On January 16, 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi left Iran for the last time. As he departed, he told his prime minister, “I give Iran into your care, yours and God’s. ” He was 60 years old and had ruled as Shah for 37 years. He carried a small container of Iranian soil onto his plane and never returned.
Pahlavi was born in Tehran on October 26, 1919, the eldest son of Reza Khan, a military officer who would later seize power and found the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Khan led 3,000 troops into Tehran in 1921, took control of the government, and was crowned Shah in 1926. He raised his son through deliberate emotional distance and physical intimidation, believing that fathers who showed love to sons produced weakness. At age 11, the crown prince was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, where he stayed for five years and became fluent in French, English, and German.
He returned to Iran, graduated from Tehran Military College in 1938, and in 1939 married Princess Fawzia of Egypt in a political arrangement. They had one daughter before divorcing in 1948. Reza Khan had cultivated close ties with Germany during the 1930s and resisted Allied demands to expel German advisers. In August 1941, British and Soviet forces invaded Iran.
Iranian resistance lasted three days. Reza Khan abdicated on September 16, 1941, was exiled, and died in Johannesburg in 1944. His 21-year-old son became Shah the same day he abdicated. British forces occupied Iran’s south and west, Soviet forces occupied the north, and American forces managed a supply corridor to the Soviet Union.
The Allies had committed to withdrawing within six months of the war’s end. The Soviet Union did not comply, backing separatist governments in Iran’s northwestern provinces in 1945. President Truman applied diplomatic pressure, and Soviet forces withdrew in May 1946. In 1949, a gunman fired five shots at the Shah during a university ceremony.
Two bullets struck him, but he was not critically wounded. The gunman, identified as a member of a radical Islamic group, was killed immediately. The Shah married Soraya Esfandiari-Bakhtiari in 1951, but the marriage produced no children and ended in divorce in 1958. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, a 21-year-old architecture student.
They had four children: Crown Prince Reza, born in 1960, followed by Princess Farahnaz in 1963, Prince Ali Reza in 1966, and Princess Leila in 1970. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company held a British monopoly over Iran’s oil fields. Between 1945 and 1950, it recorded net profits of roughly 250 million pounds while paying Iran approximately 90 million pounds in royalties. Iranian refinery workers received on average one-tenth the wages of their British counterparts.
In March 1951, the Iranian Parliament passed the Oil Nationalization Act, transferring the company’s assets to a new state body. Mohammad Mosaddegh, a 68-year-old lawyer who had led the nationalization movement, was appointed prime minister. Britain responded with an embargo, froze Iranian assets, and effectively collapsed Iranian oil revenues. Mosaddegh resigned in July 1952 over a dispute about control of the war ministry, and violent demonstrations erupted across Tehran.
The Shah reappointed him with full control of the ministry, and Mosaddegh later received emergency decree powers from Parliament. The Eisenhower administration, more receptive than its predecessor to British calls for intervention, authorized $1 million for CIA operations aimed at bringing down Mosaddegh’s government. The CIA operation, named Ajax, was run by Kermit Roosevelt Jr. , a senior officer and grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
He entered Iran secretly in July 1953. CIA money funded opposition newspapers and pamphlets, bribed military officers, politicians, and clergy, and hired street mobs. On August 15, 1953, the Shah signed decrees dismissing Mosaddegh and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. Mosaddegh received advance warning, had the colonel delivering the decrees arrested, and broadcast that a coup had been attempted and failed.
The Shah fled to Baghdad and then Rome. Roosevelt remained in Tehran and continued the operation. On August 18 and 19, paid demonstrators and military units loyal to Zahedi mobilized, and heavy fighting broke out. An estimated 200 to 300 people were killed.
Mosaddegh surrendered on August 20 and was arrested. The Shah returned to Tehran on August 22, telling Roosevelt, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you. ” Mosaddegh was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. The Shah commuted the sentence to three years of solitary confinement followed by house arrest.
Mosaddegh died at his estate in 1967, having made no public statements after his arrest. Following the coup, the National Front was dissolved and its leaders arrested. More than 4,000 members of the Tudeh party were arrested, 40 were executed, and 200 received life sentences. A new oil consortium divided Iran’s oil rights, with Iran receiving 50 percent of profits.
In 1957, with assistance from the CIA and Israeli intelligence, the Shah established a domestic intelligence and security organization known as SAVAK. Detainees had no right to legal counsel during interrogation. SAVAK monitored newspapers, universities, labor unions, and mosques, and tracked Iranian students abroad. By the mid-1960s, it had over 5,300 full-time agents.
In 1976, Amnesty International formally declared the Shah’s government one of the worst human rights violators in the world. Documented interrogation methods included sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, electrical shocks, cigarette burns, nail extractions, near drowning, and mock executions. Amnesty documented at least 300 political executions during the Shah’s reign. When asked about torture in a 1976 interview, the Shah replied, “Why should we not employ the same methods as you Europeans?
