Mohammad Reza Pahlavi facts for kids
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Not to be confused with Reza Shah, his father, or Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran, his son.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Persian: محمدرضا شاه پهلوی, pronounced [mohæmˈmæd reˈzɒː pæhlæˈviː]; 26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980), also known as Mohammad Reza Shah (محمدرضا شاه), was the last Shah (King) of the Imperial State of Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. Owing to his status, he was usually known as the Shah.

Mohammad Reza Shah took the title Shahanshah ("King of Kings") on 26 October 1967 and held several other titles, including that of Aryamehr ("Light of the Aryans") and Bozorg Arteshtaran ("Commander-in-Chief"). He was the second and last monarch of the House of Pahlavi. His dream of what he referred to as a "Great Civilization" (Persian: تمدن بزرگ, romanized: tamadon-e bozorg) in Iran led to a rapid industrial and military modernization, as well as economic and social reforms.

Mohammad Reza came to power during World War II after the Anglo-Soviet invasion which forced the abdication of his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi. During Mohammad Reza's reign, the British owned oil industry was briefly nationalized by Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh until an Army coup d'état supported by the UK and the US deposed Mosaddegh, reinstalled the Shah, and brought back foreign oil firms under the Consortium Agreement of 1954. The Shah went on to become a dominant figure in OPEC, promoting a surge in oil prices that crippled Western economies.

Mohammad Reza introduced the White Revolution, a series of economic, social, and political reforms aimed at transforming Iran into a global power and modernizing the nation by nationalizing key industries and land redistribution. The regime implemented many Iranian nationalist policies leading to the establishment of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus Cylinder, and Tomb of Cyrus the Great as popular symbols of Iran.

The Shah initiated major investments in infrastructure, subsidies and land grants for peasant populations, profit sharing for industrial workers, construction of nuclear facilities, the nationalization of Iran's natural resources, and literacy programs which were considered some of the most effective in the world. The Shah also instituted economic policy tariffs and preferential loans to Iranian businesses which sought to create an independent economy for the nation. Manufacturing of cars, appliances, and other goods in Iran increased substantially leading to the creation of a new industrialist class that was considered insulated from threats of foreign competition. By the 1970s, the Shah was seen as a master statesman and used his growing power to pass the 1973 Sale and Purchase Agreement.

These reforms culminated in decades of sustained economic growth that would make Iran one of the fastest-growing economies of both developed and undeveloped nations. During his 37-year rule, Iran spent billions on industry, education, health, and armed forces and enjoyed economic growth rates exceeding the United States, Britain, and France. National income rose 423 times over. The nation saw an unprecedented rise in per capita income rising to the highest level at any point in Iran's history and high levels of urbanization. By 1977, Iran's armed services spending, which the Shah saw as a means to end foreign intervention in Iran, had made the nation the world's fifth strongest military.

By 1978, growing political unrest snowballed into a popular revolution leading to the monarchy's overthrow. The Jaleh Square massacre, where his military killed and wounded dozens of protestors and the Cinema Rex fire, an arson attack in Abadan that was largely but erroneously blamed on SAVAK, leading to protests across Iran, made his position in Iran untenable. The true perpetrators of the Cinema Rex fire, and whether they were pro- or anti-Shah remain unclear. A meeting of western leaders was perceived by the Shah as a withdrawal of their support. He left Iran for exile on 17 January 1979. While the Shah told his contemporaries in the West that he would rather leave than fire on his people, the number of protesters killed by his military is disputed, with the total number of people killed during the revolution ranging from 540 to 2,000 (historians' figures) to 60,000 (figures of the Islamic Republic of Iran). Soon thereafter, the Iranian monarchy was formally abolished, and Iran was declared an Islamic republic led by Ruhollah Khomeini. The Shah died in exile in Egypt, where he had been granted asylum by President Anwar Sadat.

Early life

Born in Tehran to Reza Khan (later Reza Shah Pahlavi) and his second wife, Tadj ol-Molouk, Mohammad Reza was the eldest son of Reza Khan, who later became the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, and the third of his eleven children. His father, a former Brigadier-General of the Persian Cossack Brigade, was Mazandarani origin and born in Alasht, Savadkuh County, Māzandarān Province, his father was a Mazandarani, commissioned in the 7th Savadkuh Regiment, and served in the Anglo-Persian War War in 1856, and mother was a Georgian Muslim immigrant from Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), whose family had emigrated to mainland Iran after Iran was forced to cede all of its territories in the Caucasus following the Russo-Persian Wars several decades prior to Reza Khan's birth. Mohammad Reza's mother, Tadj ol-Molouk, was of Azerbaijani origin, being born in Baku, Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan).

Mohammad Reza was born along with his twin sister, Ashraf. However, Shams, Mohammad Reza, Ashraf, Ali Reza, and their older half-sister, Fatimeh, were not royalty by birth, as their father did not become Shah until 1925. Nevertheless, Reza Khan was always convinced that his sudden quirk of good fortune had commenced in 1919 with the birth of his son who was dubbed khoshghadam (bird of good omen). Like most Iranians at the time, Reza Khan did not have a surname and after the 1921 Persian coup d'état which deposed Ahmad Shah Qajar, he was informed that he would need a name for his house. This led Reza Khan to pass a law ordering all Iranians to take a surname; he chose for himself the surname Pahlavi, which is the name for the Middle Persian language, itself derived from Old Persian. At his father's coronation on 24 April 1926, Mohammad Reza was proclaimed Crown Prince.

Family

Mohammad Reza described his father in his book Mission for My Country as "one of the most frightening men" he had ever known, depicting Reza Khan as a dominating man with a violent temper. A tough, fierce, and very ambitious soldier who became the first Persian to command the elite Russian-trained Cossack Brigade; growing up under his shadow, Mohammad Reza was a deeply scared and insecure boy who lacked self-confidence according to Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani.

Reza Khan believed if fathers showed love for their sons, it caused homosexuality later in life, and to ensure his favourite son was heterosexual, denied him any love and affection when he was young, though he later became more affectionate towards the Crown Prince when he was a teenager. Reza Khan always addressed his son as shoma ("sir") and refused to use more informal tow ("you"), and in turn was addressed by his son using the same word. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński observed in his book Shah of Shahs that looking at old photographs of Reza Khan and his son, he was struck by how self-confident and assured Reza Khan appeared in his uniform while Mohammad Reza appeared nervous and jittery in his uniform standing next to his father. In the 1930s, Reza Khan was an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, though this was less because of any racism and anti-Semitism on his part, but rather because Reza Khan saw Hitler as someone much like himself, namely a man who had risen from an undistinguished background to become a notable leader of the 20th century. Reza Khan often impressed on his son his belief that history was made by great men such as himself, and that a real leader is an autocrat. Reza Khan was a huge barrel-chested and muscular man towering at over 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m), leading his son to liken him to a mountain, and throughout his life, Mohammad Reza was obsessed with height and stature, for example wearing elevator shoes to make himself look taller than he really was, often boasting that Iran's highest mountain Mount Damavand was higher than any peak in Europe or Japan, and he was always most attracted to tall women. As Shah, Mohammad Reza constantly disparaged his father in private, calling him a thuggish Cossack who achieved nothing as Shah, and most notably the son almost airbrushed his father out of history during his reign, to the point that the impression was given the House of Pahlavi began its rule in 1941 rather than 1925.

Mohammad Reza's mother, Tadj ol-Molouk was an assertive woman who was also very superstitious. She believed that dreams were messages from another world, sacrificed lambs to bring good fortune and scare away evil spirits, and clad her children with protective amulets to ward off the power of the evil eye. Tadj ol-Molouk was the main emotional support to her son, cultivating a belief in him that destiny had chosen him for great things, as the soothsayers she consulted had explained her dreams as proving just precisely that. Mohammad Reza grew up surrounded by women, as the main influences on him were his mother, his older sister Shams and his twin sister Ashraf, leading the American psychologist Marvin Zonis to conclude it was "from women, and apparently from women alone" that the future Shah "received whatever psychological nourishment he was able to get as a child". Traditionally, male children were considered preferable to females, and as a boy, Mohammad Reza was often spoiled by his mother and sisters. Mohammad Reza was very close to his twin sister Ashraf who commented: "It was this twinship and this relationship with my brother that would nourish and sustain me throughout my childhood ... No matter how I would reach out in the years to come—sometimes even desperately—to find an identity and a purpose of my own, I would remain inextricably tied to my brother ... always, the center of my existence was, and is, Mohammad Reza".

After becoming Crown Prince, Mohammad Reza was taken away from his mother and sisters to be given a "manly education" by officers selected by his father, who also ordered that everyone including his mother and siblings were to address the Crown Prince as "Your Highness". The result of his upbringing between a loving, if possessive and superstitious mother and an overbearing martinet father was to make Mohammad Reza in the words of Zonis "a young man of low self-esteem who masked his lack of self-confidence, his indecisiveness, his passivity, his dependency and his shyness with masculine bravado, impulsiveness, and arrogance", making him into a person of marked contradictions as the Crown Prince was "both gentle and cruel, withdrawn and active, dependent and assertive, weak and powerful".

Education

By the time Mohammad Reza turned 11, his father deferred to the recommendation of Abdolhossein Teymourtash, the Minister of Court, to dispatch his son to Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school, for further studies. Mohammad Reza left Iran for Switzerland on 7 September 1931. On his first day as a student at Le Rosey in September 1931, the Crown Prince antagonised a group of his fellow students who were sitting on a bench in a park outside Le Rosey with his demand that they all stand to attention as he walked past, just as everybody did back in Iran, which led to an American student beating up Mohammad Reza, who swiftly learned to accept that no one would stand to attention wherever he went in Switzerland. As a student, Mohammad Reza played competitive football, but the school records indicate that his principal problem as a football player was his "timidity" as the Crown Prince was afraid to take risks. The Crown Prince was educated in French at Le Rosey, and his time there left Mohammad Reza with a lifelong love of all things French. In articles he wrote in French for the student newspaper in 1935 and 1936, Mohammad Reza praised Le Rosey for broadening his mind and introducing him to European civilisation.

