Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  * * *

  * The Rosenberg case is almost the American Dreyfus affair. It has excited more controversy than the Hiss case, and continues to do so. In 1979 The New Republic (June 23) published an article that contended that Julius was involved in a Communist espionage ring, while Ethel—although certainly an active Communist—was innocent of any spying. The article brought forth a virtual avalanche of angry letters from both sides (see the August 4, 1979, issue of The New Republic). There is a very active National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case.

  * Wainwright, in his early twenties during the war, was a very junior member of Ike’s staff. He could recall seeing Eisenhower only four or five times in 1944 and 1945, and was much impressed that Ike remembered his name eight years later. “He had a politician’s kind of memory,” Wainwright said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Iran: The Preparation

  MIDNIGHT, AUGUST 1–2, 1953. A large, ornate garden in Teheran, Iran. A medium-sized, medium-height, rather nondescript American, wearing a dark turtleneck shirt, Oxford-gray slacks, and Persian sandals, opens the gate to the garden, slips out, glances up and down the street, and silently climbs into the back seat of an ordinary-looking black sedan. Without a backward glance, the driver pulls away slowly, smoothly, and heads toward the royal palace. In the back seat, the American huddles down on the floor and pulls a blanket over him.

  At the palace gate, the sentry flashes a light in the driver’s face, grunts, and waves the car through. Halfway between the gate and the palace steps, the driver parks, gets out, and walks away. A slim, nervous man walks down the drive, glancing left and right as he approaches. The American pulls the blanket out of the way and sits up as the man enters the car and closes the door.

  They look at each other. Then His Imperial Majesty, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran, Light of the Aryans, allows himself to relax, and even smile.

  “Good evening, Mr. Roosevelt,” he says. “I cannot say that I expected to see you, but this is a pleasure.”

  “Good evening, Your Majesty. It is a long time since we met each other, and I am glad you recognize me. It may make establishing my credentials a bit easier.”

  His Imperial Majesty laughs. “That will hardly be necessary. Your name and presence is all the guarantee I need.”

  Roosevelt—Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson and FDR’s cousin—quickly explains that he has entered Iran illegally, that his cover name is James Lochridge, and that he is there as a personal representative of President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “President Eisenhower will confirm this himself,” Roosevelt states, “by a phrase in a speech he is about to deliver in San Francisco—actually within the next twenty-four hours. Prime Minister Churchill has arranged to have a specific change made in the time announcement of the BBC broadcast tomorrow night. Instead of saying, ‘It is now midnight,’ the announcer will say, ‘It is now’—pause—‘exactly midnight.’ ”

  Having established his bona fides, Roosevelt explains that his purpose in coming is to assure the Shah that he has the full backing of the American and British governments, that Washington and London are anxious to help him overthrow his prime minister and ensure that H.I.M. retains his throne.

  The thirty-four-year-old Emperor smiles, as well he might. To have the complete, unquestioning support of a Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill is, after all, a reassuring feeling, especially to a shaky monarch surrounded by rumors of coups, countercoups, plots, and revolutions, with the additional problem of sharing a long, virtually undefended border with the Soviet Union. Even better than the general promise of support from Eisenhower and Churchill is Roosevelt’s pledge that he would personally set in motion a series of events that would rid the Shah of his Iranian enemies.

  After giving H.I.M. a brief outline of his proposed countercoup, Roosevelt indicates that they had best part before their meeting is discovered. They agree to meet again the following midnight under identical circumstances.

  “Good night—or should I say good morning?—Mr. Roosevelt. I am glad to welcome you once again to my country.”

  “And I am very glad to be here, Your Majesty. I am full of confidence that our undertaking will succeed.” The Shah leaves the car, the driver returns, Roosevelt pulls the blanket over his head again, and is returned to his garden. The CIA’S first major covert action under Eisenhower’s orders is launched.1

  HOW HAD THINGS COME TO SUCH A PASS that a Roosevelt was sneaking around at midnight, hiding under blankets, while Eisenhower altered a speech and Churchill used the BBC for personal messages, all in support of a potential dictator whose sole political objective was to overthrow a highly popular prime minister in favor of a pro-Nazi general? A brief answer is that oil and communism make a volatile mixture. A fuller response takes into account the complexities of postwar international relations and the recent history of Iran.

