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

by Burleigh, Michael

  The key assets SIS brought to the table were the rich and influential Rashidian brothers, ‘head agents’ who were given £10,000 a month to recruit influential figures as well as the leaders of urban gangs, notably Shaban ‘The Brainless’ Jafari, for any move against Mossadeq. More money had been spread around restive tribal leaders in southern Iran, who would also play their part in preliminary destabilization, while certain Majlis deputies had received cash hidden inside boxes of biscuits. SIS also had a list of seventeen prospective prime ministers as alternatives to General Zahedi, who was on the run after Mossadeq had ordered his arrest.71

  Once the Americans came on board the money available increased exponentially. The decision to go ahead was made on 25 June at a State Department meeting chaired by John Foster Dulles. After Roosevelt had outlined what the CIA had in mind, Dulles took a vote. The Dulles brothers and Bedell Smith, now Under Secretary of State, were the most enthusiastic, while Ambassador Henderson remarked, ‘Mr Secretary, I don’t like this kind of business at all . . . [but] we have no choice.’72 Ike signed off on the operation following a dubiously spontaneous breakdown of public order in Tehran, when a mob led by Shaban the Brainless broke into Mossadeq’s Tehran home. The Dulles brothers won over the President by stressing that the only beneficiaries of urban anarchy would be the Soviets, who might then take over the entire Middle East. The first domino had to be propped up.

  Preparations proceeded apace. The CIA Art Group set about producing anti-Mossadeq cartoons which would find their way into Iran’s major newspapers, along with ‘grey’ propaganda. One editor was paid $45,000. Rumours were spread that Mossadeq was a Jew.73 The money passed through the Rashidians became a torrent, with $150,000 for suborning an anti-Mossadeq mob alone. To play up the Communist threat the Rashidians organized the abduction and murder of the Tehran Chief of Police and further ‘black’ attacks were made on clerics. General Zahedi was given $135,000 to win friends among his fellow officers and $11,000 a week was directed to bribing members of the Majlis, with Asadollah Rashidian personally handling sensitive payments to the more senior figures. When the day came the rent-a-mob would bring Tehran to a standstill, prompting bribed members of the Majlis to vote out Mossadeq. If he resisted, the army would step in.

  In mid-July 1953 Mossadeq engineered the resignation of his supporters in parliament to force an election that was to be a referendum to dissolve the Majlis entirely. By this act he usurped the constitutional role of the Shah, while dispersing his own supporters back to their constituencies.74 That month one James Lockridge crossed Syria and Iraq by car, faintly amused when a dopey Iranian border guard copying his passport details wrote down ‘Scar on Right Forehead’ as his surname. This was Kermit Roosevelt, coming to orchestrate the crescendo that was to end in the overthrow of Mossadeq. The weakest link in the chain was the Shah, in defence of whom all the ‘spontaneous’ newspaper campaigns and demonstrations were notionally to take place. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a coward. Such backbone as he had was provided by his twin sister, Princess Ashraf, whose own resolve had been strengthened when Darbyshire came to her Paris hotel bearing a mink coat and a large packet of cash ‘which made her eyes light up’.

  Another key player was General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had organized the Iranian Gendarmerie in the 1940s and who now arrived back in Tehran accompanying several million dollars in the diplomatic bag. It was Schwarzkopf who brokered the first meeting between the Shah and Kermit Roosevelt – for which Roosevelt entered the royal palace concealed under the back seat of a car. At last the Shah agreed to sign two firmans (decrees) dismissing Mossadeq and appointing Zahedi, but only after he was assured he could leave the country before the coup took place. He flew via Baghdad to Rome, leaving in such haste that Queen Soraya left her Skye terrier behind. By coincidence the Iranian royals took up residence in the Excelsior Hotel, where Allen Dulles was on vacation.75

  Roosevelt moved into the basement of Henderson’s US embassy in the second week of August, when the operation went into high gear with bombing attacks on clerics falsely blamed on the Tudeh Party.76 On 15 August Roosevelt’s chosen instrument, Colonel Nematollah Nasiri, an ultra-royalist in the imperial guard and the future head of Savak, the Shah’s secret police, led a detachment of troops to Mossadeq’s home. To his surprise he found his path blocked by loyalist troops under General Taqi Riahi, who arrested him. The plot had been betrayed. As his coup unravelled, Roosevelt ignored orders from CIA headquarters to get out fast and braved the streets of Tehran, where the security police were rounding up suspected conspirators, to attend a meeting with General Zahedi to learn whether he was prepared to try again. He was.

