Reformer in Shako

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At fever pitch, the crowd plunged through Teheran's vaulted bazaar, making its way past brilliant stacks of rugs, past squatting tinsmiths and hanging ranks of newly slain lambs and, at last, down a labyrinthine alley to the home of Ayatollah Mohammed Behbehani, Teheran's most powerful religious leader. In Ayatollah Mohammed's great walled garden, a white-turbaned mullah shouted over a microphone: "All elections must be canceled!" The crowd roared back: "We agree! We agree!'' White-robed and heavily bearded, bent by his 90 years, Ayatollah Mohammed shuffled slowly across the garden on the arms of two aides. "Shall we shut down the bazaar?'' shouted the crowd. "Wait." answered Ayatollah Mohammed.

In his suburban palace north of Teheran, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, occupant of Iran's jeweled Peacock Throne, listened to the somber reports of his people's wrath. The blatant rigging of Iran's latest parliamentary elections was too much, and the Shah had to act. Scarcely had the roar of the mob in Ayatollah Mohammed's garden died away when the Shah last week accepted the resignation of Premier Manouchehr Eghbal. whose conservative Nationalist Party had just scored an unbelievably lopsided election victory. Three days later, with the crowd still unappeased, the Shah made a more drastic concession. "It seems." he proclaimed, "that the interest of the nation requires the mass resignation of all Deputies in order that new elections may take place." Dutifully, the newly elected members of Iran's 200-man Majlis fell in line, renounced their seats.

Trouble is nothing new in Iran--or for Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. In his 19 years on the throne, Iran's Shah has been shot once, chased into exile once, and has seen his country occupied by foreign powers. But that corrupt elections--which have been standard through Iran's modern history--could produce a popular explosion told of a new sense of power, and new discontent, among the country's swelling city masses. It was also a tribute to the ceaseless campaign of radio abuse Soviet Russia has lately showered on its southern neighbor. Moscow is doing everything it can to topple the Shah.

With its warm-water ports on the Persian Gulf, Iran has been a target of Russian imperialism since the days of Peter the Great. Its attraction for the Communists in the Kremlin is even greater than it ever was for the Czars. The world's fourth largest exporter of oil, Iran, as a member of CENTO (formerly the Baghdad Pact,), is an essential link in the defensive tier along Russia's southern border. The U.S. has poured more than $800 million into Iran since World War II. By bringing Iran under its influence, Russia would knock out the last anti-Communist alliance in the vast area between Western Europe and the Far East, and would acquire a land bridge to the troubled Arab world. Should the Shah lose his fight for his dynasty and his nation, the Soviets would at last be free to dominate the Middle East.

Straight from Persepolis. The man who stands between the West and such an alarming prospect is one of the few remaining monarchs who is more than merely decorative. At 41, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, Shahanshah (King of Kings) of Iran, is undisputed boss of his nation. "His Imperial Majesty is above everything," a Teheran newspaper recently explained to its readers. "Constitutionally. he can appoint or dismiss a Premier as he sees fit. He can also dissolve parliament if he so chooses. He decides on which projects his country needs, bills that should be presented for passage by the legislature, and on the conduct generally of home and foreign policy."

A trim, broad-shouldered man, the Shah walks with the easy grace of the trained athlete and soldier, shows aware ness of his power with every toss of his silvery royal head. Though he is only the second ruler in the Pahlevi dynasty--which dates from 1926--his profile might have been lifted straight from one of the bas-reliefs in the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis that Alexander conquered. If the Shah has little sense of humor and a prevalent cast of melancholy, it is perhaps because his life has been a sobering affair.

Everyone Rises. The Shah's father, known to his subjects as Reza Shah, was an old-style, absolute monarch who rose from noncom to colonel to King, overthrowing Iran's slack-chinned, 130-year-old Qajar dynasty by force of arms. A wiry, hot-tempered martinet, the old Shah set out to manhandle Iran into the mod ern world, and he did not mind machine-gunning obstreperous peasants to do it. He abolished the veil, and when a Moslem imam criticized the Queen for not wearing one, roared up to the mosque in a convoy of armored cars, marched in, and kicked the priest in the stomach.