  There are only two facts about modern Persia—Iran—that truly matter to the rest of the world. It has oil, and it is Russia’s southern neighbor. Because of the oil, the British had moved in on Iran in 1909, when the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (in which the British Government controlled 52 percent of the stock) obtained a sixty-year concession which gave it exclusive rights to explore and exploit the oil of Iran. Because of the border, Britain and Russia (with American support) had invaded Iran in 1941, where in a matter of hours they destroyed the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces. This was as much an act of great power highhandedness and brutality as Hitler’s invasion of Denmark, although in this case the voices of outraged protest were exclusively Iranian. The purpose of the invasion was to provide a corridor for the shipment of American lend-lease goods into Russia.

  The ruler of Iran in 1941 was Reza Khan, an illiterate officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade who had led a coup against the Qajar regime in the 1920s and established himself as Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Iran was a constitutional monarchy with a two-house Parliament.2 The British and Russians believed that Reza Khan was potentially pro-Nazi, so they forced his abdication, sent him into exile, and put his twenty-three-year-old son on the throne. At the same time the British also kidnaped General Fazollah Zahedi, a dashing, handsome, six-foot-two ladies’ man with a taste for silk underwear, expensive prostitutes, and opium. According to the British, Zahedi was also pro-Nazi, and they kept him in jail in Palestine for the duration.

  The new, young Shah looked the part of a monarch. He carried himself stiffly and was strikingly handsome, despite—or perhaps because of—a highly prominent nose. But despite the impression of strength he gave, he had been a sickly boy, dominated by his stern and cruel father, and was filled with self-doubt and fears of his own weakness.3 He was easily manipulated by the occupying powers (which after 1942 included the Americans).

  The Allies gave the Shah a sense of importance. Churchill accepted an invitation to lunch at the palace, and the Big Three held one of their famous conferences in Teheran, where the young Shah met, briefly, both Stalin and Roosevelt. Stalin offered him arms (with Soviet advisers to go with them); Churchill pretended to discuss seriously military strategy; FDR displayed great interest in a reforestation program and offered to return to Iran after the war to advise the Shah on the subject.4

  At the Teheran Conference, the occupying powers pledged themselves to withdraw their troops from Iran within six months of the end of hostilities. In late 1945, Britain and America kept their word, but the Russians stayed on in the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan, where they attempted to inspire a revolt that would lead to a secession of the province and its incorporation as a “republic” into the Soviet Union. This was the first real crisis of the Cold War. President Truman sent America’s newest aircraft carrier, the Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the eastern Mediterranean as a show of force to back his demand that the Russians get out of Iran. After negotiating a deal that gave the Russians access to Iranian oil, Stalin did pull his troops out. The Iranian Parliament then
refused to ratify the deal, and Russia suffered a major diplomatic setback.5

  The American attitude toward Iran in the immediate postwar years was set by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who believed the United States should play a supporting role in Iran’s resistance to the Soviet pressure. As a result, relations between America and Iran were excellent. The Shah visited the United States, where he had a successful audience with Truman and met Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University (Ike recorded in his memoirs, “At that time I developed—on short acquaintance—some confidence that he would prove an effective leader of his people”).6

  In 1947, Kim Roosevelt, Harvard graduate, historian, OSS Mideastern expert during the war, was writing a book called Arabs, Oil and History, and he had a long interview with the Shah in his palace. Roosevelt was then thirty-one, the Shah twenty-eight. They impressed each other favorably, or so Roosevelt later claimed. The Shah, he wrote, was “an intense young man, with a wiry body and a wiry spirit also—dark, slim, with a deep store of barely hidden energy.” Roosevelt did admit that “his [the Shah’s] personality was subdued at that time.”7

  The most important American in the Shah’s life in the mid-1940s was not Truman, nor Acheson, nor Kim Roosevelt, but rather a fabulous character named Schwarzkopf. Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf of the U. S. Army had been the chief of the New Jersey State Police and was internationally known for his success in handling the Lindbergh kidnaping case.

