by Amir Taheri
There is ample evidence that the Truman administration encouraged the idea of nationalizing Iran’s oil, albeit indirectly, while taking precautions not to antagonize Washington’s British allies. As the oil nationalization movement gathered momentum, the United States upgraded its diplomatic representation in Tehran, eventually naming one of its most senior diplomats, Loi Henderson, a former head of the Middle East desk at the State Department, as ambassador.9 By the end of 1950, the idea of nationalizing the oilfields had secured massive support both within the ruling elite and in the nation at large.
The Majlis, Iran’s unicameral parliament, had no difficulty recommending the appointment of Mossadeq as prime minister, a move that the shah immediately endorsed. In 1951, when Mossadeq presented his first cabinet to the shah, the Soviets saw this as a sign of growing American influence in Iran. Pravda, the daily organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, went even further by claiming that Mossadeq’s premiership represented a victory by the American “new imperialists” against “the old British imperialists.” Soon, the theme of Mossadeq as an “agent of American imperialism” became a favorite of the pro-Soviet newspapers in Tehran. This is how the most popular daily newspaper of the Soviet-sponsored Tudeh (Masses) Party saw the new government:
The government of Dr. Mossadeq has taken the path of killing the nation, lying, and obeying the colonial policy of America. Dr. Mossadeq, having miserably surrendered to American colonialism, has deemed it necessary to shower our nation with bullets and shed the blood of the most noble and independence-loving children of the nation to please the ambassador of U.S. imperialism. The path of Dr. Mossadeq’s government is the path of massacring people, use of fascist methods, spreading lies, and making deals with American and English [sic] imperialism, and sacrificing the interests of the Iranian nation. 10
A sign that Mossadeq wished to nurture a relationship with the United States was that he appointed his son, Ghulam-Hussein, a doctor of medicine, as his personal contact with the American ambassador in Tehran. During Mossadeq’s premiership, U.S. aid to Iran rose from under $5 million a year to more than $23 million. When the British sent two gunboats to anchor opposite the Iranian oil refinery at Abadan in order to intimidate Mossadeq, President Truman informed Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the United States would not endorse military action against Iran.11 Truman demonstrated his high regard for Mossadeq by receiving him as a head of state during a visit to the United States. At the United nations and other international organs, the United States consistently supported Iran’s right to nationalize its oil. The Truman administration also tried to broker an amicable settlement between Mossadeq and the British, and dispatched Averill Harriman, a former governor of new York and a senior figure of the Democratic Party, as special emissary to Tehran.
14
Five Days in August
By 1953, it had become clear that Mossadeq had reached a political impasse of his own making. He had rejected every offer extended to him by the British, including a generous one endorsed by Washington, but had not made any counteroffer. At the same time, he had dissolved the parliament, quarreled with the shah over who should command the military, declared martial law, printed vast sums of paper money and thus provoked unprecedented inflation, and broken with most of his supporters within the political elite.
For their part, the Soviets clearly hoped that Mossadeq would prove to be Iran’s Kerensky, a liberal prime minister destroying the monarchy and paving the way for a Communist takeover. The Soviet secret service, the NKVD (the future KGB), had built an impressive network of agents in Iran. Directly or indirectly, it controlled no fewer than twelve newspapers in Tehran alone.1 As it was revealed a couple of years later, the NKVD had also recruited over six hundred Iranian army, gendarmerie and police officers and NCOs in the name of “proletarian solidarity.” Moscow’s chief asset in Iran, the Tudeh (Masses) Party, boasted a card-holding membership of over fifty thousand, making it the largest Communist party outside the Soviet camp and China. An unknown number of NKVD sleeper agents, mostly Soviet citizens from the Caucasus and Central Asia who spoke Persian and could easily pass for Iranians, had created an underground network to be activated for an armed insurrection. Having been forced to withdraw his army from Iran just seven years earlier, Stalin dreamed of making a spectacular return. He had even thought of a legal façade for his planned military interventions. Two treaties signed between Tehran and Moscow, in 1921 and 1941, gave the USSR the right to land troops in Iran when and if Soviet security appeared to be threatened by armed conflict in Iranian territory.
