Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Oil also figured very prominently in British calculations regarding Iran – or Persia, as foreigners insisted on calling it. In October 1941 what had been an almost frantically neutral government issued a resigned armistice plea: ‘We have done whatever possible to prevent this nefarious war from breaking out on our land. But against all international rules and moral principles, our two neighbours invaded our country. There can be no other reason for this dastardly act but their wish to destroy our system and our progress, which we have achieved with so much labour and human struggle.’3 The victim was not Poland, but Iran. The aggressors were Great Britain and the Soviet Union, whose forces occupied the country to secure Allied Lend-Lease supplies going to the Red Army defending the Caucasus, as well as to protect the oil refinery at Abadan, on which the Royal Navy depended.

  The deep background to this unhappy story reached back to the turn of the twentieth century, when Persia had been a de facto colony of Great Britain in the south and of tsarist Russia in the north, leaving the ruling Qajar dynasty in precarious power in the centre. Russians staffed the Persian army’s elite Cossack forces, while the British had their own South Persian Rifles, whose main task was to protect the burgeoning interests of the Anglo–Persian Oil Company. This rapacious organization (renamed the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company in 1932, before eventually becoming British Petroleum) paid derisory royalties to the Iranian government from its colossal revenues.

  Every trick in the accountants’ book was used to swindle the Iranians. This was easy as two British government officials sat on AIOC’s board and there were no Iranian representatives. Taxes to the British Exchequer were deducted before profits were distributed to Iran, which meant that in 1949 the Iranian government received £1 million in tax revenue while Whitehall received £28 million. The British Admiralty paid twenty US cents per barrel of oil when the market price was $1.50 and similar discounts were made to American oil concerns to help liquidate Britain’s massive post-war debt to the USA.

  European operatives enjoyed a plush lifestyle while local workers were paid 50 cents a day and lived in shacks made from beaten oil drums amid the giant refinery complex on the island of Abadan and in what were called ‘The Fields’, where the oil was extracted. Under the 1933 agreement the AIOC was obliged to improve the infrastructure with roads, hospitals and schools, but none of this was done. Abadan was an immense complex of metal pipes, valves and tanks, all burning to the touch and shimmering like a mirage in the heat. Asphalt roads had the consistency of marshmallow, and grocers served customers while standing in a barrel of water. Two thousand British administrators and technicians worked there, although it could have functioned with fifty.4

  In the early 1920s the British had backed an officer in the Cossack guard in his quest to discipline and modernize the country along the lines of Atatürk’s Turkey. A little English general stood on tiptoe to whisper in the giant Reza’s ear, ‘Colonel, you are a man of great possibilities.’ This was the tall, pockmarked, illiterate soldier who in 1921 deposed the Qajar monarch. Five years later the Iranian parliament, or Majlis, offered Reza Shah Pahlavi – as he styled himself – the Peacock Throne; he crowned himself and preferred to sleep on the floor. Reza Shah wanted to eradicate what he regarded as the backward effects of Arab conquest on Iran. He only ever ventured west as far as Turkey, for he feared the humiliating shock of visiting developed Western Europe.5

  After having some of the old order poisoned or strangled, Reza Shah dragged urban Iran into the new century. In 1935 he banned the name ‘Persia’ in favour of the more ancient Iran. In 1936 he outlawed the Islamic chador and introduced peaked caps to make it hard for pious Muslims to bump their foreheads on their prayer rugs. He tore down much of medieval Tehran, often before the residents could evacuate their possessions, replacing it with expansive boulevards and swanky public buildings. People were prohibited from photographing symbolically backward camels. He insisted on providing the country with a modern infrastructure, notably the Trans-Iranian Railway, completed in 1938, even though most freight was carried on trucks. Nomads were forced to settle and the tribes were cowed. Mullahs without demonstrable theological training were banned from preaching and the raggedy mullah became a common sight.6

  Washington was asked to send a team of experts to sort out the country’s bankrupt and corrupted finances. Reza Shah created a civil service as well as a national army, while instituting secular courts. He could be brutal if he needed to be. When clerics gathered in the Khorasan mosque to protest against the ban on veils, his troops stormed it and killed a hundred of those inside. When bakers hoarded wheat, causing a famine, he had one of them thrown in his own oven. Dissenting liberals were bricked up in a tower.7

