A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  According to Peter Stothard his filed copy didn’t seem the work of a literary genius, although ‘like all correspondents in those days, the reports which he sent back to senior editors were better than the articles those editors chose to publish. There is a fine dry sketch of the Persian Queen Mother who “has always had an itch to interfere in politics”.’263 I’m not sure how an article on the intricate politics of the Majlis could ever ‘seem the work of literary genius’? I doubt that T. S. Eliot’s daily summaries of the financial pages did either. Bunting didn’t get a byline and we can be sure of his authorship of only one article because he copied it in a letter to Dorothy Pound.264 ‘Persia’s Present Leaders: The Maturing of National Policy, from a Special Correspondent’ appeared in The Times of 22 August 1951. It may not show signs of ‘literary genius’ but it is a compelling piece of writing, very much Bunting’s authentic voice. He wasn’t deliberately endearing himself to Mosaddeq: ‘Dr. Moussadek might seem, in normal times, merely the ordinary Persian politician and not a very distinguished one … He is not, in the ordinary sense, a brave man: perhaps, rather, a timid one. But he can be brave when his emotions are sufficiently aroused, and when he can speak for Persia he has a martyr’s temerity, marred by nervous instability and the tears he sheds as a result of it.’265 This survey of the Persian political classes is uncompromising and deeply informed.

  He told Dorothy in November that the ‘only kind of intelligence I am able to have any contact with is that of the British chargé d’affaires who argues the state of Persian politics with me twice a week or so’.266 The British chargé d’affaires, George Middleton, was the most able diplomat Bunting had ever come across. He told Ezra Pound that he was ‘intelligent, quick, knows his own mind, doesn’t have to surround himself with pomposities’. Bunting’s impression of Middleton’s diplomatic abilities may have been affected by the fact that he had Pound’s works on his shelves, was familiar with them, and even knew Bunting’s work from Pound’s Active Anthology.267

  He described a typical day working for The Times to Zukofsky. It was

  an all-day and nearly all-night job. I used to begin reading the local press as soon as I was shaved, by say 6.30, and I’d never have a pause in the work until it was too late to telegraph for the next day’s paper, about nine at night. I hardly saw Sima or Maria unless it was Friday, and even the Friday picnics were few. In a way exciting, in a way dull: Mosaddeq kept doing sensational silly things that had to be reported more shrewdly than the agencies and other papers could do it, and I was under threat of expulsion from the beginning of December.

  Most other foreign journalists fled, and by February he was practically alone,

  and having to intrigue to prevent the police serving an expulsion order on me … For nearly twelve weeks I had no papers at all – passport and identity card impounded by the cops … I found myself notorious for a few weeks. Some politician had told the police to make trouble about Sima’s exit visa, and there was a beastly period of continual cross-examinations and efforts to persuade her to leave me and remain in Persia. They even announced that Maria was to be regarded as a Persian subject and kept there by force.268

  By March 1952 his position was distinctly precarious; ‘Mossy Dick can’t make up his mind to expel me and can’t bring himself to let the cops give me a permis de séjour,’ he told Ezra Pound in March. The restrictions Mosaddeq placed on his life and movements were irritating. Apart from not being able to secure legal papers, he couldn’t retrieve his luggage and books from the customs authorities where they had been ‘rotting for ten weeks’, couldn’t get a sugar ration card, couldn’t move more than fifty miles from Teheran or spend a night away from his own house.269

  The most dramatic cable in Bunting’s employment file describes his expulsion from Iran by Mosaddeq in May 1952: ‘Bunting arrived Baghdad postexpulsion expersia accompanied wife ettwo yearold daughter. Made difficult journey parcar viaheaviest rainstorm … wife grilled, repeat grilled parpolice attempt force her upgive british nationality but she refused despite threat treat infant daughter as persian national prevent child leaving country cumparent.’270

