by James Philip
It was just a question of having the patience to play that long game and to wait for the so-called ‘victors’ of the recent war to turn inward and surrender to him, without a fight what was rightfully his.
The British had built a giant refinery complex at Abadan, a forty-two mile long island bounded on the east by the Shatt al-Arab and on the west by the Arvand River, a waterway formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris at al-Qurnah some eighty miles to the north-west. Some two dozen miles across at its widest point Abadan was both an Iranian provincial capital and – in fact, if not in strict legal terms, possession being nine-tenths of the law - a British Imperial Protectorate, strategically placed at the head of the Persian Gulf.
The current situation, as restored after the unpleasantness of the early 1950s, was one based on concessions made to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Mohammed Reza’s father’s time. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the kingdom’s first elected Prime Minister had damned those concessions as being ‘immoral as well as illegal’ but that had cut no ice in post-World War II London. Clement Atlee and later a re-elected Winston Churchill had complacently clung to the illusion that Iranian oil was actually British oil on the grounds that it was the British who had discovered it, it was the British who had developed the substantial infrastructure required to extract and transport it to Abadan, and on that island it was the British who had built the largest oil refinery on the planet. By 1951 Abadan was Great Britain’s biggest and by far its most valuable overseas asset and basically, for commercial, strategic and profoundly political reasons it was unthinkable that one day it might simply be appropriated by a bunch of foreigners. Moreover, there was always the fear that if Britain allowed Iran to get away with ‘stealing’ Abadan it would set an appalling precedent, and that thereafter ‘nationalists’ everywhere ‘could abrogate British concessions with impunity.’
Mohammad Mosaddegh had dreamed of using the wealth generated by Iran’s oil, and the vast profits of the Abadan refineries to fight poverty and to educate the Iranian people; in Britain the outgoing Labour Government and the incoming Conservative Government had viewed the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry as straightforward ‘theft’. Moreover, fearing a long term interruption to the flow of Arabian oil to the fast rebuilding war-ravaged industries of Western Europe and to the booming American post-war economy, Britain and America were alarmed that Iran might ‘go rogue’. Immediately there was talk of a Soviet occupation ‘by the back door’. To the Western superpowers it was axiomatic that the gratuitous ‘theft’ of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s property could not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
In the event exactly what Mohammed Reza had feared would happen, happened.
Firstly, after the British and most of the American workers at Abadan had been expelled from Iran it proved impossible to recruit skilled engineers and technicians to maintain and to safely operate even a small proportion of the oil fields, or the Abadan refinery complex.
Secondly, oil production slumped disastrously and serious accidents became common. Anybody who had eyes could see that in a handful of years the Iranian oil industry would be in ruins.
Thirdly, the Royal Navy blockaded the Persian Gulf and in July 1952 an Italian registered tanker, the Rose Mary, was intercepted and obliged to dock at Aden because the Royal Navy deemed the ship’s cargo to be ‘stolen goods’.
Thereafter, there were no more oil exports from Iran, people started to starve in the backstreets of Tehran, previously suppressed religious tensions began to re-surface and the people around the Shah started to panic. As always happens in such situations there were rumours of coups, palace revolts and an end to the Pahlavi dynasty.
Had it not been for the timely overthrow of Mosaddegh’s elected government on the 19th August 1953, by a second coup d’état – the first had failed forcing the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to flee to Rome - organised in London and Langley Virginia, the Shah’s days would have been numbered. As was common in those years the British and the Americans, those two indefatigable pillars of freedom and democracy, invariably took two or three attempts to mount a successful coup d’état. MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency had bought the wrong people the first time around and Operation Ajax, the name they had given the debacle, had had to be mounted a second time. The second attempt was better funded and carried out mindful of the errors and sloppy planning which had been the downfall of its earlier flawed incarnation. Second time around the right people had been bought and the CIA had made it worth Mohammad Reza’s while – in hard currency - to play along.
Of course, things had had to be finessed the following year; the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had ceased, on paper, to be a British fiefdom, instead nominally falling under the control of an international consortium. Iran had emerged from the negotiations with a deal that guaranteed it twenty-five percent of the profits of the ‘consortium’ as opposed to its pre-crisis share of twenty percent of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s declared profits. However, control of the Abadan ‘investment’ still rested with its main shareholder, British Petroleum and its partner, Royal Dutch Shell which together retained fifty-four percent of the ordinary shares in AIOC. Given that European and American oil companies operating in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf commonly shared the profits of their drilling and refining operation on a fifty-fifty basis with their hosts; to the Shah of Iran the deal still left a bitter taste in the mouth ten years later.