Mohammad Reza was the first Iranian prince in line for the throne to be sent abroad to attain a foreign education and remained there for the next four years before returning to obtain his high school diploma in Iran in 1936. After returning to the country, the Crown Prince was registered at the local military academy in Tehran where he remained enrolled until 1938, graduating as a Second Lieutenant. Upon graduating, Mohammad Reza was quickly promoted to the rank of captain, a rank which he kept until he became Shah. During college, the young prince was appointed Inspector of the Army and spent three years travelling across the country, examining both civil and military installations.

Mohammad Reza spoke English, French and German fluently in addition to his native language Persian.

During his time in Switzerland, Mohammad Reza befriended Ernest Perron introducing Mohammad Reza to French poetry and under his influence Chateaubriand and Rabelais became his "favorite French authors". The Crown Prince liked Perron so much that when he returned to Iran in 1936, he brought Perron back with him, installing his best friend in the Marble Palace. Perron lived in Iran until his death in 1961 and as the best friend of Mohammad Reza was a man of considerable behind-the-scenes power. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a best-selling book was published by the new regime, Ernest Perron, the Husband of the Shah of Iran by Mohammad Pourkian, alleging a homosexual relationship between the Shah and Perron, which has remained the official interpretation in the Islamic Republic to the present day. Zonis described the book as long on assertions and short on evidence of a homosexual relationship between the two, noted that all of the Shah's courtiers rejected the claim that Perron was the Shah's lover, and argued that strong-willed Reza Khan, who was very homophobic, would not have allowed Perron to move into the Marble Palace in 1936 if he believed Perron was his son's lover.

Early reign

First marriage

One of the main initiatives of Iranian and Turkish foreign policy had been the Saadabad pact of 1937, an alliance bringing together Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with the intent of creating a Muslim bloc that, it was hoped, would deter any aggressors. President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey suggested to his friend Reza Khan during the latter's visit to Turkey that a marriage between the Iranian and Egyptian courts would be beneficial for the two countries and their dynasties, as it might lead to Egypt joining the Saadabad pact. In line with this suggestion, Mohammad Reza and Princess Fawzia married. Dilawar Princess Fawzia of Egypt (5 November 1921 – 2 July 2013), a daughter of King Fuad I of Egypt and Nazli Sabri, was a sister of King Farouk I of Egypt. They married on 15 March 1939 in the Abdeen Palace in Cairo. Reza Shah did not participate in the ceremony. During his visit to Egypt, Mohammad Reza was greatly impressed with the grandeur of the Egyptian court as he visited the various palaces built by the Isma'il Pasha, aka "Isma'il the Magnificent", the famously free-spending Khedive of Egypt, and resolved that Iran needed palaces to match those built by Isma'il.

Mohammad Reza's marriage to Fawzia produced one child, a daughter, Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi (born 27 October 1940). Their marriage was not a happy one as the Crown Prince was openly unfaithful, often being seen driving around Tehran in one of his expensive cars with one of his girlfriends. Mohammad Reza's dominating and extremely possessive mother saw her daughter-in-law as a rival to her son's love, and took to humiliating Princess Fawzia, whose husband sided with his mother. A quiet, shy woman, Fawzia described her marriage as miserable, feeling very much unwanted and unloved by the Pahlavi family and longing to go back to Egypt. In his 1961 book Mission For My Country, Mohammad Reza wrote the "only happy light moment" of his entire marriage to Fawzia was the birth of his daughter.

Deposition of his father

Main articles: Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and Persian Corridor

In the midst of World War II in 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This had a major impact on Iran, which had declared neutrality in the conflict. In the summer of 1941, Soviet and British diplomats passed on numerous messages warning that they regarded the presence of a number of Germans administering the Iranian state railroads as a threat, implying war if the Germans were not dismissed. Britain wished to ship arms to the Soviet Union via Iranian railroads, and statements from the German managers of the Iranian railroads that they would not cooperate made both Moscow and London insistent that the Germans Reza Khan had hired to run his railroads had to be sacked at once. As his father's closest advisor, the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza did not see fit to raise the issue of a possible Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, blithely assuring his father that nothing would happen.

The Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani wrote about the relationship between the Reza Khan and the Crown Prince: "As his father's now constant companion, the two men consulted on virtually every decision". Later that year British and Soviet forces occupied Iran in a military invasion, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate. On 25 August 1941, British and Australian naval forces attacked the Persian Gulf while the Soviet Union conducted a land invasion from the north. On the second day of the invasion with the Soviet air force bombing Tehran, Mohammad Reza was shocked to see the Iranian military simply collapse, with thousands of terrified officers and men all over Tehran taking off their uniforms in order to desert and run away despite the fact they had not seen combat yet. Reflecting the panic, a group of senior Iranian generals called the Crown Prince to receive his blessing to hold a meeting to discuss how best to surrender. When Reza Khan learned of the meeting, he flew into a rage and attacked one of his generals, Ahmad Nakhjavan, striking him with his riding crop, tearing off his medals and was about to personally execute him when his son persuaded him to have the general court-martialed instead. The collapse of the Iranian military in the summer of 1941 that his father had worked so hard to build up humiliated his son, who vowed that he would never see Iran defeated like that again, which explained Mohammad Reza's later obsession with military spending.

Ascension to the throne

On 16 September 1941, Prime Minister Forughi and Foreign Minister Ali Soheili attended a special session of parliament to announce the resignation of Reza Shah and that Mohammad Reza was to replace him. The next day, at 4:30 pm, Mohammad Reza took the oath of office and was received warmly by parliamentarians. On his way back to the palace, the streets filled with people welcoming the new Shah jubilantly, seemingly more enthusiastic than the Allies would have liked. The British would have liked to put a Qajar back on the throne, but the principal Qajar claimant to the throne was Prince Hamid Mirza, an officer in the Royal Navy who did not speak Persian, so the British had to accept Mohammad Reza as Shah. The main Soviet interest in 1941 was to ensure political stability to ensure Allied supplies, which meant accepting Mohammad Reza's ascension to the throne. Subsequent to his succession as king, Iran became a major conduit for British and, later, American aid to the USSR during the war. This massive supply effort became known as the Persian Corridor.

Much of the credit for orchestrating a smooth transition of power from the King to the Crown Prince was due to the efforts of Mohammad Ali Foroughi. Suffering from angina, a frail Foroughi was summoned to the Palace and appointed prime minister when Reza Shah feared the end of the Pahlavi dynasty once the Allies invaded Iran in 1941. When Reza Shah sought his assistance to ensure that the Allies would not put an end to the Pahlavi dynasty, Foroughi put aside his adverse personal sentiments for having been politically sidelined since 1935. The Crown Prince confided in amazement to the British minister that Foroughi "hardly expected any son of Reza Shah to be a civilized human being", but Foroughi successfully derailed thoughts by the Allies to undertake a more drastic change in the political infrastructure of Iran.

A general amnesty was issued two days after Mohammad Reza's accession to the throne on 19 September 1941. All political personalities who had suffered disgrace during his father's reign were rehabilitated, and the forced unveiling policy inaugurated by his father in 1935 was overturned. Despite the young king's enlightened decisions, the British minister in Tehran reported to London that "the young Shah received a fairly spontaneous welcome on his first public experience, possibly rather [due] to relief at the disappearance of his father than to public affection for himself". During his early days as Shah, Mohammad Reza lacked self-confidence and spent most of his time with Perron writing poetry in French.

In 1942, Mohammad Reza met Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency in the 1940 election who was now on a world tour for President Roosevelt to promote his "one world" policy; Willkie took him flying for the first time. The prime minister, Ahmad Qavam, had advised the Shah against flying with Wilkie, saying he had never met a man with a worse flatulence problem, but the Shah took his chances. Mohammed Reza told Willkie that when he was flying he "wanted to stay up indefinitely". Enjoying flight, Mohammad Reza hired the American pilot Dick Collbarn to teach him how to fly. Upon arriving at the Marble Palace, Collbarn noted that "the Shah must have twenty-five custom-built cars...Buicks, Cadillacs, six Rolls-Royces, a Mercedes". During the Tehran conference in 1943, the Shah was humiliated when he met Joseph Stalin, who visited him in the Marble Palace and did not allow the Shah's bodyguards to be present, with the Red Army alone guarding the Marble Palace during Stalin's visit.

Opinion of his father's rule

Despite his public professions of admiration in later years, Mohammad Reza had serious misgivings about not only the coarse and roughshod political means adopted by his father, but also his unsophisticated approach to affairs of state. The young Shah possessed a decidedly more refined temperament, and amongst the unsavory developments that "would haunt him when he was king" were the political disgrace brought by his father on Teymourtash; the dismissal of Foroughi by the mid-1930s; and Ali Akbar Davar's death in 1937. An even more significant decision that cast a long shadow was the disastrous and one-sided agreement his father had negotiated with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1933, one which compromised the country's ability to receive more favourable returns from oil extracted from the country.

Relationship with his exiled father

Mohammad Reza expressed concern for his exiled father who had previously complained to the British governor of Mauritius that living on the island was both a climatic and social prison. Attentively following his life in exile, Mohammad Reza would object to his father's treatment to British at any opportunity. The two sent letters to one another, although delivery was often delayed, and Mohammad Reza commissioned his friend, Ernest Perron, to hand-deliver a taped message of love and respect to his father, bringing back with him a recording of his voice.

The young Shah

In 1945–46, the main issue in Iranian politics were the Soviet-sponsored separatist government in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, which greatly alarmed the Shah. He repeatedly clashed with his prime minister Ahmad Qavam, whom he viewed as too pro-Soviet. At the same time, the growing popularity of the Tudeh Party also worried Mohammad Reza, who felt there was a serious possibility of a coup by the Tudeh. In June 1946, Mohammad Reza was relieved when the Red Army pulled out of Iran. In a letter to the Azerbaijani Communist leader Ja'far Pishevari, Stalin stated that he had to pull out of Iran as otherwise the Americans would not pull out of China, and he wanted to assist the Chinese Communists in their civil war against the Kuomintang. However, the Pishevari regime remained in power in Tabriz, and Mohammad Reza sought to undercut Qavam's attempts to make an agreement with Pishevari as way of getting rid of both. On 11 December 1946, the Iranian Army led by the Shah in person entered Iranian Azerbaijan and the Pishevari regime collapsed with little resistance, with most of the fighting occurring between ordinary people who attacked functionaries of the Pishevari regime who had behaved brutally. In his statements at the time and later, Mohammad Reza credited his easy success in Azerbaijan to his "mystical power". Knowing Qavam's penchant for corruption, the Shah used that issue as a reason to sack him. By this time, Fawzia had returned to Egypt, and despite efforts to have King Farouk persuade her to return to Iran she refused to go, which led Mohammad Reza to divorce her on 17 November 1948.

