There was a thumping sound and I realized that he had struck the side of his chair. “He is evil! We Persians hate him.” Then silence. I could hear only his heavy breathing, as though the exertion had exhausted him.
“Doc is very close to the mullahs,” Yamin said to me, his voice low and calm. “There is a huge undercurrent among the religious factions here and it pervades most of our country, except for a handful of people in the commercial classes who benefit from the shah’s capitalism.”
“I don’t doubt you,” I said. “But I must say that during four visits here, I’ve seen nothing of it. Everyone I talk with seems to love the shah, to appreciate the economic upsurge.”
“You don’t speak Farsi,” Yamin observed. “You hear only what is told to you by those men who benefit the most. The ones who have been educated in the States or in England end up working for the shah. Doc here is an exception—now.”
He paused, seeming to ponder his next words. “It’s the same with your press. They only talk with the few who are his kin, his circle. Of course, for the most part, your press is also controlled by oil. So they hear what they want to hear and write what their advertisers want to read.”
“Why are we telling you all this, Mr. Perkins?” Doc’s voice was even more hoarse than before, as if the effort of speaking and the emotions were draining what little energy the man had mustered for this meeting. “Because we’d like to convince you to get out and to persuade your company to stay away from our country. We want to warn you that although you may think you’ll make a great deal of money here, it’s an illusion. This government will not last.” Again, I heard the sound of his hand thudding against the chair. “And when it goes, the one that replaces it will have no sympathy for you and your kind.”
“You’re saying we won’t be paid?”
Doc broke down in a fit of coughing. Yamin went to him and rubbed his back. When the coughing ended, he spoke to Doc in Farsi and then came back to his seat.
“We must end this conversation,” Yamin said to me. “In answer to your question: yes, you will not be paid. You’ll do all that work, and when it comes time to collect your fees, the shah will be gone.”
During the drive back, I asked Yamin why he and Doc wanted to spare MAIN the financial disaster he had predicted.
“We’d be happy to see your company go bankrupt. However, we’d rather see you leave Iran. Just one company like yours, walking away, could start a trend. That’s what we’re hoping. You see, we don’t want a bloodbath here, but the shah must go, and we’ll try anything that will make that easier. So we pray to Allah that you’ll convince your Mr. Zambotti to get out while there is still time.”
“Why me?”
“I knew during our dinner together, when we spoke of the Flowering Desert project, that you were open to the truth. I knew that our information about you was correct—you are a man between two worlds, a man in the middle.”
It made me wonder just how much he did know about me.
CHAPTER 20. The Fall of a King
One evening in 1978, while I was sitting alone at the luxurious bar off the lobby of the Hotel InterContinental in Tehran, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a heavyset Iranian in a business suit.
“John Perkins! You don’t remember me?”
The former soccer player had gained a lot of weight, but the voice was unmistakable. It was my old Middlebury friend Farhad, whom I had not seen in more than a decade. We embraced and sat down together. It quickly became obvious that he knew all about me and about my work. It was equally obvious that he did not intend to share much about his own work.
“Let’s get right to the point,” he said as we ordered our second beers. “I’m flying to Rome tomorrow. My parents live there. I have a ticket for you on my flight. Things are falling apart here. You’ve got to get out.” He handed me an airline ticket. I did not doubt him for a moment.
In Rome, we dined with Farhad’s parents. His father, the retired Iranian general who once stepped in front of a would-be assassin’s bullet to save the shah’s life, expressed disillusionment with his former boss. He said that during the past few years the shah had showed his true colors, his arrogance and greed. The general blamed U.S. policy—particularly its backing of Israel, of corrupt leaders, and of despotic governments—for the hatred sweeping the Middle East, and he predicted that the shah would be gone within months.
“You know,” he said, “you sowed the seeds of this rebellion in the early fifties, when you overthrew Mossadegh. You thought it very clever back then—as did I. But now it returns to haunt you— us.”1
I was astounded by his pronouncements. I had heard something similar from Yamin and Doc, but coming from this man it took on new significance. By this time, everyone knew of the existence of a fundamentalist Islamic underground, but we had convinced ourselves that the shah was immensely popular among the majority of his people and was therefore politically invincible. The general, however, was adamant.
“Mark my words,” he said solemnly, “the shah’s fall will be only the beginning. It’s a preview of where the Muslim world is headed. Our rage has smoldered beneath the sands too long. Soon it will erupt.”
Over dinner, I heard a great deal about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Farhad and his father made it clear that they did not support his fanatical Shiism, but they were obviously impressed by the inroads he had made against the shah. They told me that this cleric, whose given name translates to “inspired of God,” was born into a family of dedicated Shiite scholars in a village near Tehran, in 1902.
Khomeini had made it a point not to become involved in the Mossadegh-shah struggles of the early 1950s, but he actively opposed the shah in the 1960s, criticizing the ruler so adamantly that he was banished to Turkey, then to the Shiite holy city of An Najaf in Iraq, where he became the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He sent out letters, articles, and tape-recorded messages urging Iranians to rise up, overthrow the shah, and create a clerical state.
Two days after that dinner with Farhad and his parents, news came out of Iran of bombings and riots. Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs had begun the offensive that would soon give them control. After that, things happened fast. The rage Farhad’s father had described exploded in a violent Islamic uprising. The shah fled his country for Egypt in January 1979, and then, diagnosed with cancer, headed for a New York Hospital.
Followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded his return. In November 1979, a militant Islamic mob seized the United States Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American hostages for the next 444 days.2 President Carter attempted to negotiate the release of the hostages. When this failed, he authorized a military rescue mission, launched in April 1980. It was a disaster, and it turned out to be the hammer that would drive the final nail into Carter’s presidential coffin.
Tremendous pressure, exerted by U.S. commercial and political groups, forced the cancer-ridden shah to leave the United States. From the day he fled Tehran he had a difficult time finding sanctuary; all his former friends shunned him. However, General Torrijos exhibited his customary compassion and offered the shah asylum in Panama, despite a personal dislike of the shah’s politics. The shah arrived and received sanctuary at the very same resort where the new Panama Canal Treaty had so recently been negotiated.
The mullahs demanded the shah’s return in exchange for the hostages held in the U.S. Embassy. Those in Washington who had opposed the Canal Treaty accused Torrijos of corruption and collusion with the shah, and of endangering the lives of U.S. citizens. They too demanded that the shah be turned over to Ayatollah Khomeini. Ironically, until only a few weeks earlier, many of these same people had been the shah’s staunchest supporters. The once-proud King of Kings eventually returned to Egypt, where he died of cancer.
Doc’s prediction came true. MAIN lost millions of dollars in Iran, as did many of our competitors. Carter lost his bid for reelection. The Reagan-Bush administration marched into Washington with promises to free the hostages, to bring down the mullahs, to return democracy to Iran, and to set straight the Panama Canal situation.
For me, the lessons were irrefutable. Iran illustrated beyond any doubt that the United States was a nation laboring to deny the truth of our role in the world. It seemed incomprehensible that we could have been so misinformed about the shah and the tide of hatred that had surged against him. Even those of us in companies like