  While the Shah and Queen Soraya waited in Rome, Roosevelt had the firmans dismissing Mossadeq and appointing Zahedi copied and distributed throughout Tehran and sent to army officers in the provinces. Newspapers headlined that Mossadeq had tried to depose the Shah, only to be thwarted by army loyalists. Roosevelt despatched the US Military Attaché to Isfahan and garrisons in the capital with additional money to motivate the officers and their troops. He also gave two leaders of Tehran mobs the simple choice between $100,000 in cash to organize anarchy and being shot. Ayatollah Kashani received a further sweetener of $10,000.

  The following day pretend pro-Mossadeq mobs began rampaging through the streets, toppling a statue of Reza Shah and leaving only his bronze boots on the plinth. Genuine nationalists and Communists were drawn out to join the protests and Mossadeq ordered the police not to interfere. This was not what the plotters wanted and Ambassador Henderson called in person to protest against the threats and vandalism to which US nationals had been subjected by hostile mobs. Mossadeq duly ordered the police to suppress the riots and mobilized the Tehran army garrison, unaware that this was the crucial next step in Operation Ajax.

  On 19 August a huge counter-demonstration flooded central Tehran untroubled by the confused police. The crowds were led by hundreds of athletes and strongmen, somersaulting and flexing their biceps, and all crying ‘Long Live the Shah!’ Even the city’s more exotic prostitutes took part. The army moved in with tanks that fired on government buildings and the few pro-government newspaper offices went up in flames. By late afternoon tanks and troops had surrounded Mossadeq’s strongly guarded home, and while a two-hour gun battle raged he made his escape over a series of adjacent garden walls. About 150 people died in the battle, some of them members of the rent-a-mob with Roosevelt’s largesse still in their pockets.

  As Roosevelt lunched with Henderson and his wife, a Radio Tehran announcer reported that ‘the Mossadeq government has fallen’. Roosevelt did not recognize the voice of the agent he had recruited for this broadcast, but the eager interloper did the trick nonetheless. It was the signal for the army to rise up in Isfahan, Meshed and Tabriz, whose radio stations reported back when they were in control.77 At the US embassy Henderson, Roosevelt and Ardeshir Zahedi, the son of the new Prime Minister whom the CIA had recruited as a direct link to the British asset, toasted each other with champagne. Roosevelt later attended the prolonged celebration at the Officers Club where General Zahedi held court. The Americans were to ensure that he knew where his loyalties now lay by giving him $5 million for starting-up expenses with a further $1 million for himself.

  The following evening Mossadeq surrendered and after a short interval the Shah and his consort flew home from Rome, stopping off at the venerable Shiite tomb of Ali in Iraq for pious photographs. Prime Minister Zahedi fell to his knees on the tarmac to kiss the imperial hand. Loy Henderson and Shaban the Brainless were among those who came to welcome him back. For the first time Roosevelt was driven openly to meet the Shah, with the message that ‘the outcome is full repayment’ and that Iran owed the US nothing, although he did accept a gold cigarette case as a personal gift. As he left the palace he passed General Nasiri, as he had become, and caught a few hours’ sleep before flying out the next morning. He was awarded the National Intelligen
ce Medal, though he would decline the offer to repeat his Iranian escapades when the CIA decided on a repeat coup in Guatemala. Henderson was recalled to Washington as a deputy under secretary of state to supervise a purge of New Dealers.

  Mossadeq was tried and sentenced to three years in solitary confinement, to be followed by house arrest for life at Ahmadabad. Henderson made sure he was not killed, but around sixty army officers who remained loyal to him were executed. The National Front and the Tudeh Party were proscribed. An international consortium called the National Iranian Oil Company took over the industry, with BP (the rebrand of the AIOC) and a group of five American majors both owning 40 per cent and the rest split between Royal Dutch Shell and others. Oil revenues were divided 50:50 with the Iranian government, in line with the earlier Aramco deal with Riyadh. These arrangements were brokered by Sullivan & Cromwell, Foster Dulles’s old firm. After he left the CIA, Kermit Roosevelt worked as a political consultant to one of the US oil majors involved in the new Iranian consortium.