  One of those who opposed the Shah’s modernizing military despotism was Mohammed Mossadeq, a scion of Iran’s ramified ruling Qajar dynasty. Having studied public administration in Iran’s mandarin manner in order to work as a tax collector, the aristocratic Mossadeq went to Paris in his mid-twenties to acquire modern Western culture. His second long stint in Europe was in Switzerland, where he completed a doctoral thesis, in Latin, on testaments in Islamic law, the first Iranian to achieve such a higher degree. On his return home he was elected to parliament. There he bravely opposed Reza Shah’s 1925 coup and the latter’s increasingly tyrannical behaviour. Mossadeq was a committed parliamentarian – not quite the same beast as a democrat – who hated foreign interference in Iranian affairs. He spent virtually the entire 1930s living in rural isolation, the alternative to being murdered by the Shah.8

  For if Reza Shah’s initial model was Atatürk, by the 1930s he had become entranced by Europe’s Fascists. In his quest to find a source of investment capital and expertise independent of the British and Russians, Reza Shah opened Iran to the Germans, who flooded into the country in some numbers. The British and Soviets combined to insist that Reza Shah expel them so as to protect supply routes to the desperate Soviets, and, although he complied, they occupied his country anyway and he went into exile. The Allies put his twenty-one-year-old son Mohammed Reza Shah on the throne, in events witnessed by the young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei. Mohammed was a soft pastiche of Daddy.

  A British consular official, Sir Claremont Skrine, was based throughout the war in Meshed, a city within the increasingly closed Soviet north of Iran. His main task was to expedite transhipments of war materials going to the Soviet Union. In his peripheral vision Skrine also noted another power in the land, the third party to a tripartite treaty which guaranteed Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, with a supplemental promise to evacuate the country six months after the cessation of global hostilities. Thirty thousand US troops radically increased the carrying capacity of the Trans-Iranian Railway bearing Lend-Lease materials northwards. The fiscal expert Arthur Millspaugh returned to run Iran’s public finances. Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the founder of the New Jersey State Police, was imported to reorganize the Iranian paramilitary Gendarmerie. He was to return in 1953 as part of a joint CIA–SIS operation to overthrow Mossadeq and reinstate the Shah.

  Although his relations with the Soviets began amicably enough, Skrine noticed that, following a few changes of key personnel, the atmosphere deteriorated. In 1941 the Soviets helped camouflage the Iranian Communists as a more populist Tudeh or ‘Masses’ Party, to attract a wider range of those who sought reform and an end to foreign rule. Although it numbered only a few thousand core members, it had hundreds of thousands of sympathizers, particularly in the unions. The Soviets also backed separatist movements among the Azerbaijanis under Mir Bagirov and Kurds under Jafar Pishevari, even though this threat to Iran’s integrity was anathema to the Tudeh Party.

  The British responded by supporting such conservative forces as the Shia clergy and the monarchy, while encouraging an anti-Communist Party called National Will. In the event, power in the Majlis passed to liberal nationalists such as Ahmed Qavam and Mossadeq. Stalin gradually dropped the Tudeh pa
rty in favour of using the northern Azeri and Kurdish nationalists to lever oil concessions out of the Iranian government. Of course the northern nationalists were expendable pawns too, as Molotov admitted when he said that Pishevari ‘could die or become ill’ should he prove awkward.9 The Iranian government sought to interest a wider range of Western oil companies in Iran, partly to counter the hegemony of the British. This annoyed the Soviets, who in October 1944 demanded a northern oil concession of their own. The Soviet Ambassador, Sergei Kavtaradze, tried to bully the Iranians by encouraging the Tudeh Party to demonstrate outside the parliament building, calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation, and then deployed Red Army troops to protect the demonstrators from the Iranian government. No wonder the US was worried about how the Soviets conducted themselves towards a ‘friendly’ power.10

  While Mossadeq took to railing in parliament against both the British and Russians, the new Prime Minister Qazam encouraged deeper US involvement in Iran’s oil industry, while simultaneously double-crossing the Soviets over their northern concession. Qazam promised Stalin oil concessions and took three Tudeh Party members into his government. Stalin duly dropped the northern separatists and withdrew his forces in May 1946. He explained to his despondent separatist clients that their analysis of events was faulty, and that at this stage of the infant Iranian revolution it was necessary to support a progressive bourgeois like Qazam to isolate the Iranian Anglophiles.

