In the capital, ministers trembled in fear of assassins, who were influenced by revolutionary currents in Russia and targeted enemies of the people at their desks or in the bazaar. On one occasion, the prime minister permitted himself a night’s sleep only after clambering onto his unlit roof and pulling up the ladder he had used to get there. By the end of the war, Persia was in the grip of famine, and while the more fertile provinces were awash with wheat and rice, the medieval transport system was unequal to the burden of distribution and people dropped from starvation in the streets.
Politics disintegrated. No fewer than eight prime ministers (including Prince Farmanfarma) formed sixteen different cabinets during the war years. Their royal master was the uninspiring Ahmad Shah, a peevish and obese adolescent whom the Russians and British manipulated unrelievedly, and whose first significant action following the end of hostilities was to put his fortune in the Paris stock exchange.
The war prevented Mossadegh from returning to Switzerland, taking up citizenship and practising the law. He was in demand to give classes at Tehran’s new School of Law and Political Science, but soon enough he was drawn back into politics. He accepted a position on a budgetary oversight body that had been set up to weaken the Belgians’ grip on the economy, he was a prominent member of a nationalist group, and he cultivated friends in the rabble-rousing patriotic press. He did not join his fellow patriots when they went into voluntary exile in fear of a Russian takeover, though he maintained clandestine contact with them after their departure. He shared the exiles’ nationalist sentiments, but not their pro-German bent. Besides, he was suffering from acute stomach pains and fever that later developed into appendicitis. It was probably not a coincidence that these symptoms appeared as the Russians advanced on Tehran and Ahmad Shah toyed briefly with the idea of flight. Mossadegh’s insides would often react to the national angst.
He refused to join Farmanfarma’s short-lived government, which he judged to be an instrument of the powers. His instinct was right but the decision offended both his uncle and Najm al-Saltaneh. In 1917, his mother prevailed upon him to serve as deputy finance minister under another, more distant cousin, Qavam al-Saltaneh – the first chapter in what would be a long and ultimately venomous political relationship. By now, the Belgians had been relieved of control over the economy, and the finance ministry was a target for modernisers.
Mossadegh had already declared his reformist tendencies with a paper denouncing the capitulation agreements by which Muslim states such as Iran had conceded legal jurisdiction over their Christian residents to separate, Christian authorities.2 Discrete legal systems were enshrined in Islamic law, but Mossadegh raised an overriding concern. ‘Islam is in danger,’ he wrote, ‘and we see that it is getting weaker by the day. If we respected Islam’s rules and observed the wishes of the law-giver [God], the Muslim states would not now be in this condition, and the Christian states would not have subjugated them . . . in order for a country to be independent, it is necessary that it have jurisdiction over all its residents.’ His recommendation that the law be changed to ‘suit the needs of the times’ was the clarion call of the Muslim moderniser – behind which conservatives detected a secularist agenda.3
Qavam also claimed to be a moderniser, though in truth the new finance minister was driven more by ambition than ideology. Literary, ruthless and urbane, Qavam had been Muzaffar ud-Din Shah’s private secretary at the granting of the first majles, inscribing the historic rescript in his own, elegant hand. He and Mossadegh had known each other since childhood and shared the same social background. Their common tenancy of the finance ministry brought together the only Persian statesmen who would defy and outlast the monarchical despotism which lay in store.
From the start, they were at loggerheads. Mossadegh had an elevated estimation of his own abilities and behaved as if he were the minister, demanding extra powers and working long into the night. The lordly Qavam, by contrast, bided the summer in a pleasant house in the foothills, and his office, piled with urgent chits gathering dust, was a monument to bureaucratic inertia. Qavam did not appreciate the deputy minister’s encroachment onto his territory, nor his tendency to direct petitioners to his summer residence, and he volleyed back the official correspondence he received using a fleet of hired Victorias. Tensions rose and Mossadegh resigned, but there was a clamour for him to return and eventually it was Qavam who left his post. Emboldened by his success, Mossadegh set about cleaning out the ministry: an Augean stable tainted by avarice and long service under the Belgians.
