched a package of far-reaching reforms he called the White Revolution. Land was redistributed. Key industries were nationalised. Women gained the right to vote. The Shah also began programmes of infrastructure investment and profit sharing for industrial workers, and made elementary school education free and mandatory. In 1974, $16 billion was spent on building new schools and hospitals across Iran.

  The Ayatollah Khomeini was among those most bitterly opposed. When a referendum in 1963 allowed women to vote on the White Revolution's proposals, Khomeini preached that Iran's fate should never be decided by women. When the Shah had earlier changed local laws to allow Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Baháʼí to swear into municipal councils using their own holy books, Khomeini wrote to demand the change be reversed, insisting only the Koran was acceptable, and adding that he had heard women were being granted the right to vote. The Shah wrote back addressing Khomeini as Hojat-al Islam rather than as Ayatollah, a pointed downgrade, and declined.

  Nationwide demonstrations erupted in 1963 and 1964, with the holy city of Qom at their centre. At least 200 people were killed. Khomeini was exiled to Iraq on the 4th of October 1965. A second assassination attempt against the Shah took place on the 10th of April 1965, when a soldier named Reza Shamsabadi shot his way through the Marble Palace. Two civilian guards died protecting the Shah before the assassin was killed.

  By the early 1970s, Iran National, run by the Khayami brothers, had become the largest automobile manufacturer in the Middle East, producing 136,000 cars a year and employing 12,000 people in Mashhad. In 1973, Iran's economic growth rate reached 33%, and 40% the following year. Iranian oil income doubled to $4.6 billion in 1973-1974 and spiked to $17.8 billion in the year after that. Between 1950 and 1979, real GDP per capita nearly tripled, from about $2,700 to about $7,700 in 2011 international dollars. Western journalists regularly predicted Iran would become a First World nation within a generation.

• 7. Spectacle, Power, and a Growing Brittleness

  ›

  On the 26th of October 1967-26 years into his reign, Mohammad Reza took the ancient title Shahanshah, meaning "King of Kings," in a lavish coronation ceremony in Tehran. He said he had waited because, in his own opinion, he "did not deserve it" until that point, adding that there was "no honour in being Emperor of a poor country."

  In October 1971, he staged a celebration of 2,500 years of continuous Persian monarchy at Persepolis. Six thousand soldiers dressed in the uniforms of every dynasty from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis marched past the Shah in a grand parade that contemporaries said surpassed "the most florid celluloid imaginations of Hollywood epics." At the same time, Mohammad Reza changed the Iranian calendar benchmark from the Islamic Hijrah to the founding of the First Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. He also opened the Shahyad Aryamehr museum in Tehran, designed by a young Baháʼí architect named Hussein Amanat, whose selection Milani viewed as a sign of the relative liberalism of that period.

  Yet the brittleness beneath this spectacle was real. By the late 1970s, the Shah's grip was loosening. A newspaper article titled "Iran and Red and Black Colonization" helped inflame political unrest. The Cinema Rex fire and the Jaleh Square massacre made his position untenable. At the 1979 Guadeloupe Conference, his Western allies concluded there was no feasible way to save the Iranian monarchy.

  The Shah left Iran for exile in January 1979. Estimates for the total number of deaths during the Islamic Revolution range from 540 to 2,000 in independent studies, to 60,000 in figures published by the Islamic government itself. Ayatollah Khomeini, the cleric Mohammad Reza had dismissed with a downgraded honorific in 1962, returned from exile to assume leadership as supreme leader of Iran. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died in Egypt on the 27th of July 1980, having been granted political asylum by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. His eldest son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, born on the 31st of October 1960, went on to found the National Council of Iran, a government in exile that continues to operate.