All the Shah’s Men (18 page)

On July 21 National Front leaders called for a general strike to show the nation’s opposition to Qavam and support for Mossadegh, “the only popular choice to lead the national struggle.” Within hours, much of the country was paralyzed. Ayatollah Kashani, who had learned that Qavam planned to arrest him, issued a
fatwa
ordering soldiers to join the rebellion, which he called a “holy war against the imperialists.” Tudeh militants, still angry at Qavam for engineering the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Azerbaijan in 1947, eagerly joined the fray with cries of “Down With the Shah! We Want a People’s Republic!”

Qavam and the Shah were shocked by this rebellion and responded by calling out elite military units. Soldiers opened fire on protesters in several parts of Tehran. Dozens fell dead. Young military officers, appalled by the carnage, began talking of mutiny. The Shah had completely lost control of the situation. His only choice was to ask for Qavam’s resignation. Qavam submitted it at four o’clock that afternoon. Upon receiving it, the Shah sent for Mossadegh.

Their meeting was unexpectedly cordial. The Shah said he was now prepared to accept Mossadegh as prime minister and give him control of the war ministry. He asked if Mossadegh still wished to maintain the monarchy. Mossadegh assured him that he did, presuming of course that kings would accept the supremacy of elected leaders.

“You could go down in history as an immensely popular monarch if you cooperated with democratic and nationalist forces,” he told the Shah.

The next day the Majlis voted overwhelmingly to reelect Mossadegh as prime minister. Qavam’s term had lasted just four days. His fall on “Bloody Monday” was a huge, almost unimaginable victory for Iranian nationalists. It was an even greater personal triumph for Mossadegh. Without having given a single speech or even stirred from his home, he had been returned to power by a grateful nation.

The next day brought another piece of electrifying news. The World Court had turned down Britain’s appeal, refusing to be drawn into the oil dispute. In London, the
Daily Express
carried the banner headline “Mossadegh’s Victory Day.” It was that and much, much more.

Mossadegh’s support was now so broad and fervent that he could probably have dismissed the Shah, proclaimed the end of the Pahlavi dynasty, and established a republic with himself as president if he had wished. Instead he sent the Shah a peace offering. It was a copy of the Koran with a handwritten inscription: “Consider me an enemy of the Koran if I take any action against the constitution, or if I accept the presidency in case others nullify the constitution and change the form of our country’s government.”

For the British, this turn of events was a most disappointing setback. In the course of a single week they had gone from vague plotting to spectacular victory to utter defeat. With all that was at stake, however, they were hardly ready to give up. Instead they began carefully reviewing what they had done wrong. They concluded that they had made several mistakes. British intelligence officers had left too much of the planning and execution to Iranians. They had placed their faith in a civilian, Qavam, rather than in a military officer. Perhaps most important, they had acted alone, without American help. Next time—they were determined that there would be a next time—they would not repeat these errors.

The next round of British plotting was shaped by a series of insightful cables that George Middleton, the British chargé d’affaires in Tehran, wrote in the days following the July uprising. Middleton considered the uprising to have been “a turning point in Persian history” because it marked the emergence of a new political force, the mob. Britain’s plan to replace Mossadegh had failed because a mob intervened. Next time, he wrote, the British must have the mob on their side.

Middleton also observed that during the uprising, a fair number of army officers had shown themselves less than loyal to Mossadegh. Under the right circumstances, they might join a future rebellion, but they would have to be rallied to the cause by an officer they trusted and admired. Middleton had an idea who that officer might be. He suggested Mossadegh’s former interior minister, General Fazlollah Zahedi.

This was a fine choice. Zahedi was far from an ideal candidate—the
New York Times
described him as “a boulevardier with a penchant for gambling and beautiful women”—but was better than anyone else available. He had spent most of his life in uniform and was personally acquainted with almost every Iranian officer.

At the age of twenty-three, as a company commander, Zahedi had led troops into battle against rebel tribesmen in the northern provinces. Two years later Reza Shah promoted him to the rank of brigadier general. Impressed with his loyalty and his firm hand, the Shah made him governor of Khuzistan, the province where the Abadan refinery was located, in 1926; chief of the Tehran police in 1932; and commander of the important Isfahan garrison in 1941.

Zahedi shared Reza Shah’s view of what Iran needed. Both men were soldiers at heart, strong, harsh, and ambitious. When World War II broke out, both sought to help the Germans. After the British deposed Reza Shah and forced him into exile, they focused on Zahedi. They identified him as a profiteer who was making huge sums from grain hoarding, but would have left him to his devices had it not been for his close connections to Nazi agents. When they discovered that he was organizing a tribal uprising to coincide with a possible German thrust into Iran, they decided to act.

In September 1942 senior officers of the Secret Intelligence Service summoned the legendary agent Fitzroy MacLean, whose exploits had taken him to clandestine battlegrounds from Tripoli to Tashkent, to a meeting in London. They told him that they wanted Zahedi gone. “How it was to be done they left me to work out by myself,” MacLean wrote afterward. “Only two conditions were made: I was to take him alive and I was to do it without creating a disturbance.”

The simplest approach would be to kidnap Zahedi from his home, but when MacLean arrived in Isfahan, he discovered that the home was too well guarded. His next idea was to snatch the general from his car, but that also proved impractical because military security was too tight. MacLean decided that he would have to find a ruse by which he could be introduced into Zahedi’s presence.

