Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  British embassy official Sam Falle met Zahidi on 6 August and recorded that the latter was prepared to take on the premiership. Falle suggested that Zahidi make this known to the US. The ambassador confirmed that Zahidi ‘will make his own contacts with [the] American embassy and does not wish to appear to be our candidate’.22

  In October 1952, the Iranian government closed down the British embassy, claiming – correctly – that certain intrigues were taking place there, and thus removing the cover for British covert activities. An MI6 and Foreign Office team met with the CIA in November and proposed the joint overthrow of the Iranian government based on Britain’s well-laid plans. British agents in Iran had been provided with a radio transmitter with which to maintain contact with MI6, while the head of the MI6 operation put the CIA in touch with other useful allies in the country.

  British pay-offs had already secured the cooperation of senior officers of the army and police, deputies and senators, mullahs, merchants, newspaper editors and elder statesmen, as well as mob leaders. ‘These forces’, explained the MI6 agent in charge of the British end of the operation, ‘were to seize control of Tehran, preferably with the support of the Shah but if necessary without it, and to arrest Musaddiq and his ministers’.23

  On 3 February 1953 a British delegation met the CIA director and the US Secretary of State while the head of the CIA’s operation, Kermit Roosevelt, was despatched to Iran to investigate the situation. On 18 March ‘the CIA was ready to discuss tactics in detail with us for the overthrow of Musaddiq’ and it was formally agreed in April that General Zahidi was the acceptable candidate to replace him.24

  By then, British and US agents were also involved in plans to kidnap key officials and political personalities. In one incident the Chief of Police was abducted, tortured and murdered.

  The final go-ahead for the coup was given by the US in late June. Britain had by then already presented a ‘complete plan’ to the CIA. Churchill’s authorisation soon followed and the date was set for mid-August. That month, Kermit Roosevelt met the Shah, the CIA director visited some members of the Shah’s family in Switzerland, and a US army general arrived in Tehran to meet the Shan and General Zahidi.25

  The signal for the coup scenario to begin had been arranged with the BBC; the latter agreed to begin its Persian language news broadcast not with the usual ‘it is now midnight in London’, but instead with ‘it is now exactly midnight’. On hearing these broadcasts the Shah fled the country and signed two blank decrees to be filled in at the right time, one dismissing Musaddiq, the other appointing Zahidi as prime minister.26

  Huge demonstrations took place in the streets of Tehran, funded by CIA and MI6 money; $1 million was in a safe in the US embassy and £1.5 million had been delivered by Britain to its agents in Iran, according to the MI6 officer responsible. According to the then CIA agent Richard Cottam, ‘that mob that came into north Tehran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large’.

  One key aspect of the plot was to portray the demonstrating mobs as supporters of the Iranian Communist Party – Tudeh – to provide a suitable pretext for the coup and the Shah’s taking control in the name of anti-communism. Agents working for the British posed as Tudeh supporters, engaging in activities such as throwing rocks at mosques and priests.27

  Roosevelt, the head of the CIA operation, sent envoys to the commanders of some provincial armies, encouraging them to move on to Tehran. In the fighting in the capital, 300 people were killed before Musaddiq’s supporters were defeated by the Shah’s forces. A US general later testified that ‘the guns they had in their hands, the trucks they rode in, the armoured cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the [US] military defence assistance program’.28

  The British input, however, had also been significant. One agent of the British – Shahpour Reporter, who subsequently served as adviser to the Shah – was rewarded with a knighthood, before becoming a chief middleman for British arms sales to Iran, in particular for the manufacturers of Chieftain tanks and Rapier missiles. Two years after the coup, the head of the MI6 end of the operation became director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, one of Britain’s leading research institutes.29

  As in every other British and US military intervention until the collapse of the USSR, the ‘communist threat’ scenario was deployed as the Official Story. Much subsequent academic work and media commentary plays to the same tune. The real threat of nationalism (and dirtier aims like protecting oil profits) was downplayed or removed from the picture presented to the public. In the words of a secret Foreign Office telegram to the embassy in Washington:

  It is essential at all costs that His Majesty’s Government should avoid getting into a position where they could be represented as a capitalist power attacking a Nationalist Persia.30

  There are two variants to the Official Story. The first is that the coup was a response to an impending takeover by the Communist Party, Tudeh – which had close contacts with the Soviet Union – and therefore prevented the establishment of a Soviet-backed regime. The second is that Tudeh was in the ascendancy within Musaddiq’s government. Both variants are plainly false.

