Fifties (59 page)

Kermit Roosevelt, known as Kim to almost everyone, was the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt and was thus extremely well connected in Washington (Franklin Roosevelt had been “cousin Franklin”; Joe Alsop was also a cousin). He had graduated from Harvard and taught history at Cal Tech just before World War Two. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that America had to lead the Western democracies in stabilizing the world against Soviet expansionism in the postwar era. In the days just before the war he wrote
an article describing the kind of clandestine propaganda organization the United States would need if it entered World War Two. Kim Roosevelt showed his article to Joseph Alsop, and Alsop implored him
not
to publish it but instead to show it to Bill Donovan, who was then organizing the OSS. Donovan, in turn, invited Roosevelt to come to work for him. In the postwar years, the Middle East became Roosevelt’s venue. He visited there often, ostensibly to work on a book called
Arabs, Oil, and History.
To Kim Philby, who was the son of a famed Arabist, Roosevelt was rather unassuming. “The last person,” Philby once noted, “you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks.” Philby even had a nickname for him, “the quiet American,” which Graham Greene would later use as the title of a novel about an innocent but dangerous young CIA man in Vietnam.

Allied policy had kept Iran and its oil fields out of German hands during World War Two, but in the years after, it seemed a particularly vulnerable nation, its people poor, its modern social institutions weak. As Franklin Roosevelt once noted, “One percent of the population ruled—and they were all grafters—while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.”

By mutual agreement with the Americans, the British had remained the primary Western presence in Iran after World War Two. The British embassy in Teheran was a magnificent structure, whose compound took up sixteen city blocks; by contrast, the American embassy looked like a Midwestern secondary school, in the words of writer Barry Rubin, and in fact it was known as Henderson High, after the ambassador, Loy Henderson.

Since making the first successful oil strike in Iran in 1909, the British had taken Iranian oil as if it were theirs. In the years after World War Two, they had treated with great contempt the repeated pleas and protests from Iranian officials to make the relationship more equitable; inevitably they became the unwitting architects of a rising Iranian nationalism, which began to surface in the late forties and early fifties.

In 1950 the British made some 50 million pounds, in taxes alone, on the oil, while the Iranian government managed to take only a third of that in profits. The Iranians were not even allowed to look at the books kept by the British, nor were they allowed to use such company facilities as restaurants, hospitals, and swimming pools. Clearly, the times were changing, though, and in February 1951, the American oil companies worked out a new relationship with the Saudis which gave the Saudis 50 percent of the profits from their own oil fields. When the British finally accepted the idea that the old
system of economic domination would no longer work and offered the Iranians a fifty-fifty split, it was too late. The negotiations between the British and the Iranians grew increasingly acrimonious, and in May 1951 the Iranians, thoroughly disgusted with the British, nationalized the oil company.

The politician who arose to lead Iranian nationalism was the volatile Mohammed Mossadegh, who became prime minister, and who was far more adept than the young Shah (the West’s leaders in those days privately thought of the Shah as weak; the CIA’s code name for him was Boy Scout). In October 1951, Mossadegh ordered all British oil employees home while Iranian troops occupied the huge refinery at Abadan. The Americans, fearing the Soviets would sense an opportunity, urged the British and Iranians to work out a settlement.

As tensions mounted, Averell Harriman led an American team to meet with Mossadegh and the Shah. The contrast between the lushness of the Shah’s palace, the vodka and the caviar so readily available there, and the simplicity of Mossadegh’s life-style struck the American team. Mossadegh was so frail that he was confined to his bed, and Vernon Walters, Harriman’s aide and translator, had to sit as near Mossadegh as possible in order to hear him. “You do not know how crafty they [the British] are. You do not know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch,” Mossadegh said. The American team did not leave optimistic about the future.

Soon after, Mossadegh visited the United States, where hopes still existed that some kind of settlement could be achieved. But on his last evening in Washington, Mossadegh was visited in his hotel room by Vernon Walters, who reiterated the need for an accord. “Don’t you realize,” the prime minister answered, “that returning to Iran empty-handed, I return in a much stronger position than if I returned with an agreement which I would have to sell to my fanatics?”

