The Rise Of Reza
The First World War brought the world’s affairs into every country. When Turkey entered the fighting, Iran declared neutrality – but it mattered for little as Turkish and German agents, and Russian and British armed forces, all duelled for “soft power” supremacy. Iran’s military forces were weak and had divided loyalties after receiving training from many of the nations involved. A Russian invasion was possible, but the 1917 Revolution crippled its overseas reach, leaving Britain to cast Iran in a new shape, not unlike its successes in India. Iran’s few distinguished army officers and units were now to be reorganised under British officers. This latest act of national ignominy was too much to bear for one Iranian Cossack officer.
Born in 1878, Reza Khan never received a formal schooling, and struggled to read or speak in public for the rest of his life. He was a stable boy at just thirteen in the Cossack Brigade, an 1879 initiative of the Russian general staff to protect the previous Qajar leadership. Reza loved the uniforms, routine and structure of the Cossack unit, and rose through the ranks. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the British feared the Cossack Brigade could be turned and lost, so they enlisted Reza to deal with any divisions.
What followed was a classic vignette of the British Empire and its capacity to create future problems for itself. In May 1920, amid the largest Bolshevik force gains into Iranian territory, Major General Sir Edmund Ironside toured the Cossack camp in Qazvin, west of Tehran. Ironside met Reza and wrote in his diary on 14th January, 1921: ‘A military dictatorship would solve our troubles and let us out of the country without any trouble at all.’12 Ironside appointed Reza Commander of the Cossack Brigade, and by the early spring of 1921, Reza had marched on Tehran and declared himself ruler of the military forces. The title of Minister of War followed. Then Prime Minister. Finally, the Shah.
Reza’s reign from 1925–1941 did not display the great leap forward people hoped for. As a leader, he was a unique personality: he slept on the floor, never partied or fully exploited the harem, and yet he despised the clergy and their righteousness. He had no friends, trusted almost no one and had a furious temper, despite espousing the military virtues of restraint and discipline at every turn.13 As a great admirer of Kemal Ataturk, who in 1923 had established a modern secular republic in Turkey, he set about sending hundreds of Iranians to study in Europe, and eventually this did lead to a much-improved public education system in Iran.
It was not that Reza didn’t abide by the Shia faith; he simply believed that in the twentieth century, being obscure and isolated would leave Iran’s fate to the dictates of others. Reza’s reforms did lead to a weakening power for the clerics in the matters of state governance. And yet, through at least four marriages, Reza’s greatest accomplishment and source of purpose was his first-born son – Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Mohammed Reza’s childhood was the complete opposite of his father’s: an exclusive Swiss education, fluency in French and English, and a hard-schooled diplomacy and charisma that his father freely admitted he lacked. In 1938, he graduated as a second lieutenant in the Officer’s Cadet College, Tehran. It was still a far from world-class military; for all of Reza’s spending, Iran’s military forces were not battle-hardened, and possessed little of the logistical nous required in a theatre of war.
In 1941, the perfect storm came together. A modest station of German and Austrian forces undermined Reza’s claim of World War II neutrality. With the Allies fighting for their very existence, the possibility of a corridor to counter the Germans gave Britain and Russia cause to commence military action. An underfed, conscripted Iranian Army put up little fight. Reza knew the end was nigh.
He abdicated on 16th September 1941 and, after being shuffled around the world by the British, settled in a country house on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. Throughout his exile, Reza pined for his beloved Crown Prince Mohammed Reza, very much a boy, still in his early twenties. Reza died of a heart attack in July 1944, with the world around him on the brink of another raucous upheaval. To his last breath, he wondered what the second half of the twentieth century held in store for his descendants – and most importantly, his young and capable son.
From Exile, To Return
Mohammed Reza entered the world of geopolitics facing the same predicament as his father – for all of Iran’s vastness and strategic importance, it lacked the military to adequately defend itself. With a German breakthrough expected in Stalingrad, Tehran’s lack of air defence made it a likely domino in the Axis Powers’ advance once they had reached the Volga Delta, to the northwest of the Caspian Sea.