From the time Mohammed was a toddler, the old Shah paraded him about in gold-incrusted uniforms complete with shako, preaching dreams of dynasty and a rejuvenated Iran. "What is the use of leading a life of shame?" Shah Mohammed says today, recalling his father's struggles. "Our army was composed of a number of woodcutters and egg sellers. Civil servants' salaries were paid in bricks instead of money. Whenever the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to give a banquet, it had to send someone to the bazaar to borrow 100 tomans ($172)."

To prepare young Mohammed for power, Reza Shah relentlessly pushed him into the "manly sports," in 1931 abruptly packed him off (aboard a Russian cruiser) to La Rosee school in Switzerland. A U.S. schoolmate recalls that the experience was something of a shock all around. Striding into the school lounge, the young prince announced: "When I enter a room, everyone rises." His fellow students merely stared at him in polite amazement. In time, Mohammed won a kind of plebiscite from them by getting himself elected captain of the school soccer team.

Back to Barracks. When Mohammed finally returned home, an attractive, smiling young man smartly clad in European clothes, Reza Shah took one disgusted look and slapped him back in uniform at the local military academy. His smiles gone, Mohammed went back to following Reza Shah to reviews and parades, and in 1939 just as obediently trekked off to Egypt and brought back the bride his father had selected, the pretty Princess Faw-zia, sister of King Farouk.

In wartime 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union, seeking a supply bridge, suddenly occupied Iran, dividing it in two. Only then did Mohammed escape his father's shadow. Suspecting the old Shah of German sympathies, the Allies shipped him off to bitter exile in South Africa (where he died in 1944) and propped 21-year-old Mohammed on the Peacock Throne. When Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin chose Teheran as the site of their 1943 meeting, they did not even bother to let Mohammed know they were coming.

On the Way. The Shah finally got his country back in 1946 and boldly sent troops into Azerbaijan, Iran's northernmost province, to throw out a puppet regime the Soviets had left behind. Three years later, he came within a hair's breadth of death at the hands of a leftist fanatic who opened fire with a pistol as the Shah was handing out diplomas at Teheran University. Three shots drilled the Shah's hat, another creased his lip and right cheek and, as he dived to the ground, a fifth hit him in the left shoulder. Bodyguards riddled the would-be assassin, and the Shah next day grimly returned from the hospital to the throne, declaring: "My will is unrelenting."

He had not only political problems but domestic ones. Though his father sired four daughters and seven sons, the Shah still has no male heir to his throne. In 1948, after she had borne him one daughter, he divorced Egypt's Fawzia and three years later married the handsome half-German, half-Iranian Soraya. Despite Soraya's famed fiery temper, it was with regret that the Shah divorced her in 1958, apparently convinced that she was barren --a charge that makes Soraya angry.

For a time the Shah retired to the com pany of other women, the glow of fine French champagne and the stimulus of high-stakes poker games with cronies at Saadabad Palace, where he glumly lost a reported 10 million rials ($130,000). Late last year, after his companions had searched far and wide for someone who met the royal standards, the Shah struck up a third match with 21-year-old Farah Diba, a pert Iranian art student in Paris who, after royal treatment by Dior, Revillon and Carita, easily equaled his first two wives in comely poise. Soon after their marriage, Farah Diba announced that a child was on the way. On the assumption that the baby will be the long-awaited heir, the Shah reportedly has already decided to name him Cyrus--after ancient Persia's Cyrus the Great. The baby is due in late October, and the Shah plans gala celebrations early next year for the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus' empire. which once stretched from the Indus to the shores of Greece.

Dry Domain. Like his father, the Shah longs to impart grandeur to his dynasty. But he has another objective more realistic and admirable: to convert Iran into a healthy and stable modern nation. It has an awfully long way to go. Still vivid in the Shah's mind is the reaction of Iran's comfort-loving old-line politicians when he first confided his goal to them in 1942. "Sixteen Majlis Deputies," he recalls, "met with me in one of the rooms of this palace to confer about political affairs of the day. I told them that we must establish social justice in this country and added, 'It is not fair that a number of people should be at a loss what to do with their wealth, while a number die of hunger.' Next day they said, 'The Shah has developed revolutionary ideas.' "

In many ways Iran is a brown, unpromising ground for an economic and social revolution, 20th century style. A sprawl ing country that would stretch from Spain to Poland and from England to Italy, Iran is mostly arid plateau, where even under maximum irrigation a full 50% of the land would remain near-desert. Iranians all agree that life would be hopeless without the mountains: the Elburz range breaking the frosty blasts from the Russian north, the Zagros range towering over the Iraqi border to the east. On the mountain slopes the inhabitants of Iran's jam-packed cities find their vacation ground, and the migrant tribes their winter herding. More important, the snow-capped peaks send down the trickle of water that keeps the valley towns alive.

