Iran - a minor insider's perspective 25 years ago

Please note that I started a blog called Delphic Ink some time ago whereon I began offering chapters from "The Barber's Daughter: Memoirs of a Foreign Service Naif." However, I am unable to continue on that site because I was dumped by aol some months ago and blogger won't allow me access via my new email address.

Since Iran is of such moment and to get myself back into the writing mode in order to complete "Prisms in the Persian Room," I first am presenting the text of a speech I gave at Prairie View (Texas) A&M University on June 23, 1982 . Note that Mohammed Heikal is still considered by many including Robert Fisk tohave been the pre-eminent commentator on the Middle East.

Prairie View A&M University Century Two Book Review -
Iran, by Mahammed Heikal
- reviewed by Delphine Blachowicz

History has repeatedly shown that once we lock ourselves into a particular point of view we are bound to come out the loser. Such was and is the case with Iran - with the royalists, with the revolutionaries, with our own naive administrations, and most especially with our omnipresent media which looks and looks but so often does not see.

When I worked for Ardeshir Zahedi, the "playboy ambassador" of Iran to the United States from mid-1973 to early 1976, I lived in an almost toally Iranian environment. So completely was I immersed in what was virtually a microcosm of Iranian socity that I left the Embassy only to sleep at my apartment. Lunch was brought to my desk and oftentimes supper as well, especially if I was not to be included in whatever social activity might be taking place that evening in the Embassy's very beautiful public rooms on Massachusetts Avenue in our nation's capital.

Earlier I hadd lived in India, Argentina and West Africa for extended periods of time during assignment abroad as a U.S. Foreign Service Staff Officer. But it was at the Embassy of Iran, right in my own country, that I experienced the most profound culture shock.

Mohammed Heikal, editor of Egypt's principal newspaper, Al Ahran, for many years, has provided a name for part of what I found most distasteful. It is tuqui'a - the Farsi word for dissembling. With Iranians, nothing is as it seems. Children are taught to be deceitful and Iranians living in the United States are often "amazed to find American mothers teaching their children to tell the truth."


The Iranians' need for protective deception arose over the millenia during which their country was the crossroads of the ancient world. Invaders, plunderers and conquerors were many, ranging from Alexander to Genghis Khan and others even more brutal. So, like American Blacks who developed jive to communicate among themselves, the Iranians devised a means of controlling their conquerors. Their weapon was dissimulation, a trait considered not duplicitous, merely prudent for survival.

In his book "Iran: The Untold Story - An Insider's Account of America's Adventure and Its Consequences for the Future," Heikal attempted to make his readers understand the currents of history rather than join in the rush to judgment which often characterizes those who mold public opinion for purposes not necessarily nefarious but merely secondary in the constant, crass and competitive rush for ratings.

As Minister of Information and of Foreign Affairs under Nasser, Heikal had had intimate access to the leading lights of the Middle East for well over thirty years. He was considered the region's most distinguished journalist in recent memory. Yet, corroborating my view that even our most remarkable men are subject to blinders imposed by their own successes and the concomitant power they acquire, Anwar Sadat had Heikal imprisoned just before his own assassination in an attempt to quell internal dissension.

Mohammed Heikal undoubtedly was not the ultimate authority on Iran simply because none exists. Only Allah himself, perhaps, can comprehend the infinitely complicated Muslim mind and culture. My esteemed former colleague, Dr. Gholam Kazemian, Minister Counselor for Cultural Affairs at the Embassy, cautioned me against even trying. The task apparently is beyond the ability of mortal man. But let us attempt the task by peering through a few of the prisms which mirror the myriad aspects of any ultimate truth concerning the character of the Persian people.

Official Washington flocked to lavish parties at the Imperial Embassy of Iran where, perhaps for the first time in their lives, ladies experienced elegance and courtesies of the kind they'd only read about in historial novels. They took it all at face value while their husbands happily acceded to any business boons born of an economy bursting from the profits of the sky-rocketing cost of oil.

The Iranians were gallant, chivalrous and solicitous. But one always had to remember that courtesies proffered were seldom without purpose. Even among themselves, the constant kissing in the European manner concealed to the casual onlooker the fact that many members of the Embassy staff would gladly have stabbed any other in the back to gain the slightest favor with the ranking power, in this case, Ardeshir Zahedi, former son-in-law of the Shah, who reported directly to His Imperial Majesty

Zahedi disdained the Foreign Ministry which he had once headed to the extent that he did not even publicly introduce a successor at a formal dinner party attended by several of his peers from other countries.

