The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran Paperback – May 15, 2018

Well written, a real page Turner, though a very sad story. Highly recommend.

A well written, thoroughly researched biography of the Shah of Iran, focusing on his character, the increasingly volatile political/religious landscape, and the flow of events which led to his fall from power. To someone who's not an expert in Modern Iranian History, this book is very educational and seems to be a rather evenhanded, fair assessment of both the personal strengths and weaknesses within the Shah himself, his family members, and his many subordinates. It looks like the author, a New Zealander, made a sincere effort to impartially describe the good done by the Shah while in power, what he failed to do, and the deplorable corruption to which he too often turned a blind eye during his long reign.For English speakers, The Fall of Heaven is very readable. It's a fascinating unveiling of facts long classified and obfuscated by countless players involved on all sides. For someone who bewilderedly observed from afar the relentless unravelling of the Pahlavi dynasty and its rapid replacement by the maniacally fanatic regime of the Ayatollahs, reading this book is one of the great "aha, so that's what was going on" moments in life. The Fall of Heaven sheds much light on a long-obscure, seemingly unfathomable conflict that had an extremely unexpected outcome which still painfully beleaguers the world today.

The Iranian Revolution is a fascinating subject. I’ve wanted to learn more about the events of 1978-79 for a long time, but I couldn’t find any book that was generally recognized as the objective and definitive account. I decided to pick up “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran” by Andrew Scott Cooper (2018) for a couple of reasons. First, the author is a respected scholar on US-Iranian relations. Second, he was able to secure extensive firsthand interviews with most of the leading players on the Shah’s side, including the Shah’s widow and third wife, Queen Farah, the last US ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, and President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others. Finally, the book was warmly recommended by one of my favorite thinkers, Malcolm Gladwell, and I’ve come to trust his judgment on reading material.I really enjoyed this book; it was fun to read and I learned a lot; but, frankly speaking, it made the Iranian Revolution completely incomprehensible. What I mean by that is after reading “The Fall of Heaven” the reader is left wondering how in the hell such a large swath of the Iranian population – the vast majority of whom had never had it so good, according to Cooper – would ever sign up to actively support the theocratic vision of Ayatollah Khomeini. It’s truly baffling.The popular image of the Shah of Iran is that of a ruthless dictator on par with the likes of Indonesia’s Suharto and Argentina’s Pinochet. Indeed, in 1976 Amnesty International published a report that claimed the Shah ran one of the world’s most repressive regimes and implied conditions inside Iran were worse than in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda. Talk about a PR disaster! Cooper’s core argument in “The Fall of Heaven” is that the Shah was, in fact, a progressive and relatively benign autocrat who shrank from the gratuitous use of violence against his own people.Cooper argues that dissident groups and their allies wildly exaggerated the repression meted out by the Savak, the Shah’s secret police. For instance, it was widely reported that the Shah’s regime imprisoned upwards of 100,000 political opponents and routinely executed thousands. Upon closer inspection, however, Cooper says that the number of total political executions during the Shah’s reign was likely only 183. By contrast, the Islamic Republic is said to have executed over 3,000 dissident in one week in July 1988 alone.The Shah had a grand and noble vision for his country, Cooper says. He wanted to make Iran the Germany or Japan of the Middle East, a wealthy industrial powerhouse that supported human rights and eventually allowed free and open elections. From an economic perspective, the Shah’s efforts were clearly succeeding by the early 1970s. The results of his aggressive modernization plans were staggering. Iran’s literacy efforts, which the author calls “the most innovative and effective anywhere in the world,” grew literary from 17% to 50% by 1977. Between 1967 and 1977 the number of Iranian universities grew from 7 to 22; the number of higher education students exploded from 37,000 to 160,000. Iranian women enjoyed rights unheard anywhere else in the region – access to abortion, the right to vote, equal pay legislation, part-time work at full-pay for mothers with children under three. In little over a decade (from 1963 to 1977), Iran’s GNP grew by fourteen-fold. During the oil shocks of 1973 – which the Shah did much to orchestrate – Iran’s GNP was growing at a blistering 50% per year! Three quarters of the oil wealth was poured straight back into in the economy in the form of large infrastructure projects. Highways, dams, and hospitals popped up all over the country like mushrooms. The Shah’s military was the fifth strongest in the world, with over 400,000 troops and equipped with the most modern weapons money could buy. (The 52,000 Americans living in Iran in 1977 working in support of this dream was the largest American expat community in the world.) And yet the Shah fell – and disastrously.How did that happen? Cooper never really explains, and that’s the glaring flaw in this otherwise delightfully readable account of the Shah’s tumultuous 37-year-reign. There are several contributing factors that the author touches upon but never fully explores. First, Iran’s fabulous oil wealth was poorly distributed. Cooper suggests that the top 10% in Iran controlled 40% of the nation’s wealth, which sounds like a lot until one considers that the equivalent number in the United States today is nearly 70%. Second, corruption was widespread and deep. Cooper only provides a few anecdotes, but they are shocking. In one case, Queen Farah wanted to buy a fabulous diamond necklace from a jeweler in Tehran for $1 million ($5 million in today’s dollars), but was told that it had already been purchased. When she investigated, she learned that the buyer was Admiral Atai, commander of the Imperial Navy, who ostensibly lived on a modest government salary. In another example, Cooper says that at the time of his death in a hang gliding accident in 1975, the chief of the Iranian Air Force, General Khatami, had piled up a fortune in excess of $100 million. Third, the Shah often seemed out of touch with his people. In his never ending quest to dazzle the international illuminati, the Shah and the Queen spent an estimated $100 million ($750 million today) on a “banquet of the century” at the ancient Persian capital city of Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Peacock Throne in 1971. Critics were horrified. One western diplomat quipped, “The conspicuous consumption of this thing is simply shocking in a country such as this.”But the Shah’s most significant problem may have been the Shia clergy, known as the ulama. Shia Islam is almost as hierarchal as the Catholic Church. At the bottom of the pyramid are the mullahs, the equivalent of the parish priest, which in the 1970s numbered 180,000 working in 80,000 mosques, holy shrines, and schools. Above them are the scholars of religious laws, known as mutjahids. The most outstanding of the mutjahids may one day graduate to become an ayatollah, roughly a bishop of the church. A handful of ayatollahs become grand ayatollahs, somewhat equivalent to cardinals. Finally, the most influential grand ayatollahs, with perhaps millions of followers who attempt to emulate their lives and teachings, become marjas, the pinnacle of Shia Islam.In the 1970s, there were less than five marjas in the world. “Marjas were immune from prosecutions,” Cooper writes, “and in every respect considered above the law of the land.” The Shah lived in constant fear of their power, Cooper says. In the 1970s, the paramount marja in the world was Grand Ayatollah Abol Qasem Khoi in Najaf, Iraq. The most powerful and respected marja inside Iran was Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariamadari in the holy city of Qom. Shariamadari was considered a moderate and viewed