Farah Diba Pahlavi has spent almost thirty years in exile but she cannot forget the night of 23rd March 1980 when an Evergreen Airlines DC9 in which she was travelling stopped over in the Azores. Officially it was a refuelling stop but the aircraft was held up for several hours on the tarmac without permission to take off. ‘It was an anxious moment,’ the last Empress of Persia tells Pública during a rare interview by e-mail.

We have to go back in time to understand what actually happened at Lajes Air Force Base, and which could have changed the course of history. Farah Diba and her husband, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been forced to leave Panama and they should have gone on to Cairo where President Anwar Sadat had renewed his offer of refuge. They had been fleeing for over a year. Several doors had been closed to them after Ayatollah Khomeini had overthrown the monarchy.

Egypt had been the first stop in their exile on 16th January 1979 when the imperial couple arrived in Aswan. But on the 22nd, Farah Diba and the “king of kings”, who was suffering from terminal lymphoma, “a well-guarded secret since 1974,” were already on their way to Morocco at the invitation of King Hassan II. It was whilst they were staying at a luxury villa in Marrakech that on 11th February Radio Tehran broadcast the news most dreaded by the Shah: that “the Revolution had won and the bastion of the dictatorship had capitulated.”

In her Memoirs the Shahbanu (empress) confesses: “For a few moments I thought we had won. In my view we were the good ones whilst they were the bastions of horror. Unfortunately it was they who had won and who had overthrown the last government (of Chapour Bakhtiar) nominated by my husband.” the Shah, who had refused the requests of the officers of his personal staff to shoot down the plane carrying Khomeini from Paris to the future Islamic Republic, “remained silent for some time.” Their stay in Morocco, where their children who had joined them from the United States, became threatened when the Iranian masses began to demand the return of the Emperor to be tried, and perhaps to be summarily executed. This had already happened to hundreds of Army officers of the previous regime. On 14th February, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was temporarily occupied by Revolutionary Guards. A French secret service emissary arrived at King Hassan’s Palace in Rabat to warn that Khomeini had ordered the kidnapping of members of the Moroccan royal family in exchange for his guests.

Although King Hassan maintained his solidarity, Farah Diba understood the seriousness of the situation. “It was urgent to find another place of exile,” she states in her autobiography, but “everybody turned their backs on us”. France had refused, stating that it could not guarantee the safety of the emperors who had fallen on hard times. The same happened with Switzerland and Monaco. Mexico and Canada didn’t reply. The US said, “later, perhaps.” Margaret Thatcher, who had promised support if she won the elections, changed her mind when she became prime minister because, “it would be bad for British interests.”

From Bahamas to Mexico