The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
in Tehran – later renamed Laleh, ‘Rose’, after the symbol of revolution – we could still drink vodka with blinis. But the ban on alcohol was quickly imposed. I still possess a memorable note from the Tehran hotel management pushed under my door on 21 March 1979. ‘Due to the limited supply of alcoholic beverages in the country and the unexpected [sic] in the mark-ups in the price of these itesm [sic],’ it said, ‘the management has no alternative but to a 20% increase. Thank you.’ Not long afterwards, a revolutionary komiteh invited journalists to watch the destruction of the remaining stocks of Satanic alcohol in the hotel’s cellars. As film cameras whirred, gunmen hurled Pol Roger champagne bottles into the bottom of the empty swimming pool, along with the finest French wines and upended boxes of Gordon’s gin. From the two-foot-deep field of glass at the bottom of the pool, the stench of alcohol permeated the hotel for days afterwards. A South Korean restaurant continued to elude the authorities, its staff burying cases of German beer in their garden. Clients had to wait for ten minutes until each beer can arrived at their table covered in earth.
And the middle classes so beloved of Entezam continued to entertain. One evening I was invited to dinner at a villa of marble stone floors and tasteless pseudo-baroque paintings in north Tehran where a young couple entertained several Iranian writers and myself with poetry-reading and a meal of pre-revolutionary abundance, along with obligatory glasses of home-made vodka. I was intrigued by the attractive hostess because she was rumoured to have been one of the Shah’s last mistresses. Whenever the Shah wished to make love to a woman, it was said, she would be invited to a side door of his palace, would spend two hours with him in a discreet salon and – before leaving – would be presented with a Labrador puppy dog as a token of the King of Kings’ affection. Given the grotesque reputation of the man, I often wondered why Tehran was not populated with hundreds of stray Labradors. I had dismissed all such thoughts when the dinner ended and I was saying goodbye to my hosts. It was at this moment that the kitchen door burst open and something vast and furry catapulted into me, to the consternation of the couple. I looked up to see the friendly face of a golden Labrador, looking at me as if it had spent all evening waiting to make my acquaintance.
Just what life for the Shah was like emerged when the new information ministry, rejoicing in the name of the ‘Ministry for Islamic Guidance’, asked us to take a look at the Niavaran Palace in north Tehran. If Richard the Third really did offer his kingdom for a horse, then the Shah of Iran paid for his freedom with a clutch of palaces, a heap of priceless Persian carpets, a Marc Chagall sketch, a 22-carat gold seventeenth-century model of a Chinese slave ship, a two-storey library, a set of pianos that would send a music college into ecstasy and two solid gold telephones.
Standing beneath the silver birches on the windy lawn of the Niavaran, an Iranian government official made one of the more historic sales of the century sound like nothing but a momentary hiccup in the progress of the revolution – which was what it would turn out to be. ‘We will put the contents up for auction,’ he announced. ‘Then the palaces will be turned into museums.’ So we were left to watch a turbaned mullah and two men armed with G-3 automatic rifles as they pulled and tugged a 30-foot-square handwoven crimson and gold Isfahan rug across the inlaid wooden floor of the Shah’s drawing room. Oriental princesses, plumed birds and exotic beasts of prey were tangled through the arabesque embroideries and each carpet was neatly tagged with an inventory number: proof that while the revolution might have its ups and downs, Iran’s new rulers had a head for efficiency. In the previous few weeks, the Shah’s carpets had reportedly raised $15 million.
One had to admit that the Shah had the most dreadful taste in furniture. French baroque chairs nestled against glass and steel tables while the most grotesque urns – mutated by some silversmith’s black magic into ugly peahens – sat upon desks of delicately carved and mosaic-encrusted wood. Walls of cut glass with a powdering of dust upon them suggested a British cinema of the 1930s. This was how the Shah and his wife left their palace in January 1979 when they set off for a ‘holiday’ and eternal exile.
