How could Zia refuse the Shahanshah?
This was almost a year and a half before the hanging of Bhutto. There was ample time for the Shah to make efforts for his release. And there is no denying the fact that the Shah did make strenuous efforts but then why did he fail? In the darkness of the death cell, it eventually dawned on Bhutto that the Shah was not sincere in securing his release
On 5 July 1977, the Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was toppled in a military coup by General Zia ul Haq. Did he sense the coming coup? Yes, he did, several weeks before it took place. He suspected the Americans to be behind it, whom he charged were funding the opposition that was waging a protest movement to bring him down. To register his displeasure to the Americans, he did not send his foreign minister to the annual meeting of the US-sponsored CENTO alliance in Tehran.
Almost a fortnight before the coup, while on his way back to Pakistan from Kuwait, he stopped in Tehran and complained to the Shah, whom he looked upon as a bridge to the US, that the American diplomats in Islamabad were hand in glove with certain members of the opposition, but added that he “regretted his tirade against Washington and that he was anxious to make it up to the USA by whatever means possible.” A new work by Alex Vatanka quoting the Shah’s chief courtier Asadollah Alam from the latter’s memoirs, “Shah and I” states that the “Shah agreed Bhutto’s days were numbered.” Bhutto could not read Shah’s mind then but after reflecting on the past events in his jail cell, he had realised that the “Shah definitely knew that a coup d’état was about to take place in Pakistan within days and with his approval.”
Among several irritants with the US, the immediate one that hastened the coup was Bhutto’s struggle to procure a nuclear reprocessing plant from France which was to be paid by the Libyan money and which the double-standard Americans opposed tooth and nail while turning a blind eye to the nuclear activities of Israel and South Africa at that time. When the Americans urged the Shah to use his good offices to dissuade Bhutto from the nuclear ambition, he told them, “Suppose I put pressure on Bhutto. What will he say? It seems he is determined to obtain [nuclear] reprocessing plant…Do they really care if your [US] Congress gets mad at them?;” however, as he could not flatly turn down the American cajoling so he peddled them the ‘aircraft-for-nukes’ deal, thinking that Bhutto “would be wise to accept it.” The idea clicked the Americans and thus dashed the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Lahore in August 1976 and offered 100 A-7 fighter aircraft in exchange for dropping the nuclear reprocessing plant deal but Bhutto rejected the offer point-blank to which the US responded by suspending all military and economic assistance to Pakistan.
The nuclear irritant apart, the rumours of a likely coup in Pakistan were rife in Iran for some years before it actually took place. The Pakistani ambassador in Tehran was alarmed when an Iranian general at a social gathering in Tehran ‘jokingly’ enquired, “When the Pakistani generals would once again come to power?,” the ambassador laughed off the “joke” on the spot but seriously took up the issue with General Naimatollah Nasiri, the head of the ace Iranian intelligence agency, SAVAK, which the latter downplayed by saying that anyone “who travelled in Pakistan or followed the news could see there were signs of a military intervention.” The fact of the matter is that the Shah apprehended a coup against Bhutto as early as 1973.
Once the Americans had decided the fate of Bhutto, he had to go, and the Shah could not do much about it, however, he made several efforts to save the life of imprisoned Bhutto. When General Zia requested for financial aid, the Shah demanded the release of Bhutto. Moreover, the Shah publicly threatened to break relations with Pakistan if Bhutto was executed. Before his own downfall in January 1979, one of the two requests that he put to Zia in his last letter was the release of Bhutto. Through the Iranian embassy in Islamabad, he kept nagging Zia for the release and Zia kept telling them that the “Shah’s friend [Bhutto] will be treated in a friendly manner,” which, of course, was a lie. Even Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, who was a close personal friend of Bhutto, wanted Zand-Fard, the Iranian ambassador in Islamabad to deliver a letter to Bhutto in prison, which the ambassador never passed on for fear of breaking the diplomatic protocol. Zia never directly said “No!” to the Iranian pleas because he hoped to benefit from Shah’s proximity to the Americans, who were initially cool towards him after the coup.
While the Shah was making all those noises, did Bhutto really think that the former could be his saviour? Yes, he did! When the Shah was on board his royal aircraft after the farewell luncheon by Zia in Islamabad in February 1978, his Chief of Protocol Amir Aslan Afshar presented him an envelope that contained a letter from Bhutto which was quietly delivered to Afshar during the luncheon by an anonymous person, who claimed to be a Bhutto-buddy. The two-page hand written letter not only rejected all the charges levelled against him by Zia but also pleaded the Shah to save him from his jailor by stating, “I am willing to prove my intention [to Zia ulHaq] by leaving Pakistan and come and live in Iran. I consider Iran my second home. My wife is Iranian. And I have always considered you [the Shah] my friend.” This was almost a year and a half before the hanging of Bhutto. There was ample time for the Shah to make efforts for his release. And there is no denying the fact that the Shah did make strenuous efforts but then why did he fail? In the darkness of the death cell, it eventually dawned on Bhutto that the Shah was not sincere in securing his release otherwise “how could Zia have refused the ‘Shahanshah’—the King of Kings!”