clerical involvement in politics as heresy and demagoguery. Cooper emphasizes that Grand Ayatollah Rumollah Khomeini was, at best, a second tier player in Shia leadership circles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Shariamadari eventually advocated for the assassination of the exiled Khomeini and even offered to issue a fatwa to support the decision. The trouble was the Shah couldn’t make up his mind about what to do about Khomeini. His indecision is a theme that runs throughout “The Fall of Heaven” and Cooper says it eventually ruined him.The Peacock Throne may have existed for 2,500 years, but the Pahlavi dynasty was of a much more recent vintage. An illiterate army officer named Reza Shah captured the throne from the ruling Qajr dynasty in 1925. He abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in September 1941. The new Shah was just 22-years-old and unimpressive. According to Cooper, the Shah’s siblings described him as “insecure and petulant, browbeaten by his mother, humorless and thin-skinned.” For the next couple of decades the young monarch would rule diffidently and displayed no instinct for the jugular. In 1953, when the CIA-orchestrated coup against Mossadeq hung in the balance, the Shah made it clear that he preferred to leave the country than risk the spilling of innocent blood. In the wake of a clerically inspired revolt in 1963, known as Fifteen Khordad, the Shah finally seized the reins of executive power and established personal authoritarian rule. Law forbade all public criticism of the Shah. He vowed to never again allow a strong personality to emerge as a threat from within the ranks or the clergy, the military or the political class.Cooper says the Shah dreamed of building a strong, centralized state on the French model. In the 1960s, he launched the White Revolution, a progressive policy agenda that sought to transform Iran from a semi-feudal society to a modern industrial state in a single generation. Its objectives were liberal and far reaching: land reform, women’s rights, forest nationalization, profit sharing in nationalized industries, literacy campaigns, and more. It is difficult for a twenty-first century American to read about all this and understand why and how the Shah became so universally reviled by 1978.Ayatollah Khomeini stridently opposed the Shah’s modernist future. The cleric’s alternative political philosophy was simple and retrograde. Any form of government that was not Islamic in character was illegitimate and must be annihilated, he argued. The details of what would follow were left hazy. According to Cooper, Khomeini slowly captured broad support across the population, including even young leftists who looked to him as an “Iranian Che Guevara,” primarily because he stood up bravely against the Shah, not because of any specific political ideas he espoused. Khomeini and a significant portion of the ulama rejected modernization, which Cooper says they associated with corruption, income inequality, and political repression. The Shah was perplexed by this unholy alliance of left-wing socialists conniving with right-wing Shia clergy, an unnatural partnership the Shah called “the Red and the Black.” The alliance quickly broke apart after Khomeini’s victory. Cooper writes that, “Iran’s best-educated minds [helped] their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name.” In December 1977, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a public fatwa declaring the Shah an illegitimate ruler and condemned his rule as illegal.The Shah was incredulous of Khomeini’s evident widespread popularity. As the situation inside Iran came to a boil, many shared his disbelief. In 1973, the Washington Post observed, “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.”Khomeini’s supporters didn’t just revile Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the man known as the Shah, they reviled everything he stood for and fought for. According to Cooper, in their eyes the national parliament, the Majles, was “the ultimate symbol of Western liberal decadence.” When street protests turned violent in 1978, they acted against not only symbols of the imperial regime and burned pictures of the Royal Family, but they also targeted banks, upscale hotels and restaurants, cinemas, even the offices of the local Boy Scouts, anything that smacked of the West.On 19 August 1978 the Rex Cinema in Abadan was deliberately set on fire and the doors barred. Nearly five hundred people were killed. At the time, it was the deadliest act of terrorism in history. “The Rex Cinema was not the isolated act of a bunch of misfits,” Cooper says, “but the centerpiece of a concerted terror campaign to destabilize and panic Iranian society and shake the foundations of the Pahlavi state.” The response from Niavaran, the Shah’s palace in northern Tehran, was, as usual, weak and indecisive. Cooper claims that the once feared Savak had been “emasculated” by the Shah’s efforts to placate Western human rights critics and was now more or less impotent. The Shah was determined to avoid bloodshed at all costs. He announced a blizzard of economic and social concessions in a last ditch effort to win back popular support: freezing electricity and water prices, lifting all restrictions on hajj pilgrimages, extending the national health insurance plan. Nothing worked. The Shah fled Iran on 16 January 1979. Khomeini returned in triumph two weeks later. The Islamic Republic would go on to execute 12,000 Iranians over the next ten years.How did this happen? Cooper casts a lot of blame on William Sullivan, the arrogant and misguided American ambassador in Tehran. “Sullivan was convinced that he alone understood the complexities of the crisis in Iran,” Cooper writes, and went about crafting a freelance US foreign policy that all but showed the Shah the door. By 1978, Sullivan was confidently telling the White House that the Shah was finished. According to Cooper, he wasn’t; the monarch still retained the support of several large and important constituencies within Iran, including farmers, workers, moderate ulama, and most of the middle and upper classes. Meanwhile, Sullivan was completely misrepresenting Ayatollah Khomeini as the united leader of the Shia faith and “a pacifist in the spirit of Gandhi,” when in fact he was the most junior marja in the country, deeply resented by his clerical peers, and wildly dangerous. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein saw things more clearly. In November 1978, the Iraqi strongman offered to assassinate Khomeini while he was still in Najaf saying, “It is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.” Once again, the Shah demurred.Did the United States do enough to support the Shah? Cooper clearly thinks not. The Shah was America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. He was Israel’s main supplier of oil, Egyptian President Sadat’s closest friend, and the most vocal regional supporter of the Egypt-Israel peace talks. Yet the Carter administration barely lifted a finger to help him. In the end, senior national security decision makers in Washington determined the Shah was beyond saving. National security advisor Brzezinski remarked, “We are giving up on the Shah only after being forced reluctantly to conclude that he is incapable of decisive action.”According to Cooper, the person who probably should have been in charge was Queen Farah. The author fawns over the former Queen. She was “not only one of the greatest women of Iranian history,” he says, but also “the most accomplished female sovereign of the twentieth century.” Cooper claims that the ulama was disturbed by the Queen’s prominent role in national affairs, particularly her outspoken beliefs on family issues, which they considered their exclusive domain. “Not since Catherine the Great of Russia had the world known a female sovereign entrusted with as much influence and as many resources.”The Shah had always said that he was opposed to violence against his own people. He was true to his word. During his short exile before he died of cancer in 1980, reporter David Frost asked him if he had wished he had stayed and died fighting in the streets of Tehran. The Shah said no, “If I was not a king, surely I would have done that, but a crown, a throne could not be based on the not-so-very-solid foundation of blood.” Given how things turned out under the Islamic Republic, you can’t help but wish he had tried harder to keep his throne.