It says much for the fleeting nature of public office in Persia in the first half of the twentieth century that Mossadegh’s fourteen-month stint as deputy finance minister would be, after the premiership, the longest tenure of his career. Equally significant was his ability to re-engage obsessively with Iran so soon after deciding to make his home in Switzerland. But Switzerland had never been a serious rival for his affections. Neuchâtel was blessed relief from the torrid emotions that Iran never failed to inspire – an escape from home, not a home. Only in Tehran could he flourish and grow, and now, in his mid-thirties, his distinctive political persona began to emerge – one of ostentatious, combative morality. Here was Mossadegh’s demagogic gene.
Mossadegh began a pursuit of top ministry officials on charges of corruption and other irregularities, and it turned into a poisonous affair which brought the press to paroxysms, toppled a government and aroused the Shah’s displeasure. According to Mossadegh, these bureaucrats’ decision to annul a concession that had been awarded to an Armenian businessman was an act of ‘treachery’ that had cost the country dearly in lost revenues. Mossadegh accused the grandees of making unauthorised withdrawals from government coffers, and in the process was subjected to criticism of an intensity he had never experienced. In a public statement of considerable sanctimony, he claimed to be soldiering on in office against his will. In truth, he derived a true contrarian’s enjoyment from the struggle.
One day, while he sat at his desk, he heard a newspaper-vendor in the street outside shout, ‘Deputy minister accused of reneging on Islam!’ The newspaper’s claim, resting on a mistranslation of a line in his doctoral thesis (in French), was easily disproved, but even so an allegation of apostasy might provoke religious fanatics to assassinate him. Seyyed Zia ud-Din Tabatabai, an anti-establishment newspaper editor who would become one of Mossadegh’s most persistent enemies, was especially vitriolic. His newspaper accused Mossadegh of selling government land he was tenanting, and of underpaying taxes on his own estates.4 ‘So unabashed a shortfall!’ the paper shrieked. ‘So naked an infraction!’5
After several months, the case ended inconclusively. The court suspended the four defendants from their posts, but the suspensions were quashed in cabinet and Mossadegh himself, somewhat paradoxically, had his wages docked for exceeding his powers.6 One of the judges conceded that the outcome had been a whitewash, and that Mossadegh had been punished for daring to ‘catch thieves’. Much of the newspaper-reading public agreed.
A defeat on paper, but a moral victory, the episode helped form Mossadegh’s intensely polarising reputation. To one hostile observer, his pursuit of the bureaucrats was evidence for his ‘lust for renown’. He was the kind of man who would ‘raze Caesarea for the sake of a handkerchief’.7
Mossadegh was building a public image but he wanted it to be based on integrity and patriotism, and this set him apart from the self-serving politicians around him. As long as men like Qavam held office, they would not want for a constituency; power, in Persia as elsewhere, makes its own friends. But Mossadegh’s desire to be on the side of right chimed with his qualities as a public figure, and his personal prestige would never be higher than when politically he was most wretched. This was connected to the ideal, rooted in the national psyche and in the history of Shia Islam, of virtue and self-sacrifice in leadership. At the height of the campaign to defame him, his mother Najm al-Saltaneh, that prayerful woman of the world, coined a phrase tha
t would become his political motto. Noting his despondency, she said, ‘a person’s weight in society is proportional to the adversities he faces on behalf of the people’.8
At the end of the war, Persia was on its knees. The October Revolution had paved the way for Russia’s withdrawal from a forward position in the country’s affairs, raising Bolshevik prestige in Iran but permitting Britain to exploit the absence of its old rival. The sense of crisis, never far away, was sharpened by burgeoning secessionist movements, while the Cossack Brigade collapsed in the absence of firm Russian direction, alarming Mossadegh, who ran across a group of unruly Cossacks, roaring drunk, as he returned home one evening.
