Bahram Aryana

He was born on 17 March 1906 in Tehran^[6] from a noble Georgian mother,^[7] who was the great-granddaughter of King Heraclius II, and from a judge father, Sadr-ed-din.^[6] His name was Hossein Manouchehri, which he would change to Bahram Aryana in 1950 and he was a descendant of Sepahsalar Khalatbari Tonekaboni, the noble Iranian statesman who was the leader of the constitutional revolutionary forces and four time former prime minister of Iran.^[6] Professor Monica M. Ringer has described Aryana as probably the most notorious "converted Zoroastrian” of the Pahlavi era.^[5]

He was educated in France at the École Supérieur de Guerre and received his PhD in 1955 from the Faculty of Law of Paris with his thesis "Napoleon et l'Orient" (published in 1957). Aryana is known to have styled himself on Napoleon and dressed in the Imperial French style.^[8]

After the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941 during World War II, he went on with armed struggle and resisted the occupation before being arrested by the British forces. He was instrumental in many of the nationalist policies in the 1950-1960s. During the military campaign of 1964-65 he successfully pacified rebellious tribes in the south of Iran (Fars, Isfahan and Khuzestan) stirred-up by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, without shedding blood.

Following his military success in the south, General Aryana was named Chief of Staff of the Shah's entire Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, a position he maintained from 1965 to 1969.

During his posting as Chief of Staff, he met with various head of states including Richard Nixon, who received him at the White House, Yitzhak Rabin (then the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces), who received him in Israel and General de Gaulle, during his visit to Iran.

His archaizing tendencies grew to the extent that he had replaced the Quran with the Shahnameh and in his office and proposed adopting the Latin alphabet for Persian as a means to sever cultural ties with the Arabs. Due to the controversial nature of his views, the SAVAK deemed his ideas "indecent" even for the Shah's modernizing and archaistic theories.^[9] As a result, and under the indirect orders of the Shahanshah, he, along with his wife Arianoush Ariana, left the country for Paris in 1969.^[6] This was also due to the Arvand Rud (Shatt al-Arab) crisis.

Unlike his fellow Arteshbod and exiled leader, Gholam-Ali Oveissi. Aryana was 'beloved' by the Kurdish population of Iran from his time as the military governor of Kurdistan.

He died in exile in Paris in June 1985^[10] and is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery. General Aryana was a Grand Officier of the French Legion of Honour.

His last published book, Pour une Éthique Iranienne was a call for unity against the obscurantist forces driving Khomeini and the mullahs' fundamentalist revolution.^[11]

Aryana described himself as being an Iranian nationalist and moderate socialist, not a monarchist. Although he received a great deal of support from monarchists who considered him to be a supporter.^[10] Aryana held dual membership of Aria Party and SUMKA.^[12]

He founded Azadegan,^[13] a nationalist opposition group which had "developed a full command staff structure and support from all nationalist elements from the moderate left to the monarchists",^[14] while in exile in Paris.

Aryana combined his forces with not just Gholam Ali Oveissi but also Shapour Bakhtiar, Ahmad Madani and Ali Amini.^[15] Azadegan, meaning Born Free, was an anti-Khomeini movement which claimed as many as 12,000 followers in Iran, many of them in the armed forces.^[10] The daring seizing by Azadegan's officers of Tabarzin, an Iranian Navy La Combattante II type fast attack craft just built by France and en route to Iran while in the Mediterranean in August 1981, attracted media attention to Azadegan and its members' armed resistance against the clerical regime of Iran.^[16][17]

• Monica M. Ringer (2012). "Iranian Nationalism and Zoroastrian Identity". In Abbas Amanat; Farzin Vejdan (eds.). Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan US. doi:10.1057/9781137013408_13. ISBN 978-1-137-01340-8.