IRAN: The Shah’s Gamble

THE gleaming white Vickers Viscount had taken off in bright moonlight from Teheran. Now, some ten hours later, escorted by a squadron of Italian jet fighters, it touched down on Rome’s Ciampino airport. Wearing a blue air marshal’s uniform with gold pilot’s wings.

Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the handsome, greying Shah of Iran, stepped from the plane one day last week, exchanged greetings with Italy’s President Giovanni Gronchi, Premier Amintore Fanfani and six Cabinet ministers.

A small cluster of Iranian citizens resident in Italy set up a shout of “Zendibad Shahanshah [Long live the King of Kings]!” The Shah made a the brief speech commenting on the good relations between Italy and Iran, which, he said, “were reinforced by the oil agreement.” Oil and the influence of the Shah are perhaps the two most important factors in the slow but certain awakening of the Iranian nation from the sleep of decadent centuries.

Fight Against Corruption

Without its oil, pouring from the ground at a rate of 1,000,000 barrels a day and earning the nation an estimated $250 million this year, Iran would simply be another semi-arid pastoral and agricultural nation like its neighbor Afghanistan. Without the special qualities of its 19 million people, who have been taught cleverness and patience by history, are generally more devoted to their kinsmen than their nation, and are suspicious of every move by those in power, Iran would be an easier country to govern. For example, Iranian slum dwellers have been known to refuse to move into newly completed low-cost housing because they were sure that there must be a trick to it.

In the Shah’s absence in Europe, his Prime Minister Manouchehr Eghbal last week rammed through the docile Majlis the Shah’s anticorruption bill which requires all government officials, civil or military, to file an inventory of their properties, as well as those of their wives and children. An earlier bill forbade ministers, government officials, Deputies, Senators or members of the royal family from dealing in any way with companies having or seeking contracts from the government.

A skeptical public waits to see whether anything will happen. The Shah is considered personally honest. The Queen Mother, Tajul-Moluk, and the Shah’s twin sister, sinuous Princess Ashraf, are acknowledged to have great commercial acumen. When, last month, Princess Ashraf was caught by French customs officials as she left France with 800,000 francs in her handbag after declaring only 10,000, many wondered how this could happen to so wealthy a woman. Cracked an old Teheran hand: “Probably habit.”

Thousand Families

The Shah is fighting not only corruption and graft but the deadening hand of Iran’s “thousand families” who are absentee owners of 70% of the land. The Shah himself, as the nation’s biggest single landowner (2,500,000 acres), has shown the way by distributing his vast farm properties to the peasants of about 300 of his villages. But the thousand families are cool to land reform. Even worse, landlords seldom reinvest their profits in upgrading the soil. Tenants, who can usually be dispossessed at will with no compensation for any improvements they have made, are understandably reluctant to make any. The Shah has struck hard at one landlord privilege by ordering an end to the “gifts” of cattle and food traditionally taken by the landlords from their peasants on the eve of festivals.

The Shah’s reforms have one thing in their favor: Iran has already been through the sort of violent upheaval now shaking most of its neighbors. The Mossadegh turmoil of 1953, with its hate-the-West nationalism and Communist coloring, had a cathartic effect on many young idealists.

And the Shah’s security forces moved firmly against the remnants of Mossadegh’s organization, pushed through the trial and execution of 30 army officers linked with the Communist-run Tudeh Party.

Discontent remains among white-collar workers squeezed by inflation, among peasants oppressed by landlords, among army officers frustrated by inefficient commanders who distribute promotions by bribery and special influence, among young intellectuals who resent police state controls. There is little evident organized opposition to the regime. Yet an esti mated 60% of Iranian students educated abroad never come home because they are grimly aware how few opportunities there are in Iran for young men without connections in high places.