  In the 1960s the Shah was to spend much of this revenue on British tanks and American aircraft, for his rule rested on the armed forces and on Savak, the secret police trained by CIA operatives who had taken part in Operation Ajax.78 The Americans believed that the Shah’s authoritarian modernization would marginalize the reactionary Muslim clergy, as Iran progressed into a Western society. It did, and they struck back. While it would be absurd to blame the 1979 Iranian Revolution on the CIA, they did enable the Shia clerics to posture as Iranian patriots, notably Ayatollah Khomeini, who had remained aloof during the struggle between Mossadeq and the Shah. The always perceptive Loy Henderson summed it up in an early report from Tehran: ‘Religious fanaticism can be used to combat communism, but it cannot be employed as a constructive force for the country’s progress.’79

  Before returning to Washington Roosevelt paid a courtesy call on Winston Churchill. He was shepherded into Churchill’s bedroom, where he was recovering from a stroke. Roosevelt noted that he ‘seemed in bad shape physically. He had great difficulty in hearing; occasional difficulty in articulating; and apparent difficulty in seeing to his left.’ As usual in his contacts with Americans the old man laid it on with a trowel. He praised Roosevelt for pulling off ‘the finest operation since the war’ and said he would have liked to have served under the young American. The weight of history was immense: as first lord of the Admiralty in 1911–15, Churchill had ordered the Royal Navy to switch from coal to oil, and to secure supplies had ensured that the British government bought a controlling stake in the old Anglo-Persian company. In Iranian eyes the US was forever linked with British duplicity and skulduggery; but Britain would still be regarded as the ultimate malign force in Iranian affairs, long after it had lost the ability to fulfil such a role.

  10. HUNGARY AND SUEZ

  The Kremlin: Old Guard, New Look

  As New Year dawned in 1953 Stalin was in such a good mood that he grabbed his daughter Svetlana by the hair to take her on to the dance floor to shuffle some steps. By 5 March he was dead. The succession was settled quickly. The ruling group consisted of Yegor Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, Viacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov – and Nikita Khrushchev, fifth in seniority. None of the others rated the autodidact Khrushchev, who could read but could write only his name, and whom they regarded as a conscientious slogger.

  Nikita Sergeyevich was born in 1894, into a peasant family too poor to afford either shoes or more than a couple of years of schooling. As a teenager he cleaned the insides of industrial boilers in one of Russia’s hellish mining towns before becoming a skilled metal worker. He was a good organizer, something that saw him rise rapidly in the Communist Party, which he joined in late 1918. He did well in successive industrial managerial roles and eventually caught Stalin’s eye when he drove forward construction of Moscow’s extraordinary Metro project. Khrushchev was a willing participant in the purges of the 1930s, when even close friends were culled, and while still in his forties he was made first secretary in the Ukraine, where he was as active as the Boss in signing arrest and death-sentence warrants. Power brought material comforts. In addition to an outsized villa overlooking Kiev, the Khrushchevs had a huge apartment, with staff, a few blocks from the Kremlin.

  During the Great Patriotic War Khrushchev served as political commissar-in-chief, and was promoted to lieutenant-general. He lost his fighter pilot son Lyonia, who sought death in battle to atone for a drunken incident when he accidentally killed a comrade as he tried to shoot a bottle off his head. After the reconquest of Kiev Khrushchev resumed his earlier role of viceroy in the Ukraine, ruthlessly crushing nationalists who had sought to piggyback on the German occupation, and who would still be fighting into the early 1960s. Ukraine was a vast charnel house of pulverized towns and charred villages, with millions of decomposing bodies hastily buried or not interred at all. It remains astonishing that the Western media were to highlight Khrushchev’s roly-poly appearance and ragged-toothed smile without reference to his record.1

  At five foot one and 200 pounds Khrushchev was no threat to Stalin, who was touchy about his height, and by acting like an enthusiastic teddy-bear he won the role of court jester, enduring the Boss’s jape of tapping his pipe on his subordinate’s bald pate to show that it was hollow. The teddy-bear showed his teeth after Stalin’s death, when Khrushchev was the prime mover in the conspiracy to get rid of Beria, the psychopathic Mingrelian secret police chief, who was arrested, tried and after a few months shot. In September 1953 Premier Malenkov and the others rewarded him with the post of first secretary of the Communist Party, apparently hoping that this would keep him busy and leave the running of the state to them.