  In September 1952 the British ambassador recognised that the Tudeh ‘have played a largely passive role, content to let matters take their course with only general encouragement from the sidelines … they have not been a major factor in the development of the Musaddiq brand of nationalism’. The US embassy stated three months before the coup that ‘there was little evidence that in recent months the Tudeh had gained in popular strength, although its steady infiltration of the Iranian government and other institutions [had] continued’.31

  As for Tudeh attempting a coup, a State Department intelligence report noted that an open Tudeh move for power ‘would probably unite independents and non-communists of all political leanings and would result … in energetic efforts to destroy the Tudeh by force’. As Iranian scholar Fakhreddin Azimi has pointed out, the seizure of power by means of a coup was not part of Tudeh strategy, and it was also unlikely that the Russians would anyway have endorsed such a move.32 The deliberate funding of demonstrators posing as Tudeh supporters also gives the game away as to how seriously the communist threat was actually feared.

  In their secret planning, the British deliberately played up the communist threat scenario to the Americans to persuade them to help overthrow the government. One file notes that, in proposing the overthrow of Musaddiq to the Americans, ‘we could say that, although we naturally wish to reach an oil settlement eventually, we appreciate that the first and most important objective is to prevent Persia going communist’. The MI6 agent believed ‘the Americans would be more likely to work with us if they saw the problem as one of containing communism rather than restoring the position of the AIOC’.33

  ‘I owe my throne to God, my people, my army – and to you’, the Shah told the head of the CIA operation responsible for installing him; by ‘you’ he meant the US and Britain.

  Now that a ‘dictator’ had been installed in line with Foreign Office wishes, stability could be restored, initially under the favoured candidate for prime minister, General Zahidi. An agreement the following year established a new oil consortium that controlled the production, pricing and export of Iranian oil. This provided Britain and the US with a 40 per cent interest each. Indeed, the 40 per cent figure for the US was the price Britain secretly (and grudgingly) agreed to pay the US in exchange for US help in overthrowing Musaddiq.34 Britain’s share was thus reduced from the complete control it had prior to Musaddiq; but it had prevented the danger that Iranians might use oil primarily to benefit themselves. The US gain of a significant stake in Iranian oil showed the new relative power of the partners in the special relationship.

  British aid for repression

&n
bsp; The Shah’s regime progressed in accordance with British expectations. As a ‘dictator’ with huge personal power, the Shah proceeded to ‘monopolise power for himself, allowed family representatives to plunder the national coffers, and ended representative government.

  The Shah’s regime killed around 10,000 people, about half of these during the revolution in 1978/9. In 1975, Amnesty International observed that Iran had the ‘highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.’ Iran analyst Barry Rubin notes that ‘prisoners were subjected to horrendous torture, equal to the worst ever devised’, while ‘the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror’. For the US the Shah was ‘that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally’, in Henry Kissinger’s words.35

  The secret police responsible for many of these atrocities – SAVAK – had been created by the US and was later trained by Israel’s Mossad. A former CIA analyst stated that the CIA instructed SAVAK in torture techniques, and it appears that Mossad did likewise. Former Deputy Director of MI6, George Young, described SAVAK as an ‘allied and friendly’ intelligence service, along with South Africa’s BOSS; he wrote this in 1990, while South Africa was still under apartheid.36

  According to Hassan Sana, a former coordinator of SAVAK, Britain also trained some of SAVAK’s officers in Britain when it was set up in 1957. MI6 was in close touch with leading SAVAK officials and several of its policy recommendations were implemented. In exchange for providing information on Arab countries, Sana claimed, SAVAK was given a free hand in intelligence gathering against the Shah’s political opponents in Britain. Most targets were students but also included Labour MPs campaigning against the brutality of the Shah’s regime.37

  Maurice Oldfield, then head of MI6, met the Shah regularly in the middle and late 1970s and ‘had a close and intimate relationship with His Imperial Majesty’, according to a former MI6 officer. Young even promised the Shah that, as long as he were head of MI6, Britain would not conduct any internal espionage against Iran or have any direct contact with military officers.38

  The SAS, meanwhile, loaned soldiers to the Iranian military to help train the Shah’s special forces for operations against Kurdish guerillas in northern Iran. Britain also built a GCHQ monitoring station on the Iran-Soviet border that the SAS protected.39

  The Shah also understood the right economic priorities, with the fruits of political repression going primarily to a minority elite. Twenty years after the coup, the top 20 per cent of households accounted for nearly half of all consumption expenditure, whilst the bottom 40 per cent accounted for 15 per cent, and less than 12 per cent of total income. Those who suffered from the extreme concentration of wealth – such as poor immigrants and squatters in Tehran – were forced into a desperate contest for shelter and land.40 The system that partly resulted from the considered actions and priorities of Anglo-American power sowed the seeds for the revolution that followed.

  15

  DETERRING DEVELOPMENT IN KENYA

  Short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging – all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

  A former officer describing a British detention camp, Kenya, 1954–55

  FORMER MEMBERS OF the Mau Mau movement in Kenya are currently trying to sue the British government for human rights abuses committed by British forces who fought against them in the 1950s. They are calling for compensation:

  on behalf of the 90,000 people imprisoned and tortured in detention camps, 10,000 people who had land confiscated and a further half a million who were forced into protected villages.1

  If Britain is forced to reveal more evidence from the formerly secret files, as it was in the court case with the islanders of Diego Garcia (see chapter 22), a terrible chapter in British history will be revealed. For the declassified files I have seen already paint a frightening picture of terrible human rights atrocities by the colonial authorities, especially in the Nazi-style detention camps and ‘protected villages’ they established. All in all, around 150,000 Africans are thought to have died as a result of British policy.

