All the Shah’s Men (17 page)

The change in Britain’s government would prove decisive for Iran. Attlee had done whatever he thought possible on behalf of Anglo-Iranian, stopping only at the use of force. Churchill, who considered Mossadegh “an elderly lunatic bent on wrecking his country and handing it over to the Communists,” was willing and even eager to cross that line. The fervor with which Mossadegh was welcomed in Egypt proved to Churchill that he was not only a danger to Britain’s oil supply but also an intolerable symbol of anti-British sentiment around the world.

Britain’s policy toward Mossadegh toughened immediately. Foreign Secretary Eden told Acheson that the Americans had spent too much time appeasing him, and that inviting him to Washington had been a mistake. From now on, he declared, Britain would be interested only in deposing him.

Among the Americans most devastated by Britain’s decision to turn toward force was George McGhee. To him, it was the final blow in a campaign of mutual suicide, “almost the end of the world.” His friend Henry Grady had been removed a few weeks earlier as ambassador to Iran, and around the time Mossadegh left Washington, McGhee himself accepted a new post as ambassador to Turkey. Both men had devoted untold amounts of energy to the idea of compromise in Iran, and that idea was now dead.

During that year of 1951, Mossadegh vaulted onto the world stage and came to dominate it. He had become a defining figure whose ideas, for better or worse, were reshaping history. No one was surprised when
Time
magazine chose him—not Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or Winston Churchill—as its Man of the Year.

Mossadegh looked stately and dignified on the cover of
Time.
The long article inside was full of dismissive insults about this “weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country” who was an “obstinate opportunist” and threw tantrums like “a willful little boy.” But it also called him “the Iranian George Washington” and “the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries.” Reflecting the ambivalence with which the United States regarded him,
Time
portrayed him as an exasperating and immature figure who nonetheless had a legitimate case to make:

Once upon a time, in a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar, there lived a nobleman. This nobleman, after a lifetime of carping at the way the kingdom was run, became Chief Minister of the realm. In a few months he had the whole world hanging on his words and deeds, his jokes, his tears, his tantrums. Behind his grotesque antics lay great issues of peace or war, which would affect many lands far beyond his mountains….

He was Mohammad Mossadegh, Premier of Iran in the year 1951. He was the Man of the Year. He put Scheherazade in the petroleum business and oiled the wheels of chaos. His acid tears dissolved one of the remaining pillars of a great empire. In his plaintive, singsong voice he gabbled a defiant challenge that sprang out of a hatred and envy almost incomprehensible to the West….

The British position in the whole [Middle East] is hopeless. They are hated and distrusted almost everywhere. The old colonial relationship is finished, and no other power can replace Britain…. The U.S., which will have to make the West’s policy in the Middle East, whether it wants to or not, as yet has no policy there…. In its leadership of the non-Communist world, the U.S. has some dire responsibilities to shoulder. One of them is to meet the fundamental moral challenge posed by the strange old wizard who lives in a mountainous land and who is, sad to relate, the Man of 1951.

CHAPTER 9

Block Headed British

On a sunny July day in 1952, eight months after his return from Washington, Prime Minister Mossadegh was driven along an elm-shaded lane to the Saad Abad Palace for a showdown with Mohammad Reza Shah. Iran was no longer big enough for both of them. Behind closed doors at the palace, they faced off in a duel of wits and power. It ended with Mossadegh lying unconscious at the Shah’s feet.

This meeting was supposed to be no more than ceremonial. Mossadegh had just been chosen by the Majlis to serve a full two-year term as prime minister, and according to custom, he was presenting the Shah with a list of his cabinet ministers. He took the occasion, however, to make a demand that no Iranian prime minister had ever dared to make. Mossadegh wanted the Shah to recognize the supremacy of the elected government by surrendering control of the war ministry. The Shah was outraged. Without the war ministry he would lose control of the army, the bulwark of his power, and be reduced to the status of a figurehead. Rather than lose his army, he told Mossadegh, he would “pack my suitcase and leave.”

Mossadegh, who had mastered the art of political theater before the Shah was born, said not a word. He paused for a few moments to reflect, then rose to walk out. The Shah was struck with fear that the old man would take to the streets and rouse the masses against him. He jumped up, ran to the door, and threw his body across it. Mossadegh insisted that he step aside. Impossible, the Shah replied; their discussion must continue. The standoff lasted for a minute or two. Mossadegh began breathing harder. Then he gasped, took a few steps back, and fainted.

An annex to the 1906 constitution made the Shah supreme commander of the Iranian army but also required him to cooperate with the elected government on political matters. Prime ministers had traditionally interpreted this as allowing the Shah to appoint the minister of war. By breaking with this tradition, Mossadegh provoked a crisis. As he lay in bed recovering from his collapse, he decided to resolve it in a way that shocked the country. The next morning, July 17, he resigned from office.