  It was Stalin’s analysis of the situation that proved flawed. The Shah’s forces crushed the Azeri and Kurdish separatists with extreme violence, the three Communists were ejected from the Tehran government and the oil-concessions treaty was never ratified by the Majlis, where opposition to Qazam was led by Mossadeq. Resembling a cartoon vulture, Mossadeq was much given to fainting, weeping and long bouts of hysterical laughter, which played well among emotional Shias but which lent themselves to self-serving foreign insinuations about his sanity. He was emerging as the one figure who had suffered twenty years of exile and house arrest for his loyal opposition to the old Shah, and who could unite all shades of nationalist opinion, including the Shia clergy. The door closed on Stalin was one which opened for the US, reluctantly drawn into ever closer support for the young Shah of Iran, whose pretensions to restoring the empire of Darius the Great otherwise struck the Americans as absurd.11

  Stalin’s parallel demands on Turkey, for military bases on the Straits and the return of Kars and Ardahan to the Armenian Soviet Republic, and his alleged backing for Communists in Greece led many US policy-makers to see ominous patterns in his behaviour.12 One who did so was Loy Henderson, who in the spring of 1946 became head of the State Department’s Near Eastern and African Affairs division, having served in Moscow in the 1930s. In a major policy paper, written two months before Kennan’s Long Telegram, Henderson argued that with Germany and Japan out of the way, the Soviets would turn their attentions to an enfeebled British position in the greater Middle East. He played a major role in following Soviet troop movements in northern Iran – the Vice Consul in Tabriz spent many nights counting tanks by moonlight – and in persuading Secretary of State Byrnes to let the Russians know that the US were fully aware of what they were doing.13

  In fact Stalin pursued a policy that might be called an immoderate sauter pour mieux reculer to make a more moderate gain, always testing his ideological enemies’ resolve. Thus Soviet demands for a military presence on the Dardanelles in August 1946 led the Americans to elaborate war plans (codename Pincher) for the region. There was talk of the knock-on effects, not just in Greece, but in the Middle East, India and even China, the prototype of the domino theory that came to dominate US policy-making. A US carrier group, led by the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, was moved into the eastern Mediterranean, while by October plans had been worked out for air strikes on Soviet oil installations, and for nuclear war. Fully informed of US plans by his many agents in the US government, Stalin backed down and made more emollient noises to Ankara.14

  Egyptian Resurgence

  If the Soviet threat drew the US into the affairs of Iran and Turkey, to the west and south its British ally was the main problem. Egypt had never formally been a British colony, unusual in that since the time of the ancient pharaohs foreigners, from the Hellenic Ptolemys to the Ottoman Turks, had always ruled Egypt. But because the French-designed and Egyptian-built Suez Canal was the jugular vein for the wider British Empire, the British used financial power and military might to install themselves on and around this major artery. Interwar monarchical Egypt was a paradise of liberality compared with anywhere in the Middle East. There were regular elections to a bicameral legislature, which dated back to 1866, full adult male suffrage and a free press. Only the last was true of contemporary Britain. Alexandria and Cairo were lively cosmopolitan cities. Of course, one should not idealize modern Egypt for in the late 1940s as little as 5 per cent of Egypt’s population controlled 65 per cent of the country’s commercial and industrial assets, while 3 per cent owned 80 per cent of its land.15

  As the first entrant into the field, the liberal nationalist Al-Wafd (Delegation) Party dominated the politics of the period. Its main concerns were to wring further constitutional concessions from King Fuad, and from 1936 his child heir Faruq, and to limit British dominance of what, since 1922 when the British relinquished financial controls, was a nominally independent country. Although the 1936 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, negotiated by Anthony Eden, conceded that ‘Egypt was an independent and sovereign state’ – it joined the League of Nations a year later – two major points of tension were unresolved. First, Britain refused to acknowledge exclusive Egyptian suzerainty over the much vaster Sudan, which since 1899 had been ruled as a condominium; and second, the British retained an enormous military presence in the Suez Canal Zone as well as in Cairo and Alexandria. Suez was the juncture where the British Empire could be split in half. The Suez complex included some ten airfields and forty other major encampments capable of sustaining half a million troops or more in the event of war, in which the Canal was a vital strategic route for the defence of India. Ironically, one minor detail in the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty was that the Military Academy was opened to all of Egypt’s social classes. Among the beneficiaries was Gamal Abdul Nasser.

