Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [3]
Although my father had been tortured so badly by the prison guards that he had lost all of his teeth and his toenails were deformed, the many months he spent in solitary confinement had made him only more resilient and determined. The shah’s torturers crushed the Tudeh Party, but not my father. After his release, he was just as large a figure to his friends and relatives as he’d been before. As far as I could tell, he enjoyed this role. He was an impressive man, with large, beautiful eyes and full lips. He had dropped out of high school, but he knew hundreds of classic Persian poems by heart and spoke like a university-educated orator. He had tried to shape himself after the heroes of Soviet socialist realist novels: enigmatic proletarian revolutionaries who could have been successful in any profession, but instead chose to dedicate their lives to the ideals of the communist revolution. Helping the helpless and fighting for a better future for Iran had become part of my father’s identity.
As my father matured, he realized that revolutions and violence couldn’t heal Iran’s historical maladies. Despite the torture he had suffered at the hands of the regime, after he was released from prison, in February 1957, he joined the government of the shah and tried to change the system from within. Through a combination of hard work, charm, and intelligence, he became a high-ranking manager in the Ministry of Industries and Mines and, eventually, the CEO of the government’s biggest construction company. As the CEO, my father made the welfare of the workers and their families his top priority. He helped them with housing, health insurance, and pensions. He proudly said that as a CEO, he was achieving what he’d never accomplished as a union activist.
Despite his hatred of the shah’s dictatorship, my father, and many other young Iranians of his generation, supported the monarch’s efforts to modernize the country. During the two decades that my father worked for the government, new industries were developed, many Iranian students were educated in the West, and Iranian arts and culture were heavily influenced by Europe and America. The shah’s Western allies, especially the United States, backed this rush to modernity, as well as the tyrannical rule that came with it. In many ways, the shah was the perfect partner for the West. He supplied Western nations with cheap crude oil and bought their most expensive high-tech military equipment for his ever-expanding army. The shah also allowed the United States to spy on Iran’s northern neighbor, the Soviet Union.
Many traditional and religious Iranians were alienated by this process of rash modernization. Even as a child, I could see that many of my relatives who lived in the poorer, more religious parts of the country held a grudge against my family because of my father’s position in the shah’s regime. They hated the fact that we lived in a big house and had a color television (a big deal in 1970s Iran), and they disapproved of our choices: my sister and mother refused to pray or wear the veil, and my father and his friends went through a few bottles of imported Scotch during their weekly poker games.
Even though the shah’s intelligence agents suppressed his critics, the gap between the religious masses and the shah’s pro-Western dictatorship gradually widened, and eventually this triggered an anti-Western, fundamentalist movement led by a high-ranking Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Between 1965 and 1978, Khomeini lived in exile in neighboring Iraq, and from there, he communicated with his followers through photocopied leaflets and