FROM THE PALACE TO PRISON
Fereydoun “Fred” Nasseri was a cabinet minister in the Shah’s government. He negotiated with foreign companies that wanted to invest
in the oil-rich country. His name can be found on the list of Iranian delegates to United Nations treaty discussions, along with American
delegates led by Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford.
“I was in charge of the budget and planning organization of Iran,” he says.
“Before that I was a diplomat in Washington, D.C. I was responsible for signing
international agreements. I did many of these agreements, with the United States,
with India, with the Philippines. I met the leaders of the countries, like Ferdinand
Marcos. I was very active in international life.”
The Nasseri family enjoyed all the trappings of the royal life. They resided in a
20,000-square-foot mansion. They rode in chauffeured limousines. Both sons went
off to boarding school in England.
Shahrzad Nasseri Gardner was a child then, but she has vivid memories of life in
Iran.
“I remember having great times,” she says. “We had a staff of people. Our house
was across from the palace of the Shah of Iran. I had a fulltime nanny. We had a
chef. I had a driver that took me to school. I went to a French school in Iran.”
But in the 1970s, anti-Shah and anti-West sentiment was building in the coun-try
Top: The coronation ceremony for Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi and Empress Farah in October 1967. Pahlavi,
the last Shah of Iran, ruled from 1941 to 1979.
Bottom: The Nasseri family celebrates Shahrzad’s
4th birthday at home in Tehran in 1975.
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of approximately 40 million. From Iraq, exiled Islamic fundamentalist cleric
Ayatollah Khomini, who had led a previous failed uprising, had been ramping up
his rhetoric with the intent of overthrowing the monarchy and undoing reforms
that saw women unveiled, educated, holding jobs, voting, and driving.
In “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran,”
author Andrew Scott Cooper describes how the country erupted in flames and
bloodshed that rapidly escalated. “Death to the Shah” became the street chant of
the opposition.
As the chaos worsened, Pat and the three children fled to a flat in England.
Fred remained behind, working, even as violence shut down the country and
escalated unchecked to a point of no return.
By January 1979, the imperial government collapsed. The Shah and Queen
Farah left the country. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to declare an
Islamic republic, repressing all political groups and individuals not under control
of his ruling council, and taking extreme, brutal measures to suppress Western
influence.
“In February and March 1979, they were hanging people in the street,” Fred says.
Top government officials, high-ranking military leaders, the country’s intel-lectuals,
even some of the very ones who had aided in elevating Khomeini were
executed. Thousands more were imprisoned.
“All of us who were working with the government of the Shah, they put us under
house arrest,” Fred says. “A few months later they took me to prison. They tortured
me. They asked me crazy questions. ‘What did Henry Kissinger tell you? You were
a spy. You were helping the Americans.’ They were asking why I brought all these
spies to Iran. They weren’t spies. The guy who comes to work for Bell Helicopter,
the guy who comes to work for Boeing or General Motors, these were not spies.
Everyone is not a spy. The CIA cannot afford to hire everybody in America to
work for them.”
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