In the eighteen months since the October War the British, latterly with a garrison reinforced by troops and a handful of aircraft from Australia and New Zealand had tightened their grip on Abadan. Despite other commitments the British still kept several warships – at least two destroyers or frigates, several minesweepers and patrol craft, and probably submarines - in the Persian Gulf operating out of their base at Aden. Recently the Shah had received reports suggesting that the British had installed long-range Bloodhound anti-aircraft missiles and unloaded a consignment of modern battle tanks at Abadan; but these were the sort of reports he had learned to treat with caution. Given the difficulties the British had lately experienced in the Mediterranean the notion that they had scarce modern equipment and armour to spare to reinforce a garrison located in the heart of nominally friendly territory was faintly preposterous. This said, he did not discount the possibility that the British had become aware of the re-positioning of the bulk of his front line ground and air force units in the southern provinces of the kingdom, just in case a situation developed in which the former imperial overlords might be persuaded that it was in their best interests to depart Abadan. Besides, with the Soviet Union wrecked from end to end; what profit was there in leaving the bulk of his forever restless Army and Air Force twiddling its collective thumbs guarding the mountain passes to the Trans-Caucasus?
It was better by far to keep his generals busy in the south; recent history was replete with evidence that idleness only encouraged them to discuss new conspiracies against the Pahlavi Dynasty.
The Sa’dabad Palace was some miles north of the centre of Tehran, located in the hills overlooking the city. Between the compound and the northern limits of the capital a forest was coming into spring leaf. At dawn the view was often spectacular.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi sighed in disgust. Once awakened as he had been by his Air Force’s exercise over Tehran he knew he would be unable to get back to sleep. He contemplated summoning one of the ladies of the court; but he was too restless, not in the mood for sex.
Surely somebody on his staff would have forewarned him of a big exercise anywhere in the vicinity of the capital?
His secret police – the SAVAK – had been set up with advice, guidance and ongoing technical support from the Americans and very discreetly, by the Israelis in 1957. The October War had been a signal for a major expansion of the Sāzemān-e Ettelā'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, the Organization of Intelligence and National Security. In troubled times a monarch can trust no man. He had given SAVAK its head; in the kingdo
m of Iran enemies of the state, dissidents and troublemakers should expect no mercy.
SAVAK would surely have warned him if there was a serious threat of an imminent coup d’état?
Moreover, SAVAK would have routinely reported any planned military exercise, display or demonstration within fifty miles of the capital.
And yet many aircraft were still circling high over the city.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi marched to the nearest phone.
“Wake up the Palace Guard and put me through to the Military Governor of the Tehran Region!”
That was when the usurper’s blood running in the veins of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, suddenly began to run cold.
Even as he was in the process of slamming down the telephone handset the first sirens began to wail like distant auguries of doom in the cool spring air and he heard the first distant explosions.
Chapter 23
03:59 Hours (Local)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Astara, Azerbaijan
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian fought back the temptation to look again at his wristwatch. His staff had laid out the big maps of Northern Iran on two rickety trestle tables in the grubby rather squalid little hall that from the road had looked completely derelict the previous afternoon when he had arrived at the front. The border crossing into Iran was less than three hundred metres from where he now stood, gazing thoughtfully at the topography of the terrain over which he was about to launch two great armoured hammer blows. The ground over which the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army had to advance was impossible. Manuever would be restricted to a handful of high valleys; and progress would be crucifyingly slow as soon as the forward spearheads started to climb the foothills of the Alborz Mountains on the way to Tabriz and Ardabil. If anybody in the Iranian Army or Air Force realised what was happening the narrow mountain valleys and passes would be choked with the wreckage of his armoured spearheads within hours and the Soviet Union’s great throw of the dice would be its last.
Not that he believed for a moment that anybody in Tehran would believe what was happening even if they discovered it; it was too incredible. If Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had studied the borders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the specific intention of identifying the worst place on Earth to launch a massive armoured thrust – the mountains of Afghanistan excluded - he was looking at it now. This said he comforted himself with the knowledge that if the USSR had attempted to mount an attack on this scale anywhere else – say, across the Anatolian littoral of Turkey, or through Bulgaria and Romania towards the Balkans, or even across the radioactive firestorm-ravaged wasteland of central Europe – the British and the Americans would have surely discovered the preparations at an early stage and destroyed his two tank armies as they massed for the attack. A handful of Minutemen or Polaris strikes would have obliterated the Soviet Union’s last two intact armies and then, well, the Cuban Missiles War really would have been over not just for a generation but for perhaps a hundred years.
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was not by nature one of life’s gamblers. To the contrary the fifty-eight year old veteran tank commander born to poor Armenian farmers in the village of Chardakhlu was a man who took little on trust and believed that meticulous planning and preparation was the secret of success in war. Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian – he preferred the Armenian style to the Russian translation of his birth names, Amazasp Khachaturovich Babadzhanyan – was also the kind of soldier who thought that people who talked about knowing the ‘secret’ of success on the battlefield were either charlatans or idiots, or both.