  Nasser was one of eleven children, who moved frequently in the tow of their postmaster father until he settled in the capital. Despite the inevitably cramped conditions in a four-room Cairo apartment, Nasser managed to supplement the rote learning common at the time with extensive if somewhat indiscriminate reading about Julius Caesar, Nelson and Gandhi, even tackling the novels of Dickens and Hugo. Schoolboys and students were sufficiently uncommon in a society where peasants earned £15 a year for them to assume vanguardist functions. While still young, Nasser was smashed in the face with a truncheon during a demonstration. By late adolescence he had to face the fact that his family were too poor for him to study law. Instead he joined the army, which had something of the Kemalist cum Prusso-Japanese air of being a school for the nation. Various desultory provincial postings ensued, including three years in the Sudan, but already he had become firm friends with a group of like-minded nationalist officers, including Anwar Sadat, who chafed at the continuance of British informal rule behind the puppets on the Egyptian throne.

  Sadat was tantalized by the discipline and mobilizing powers of totalitarian dictatorships, but above all this group looked at neighbouring Palestine and saw a majority Arab population held down in order for the British to import European Zionist refugees, bent on creating a settler society resembling what the French had established in Algeria. Among these Egyptian officers the Palestinian Arab revolt of the late 1930s elicited the same passionate response as the Spanish civil war among European and US intellectuals. On the outbreak of war in Europe, Sadat was most assiduous in seeking an Axis victory, establishing contacts with Italian and German agents, as well as with the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Hassan al-Banna, with a view to
overthrowing Faruq’s regime along the lines of Rashid Ali al-Gayani’s coup in Iraq. The British had little difficulty keeping tabs on German agents so incompetent that they established their base next to a houseboat inhabited by the city’s best belly dancers. Sadat was duly rounded up and imprisoned.16

  The British engineered the dismissal of Prime Minister Aly Mahir in June 1940 and of the Egyptian Chief of Staff in August. In early 1942, they persuaded the Egyptian government to break off relations with Vichy France, although they did not consult young Faruq about this development. The entire government collapsed when Faruq demanded that his Foreign Minister resign. The British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, was a bullying giant at six feet five and seventeen stone, who had the unfortunate habit of referring to Faruq as ‘the boy’. Lampson insisted that Faruq form a new pro-British government and sent him an ultimatum warning that ‘unless I hear by 6pm that Mustafa Nahas Pasha has been asked to form a cabinet, his Majesty King Farouk must expect consequences’. When Faruq ventured rhetorical defiance while otherwise complying with this demand, Lampson had tanks surround Abdin Palace. Lampson stormed in, accompanied by two South African officer cadets brandishing guns, and told the King he should appoint Nahas or abdicate immediately. He had a letter of abdication already prepared for the browbeaten King lest he baulk at dismissing his own Prime Minister.17

  This incident, which has hardly registered in British consciousness, was of the utmost importance in the evolution of Egyptian nationalism. It discredited both Faruq and those who benefited from the brutal intervention. To Nasser and his friends it was an appalling affront to their sense of national dignity and honour. Of course it also discredited the British, although other factors had contributed more to that process. Throughout the war all colonial peoples observed white men killing other white men in vast numbers, while the influx of thousands of lower-class soldiers undermined the carefully cultivated image of the white men as a superior race. This was particularly the case in Egypt.18 A capital where the Circassian-Egyptian elite had interacted happily with their British equivalents was suddenly invaded by a horde of British and Dominion troops, the Australians in particular distinguished by their drunken boorishness. Amid the bars and brothels of the Fish Market, there was much knocking off of red tarboosh hats and raucous chants of ‘Faruq the Dirty Old Crook’. Although the King was still in his twenties, the refrain was otherwise accurate about his lifelong pursuit of teenage girls.