Other Political Prisoners
Monotony was broken—especially in the mid-1930s—by the sudden appearance of fallen dignitaries. Ovanessian writes that Qasr inmates were the first to feel the shifts in national politics:
dignitaries would arrive at all hours of the night, sometimes after having spent the same evening playing cards with the royal family.[70]
Seven prominent figures passed through Qasr before meeting their deaths in the Central Jail: Timurtash and Firuz Mirza, two of the triumvirate who had reformed the judicial system; Abdul-Hossein Diba, Timurtash's confidant and the uncle of the future empress Farah Diba; Sardar As'ad, a Bakhtiyari leader and war minister; Khan Baba As'adi, his brother; Sowlat al-Dowleh, the Qashqayi chief; and last, but not least, Mohammad Forrokhi-Yazdi, a well-known poet and the editor of Tofan (Storm) who was arrested after visiting Moscow and publishing in the émigré communist paper Peykar (Struggle). Forrokhi-Yazdi was murdered probably because he satirized the marriage of the crown prince to Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Expecting a similar fate, Davar, the other member of the triumvirate, committed suicide.
These murders were committed in the Central Jail rather than in Qasr to avoid prison unrest. They were carried out by Lieutenant "Doctor" Ahmadi, a self-taught pharmacist promoted through the ranks and given a crash course on nursing. It was said—probably apocryphally—that he had received his promotion as compensation for having inadvertently eaten poisoned stew intended for one of the prisoners.
Two other national figures—Sayyed Hassan Modarres, the chief cleric in parliament, and Shaykh Khaz'al, the main Arab leader in Khuzestan—were both strangled after spending years in internal exile. To discredit all these dignitaries, the regime accused them of bribery and embezzlement. Such smears easily stuck as the public tended to view the elite as inherently venal and financially corrupt. The regime did not try to extract public confessions from them. Financial accusations were deemed more than adequate.
While in prison, Timurtash and Firuz Mirza were constantly ridiculed for having collaborated with Reza Shah and having built Qasr. Firuz Mirza wrote in his Prison Memoirs —not pub-
lished until 1986—that he was proud of his model prison and was tempted to remind his fellow inmates of the old dungeons and their "horrendous filth."[71] Nevertheless, he was so "ashamed" of being incarcerated in the same prison as "pickpockets and petty crooks" that he forbade his children to visit him. After watching Moharram flagellations in the courtyard, he commented that it was a pity the regime had not diverted such "deep and genuine energies" into creating a strong modern nation-state. He found Shi'ism to be closer to Christianity than to Sunni Islam with its "passive fatalism." Firuz Mirza filled his cell—which enjoyed a skyline view of Tehran—with carpets and his private library. There he composed his memoirs, wrote the history of legal reform, and translated Oscar Wilde's De Profundis —this probably suited his self-pity and the pain of misplaced affection.
Timurtash was needled even more. Pishevari writes that Timurtash was disliked because of his role in the execution of the Jangali leaders, his drafting of the 1931 law, and his constant self-pity, weeping, and childlike behavior.[72] He pleaded with the guards to shoot some harmless owls nesting in the prison courtyard on the grounds that they were bringing him bad luck. The guards could not oblige; they were not permitted to bring guns into the prison compound. According to legend, the master builder of the Tower of London had been one of its first inmates. With Qasr this was no legend.