You use psychological methods to extract the truth. We do the same. ”
In January 1963, the Shah announced a six-point reform program he named the White Revolution. A national referendum reported 5,598,711 votes in favor and 4,115 against, though opposition parties boycotted the vote entirely.
The original points included land reform, nationalization of forests and pastures, sale of state factories, profit sharing for industrial workers, women’s suffrage, and the formation of a literacy corps. The land reform was the largest redistribution of agricultural land in Iranian history. Land was redistributed to approximately 2. 5 million families, and agricultural production increased by 80 percent in tonnage between 1964 and 1970.
The literacy corps deployed more than 200,000 high school graduates as village teachers, educating over 2. 2 million children and one million adults. Iranian women voted in parliamentary elections for the first time in September 1963. Between 1960 and 1977, Iran’s real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 9.
6 percent. In 1976 alone, GDP increased by 18. 3 percent. Real GDP per capita rose from roughly $2,700 to approximately $7,700, an increase of 185 percent.
In October 1967, 26 years after his accession, the Shah held his formal coronation. He placed the crown on his own head and crowned his wife Farah as Empress, the first woman to hold that title in Iran since the pre-Islamic era. He assumed the titles Shahanshah, King of Kings, and Aryamehr, Light of the Aryans. In October 1971, the Shah staged a celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy at Persepolis, the ceremonial capital built by Cyrus the Great.
Sixty-nine heads of state attended. The menus were prepared by Maxim’s of Paris. Fifty thousand trees were imported from France to landscape the desert. The total estimated cost ranged between $100 million and $300 million.
That same year, 35 percent of Iran’s rural population had no access to clean drinking water, and rural infant mortality stood at roughly 180 deaths per thousand live births. Ruhollah Khomeini, a 51-year-old professor of Islamic philosophy in Qom, issued a statement in January 1963 declaring the White Revolution unconstitutional and contrary to Islamic law. He objected to women’s suffrage and argued that land reform would dispossess religious institutions of their charitable land holdings. After a government crackdown on a theological school in which several students were killed, Khomeini delivered a public sermon addressing the Shah directly: “Mr.
Shah, I advise you to desist. I don’t want the people to offer thanks should you leave the country. ” He was arrested that day, and three days of demonstrations followed. Opposition sources claimed 15,000 killed by government forces; the government acknowledged 32 deaths.
In October 1964, after Parliament passed a law extending diplomatic immunity to American military personnel, Khomeini called the law a “document of Iranian enslavement. ” He was arrested and expelled from Iran. Settling in Najaf, Iraq, he recorded lectures outlining a doctrine called velayat-e faqih, the governance of the Islamic jurist, arguing that political authority in a Muslim society must rest with senior Islamic clergy. The lectures were distributed on cassette tapes through religious networks.
A secular intellectual opposition also developed. Ali Shariati, a sociologist educated in Paris, argued that the Shah’s modernization represented a form of cultural colonization. Shariati died in England in 1977 at age 44. His death was disputed, with many Iranians attributing it to SAVAK, though no evidence of SAVAK involvement was established.
In 1975, the Shah dissolved Iran’s two-party system and replaced it with a single party. He said publicly that Iranians who disagreed with the party’s principles were free to obtain a passport and leave the country. After the 1973 oil embargo, Iran’s oil revenues rose from $4. 4 billion in 1973 to nearly $20 billion in 1974, even though Iran did not join the embargo.
The Shah tripled the national development budget. Between 1972 and 1976, Iran purchased more than $10 billion of American military equipment, and the American military advisory mission grew to over 24,000 personnel. Hundreds of thousands of rural workers migrated to Tehran. Between 1966 and 1976, the city’s urban population grew by over 2 million people, overwhelming water, sewage, transport, and housing systems.
Price controls and supply shortages produced inflation, and the Shah launched an anti-profiteering campaign that fined 10,000 shopkeepers and merchants, arrested over 7,000, and exiled 200 to provincial towns. In October 1977, a 10-night poetry festival at the Goethe Institute in Tehran drew thousands each evening, with writers reading works criticizing the government directly. The same month, lawyers, intellectuals, and politicians published open letters calling for the rule of law and freedom of expression. On October 23, Khomeini’s eldest son died in Najaf at age 47.
No cause of death was established, but Khomeini’s network publicly attributed his death to SAVAK. His death triggered mourning ceremonies in mosques across Iran. On January 7, 1978, the government newspaper Ettela’at published a front-page article attacking Khomeini personally, describing him as a foreign agent with ties to British colonialism. The article was later reported to have been written at the direction of the royal court.
On January 9, theology students in Qom demonstrated in response, and police fired into the crowd, killing between two and six students. The Shia mourning tradition requires ceremonies 40 days after a death. Those ceremonies drew new demonstrations, which produced new deaths, which produced new mourning ceremonies across every major Iranian city from January through December 1978. On August 19, 1978, the 25th anniversary of Operation Ajax, a fire broke out at the Rex Cinema in Abadan.
The doors had been locked from the outside. Between 377 and 470 people died. The government stated Islamist militants had set the fire; Khomeini’s network stated SAVAK was responsible. No legal conclusion was reached before the revolution ended the investigation.