  The Times reacted unsympathetically to this tale of woe and three days later the news editor cabled a return: ‘we sympathise and regret no other vacancy abroad stop.’ Although the newspaper’s accounts department allowed him to keep his company car, a Ford Mercury, Bunting maintained a healthy disrespect for the newspaper for the rest of his life. On the one occasion The Times stuck up for Bunting it did so from a safe distance. A leader on 14 April 1952 explained why Mosaddeq had expelled its correspondent:

  the real reason for excluding all these correspondents is the Persian Government’s dislike of criticism and its desire to hold the truth from both other countries and its own people. Our Correspondent’s dispatches in The Times were frequently quoted in the Persian Press. Inside Persia elections can be rigged and the Opposition bought or suppressed in various ways; foreign correspondents cannot be silenced unless they are expelled. It is the remedy of all weak and dictatorial Governments and it always wrong.271

  In the light of ensuing events it isn’t altogether surprising that Bunting came to regard this as hypocritical cant. A similar leader three years later provoked a letter from Bunting that put his case in characteristically forthright style: ‘Sir, you expressed as much indignation three and a half years ago, when your own correspondent was expelled from Tehran, but showed the depths of your concern for the freedom of the press by leaving him to starve.’272

  I kept on telling the truth

  His account of his expulsion to Margaret de Silver contains elements of the Leighton Park School incident nearly thirty-five years previously – refusal to compromise, commitment to tell the truth as he saw it, contempt for those who didn’t:

  The grounds [Mosaddeq] gave were absurd, namely, that I had once been a consul, that I had a Persian wife, and that Persian newspapers continually quoted my despatches. These things supposedly made me dangerous. I had been under threat of expulsion for several months, but didn’t allow that to affect my despatches. I sent facts – things actually seen – that other correspondents were afraid to send, and made comments which were afterwards proved accurate by events – was, in short, always ahead of what was happening: and that no doubt seemed a danger to a man whose game is as intricate and unavowable as Mosaddeq’s.273

  He told Ezra Pound a few months later that he had been ‘under threat’ for several months before his expulsion. During that period he had had ‘several messages from Mossy and his pals, hinting strongly that if I would modify the news (I was the only foreigner reporting it) he’d see what could be done for me. Instead I kept on telling the truth, which is reputed to be a virtue, and imagined that the Times (which had previously promised to back me up if I got expelled) would impute it to me for merit.’274

  ‘This is pretty bad,’ he wrote to his boss at The Times.

  Mossy has no common sense, and the idea of expelling a man because he likes Persia and has a real interest in Persians doesn’t seem to him grotesque. But in addition; (a) Ansari [head of the Iranian Foreign Office] lied to me when he said he hadn’t got my passport – it was visible on his tray (b) another time Ansari kept me waiting nearly an hour in the corridor when not only was he disengaged, as I could see once or twice when his room door was opened by servants, but the comfortable waiting room was quite empty. This kind of discourtesy is rare in Persia and always deliberate. It means he thinks I’ve got to be treated as an enemy to secure his own position in the eyes of the ultimate authorities.

  According to Tom Pickard,

  after many days of bureaucratic shove-halfpenny, he unhappily accepted his fate. The Times suggested that he could cover Persia from Basra. Bunting thought not, although ‘one could greatly annoy the Persians with the sort of stuff one could send from there.’ Instead he suggested Kuwait might be better: ‘since large numbers of unemployed from Khuzistan are believed to be smuggling themselves in t
here.’ Musaddiq was determined he should leave, and the Persian evening press reported the story in detail. Bunting was unable to file anything to The Times because he had ‘spent two whole days in government offices, collecting the papers necessary to collect other papers necessary to show at the frontier, and I’m far from done.’ The authorities proved particularly obstructive in supplying an exit visa for ‘my poor wife [who] is stricken at leaving her country, family and friends.’275

  For all his complaints Bunting must have known that his expulsion was inevitable. In 1951 Mosaddeq nationalised the Iranian oil industry and began negotiations with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for a smooth transfer to the newly created National Iranian Oil Company. The British responded by evacuating all AIOC personnel, blocking the export of oil from Iran and lodging a formal complaint at the United Nations. When Mosaddeq broke diplomatic relations and closed the British Embassy and consulates Britain retaliated by freezing Iranian assets and sending more warships to the Persian Gulf. As Ervand Abrahamian says, ‘by the end of 1951 Mosaddeq was embroiled in a full-blown crisis with Britain’.276 In August 1951 Christopher Montague (Monty) Woodhouse, British hero of Greek resistance to the Nazis, was sent to Teheran as head of British Intelligence and found a country ‘already on the brink of catastrophe’.