In April 1919 Mossadegh set out for Switzerland to be reunited with his elder children, Zia Ashraf and Ahmad. The great peace conference to divide the spoils of the First World War was underway at Versailles. The British ensured that Persia’s delegation was not admitted to the conference, and that its desiderata were not discussed. The agent of Iran’s frustration was George Nathaniel Curzon, who had been Viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905 and who was now Britain’s acting foreign secretary. He was secretly pursuing a separate, bilateral deal with a triumvirate of powerful Anglophiles in Tehran, and intended the Anglo–Persian Agreement to be one of the crowning achievements of his career.
Curzon had travelled all over Persia in the 1880s as a brilliant, bossy, prolix Oxford graduate and rising public figure, and had not wavered in his belief that the two countries were natural partners in a ‘friendly alliance’ to defend India against Russia. Persian patriots had noted appreciatively Curzon’s denunciations of the 1907 Anglo–Russian Convention – though Curzon had been moved more by the convention’s small print than any distaste for the principle of an imperial carve-up. Now, at the close of the First World War, with the Russians absorbed in revolution and civil war and Britain establishing a new mandate in Mesopotamia, his dream of a chain of vassal states guarding the overland route to India finally seemed feasible.
Curzon expected to become prime minister. His tendency in this, his grandest phase, was to regard not only the British Empire, but the whole world, as an annex to his Derbyshire estate. For the Persians, he planned an onslaught of charity and benevolence. He exhibited that peculiarly English trait of wishing, as the comic character Haji Baba of Isfahan puts it, to ‘do us good against our inclination’. Curzon understood the imperial challenge that Bolshevism would mount after its brief retreat into virtuous monasticism, as well as the importance of Britain’s interests in the Persian oilfields. He believed that no sensible Persian could desire anything but the agreement he was offering, under which the British would have a free hand to modernise all areas of public administration and the armed forces, and Persia would get armaments and a big loan in return. Indeed, had the Persians been seeking profitable integration into the British Empire, Curzon’s terms might have been attractive. But the mood in Persia was not submissive. It was prickly and nationalistic. The government of India and some of Curzon’s subordinates in the Foreign Office advised him of this. He dismissed them as fools.
The Anglo–Persian Agreement was negotiated in secrecy by Sir Percy Cox, the British minister in Tehran, and three Persian nobles: the prime minister, Vusuq ul-Dawleh (who was Qavam’s half-brother), Farmanfarma’s son Prince Firooz, who was named as foreign minister during the negotiations, and the finance minister, Sarem ul-Dawleh – with the Shah, hearing the jingle of English coin, in rapacious attendance. Against Curzon’s better judgement, the British gave the triumvirate an advance on the prospective loan worth £130,000 – ‘palm oil’, as Cox put it, for buying off anticipated opposition – and promises of asylum should the need arise. The Shah was already receiving a subsidy in return for supporting Vusuq and his government.
In Curzon’s words, ‘no more disinterested and single-minded attempt was ever made by a Western Power to re-establish the existence and secure the prosperity of an Eastern country’. But most educated Persians were appalled when the agreement was made public in August 1919. The barely-concealed protectorate status that Curzon was offering compared unfavourably with the Bolsheviks’ promise of a new bilateral relationship based on equality, and their unilateral renunciation of all Tsarist privileges harmful to Persian sovereignty. But it was the secret nature of the negotiations, and rumours of a ‘British bribe’, that were the treaty’s undoing.
Mossadegh read the news over breakfast in Switzerland. ‘He grew agitated,’ his elder son Ahmad recalled. ‘He wept. We couldn’t go near him. That evening several of my father’s Iranian acquaintances came to see him and they occupied themselves with lamentation and weeping until the middle of the night. And this went on for several days.’9
Mossadegh’s shame must have been compounded by the knowledge that his first cousin Prince Firooz had been one of the treaty’s architects, and a beneficiary of the ‘British bribe’. Brilliant, snobbish and ambitious, Firooz incarnated all that Persian reformers found objectionable about the Qajar upper class from which Mossadegh would gradually withdraw. As a student in Paris, Firooz had occupied a suite at the Lutetia, the art-deco hotel where James Joyce wrote part of Ulysses, and had attended fancy-dress parties with Cocteau. He had also been married to Mossadegh’s only sister, Ameneh, but the marriage had ended in divorce, and Mossadegh seems to have blamed Firooz.10 The two men were opposites even in superficial ways. Firooz owned one of the first Rolls-Royces in Tehran and left unpaid tailors’ bills wherever he went. He did not shrink from political assassination.11 He was feted by Curzon. It is hard to imagine Mossadegh relishing his association with such a man.
