bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 31–33
Ten years ago, in February, the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah’s regime. A year later, the Canadian Embassy closed down because of its involvement in smuggling six American diplomats out of the country. It reopened late in 1988. To give some of the flavour of what it was like in Tehran in January and February 1979, I have assembled some extracts from my letters written home. They give a fairly vivid picture of how things were. I felt little need to downplay events to my parents who took a fairly relaxed view of the nightly TV coverage of the revolution. One letter from my mother summed it up, “Dear Roger, if we believed everything we saw on TV, we would fear for your safety, but we don’t, so we don’t.”
Things had been bubbling in Iran before my arrival, but soon took a distinct turn for the worse. On September 8, 1978, less than one week after my arrival, ‘martial law’ was declared. This included an assembly ban as well as a 9:00 pm curfew. It not only cramped social life, but also made going out to fetch late arriving couriers a rather interesting, not to say exciting, procedure. Following the Jaleh Square massacre on September 8, when a large number of demonstrators were shot after putting the ban on assemblies to the test, the situation became fairly calm and stayed that way thoughout October. But escalating strikes and violence in the provinces finally exploded in Tehran.
On November 5, mobs systematically ransacked and burned the downtown business district. The Canadian Embassy was somewhat to the north of the area affected, but we had a good view of the fires which was better still from my flat higher up the hill. The burning of the National Iranian Gas Company’s building was particularly spectacular, but fortunately the damage to the district was not extensive and concentrated on banks, discos, government offices and other very specific targets – including the British Embassy which had a unique Guy Fawkes celebration. The curfew, which had gradually been rolled back to midnight, was once again set at 9:00 pm and a military government installed. In spite of the new government’s outward show of force (more road blocks, more aggressive shooting at demonstrations, and Chieftain tanks going flat out down the main drag), things did not really quieten down and the country was slowly paralyzed by spreading strikes which in the end stopped all but essential services. Embassies began to update their contingency plans, and divided Iran into evacuation areas. Canada was assigned responsibility for evacuating western nationals from the Caspian coast where there was a large Canadian forestry project.
December coincided with the Moslem month of Moharram, a month of mourning for the Shia’s culminating in “Ashura” the day Imam Hussein was martyred at Karballah. During Moharram, the mobs came out every night after curfew, and every night at that time there was a power cut. All over town, you could hear chants of “Allah Akhbar” (God is Great) and “Marg bar Shah” (death to the Shah), followed by gun fire of various sorts ranging from tear gas grenades through heavy machine guns and the odd tank cannon. The Americans, who tried not to believe this was happening, claimed at first that these sound effects were actually tape recordings!! Any illusions that the Shah could reimpose order were finally dashed on Ashura, when the army pulled back to the northern suburbs and allowed 2-3 million demonstrators to hold a rally at the Shahyad Monument on the airport road.
Around Christmas, I did recce of the Caspian area to discuss evacuation plans with the Canadians there, check out airstrips, and the feasibility of taking evacuation convoys either down to Tehran or north into Russia. At the same time, we were installing “bullet-proof” doors, a radio system and a contingent of 7 Military Police who provided very valuable protection. However, we had none of the modern refinements Embassies in difficult situations now get like satellite dishes, flak jackets or armoured cars.
The first evacuation of Canadians was on January 3, 1979.
Jan. 2, 1979
Dear Parents,
Here I am sitting in the Embassy, the power has been off since 7:30 pm and we wonder if it will ever come on again. (It did at 5:00 am.) Iran has basically run dry and we “Middle Eastern bastards” are, as they say, “freezing in the dark”.
Economically and politically this country is bankrupt. The latest PM can’t get anyone to form a Cabinet, and those civil servants who are still working won’t make any decisions. Canadian planes are sitting in Ankara waiting for the word to fly to Rasht, and 350 Canadian and another 150 other nationals are sitting near Rasht waiting for the planes. The Iranians at the highest level won’t give them permission to go to Rasht because there is no Customs there, and they can’t provide planes to get the people to Tehran (where our planes can land) because they have not got the fuel. It’s all very interesting. So we may have to have a bus convoy to get them all down to Tehran. I’m not really looking forward to going up to Rasht to face 350 cold, hungry and puzzled Canadians.
We spent New Year’s Eve at the Embassy sending flash telegrams everywhere. We broke out my last bottle of champagne at midnight and had a tin of caviar. Why, you ask, all this sudden flurry? What happened? Nothing in particular, except that with growing shortages of fuel, food, heating oil and what have you (Iran Air is going on strike again), the Shah’s fall seems imminent. So we, the Americans and British decided the time was ripe to tell our nationals to go if they had no reason to be here. Sensible enough. The problem is how to pull it off, as Iran Air is on strike, and air traffic control is too. It will be hard to get the planes in.
Jan. 4, 1979
Dear Parents,
January 2-3 were all one to me. Basically, I was travelling or working from 6 am Jan. 2 to 4 pm Jan. 3. Last night was my first night in a bed this year. Gruelling but, one gets one’s second, third or fourth wind and keeps right on going. Early Tuesday morning, after cat-napping on a sofa in the office, I started to write notes for an aircraft clearance. Then I went home to have a quick bath and change, before going back to the office to try to get our flight clearances again and make preparations to go up to the Caspian to bring the convoy down.