His plan, which he laid out in a cipher telegram to London, was to masquerade as a Baghdad-based brigadier in the British army; send a message telling Zahedi that he was passing through Isfahan and wanted to pay his respects; arrive with one or two “resourceful characters”; and then, when he was alone with the general, pull a pistol and force him into their waiting car. Nearby, a platoon of infantrymen would be waiting “to lend a hand in case anything went wrong.” MacLean’s superiors granted him everything he asked, including permission to kill Zahedi if that became necessary, but on one point they would not yield. No one under any circumstances could be allowed to pretend he was a British brigadier. A real one would be supplied if necessary.

MacLean traveled to Qom, 150 miles north of Isfahan, where the local British commander had been instructed to give him whatever he needed. He needed a platoon of soldiers and rounded one up without difficulty after letting it be known that he was recruiting for a commando mission. At a ruined fort in the nearby desert, he and his men rehearsed for several days. Then, on the day before the planned abduction, he set out for Isfahan. With him was a genuine brigadier, supplied by the British consulate in Qom, “a distinguished officer whose well-developed sense of humor caused him to enter completely into the spirit of the somewhat equivocal role that had been allotted to him.”

The arrangement to meet General Zahedi went perfectly. MacLean arrived in a car flying a large Union Jack. The guard at the gate was deep in conversation with a British agent who was part of MacLean’s team and looked up only briefly as he passed. Two nondescript trucks, their cargo space covered with tarpaulins, were parked nearby. Inside were the soldiers MacLean had spent the last week training. They waited while he entered the brigade headquarters:

When, a couple of minutes later, General Zahedi, a dapper figure in a tight-fitting gray uniform and highly polished boots, entered the room, he found himself looking down the barrel of my Colt automatic. There was no advantage in prolonging a scene which might easily have become embarrassing. Without further ado, I invited the general to put his hands up and informed him that I had instructions to arrest him and that, if he made any noise or attempt at resistance, he would be shot. Then I took away his pistol and hustled him through the window into the car which was waiting outside with the engine running…. Soon we reached the point in the desert where we had spent the night, and here I handed over my captive to an officer and six men who were standing by to take him by car to the nearest landing-ground, where an airplane was waiting to fly him to Palestine…. In the general’s bedroom I found a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium, [and] an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan.

Zahedi spent the rest of the war in a British internment camp. After his release, he resumed his career as if nothing had happened, serving as military commander in Fars province and then returning to his old job as police chief in Tehran. Mohammed Reza Shah named him to the Senate in 1950 and the next year persuaded Mossadegh to choose him as interior minister. Mossadegh dismissed him a few months later, after he ordered the massacre of rioters who were protesting Averell Harriman’s visit. Although Zahedi was no longer in the army, he was the president of the Retired Officers Association, which was made up mostly of men whom Mossadegh had cashiered and who were anxious for revenge. This constituency, coupled with his own boldness and well-known ruthlessness, led the British to choose him as the figurehead leader of their coup. They were willing to forget the unpleasantness of the past, and so was he.

The combination that George Middleton recommended in his cables—a mob plus Zahedi—became the core of the plot against Mossadegh, and it never changed. Before serious planning could begin, however, the British had to win American cooperation. Prime Minister Churchill, who in the words of one of his foreign spies “enjoyed dramatic operations and had no high regard for timid diplomatists,” spent the second half of 1952 trying to enlist President Truman.

In August Mossadegh invited an American oil executive named Alton Jones to visit Iran. Truman thought this was a fine idea and gave it his blessing, but when Churchill learned of it, he was mightily upset. He protested that any friendly overtures from the United States would undermine his campaign to isolate Mossadegh. Britain was supporting the Americans in Korea, he reminded Truman, and had a right to expect “Anglo-American unity” on Iran.

Nothing substantial came out of the Jones mission, but that did not shake Truman or his senior advisers from their desire to seek compromise with Mossadegh. They had concluded, in Acheson’s words, “that the British were so obstructive and determined on a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran that we must strike out on an independent policy or run the risk of having Iran disappear behind the Iron Curtain.” Truman urged Churchill to accept the fact of nationalization, which he said “seems to have become as sacred in Iran’s eyes as [the] Koran.” To continue resisting it, he warned, could provoke upheaval that would send Iran “down the Communist drain” and be “a disaster to the free world.”

Churchill replied by proposing that he and Truman “send a joint telegram personal and confidential to Mossadegh.” He wrote a draft. It was couched in friendly language but offered only a rehash of old British proposals. Truman would not sign. Doggedly Churchill pressed his argument that Britain and the United States must “gallop together” against Mossadegh. “I do not myself see,” he told Truman, “why two good men asking only what is right and just should not gang up against a third who is doing wrong.”

Finally Truman agreed to sign a watered-down version of Churchill’s letter. It asked Mossadegh to do two things he had sworn never to do: allow the return of Anglo-Iranian to its old position in Iran and accept arbitration by the World Court based on the company’s position before it was nationalized. If he complied, Britain would lift its economic embargo and the United States would give Iran $10 million in aid.

A few days after receiving the letter, Mossedegh read it scornfully to the Majlis. It was an affront, he said, because it failed to recognize that the “former company” had been finally and irrevocably nationalized. As for the aid offer, it “smacked of charity,” which Iran did not want. To rising applause he declared that Britain “for centuries has been used to plundering poor nations,” and that Iran would no longer accept its “oppressive terms.” He concluded with a telling moral observation: “Abiding by law and respecting the rights of the weak not only would not diminish, but would greatly enhance the position and prestige of the strong.”

Mossadegh then asked for and won Majlis support for a counterproposal. Iran would accept mediation by the World Court, but on two conditions. First, the Court would have to decide the case according to either Iranian law or “any law in any country nationalizing its industries in similar circumstances.” Second, if the British were going to demand compensation, Iran must be allowed to make a counterclaim for its lost revenues.