A qualified pilot, Mohammad Reza was fascinated with flying and the technical details of aeroplanes, and any insult to him was always an attempt to "clip my wings". Mohammad Reza directed more money to the Imperial Iranian Air Force than any branch of the armed forces, and his favourite uniform was that of the Marshal of the Imperial Iranian Air Force. Zonis wrote that Mohammad Reza's obsession with flying reflected an Icarus complex, also known as "ascensionism", a form of narcissism based on "a craving for unsolicited attention and admiration" and the "wish to overcome gravity, to stand erect, to grow tall ... to leap or swing into the air, to climb, to rise, to fly."

At least two unsuccessful assassination attempts were made against the young Shah. On 4 February 1949, he attended an annual ceremony to commemorate the founding of Tehran University. At the ceremony, Fakhr-Arai fired five shots at him. Fakhr-Arai was instantly shot by nearby officers. After an investigation, it was thought that Fakhr-Arai was a member of the Tudeh Party, which was subsequently banned. However, there is evidence that the would-be assassin was not a Tudeh member but a religious fundamentalist member of Fada'iyan-e Islam. The Tudeh were nonetheless blamed and persecuted.

The Shah's second wife was Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, a half-German, half-Iranian woman and the only daughter of Khalil Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, Iranian Ambassador to West Germany, and his wife, the former Eva Karl. She was introduced to the Shah by Forough Zafar Bakhtiary, a close relative of Soraya's, via a photograph taken by Goodarz Bakhtiary, in London, per Forough Zafar's request. They married on 12 February 1951, when Soraya was 18 according to the official announcement; however, it was rumoured that she was actually 16, the Shah being 32. As a child she was tutored and brought up by Frau Mantel, and hence lacked proper knowledge of Iran, as she herself admits in her personal memoirs, stating, "I was a dunce—I knew next to nothing of the geography, the legends of my country, nothing of its history, nothing of Muslim religion."

Oil nationalisation and the 1953 coup

Main article: 1953 Iranian coup d'état

By the early 1950s, the political crisis brewing in Iran commanded the attention of British and American policy leaders. Following the 1950 Iranian legislative election, Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed prime minister in 1951. He was committed to nationalising the Iranian petroleum industry controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) (as Anglo-Persian Oil Company, or APOC, had become). Under the leadership of Mosaddegh and his nationalist movement, the Iranian parliament unanimously voted to nationalise the oil industry—thus shutting out the immensely profitable AIOC, which was a pillar of Britain's economy and provided it political clout in the region.

At the start of the confrontation, American political sympathy was forthcoming from the Truman Administration. In particular, Mosaddegh was buoyed by the advice and counsel he was receiving from the American Ambassador in Tehran, Henry F. Grady. However, eventually American decision-makers lost their patience, and by the time the Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower entered office, fears that communists were poised to overthrow the government became an all-consuming concern; these concerns were later dismissed as "paranoid" in retrospective commentary on the coup from U.S. government officials. Shortly prior to the 1952 presidential election in the United States, the British government invited Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., to London to propose collaboration on a secret plan to force Mosaddegh from office. This would be the first of three "regime change" operations led by Allen Dulles (the other two being the successful CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba).

Under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a senior CIA officer and grandson of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, the American CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) funded and led a covert operation to depose Mosaddegh with the help of military forces disloyal to the government. Referred to as Operation Ajax, the plot hinged on orders signed by Mohammad Reza to dismiss Mosaddegh as prime minister and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans.

Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup initially failed, causing the Shah to flee to Baghdad, and then to Rome. During his time in Rome, a British diplomat reported about a monarch who spent most of his time in nightclubs with Queen Soraya or his latest mistress: "He hates taking decisions and cannot be relied on to stick to them when taken. He has no moral courage and succumbs easily to fear". To get him to support the coup, his twin sister Princess Ashraf, who was much tougher than him and publicly questioned his manhood several times, visited him on 29 July 1953 to berate him into signing a decree dismissing Mossaddegh. After a brief exile in Italy, he returned to Iran, this time through a successful second attempt at a coup. A deposed Mosaddegh was arrested and tried. The king intervened and commuted the sentence to three years, to be followed by life in internal exile. Zahedi was installed to succeed Mosaddegh.

Before the first attempted coup, the American Embassy in Tehran reported that Mosaddegh's popular support remained robust. The Prime Minister requested direct control of the army from the Majlis. Given the situation, alongside the strong personal support of Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden for covert action, the American government gave the go-ahead to a committee, attended by the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Henderson, and Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson. Kermit Roosevelt returned to Iran on 13 July 1953, and again on 1 August 1953, in his first meeting with the king. A car picked him up at midnight and drove him to the palace. He lay down on the seat and covered himself with a blanket as guards waved his driver through the gates. The Shah got into the car and Roosevelt explained the mission. The CIA bribed him with $1 million in Iranian currency, which Roosevelt had stored in a large safe—a bulky cache, given the then-exchange rate of 1,000 rial to 15 dollars.

The Communists staged massive demonstrations to hijack Mosaddegh's initiatives, and the United States actively plotted against him. On 16 August 1953, the right wing of the Army attacked. Armed with an order by the Shah, it appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. A coalition of mobs and retired officers close to the Palace executed this coup d'état. They failed dismally and the Shah decided to leave the country. Ettelaat, the nation's largest daily newspaper, and its pro-Shah publisher, Abbas Masudi, were against him, calling the defeat "humiliating".

During the following two days, the Communists turned against Mosaddegh. Opposition against him grew tremendously. They roamed Tehran, raising red flags and pulling down statues of Reza Shah. This was rejected by conservative clerics like Kashani and National Front leaders like Hossein Makki, who sided with the king. On 18 August 1953, Mosaddegh defended the government against this new attack. Tudeh partisans were clubbed and dispersed.

The Tudeh party had no choice but to accept defeat. In the meantime, according to the CIA plot, Zahedi appealed to the military, claimed to be the legitimate prime minister and charged Mosaddegh with staging a coup by ignoring the Shah's decree. Zahedi's son Ardeshir acted as the contact between the CIA and his father. On 19 August 1953, pro-Shah partisans—bribed with $100,000 in CIA funds—finally appeared and marched out of south Tehran into the city centre, where others joined in. Gangs with clubs, knives, and rocks controlled the streets, overturning Tudeh trucks and beating up anti-Shah activists. As Roosevelt was congratulating Zahedi in the basement of his hiding place, the new Prime Minister's mobs burst in and carried him upstairs on their shoulders. That evening, Henderson suggested to Ardashir that Mosaddegh not be harmed. Roosevelt gave Zahedi US$900,000 left from Operation Ajax funds.

U.S. actions further solidified sentiments that the West was a meddlesome influence in Iranian politics. In the year 2000, reflecting on this notion, U.S.

Mohammad Reza returned to power, but never extended the elite status of the court to the technocrats and intellectuals who emerged from Iranian and Western universities. Indeed, his system irritated the new classes, for they were barred from partaking in real power.

Middle years

The Shah and his enemies

In 1963, Mohammad Reza launched the White Revolution, a series of far-reaching reforms, which caused much opposition from the religious scholars. They were enraged that the referendum approving of the White Revolution in 1963 allowed women to vote, with the Ayatollah Khomeini saying in his sermons that the fate of Iran should never be allowed to be decided by women. In 1963 and 1964, nationwide demonstrations against Mohammad Reza's rule took place all over Iran, with the centre of the unrest being the holy city of Qom. Students studying to be imams at Qom were most active in the protests, and Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as one of the leaders, giving sermons calling for the Shah's overthrow. At least 200 people were killed and Khomeini was exiled to Iraq in August 1964.

The second attempt on the Shah's life occurred on 10 April 1965. A soldier shot his way through the Marble Palace. The assassin was killed before he reached the royal quarters, but two civilian guards died protecting the Shah.

According to Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB officer who defected to MI-6, the Soviet Union also targeted the Shah. The Soviets tried to use a TV remote control to detonate a bomb-laden Volkswagen Beetle; the TV remote failed to function. A high-ranking Romanian defector, Ion Mihai Pacepa, also supported this claim, asserting that he had been the target of various assassination attempts by Soviet agents for many years.

The Shah and his court

Mohammad Reza's third and final wife was Farah Diba (born 14 October 1938), the only child of Sohrab Diba, a captain in the Imperial Iranian Army (son of an Iranian ambassador to the Romanov Court in St. Petersburg, Russia), and his wife, the former Farideh Ghotbi. They were married in 1959, and Queen Farah was crowned Shahbanu, or Empress, a title created specially for her in 1967. Previous royal consorts had been known as "Malakeh" (Arabic: Malika), or Queen. The couple remained together for 21 years, until the Shah's death. They had four children together:

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi (born 31 October 1960), heir to the now defunct Iranian throne. Reza Pahlavi is the founder and leader of National Council of Iran, a government in exile of Iran;

Princess Farahnaz Pahlavi (born 12 March 1963);

Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi (28 April 1966 – 4 January 2011);

Princess Leila Pahlavi (27 March 1970 – 10 June 2001).

One of Mohammad Reza's favourite activities was watching films and his favourites were light French comedies and Hollywood action films, much to the disappointment of Farah who tried hard to interest him in more serious films. He also had a passion for automobiles and aeroplanes, and by the middle 1970s, the Shah had amassed one of the world's largest collection of luxury cars and planes. His visits to the West were invariably the occasions for major protests by the Confederation of Iranian Students, an umbrella group of left-wing Iranian university students studying abroad, and Mohammad Reza had one of the world's largest security details as he lived in constant fear of assassination.