At 4 pm three of us, Mahmud our driver, John Broadbent (a commercial officer at the Embassy) and I, with Mr. Schumacher from the German Embassy, set out for our “Anabasis”. The real sticker was Qazvin, about two hours away, where there was now a 6 pm curfew. We reached Qazvin at 5:30 pm — it was dark and the power was off. There were Chieftan tanks and BTR-60 armoured cars on the outskirts. The town was a mess, literally burnt out. There were rows and rows of sacked and gutted buildings, burnt out shops, smashed, burned vehicles on the streets and one large truck wedged nosedown in the gutter. Beyond the area patrolled by the troops, clusters of people were gathering in the streets obviously waiting to come storming out after curfew. Eech!. It was not a nice place. We got slightly lost on our way through, but we were through and out by 5:45, and then had the long drive through the mountains in Rasht.
Outside Rasht we found the road totally blocked by a line-up at a gas station. The mood of those involved was quite festive, but the only lane through was blocked by a bus which had just had an altercation with a Citroën 2CV. The driver of the Citroën was holding out for rather heavy compensation, although the car had suffered only a minor scrape. The arrival of the police cleared up the jam, and we roared through the empty streets of Rasht (despite grim reports to the contrary, it looked in pretty good shape) on to Bandar Pahlavi and to the hotel where the evacuees were gathering.
There we learned that permission had been granted for four aircraft sorties into Rasht. So leaving the others, I collected about 110 of the hardier looking souls into three buses, and we went blasting off at 3 a.m. back to Tehran. We made it in one piece and without incident, beyond wear and tear on my nerves. I lost track of some of the buses at one point, but all were back in the convoy at the end of our trip.
We then had to sort everything out at the airport, wondering what was wrong with all our planes. One broke down with an engine that would not start. It had to have a “windmill” start, the airplane equivalent of a push start, by doing a fast taxi. The other managed the flight, but the last two came in too late to fly to Rasht.
Between Jan. 3 and 5 we took out 420 people. At our end in Tehran, we muddied through very successfully and no-one got left behind, despite the stickiness of Iranian Customs. It was an excellent operation, exhausting but exciting, and we really achieved something worthwhile. However, I do not want to see another Hercules for a long time. It clearly was the fashion to send a Hercules to Tehran! The Belgians, the Italians and the Australians each sent one, but none of these took out as many people. They took only 25-30 per plane, while we had over a hundred in some of ours!
Now everything seems anticlimatic. All there is to do is to continue to watch the decline and fall of the Persian Empire.
Over the next month things slid downhill. PM Bakhtiar finally got a government together and persuaded the Shah to go away on holiday (only the most die-hard believed he would ever return) on January 17. The town exploded with honking horns and flashing lights and woe betide anyone who showed less than total delight. But Bakhtiar, despite his past anti-Shah credentials, never had a chance. On Feb. 2, he allowed Khomeini to return to Iran hoping to come to some sort of compromise arrangement.
That was not to be, and Ottawa was getting a little panicky about where things would go, and even took literally the newly returned Imam’s call to “cut off the hands of the foreigners”. In Tehran, we realized this was an allusion to foreign influences, but even so we had our moments of uncertainty about what attitude they would take to foreign embassies when the day of reckoning finally came. Would the army go down fighting or would law and order simply collapse? It seemed time to send in another evacuation flight, which in addition to members of the public, took out various “non-essential” (or were those of us who stayed on “expendable”? Canadian staff.
While those of us who remained had few difficulties, the mood of the populace was more than a little xenophobic. Still, there were compensations. Beer could still be found at the Sheraton Hotel, which also had large stocks of smoked salmon. We made it our lunch-time goal to ensure none fell into the wrong hands and wondered how things had been in Petrograd in 1917. Meanwhile, I got out one last letter before “the deluge”
Feb. 8, 1979
Dear Parents,
Rather a short letter which I will entrust to Colin Fabro who is on his way to Peru, via Athens, Israel, Canada and Bolivia. As we will have no more couriers until Feb. 15, I thought I would get something off to you any chance I could. I’m still here, along with the Ambassador, Paul Thibault, Mary O’Flaherty, Betty-Jean O’Roidan our secretary, John Sheardown and Captain Joe MacDonald with his six “Sarbaz” (soldiers). All the rest of the Embassy staff, plus 35 other Canadians and a motley crew of foreigners exited Tuesday on the Herc, “Operation Baton 2” ’ If we ever have a “Baton 3”, that will be the last, as we will be on it. However, it may well never come to that, though in this country God only knows what will happen next. At least since the Ayatollah came home, things have been pretty peaceful, and the airport is working again, after a fashion.
My next letter began shortly afterwards but was not sent out until the situation was calm enough for the airport to reopen.