“Under the present circumstances it is impossible to conclude the final phase of the national struggle,” he wrote to the Shah. “I cannot continue in office without having responsibility for the Ministry of War, and since Your Majesty did not concede this, I feel I do not enjoy the confidence of the Sovereign and, therefore, offer my resignation to pave the way for another government which might be able to carry out Your Majesty’s wishes.”

Did Mossadegh really wish to leave power, or was he just maneuvering for political advantage? At several crucial moments in his career, he had chosen to retire from public life rather than sully himself. He was so mortified by the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 that he applied for residence in Switzerland and told his family he would live the rest of his life in exile. During the long reign of Reza Shah, he remained absolutely aloof from politics. In 1947, after an election-reform bill he had proposed in the Majlis was defeated, he retired to his estate at Ahmad Abad and announced the definitive end of his political life. These episodes reflected a martyr’s streak in Mossadegh, perhaps reinforced by Shiite theology, that disposed him to choose stoic suffering over compromise with iniquity.

By the middle of 1952 Mossadegh was facing many troubles. Britain’s boycott of Iranian oil had been devastatingly effective, and he knew that British agents in Tehran were working to subvert his government. For a time he hoped to ride out the crisis with American aid, but President Truman, who was under heavy pressure from London, would not give him any. He sought help from the World Bank, but that effort also failed. Iranians were becoming poorer and unhappier by the day. Mossadegh’s political coalition was fraying, and in his new term he could look forward to fighting a swarm of enemies.

It would be naïve, however, to believe that Mossadegh was truly eager to leave the exalted position he had reached in the eyes of Iranians and millions of others around the world. He wanted not to quit but to force Iranians to decide whether they really wanted him as their leader. Resigning was an inspired gamble.

For most of that spring, Mossadegh had been preoccupied with parliamentary elections. He had little to fear from a free vote, since despite the country’s problems he was widely admired as a hero. A free vote, however, was not what others were planning. British agents had fanned out across the country, bribing candidates and the regional bosses who controlled them. They hoped to fill the Majlis with deputies who would vote to depose Mossadegh. It would be a coup carried out by seemingly legal means.

Iranian elections took several weeks to complete because of difficulties in transportation and communication. The first results came from big cities, and they were encouraging to Mossadegh. In Tehran all twelve National Front candidates were elected. Results in other parts of the country, where there was no one to monitor the voting, were quite different. These results did not in themselves disturb Mossadegh, whose faith in the popular will was boundless, but he became worried after violence broke out in Abadan and several other parts of the country where elections were being hotly contested. Aides told him that some of the candidates being elected were under the direct control of British agents. He was about to leave for The Hague to defend Iran against another British lawsuit at the World Court and feared that his absence might remove the last checks on his enemies’ electoral chicanery. In June, after 80 candidates had been certified as winners of seats in the 136-seat Majlis, his cabinet voted to halt the elections. In a statement he asserted that since “foreign agents” were exploiting the election campaign to destabilize Iran, “the supreme national interests of the country necessitate the suspension of elections pending the return of the Iranian delegation from The Hague.”

Mossadegh was legally entitled to take this step as long as the eighty seated members did not veto it, which they did not. He could also claim a measure of moral legitimacy, since he was defending Iran against subversion by outsiders. Nonetheless, the episode cast him in an unflattering light. It allowed his critics to portray him as undemocratic and grasping for personal power.

While Mossadegh dealt with this challenge, he also had to face another that most Iranians considered far more urgent. Their country was spiraling into bankruptcy. Tens of thousands had lost their jobs at the Abadan refinery, and although most understood and passionately supported the idea of nationalization, they naturally hoped that Mossadegh would find a way to put them back to work. The only way he could do that was to sell oil.

During the first half of 1952, tankers from Argentina and Japan managed to make their way into and out of Iranian ports despite Britain’s proclaimed embargo. Another brought four thousand tons of Abadan oil to Venice, and after an Italian court rejected Britain’s protest, Winston Churchill complained about “what paltry friends and allies the Italians are.” Churchill realized that if he did not enforce the embargo more effectively, it would collapse.

In mid-June dock workers at the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Mashur welcomed the tanker
Rose Mary,
which had been chartered by a private Italian oil company that wanted to buy twenty million tons of Iranian crude over the next decade. The company had organized this “experimental voyage” to challenge Britain’s embargo. If the
Rose Mary
could make her way safely back to Italy, the embargo would be broken and Iran would be on the road to economic recovery.

As Britain and Iran prepared for confrontation on the high seas, they also clashed at the World Court. The British were seeking an order declaring that the Abadan refinery and surrounding oil fields rightfully belonged to them. Their lawyers argued eloquently, but any hope they had of dominating the proceedings vanished when Mossadegh arrived. A crowd welcomed him at the Peace Palace, cheering wildly and rhythmically chanting his name. Inside, he gave a brief speech asking the judges to consider the moral and political aspects of the case as well as the strictly legal ones. Nationalizing Anglo-Iranian, he said, had been the only possible response to an intolerable situation in which the company had for years treated its Iranian employees “like animals” and manipulated Iranian governments to assure that it could continue plundering the country’s most precious natural resource.