Milani described Mohammad Reza's court as open and tolerant, noting that his and Farah's two favourite interior designers, Keyvan Khosravani and Bijan Saffari, were openly gay, with Khosravani often giving advice to the Shah about how to dress. Milani noted the close connection between architecture and power in Iran as architecture is the "poetry of power" in Iran. In this sense, the Niavaran Palace, with its mixture of modernist style, heavily influenced by current French styles and traditional Persian style, reflected Mohammad Reza's personality. Mohammad Reza was a Francophile whose court had a decidedly French ambiance to it.

Mohammad Reza commissioned a documentary from the French film-maker Albert Lamorisse meant to glorify Iran under his rule. But he was annoyed that the film focused only on Iran's past, writing to Lamorisse there were no modern buildings in his film, which he charged made Iran look "backward". Mohammad Reza's office was functional whose ceilings and walls were decorated with Qajar art. Farah began collecting modern art and by the early 1970s owned works by Picasso, Gauguin, Chagall, and Braque, which added to the modernist feel of the Niavaran Palace.

Imperial coronation

On 26 October 1967, twenty-six years into his reign as Shah ("King"), he took the ancient title Shāhanshāh ("Emperor" or "King of Kings") in a lavish coronation ceremony held in Tehran. He said that he chose to wait until this moment to assume the title because in his own opinion he "did not deserve it" up until then; he is also recorded as saying that there was "no honour in being Emperor of a poor country" (which he viewed Iran as being until that time).

2,500-year celebrations

Main article: 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire

As part of his efforts to modernise Iran and give the Iranian people a non-Islamic identity, Mohammad Reza quite consciously started to celebrate Iranian history before the Arab conquest with a special focus on the Achaemenid period. In October 1971, he marked the anniversary of 2,500 years of continuous Persian monarchy since the founding of the Achaemenid Empire by Cyrus the Great. Concurrent with this celebration, Mohammad Reza changed the benchmark of the Iranian calendar from the Hijrah to the beginning of the First Persian Empire, measured from Cyrus the Great's coronation.

At the celebration at Persepolis in 1971, the Shah had an elaborate fireworks show intended to send a dual message; that Iran was still faithful to its ancient traditions and that Iran had transcended its past to become a modern nation, that Iran was not "stuck in the past", but as a nation that embraced modernity had chosen to be faithful to its past. The message was further reinforced the next day when the "Parade of Persian History" was performed at Persepolis when 6,000 soldiers dressed in the uniforms of every dynasty from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis marched past Mohammad Reza in a grand parade that many contemporaries remarked "surpassed in sheer spectacle the most florid celluloid imaginations of Hollywood epics". To complete the message, Mohammad Reza finished off the celebrations by opening a brand new museum in Tehran, the Shahyad Aryamehr, that was housed in a very modernistic building and attended another parade in the newly opened Aryamehr Stadium, intended to give a message of "compressed time" between antiquity and modernity. A brochure put up by the Celebration Committee explicitly stated the message: "Only when change is extremely rapid, and the past ten years have proved to be so, does the past attain new and unsuspected values worth cultivating", going on to say the celebrations were held because "Iran has began to feel confident of its modernization". Milani noted it was sign of the liberalization of the middle years of Mohammad Reza's reign that Hussein Amanat, the architect who designed the Shahyad was a young Baha'i from a middle-class family who did not belong to the "thousand families" that traditionally dominated Iran, writing that only in this moment in Iranian history such a thing was possible.

1973 oil price hike

Prior to the 1973 oil embargo Iran spearheaded OPEC's aim for higher oil prices. When raising oil prices Iran would point out the rising inflation as a means to justify the price increases. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Arab states employed an oil embargo in 1973 against Western nations. Although the Shah declared neutrality, he sought to exploit the lack of crude oil supply to Iran's benefit. The Shah held a meeting of Persian Gulf oil producers declaring they should double the price of oil for the second time in a year. The price hike resulted in an “oil shock” that crippled Western economies while Iran saw a rapid growth of oil revenues. Iranian oil incomes doubled to $4.6 billion in 1973–1974 and spiked to $17.8 billion in the following year. As a result, the Shah was established as the dominant figure of OPEC, having control over oil prices and production. Iran experienced an economic growth rate of 33% in 1973 and 40% the next year, and GNP expanded 50% in the next year.

The Shah directed the growth in oil revenues back into the domestic economy. Elementary school education was made free and mandatory, major investments were made in the military, and in 1974, 16 billion dollars were spent on building new schools and hospitals. The Shah's oil coup signaled that the United States had lost the ability to influence Iranian foreign and economic policy. Under the Shah, Iran dominated OPEC and middle eastern oil exports.

Nationalism

By the 19th century, the Persian word Vatan began to refer to a national homeland by many intellectuals in Iran. The education system was largely controlled by Shiite clergy who utilized a Maktab system in which open political discussion of modernization was prevented. However, a number of scholarly intellectuals including Mirzā FathʿAli Ākhundzādeh, Mirzā Āqā Khān Kermāni and Mirzā Malkam Khān began to criticize Islam's role in public life while promoting a secular identity for Iran. Over time studies of Iran's glorious history and present reality of a declined Qajar period led many to question what led to Iran's decline. Ultimately Iranian history was categorized into two periods pre-Islamic and Islamic. Iran's pre-Islamic period was seen as prosperous while the Arab invasions were seen as, ‘a political catastrophe that pummelled the superior Iranian civilization under its hoof.’ Therefore, as a result of the growing number of Iranian intellectuals in the 1800s, the Ancient Persian Empire symbolized modernity and originality, while the Islamic period brought by Arab invasions brought Iran to a period of backwardness.

Ultimately these revelations in Iran would lead to the rise of Aryan nationalism in Iran and the perception of a ‘intellectual awakening’, as described by Homa Katouzian. In Europe, many concepts of Aryan Nationalism were directed at the anti-Jewish sentiment. In contrast, Iran's Aryan nationalism was deeply rooted in Persian history and became synonymous with an anti-Arab sentiment instead. Furthermore, the Achaemenid and Sasanian periods were perceived as the real Persia, a Persia which commanded the respect of the world and was void of foreign culture before the Arab invasions.

Thus under the Pahlavi state, these ideas of Aryan and pre-Islamic Iranian nationalism continued with the rise of Reza Shah. Under the last Shah, the tomb of Cyrus the Great was established as a significant site for all Iranians. The Mission for My Country, written by the Shah, described Cyrus as ‘one of the most dynamic men in history’ and that ‘wherever Cyrus conquered, he would pardon the very people who had fought him, treat them well, and keep them in their former posts ... While Iran at the time knew nothing of democratic political institutions, Cyrus nevertheless demonstrated some of the qualities which provide the strength of the great modern democracies’. The Cyrus Cylinder also became an important cultural symbol and Pahlavi successfully popularized the decree as an ancient declaration of human rights. The Shah employed titles like Āryāmehr and Shāhanshāh in order to emphasize Iranian supremacy and the kings of Iran.

The Shah continued on with his father's ideas of Iranian nationalism concluding Arabs as the utmost other. Nationalist narratives which were widely accepted by a majority of Iranians portraying Arabs as hostile to Pahlavi's revival of ‘modern’ and ‘authentic’ Iran.

Economy

In the 1970s, Iran had an economic growth rate equal to that of South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan, and Western journalists all regularly predicted that Iran would become a First World nation within the next generation. Significantly, a "reverse brain drain" had begun with Iranians who had been educated in the West returning home to take up positions in government and business. The firm of Iran National ran by the Khayami brothers had become by 1978 the largest automobile manufacturer in the Middle East producing 136,000 cars every year while employing 12,000 people in Meshed. One of the Khayami brothers complained if it had not been for the revolution "Iran National would be where the South Korean car industry is today". Mohammad Reza had strong étatist tendencies and was deeply involved in the economy, with his economic policies bearing a strong resemblance to the same étatist policies being pursued simultaneously by General Park Chung-hee in South Korea. Mohammad Reza considered himself to be a socialist, saying he was "more socialist and revolutionary than anyone". Reflecting his self-proclaimed socialist tendencies, although unions were illegal, the Shah brought in labour laws that were "surprisingly fair to workers". Iran in the 1960s and 70s was a tolerant place for the Jewish minority with one Iranian Jew, David Menasheri, remembering that Mohammad Reza's reign was the "golden age" for Iranian Jews when they were equals, and when the Iranian Jewish community was one of the wealthiest Jewish communities in the world. The Baha'i minority also did well after the bout of persecution in the mid-1950s ended with several Baha'i families rising to prominence in the world of Iranian business.

Under his reign, Iran experienced over a decade of double-digit GDP growth coupled with major investments in military and infrastructure.

The Shah's first economic plan was geared towards large infrastructure projects and improving the agricultural sector which led to the development of many major dams particularly in Karaj, Safīdrūd, and Dez. The next economic plan was directed and characterized by an expansion in the credit and monetary policy of a nation which resulted in a rapid expansion of Iran's private sector, particularly construction. From the period 1955–1959, real gross fixed capital formation in the private sector saw an average annual increase of 39.3%. The private sector credit rose by 46 percent in 1957, 61 percent in 1958, and 32 percent in 1959 (Central Bank of Iran, Annual Report, 1960 and 1961). By 1963, the Shah had begun a redistribution of land offering compensation to landlords valued on previous tax assessments, and the land obtained by the government was then sold on favorable terms to Iranian peasants. The Shah also initiated the nationalization of forests and pastures, female suffrage, profit-sharing for industrial workers, privatization of state industries, and formation of literacy corps. These developments marked a turning point in Iranian history as the nation prepared to embark on a rapid and aggressive industrialization process.