Meanwhile, a coalition of anti-Mossadeq personalities, parties, and associations had taken shape with one of Mossadeq’s former cabinet colleagues, Senator Fazlallah Zahedi, as figurehead. A retired major general and a relative of Mossadeq, Zahedi had been interior minister in Mossadeq’s first cabinet in 1951. Two years later, however, Zahedi had emerged as leader of the opposition in the Iranian senate while also enjoying the support of several members of the lower house of parliament. But how to get rid of Mossadeq and allow Zahedi to become prime minister? The constitution required that the shah dismiss Mossadeq and appoint Zahedi in his place, but the shah would not hear of such a scheme. He had dismissed Mossadeq once before and experienced pro-Mossadeq street riots that claimed thirty-one lives in Tehran. no, he did not want any more bloodshed. Also, the shah did not like Zahedi, a member of his father’s military entourage, who regarded the young monarch as a mere boy. Finally, the shah would not risk provoking an armed conflict that could give the Soviets the pretext to invoke the 1921 and 1941 treaties and send the Red Army back into Iranian territory it had evacuated seven years earlier. With the British out of Iran and turned into sworn enemies because of the dispute over oil nationalization, there was no major power to counter such a Soviet move should it come to pass. To all those who urged him to dismiss Mossadeq, including some Iranians with close ties to the British, the shah always had one answer: Who would protect us against the Russians?
The obvious answer was the United States, the same power that had helped Iran push the Russians out a few years earlier. The problem was that the Truman administration, still supportive of Mossadeq, would not give the shah the guarantee he demanded for dismissing the prime minister. By January 1952, however, President Truman had been replaced by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and friend of Winston Churchill, who had replaced Clement Attlee as Britain’s prime minister. John Foster Dulles, the new U.S. secretary of state, was much more of a cold warrior than Dean Acheson, the man he had replaced. He was also the architect of what was to become known as the “quarantine the aggressor” strategy, a more dynamic version of the Truman administration’s doctrine of containment against the USSR. Determined that Iran should not fall into the Soviet orbit, Dulles let himself be persuaded by the British to give the shah the guarantee he wanted. The guarantee eventually came in the form of a coded message relayed by Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, during a secret meeting in Switzerland, and passed on to the shah through his wife, Queen Soraya, in another secret meeting between the two women in Tehran.2
Buoyed by the American guarantee of support against a putative Soviet invasion, the shah signed two edicts, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other appointing Zahedi as prime minister. But when a colonel in the Royal Guard arrived at Mossadeq’s residence to deliver the edict, the prime minister claimed that the document was a forgery and thus unacceptable. The colonel was arrested, and Mossadeq ordered a propaganda campaign around the theme of “an attempted military coup by British agents.” Convinced that Mossadeq was determined to defy the constitution with support from the army, the shah decided to leave the country so as to prevent a direct clash.
At the time, Mossadeq held the post of minister of defense as well as prime minister and had appointed officers related to him by blood ties or political ideas to all key posts within the arme
d forces. One of his relatives, General Muhammad-Taqi Rihai, a brilliant French-educated officer, served as chief of staff. A few months earlier, Mossadeq had given himself “full powers,” dissolved the parliament, declared a state of emergency (known as Point V under Iranian law), and arrested scores of his opponents, creating the impression that he wanted to impose personal rule or maybe even abolish the monarchy with support from the Communists. Later, he put a prize on Zahedi’s head and dissolved the senate, forcing the senator to go into hiding.
As things heated up, the Tudeh threw its full support behind Mossadeq, the man it had vilified as an “American agent” two years earlier. But the bulk of Mossadeq’s original coalition had turned against him.3 His foreign minister, Hussein Fatemi, a firebrand and a magnetic orator, seized the opportunity to call for the abolition of the monarchy at a series of public meetings, thus widening the gap between Mossadeq and the traditional, monarchist elements of Iranian society.
Surprisingly, however, Mossadeq appeared to be paralyzed, often spending most of the day in bed in his pajamas and refusing to see his ministers. When the interior minister, Hussein Sadiqi, arrived to ask what was to be done now that the shah had left the country and there was no parliament either, Mossadeq dismissed him with “a few incoherent banalities.”4 The old man had simply run out of ideas. He was one of those politicians who have one big idea—his had been the nationalization of oil—beyond which they cannot think. The Tudeh urged him to declare a transitional government with himself as president. But he couldn’t; he had been appointed prime minister by the shah and still pretended that the royal decree dismissing him had been a forgery. It would not have been difficult for him to contact the shah and find out whether the decree was genuine. But he didn’t. He wanted the shah in the system and did not want the shah; he didn’t know what he wanted. Or, rather, there was one thing he wanted above everything else: to preserve his “good name.” Like all populists, he was prepared to sacrifice almost anything to ensure that crowds continued to hail him. In those hot August days, however, Mossadeq’s ambivalence and inertia persuaded the crowds that he was no longer capable of offering leadership in any direction. The crowds now in the streets were no longer Mossadeqist; they were pro-Tudeh mobs, brought to destroy the statues of the shah and his father, ransack the offices of anti-Communist newspapers, and call for a “people’s republic.”