Among the estimable gentlemen at the Embassy was an officer named Ahmed Moshaveghzadeh. He spoke softly and from the heart but somehow remained in the backwaters of the building, only to be censured for honest and forthright behavior of those rare occasions when he was deputized to deliver a modicum of discipline to the embassy staff. When the Shah fled Iran and the revolutionaries took control of the Embassy, it was Moshaveghzadeh who led them, according to press reports. He flew back to Tehran soon thereafter only to be immediately clapped into jail. This was the same Moshaveghzadeh who once asked me not to judge his people by those I found within the Embassy.

No one knew whom to trust. Neither the Shah nor Ambassador Zahedi knew who his friends were. When his house of cards finally fell, the Shah blamed Zahedi, among others, for much of the misinformation emanating from Washington. He even refused to see him until just before his death, according to Heikal. I felt profound sorrow for the Ambassador when I read this because I respected him for a loyalty greater than any I've ever observed. Of course, one could say that such layalty was misplaced. It should have been to country rather than to the individual who was its temporal head but that is another matter.

Zahedi may have been wrong in his advices but he was not wanting in his affection. The Shah was the totality of his existence, the very reason for his being. Despite Zahedi's reputation as a great lover and friend to all, he was among the loneliest of people. Only his daughter, Mahnaz, perhaps and only perhaps, laid claim to whatever love was not reserved for His Imperial Majesty, the King of Kings, Lights of Lights, the Center of the Universe.

But so distorted became the Shah's perceptions, so insulated was he from reality by a host of self-serving sycophants, that at the end he trusted not Zahedi nor even his Queen, the Empress Farah, mother of his long-sought heir , whom he ordered searched before gaining admittance to his private chambers, Heikal reported.

Zahedi, to, although among the shrewdest judges of human nature, made grievous mistakes only one of which I shall recount as an example of hos difficult it is to discover the truth among a people governed by tuqui'a. He allowed one Ali Tabatabai to become a member of his staff.


the Embassy was like a miniature royal court, one in which flatterers ad prevaricators prevailed. The Ambassador is still adored by many Americans for his forthrightness, but they never knew that he was at least two different people. Standards which pertained for westerners were not used for his own countrymen. Embassy guests would recount examples of his humility and many kindnesses, not knowing of the terror he inspired among his Iranian staff, including his most senior aides whose egos he devastated on a daily basis. Frankly many of them appeared to have deserved the treatment they received. But every man errs.

The case of Ali Tabatabai held Washington's attention for some time after he was shot to death on his doorstep in July of 1980. The press, preferring as usual to paint creatures in black and white, built him into a hero of local anti-Khomeini elements. Included in this groups were most of the former diplomats from the Imperial Embassy of Iran from whom Americans had already received a distoreted view of what had been going on in Iran. But this they forgot. It's always easier to deal with known entities than to try to understand the unknown. Like the White Russians who are still to be found leading illusory lives on certain society pages, we will long have in our nation's capital the royalists who have no recourse but to importune our government for a return to the former status quo, i.e. another monarchy.

While I have no direct knowledge of events leading to the death of Ali Tabatabai, I knew the man as reporters did not. Thus, in no way can I conceive of him as martyr to any cause other than his own.

Tabatabai first came to my attention at a party attended by no other Iranians. At this gathering he held forth for several hours on the brutality and bestiality of the Shah and of my boss, Ardeshir Zahedi. Imagine my astonishment a few months later when Manoutchehr Ardalan, the Ambassy press officer, brought Tabatabai up to the Ambassador's office to be formally presented as a new press aide. I told my Iranian co-worker of my earlier encounter with him and she acknowledged the truth of my words, saying that the Iranian community knew of Tabatabai's hatred for the Shah and Zahedi. She admonished me not to get involved, warning that when the Ambassador made up his mind, he was not to be deterred. On other occasions I did confront the Ambassador when I thought him to be misinformed but in this case I could not because Ardalan and I did not get along and anything I said would have been construed only as malice toward the press officer.

As time passed, Tabatabai lost no effort to ingratiate himself into the Ambassador's confidence and to insinuate himself into as many social functions as possible. After my resignation in 1976, I learned that Tabatabai replaced Ardalan as press officer in Washington and Ardalan, to his surprise, shock and chagrin, was rusticated to the Iranian Consulate in San Francisco.