1963–1978 represented the longest period of sustained growth in per capita real income the Iranian economy ever experienced. During the 1963–77 period gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an average annual rate of 10.5% with an annual population growth rate of around 2.7% placing Iran as one of the fasted growing economies in the world. Iran's GDP per capita was $170 in 1963 and rose to $2,060 by 1977. The growth was not just a result of increased oil revenues. In fact, the non-oil GDPs grew by an average annual rate of 11.5 percent, which was higher than the average annual rate of growth experienced in oil revenues. By the fifth economic planning, oil GDP rose to 15.3% strongly outpacing growth rates in oil revenue which only saw .5% growth. From 1963 to 1977 the industrial and the service sectors experienced annual growth rates of 15.0 and 14.3 percent, respectively. The manufacturing of cars, television sets, refrigerators, and other household goods increased substantially in Iran. For instance, over the small period of 1969 to 1977, the number of private cars produced in Iran increased steadily from 29,000 to 132,000 and the number of television sets produced rose from 73,000 in 1969 to 352,000 in 1975.

The growth of industrial sectors in Iran led to substantial urbanization of the country. The extent of urbanization rose from 31 percent in 1956 to 49 percent in 1978. By the mid-1970s Iran's national debt was paid off, turning the nation from a debtor to a creditor nation. The balances on the nation's account for the 1959–78 period actually resulted in a surplus of funds of approximately $15.17 billion. The Shah's fifth five-year economic plan sought to achieve a reduction in foreign imports through the use of higher tariffs on consumer goods, preferential bank loans to the industrialists, maintenance of an overvalued rial, and food subsidies in urban areas. These developments led to the development of a new large industrialist class in Iran and the nation's industrial structure was extremely insulated from threats of foreign competition.

In 1976, Iran saw its largest-ever GDP uptick, thanks in large part to the Shah's economic policies. According to the World Bank, when valued in 2010 dollars, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi improved the country's per-capita GDP to $10,261, the highest at any point in Iran's history.

According to economist Fereydoun Khavand, “During these 15 years, the average annual growth rate of the country fluctuated above 10%. The total volume of Iran's economy increased nearly fivefold during this period. In contrast, during the past 40 years, Iran's average annual economic growth rate has been only about two percent. Considering the growth rate of Iran's population in the post-revolution period, the average per capita growth rate of Iran in the last 40 years is estimated between zero percent and half a percent. Among the main factors hindering the growth rate in Iran are a lack of a favorable business environment, severe investment weakness, very low levels of productivity, and constant tension in the country's regional and global relations.”

Many European, American, and Japanese investment firms sought business ventures and to open up headquarters in Iran.

Relationship with West and Media

By the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian oil revenues experienced rapid growth. By the mid-1960s Iran saw "weakened U.S. influence in Iranian politics" and a strengthening in the power of the Iranian state. According to Homa Katouzian, the perception that the US was the instructor of the Shah's regime due to their support for the 1953 coup contradicted the reality that "its real influence" in domestic Iranian politics and policy "declined considerably". In 1973 the Shah initiated an oil price hike with his control of OPEC further demonstrating the US no longer had influence over Iranian foreign and economic policies. In response to American media outlets critical of him, the Shah claimed that Iran's oil price hikes did little to contribute to the rising inflation in the United States. Pahlavi also implied criticism of the US for not taking the lead on anti-communist efforts.

In 1974 during the oil crisis, the Shah began an atomic nuclear energy policy prompting US Trade Administrator William E. Simon to denounce the Shah as a "nut." In response, US President Nixon publicly apologized to the Shah and through a letter in order to disassociate the president and the United States from the statement. Simon's statement illustrated the growing American tensions with Iran over the Shah's raising of oil prices. Nixon's apology covered up the reality that Shah's ambitions to become the leader in the Persian Gulf Area and the Indian Ocean basin was placing a serious strain on his relationship with the United States, particularly as India had tested its first atomic bomb in May 1974.

Many critics labeled the Shah as a Western and American "puppet", an accusation that has been disproven as unfounded by contemporary scholars due to the Shah's strong regional and nationalist ambitions which often led Tehran to disputes with its Western allies. In particular, the Carter administration which took control of the White House in 1977 saw the Shah as a troublesome ally and sought change in Iran's political system.

By the 1970s, the Shah had become a strongman. His power had dramatically increased both in Iran and internationally, and on the tenth anniversary of the White Revolution, he challenged The Consortium Agreement of 1954 and terminated the agreement after negotiations with the oil consortium resulting in the establishment of 1973 Sale and Purchase Agreement.

Khomeini accused the Shah of false rumors and employed Soviet methods of deception. The accusations were amplified by international media outlets which widely propagated the information and protests were widely shown on Iranian televisions.

Many Iranian students studied across Western Europe and the United States where ideas of liberalism, democracy, and counterculture flourished. Among left-leaning Westerners, the Shah's reign was seen as equivalent to that of right-wing hate figures. Western anti-Shah fervor broadcast by European and American media outlets was ultimately adopted by Iranian students and intellectuals studying the West who accused the shah of Westoxification when it was the students themselves who were adopting Western liberalism they experienced during their studies. These Western ideas of liberalism resulted in utopian visions for revolution and social change. In turn, the Shah criticized Western democracies and equated them to chaos. Furthermore, the Shah chastised Americans and Europeans as being "lazy," and "lacking discipline," and criticized their student radicalism as being caused by Western decline.

Foreign relations

In 1961, the Francophile Mohammad Reza visited Paris to meet his favourite leader, General Charles de Gaulle of France. Mohammad Reza saw height as the measure of a man and a woman (the Shah had a marked preference for tall women) and the 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m) de Gaulle was his most admired leader. Mohammad Reza loved to be compared to his "ego ideal" of General de Gaulle, and his courtiers constantly flattered him by calling him Iran's de Gaulle. During the French trip, Queen Farah, who shared her husband's love of French culture and language, befriended the culture minister André Malraux, who arranged for the exchange of cultural artifacts between French and Iranian museums and art galleries, a policy that remained a key component of Iran's cultural diplomacy until 1979. Many of the legitimising devices of the regime such as the constant use of referendums were modelled after de Gaulle's regime. Intense Francophiles, Mohammad Reza and Farah preferred to speak French rather than Persian to their children. Mohammad Reza built the Niavaran Palace which took up 9,000 square feet and whose style was a blend of Persian and French architecture.

The Shah's diplomatic foundation was the United States' guarantee that it would protect his regime, enabling him to stand up to larger enemies. While the arrangement did not preclude other partnerships and treaties, it helped to provide a somewhat stable environment in which Mohammad Reza could implement his reforms. Another factor guiding Mohammad Reza in his foreign policy was his wish for financial stability, which required strong diplomatic ties. A third factor was his wish to present Iran as a prosperous and powerful nation; this fuelled his domestic policy of Westernisation and reform. A final component was his promise that communism could be halted at Iran's border if his monarchy was preserved. By 1977, the country's treasury, the Shah's autocracy, and his strategic alliances seemed to form a protective layer around Iran.

Although the U.S. was responsible for putting the Shah in power, he did not always act as a close American ally. In the early 1960s, when the State Department's Policy Planning Staff that included William R. Polk encouraged the Shah to distribute Iran's growing revenues more equitably, slow the rush toward militarisation, and open the government to political processes, he became furious and identified Polk as "the principal enemy of his regime." In July 1964, the Shah, Turkish President Cemal Gürsel, and Pakistani President Ayub Khan announced in Istanbul the establishment of the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) organisation to promote joint transportation and economic projects. It also envisioned Afghanistan's joining at some time in the future. The Shah was the first regional leader to grant de facto recognition to the State of Israel. Although when interviewed on 60 Minutes by reporter Mike Wallace, he criticised American Jews for their presumed control over U.S. media and finance; these remarks are widely believed to have only been intended to pacify the Shah's Arab critics, and in any case, bilateral relations between Iran and Israel were not adversely affected. In a 1967 memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote that "our sales [to Iran] have created about 1.4 million man-years of employment in the U.S. and over $1 billion in profits to American industry over the last five years," leading him to conclude that Iran was an arms market the United States could not do without. In June 1965, after the Americans proved reluctant to sell Mohammad Reza some of the weapons he asked for, the Shah visited Moscow, where the Soviets agreed to sell some $110 million worth of weaponry; the threat of Iran pursuing the "Soviet option" caused the Americans to resume selling Iran weapons. Additionally, British, French, and Italian arms firms were willing to sell Iran weapons, thus giving Mohammad Reza considerable leverage in his talks with the Americans, who sometimes worried that the Shah was buying more weapons than Iran needed or could handle.

Concerning the fate of Bahrain (which Britain had controlled since the 19th century, but which Iran claimed as its own territory) and three small Persian Gulf islands, the Shah negotiated an agreement with the British, which, by means of a public consensus, ultimately led to the independence of Bahrain (against the wishes of Iranian nationalists). In return, Iran took full control of Greater and Lesser Tunbs and Abu Musa in the Strait of Hormuz, three strategically sensitive islands which were claimed by the United Arab Emirates. During this period, the Shah maintained cordial relations with the Persian Gulf states and established close diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. Mohammad Reza saw Iran as the natural dominant power in the Persian Gulf region, and tolerated no challenges to Iranian hegemony, a claim that was supported by a gargantuan arms-buying spree that started in the early 1960s. Mohammad Reza supported the Yemeni royalists against republican forces in the Yemen Civil War (1962–70) and assisted the sultan of Oman in putting down a rebellion in Dhofar (1971). In 1971, Mohammad Reza told a journalist: "World events were such that we were compelled to accept the fact that sea adjoining the Oman Sea—I mean the Indian Ocean—does not recognise borders. As for Iran's security limits—I will not state how many kilometers we have in mind, but anyone who is acquainted with geography and the strategic situation, and especially with the potential air and sea forces, know what distances from Chah Bahar this limit can reach".