Gold-Toothed Smile

The oil of the Persian Gulf pumps its steady stream of dollars, and new trade agreements, like the one with Italy which guarantees Iran the lion’s share of a 25-75% split, will certainly affect the 50-50% deals that have been standard with British and most U.S. companies. Under Iran’s $1.1 billion development program, made possible by oil revenues, regional schemes will supply irrigation, fertilizer, electric power and light industry. The ambitious Khuzistan project in southwestern Iran is under the able guidance of a U.S. firm headed by David E. Lilienthal and Gordon R. Clapp, who pioneered TVA. The development plans are good, but their allotted revenues have sometimes been borrowed for other purposes, and the Shah himself wishes that there were more “visual impact” schemes to give his poverty-stricken people a feeling of hope. Despite large oil revenues, the Iranian economy has been crucially dependent on more than $300 million in aid pumped in by the U.S. since 1951.

Iran remains a precarious outpost. The bloody July revolution in neighboring Iraq sent an apprehensive shudder through Iran’s top thousand families and made them more receptive to the Shah’s reforms. Though Iran is a Moslem nation, its people are not Arab, and the Shah is thus insulated from the Nasser virus. The Soviet Union, through pudgy Ambassador Nikolai Pegov, has lately purred friendship and slyly supported Iran’s claim to Britain’s oil-rich Bahrein Island. The Soviet Union sent its dancers and acrobats, sponsored joint Russian-Iranian projects such as locust control on the border, even promised junketing President Kliment Voroshilov would come to Teheran next month in repayment for the Shah’s 1956 visit to Moscow. But all Iranians remember Stalin’s attempt to grab Azerbaijan in the north after World War II.

Backhanded Tribute

The Soviet campaign of sweetness and light changed abruptly to the hurtling of thunderbolts a month ago. The grounds: that Iran was negotiating a bilateral defense agreement with the U.S. Yet this agreement has been in the works for months. In Moscow, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko handed the Iranian ambassador a stiff note warning of the danger of Iran’s being involved in the “military adventures” of foreign circles.” Voroshilov’s visit was abruptly canceled; Ambassador Pegov stopped flashing his gold-toothed smile and packed for the trip home. The Soviet radio, in Persian language broadcasts, cried that “American warmongers will be masters of the country,” and painted a gruesome picture of Iranians living in mud huts, forced to eat grass, date seeds and locusts because “everyone knows that the policy of militarizing the country is one of the main reasons for difficult living conditions.”

But the Soviet radio stopped short of attacking the Shah, a backhanded tribute to his popularity. A brooding, impulsive, often irritable man, the Shah at 39 is the one unifying force in the nation. Some of his supporters wish he were more like his father, the decisive, brusque Reza Shah “the Great,” who rose from army noncom to the throne of the King of Kings and who showed his displeasure immediately, as when he once dragged a losing jockey from his horse and publicly kicked him in the belly. The young Shah knows that Iran needs a strong, tough hand like his father’s, but he cannot bring himself to behave that way. He used to be sensitive to the fact that though his title was old, his dynasty had begun only with his father. But increasingly the Shah has shown a self-confidence to match his character and intelligence.

Educated in Switzerland, emotionally as well as intellectually committed to the West, the Shah is often critical of U.S. policy. He told a TIME correspondent last week: “You say, for example, that we cannot handle military electronic equipment, but if you had started training us four or five years ago, we could handle it now. If you fail to see what we need, you will lose a fantastic opportunity and may be regret it bitterly later on.” Iran risked Soviet anger to sign a defense agreement with the U.S., and the Shah, like most of his countrymen, cannot understand John Foster Dulles’ explanations that it must be an “agreement” not a treaty.

Heirless Throne

At week’s end the Shah planned to journey north from Italy to Switzerland, where two prominent Iranians are often to be found. One is his daughter Shahnaz (by his first marriage to Egypt’s Princess Fawzia), but she had just left Lausanne for home, accompanied by a Swiss gynecologist. She is expecting a child, and the Shah insisted that it be born in Iran—if it is a son, he might be heir to the Iranian throne. The other is his handsome second wife, Soraya, whom he divorced because she had not provided him with a son. But her photograph is still prominently displayed in the palace in Teheran.

In the chaotic Middle East, worries over an heir to the throne are certainly preferable to plots to topple it. A veteran U.S. observer in Teheran allowed himself some tempered optimism about Iran: “I wouldn’t say we are confident, but the situation today looks a helluva lot better than it did two or three months ago.”