A Western boycott of Iranian oil followed. Mossadegh broke diplomatic relationships with the British. Americans feared he was moving ever leftward. Mossadegh was a highly dramatic political figure. Many in the West mocked him because of the provocative nature of his speeches and also because he often went around in his pajamas. But even that was calculated. He used his histrionics, as Barry Rubin wrote, “to embody Iran personally, its problems and its requirements. The highly emotional component in his nationalist cause took hold among urban Iranians especially; his charisma could
never be matched by the shy, stilted Shah.” He was easy to underestimate. “Old Mossy,” Anthony Eden called him.

Dean Acheson liked to describe a wonderful scene when Mossadegh first arrived in Washington: He was “small and frail, with not a shred of hair on his billiard-ball head; a thin face protruded into a long beak of a nose flanked by two bright shoe-button eyes. His whole manner and appearance was birdlike, marked by quick and nervous movements as he seemed to jump about on a perch.” As he got off the train, he supported himself with a stick and on the arm of his son, but when he spotted Acheson, he threw down the stick and skipped over to greet him. Later, Mossadegh spoke in piteous tones: “I am speaking for a very poor country—a country all desert—just sand, a few camels, a few sheep.” Acheson interrupted him to note that his country had, just like Texas, sand
and
oil. But being called on so obvious a ploy had seemed only to delight Mossadegh. Truman and Acheson had been somewhat charmed by his performance. Later, they felt they had underestimated his darker side; he was, in Acheson’s words, “essentially a rich reactionary, a feudal-minded Persian inspired by a fanatical hatred of the British and a desire to expel them and all their works from the country regardless of cost.” In fact, his family was immensely wealthy, among the largest landowners in Iran.

In November 1952, British intelligence sought out Kim Roosevelt, who, unlike them, still had access to Iran, and presented him with surprisingly detailed plans for a coup against Mossadegh. For a time Roosevelt held them off because he felt that the Truman administration was not sufficiently concerned about the threat in the area. But, he told them, it was likely that the Republicans would soon gain the White House, and he suspected American policy on covert operations was likely to change dramatically.

Roosevelt was right: Even as the Eisenhower administration was preparing to take office, Beetle Smith began pushing him to put together a covert operation against Mossadegh. Smith was extremely aggressive about it, Roosevelt thought. “When are those blanking British coming to talk to us? And when is our goddam operation going to get under way?” he asked. “As soon after Inauguration Day as you and JFD [Foster Dulles] can see them,” Roosevelt answered. “They’re every bit as eager to get going as you are. But we still have considerable studying to do before we’ll be sure, reasonably sure, that we can pull it off.” Beetle Smith was not a man greatly burdened by self-doubts. “Of course we can,” he told Roosevelt irritably. “Pull up your socks and get going, young man,” he answered. The key to
success, Roosevelt thought, was the loyalty of the army. The Shah was young and immature, but he was connected to the nation’s past. Mossadegh’s popularity was thin—the mullahs were wary of him, the Tudeh was merely using him, the students were volatile, and only a few top military men supported him.

By this time, all sides were becoming edgy. In Iran, Mossadegh’s popularity was slipping during the hard months of the economic boycott, and he was becoming increasingly dependent on the support of the Tudeh. The British were impatient and anxious to topple him. It was obvious from the start, Roosevelt thought, that the two Western allies had very different interests in the region: The British were driven by their desire to get back on line with Iranian oil, but the Americans, with their own large domestic oil deposits and their tight connections to the Saudis, were primarily interested in keeping the country out of the Soviet orbit. Starting in early February 1953, meetings between intelligence agents from Britain and America began taking place regularly on the subject.

Ajax was the name of the operation, and it took ever clearer shape, with Roosevelt and British intelligence in constant contact. On a regular visit to Teheran, Roosevelt noted that the gap between the Shah and Mossadegh seemed to be widening. A new Soviet ambassador had arrived, the same man who had been in charge of the Soviet embassy in Prague when the Czech coup had taken place in 1948. As the summer began, it seemed more and more a matter of who would strike first—the West and the Shah against Mossadegh, or perhaps Mossadegh and the Soviets against the Shah, or perhaps another party backed by the Soviets would act.