From 1968 to 1975 the Iraq deported over 60,000 Iraqis of Iranian descent into Iran causing a rise in tensions. Iran's relations with Iraq, however, were often difficult due to political instability in the latter country. Mohammad Reza was distrustful of both the Socialist government of Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Arab nationalist Baath party. He resented the internationally recognised Iran-Iraq border on the Shatt al-Arab river, which a 1937 treaty fixed on the low watermark on the Iranian side, giving Iraq control of most of the Shatt al-Arab. On 19 April 1969, the Shah abrogated the treaty, and as a result Iran ceased paying tolls to Iraq when its ships used the Shatt al-Arab, ending Iraq's lucrative source of income. He justified his move by arguing that almost all river borders all over the world ran along the thalweg (deep channel mark), and by claiming that because most of the ships that used the Shatt al-Arab were Iranian, the 1937 treaty was unfair to Iran. Iraq threatened war over the Iranian move, but when on 24 April 1969 an Iranian tanker escorted by Iranian warships sailed down the Shatt al-Arab without paying tolls, Iraq, being the militarily weaker state, did nothing. The Iranian abrogation of the 1937 treaty marked the beginning of a period of acute Iraqi-Iranian tension that was to last until the Algiers Accords of 1975. The fact that Iraq had welcomed the former SAVAK chief General Teymur Bakhtiar to Baghdad, where he regularly met with representatives of the Tudeh Party and the Confederation of Iranian Students, added to the difficult relations between Iran and Iraq. On 7 August 1970, Bakhtiar was badly wounded by a SAVAK assassin who shot him five times, and he died five days later; Alam wrote in his diary that Mohammad Reza rejoiced at the news.

On 7 May 1972, Mohammad Reza told a visiting President Richard Nixon that the Soviet Union was attempting to dominate the Middle East via its close ally Iraq, and that to check Iraqi ambitions would also be to check Soviet ambitions. Nixon agreed to support Iranian claims to have the thalweg in the Shatt al-Arab recognised as the border and to generally back Iran in its confrontation with Iraq. Mohammad Reza financed Kurdish separatist rebels in Iraq, and to cover his tracks, armed them with Soviet weapons which Israel had seized from Soviet-backed Arab regimes, then handed over to Iran at the Shah's behest. The initial operation was a disaster, but the Shah continued attempts to support the rebels and weaken Iraq. Then, in 1975, the countries signed the Algiers Accord, which granted Iran equal navigation rights in the Shatt al-Arab as the thalweg was now the new border, while Mohammad Reza agreed to end his support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels. The Shah also maintained close relations with King Hussein of Jordan, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and King Hassan II of Morocco. Beginning in 1970, Mohammad Reza formed an unlikely alliance with the militantly left-wing regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, as both leaders wanted higher oil prices for their nations, leading Iran and Libya joining forces to press for the "leapfrogging" of oil prices.

The U.S.-Iran relationship grew more contentious as the U.S. became more dependent on Mohammad Reza to be a stabilising force in the Middle East, under the Nixon Doctrine. In a July 1969 visit to Guam, President Nixon had announced the Nixon Doctrine, which declared that the United States would honour its treaty commitments in Asia, but "as far as the problems of international security are concerned ... the United States is going to encourage and has a right to expect that this problem will increasingly be handled by, and the responsibility for it taken by, the Asian nations themselves." The particular Asian nation the Nixon Doctrine was aimed at was South Vietnam, but the Shah seized upon the doctrine, with its message that Asian nations should be responsible for their own defense, to argue that the Americans should sell him arms without limitation, a suggestion that Nixon embraced. A particular dynamic was established in American-Iranian relations from 1969 onward, in which the Americans gave in to whatever Mohammad Reza demanded, as they felt they needed a strong Iran as a pro-American force in the Middle East and could not afford to lose Iran as an ally. Further adding to the Shah's confidence was the Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969, which forced the Red Army to make a major redeployment to the Chinese border. Mohammad Reza, who always feared the prospect of a Soviet invasion, welcomed the Sino-Soviet war and the resulting reduction of Red Army divisions along the Soviet-Iranian border as giving him more room internationally.

Under Nixon, the United States finally agreed to sever all contact with any Iranians opposed to the Shah's regime, a concession that Mohammad Reza had been seeking since 1958. The often very anti-American tone of the Iranian press was ignored because Mohammad Reza supported the U.S. in the Vietnam War and likewise the Americans ignored the Shah's efforts to raise oil prices, despite the fact it cost many American consumers more. After 1969, a process of "reverse leverage" set in, when Mohammad Reza began to dictate to the United States as the Americans needed him more than he needed the Americans. The American National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote in 1982 that because of the Vietnam War, it was not politically possible in the 1970s for the United States to fight a major war: "There was no possibility of assigning any American forces to the Indian Ocean in the midst of the Vietnam War and its attendant trauma. Congress would have tolerated no such commitment; the public would not have supported it. Fortunately, Iran was willing to play this role." Consequently, the Americans badly needed Iran as an ally, which allowed Mohammad Reza to dictate to them. This experience greatly boosted the Shah's ego, as he felt he was able to impose his will on the world's most powerful nation.

The Americans initially rejected Mohammad Reza's suggestion that they join him in supporting the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighting for independence on the grounds that an independent Kurdistan would inspire the Turkish Kurds to rebel, and they had no interest in antagonising the NATO member Turkey. Some of the Shah's advisers also felt it was unwise to support the peshmerga, saying that if the Iraqi Kurds won independence, then the Iranian Kurds would want to join them. When Nixon and Kissinger visited Tehran in May 1972, the Shah convinced them to take a larger role in what had, up to then, been a mainly Israeli-Iranian operation to aid Iraqi Kurds in their struggles against Iraq, against the warnings of the CIA and State Department that the Shah would ultimately betray the Kurds. He did this in March 1975 with the signing of the Algiers Accord that settled Iraqi-Iranian border disputes, an action taken without prior consultation with the U.S., after which he cut off all aid to the Kurds and prevented the U.S. and Israel from using Iranian territory to provide them assistance.

As a way of increasing pressure on Baghdad, the peshmerga had been encouraged by Iran and the U.S. to abandon guerrilla war for conventional war in April 1974, so the years 1974–75 saw the heaviest fighting between the Iraqi Army and the peshmerga. The sudden cut-off of Iranian support in March 1975 left the Kurds very exposed, causing them to be crushed by Iraq. The British journalist Patrick Brogan wrote that "...the Iraqis celebrated their victory in the usual manner, by executing as many of the rebels as they could lay their hands on." Kissinger later wrote in his memoirs that it was never the intention of the U.S. or Iran to see the peshmerga actually win, as an independent Kurdistan would have created too many problems for both Turkey and Iran; rather, the intention was to "irritate" Iraq enough to force the Iraqis to change their foreign policy.

The Shah also used America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil as leverage; although Iran did not participate in the 1973 oil embargo, he purposely increased production in its aftermath to capitalise on the higher prices. In December 1973, only two months after oil prices were raised by 70 per cent, he urged OPEC nations to push prices even higher, which they agreed to do, more than doubling the price. Oil prices increased 470 per cent over a 12-month period, which also increased Iran's GDP by 50 per cent. Despite personal pleas from President Nixon, the Shah ignored any complaints, claimed the U.S. was importing more oil than any time in the past, and proclaimed that "the industrial world will have to realise that the era of their terrific progress and even more terrific income and wealth based on cheap oil is finished."

Modernisation and evolution of government

For more details, see White Revolution

With Iran's great oil wealth, the Shah became the preeminent leader of the Middle East, and self-styled "Guardian" of the Persian Gulf. In 1961 he defended his style of rule, saying "When Iranians learn to behave like Swedes, I will behave like the King of Sweden."

During the last years of his regime, the Shah's government became more autocratic. In the words of a U.S. Embassy dispatch: "The Shah's picture is everywhere. The beginning of all film showings in public theaters presents the Shah in various regal poses accompanied by the strains of the National Anthem ... The monarch also actively extends his influence to all phases of social affairs ... there is hardly any activity or vocation in which the Shah or members of his family or his closest friends do not have a direct or at least a symbolic involvement. In the past, he had claimed to take a two-party system seriously and declared, 'If I were a dictator rather than a constitutional monarch, then I might be tempted to sponsor a single dominant party such as Hitler organised'."

However, by 1975, Mohammad Reza had abolished the two-party system of government in favour of a one-party state under the Rastakhiz (Resurrection) Party. This was the merger of the New Iran Party, a centre-right party, and the People's Party, a liberal party. The Shah justified his actions by declaring: "We must straighten out Iranians' ranks. To do so, we divide them into two categories: those who believe in Monarchy, the constitution and the Six Bahman Revolution and those who don't ... A person who does not enter the new political party and does not believe in the three cardinal principles will have only two choices. He is either an individual who belongs to an illegal organisation, or is related to the outlawed Tudeh Party, or in other words a traitor. Such an individual belongs to an Iranian prison, or if he desires he can leave the country tomorrow, without even paying exit fees; he can go anywhere he likes, because he is not Iranian, he has no nation, and his activities are illegal and punishable according to the law." In addition, the Shah had decreed that all Iranian citizens and the few remaining political parties become part of Rastakhiz.

Image and self-image of Mohammad Reza in the 1970s

From 1973 onward, Mohammad Reza had proclaimed his aim as that of the tamaddon-e-bozorg, the "Great Civilisation," a turning point not only in Iran's history, but also the history of the entire world, a claim that was taken seriously for a time in the West. On 2 December 1974, The New Yorker published an article by Paul Erdman that was a conjectural future history entitled "The Oil War of 1976: How The Shah Won the World: The World as We Knew It Came to an End When the Shah Of Iran Decided to Restore The Glory of Ancient Persia with Western Arms". In 1975, U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller declared in a speech: "We must take His Imperial Majesty to the United States for a couple of years so that he can teach us how to run a country." In 1976, a pulp novel by Alan Williams was published in the United States under the title A Bullet for the Shah: All They Had To Do Was Kill the World's Most Powerful Man, whose sub-title reveals much about how the American people viewed the Shah at the time (the original British title was the more prosaic Shah-Mak).

The great wealth generated by Iran's oil encouraged a sense of nationalism at the Imperial Court. Mohammad Reza shared the Empress's sentiments as Westerners came begging to his court looking for his largesse, leading him to remark in 1976: Because the House of Pahlavi were a parvenu house as Reza Khan had begun his career as a private in the Persian Army, rising up to the rank of general, taking power in a coup d'état in 1921, and making himself Shah in 1925, Mohammad Reza was keen to gain the approval of the older royal families of the world, and was prepared to spend large sums of money to gain that social acceptance.