In the meantime, plans by a network of CIA agents, working hand-in-glove with British intelligence “assets” in Tehran, to organize demonstrations against Mossadeq had collapsed. The reason was that the demonstrations were supposed to be triggered by the news of Mossadeq’s dismissal by the shah and Zahedi’s appointment. But when Mossadeq refused the royal decree on the grounds that it might be forged, the transfer of power to Zahedi could not take place. The CIA had established an antenna in Tehran in 1950 to watch the growing activities of its Soviet counterpart, the NKVD. The Americans had managed to bribe a few members of parliament, and made arrangements with two or three minor newspapers to publish stories planted by the agency. There is no doubt that by the time the shah had signed the decree dismissing Mossadeq, the CIA, using whatever assets the British had left behind, was engaged in a number of dirty tricks designed to incite public opinion against the prime minister by creating the impression that the Communists were about to seize power in Tehran.
In the end, the CIA played only a minor role in the dramatic events that led to the August 1953 uprising in favor of the shah. Mossadeq realized that the game was up for him, and as crowds of angry Tehranis moved towards his home, later to loot and ransack it, he climbed his wall with a ladder, still in his trademark pajamas, to seek refuge in the headquarters of the American Point Four next door. Zahedi, who had been in hiding and played no role in the actual uprising, emerged to seize control and invite the shah to return from his brief exile first in Baghdad and then in Rome.
Over the years, the events of those five days in August in Tehran were built up into a myth according to which the CIA had organized what amounted to a decisive change of course in Iranian history. It is virtually impossible to find a single anti-American text published after 1960 that does not refer to the “CIA plot” as something horrible, on par with the Holocaust. The narrative built around the “plot” theme is simple: Iran in 1953 was a democratic society with a democratically elected parliament, prime minister, and cabinet, supported by the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people. But then, sometime in August, the United States, which had supported Iran’s democracy during the Truman administration, decided, under the Republican administration of President Eisenhower, to ally itself with the dictatorial shah against Iranian democracy as symbolized by Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. The CIA sent an operative, a certain Kermit Roosevelt, to “put the shah back on his throne.” Roosevelt almost single-handedly succeeded in overthrowing Mossadeq, reinstalling the shah, and earning the United States the eternal ire of all nations in the so-called Third World, before quickly flying to London for a well-deserved holiday. (As Brecht once observed: OK, Caesar did cross the Rhine in winter; but did he not have someone to make him soup and polish his boots?)
This story, born in 1960—a full seven years after the August 1953 events in Tehran—was quickly adopted by the Soviet Union as a major theme in its global anti-American propaganda campaign. Over the years, other opponents of the United States have also adopted it, as have some American academics who often thought the worst of their own nation. For more than fifty years, the story has been used to “prove” that the United States, its claims of loving liberty notwithstanding, has been an enemy of democracy in the developing world.
In recent years, one American journalist has published a book to “prove” that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda decided to attack the United States on 9/11 because of the “bitterness felt about those distant events in Iran.” In 2006, the newspaper USA Today ran an article claiming that the “destruction by the United States of democracy in Iran” was “an established fact.”
In March 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright implicitly adopted the myth of “August in Tehran” and apologized to the Iranian people for it. Later that year, President Bill Clinton echoed her apology in a speech, expressing regret for “all the crimes that my country and my culture have committed” against the Iranian people. After leaving office, Clinton told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that during his presidency he had “formally apologized on behalf of the United States” for what he termed “American crimes against Iran.” By his account, “It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadeq, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the shah back and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the ’50s; at least, that is my belief.”
Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America coalition, Clinton appeared to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadeq was named prime minister by the shah twice, and dismissed by him twice. This did not mean that the United States “got rid of parliamentary democracy,” something that did not exist in the first place. Having dissolved the parliament and stopped the subsequent general election in midcourse because he realized that his opponents would win a crushing majority, Mossadeq was ruling by decree in violation of the constitution. Though a popular populist, he could hardly be described as a democrat.
Clinton’s claim that the United States changed the course of Iranian history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an insult by an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation more than half a century ago. Moreover, in the Islamic Republic that Clinton was trying to court, Mossadeq, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullahs af
ter seizing power in 1979 was to take the name of Mossadeq off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village where Mossadeq is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his tomb. History textbooks written by the mullahs present Mossadeq as “the son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed shah, and betrayed Islam.” Clinton’s apology to the mullahs for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadeq was like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy towards Alexander Kerensky.
The so-called coup d’état that supposedly brought back the shah happened only in the imagination of anti-American ideologists. The Iranian army did not intervene in the events until after pro-shah demonstrators had seized most key government buildings, and then only to restore public order after the new government had been announced. Many hours of newsreel footage of the events are available in archives, including the national Film Archive in Washington, D.C., clearly depicting a popular pro-shah uprising. There are also hundreds of eyewitness accounts by Iranians who observed or took part in the events.