Word: shahs
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Half an hour after the Shah had gone, his departure was announced over Tehran Radio. The news set off an orgy of exultation throughout Iran. In Tehran, people danced in the streets and hugged and kissed one another in joyous abandon. "The Shah is gone! The Shah is gone!" they shouted. They garlanded their windshield wipers with flowers that seemed to dance in the air. They toppled statues of the Shah and his father, and cut his picture from bank notes. Demonstrators and army troops embraced. Red carnations sprouted incongruously from the barrels of soldiers' rifles...
Replacing the Shah's portrait were hundreds of thousands of pictures of the man whose single-minded determination had at last succeeded in bringing down the Shah. The exiled leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, had become both symbol and architect of the Iranian revolution, and presumably was weighing the appropriate moment to return to claim his due. Within hours, virtually every public square and boulevard once named for the Shah had been renamed for Khomeini...
Even Iranians in official positions of power seemed to be relieved and, in fact, often delighted. Employees at the Iranian embassy in Washington issued a statement accusing Iran's ambassador to the U.S., Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's closest adviser, of "conspiring against the interests and will of the Iranian nation," and vowed not to work until he was removed. A similar revolt took place at Iran's United Nations mission in New York City, where diplomats closed down their offices as a "token of solidarity with the Iranian people...
Next day the Bakhtiar government announced that it had fired nine prominent ambassadors from their posts, including U.N. Ambassador Fereydoun Hoveida, and Zahedi, though the latter said he would continue as the Shah's emissary. Not all the demonstrations, unfortunately, were peaceful-or approving. When the Shah's departure was revealed to a group of soldiers in Ahwaz, they poured into the streets, setting fire to cars and shooting wildly at crowds. At least 20 people were killed, 60 wounded...
...Khomeini has drawn a list of priorities for the Islamic nation that he envisions, one item in particular must surely be near the top. He has promised to dismantle the estimated multibillion-dollar financial empire that the Shah and his family have created for themselves. Sources in Tehran last week, evidently now willing to discuss long secret information, disclosed something of the nature of that empire. The royal family and the Pahlavi Foundation, which the Shah created in 1958, operated 205 business firms, banks and factories in Iran. The foundation controls 96 such enterprises; the rest are either fully...