He was a warrior who had a knack of emerging from each successive battle with an enhanced reputation and increased professional kudos from his peers. He was the sort of soldier another soldier wanted at his side in combat; a man they could trust to defend his front, his flank or his back to the death. In the Finno-Soviet Winter War of 1939-40 – which was an unmitigated disastrous for the Red Army – he had distinguished himself to such effect that he was subsequently promoted to the command of the 751st Rifle Regiment, based in the Northern Caucasus Military District. Later when the Nazis invaded the Mother Country he was sent to Smolensk to command the 395th Regiment of the 127th Rifle Division, where his unit was involved in a series of savage rearguard actions before taking part in a brief, ultimately futile counter attack. In early September 1941 the 395th Regiment had participated in another counter attack, this time against the German 4th Army south of Smolensk and was the first Soviet unit to re-enter the city of Yelnya. Sent to refit and rest his regiment in the Ukraine, Babadzhanian was soon back in the thick of the fighting again, this time heavily engaging the Wehrmacht invaders while Kursk was evacuated ahead of the seemingly all-conquering panzers. In action after desperate action throughout 1942 he showed a flair for attacking the enemy where he least expected and a talent for exploiting the merest sniff of any advantage gained, fighting always during this period against greatly superior numerical enemy forces. By September of that year he was in command of the 3rd Mechanised Brigade of the Third Mechanised Corps; in 1943 he commanded the 20th Tank brigade at the Battle of Kursk – the greatest clash of armour in history – and although wounded he had recovered to play his part in practically every major battle and campaign the Red Army fought along the long bloody road that had ended in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945. By the end of the Great Patriotic War he was an acknowledge master of tank warfare in an army full of veteran ‘tankers’. In November 1956, it had been to Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had turned to crush to the Hungarian uprising.
However, as Babadzhanian surveyed the map of the mountainous terrain of Northern Iraq it gave the commander of the ‘Great Push to the South’ little satisfaction to know that second only to his immediate superior, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Defence Minister of the USSR, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, he was universally regarded as the finest living exponent of mechanised warfare in the Red Army. Hannibal had only had to transport a few elephants across the Pyrenees; in comparison his own task was positively Herculean!
What made things even worse was that because of time constraints and uncertainties about the mobility and availability of the mechanised infantry, airborne and Ministry of Interior police troops detached to put down the Red Dawn insurgency in Turkey, Greece and Romania, and the need to keep the strategic goals and specific military objectives of the forthcoming endeavour, Operation Nakazyvat – Operation Chastise - secret there had been no time or scope to war game the movement plans, or any of the critical stresses those plans would inflict on the Army Group South’s logistics train, below the level of Corps commander. Moreover, the results of the handful of paper ‘war games’ that had been ‘fought’ had not been encouraging. Of necessity Operation Nakazyvat had too many moving parts, and every assumption about the fighting power of the units involved and the supply chain which would eventually stretch all the way back to the Urals had had to be hedged around with countless complex caveats.
The icing on the cake impossibly late in the day had been the Central Committee’s endorsement of the imbecilic ‘Malta adventure’. Babadzhanian had been livid when he had learned what was envisaged and regardless of the short-term success or failure of the lunatic enterprise in the Central Mediterranean – which was more likely to stir up a hornets’ nest in the mid to long term than to deny the British and the Americans Cyprus as a base of operations against his exposed right flank – undertaking the operation had delayed his offensive by a further two weeks and robbed him of over two thousand invaluable and irreplaceable highly trained Spetsnaz and airborne assault troops and as many as one hundred and forty vital transport aircraft. Of the twenty-nine thousand men initially detached to fight ‘somebody else’s fires’ in the west, less than a third had so far been returned to him in good combat order meaning that significant elements of the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army, responsible for taking Ardab
il would – if the Iranians got their act together at some stage - probably now have to be permanently detached to police his lines of communication and to provide at least a ‘picket line’ guard for the impossibly long exposed southern flank of his advance.
The purity of his strategic vision which had once been so clinically simple, so marvellously unadorned with superfluous and distracting requirements had been shamelessly watered down and hamstrung, while leaving its original goals unaltered.
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would have lost sleep worrying but there was nothing he could do about it now. He had a job to do and he intended to get on with it. In the final moments before the opening artillery barrage he steeled himself for the trials to come, hardened his heart and resolved that whatever happened, his tanks would one day reach the warm blue waters of the Persian Gulf.
The map of Northern Iran described the obstacles in his path perfectly.
First there was the towering barrier of the Alborz Mountains curving around the southern Caspian Sea from the Soviet border all the way to Tehran and beyond far into the eastern deserts of Iran towards distant Afghanistan. A single tank corps, or perhaps two, from either of his armoured armies could hold the line of those mountains forever and a day against all comers. Which was good to know but he actually needed those corps to drive west south west from their first targets, Tabriz and Ardabil, on across the high plateau on the other side of the Alborz Mountains and burst through the narrow passes of the even more formidable obstacle of the Zagros Mountains which guarding Iran’s western border with neighbouring Iraq. The Zagros Mountains stretched from Anatolia to the Persian Gulf and only when his tanks had crossed them and swept down onto the plains of the head waters and tributaries of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers could the real ‘drive to the sea’ commence.