Amongst the royalty that came to Tehran looking for the Shah's generosity were King Hussein of Jordan, the former King Constantine II of Greece, King Hassan II of Morocco, the princes and princesses of the Dutch House of Orange, and the Italian Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, whom the Shah had once courted in the 1950s. He coveted the British Order of the Garter, and had, prior to courting Maria Gabriella, inquired about marrying Princess Alexandra of Kent, granddaughter of King George V, but in both cases he was rebuffed in no uncertain terms. As an Iranian, Mohammad Reza greatly enjoyed supporting the Greek branch of the House of Glücksburg, knowing the Greeks still celebrated their victories over the Persians in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. He enjoyed close relations with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, as demonstrated by the fact that he was the guest of honour at the Persepolis celebrations in 1971. Ethiopia and Iran, along with Turkey and Israel, were envisioned as an "alliance of the periphery" that would constrain Arab power in the greater Middle East.

In an era of high oil prices, Iran's economy boomed while the economies of the Western nations were trapped in stagflation (economic stagnation and inflation) after the 1973–74 oil shocks, which seemed to prove the greatness of Mohammad Reza both to himself and to the rest of the world. In 1975, both the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing made pleading phone calls to Mohammad Reza asking him for loans, which ultimately led the Shah to give a US$1 billion loan to the United Kingdom and another US$1 billion to France. In a televised speech in January 1975 explaining why he was lending Britain a sum equal to US$1 billion, Mohammad Reza declared in his usual grandiose style: "I have known the most dark hours when our country was obliged to pass under the tutelage of foreign powers, amongst them England. Now I find that England has not only become our friend, our equal, but also the nation to which, should we be able, we will render assistance with pleasure," going on to say that since he "belonged to this [European] world," he did not want Europe to collapse economically. As Britain had often dominated Iran in the past, the change in roles was greatly gratifying to Mohammad Reza.

Courtiers at the Imperial court were devoted to stroking the Shah's ego, competing to be the most sycophantic, with Mohammad Reza being regularly assured he was a greater leader than his much admired General de Gaulle, that democracy was doomed, and that based on Rockefeller's speech, that the American people wanted Mohammad Reza to be their leader, as well as doing such a great job as Shah of Iran. According to historian Abbas Milani, all of this praise boosted Mohammad Reza's ego, and he went from being a merely narcissistic man to a megalomaniac, believing himself a man chosen by Allah Himself to transform Iran and create the "Great Civilisation." When one of the Shah's courtiers suggested launching a campaign to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote on the margin: "If they beg us, we might accept. They give the Nobel to kaka siah ["any black face"] these days. In an interview with Der Spiegel published on 3 February 1974, Mohammad Reza declared: "I would like you to know that in our case, our actions are not just to take vengeance on the West. As I said, we are going to be a member of your club". In 1976, Mohammad Reza told the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal in an interview: "I want the standard of living in Iran in ten years' time to be exactly on a level with that in Europe today. In twenty years' time we shall be ahead of the United States".

Reflecting his need to have Iran seen as "part of the world" (by which Mohammad Reza meant the western world), all through the 1970s he sponsored conferences in Iran at his expense, with for example in one week in September 1975 the International Literacy Symposium meeting in Persepolis, the International Congress of Philosophy meeting in Mashhad and the International Congress of Mithraic Studies meeting in Tehran. He also sought to hold the 1984 Summer Olympics in Tehran. For most ordinary Iranians, struggling with inflation, poverty, air pollution (Iranian cities in the 1970s were amongst the most polluted in the world), having to pay extortion payments to the police who demanded money from even those performing legal jobs such as selling fruits on the street, and daily traffic jams, the Shah's sponsorship of international conferences were just a waste of money and time. Furthermore, conferences on pre-Islamic practices such as the cult of Mithra fuelled religious anxieties. Though Mohammad Reza envisioned the "Great Civilisation" of a modernised Iran whose standard of living would be higher than those of the United States and at the forefront of modern technology, he did not envision any political change, making it clear that Iran would remain an autocracy.

Achievements

In his "White Revolution" starting in the 1960s, Mohammad Reza made major changes to modernise Iran. He curbed the power of certain ancient elite factions by expropriating large and medium-sized estates for the benefit of more than four million small farmers. He took a number of other major measures, including extending suffrage to women and the participation of workers in factories through shares and other measures. In the 1970s, the governmental programme of free-of-charge nourishment for children at school known as "Taghziye Rāyegan" (Persian: تغذیه رایگان lit. free nourishment) was implemented. Under the Shah's reign, the national Iranian income showed an unprecedented rise for an extended period.

Improvement of the educational system was made through the creation of new elementary schools. In addition, literacy courses were set up in remote villages by the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, this initiative being called "Sepāh-e Dānesh" (Persian: سپاه دانش) meaning "Army of Knowledge". The Armed Forces were also engaged in infrastructural and other educational projects throughout the country "Sepāh-e Tarvij va Ābādāni" (Persian: سپاه ترویج و آبادانی lit. army for promotion and development) as well as in health education and promotion "Sepāh-e Behdāsht" (Persian: سپاه بهداشت lit. "army for hygiene"). The Shah instituted exams for Islamic theologians to become established clerics. Many Iranian university students were sent to and supported in foreign, especially Western, countries and the Indian subcontinent.

Between 1967 and 1977, the number of universities increased in number from 7 to 22, the number of institutions of advanced learning rose from 47 to 200, and the number of students in higher education soared from 36,742 to 100,000. Iran's literacy programs were among the most innovative and effective anywhere in the world, so that by 1977 the number of Iranians able to read and write had climbed from just 27 percent to more than 80 percent.

In the field of diplomacy, Iran realised and maintained friendly relations with Western and East European countries as well as the state of Israel and China and became, especially through its close friendship with the United States, more and more a hegemonial power in the Persian Gulf region and the Middle East. The suppression of the communist guerrilla movement in the region of Dhofar in Oman with the help of the Iranian army after a formal request by Sultan Qaboos was widely regarded in this context.

As to infrastructural and technological progress, the Shah continued and developed further the policies introduced by his father. His programmes included projects in technologies such as steel, telecommunications, petrochemical facilities, power plants, dams and the automobile industry. The Aryamehr University of Technology was established as a major new academic institution.

International cultural cooperation was encouraged and organised, such as the 2,500 year celebration of the Persian Empire and Shiraz Arts Festival. As part of his various financial support programmes in the fields of culture and arts, the Shah, along with King Hussein of Jordan made a donation to the Chinese Muslim Association for the construction of the Taipei Grand Mosque.

The Shah also led a massive military build-up and began the construction of many nuclear facilities. By 1977, Iran was considered the fifth strongest nation in the world according to a report by Georgetown University.

Despite criticism from western critics, the Shah was seen as a master statesman through his domestic reforms, popular base in Iran, successful opposition to radical Arab neighbors, and ambitions for regional stability and prosperity, particularly in the two superpowers and other European powers. The fall of the Pahlavi order in 1979 removed the Shah's stabilizing efforts, leading to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the destabilization of Pakistani politics, the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a major oil power, the rise of Saddam Hussein and Ba'athists in regional conflicts, and the subsequent Wahhabi-Salafi militancy.

Under the Shah's leadership, Iran experienced an impressive transformation of the economy. From 1925 to 1976 Iran's economy had grown 700 times, per capita 200 times, and domestic capital formation 3,400 times most of which occurred during the reign of the second Pahlavi Monarch, Mohammadreza Pahlavi. Iran enjoyed an average annual industrial growth rate of over 20% from 1963 to 1976. From 1965 to 1976 Iranian per capita income rose 8 times from $195 to $1,600. By 1978 per capita income surpassed $2,400. Much of the growth was not due to oil income. Among the OPEC oil-producing nations experts agreed only Iran's growth was due to an intelligent development plan while the growth seen in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Libya was solely based upon oil revenues. Iran's growth was expected to continue, with half of the Iranian families expected to own cars by 1985, per capita income reaching $4500, Iran would produce twenty million tons of steel annually, one million tons of aluminum, one million cars, three million television sets, one million tons of paper, and a large number of engineers.

During the Shah's rule, Iran's average income level was nearing that of Western European nations, and Iranians experienced an unprecedented amount of prosperity and opportunity with an emerging middle class. Iran's growing prosperity coupled with goals of independence allowed for increasing autonomy from Western nations like the US. From 1963 to 1977 Iran experienced an average annual growth rate of 10.5% making it one of the world's fastest-growing economies and Iran experienced its largest GDP growth ever. The economic growth was not simply based on oil, in fact, nonoil revenues grew at a faster rate of 11.5% annually.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Iran's society and the economy experienced a great transformation as a result of rapid industrialization. The state invested in infrastructure to develop industry and provided financial capital resulting in profitable conditions for private Iranian companies. As a result, Iran's development across the industrialization scale, technological advancement, economic growth, urbanization, and per capita income increase was extraordinary compared to other developing nations. World Bank data during this period reveals Iran had an annual real growth rate of 9.6% for middle-income categories which was the highest of any other country in the developing world. Investment, savings, consumption, employment, and per capita income also demonstrated exceptional growth. Gross domestic investment grew at an average yearly rate of 16% and reached 33% of the GDP by 1977-1978. Iranian consumption grew on average by 18% a year. Iran's middle class was far larger than any other developing country. Iran's economic growth was compared to that of rapidly industrializing Asian countries such as South Korea. Since the revolution, Iran's economic growth and rapid industrialization have plummeted.

During the early 1970s, with the success of the Shah's White Revolution, Iran had become a country of economic opportunity and its international status was rising. From 1959 and 1970 the Gross national product (GNP) approximately tripled rising from $3.8 to $10.6 billion and by the late 1960s Iran become one of the middle east's most flourishing spots for investment among foreign investors due to financial stability and rise in purchasing power. Many foreign powers struggled to compete for relations with Iran due to the rising potential of its growing marketplace. Iran Air also became one of the fastest growing airlines in the world and many Iranian construction companies some funded by the state had been involved in many construction projects such as Pre-Fab Inc. which created the precast concrete benches for the Āryāmehr Stadium.