On July 19, 1953, Kermit Roosevelt drove from Beirut to Baghdad to lead the covert operation. He went under the name of James Lochridge, one of several aliases he used. He felt excited and ready to embark on the great adventure he had long been looking forward to. He recalled something that his father had written when he had arrived in East Africa in 1909 with
his
father, Teddy Roosevelt: “‘It was a great adventure and all the world was young!’ I felt as he must have then. My nerves tingled, my spirits soared as we moved up the mountain road to Damascus.” The guard at the Iranian border post at Khanequin seemed, Roosevelt thought, unusually listless. He was barely literate and mistook the description on the immigration sheet as Roosevelt’s name: “Mr. Scar on Right Forehead,” he wrote down.

From then on, it was a matter of moving quietly around Teheran and readying his Iranian agents to create the requisite pro-Shah
mob. It was also necessary for Roosevelt to meet with the Shah, who could not easily move around the city, particularly to a CIA safe house. Roosevelt had himself smuggled into the palace. An ordinary black car showed up at his agency house. Roosevelt got in the back and sat on the floor. A blanket was spread over him. The car drove off to the palace grounds and pulled inside the gate, but Roosevelt never got out. Instead, the Shah came out of the palace and slipped into the car. Roosevelt explained that he was the personal representative of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. As proof of the Anglo-American commitment, he said, there would be certain signals given over the radio for which the Shah was to listen. The next night on the BBC overseas broadcast, for example, instead of saying, “It is now midnight,” the announcer would say, “It is now ...” then pause for a moment, and conclude,
“exactly
midnight.” There would be a similar secret message contained in a speech Eisenhower was about to give in San Francisco.

This was the kind of intrigue that Allen Dulles and Roosevelt loved: It brought back memories of OSS during World War Two. Roosevelt’s cryptonym was RNMAKER, for Rainmaker. The Shah’s cryptonym was KGSAVOY; his nickname (“I hope it won’t offend you,” Roosevelt had told him) was Boy Scout. Mossadegh’s nickname was The Old Bugger. Roosevelt also brought with him $1 million, in Iranian currency, of which about $100,000 was subsequently used to rent a mob and pay off key people.

It was important for the Shah to be out of the country when the coup was taking place, both to reduce his responsibility for events and also to get him out of harm’s way in case things went wrong. Everything was set. The Shah was ready and eager. At his final clandestine meeting with the emperor at the palace, Roosevelt told the Shah of a cable from Ike (an imaginary cable, actually, as Roosevelt noted in his book: the occasion had called for a presidential blessing from Washington, but since Ike had neglected to mark the moment with his own words, Roosevelt made up what Ike would have said): “I wish your Imperial Majesty goodspeed. If the Pahlavis and the Roosevelts working together cannot solve this little problem, then there is no hope anywhere. I have complete faith that you will get this done!”

The coup itself began inauspiciously. Messages were not delivered on time, and on August 16, the Teheran radio did not, as the CIA had hoped, announce the Shah’s firing of Mossadegh; rather, Mossadegh appeared to get in the first strike, announcing that the Shah, “encouraged by foreign elements,” had tried to oust him as
prime minister. Therefore, he announced, he was seizing all power to himself. The Tudeh rallied to him, and for a day the Mossadegh-Tudeh forces seemed to control the streets. The fate of the coup hung in the balance. Then on August 19, the pro-Shah mob, recruited by Roosevelt’s man out of gyms and wrestling clubs, began to gather and shout slogans. The tide quickly turned. Roosevelt later took great pleasure in publishing a cable to him from Beetle Smith, written at the moment that the coup seemed to have stalled. “Give up and get out.” By the time the cable arrived, though, the coup was a success. “Yours of August 18 received,” Roosevelt cabled back to Washington. “Happy to report ... KGSAVOY will be returning to Teheran in triumph shortly. Love and kisses from all on the team.” When the pro-Shah forces made their move, the army remained loyal to the Shah and Mossadegh fled. It had all seemed so easy: Roosevelt, who was hardly an area expert and did not speak Farsi, had had only five American agents and a handful of Iranian organizers working for him.