  These files also reveal that Britain used the war against Mau Mau as a cover for halting the rise of popular, nationalist forces that threatened control of its then colony. It was an early postwar example, therefore, of wiping out the threat of independent development. Indeed, the shape of poverty in Kenya today owes much to British policy during those dark days.

  By contrast, much standard history has essentially exonerated the British role in Kenya, ascribing to planners the usual noble value of protecting freedom in a good versus evil battle.

  Exploitation and racism: Background to the war

  Britain declared a state of emergency in Kenya in 1952 and sent its military to quell a rebellion by the Mau Mau movement. This was comprised predominantly of Kikuyu, the largest Kenyan ethnic group, who were among the most exploited of the poor under colonial rule. The Attorney General in the Kenyan colonial government called Mau Mau ‘a secret underground nationalistic organisation which is virulently anti-European’. A government-sponsored report on the origins of Mau Mau noted that it was ‘the violent manifestation of a limited revolutionary movement’ and that ‘it was no sudden uprising’ but the result of ‘a long period of political unrest among the Kikuyu people of Kenya’.2

  Mau Mau was the often violent, nationalist expression of revolt against British colonial repression. ‘The causes of the revolt’, David Maughan-Brown writes in an extensively documented study of Mau Mau, were ‘socio-economic and political and amounted, to put it crudely, to the economic exploitation and administrative repression of the Kikuyu by the white settlers and the colonial state’. It was a militant response ‘to years of frustration at the refusal of the colonial government to redress grievances over land or to listen to demands for constitutional reform’; and a ‘peasants revolt triggered off by the declaration of the state of emergency and the eviction of the squatters from the farms on the White Highlands’, the most arable land in Kenya. Mau Mau demands were for the return of the ‘stolen’ land and self-government.3

  The planning files clearly recognise that Mau Mau received no material support from elsewhere, and was decidedly not communist. ‘There is no evidence that communism or communist agents have had any direct or indirect part in the organisation or direction of the Mau Mau itself, or its activities’, a Colonial Office report stated.4

  The British were unfortunately unable to present the rebels as being part of the international communist conspiracy. They therefore presented them as straight out of the heart of darkness – as gangsters who indulged in cannibalism, witchcraft, devil worship and sexual orgies and who terrorised white settlers and mutilated women and children. This deceit conveniently masked the Mau Mau’s true struggle as a political and economic one mainly over the possession of land.

  Britain had established in Kenya a system of institutionalised racism and exploitation of the indigenous population. It was estimated that half of the urban workers in private industry and one quarter of those in public services received wages too low to provide for their basic needs. As late as 1960 – three years before independence – Africans, who made up 90 per cent of the workforce, accounted for only 45 per cent of the total wage bill. A crucial aspect of the colonial economy was the taxation system which increased poverty and dependence in the reserves allocated to Africans by a net drain of resources out of them.5

  The Governor of Kenya explained the racist policy to the Colonial Secretary in 1955:

  Up to 1923, the policy of segregation as between Europeans and other immigrant races followed as a measure of sanitation. The White Paper of 1923 recommended ‘as a sanitation measure, [that] segregation of Europeans and Asiatics is not absolutely essential for the preservation of the health of community’, but that for the present it was
considered desirable to keep residential quarters of natives, so far as practicable, separate from those of immigrant races.

  These ‘residential quarters’ for the ‘natives’ – that is, the population – were, the Governor explained, ‘behind anything that I have seen elsewhere on the continent’.6

  This was the situation at home for the nearly 100,000 Kenyan Africans who had fought on Britain’s side in the Second World War. It was, the Governor explained, a result of Britain’s ‘determination to persevere in the task to which we have set our minds – to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state’. In reality, the ideology and institutions of the British settlers and colonial state in Kenya closely resembled the fascist movements of the years between the First and Second World Wars.7

  Land ownership was the clearest example of inequity and exploitation. The white settlers, who comprised a minuscule 0.7 per cent of the population, owned 20 per cent of the best land in Kenya, the White Highlands. This meant that fewer than 30,000 whites owned more arable land than one million Kikuyu. The colony’s function was to produce primary products for export and because settler agricultural production depended on the availability of labour, it was essential for a large portion of the African peasantry to be deprived of their own land and forced on to the labour market. By 1945 there were over 200,000 registered African squatters in the White Highlands, over half of whom were Kikuyu. Called ‘“resident native” labourers’, they performed tasks as ‘a cheap, malleable and readily accessible African labour force’.8