Arteshbod Hassan Toufanian was an Iranian Air Force General under the Shah of Iran. He was a graduate of the Iranian Military Academy and later served as commanding officer of Iran's flight academy. In 1977 he was the Shah's Vice Minister of War and led Project Flower, which entailed an economic deal between Iran and Israel which would have built cooperation and exchanged Iranian oil for an Israeli missile system, but which collapsed in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution.
Early life
General Toufanian was born in Tehran. His father was a tailor. Toufanian was the oldest of five sons and two daughters. He graduated from Dar al-Funun in high school and briefly attended a small medical school before pursuing a career in the air force. He received a military commission in 1936. After graduating from the academy, Toufanian married Fatemeh Zerehi and they had four sons and two daughters.
Career
Before WWII, Toufanian worked in an airplane assembly factory as a test pilot. During the 1940s, he also spent 18 months in England. from 1950 to 1952 he attended military training in the United States. He claimed no role in the August 1953 Iranian coup d'état, but was a pilot involved in escorting the Shah's return at its end. He then worked as a teacher at the Officers Academy. By the end of the 1950s, he was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Office of Planning. He was involved in designing defense against perceived threats from the Soviet Union and Iraq. This duty brought him closer to the Shah, and in 1961 he was named one of the shah's special adjutants, responsible for notifying the shah in his quarters if an emergency arose during off house. In 1963, Toufanian became arms purchaser for the Iranian Armed Forces. In this role, Toufanian was involved in many deals, during which he received kickbacks and became quite wealthy. He also became undersecretary in the Ministry of War and the director of Iran's main military industrial corporation. He hired promising officers and scientists to run the organization and its Research and Development Department, greatly improving the efficiency of the cooperation. Under his supervision, the military saw success reverse engineering weapons technologies and licensing agreements with Western companies. Although a member of the Shah's inner circle, Toufanian worked with the United States CIA as an informant.
Project Flower and Iranian Revolution
In 1977 Toufanian traveled to Israel and negotiated a multi-billion-dollar exchange of oil for Israeli Jericho missiles. He was also involved in a separate project named Tzier which sought to increase the range of Iran's own missiles using Israeli technology. In February 1979, the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution, and Project Flower ended. In the early days of the Revolution, Toufanian was announced to have been arrested, but was escaped from prison in a secret deal, going into hiding in Tehran for nine months. He eventually moved to the United States where he lived the rest of his life in exile. After the fall of the Shah, Toufanian moved to Chevy Chase, MD, which is in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.