On September 7, the government declared martial law in Tehran and 11 other cities. The next day, a crowd gathered at Jaleh Square in Tehran, and security forces opened fire. The government’s official death toll was 87; independent estimates ranged from 200 to 500. In October and November, a coordinated strike movement paralyzed the economy.
Oil workers walked out, and Iran’s oil production dropped from 5. 8 million barrels per day to under 1 million. Factory workers, bank employees, airline staff, and broadcasting workers followed. Khomeini left Iraq in October 1978 after the Iraqi government, under pressure from Iran, asked him to stop broadcasting.
He moved to Paris, where he held daily press conferences and gave over 130 recorded interviews between October 1978 and February 1979. On December 9 and 10, the Shia holy days of Tasua and Ashura, demonstrations took place across Iran. In Tehran, between 2 million and 9 million people marched, depending on whose estimate is accepted. The Shah had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1974 but kept the diagnosis secret from his prime minister, military commanders, and American allies.
By late 1978, the disease had progressed, and his personal physician later confirmed that the medications used to treat it were affecting his alertness and decision-making. In January 1979, the leaders of France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States concluded there was no feasible military option to preserve the Iranian monarchy. The Shah asked Shapour Bakhtiar, a veteran opposition politician who had previously been imprisoned by his government, to form a new administration. Bakhtiar’s condition was that the Shah leave Iran.
The Shah agreed. On January 16, 1979, at 9:14 in the morning, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi drove to Mehrabad airport, embraced his prime minister, and boarded his Boeing 707. State radio announced the departure at 2:00 in the afternoon. Crowds gathered across Tehran.
Statues of the Shah were pulled from their pedestals, and photographs were torn from government building walls. On February 1, an Air France Boeing 747 landed at Mehrabad airport. Ayatollah Khomeini had not been in Iran for 15 years. An estimated 3 to 5 million people lined the route from the airport into the city.
A journalist on the plane asked Khomeini what he felt about returning to Iran. He replied, “Nothing. ”
On February 4, Khomeini appointed Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of a parallel provisional government. Bakhtiar insisted his government was the only legally constituted one.
Both governments operated simultaneously for seven days. On February 10, fighting broke out between air force cadets who had declared for Khomeini and Imperial Guard units. On February 11, the Iranian Supreme Military Council announced the armed forces would observe strict neutrality, and all units were ordered back to barracks. Bakhtiar resigned and fled Iran.
The Pahlavi monarchy ceased to exist. On April 1, Iranians voted in a referendum on whether to establish an Islamic Republic. The result was 98. 2 percent in favor, though no alternative was offered on the ballot.
The Shah went first to Egypt, where President Anwar Sadat received him as a state guest. He stayed two weeks, then went to Morocco, where he was asked to leave after two months. He flew to the Bahamas and was asked to leave after two and a half months. He then went to Mexico.
Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller lobbied the Carter administration to admit the Shah to the United States for cancer treatment. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski supported the request; Secretary of State Cyrus Vance warned it would produce consequences in Tehran. On October 22, 1979, the Shah entered the United States and was admitted to Cornell Medical Center in New York. Thirteen days later, on November 4, Iranian students stormed the U.
S. embassy in Tehran. They took 66 Americans captive. Fourteen were released within days; 52 remained.
Their stated demand was the return of the Shah to Iran to face trial. The Shah left the United States for Panama on December 15, then left Panama for Egypt on March 23, 1980. President Sadat offered him permanent residency. He accepted and died at the Maadi Military Hospital in Cairo on July 27, 1980.
The cause of death was non-Hodgkin lymphoma and postsurgical complications. He was 60 years old. He was buried at the Al-Rifa’i Mosque in Cairo, a royal mausoleum that also holds the remains of King Farouk of Egypt. Sadat attended the funeral, and Richard Nixon attended as a private citizen.
No other sitting head of state attended. The 52 American hostages were released on January 20, 1981, 444 days after their capture, at the exact moment Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president of the United States. Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was assassinated in Paris in August 1991. Kermit Roosevelt Jr.
left the CIA in 1958 and published a memoir about the 1953 coup in 1979. He died in 2000. Khomeini served as Supreme Leader of Iran from 1979 until his death on June 3, 1989. Historian Ervand Abrahamian documented that under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fewer than 100 political prisoners were executed between 1971 and 1979.
Under the Islamic Republic, more than 7,900 people were executed between 1981 and 1985. In the summer of 1988, following a fatwa issued by Khomeini, Iranian prison authorities executed between 2,800 and 5,000 political prisoners over approximately three months. The killings were not publicly announced. Mass graves were subsequently identified at sites including Khavaran Cemetery in Tehran.
The CIA’s role in the 1953 coup was denied by the United States government for 60 years. In August 2013, the CIA publicly stated that the operation had been carried out under CIA direction as an act of U. S. foreign policy.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s body remains in Cairo. His son Reza Pahlavi lives in the United States. The Peacock Throne is held by the National Museum of Iran in Tehran.