Revolution

Spark

Main article: Iranian Revolution

See also: Jimmy Carter's engagement with Ruhollah Khomeini

The overthrow of the Shah came as a surprise to almost all observers. The first militant anti-Shah demonstrations of a few hundred started in October 1977, after the death of Khomeini's son Mostafa. On 7 January 1978, an article Iran and Red and Black Colonization was published in the newspaper Ettela'at attacking Ruhollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Iraq at the time; it referred to him as a homosexual, a British spy and claimed he was an Indian, not an Iranian. Khomeini's supporters had brought in audio tapes of his sermons, and Mohammad Reza was angry with one sermon, alleging corruption on his part, and decided to hit back with the article, despite the feeling at the court, SAVAK and Ettela'at editors that the article was an unnecessary provocation that was going to cause trouble. The next day, protests against the article began in the holy city of Qom, a traditional centre of opposition to the House of Pahlavi.

Cancer patient

Mohammad Reza was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1974. As it worsened, from the spring of 1978, he stopped appearing in public, with the official explanation being that he was suffering from a "persistent cold." In May 1978, the Shah suddenly cancelled a long planned trip to Hungary and Bulgaria. He spent the entire summer of 1978 at his Caspian Sea resort, where two of France's most prominent doctors, Jean Bernard and Georges Flandrin, treated his cancer. To try to stop his cancer, Bernard and Flandrin had Mohammad Reza take prednisone, a drug that can cause depression and impair thinking.

As nationwide protests and strikes swept Iran, the court found it impossible to get decisions from Mohammad Reza, as he became utterly passive and indecisive, content to spend hours listlessly staring into space as he rested by the Caspian Sea while the revolution raged. The seclusion of the Shah, who normally loved the limelight, sparked all sorts of rumors about the state of his health and damaged the imperial mystique, as the man who had been presented as a god-like ruler was revealed to be fallible. A July 1978 attempt to deny the rumors of Mohammad Reza's declining health (by publishing a crudely doctored photograph in the newspapers of the Emperor and Empress walking on the beach) instead further damaged the imperial mystique, as most people realised that what appeared to be two beach clogs on either side of the Shah were merely substitutes inserted for his airbrushed aides, who were holding him up as he now had difficulty walking by himself.

In June 1978, Mohammad Reza's French doctors first revealed to the French government how serious his cancer was, and in September the French government informed the American government that the Shah was dying of cancer; until then, U.S. officials had no idea that Mohammad Reza had even been diagnosed with cancer four years earlier. The Shah had created a very centralised system in which he was the key decision-maker on all issues, and as historian Abbas Milani noted, he was mentally crippled in the summer of 1978 owing to his tendency to be indecisive when faced with a crisis which, combined with his cancer and the effects of the anti-cancer drugs, made his mood "increasingly volatile and unpredictable. One day, he was full of verve and optimism and the next day or hour he fell into a catatonic stupor," bringing the entire government to a halt. Milani wrote that the Shah was in 1978 "beset with depression, indecision and paralysis, and his indecision led to the immobilisation of the entire system." Empress Farah grew so frustrated with her husband that she suggested numerous times that he leave Iran for medical treatment and appoint her regent, saying she would handle the crisis and save the House of Pahlavi. The very masculine Mohammad Reza vetoed this idea, saying he did not want Farah to be "Joan of Arc," and it would be too humiliating for him as a man to flee Iran and leave a woman in charge.

Black Friday

Main article: Black Friday (1978)

The Shah-centred command structure of the Iranian military, and the lack of training to confront civil unrest, was marked by disaster and bloodshed. There were several instances where army units had opened fire, the most significant being the events on 8 September 1978. The day, which later became known as "Black Friday", thousands of people had gathered in Tehran's Jaleh Square for a religious demonstration. With the population generally refusing to recognise martial law, the soldiers opened fire, killing and seriously injuring a large number of people. Black Friday played a crucial role in further radicalising the protest movement. The massacre so reduced the chance for reconciliation that is became known as "the point of no return" for the revolution.

The regime falls apart

Hoping to calm the situation, on 2 October 1978, the Shah granted a general amnesty to dissidents living abroad, including Ayatollah Khomeini. But by then it was too late. October 1978 was characterized by extreme unrest and open opposition to the monarchy; strikes paralyzed the country, and in early December a "total of 6 to 9 million"—more than 10% of the country—marched against the Shah throughout Iran. In October 1978, after flying over a huge demonstration in Tehran in his helicopter, Mohammad Reza accused the British ambassador Sir Anthony Parsons and the American ambassador William H. Sullivan of organising the demonstrations, screaming that he was being "betrayed" by the United Kingdom and the United States. The fact that the BBC's journalists tended to be very sympathetic towards the revolution was viewed by most Iranians, including Mohammad Reza, as a sign that Britain was supporting the revolution. This impression turned out to be crucial, as the Iranian people had a very exaggerated idea about Britain's capacity to "direct events" in Iran. In a subsequent internal inquiry, the BBC found many of its more left-wing journalists disliked Mohammad Reza as a "reactionary" force, and sympathised with a revolution seen as "progressive". Mohammad Reza spent much of his time working out various conspiracy theories about who was behind the revolution, with his favourite candidates being some combination of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Milani wrote that Mohamad Reza's view of the revolution as a gigantic conspiracy organised by foreign powers suggested that there was nothing wrong with Iran, and the millions of people demonstrating against him were just dupes being used by foreigners, a viewpoint that did not encourage concessions and reforms until it was too late. For much of 1978, Mohammad Reza saw his enemies as "Marxist" revolutionaries rather than Islamists. The Shah had exaggerated ideas about the power of the KGB, which he thought of as omnipotent, and often expressed the view that all of the demonstrations against him had been organised in Moscow, saying only the KGB had the power to bring out thousands of ordinary people to demonstrate. In October 1978, the oil workers went on strike, shutting down the oil industry and with it, Mohammad Reza's principal source of revenue. The Iranian military had no plans in place to deal with such an event, and the strike pushed the regime to the economic brink.

The revolution had attracted support from a broad coalition ranging from secular, left-wing nationalists to Islamists on the right, and Khomeini, who was temporarily based in Paris after being expelled from Iraq, chose to present himself as a moderate able to bring together all the different factions leading the revolution. On 3 November, a SAVAK plan to arrest about 1,500 people considered to be leaders of the revolution was submitted to Mohammad Reza, who at first tentatively agreed, but then changed his mind, disregarding not only the plan, but also dismissing its author, Parviz Sabeti. On 5 November 1978, Mohammad Reza went on Iranian television to say "I have heard the voice of your revolution" and promise major reforms. In a major concession to the opposition, on 7 November 1978, Mohammad Reza freed all political prisoners while ordering the arrest of the former prime minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and several senior officials of his regime, a move that both emboldened his opponents and demoralised his supporters. On 21 November 1978, the Treasury Secretary of the United States Michael Blumenthal visited Tehran to meet Mohammad Reza and reported back to President Jimmy Carter, "This man is a ghost", as by now the ravages of his cancer could not longer be concealed. In late December 1978, the Shah learned that many of his generals were making overtures to the revolutionary leaders and the loyalty of the military could not longer be counted upon. In a sign of desperation, the following month Mohammad Reza reached out to the National Front, asking if one of their leaders would be willing to become prime minister.

The Shah was especially interested in having the National Front's Gholam Hossein Sadighi as prime minister. Sadighi had served as interior minister under Mosaddegh, had been imprisoned after the 1953 coup, and pardoned by Mohammad Reza on the grounds that he was a "patriot". Sadighi remained active in the National Front and had often been harassed by SAVAK, but was willing to serve as prime minister under Mohammad Reza in order to "save" Iran, saying he feared what might come after if the Shah was overthrown. Despite the opposition of the other National Front leaders, Sadighi visited the Niavaran palace several times in December 1978 to discuss the terms under which he might become prime minister, with the main sticking point being that he wanted the Shah not to leave Iran, saying he needed to remain in order to ensure the loyalty of the military. On 7 December 1978, it was announced that President Carter of the U.S., President Giscard d'Estaing of France, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany and Prime Minister James Callaghan of the United Kingdom would meet in Guadeloupe on 5 January 1979 to discuss the crisis in Iran. For Mohammad Reza this announcement was the final blow, and he was convinced that the Western leaders were holding the meeting to discuss how best to abandon him.

End of monarchy

On 16 January 1979, Mohammad Reza made a contract with Farboud and left Iran at the behest of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar (a longtime opposition leader himself), who sought to calm the situation. As Mohammad Reza boarded the plane to take him out of Iran, many of the Imperial Guardsmen wept while Bakhtiar did little to hide his disdain and dislike for the Shah. Spontaneous attacks by members of the public on statues of the Pahlavis followed, and "within hours, almost every sign of the Pahlavi dynasty" was destroyed. Bakhtiar dissolved SAVAK, freed all political prisoners, and allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to return to Iran after years in exile. He asked Khomeini to create a Vatican-like state in Qom, promised free elections, and called upon the opposition to help preserve the constitution, proposing a "national unity" government including Khomeini's followers. Khomeini rejected Bakhtiar's demands and appointed his own interim government, with Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister, stating that "I will appoint a state. I will act against this government. With the nation's support, I will appoint a state." In February, pro-Khomeini revolutionary guerrilla and rebel soldiers gained the upper hand in street fighting, and the military announced its neutrality. On the evening of 11 February, the dissolution of the monarchy was complete.

Criticism of reign and causes of his overthrow

Main article: Background and causes of the Iranian Revolution

See also: Jimmy Carter's engagement with Ruhollah Khomeini

The US State Department drew criticism for doing little to communicate with Tehran or discourage protest and opposition to the Shah. The intelligence community within the US has also been subject due to criticism particularly for reporting to President Jimmy Carter “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.” President Jimmy Carter was also blamed for his lack of support for the Shah while failing to deter opposition. Within Iran, the revolution is widely believed to have been a British plot to overthrow the Shah. This theory would c