So at mid-summer of 1978 a man whose detest for the Shah was infinite was functioning as the principal spokesman at the embassy in Washington. Coincidentally or not, just after the revolution the chief spokesman for the Khomeini government in Tehran also was named Tabatabai.

Meanwhile, in September of 1978, as events leading to the Shah's exile were beginning to gain momentum, there appeared in New York magazine a scurrilous article which purported to name members of the dreaded Savak operating out of the Embassy in Washington. The article also alleged debaucheries of the very wildest kinds. I later learned that this article had enormous impact upon the puritannical Khomeini and his entourage in Paris.

Everything, hoever, seemed to me to be reversed. The more honorable, family-oriented men were mentioned as profligates while those who were, in my estimation, notorious moral degenerates were not even named. The article also alleged drug parties with U. S. congressmen in attendance and women of the staff providing additional diversion.

The Ambassador's reputation as a womanizer and party goer and giver par excellence most assuredly was well deserved but while the official functions had more style and flair than those at other embassies in no way were they orgies. And there certainly were no afternoon dalliances right in the embassy proper on a workday afternoon. Simple logistics would have precluded such behavior given the Persian disrespect for privacy. Apparently there was a distinct lessening of professionalism after my departure but I simply cannot conceive of the toal abandonment of all proprieties which is what the New York article alleged.

After I recovered from my surprise that a magzine of some influence, at least in Manhattan, would have published so inflammatory an article, I realized that in its listing of member of the press office only one name was missing - that of Tabatabai. Given my direct knowledge of his perfidy, I can only surmise that it was he who planted the story, overlaying with just enough facts the fabrications which fed the imaginations of those who looked for even greater laxness than already existed. Thus it is my personal view that Tabatabai must have been a spy for the Khomeini people, continuing in that role after the revolution by proclaiming himself leader of the expatriate group in Washington in order to keep tabs on their activities. Or, alternatively, knowing that loyalty among many Iranians is as steadfast as their desert sands, perhaps there was a falling out of some sort with Tabatabai deciding to run his own show rather than accepting dictates disseminated a half world away.

In any event, the New York article occasioned apoplectic responses from those mentioned. Lawsuits for damages in the millions were initiated. Some many still be pending. Might is not have been ossible that one of those whose personal life had been so publicly dishonored would have sought retribution? After all the same article listed embassy staff members as agents of the fearsome Savak, and thus presumably experienced in extracting their own form of rough justice. I once was told that fully a third of the embassy staff were Savak but I knew no specifics except, of course, the Rafiizadeh, the chief who operated out of New Jersey. This is the same Rafiizadeh revealed by Time magazine last February to have been then and now on the CIA payroll as a principal source of information for a land and a people about whomwhomknew and know so little.

So there you have another example of tuqui'a - the inability of Iranians, even the most shrewd, to uncover the truth. Or perhaps to wish to see it.

If the truth was so difficult for the Persians themselves to discover, consider the haplessness of the succession of guileless Americans who attempted to work with them - our proper Baptist president, the innocents in the U.S. diplomatic service who happily partook of the Shah's largesse and swallowed his party line without question, and most recently, the stalwart White House military aides whose self-righteousness obscured reality. How could those with so little sense of the history of the Middle East have hoped to have comprehended an enigma within a conundrum and, more importantly, to have prevailed in any representations?

Can we as a nation protect our interests in the Middle East now? Have we learned from our mistakes or will be continue to be as surprised by events as was own own great 20th century Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, who in 1979 told Heikal that he had been totally taken aback by the revolution in Iran.

So were journalists like Joseph Kraft who late in 1978 lamented the fact that only a few fourth rate State Department officials "cared a lot about Iran." Kraft blamed the "wrong strategic priorities at the very top." But who was it, may I ask, who sat at the apex of the Washington social heap, who regularly dined with the movers and shakers in the Shah's government and our own? Why Joseph Kraft, of course. And Arnaud deBorchgrave and Barbara Walters and Tom Braden and so forth - not the fourth rate officials.