  Bunting can hardly have been surprised by his enforced departure. All British officials were expelled from Iran early in 1952 and, from Mosaddeq’s perspective, with good reason. Bunting had no reason to feel singled out for special attention by Mosaddeq. On the other hand he may well have deserved special attention and a footnote buried in Darioush Bayandor’s Iran and the CIA may explain why.277 We know that Bunting was active among the Bakhtiari tribesmen in the Zagros mountains throughout his time in the region. Bayandor claims that low-level plots and subversion were a continuous threat to Mosaddeq, and not long after Bunting’s expulsion the Bakhtiari started an insurgency against Mosaddeq’s government. It is unlikely that Bunting had not been involved, especially as the British government, according to Woodhouse, had been secretly arming tribesmen to resist a Russian insurgency if Iran descended further into chaos.278 Perhaps unsurprisingly Britain’s repeated covert attempts to subvert the Mosaddeq regime were all about oil.279

  By October the last remaining officials of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company withdrew from Iran and Richard Stokes, a minister in the Labour government, was sent to try to restart negotiations with Mosaddeq, who was immensely popular at the time ‘although with little sense of direction’, according to Woodhouse, and with a track record of principled opposition to the autocracy of Reza Shah as well as strong and consistent advocacy of Iranian national integrity and constitutional government.280 Mosaddeq closed all the British consulates early in 1952 and a Soviet sponsored coup in Iran seemed inevitable. The British Foreign Office, under Herbert Morrison, mounted a covert campaign to remove Mosaddeq but the British cabinet forced him to cancel the operation. Attlee’s Labour government lost the October 1951 election and Anthony Eden returned to the Foreign Office for the third time. Eden withdrew government support from the destabilisation plot and Iranian politics were left to run their course, Mosaddeq continuing to believe until his overthrow in 1953 that the British were actively working to overthrow his regime, which they were.281

  In the summer of 1952 Mosaddeq resigned because of differences with the Shah, although he was quickly reinstated, and he broke all diplomatic links with Britain in October, by which time he had almost certainly got wind of the fact that the British were conspiring with the US to foment a coup to remove him. The coup d’état, Operation Ajax, finally went ahead in August 1953 and Mosaddeq was arrested and tried for treason. The coup could not have happened, as Nikki R. Keddie shows, without the intervention of the CIA and the British SIS.282 Britain’s pivotal role in the coup was spearheaded in Teheran by Nancy Lambton, who had run British propaganda in Iran during the war, and Robin Zaehner. It was Lambton who made the decisive recommendation that Mosaddeq should be overthrown by a deliberately fomented coup.283

  In the context of massive social unrest, loss of oil revenue following Mosaddeq’s nationalisation of the country’s oil industry, the British imposition of major trade sanctions, hostility at home from the Shah and his foreign advisers, the US support for a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil and an impending US/UK sponsored coup, it isn’t really surprising that Mosaddeq expelled Bunting, who reflected on all this ruefully in a letter to Zukofsky in October 1953: ‘A letter a few days ago, that the Govt now realises that my work in Persia in 1947 could have prevented the whole oil trouble if it had been attended to … but the man who refused to attend [Sir John Le Rougetel] is a knight and a High Commissioner; and I’m on the dole.’284 At this distance it is hard to be certain but Bunting’s complaints have the genuine indignation of honesty underneath them. He could embellish stories innocently as well as Ford could, but on matters about which he cared, as we saw at Leighton Park School, he told the story exactly as he saw it: ‘Attlee, told of the Persian nationalisation demand, wrung his hands, wept and cried: “Why wasn’t I told?” He wasn’t told because Sir John le Rougetel wouldn’t forward my reports, and when they were sent another way, Sir William Strang sat on them. Then he let them send Stokes – thus making certain that no agreement wd be reached – out of pure ignorance, deliberately unenlightened by the blokes who are paid to enlighten him.’285