  He was one of the first of those experts sent by the United States to underdeveloped countries to teach their governments how to maintain law and order and preserve themselves in power. The Iranians had asked for his help in reorganizing their police force. From 1942 to 1948 he commanded the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie with firmness and determination, turning it into a modern, efficient force that was loyal to the Shah and extremely hostile to the Tudeh (Communist) Party. Schwarzkopf also helped organize the secret, or security, branch of the police, the notorious SAVAK. During the crisis in Azerbaijan the Gendarmerie helped ensure firm government control by arresting some three hundred Tudeh Party leaders. Schwarzkopf personally showed up wherever trouble was brewing and was thus singled out as a target for special attacks from the Soviet press, which accused him of being the front man for American imperialism.8 In 1948, Schwarzkopf was promoted to brigadier general and left Iran for a new post in West Germany.

  The United States, delighted at Iran’s successful resistance to Soviet encroachment, rewarded the Shah’s government with new programs of technical and financial aid, including a military mission of some eighteen officers who oversaw the distribution of weapons from American war surplus stocks worth some $60 million.9 The badly burned Soviets, meanwhile, fearful of an increased American presence on their southern border (at this time the United States was replacing Britain as the chief supporter of the Greek monarchy, in accordance with the recently announced Truman Doctrine), adopted a cautious and rather conservative attitude toward Iran. The Russians preferred a weaker British presence in Iran to an aggressive American intrusion, but there was little they could do to stop the incoming Yanks.10

  With the Russians checked and the Americans providing support, the Iranians were in a position to turn on their real enemies, the hated British. They had much to complain about. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company paid more in taxes to the British Government than it did in royalties to Iran. Equally galling, the company used the huge profits it earned in Iran to expand its oil output in other parts of the world. Further, to the British the Iranians were just another set of “wogs,” to be treated with contempt and excluded from any but the most menial posts in the operation of the Abadan refinery.

  The situation was intolerable. It presented a marvelous opportunity to any Iranian politician who had the courage to lead. The one who seized the chance was a remarkable old man, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, leader of the National Front. Seventy years old in 1951, he was a rich landowner, educated in France and Switzerland, worldly wise, a successful spellbinder of a speaker who had been elected to the Majlis (the second house of the Parliament) in 1915, and who was generally regarded by those Westerners who dealt with him as a completely unreasonable, demagogic, and xenophobic man.

  Tall, thin, bent, a semi-invalid who often appeared in public clad only in pajamas, he would burst into tears at the most inappropriate moment, or faint dead away. He had a huge nose that was always dripping. (One State Department official said, “Mossadegh has a nose that makes Jimmy Durante look like an amputee!”)11 His favorite place for doing business was his bedroom, where he would recline, propped up by pillows, and alternatively cackle and cry.

  Dean Acheson depicted Mossadegh as “small and frail, with not a shred of hair on his billiard-ball head; a thin face protruding into a long beak of a nose flanked by two bright shoe-button eyes. His whole manner and appearance was birdlike and he moved quickly and nervously as if he were hopping about on a perch. His pixie quality showed in instantaneous transformations.”12

  Mossadegh was the first Middle Eastern politician to demand the complete nationalization of his country’s oil fields. The Shah’s Prime Minister, General Razmara, opposed such drastic action. On March 7, 1951, a member of the Crusaders of Islam, one of the groups in Mossadegh’s National Front, assassinated Razmara while he was attending a ceremony in a mosque. Mossadegh was the overwhelming popular choice to succeed Razmara. As the Shah later wrote, “How could anyone be against Mossadegh? He would enrich everybody, he would fight the foreigner, he would secure our rights. No wonder students, intellectuals, people from all walks of life, flocked to his banner.”13 Reluctantly, the Shah appointed him Prime Minister. The same day, May 2, 1951, the Parliament passed a bill nationalizing the oil industry. A week later the Majlis gave Mossadegh’s government a vote of confidence by a majority of ninety-nine to three.