Three lesser figures were executed for plotting a coup: Colonel Fouladin, the governor of Azerbaijan; Samuel Haim, the Jewish Majles deputy; and Alimardan Khan, a Bakhtiyari rebel leader. Fouladin insisted on giving the order to fire at his own execution. Haim, who spent seven years in prison refusing to answer questions about Fouladin, devoted his last hour to giving Eftekhari his daily French lesson. Alimardan Khan went cheerfully to the firing squad, refusing a blindfold and distributing his possessions to his fellow prisoners. Ovanessian writes that he published his prison memoirs in part to "keep alive the memory of such courageous figures as Alimardan Khan"—even
though he came from the upper class.[73] Pishevari contrasts their fortitude with the panic that broke out among the convicted spies as they approached the gallows.[74]
Many other dignitaries spent time in Qasr: Amir Mojahed and Manoucher As'ad, two other Bakhtiyari leaders; Nasser Khan, a Qashqayi chief; Dabir Azam Bahrami, a court minister; Qavam Shirazi, the Shah's future son-in-law; Moshir Homayun, the former mayor of Tehran; Abu-Nasr Azod, a wealthy Qajar landlord who had sent a letter critical of the Shah to a French newspaper; Generals Jahanbani and Shahybani; Amir Khosrow Khan, the chief of the Kalhor tribe from western Iran; Salar Zafar Sanjabi and Sardar Rashid Ardalan, two Kurdish chiefs (the latter spent eleven years in Qasr); Mirza Taher Tunekaboni, a cleric on the Supreme Court; Movarrekh al-Saltaneh Sephar, a senior bureaucrat who fell victim to typhus while in prison; Zaka al-Dawleh Ghaffari, a law professor who had questioned the financial wisdom of building the Trans-Iranian Railway; Abdul-Qadir Moshkinfam, a maverick journalist who changed his name to Azad (Free) while in prison; and Ali Dashti, a journalist who had started his political career by singing loud praises for Reza Shah.
Dashti was in Qasr for only a few months. Suffering from acute insomnia, he was transferred to a mental asylum where he translated Le Bon's Sociology and composed his Prison Days, which was not published until 1948. Prison Days contains little on prison life but much on fate, love, death, suicide, divine providence, Christ, and Thomas Jefferson. It belongs less to the genre of modern prison literature than to that of medieval courtiers bemoaning their unfair fate. Dashti describes prison as a "cemetery," chastises Europe for inventing such horrors, and depicts incarceration as "torture worse than death."[75] Ovanessian comments that prisoners of Dashti's ilk enjoyed many privileges in Qasr, including private rooms, opium pipes, and personal servants—common criminals who cleaned out their cells and did their daily chores.[76]
In addition to these dignitaries, a colorful array of person-
alities passed through Qasr. They included Mr. Lapidus, a wealthy Polish businessman who often bribed his way out to fancy restaurants; "Alexander," a White Russian officer who entertained cellmates with artful portraits; and Sayyed Farhad, a bandit who made a rare escape from Qasr—when gendarmes took his eighty-year-old father hostage, the old man told them he could produce for the Shah another Sayyed Farhad if given nine months of freedom.[77] At one time, the cells housed a group of "simple peasants" from Azerbaijan who had dreamed of an unnamed figure heralding the dawn of freedom. The communists jested that these villagers had invented a new form of high treason—subversive dreams.[78]
Some remained in Qasr until 1941. These included Yousef "The Armenian" (in fact, he was Assyrian), a bandit who bribed the guards to smuggle in his wife for overnight visits; Matous Melikian, the octogenarian principal of the Armenian high school who had protested the closing of his teaching establishment; Ahmad Ispahani, a young literary friend of the famous Nazem Hekmat of Turkey (Ispahani had been caught crossing the border into Iran); Ruhollah Kazemzadeh, an air force pilot who had tried to escape abroad in his airplane; and eight young officers accused of forming a fascist organization. Their leader, Lieutenant Mohsen Jahansouz, was a Beirut-educated aristocrat who had translated Hitler's Mein Kampf . Suspected of plotting to assassinate the Shah, Jahansouz was deprived of sleep, subjected to the qapani, and then executed.[79] His seven associates remained in Qasr; two of them soon converted to Marxism.
For the veteran communists, however, by far the most interesting of all the newcomers were a group of young Marxists known as the Fifty-three. They were to form the nucleus of the future Tudeh party. Ovanessian reports that their arrest struck Qasr like a lightning bolt. "We were all eager," he writes, "to see, talk to, and get to know these famous newcomers."[80] Pishevari recounts that by the mid-1930s the communist komun had grown gloomy: few radicals were coming in, and the state
appeared to have the whole country in its tight grip. "We had concluded Iran was either dead or in deep sleep. The arrival of the Fifty-three shook us out of our gloom."[81]