After his speech, Mossadegh retired to his hotel and did not appear again in court. Iran’s case was presented over the course of three days by a team of Iranian lawyers and an eminent Belgian, Henri Rolin, a professor of international law and former president of the Belgian Senate. Over and over, Rolin returned to his central argument. The Court had no authority in the case, he asserted, because it concerned not two nations but a nation and a private company.

Mossadegh was at his hotel when news came that British warships had intercepted the
Rose Mary
and forced her to port at the British protectorate of Aden. In a court there, British lawyers argued that Anglo-Iranian was the legal owner of all Iranian oil and that therefore the
Rose Mary
was carrying stolen property. The verdict, which to no one’s surprise was in Britain’s favor, did not come for several months, but news that the Royal Navy was now intercepting tankers carrying Iranian oil was enough to scare off other customers. Mossadegh called a news conference to denounce the seizure, which he called “a vivid example of the way Britain is attempting to strangle us.” Many Europeans were sympathetic. “I fear Dr. Mossadegh has managed to leave behind him in The Hague a generally favorable impression,” the British ambassador cabled home to London.

Britain’s seizure of the
Rose Mary
was a devastating blow to Mossadegh and his government. No oil company would now do business with Iran, so the country’s main source of income was gone. Iran had earned $45 million from oil exports in 1950, more than 70 percent of its total export earnings. That sum dropped by half in 1951 and then to almost zero in 1952.

Mossadegh told Iranians that their campaign for national dignity required “deprivation, self-sacrifice and loyalty,” and although most agreed, they suffered nonetheless. He eased their pain by promoting the export of products other than oil, especially textiles and foodstuffs, and by negotiating barter agreements with several countries. These and other steps kept Iran from collapsing, but they were no substitute for the income that oil exports would have earned.

The divisive election, the tightening British oil embargo, and the World Court case all weighed on Mossadegh’s mind as he returned home from The Hague at the end of June. Two weeks later, he had his fainting fit in the Shah’s salon and, the next day, resigned his office. His resignation was a godsend for his British enemies and for the Shah. They had hoped to manipulate the Majlis into blocking his reelection. Now he had done them the unimaginable favor of leaving on his own accord.

British officials had chosen the man they wished to succeed Mossadegh. He was the wily seventy-two-year-old politician Ahmad Qavam, who had served as prime minister in the mid-1940s. The British scholar/agent Robin Zaehner reported from his post in Tehran that “it was Qavam’s desire to work closely with the British and to preserve their legitimate interests in Persia…. [He] greatly preferred that British influence should be exercised in Persia rather than that of the Americans (who were foolish and without experience) or that of the Russians, who were Persia’s enemies.”

At first the Shah was reluctant to support Qavam. His experience with Mossadegh had soured him on strong prime ministers, and he wanted one who was weak and pliable. Qavam was neither. The British, however, insisted on him. In the hours after Mossadegh submitted his resignation on July 17, the Shah mused inconclusively about how to proceed. That night a group of forty pro-British Majlis members met and nominated Qavam. Twenty-seven others gathered nearby to declare their undying loyalty to Mossadegh, the only figure capable of ruling Iran “at this momentous time in our history.”

In the end the Shah succumbed to British pressure, as he was wont to do, and accepted Qavam. Foolishly believing that he had won a firm mandate, Qavam immediately began issuing harsh proclamations declaring that the day of retribution had come. He denounced Mossadegh for failing to resolve the oil crisis and for launching “a widespread campaign against a foreign state.” Iran, he declared, was about to change. “This helmsman is on a different course,” he declared in his first statement as prime minister. Anyone who objected to his new policies would be arrested and delivered into “the heartless and pitiless hands of the law.”

Many Iranians did not realize that Mossadegh was really out of power until they heard Qavam deliver this proclamation over the radio. It triggered an explosion of protest. Crowds poured onto the streets of Tehran and other cities, chanting, “Ya Marg Ya Mossadegh!” (Death or Mossadegh!). Qavam ordered the police to attack and suppress them, but many officers refused. Some joined the protesters and were joyfully embraced.

This spontaneous outburst was, above all, an expression of support for Mossadegh’s decision to confront the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Many Iranians, however, were also drawn to him because of his commitment to social reform. Mossadegh had freed peasants from forced labor on their landlords’ estates, ordered factory owners to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, established a system of unemployment compensation, and taken 20 percent of the money landlords received in rent and placed it in a fund to pay for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths. He supported women’s rights, defended religious freedom, and allowed courts and universities to function freely. Above all, he was known even by his enemies as scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded Iranian politics. The prospect of losing him so suddenly, and of having him replaced by a regime evidently sponsored from abroad, was more than his aroused people would accept.