  For the British, the wogs were on the rampage. For the Iranians, a war of liberation had begun against the colonialists.14 For the Americans, here was an opportunity to get a foothold in the rich Iranian oil fields, and a window to Russia. The British refused to accept the compensation payment for the company offered by Mossadegh, shut down Abadan cold, refused to buy oil from Iran, and put various legal obstacles in the way of any country that was willing to purchase Iranian oil, arguing that such oil was in fact stolen goods and threatening to take any purchaser to court.

  Truman and Acheson tried to serve as honest brokers, offering to mediate to bring about a compromise. Mossadegh came to Washington and was put up at the Blair House. Meeting with Truman, Mossadegh, looking old and pathetic, said in trembling tones, “I am speaking for a very poor country—a country all desert—just sand, a few camels, a few sheep …” Acheson, grinning, interrupted to say that with all its sand and oil, Iran reminded him of Texas. Mossadegh laughed delightedly. They talked of oil prices, with Mossadegh complaining about the vast gap between what the British paid Iran per barrel and what they charged for the product on the world market. Acheson “explained oil economics to him in terms of the wide spread between the price we got for beef cattle on the hoof on our farms and the price we paid for a prime roast of beef in the butcher’s shop.” Mossadegh responded that “peasants were always exploited.”

  Later, Acheson wrote that the United States was slow to realize that Mossadegh was “essentially a rich, reactionary, 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.”15

  The shutdown at Abadan, meanwhile, forced a crisis in Iran. With no moneys coming in from oil royalties, the government was rapidly going bankrupt. In July 1952, Mossadegh demanded authority to govern for six months without recourse to Parliament, and that he be given the additional post of Minister of War. The Shah refused and instead demanded (and got) Mossadegh’s resignation. Immediately the National Front, supported by the Tudeh Party, launched riots and demonstrations. Mossadegh’s replacement inflamed the situation by indicating that he was going to gi
ve in to the British on the question of oil nationalization. The riots grew worse. Unable to control them, the new Prime Minister resigned. Five days after the Shah had fired Mossadegh, he had to reappoint him.16

  In October 1952, Mossadegh broke off diplomatic relations with Britain. Meanwhile, Winston Churchill once again became Prime Minister of Great Britain, and, in November 1952, Eisenhower was elected President of the United States. The two comrades in arms from World War II now had their opportunity to solve the Iranian “problem.”

  IN JANUARY 1953, Mossadegh sent President-elect Eisenhower a three-page cable in which he congratulated Ike on his election victory, then plunged into an extended discussion of Iranian affairs. The theme was summed up in one sentence: “For almost two years,” Mossadegh wrote, “the Iranian people have suffered acute distress and much misery merely because a company inspired by covetousness and a desire for profit supported by the British government has been endeavoring to prevent them from obtaining their natural and elementary rights.” In a hand-drafted reply, Ike said his own position was impartial, that he had no prejudices in the case, and that he hoped future relations would be good.17

  In fact, however, everything the President-elect was hearing was anti-Mossadegh. Churchill and the British seized on the Tudeh’s support of the Prime Minister to make the point that the old man was either a Communist or a victim of Communist intrigue. The American ambassador to Iran, Loy Henderson, a career Foreign Service officer who had served in Moscow before the war, was bitterly anti-Communist. When asked to assess the extent of Mossadegh’s support, Henderson told the incoming Eisenhower administration that “old Mossy” relied on “the street rabble, the extreme left … extreme Iranian nationalists, some, but not all, of the more fanatical religious leaders, intellectual leftists, including many who had been educated abroad and who did not realize that Iran was not ready for democracy.”