Some of Iran's barrenness stems from its history. Ever since the decline of the ancient Persian empire,-it has been a crossroads nation--sacked bloodily by Alexander, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. (One of Persia's last forays as conqueror was a 1739 raid on India, when troops pilfered from Delhi the emerald-incrusted throne on which the Shah now sits on cer emonial occasions.) Centuries ago, the average Persian retreated to his ridge-locked valley, where the keeper of the ritual hot baths still gets a cut of the villagers' crops, and where slim youths still build and maintain the tiled-roofed qanats that tunnel water as far as 40 miles from the nearest mountain well. Even yet, the Iranian economy remains primitive enough that a whole family can make a living off a single walnut tree. In the rug shops of Tabriz, tiny children work at the looms all day for 20^ or less. And the country's exports remain highly selective: choice caviar from the lightly salted Caspian Sea, sheep intestine for sausage casing, 300 tons of dried rose petals--and 350 million barrels of oil a year.

Reassuring Words. Even the oil--which Britain's Anglo-Persian Co. first began to exploit in 1909--long brought little to Iran but a more flagrant gap between rich and poor.

The man who capitalized. on the oil-brought discontent is still widely revered in Iran. Mohammed Mossadegh, a wealthy landowner, started with no coherent platform except blind xenophobia and the understandable conviction that the British payment of four gold shillings a ton, plus a sum equal to about 20% of company dividends, was far too little for the right to exploit Iran's major resource. In 29 swirling months beginning in 1951, Mossadegh parlayed these prejudices into the premiership of Iran. When the Shah tried to curb him, worried both by Mossadegh's street popularity and the fact that his defiant policies threatened to land Iran in bankruptcy, the weepy little Premier turned to the Communist-led city mob and, in effect, replaced his royal master as ruler of Iran.

The Shah bided his time until August 1953, then gave his backstairs blessing to a coup against Mossadegh. The first reports to reach the Shah at a Caspian resort were that the coup had failed. At the controls of his own twin-engined Beechcraft D185, the Shah fled Iran accompanied only by Soraya, the royal gamekeeper and Air Force Colonel Mohammed Khatemi (now commanding general of the Iranian Air Force and husband of the Shah's sister. Princess Fatemeh). Six days later, after holing up in Rome (where Allen Dulles, boss of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, just happened to be vacationing), the Shah realized that the coup was a success and flew home to a tumultuous wel come in Teheran.

Atonement. Perhaps as partial atonement for his flight, the Shah subsequently married his daughter, Princess Shahnaz. to the son of the general who led the coup. As a more permanent atonement, the Shah has tried conscientiously ever since to provide Iran, against uphill odds, with the prerequisites of stability.

It required stout nerves in this young ruler to defy the bluff and threat of his northern neighbor. Sometimes the Shah, envious of the way the great powers wooed the neutralist Nasser, complained that he was not getting enough Western help. In one dangerous foray into the perilous waters of neutralism, the Shah, despite Iran's membership in the Baghdad Pact, made a red-carpet tour of Moscow and later dangled in front of the Kremlin the hint that he might be willing to sign a nonaggression treaty. Last year he abruptly called the whole deal off. Ever since, the Russians have ranked him with West Germany's Konrad Adenauer as a specially loathsome "cold-war criminal." Powerful Persian-language stations in Stalinabad, Baku, Tashkent and Yerevan blast away at him daily. "Such puppets as Mohammed Reza Shah ought to be dumped in the garbage bin. The regime must be overthrown." proclaimed the self-styled "National Voice of Iran" from near Soviet Baku last week. At the in frequent wattle villages along Iran's bleak, mine-infested 1000-mile frontier with Russia, batteries of Soviet loudspeakers steadily blare out anti-Shah propaganda. The ceaseless attacks from Moscow-repeated in whispers in every Iranian bazaar--make it all the more imperative for the Shah's reforms to succeed. Heart of his program is a seven-year economic-development scheme called Operation Plan, backed both by U.S. aid and the revenues from Iran's oil--which is now produced and marketed by a four-nation (Britain, U.S., France, The Netherlands), consortium in partnership with the Iranian government. Virtually the only Iranian government agency bossed by bright young men. Operation Plan will have spent $1.2 billion by the time it is officially due to wind up in 1962. It has already done much to change the somber face of Iran.

