Word: shahs
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Drawing on oil income that now has reached $2 billion, the Shah has built modern roads, communications facilities and dams. He has bartered natural gas for a Soviet steel plant and a Rumanian tractor factory, and used hard currency to buy more sophisticated Western technology. U.S. and European investment has built an auto-assembly works, an aluminum plant and a petrochemical complex. Though two-thirds of the country's 30 million people still live in villages, Teheran, the capital, has become a bustling city of 3,000,000, with traffic even scarier than Tokyo...
Democracy is less advanced. Iran has political parties and elections, but the Shah appoints half the members of the Senate and makes all the important decisions. The press is firmly controlled, and criticism of the Shah is wholly forbidden. For the celebrations, the army clamped tight security around a 60-mile circumference of the tent city and, by ironic coincidence, arrested exactly 2,500 potential troublemakers. Iran's security police, SAVAK, tracked each VIP electronically via a small radio transmitter carried by an aide of the guest...
...Regrets were sent by President Nixon (who dispatched Spiro Agnew instead), Queen Elizabeth II (who was represented by Prince Philip and Princess Anne) and, in the unkindest cut of all, French President Georges Pompidou, who sent Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas. What was particularly grating was the fact that the Shah had given the affair such a heavily French accent. Taking note of this, Pompidou is reported by a Western diplomat to have said: "If I did go, they would probably make me the headwaiter...
Despite the fact that the Shah strictly followed the rules of protocol laid down at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, some guests were miffed. When Kai-Ewe von Hassel, president of West Germany's Bundestag, was sent to represent (Federal President Gustav Heinemann, protocol decreed that he be shifted to a hotel and his tent assigned to the higher-ranking Princess Bilgis of Afghanistan. Von Hassel was not happy...
Nonetheless, considering the potential for disaster, the festivities went off remarkably smoothly. They began officially when the Shah visited the unadorned stone tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, 50 miles from Persepolis. "O Cyrus, great king, king of kings, Achaemenian king, king of the land of rlran," the Shah intoned, "I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself and from my nation. Rest in peace, for we are awake and we will always stay awake...