9
Iran and Iraq
During the Second World War the Red Army, together with forces from its Western allies, had occupied Iran. Soviet intelligence used the occupation to establish its largest presence so far beyond its borders with nearly forty residencies and sub-residencies. The main residency in Tehran had 115 operations officers. Their principal task, as in neighbouring areas of the Soviet Union, was the identification, abduction and liquidation of those whom Stalin considered ‘anti-Soviet’ elements.1 Only strong post-war pressure from both the United States and Britain persuaded the Soviet Union to end its military occupation in 1946. For almost two decades thereafter Moscow hoped, and the West feared, that an Iranian revolution would bring a pro-Soviet regime to power. Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who had become Shah in 1941 shortly before his twenty-second birthday, remained uneasy on the ‘peacock throne’. In 1949 a group of Tudeh (Communist) Party members in the Iranian officer corps made an attempt on his life.2 Though the Shah survived, his authority was weakened two years later when he yielded to public pressure and appointed the eccentric nationalist, Dr Muhammad Mossadeq, as his Prime Minister. Mossadeq promptly nationalized the oil industry - to the outrage of the British government which owned 50 per cent of the shares in the Iranian Oil Company.
Both Britain and, still more, the United States greatly exaggerated Mossadeq’s susceptibility to Communist influence. When Dwight D. Eisenhower became President in January 1953, Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary in Winston Churchill’s government, found him ‘obsessed by the fear of a Communist Iran’. Six months later the CIA and SIS jointly organized a coup which overthrew Mossadeq, and restored the authority of the Shah. According to Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA officer chiefly responsible for planning the coup, an emotional Shah told him afterwards, ‘I owe my throne to God, my people, my army - and to you!’ He then reached into his inside pocket and presented Roosevelt with a large gold cigarette case. On his way back to Washington, Roosevelt called at London to brief Churchill in person. He found the Prime Minister propped up in bed, recovering from a stroke but eager to hear a first-hand account of the coup. ‘Young man,’ said Churchill, when Roosevelt had finished his briefing, ‘if I had been but a few years younger, I should have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture!’ Eisenhower was equally enthusiastic. He wrote in his diary that Roosevelt’s exciting report ‘seemed more like a novel than a historical fact’. The short-term success of the coup, however, was heavily outweighed by the long-term damage to American and British policy in Iran.3 It was easy for KGB active measures to encourage the widespread Iranian belief that the CIA and SIS continued to engage in sinister conspiracies behind the scenes. Even the Shah from time to time suspected the Agency of plotting against him. The Centre tried hard to encourage his suspicions.
For a quarter of a century after the 1953 coup, none the less, the CIA’s influence in Tehran comfortably exceeded that of the KGB. The banning of the Tudeh Party and the exile of its leadership meant that the Centre was unable to rely in Iran on the assistance it received from fraternal Party leaders in a number of other Middle Eastern countries. In 1957, in order to both monitor and intimidate domestic opposition, the Shah created with help from both the CIA and Mossad a new state security and intelligence organization, better known by its acronym SAVAK, which rapidly acquired a fearsome reputation for brutality. Two years after its foundation, Iran and Israel signed a secret agreement on intelligence and military co-operation.4
The KGB retaliated with a series of active measures to which it seems to have attached exaggerated importance. Late in 1957 the head of the Soviet department of the Iranian Foreign Office was trapped by a KGB agent into - allegedly - changing money illegally during a visit to Moscow and reported to the Iranian ambassador. According to a KGB report, he was dismissed on the personal orders of the Shah and replaced by a less anti-Soviet successor.5 The Centre’s most effective tactic, however, was to exploit the Shah’s continuing sense of insecurity and recurrent fears of US double-dealing. In February 1958, Service A forged a letter from the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to his ambassador in Tehran, belittling the Shah’s ability and implying that the United States was plotting his overthrow. The Tehran residency circulated copies of the letter to influential Iranian parliamentarians and editors in the confident expectation that one would come to the attention of the Shah - which it duly did. According to the KGB file on the operation, the Shah was completely taken in by the fabricated Dulles letter and personally instructed that a copy be sent to the US embassy with a demand for an explanation. Though the embassy dismissed it as a forgery, the Tehran residency reported that its denials were disbelieved. Dulles’s supposedly slighting references to the Shah were said to be a frequent topic of whispered conversation among the Iranian élite.6 The impact of these insults on the Shah’s insecure personality was all the greater because of the court culture of ‘shadulation’ which normally protected him from any hint of criticism.
