It was winter 1980, nearly two years after the people of Iran had surprised even themselves by toppling the shah and then had their brief moment of freedom snuffed out by Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. Amir (not his real name) and some of his friends had driven out to the huge Behesht-e Zahra cemetery south of Tehran, where tens of thousands of people had gathered to hear a speaker from the Mojahedin, the strongest of the organizations opposing Khomeini’s government. When the speech was over, Amir climbed into a van with some other people who were going back to the city through his neighborhood.
They tied one end of a rope around him, Amir says, knotted the other end to the bumper of their car, and drove off. “I was just trying to protect my head and trying to get the car not to flip me over, because that was very painful. It was easier just to be straight.” He says he doesn’t know how long they drove. Somehow he wriggled his arms free of the blanket and grabbed the rope above his head so he could drag himself up and catch the bumper. “Then I could protect my head and my back,” he says, almost whispering. “It amazed me that I could do this thing. I don’t know with what power I could still hold myself. I knew I wanted to survive–anything that I could do. But I shouldn’t give up. I was saying that, ‘I shouldn’t give up.’”
It was risky to oppose the shah in the early 1960s. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi had been put on the throne in 1941 after his father–a soldier who had deposed the previous shah and then crowned himself–was forced to abdicate by the British and Russians. Iran was nominally a constitutional monarchy, yet over the years Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had grown more authoritarian and more willing to use SAVAK and the military to quash any dissent, generally bypassing or manipulating the parliament. That had its good side. Partly because of pressure from President John Kennedy, in 1963 the shah announced a series of major reforms, collectively labeled the White Revolution because they were to be bloodless. Literacy volunteers were sent to rural areas, some industrial workers were allowed to share their companies’ profits, women were given the vote, and huge feudal estates were broken up and redistributed to landless peasants. Though popular with the people they benefited, these reforms made others unhappy.
Many books, most of them religious, had been declared illegal in 1966. Amir’s mother and a friend of hers helped to secretly publish and translate books, among them one by Khomeini, one about feudalism in Iran, another about corruption in the shah’s government, another about the history of colonial oil contracts in the Middle East; Amir still has the uncut newsprint pages of one of them. They were printed on small presses that had to be continually moved so they wouldn’t be discovered. SAVAK agents came to the house a couple of times to question his mother, but again found nothing.
Plenty of people still managed to evade SAVAK’s net, at least for a time. For two years in high school Amir had a teacher who had been a political prisoner for three years and who managed to weave his opinions into his lessons. Amir thinks he was allowed to teach in the school because it was on the south side of Tehran, the poor and rough and therefore ignored end of the city. “He was very smart. He knew how to develop our minds to get the point, but not talk about anything directly. Later he was arrested, and I didn’t hear about him anymore.” During his last year in high school Amir and the other students watched from their classroom window as SAVAK agents chased and shot a man and two women in the street below.
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By 1977 the shah was being pressured to stop human-rights abuses by organizations such as Amnesty International and the Red Cross as well as President Jimmy Carter (who nevertheless praised the shah prodigally a year before the revolution, for the “respect, admiration, and love which your people give to you”). The shah responded by easing controls on the press, curbing SAVAK, and releasing a number of political prisoners, which he later said was one of the biggest mistakes he’d ever made.