Then to the surprise of almost everyone, history moved in a direction that fell in the twenty-three-year-old Shah’s favour. Firstly, Stalingrad didn’t fall, and the immediate threat to Tehran faded. Then, a period of domestic political paralysis ensued. In fact, from the first Reza’s abdication in 1941 to 1953, a remarkable twenty governments took office, all of which achieved very little. Over time, the appeal of a strong, authoritarian Shah grew.
Deciding that his father’s attempt at neutrality had failed, Mohammed Reza threw himself and his country into the fray – declaring war on the Third Reich, joining the United Nations, and reaching an agreement for the British and Soviets to leave Iran within six months of World War II coming to an end.
The three principal Allied leaders met in Tehran in late 1943, and though Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt and Josef Stalin did little to respect the Shah or diplomatic protocols, it showed Iran’s importance to the strategic picture. With a need to protect the road and rail supply lines (what became known as the Persian Corridor), the US agreed to send two advisory missions to Iran.
And so began a phenomenon that stayed in place until my parents’ arrival thirty years later: Iranian awe for American organisation. In just the war years from 1942 to 1945, the US fixed weary rail gauges, improved average roads, and injected $100 million of assets into the infrastructure, along with the bakeries, laundries, refrigerators and dental surgeries that poor, hungry Iranians had never seen before.14
Regular noises from visiting US military advisers about the need for a strong Iranian Army were music to Mohammed Reza’s ears. With World War II drawing to a close, but Stalin’s ruthless ambition already visible, the Shah saw the implications of a Cold War for his own corner of the world and knew which side he wanted to be on.
In October 1947, Mohammed Reza reached agreement for the creation of a permanent US Mission to the Iranian Army (ARMISH), a body that would survive until the bloodshed and upheaval of 1979. The unshakeable ties between Mohammed Reza and the US military had their beginning, though no one at the time could’ve ever imagined their end.
Bullets Fired,
The Shah Spared
On 4th February 1949, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi stepped out of his chauffeur-driven vehicle for a ceremony at the Tehran University Faculty of Law. With the crowd of press and photographers huddled together on a wintry Friday, a religious newspaper journalist named Nasser Fakhrara strode forward and took a Belgian revolver from his camera case. From six feet away, Fakhrara opened fire, sending the first three bullets through Mohammed Reza’s military cap.
Fakhrara fired again. The fourth bullet burst through Mohammed Reza’s right cheekbone and broke apart his upper teeth and lip. With the crowd seemingly stunned, Fakhrara composed his shaking hand and aimed directly for the heart. Through either his poor aim or the jolt on the revolver, he lodged the bullet in Mohammed Reza’s shoulder. As the sixth bullet jammed in the barrel, Fakhrara threw the gun in disgust, and turned to escape. He was gunned down by the security entourage almost immediately.
Like so many rulers through history, a moment such as this stayed with the Shah. To survive five bullets from six feet left Mohammed Reza with a sense of manifest destiny,15 and a deep belief in his own ability to forge a future for himself and the Iranian people that had eluded the rulers of the p
ast. The events of that Friday in the winter of 1949 also left a great deal of public sympathy with Mohammed Reza, which he deftly used to take greater controls from Parliament, and ban the Tudeh,16 the Iranian Communist Party offshoot of which Fakhrara had been a member.
Meanwhile the politics of oil would not go away. The bounty offered to the British Government by the original D’Arcy Concession had continued right through the war, and in practically every year of the 1940s, Anglo-Iranian’s income tax proceeds to the Treasury back in the UK outstripped the royalties to Iran.17 An attempt at revision in 1949 (known as the Gass-Golshaian Agreement, after its principal negotiators) saw an increase to six shillings per ton. This was rejected out of hand by the Iranian Parliament, and with some justification.
The atmosphere around national oil production was changing. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had all negotiated fifty-fifty profit splits with foreign companies in the preceding eighteen months, and with years of ignominy behind them, Iran sought a forceful overcorrection. In March 1951, Iran’s Parliament took a unanimous vote to nationalise the oil industry. Mohammed Reza signed this bill into law, and just a month later, a new Prime Minister ran the gauntlet to power – Mohammed Mossadegh.