  Bunting did however have some reason to feel singled out for special inattention from the British establishment, and in particular The Times, which, along with the British Embassy in Teheran, he claimed, had always encouraged him ‘to take the boldest course’, implying that if his ‘indifference to Persian threats brought me into trouble in the end, my family and my income shouldn’t suffer for it’.286 The Times, as we have seen, published a ‘violent leader’ in protest at Bunting’s expulsion but refused him alternative employment and though contractually obliged to continue to pay him until October halved his pay from the moment of his expulsion in April.287 Bunting complained that the Foreign Office didn’t even issue a protest about the expulsion and refused to intervene in the Persian customs’ confiscation of the Buntings’ property, including all their household linen, baby clothes, toys and the priceless collection of Persian books and manuscripts that Bunting had been collecting for the previous twenty years. The Foreign Office, he felt, could easily have found him a place in its Information Service, in the British Council or in the BBC’s foreign department, but were not prepared to ‘make a precedent’. It is a minor but nevertheless shameful example of tight-lipped British establishment callousness, but it is not helped by the fact that its victim was always hovering on paranoia about ‘them’. He held the British Council in special contempt:

  I never could [secure work with the British Council], even in their earliest days, and with a recommendation from T. S. Eliot O.M. They wiped their noses and said I had no qualifications, which is Greek for teacher training college. I was delighted when a repulsive darvish took a bath stark naked in the pool of their building in Isfahan, thus shocking them all, for a moment, to silence. The ladies pretended they hadn’t noticed, though he practically shook his stick at them.288

  If Bunting was contemptuous of the British Council he came to positively detest The Times. The feeling seems to have been mutual. He complained in September 1953 that the newspaper had refused to publish his short letter to the editor about Persian affairs, ‘and that is a grave discourtesy to a former staff-correspondent’.289 He told Denis Goacher that ‘somebody in the Times set-up was against him. He said he was never offered another job with the newspaper except one in Chile and, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to go out to Chile.’290

  Bunting for his part, however, just as he had been in Charles Evans’ office nearly forty years’ previously, was determined to be fair. A letter to Margaret de Silver in May 1953 contains a passage that rang warning bells that are still pealing:

  I think diplomacy (and American diplomacy even more
than British) is making such a series of huge blunders out there [the Middle East] that they will ultimately make a present of it all to [Georgy] Malenkov [Russian Prime Minister after Stalin’s death in 1953], but not before they have produced chaos and massacre on a considerable scale. The Times did its best for a while with me in Persia and an excellent man in Cairo: but now they have only halftime men from the Egyptian frontier to Pakistan. They are trying to prevent the British Government making an equally unnecessary mess in Africa, and all their spare energy seems to have gone to Rhodesia and Kenya … the moral atmosphere of Islam is NOT the moral atmosphere of Xtianity (nor is the Shiah atmosphere the same as the Sunni) and the persistent Western attempt to impose Christian morals on Moslems is FATAL. Especially when you remember that the morals Xtians take for granted and expect people to conform to have hardly any relation to the ones advocated in the New Testament. Money doesn’t mean the same between Stambul and Karachi as it does in the West, success in our sense is unimportant, our notions of honesty aren’t theirs. In short, anyone who brings economics to the East is wasting his time.

  Secondly, they lump it all together: ‘The Middle East’: they read Persian (Shiah, Aryan, squirearchical) problems in terms of Egyptian (Sunni, Hamitic, plantation) or Arabian (Wahabi, Semitic, demi-autocratic). Idiots! And so they are always surprised and baffled.

  Thirdly they are plain ignorant … one meets perpetual confusions: between tribes and dervish orders; between nomad tribes and nomad herds, whose tribes, except the shepherds, stay put; between systems of landholding and water-owning; between religions and races.291