Iran: The Grand Vizier

Out for an early-morning horseback ride in Teheran on one of his Arabian stallions, Iranian Premier Assadollah Alam came across some building laborers who were grumbling about their low pay. The workers did not recognize Alam, and when he asked them why they had left their villages for the capital, one replied: “Well, we heard the Premier on the radio promising that workers would get a raise to 100 rials [$1.33] a day.” Replied Alam, “Don’t you know that all Premiers lie?” and casually trotted off.

A man of sardonic urbanity and quick, quizzical intelligence, Alam, 45, is a British-educated aristocrat to his manicured fingernails. He is a millionaire by inheritance, married into one of Iran’s greatest landowning families, and lives like a prince (which he is) in a palace on the slopes overlooking Teheran. Padding about in a silk dressing gown or British tweeds amidst his huge flower gardens, Olympic-sized swimming pool, stables and servants, Alam seems wildly unlikely as the administrator of revolutionary social reforms aimed at liberating the masses from centuries of feudalism. He is not even sure that he likes the job. “I am lazy by birth,” he admits cheerfully. “As Premier I have to work all the time, and I don’t like it. Maybe it’s better to change now and get somebody else.”

Skillful Servant. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi does not want somebody else. After 15 highly successful months as Premier, Amir Assadollah Khan Alam was renamed last week to head Iran’s Cabinet, promptly got down to business with a two-hour state-of-theunion speech to the newly elected Majlis. To be sure, the Shahanshah remains firmly in command of land reform, foreign affairs, financial matters and other basic policies. But as the Shah’s skillful grand vizier, Alam has done more to modernize the Peacock Throne than any other Premier in the nation’s history.

Leading a crackdown on corruption, Alam is currently investigating eight former government ministers and prosecuting a dozen ex-army generals. A nationwide drive against tax dodgers has produced remarkable results; in one province alone, collections increased 1,300%. Almost 5,000 opium parlors have been shut down. Thanks to record oil revenues of nearly $400 million this year and massive U.S. aid ($157 million in 1962), the national budget is balanced and the treasury even boasts a small surplus. Fortnight ago, the government signed a trade agreement with the Common Market, lowering European tariffs on Iranian carpets, caviar and various other products.

The ambitious land-reform program, which has already created 2,300 farm cooperatives, is about to swing into a second phase. So far, 8,300 villages belonging to major landlords have been distributed to peasants; now they will receive lands from smaller owners as well, until some 40,000 villages are free. “By what right,” asks Alam, who gave away his own vast holdings 15 years ago, “should peasants be treated like serfs, workers like slaves, and women like animals?”

If the words sound like an echo of the Shah’s, it is no accident. Alam’s father, a tribal chieftain whose private domains extended for hundreds of miles along the Afghanistan border, was a friend of the Shah’s father. The two young men were buddies, and after Mohammed Reza Pahlevi assumed the throne in 1941, Alam became his closest confidant. He served as Minister of the Interior (twice), Agriculture and Labor. When ex-Premier Ali Amini quit in 1962, the Shah, who had had 16 Premiers in his 21-year reign, finally turned to his childhood friend.

Poolside Business. Alam developed into a shrewd administrator who knows when to conciliate and when to cut off debate. “I learned,” he says, “to be cold-blooded in critical moments and to be just to my enemies.” Displaying his toughness, the Premier called out the army last June to crush Teheran rioters who had been whipped into a frenzy by Moslem mullahs (priests) opposing land reform and women’s suffrage. He often holds Cabinet sessions in a tented pavilion alongside the blue-tiled swimming pool on his palace grounds. On a nearby tree hangs a telephone, just in case the Shah should call, which he does at least a dozen times a day.

Alam is hopeful that in 20 years Iran’s current spate of reforms will produce a Western standard of living. He has no worries about his own future either. “I am an optimist,” he says. “If I do all right, then the nation benefits. If not, the Shah will fire me and I can rest.”