Teheran streets, which only a few years ago were the preserve of donkeys and camels, today are clogged by 100,000 automobiles. On the northern outskirts of the city, showplace villas, some with kidney-shaped swimming pools and lush green lawns as trim as pile carpets, dot the cool foothills of 18,600-ft. Mount Demavend ("Bride of the Gods"). Cement mixers growl at the sites of a new 2O-story hotel and the nearly finished 15-story headquarters of the National Iranian Oil Co. Auditoriums, stadiums and university buildings add relieving notes to what was once peripheral wasteland. A jeep assembly plant spews out new models, soon to be shod by an Iranian Goodrich factory.

Nor is growth confined to Teheran, an unhandsome city.*At Azna, near unexploited iron-ore deposits, work is soon to start on that final modern symbol of sovereignty, a $165 million steel plant to be built by a 'combine including West Germany's Krupp. In the southern city of Shiraz, where a new hotel is going up, a natural-gas pipeline is burrowing into town to provide cheap fuel both for domestic use and the burgeoning textile industry. Most ambitious project of all is a land-reclamation scheme in southwest Khuzistan province, near the rich oilfields on the Persian Gulf, where a corporation bossed by former TV A Chief David Lilienthal is building a 620-ft. dam across the Ab-i-Diz River to furnish power and irrigation to 160 villages scattered over 375,000 acres. Lilienthal hopes to restore the arid province to the fertility it enjoyed in the days when, as he is fond of noting, "the horses on the friezes of Persepolis were fattened on Khuzistan grain."

The Shadow of Nuri Said. In making over his country, the Shah has not hesitated to spend his own private fortune as freely as public funds. In the past nine years, he has distributed 350,000 acres of crown land to the peasants who till it, using the low, interest-free payments for the plots to finance seed, fertilizer and machinery costs for the new owners. And this is only the beginning: the Shah's aides have stern orders to cut through red tape and give away within 18 months the rest of the 1,400,000 acres that old Reza Shah so lustily acquired only a generation ago. With the $6.000.000 annual income of his Pahlevi Foundation, the Shah supports projects ranging from 40 orphanages to the education of Iranian students abroad and winter fuel for needy farmers.

Too much of Iran's money has stuck on hands along the way. Too much more of it has gone into what technicians call infrastructure, the little noticed underpinnings such as roads and education (since 1953, school enrollment in Iran has been boosted from 427.000 to 1,381,000) on which a modern economy is raised. The Shah's admirers, though conceding that this makes economic sense, cannot quite shake off the ominous shadow of Iraq's late Strongman Nuri asSaid, who built the finest infrastructure in the Middle East and lost his head in a bloody revolution. Even the enthusiastic Lilienthal admits that irrigating Khuzistan may take "a generation." The question is whether the Shah can count on his miserable people forbearing that long.

Occupation Complex. History has left some psychological scars on the Shah's 20 million subjects. After centuries of conquest, Iran has a kind of occupation complex, vividly exemplified by a tenet of its Shi'ite sect of Islam, which holds that a man may legitimately disavow his religion in time of danger. ''Deep in the Iranian mind," says one Middle East expert, "lies the conviction that nothing ever happens in Iran except by the desire of a foreign power." Many of the middle-class Teheran intellectuals and business men who most heatedly denounced the recent election rigging had not even bothered to vote. Scoffed one educated Teherani: "That's for coolies." They also knew it was only a contest between two men outdoing each other in pledged subservience to the Shah. And what hangs most ominously over all Iranian life, too often at court as well as in business life, is the ingrained Iranian tradition of corruption and favoritism, casually explained away by the Persian saying: "Let no man of rank be a tree without fruit.''