Born in Tehran in 1882 to a wealthy family, and a distant cousin of Shah Nassereddin Qajar, Mossadegh grew up with an ‘Old Iran’ mentality around him. Elected to the first Iranian Parliament in 1907, he was deemed too young; so, he followed this setback with a Persian ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, a doctorate in law, and then a number of cabinet positions into his forties. A litmus test of his fortitude came when Reza began his push to be the new Shah in 1925. Mossadegh was only one of four men to speak on the floor of Parliament against the abolition of the Qajar dynasty, but his big words were met with a record of absence on the day of the vote.18
At just 46, Mossadegh retired to part of his family estate in west Tehran, and when the spectre of war arose in 1940, old suspicions led to Reza imprisoning him in the remote desert town of Birjand. Mossadegh later confided in friends that he expected to die there.19 His unlikely saviour? Reza’s son, the young Mohammed Reza, who came to Mossadegh’s rescue after his father was exiled. Mossadegh was elected once more to Parliament in 1943, and formed a political alliance called the National Front.
What would’ve been a fair deal for the British and Iranians? It’s hard to say. Oil nationalisation is a fraught business, as the second half of the twentieth century showed around the world. The momentum behind seizure of the oil industry preceded Mossadegh; but like many Iranians, he viewed this as a matter of dignity and national self-respect.20 So much reform had taken place within the span of just thirty years, and in retrospect, Iranians new to democracy elected a host of economic nationalists who talked up major change but were destined to disappoint.
With Indian independence in the rear-view mirror, Britain had few true jewels left in the Empire, and they were determined to retain the prize of Persia.21 At first, polite dispute resolution actions were initiated in the new post-WWII architecture of the World Bank and United Nations, but in the end, British warships were deployed to the Gulf.
The brinkmanship cost Iran. Under pressure from Western governments, the world’s major oil companies refused to buy Iranian oil. Their largely Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq delighted in opening the spigots to absorb the excess demand, and Shia Iran’s oil dominance took nearly two decades to recover.22
Despite the reality of isolation, Mossadegh enjoyed unfettered public support at his back, and turned on a new rival. He demanded new powers from Parliament, and control of the military from the Shah. Mohammed Reza refused, but Mossadegh called his bluff; he resigned on principle, forcing riots and cornering the Shah into a humiliating reversal. With emergency powers, Mossadegh had a free rein, and in October 1952 he cut diplomatic ties with Britain. But like many ambitious nationalists, the irony of Mossadegh’s popularity would be his downfall – his expertise in describing Iran’s problems had no connection to finding the solutions.
Through much of 1952, Mossadegh increasingly felt snookered by a circle of former allies who gradually became his opponents. These included parts of the clergy, who felt him too European, and parts of the military, who resented his power grab and cuts to defence spending. In January 1953, he again sought to extend his emergency powers, but with less of the public support.
The British turned to the US with the one Cold War fear that would grab their attention: the threat of Iran imploding, and reverting to its historical Russian patronage. In the run-up to Christmas 1952, the British SIS approached the American CIA with a plan to overthrow Mossadegh. After a series of meetings in Beirut and London through the summer of 1953, Churchill and Eisenhower approved a plan that (critically) involved the Shah’s tacit support.
A lot was asked of the Shah in the early discussions, but all that eventually came to be required of him was the signing of two firman decrees – one dismissing Mossadegh as Prime Minister, and the other installing General Zahedi in his place (Zahedi was in hiding but had been involved in planning discussions with the CIA). The Shah and his family holed up in a remote chalet to the north of Tehran on the way to the Caspian Sea. There they waited, playing cards and pacing around the rooms, until word came through via radio telephone from one Colonel Nassiri that the coup had been a success. That word never came.
Instead, Radio Tehran made a morning broadcast to the nation on 16th August that laid bare the shambolic events at the Prime Minister’s residence. Colonel Nassiri arrived with two jeeps and four trucks of soldiers, but had been beaten back by the guards and arrested. The Shah knew the firmans would’ve been seen, and his treachery as monarch to a democratically elected leader eventually known. He woke his family in the dead of night, and they fled without money or luggage on a small jet to Baghdad, telling the control tower they were merely a group of tourists needing fuel. In meetings over the coming days with the King of Iraq and the British and US Ambassadors in Baghdad, Mohammed Reza relayed his version of events, but increasingly felt he’d played the wrong hand. Against the strong advice of all involved, he boarded a jet to Rome with his family.