Fate does not usually vouchsafe to ordinary folk the right to roam around a Shah’s gilded palace, and strange things happen when mere mortals are let loose among such opulence. When the international press were invited into what Abolhassan Sadeq of the guidance ministry sarcastically called ‘the Shah’s slum’, there were scenes befitting the Ostrogoth descent on Rome. We tripped over piles of carpets and surged into the great library to discover what the Shah read in his spare time. There were leather-bound volumes of Voltaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, Plutarch, Shakespeare and Charles de Gaulle. The entire works of Winston Churchill rested against Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner – a work the Shah might have found suitable reading on his long journey of exile – and biographies of Mahatma Gandhi. My People by Abba Eban, the former Israeli foreign minister – in fact, his book was partly written by an editor of Commentary magazine – lay on a lowly shelf with the author’s handwritten dedication to ‘His Imperial Majesty, the Shah of Shahs’. On another rack were the Goebbels Diaries.
In the Shah’s personal office, the guards could scarce restrain us from dialling a line on the golden telephones. On a balcony above the living room, a youth with a rifle over his shoulder watched with an expression of perceptible concern while I played an execrable two-finger version of Bach’s Air on a G String on a harpsichord presented to the Shah by King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of the Belgians. Souvenir-hunters would be able to bid for the toys that once belonged to Princess Leila, the Shah’s eight-year-old daughter. Miniature aircraft and toy bears lay near a cupboard not far from her four-poster bed. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of the American president’s family with a handwritten greeting: ‘With best wishes, Rosalynn and Amy Carter’. A blackboard carried Leila’s first efforts at writing in chalk the European version of Arabic numerals. In the Shah’s study, the desk calendar still registered 16 January, the day on which the monarch left his realm. In the golden ashtray I found five dusty cigarette ends, testimony to the last depressed hours of imperial rule.
We had been taken earlier to the slums of south Tehran in a heavy-handed though quite effective effort by the guidance ministry to point up the different lifestyles of the Shah and his people. Children played upon the earth floor of No. 94 Gord Najhin Place and women carried their washing over open drains. Tehran’s slums were less poverty-en crusted than Cairo’s tenements and the Shah’s palace was modest by Saudi standards. But we got the point – even if the smell of sewage did mix oddly with the expensive perfumes of the ministry girls.
There was much that was odd about Tehran. The sheer normality of the great, dirty, traffic-clogged city was more astounding than the crisis in Iranian-American relations. For all the talk of fanatical mobs and economic chaos, I could still catch the Number 20 bus – a green-painted Leyland double-decker – into the centre of town, go shopping for French clothes in expensive stores or call in for a snack at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Iranians weaned on the American way of life could no longer buy Skippy peanut butter or Kraft cheese spread at the Forshagh Bozorg department store and, in keeping with Khomeini’s views on the general appearance of women, French and American cosmetics had been banned. Tehran was not an attractive city by either Western or oriental standards. Its square blocks and the architectural poverty of the shop façades built in the 1960s gave the place a sterile, curiously east European air. Even Tehranis, however, were still having problems with their city’s political geography, for nearly every main street in the capital had undergone an identity change in accordance with revolutionary instructions. Thus Pahlavi Street disappeared to become Dr Hossein Fatimi Street, named after Mossadeq’s foreign minister, who was executed two months after ‘Operation Ajax’.*
The Reuters news agency bureau in Tehran became a place of spiritual repair. When I first pushed open the door, I found its bureau chief, Harvey Morris, surrounded by clouds of thick cigarette smoke with an open bottle of Scotch on his desk and a look of pained surprise on his face. With his Mark Twain moustache and unruly hair, Harvey found the revolution as outrageous as it was brave, as farcical as it was cruel. He had to protect his staff from the komitehs, keep his Iranian freelancers out of prison and soft-soap the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. And it was the ministry that was causing him his latest crisis. ‘They’ve told me they want to know the history of the Reuters news agency,’