Thank you Andrew Scott Cooper for writing this book. Like yourself as a young person I was riveted by the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that toppled the Shah. From a young age the Shah has been one of my main interests and is probably why I majored in history in college and became a history teacher. It was gut wrenching to read the story of the Shah's downfall. No one should have to endure the kind of abuse the Shah and his family went through during the revolution. I don't care what anyone says the Shah was a great man, a patriot who loved his country, and his people. Although a very sad story the book was awesome and it will be a welcome edition to my many books about the Shah. Well Done Mr.Cooper.

Highly recommended:1. Gives very comprehensive background on events of the decades leading to the events of the 70's, so the reader has the necessary context.2. Goes into good detail on all relevant parties: the Shah, Khomeini, key government figures, religious figures, US and other foreign officials.3. Writing style is gripping, especially in the second half of the book, when things spiral out of control. Just as you think things can't possibly get any worse, the next chapter shows you that oh yes they can.4. Gives a good sense of the cultural and political mentalities governing the various players.5. Gives good explanation of the various relevant streams of society: royalists, middle class, radical religious, etc. etc. etc.6. Goes into great detail about the key events, so that the reader has a very clear understanding of just what was going on.This book was as gripping as any first-rate fiction thriller. The first half astounded me with revelations about the Shah, and how he was not close to the evil authoritarian many believe him to be -- if he were, he would have easily retained power. The second half, which dealt with the events of 1975 to 1979, was a spellbinding journey into the heartbreaking destruction of a noble effort on the part of the Shah to bring a backwards country into the cutting edge of political, social, technological and economic progress.