  In fact real power rested with the Presidium, which operated in the name of the Party Central Committee, and not with the Premier and the Council of Ministers. Khrushchev used his extensive powers of Party patronage to outmanoeuvre Malenkov, who in a novel departure was not executed when he was forced to resign in 1955.2 Next, Khrushchev went after the long-time Foreign Minister Molotov, who continued to conduct a Stalinist foreign policy. Khrushchev wanted a competitive but less confrontational relationship with the capitalist world so as to avoid a nuclear war, and a more tolerant relationship with whatever ‘progressive’ forces stirred in the Third World.3 Molotov also failed to achieve a united and neutral Germany and was held to have given too much away in a May 1955 state treaty with Austria. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was a keen traveller. He led a delegation to China and took the lead in repairing relations with Yugoslavia, both wounded by Molotov’s high-handedness. He would meet Eisenhower at Camp David in 1959 and Kennedy in Vienna in 1961.4

  Khrushchev blamed Molotov for creating a world of enemies, a theme he took up during the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party when it convened from 14 February 1956. But the real meat came in an unscheduled secret session, in which Khrushchev devoted four hours to Stalin’s ‘mania for greatness’, summed up in the dictator’s remark ‘I’ll wag my little finger – and there will be no more Tito.’ Fortified by brandy, Khrushchev committed such heresies as accusing Stalin of cowardice and incompetence in 1941–2. Since most of those present had been complicit in Stalin’s crimes, not least the speaker himself, the speech was greeted with an excruciating silence punctuated by an audibly anxious hum, even though he neglected to mention the terror famine in the Ukraine or the ordinary people scythed down in the purges.5

  Khrushchev ordered the release of some of the 2.5 million people confined in the gulags, together with an investigation into the crimes Stalin had perpetrated against members of the Party, without, it should be noted, questioning its continuing legitimacy. By June, he had ousted Molotov, and other such prominent Stalinist cronies as Lazar Kaganovich, bringing in ambitious younger men like Leonid Brezhnev and Ivan Serov, his KGB (Committee for State Security) chief in Ukraine, to replace them. The relatively young Dmitri Shepilov, a former editor of Pravda, was given a major foreign policy role. Smartly t
urned out, he came as a pleasant surprise to Westerners used to dealing with grim old bruisers in baggy suits.6

  Shepilov’s ministry shared a twenty-three-storey building on Smolensk Square with the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Imposing on the outside, this Stalinist edifice had dull dun-coloured corridors, with high-ceilinged offices containing too many people crammed together. A separate elevator took Foreign Ministry staff higher than the first six floors, where the ‘tradesmen’ operated. Another transported a select few to the top, where it was all hushed carpets and wooden panelling. That was where the ministers and senior bosses lurked. Several checkpoints monitored all internal movements.7 There were also the ‘near neighbours’ at the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka and the ‘far neighbours’ of the military intelligence GRU, both heavily represented in any Soviet mission like their counterparts in the CIA or SIS.

  During the purges 90 per cent of the old Commissariat of Foreign Affairs had been shot or sent to concentration camps. Their instant replacements were poorly educated and utterly orthodox. Shepilov was an economist. By ordering all Foreign Ministry staff to retake courses in political economy, he weeded out many of the more concrete-headed Stalinists. New recruits came from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, or MGIMO in Russian, housed in a sooty building near Krymsky Bridge. This prestigious school recruited heavily from the golden youth: that is the children of higher Party and state officials. There were no Jews and only a token woman – Molotov’s daughter. Dialectical materialism dominated the curriculum, although the elite cadres were also despatched each autumn to a kolkhoz to harvest potatoes.