Feb. 10, 1979
Dear Parents,
I was going to grumble in this letter about how the western press exaggerates everything – like the Defence Minister’s comments. The news report almost compromised our flight, because by saying that the crew of the Herc would be armed, the Minister contradicted the terms of our clearance requests, which said that there would be no arms on the plane. Fortunately, the Iranians took no heed, so our operation went like clockwork. Betty-Jean, my secretary, got some clippings about our first airlift. I was rather amazed to read an account of one lady, who seems to have been on my bus convoy, describing how she crouched in terror on the floor of her bus as it passed through gunfire and screaming mobs. Odd — I never noticed either. Qazvin was a mess (100 dead the day we went through it, another three score the day we came back), but on both occasions when we passed through, it was devastated, but calm. Also, I learned one thing last night. Even a few gasoline and rubber tire fires set along the street, as some fool kids were doing, are able to make a respectable blaze with a dense column of black smoke, which from a distance and combined with other such fires (by now you would think that they would be running short of tires) makes it look like a re-enactment of the Hamburg raid. When you see all the flames and smoke on your TV, remember it is not always as nasty as it looks. Since Friday night, after a calm week, things have become hot again. Friday night a fracas broke out at the airbase and the Imperial Guard bulldozed in to put it down. My first inkling came Saturday morning when, for over an hour there was continuous automatic weapons fire off to the southeast, probably at the army headquarters or the airbase. I went to the office and around noon the traffic seemed agitated. At 2 p.m. we learned that curfew had been lowered again from midnight to 4:30 p.m. The Americans figured the army was staging a coup. Later, it was announced that curfew would last to noon today, but why I don’t know. Yesterday evening was rather exciting. the local kids were out on the streets and rooftops ’Allah Akbar’-ing (no more ’Marg bar Shah’s) and setting bonfires in the middle of the road. They kept it up for quite a while. At about I p.m., some soldiers came in to pacify the area, and after a few bursts of automatic gunfire the kids must have been persuaded that it was past their bedtime. A little later, there were some more adult voices yelling something and some heavy crumps of probably home-made bombs, then more shooting. At last, all was quiet for a while. How far away this was I can’t say: Sounds seem to carry a long way here. I think it was somewhere down to the west. There was some more gunfire around 4 a.m. and scattered shots at about 5 a.m., so let’s see what today brings.
Feb. 14, 1979
Dear Parents,
It was rather a hiatus while we had our Revolution. Spent Sunday night at Paul Thibault’s house, up in the northern suburbs, which took us through about a dozen roadblocks, manned by various groups of youths, with long sticks and knives. They were not unfriendly, and even waved us away from an on-going shoot out. Earlier that day I had gone down to the British Embassy, which being south of Shah Reza Avenue means traversing some rather hairy territory. However, again, the natives did not seem unfriendly. All afternoon there was fairly continuous shooting north-east of the Embassy, near Army Ordnance and Martial Law Headquarters. By the time we got to Paul’s, the army had capitulated, and aside from burning down the police station at the end of the street, all was quiet.
Coming to work the next morning most of the barricades (which had been designed as flame barrages with tires and brushwood and garbage) were open. Outside two gutted police stations there were civilians sporting looted weapons, helmets and equipment. It was quiet, but soon everyone was in the streets with their newly acquired weaponry, blasting it off in all directions. There were truckloads of yahoos charging off to assault the last remaining army barracks, police stations, SAVAK and the palaces. Vive la Révolution!
The Iranian army, including the highly overrated Imperial Guard, simply collapsed and Molotovs and assault rifles in the hands of some trained guerrillas, insurgent airforce personnel and a mass of civilians prevailed against Chieftan tanks — they even brewed up a few! Incredible!
Tuesday was quiet and it looked like the new Government was going to shake things down and gather up some of the 70,000 guns that had been looted. There was some shooting at night, but maybe the new Islamic militia was practicing in the park.
On Wednesday, things blew sky high. The Fedayeen Khalq (Communists) said they were hanging on to their guns. That morning they overran the U.S. Embassy. The supporters of the clergy (their guerrillas are called Mujehideen, rather inappropriately translated as Crusaders) barged in and got the Yankies out. It looks like the Reds are trying to make a play for a takeover before Khomeini’s lot get too strong. Last night, they tried to take over the radio and TV stations, including the one up the street from me. I was routed from bed by an incredible fire fight, tracers and grenades all around my place.
Incredible! I found a place to sleep in a corner of my living room, which was not in the direct line of fire from any windows. With so much flak in the air, it did not seem a good idea to be too near a window, though there were no hits on my place. It is perhaps a little unhealthy to watch so grand a spectacle behind a floor to ceiling window. Today is quiet.
Thereafter, things gradually normalized. Most of the remaining foreigners were evacuated (we hitchhiked on British and Australian aircraft to reduce the staff at the Canadian Embassy even more) and slowly the local revolutionary “Komitehs” learned about such niceties as diplomatic immunity and diplomatic bags. Animosity to foreigners evaporated almost overnight and, for a time, even Iranian driving habits improved. An almost daily feature in the press were the photos of those of the Shah’s generals and cabinet ministers who had been executed the night before. In September, I had not believed it would come to this, and when it did happen, I never believed the new regime would survive a year, let alone ten!
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 31–33. Read the rest of this issue →