Despite the Shah's best intentions, a shocking percentage of Iran's economic-development money turns into "fruit'' distributed at every level of officialdom. One foreign entrepreneur, after striking a bargain for some surplus airplane parts originally given to the Iranian Air Force by the U.S., resignedly paid off the colonels concerned only to have his loaded trucks held up at the gate by a young captain of the guard who inquired with pointed effect, "Don't you think captains are as good as colonels?" "They aren't even subtle about it," says one prosperous contractor. "We all regard it as merely part of the deal. Frequently, we negotiate to come to terms. But dealing with royalty, for example, remains pretty much of a command performance." Most notable of Iran's royal tycoons: the Shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, who has already made two husbands wealthy.

Sporadically fired with determination to stamp out dishonesty in government, the Shah has fired 4,000 bureaucrats for corruption within a year, not long ago arrested 150 army officers on the same charge and put several colonels in jail. Corruption is in the air; but it also exists because the hard-working Shah tries to run the government all by himself. His few trusted aides are mostly officers of Iran's 200,000-man army, which he relies on to keep him in power and hence pampers. As a result, generals abound, and every other automobile in Teheran seems to bear the yellow and white plates that denote an army car. Among civilian officials. the Shah depends on retainers like Eghbal. who once told the Majlis: "I am not interested in your criticism and your complaints. You may say whatever you like -- I do not care. I do not depend on your votes. The Shahanshah ordered me to serve, and I am his servant."

The III -Served Prince. Such faithful service is more apt to be fawning than effective or reliable. Last month, on a visit to the Abadan refineries on the Per sian Gulf, Farah Diba demanded to see the living conditions inside one of the worker's homes and, when she had, burst into tears. Solicitously, the official who was guiding her asked "to be allowed" to make a contribution to the families on the block. Ostentatiously, he collected identity cards, jotted down names -- and, as Farah Diba drove away, tore up the list and tossed it into the gutter.

The cost of that kind of officialdom could be seen in the recent elections. The Shah originally intended the elections as a way of cleaning out some of parliament's more notorious rascals. He personally approved the slates of candidates of the only two organized parties in the race, and seems to have hoped for a fair fight. But when a few independent candidates launched lively anti-Nationalist campaigns, Premier Eghbal and his cronies panicked.

The resulting fraud was too blatant to be disguised. Cycling rapidly past a polling booth in downtown Teheran, one citizen let fall a pouch full of documents that included 40 personal-identity cards to be used in fraudulent voting. When the government ticket in one rural district seemed sure to lose, election officials simply stayed home "ill."

The Perils of Ambition. By some Western diplomats, the Shah is rated as "the most intelligent ruler in the Middle East" -- and he showed his sensitivity to his country's mood by his quick reaction last week to the election scandal. But whether he has done enough is less clear. The caretaker Premier he chose to replace the hapless Eghbal, ex-Minister of Mines and Industries Jaffar Sharif-Imami, 50, is an honest but uninspiring choice. His Cabinet gave no voice to the independent feeling that ran so high during the elections. More disturbing are the indications that the Shah, in a moment of peril, is veering back toward the dangerous game of trying to pacify the Russians. As one of his first official acts, Sharif-Imami ended the anti-Soviet radio broadcasts with which Iran has countered the Russian diatribes. In response to a planted press-conference question on the possibilities of a "new phase" in Soviet-Iranian relations, the Shah pointedly declared that Iran's foreign policy is based on "membership in the United Nations and friendship for all neighbors."

Like all great tasks, the one which Mohammed Reza Pahlevi has set for himself involves great hazards. He has committed himself not just to a holding action for feudalism but to the evolution of a mod ern state. Sooner or later, the Shah must find trustworthy and independent subordinates to whom he can delegate authority and must create responsible institutions to close the gap between the court and the people. For, as last week's election fiasco showed, Iran can no longer be governed by the simple kingly fiat: "I have given orders. Let them be carried out."

-*The nation changed its name officially in 1935 from Persia to Iran, a variation of the word Aryan, one of its principal peoples. This was done in part to point up the ethnic contrast with its Semitic neighbors. Though Moslem, Iran is not Arab, a fact that has saved it from the Nasser-sponsored troubles that have rocked the rest of the Middle East. -Far more beautiful: the ancient tiled mosque city of Isfahan to the south, which in the 16th century reign of Shah Abbas was a greater city than Elizabethan London.

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