In swirls of panic, and through chain-smoked cigarettes by the Italianate balcony of their fourth-floor suite in the Hotel Excelsior, the Shah muttered aloud of a new chapter – letting the extended family fend for themselves, or using the last funds outside Iran to buy a home in the United States and live out a quiet life.23 All the while, the paparazzi gathered at the hotel entrance; and during a lunch in the opulent hotel dining room, a reporter raced in with a paper message off the wires that Mohammed Reza never could’ve expected. Mossadegh had fallen. The coup had actually been a success.
A Coup In Parts
Those who’ve studied coups or political upheavals often speak of inflexion points – say, decisions in back rooms that fan out and enable larger events to follow. Those who’ve lived through coups feel that upheaval in a very different manner: in the way a crowd turns on a speech, or a mob moves up through a town square with such a rumble that it’s as though the tide of history is moving with the ebb or flow of the rally.
In the sweltering summer heat of Baharestan Square, just hours after Colonel Nassiri’s botched home arrest, Foreign Minister Hosein Fatemi stood before a public address system, and called not only for the Shah’s family to be put on trial, but also for the Pahlavi monarchy to be abolished. The news of the Shah’s treacherous firmans did not circulate, but it didn’t seem to matter; Mossadegh’s National Front rioted, and the Tudeh (Iran’s outlawed equivalent of the Communist Party) tore down Reza statues in prominent places.24 In some way, these actions struck a chord with the Iranian masses – and it was not the chord Mossadegh intended.
It is common (and for some, convenient) to say what happened next came from the invisible hand of British and American intelligence – that the Mossadegh Coup of 1953 was the beginning of a long chain of Western interference tha
t continues to this day. There is a thick slice of truth in this; but another slice of truth, however, is that CIA officials on the ground almost certainly exaggerated their role in the rousing of rallies, and the coordination of dissent.25 It is more than plausible that forces beyond the CIA Station’s control moved in a direction that suited their cause: if they sought to take credit for it, they’re not the first in history to do this, and they certainly won’t be the last.
We’ll probably never know for certain why four days on from Colonel Nassiri’s bungled raid, on 19th August, a crowd mixed with craft guilds, civic fraternities, businessmen and retired military men turned out to show allegiance to the Shah – but this is most certainly what they did. Five tanks and over a dozen trucks of soldiers secured Tudeh buildings after raids by civilians: and wthin 24 hours, Army Square, Radio Tehran and every major provincial town were in the hands of forces loyal to the Mohammed Reza Pahlavi monarchy.
In that hour of dusk, a second wave of violence hit Mossadegh’s residence near the Marble Palace. This time, six tanks and a raging crowd descended on his closest supporters, with reports of up to thirty-five people dying in the bloodshed. Mossadegh himself had fled over the back wall before the gunfire began. He was captured the next day, sentenced to three years in prison for treason, and upon release, lived out his days on a quiet remote farm until his death in 1967. For General Zahedi, the nerve to continue with the coup after the first arrests was handsomely rewarded: not only was he appointed Prime Minister, he was the recipient of $5 million of CIA funds.26 The punishment for Foreign Minister Fatemi, and his incendiary speech against the Shah in Baharestan Square? A committal of death.
For Mohammed Reza at the time, the news in Rome merely confirmed his sense of manifest destiny – he flew back within the week, on a jet surrounded by journalists, and landed in Mehrabad Airport to a throng of supporters kneeling to kiss the nose of his shoes. Emboldened by his popularity, and with a US desire for royal continuity morphing into one for market share, a new grand oil bargain was struck. Anglo-Iranian (now British Petroleum) lost their coveted monopoly, instead becoming a shareholder with many US companies in a consortium with the Iranian Government.27 Finally, the Iranian people (and their Treasury) had a fifty-fifty profit share, reflecting the recent deals across the region. State revenue swelled, and together with US support and countless loans from the World Bank, Iran by the end of 1954 looked a different nation altogether.
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