These are only examples. No one was more adept than Zahedi in manipulating our most prominent journalists into unwittingly feeding us what the Shah wanted us to know. So often did they dine at the tables of the mighty that their eyes were blinded to actualities beyond the palace and embassy gates. Students had had already begun to march both here and abroad. Amnesty International already was reporting the savageries of Savak but our prima donna press people preened themselves on their accessibility to power and and failed to see the swelling surge of an even greater strength.

So completely did the U.S. government swallow the Shah's line that our CIA in Tehran had no, I repeat no, contacts with the Muslim clergy. This I have from a former very senior American official who piously wrote to me that "contrary to press reports, we had good people at the Embassy, who spoke Farsi and were in toch with all elements of the local scene including the opposition. One group we did overlook, however, were the mullahs."

The Shah dismissed the mullahs as vetiges of an agrarian age which he was seeking to supplant with an industrial society and our own intelligence people didn't both to find out what the vast majority of the Iranian people might be thinking. So much for the usefulness of that vaunted agency, at least on that occasion.

Nobody wanted to know that truth. Some months after I quit the bmassy, the Washington Post published a letter to the editor which was quite supportive of the official Iranian line on a subject which now escapes me. When I got in touch with the Post, not to object to the fact of the letter, but to voice my view that the author should have been identified as a paid consultant to the Imperial Embasys of Iran, I was treated like a crazy lady.

The Washington Post performed a great service to our nation with its pursuit of Watergate. Its subsequent arrogance, however, is unconscionable. It would behoove Americans everywhere to assess the extent to which the Post influences the opinions of those they send to Washington, the politicians who read it daily with their morning coffee.

I have a personal love/hate attitude toward our press, believing it to be oftentimes grievously flawed and yet our ultimate recourse in ensuring the contination of our democracy. But it was only the papers who serve the unwashed masses in the hinterlands - Buffalo and Miami - which published the words of an obscure insider. The arrogant elitists in Washington and New York trust only one another and so when they fall, they fall the hardest, witness the Janet Cooke case as well as the end of the Pahlavi "dynasty."

What has happened more recently? The New York Times in 1982 carried a front page story by Leslie Gelb indicating that the CIA was positioning spies in western turkey for possible incursions into Iran and supporting a variety of dissident groups including some which endorse the Shah's heir, Reza Pahlavi, as claimant to the throne. Mr. Gelb wisely noted that Iranian groups "serve their own interests in portraying increasing Soviet influence in order to generate more American support." Iranians, like other foreign nationals, know that they have only to cry "communist" and Americans will come running with beshels of money and/or planeloads of arms.

Any leader, including our own, lives in a cocoon of his own creation. As the Shah grew in stature, at least in his own eyes, no one dared to tell him the truth. Let us hope that the CIA is informing our president not only of the communists he so vigilantly seeks to contain but also of the utter disrepute of the Pahlavis. No matter how dreadful the current situation in Iran, I doubt that Iranians want a return of the royalists.

But Washington is full of people who would benefit were Reza placed upon a nonexistent throne. They include not only former officials of the Pahlavi regime but those with whom they have dealt in the past - the multinational businessmen who would find it easier to manipulate people they already know in order to get at the oil and to start selling armaments again. Our very own neo-royalists in the White House have brought into the present administration many individuals who earlier served in the Nixon and Ford administrations. It is these people who had the closest ties to the Iranians, it is they who still do not understand the depth of hatred that Iranians have for the violations of human rights, the extravagantly widespread waste and corruption and the decadence imported from the west which occurred during the reign of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Ardeshir Zahedi even now enjoys an enormous reservoir of good will in Washington. All the old movie stars who frequent the White House also stop at the Villa des Rosas when in Switzerland. A man of great personal courage, Zahedi no doubt wishes to emulate his father who in 1953 returned the Shah to the throne - with the helpf of the CIA, of course.

As their fortunes decline, the Reaganites will cry "communist" with increasing regularity. Teh danger is that they will be persuaded that the monarchy is the only solution in Iran. Only those who live within that fantasy land inside the Washington beltway can seriously believe that Iran is ripe for plucking by the Soviets. Only those who have learned nothing from events of recent years can delude themselves into thinking that a people profoundly committed to one of the most individualistic religions in the world would countenance such regimentation. Moreover, they treasure the glory of their pre-Islamic history to which the Shah was presuming to restore himself rather than await the Hidden Imam who has been foreordained by the Shiites to do so.