The Shah’s irritation with the United States was increased by its failure to provide as much military aid as he wanted. During 1959 he flirted with the idea of signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union unless his demands were met by Washington. Dulles privately complained that the Shah was coming close to ‘blackmail tactics’ .7 Friction between Tehran and Washington was skilfully exacerbated by the Centre. In 1960 Service A fabricated secret instructions from the Pentagon ordering US missions in Iran and other Third World countries to collaborate in espionage operations against the countries to which they were accredited and to assist in operations to overthrow regimes of which Washington disapproved. Copies of the forged instructions were sent in November to the Tehran embassies of Muslim states by a supposedly disaffected Iranian working for the US military mission. Once again, as the Centre had intended, the forgery was believed to be genuine by the Iranian government and came to the attention of the Shah. The US ambassador was summoned by the Iranian foreign minister and asked for an explanation. As a result of the active measures, according to the Tehran residency, in 1961 the Shah personally ordered the replacement of a number of pro-American Iranian officers.8
The KGB also claimed to have influenced the Shah’s choice of his third (and last) wife, the twenty-one-year-old Farah Diba, whom it wrongly believed had Communist sympathies. The Centre boasted that, while Ms Diba was an architecture student in Paris, a KGB agent had persuaded the Iranian cultural attaché, Djahanguir Tafazoli, to introduce her to the Shah.9 Though she was unaware of the KGB’s interest in her, Farah Diba’s correspondence with her mother shows that there was some truth to the Centre’s boast. Her first meeting with the Shah took place at a reception at the Iranian embassy during his visit to Paris in the spring of 1959. Tafazoli took Ms Diba’s hand and tried to take her to meet the Shah. The shy Ms Diba hung back but when the Shah spoke to her later in the reception, she told her mother that, ‘Tafazoli added immediately, “Mademoiselle is a very good student. She is first in her class and she speaks French very well.” ’ Ms Diba added that it was ‘very nice of [Tafazoli] to have said so many nice things about me’. A cousin who was at the reception told her that the Shah clearly liked her and had his eyes on her as she left the room. ‘Of course’, wrote Ms Diba, ‘all of that is just talk.’10 Only a few months later, however, she and the Shah became engaged. The KGB’s misplaced interest in the future Empress appears to have derived from the fact that she had a circle of Communist student friends within the Paris Left Bank café society which she frequented. A friend who persuaded her to attend a demonstration in support of Algerians ‘fighting French imperialism’ was later imprisoned in Iran as a member of the Tudeh Party.11 The Centre was also encouraged by the fact that, unknown to Farah Diba, one of her relatives was a KGB agent codenamed RION.12 The KGB, however, failed to realize that she remained, as she had been brought up, a convinced royalist.
Though Farah Diba went to the pro-Algerian demonstration t
o counter taunts that she lacked the courage to do so, she recalls finding the world-view of her Communist and fellow-traveller friends ‘grim and deeply depressing’: ‘They were so young, but already they seemed to be against the whole world, extremely sour and bitter. You would have thought that, in their view, there was nothing worth keeping on this planet apart from the Soviet Union.’13
As soon as Farah Diba became Empress of Iran in December 1959, it became clear that the KGB had misjudged her. The new Empress’s radicalism showed itself not in her politics but in her artistic tastes. Farah Diba scandalized both Shia clergy and conservative Iranians by her patronage of avant-garde Western art. At a time when, as one Iranian businessman put it, ‘we were only just beginning to listen to Bach’, the Empress’s interest in Stockhausen seemed shocking.14
For some years after his marriage to Farah Diba the Shah’s position still appeared far from secure. At his summit meeting with John F. Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, Khrushchev confidently predicted that Iran would fall like a rotten fruit into Soviet hands. The CIA also thought that an Iranian revolution was on the cards. A National Intelligence Estimate of 1961 concluded, ‘Profound political and social change in one form or another is virtually inevitable.’ Among those plotting against the Shah was the brutal head of SAVAK, General Teimur Bakhtiar, whom the Shah sacked after receiving a warning from the CIA.15 The Shah also had to endure several further assassination attempts. According to the KGB defector, Vladimir Kuzichkin, one of the attempts was organized by the KGB and personally approved by Khrushchev. In February 1962 a Volkswagen Beetle packed with explosive by a KGB illegal was parked on the route taken by the Shah as he drove to the Majlis (the Iranian parliament). As the Shah’s motorcade passed the VW, the illegal pressed the remote control but the detonator failed to explode.16 There was no further plot by the KGB to assassinate the Shah, due in large part to a dramatic scaling down of its foreign assassinations after the damaging international publicity given to the trial in West Germany later in the year of one of the Centre’s leading assassins, Bogdan Stashinsky.17