So individualistic are the Iranians they are virtually ungovernable. In my more cynical moments, I would like to see the Soviets attempt to control these proud people. They would have their hands full for generations to come. Zahedi himself did not control his staff. True, they jumped when he hollered and screamed but when he was gone they did as they pleased. Heikal confirms this attitude by quoting one-time Khomeini favorite, his former Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, as saying: "The real enemy I have to deal with is not outside - it is inside my ministry. The civil servants have been doing their best to frustrate my efforts and carry on just as they did in the days of the Shah."

Heikah points out that even the Persian communists are fragmented. He counts at least eleven different splinter groups and feels that only if they were brought to power on the back of an invading Soviet army would they prevail. This he discounts as a serious possibility because Iran, unlike Afghanistan, is very definitely not in an indeterminate area of superpower influence. Moreover, the Iranians and the Russians are traditional enemies because of both Tsarist exapnsionism and the more recent Soviet predatory inclinations.

Both Heikal and James Bill, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, believe that Iran's revolution is very similar in pattern to those which occurred in England in the 2640s, France in the 1790s and Russia in the years after 1971. Bill cites Crane Brinton's "Anatomy of a Revolution" wherein the first stage, the fall of the ancien regime, occurs after a period of growth and reform but then the populace perceives it as too little too late. The second stage sees the rule of moderates for a short period - Baktiar, Barzagan and Banisadr in Iran. Third is the rule of the extremists, the Reign of Terror and of Virtue. Next, comes the Thermidor, a period of relative normalcy or convalescence. And finally a military strongman will appear.

The latter may come sooner than we think. Heikal quotes the then chief of staff of the Iranian army, General Walieddin Fellahi, as saying "Thanks to the war (with Iraq) the army has been purged of its sins. Today it is no longer the army of the Shah which fired on unarmed citizens, but the army which has successfuly defended the integrity of the Motherland."

And what has been happening more recently?

Alexander Haig ina speech at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg last December said that the first shipment of U.S. arms to Iran was intended for the "western trained, professional" military, not the Khomeini revolutionaries who are conducting the war with Iraq. These trained, professional military are, of course, those who served the Shah. So perhaps we should look more closely at how the billions he bequesthed are currently being used, for surely they do not lie idle while his son aspires to a nonexistent throne and his supporters seek to reassert dominion over the crossroads of Asia and the oil which underlies the land.

Actually, Reza Pahlavi may have given it all away when, on Face the Nation some months ago, he responded to Leslie Stahl's wonderment that he wasn't more disturbed to learns of the arms sales by saying that he, in fact, welcomed the infusion of weapons into the cauldron of competing aspirants to succeed the aging Ayatollah. For if the means to eliminate conflicting factions is enhanced, the Royalists can return to far less internal opposition.

Mr. Reagan and his inner circle apparently have been doing business with the Persians ever since Mr. McFarlane, according to press reports, intruded himself into the 1980 presidential campaign by offering to retrieve the 52 American hostages in such manner that the PR star, rather than the patient president, would reap political benefit.

In circumventing official channels even before they were in office, they more surely subverted our democratic process than did Nixon's White House aides when they bungled the burglary at the Watergate.

There is a Persian proverb which goes" "If you see a blind man, kick him. Why should you be kinder than God?" Apparently the Reagan administration acts in accordance with a more contemporary version which goes" "If you see a hungry peasant, sell him a gun. Why shouldn't one of you profit?"

The perfidy of our leaders and their ability to govern is not the only issue. Indeed it is not the principal issue. They could not operate extralegally were it not for the profound and all pervasive immorality born of immense self-interest and materialism which is sofocating our planet and its peoples in a noxious cloud of greed.

Whether or not there is a Bonaparte waiting in the wings, Iranians and other peoples of the third world are ultimately much more pre-disposed to American ideas and ideals than they are to those of the Soviet Union. Despite all our self-criticism, we remain more powerful as a nation than we ourselves believe. Thus if we can use history to avoid the oversimplifications of a world divided only into communist and non-communist blocs, when the Iranian revolution has recaptured its initial integrity, an integrity which the current regime is profoundly prostituting, this ancient land may yet renew itself by becoming a beacon for Islamic justice and mercy throughout the Muslim world.

As we travel together on this ever shrinking planet, let be be alert to realities greater than the instant analyses of the avenging angels of the airwaves and the
princes of our facile press. Truth is an unfolding. It is not an expedient of the six o'clock news,

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