During the Khrushchev era sabotage replaced assassination as the most important of the ‘special actions’ for which the FCD was responsible. At the heart of its sabotage planning was the identification of foreign targets, mostly in the West, and preparations for their destruction in time of war or other crises by Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy or DRGs) operating with local Communist or other partisans.18 Greater preparations for sabotage were made in Iran than in any other non-Western country. Between 1967 and 1973 a series of landing sites, bases and arms dumps for DRGs in Iranian Kurdistan, Iranian Azerbaijan and Abadan were selected, photographed and reconnoitred in detail, mostly by KGB illegals. The Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Kyrgyz KGBs were ordered to assist in recruiting illegals who could pass as members of one of Iran’s ethnic groups and help in setting up illegal residencies on Iranian territory.19 Following Andropov’s call in 1967 for a new ‘offensive to paralyse the actions of our enemies’, the main priority of FCD Department V became the planning of ‘special actions of a political nature’ - the peacetime use of sabotage and other forms of violence in the furtherance of Soviet policy. Line F officers in residencies, who reported to Department V, were instructed to show greater ingenuity in devising ‘special actions’ in which the hand of the KGB would be undetectable. 20 In Tehran alone detailed preparations were made for the bombing of twenty-three major buildings (among them royal palaces, major ministries, the main railway station, police and SAVAK headquarters, TV and radio centres) as well as key points in the electricity supply system and fifteen telephone exchanges.21 None of these elaborate schemes, however, ever proceeded beyond the planning stage. In September 1971 the defection of a Line F officer in the London residency, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, compromised many of Department V’s plans and led to the recall of most other Line F officers. Though the planning of ‘special actions of a political nature’ by the KGB continued, they never again had the same priority.22
During the later 1960s the Shah’s regime seemed to stabilize. The United States, whose military aid was on a much larger scale than a decade earlier, saw partnership with Iran and Saudi Arabia as the key to preserving Western access to the oil of the Persian Gulf. The Shah acquired the image in the West of an enlightened despot gallantly pursuing liberal reforms in the teeth of bigoted opposition. Washington and other Western capitals preferred to turn a blind eye when the Shah used SAVAK to crush protests from left-wing militants, independent-minded liberals and Islamic activists, chief among them the Ayatollah Khomeini.23 A brief for President Lyndon Johnson before the visit to Washington in 1968 by the Iranian Prime Minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, warned, ‘Queries about party politics should be avoided because the Iranian parliament is a one-party body, hand-picked by the Shah in an effort at “guided democracy”. Freedom of the press is similarly a touchy subject.’24 Though the Soviet Union maintained a tone of official cordiality in its relations with Iran, it was well aware that it was losing the struggle for influence in Tehran to the United States. The appointment in 1973 of the former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, as US ambassador in Tehran seemed to demonstrate that the special relationship between the Shah and the CIA had survived disruption by KGB active measures. The Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Yerofeyev, said sneeringly to Hoveyda, ‘We hear the Americans are sending their Number One spy to Iran.’ ‘The Americans are our friends,’ Hoveyda retorted. ‘At least they don’t send us their Number Ten spy!’25
During the early 1970s the Soviet Union’s most reliable major ally in the Middle East increasingly appeared to be Iran’s main regional opponent, Iraq. The preoccupation of the Ba‘thist regime in Baghdad with plots against it, probably even greater than that of the Shah, was skilfully exploited by the KGB, which claimed much of the credit for alerting President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and other Iraqi leaders to a conspiracy against them in January 1970. The Iraqi government declared that the conspirators had been acting in collusion with ‘the reactionary government in Iran’, with which it had a serious border dispute over the Shatt el-Arab waterway, and expelled the Iranian ambassador. In December Iran in turn accused Iraq of plotting to overthrow the Shah. Diplomatic relations between the two states were broken off in the following year. The Baghdad residency reported with satisfaction that, as a result of its active measures, many ‘reactionary’ army officers and politicians had been arrested and executed - among them a former military governor of Baghdad whom it blamed for a massacre of Iraqi Communists seven years earlier.26 In 1972 another active-measures operation, codenamed FEMIDA, compromised further Iraqi ‘reactionaries’ who were accused of contact with SAVAK and SIS.27 Simultaneously Moscow put pressure on a somewhat reluctant Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) to reach an accommodation with the Ba‘th regime.28 In April 1972 the Soviet Union and Iraq signed a fifteen-year Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. A month later two Communists entered the Iraqi cabinet. In July 1973 the Ba‘th and ICP joined in a Ba‘th-dominated Progressive National and Patriotic Front (PNPF).29
Simultaneously the KGB maintained covert contact in northern Iraq with the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Mullah Mustafa Barzani (codenamed RAIS), who had spent over a decade in exile in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. From 1968 to 1972 the KGB carried out twenty-three operations to pass funds to Barzani.30 In 1973, after a series of clashes with Iraqi forces, Barzani publicly accused the Baghdad government of duplicity and double-dealing. Forced to choose between the Ba‘th regime and the Kurds, Moscow opted for the Ba‘th. Betrayed by the Soviet Union, Barzani turned instead to Iran, the United States and Israel, who provided him with covert support. In 1974 full-scale war broke out between the Kurds and the Ba‘th regime. At its peak, 45,000 Kurdish guerrillas succeeded in pinning down over 80,000 Iraqi troops, 80 per cent of the total. According to a UN report, 300,000 people were forced to flee their homes. The war ended in victory for Baghdad in 1975
when Iran and Iraq settled their differences and the Shah withdrew support for the Kurds. Barzani was forced into exile in the United States, where he died four years later. In July 1975 Iraq became the first Middle Eastern country to be admitted to Comecon with the status of observer.31
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