After recovering from the shock of the treaty, Mossadegh got to work to galvanise Iranian opinion in Europe, taking a leading role in a new ‘Committee of National Resistance’ that was set up by Persian émigrés and firing off letters to the League of Nations. He travelled to Berne for the sole purpose of having a rubber stamp made for the committee, and convinced himself that a flirtatious advance by an attractive young woman was a British trap to besmirch him. One can well imagine his ecstasy of embarrassment as he declined her invitation to meet for a smoke: ‘I am sorry, madame, I am ill. I am very busy. I am tired. Forgive me. I don’t have the time.’
The strength of opposition to the treaty came as an unwelcome surprise for Curzon, Cox and the triumvirs. Vusuq used bribery and intimidation to silence his critics, while Curzon hoped that the majles would pass the treaty into law. But the impetus now lay with its opponents. The nationalists were heartened by international criticism – Woodrow Wilson’s administration in the United States was particularly disapproving – while Curzon’s warm feelings for the Persians evaporated. ‘These people have got to be taught –’ he wrote, ‘at whatever cost to them – that they cannot get on without us. I don’t at all mind their noses being rubbed in the dust.’12
The Persians refused to be taught, and the Bolsheviks, having seized the advantage in their civil war, now made a sensational return to Persian affairs. A Russian landing on the Caspian coast in May 1920, and the ignominious British withdrawal that followed, were blows to Curzon and his protégé Vusuq. By the time the government fell in July, the Anglo–Persian Agreement was a dead letter, though it was some time before Britain’s foreign secretary was reconciled to its demise.*
How had Curzon and the triumvirs misread Persian public opinion so badly? Vusuq was not the only Persian statesman to suggest that his country was unready for the burden of modern government. He was not alone in proposing an authoritarian administration bolstered by foreign expertise. But he and Curzon had underestimated the strength of patriotic feeling, and their secretive methods suggested that they had something to hide. In the words of one British official in Tehran, the average Persian’s thinking ran as follows:
‘We know that you British are asking to lend us money; you have done so before. We know that you are willing to lend us advisers; we have had foreign advisers before. But why do you find it necessary to pay these Ministers to make thi
s Agreement? Evidently you want something for your money which does not appear in the Agreement, which you wish to conceal. We believe that you want to seize Persia as you have seized Egypt and Mesopotamia and that Vusuq ul-Dawleh has sold his country to you.’13
Still-born it was; but the treaty would have a lasting effect on Persian perceptions of Great Britain. Dispelled for ever were memories of the British as supporters of the early constitutionalists. In their place came an inflexible belief in Britain’s duplicity and the morally corrosive effect of its representatives. In time, Persians’ fear and hatred of the British would assume proportions rarely seen in the formal empire. British influence was so compelling an idea, everyone ended up being drawn to its flame. If a politician fell, it was that he had displeased the British. Careers would stand or fall, and policies be implemented or put into abeyance, not simply in response to the British position, but on the strength of the Persians’ intuition of what that position might be. If the British had no position, that itself became a position. Paid-up Anglophiles went to such lengths to disprove their sympathies that conversely a strident critic of Britain might be accused of throwing up a smokescreen to hide his real sympathies and genuine patriots might make concessions to British interests in order to hide the depth of their antipathy.
Chronic insecurity, mingled with fatalism, tainted public life as Persia tried to become modern, but this on its own does not explain the theories and delusions that arose with respect to the British. The most important source was the conduct of the British themselves. Reading the words of the diplomats and leader writers, with their lucid emphasis on British benevolence, it is easy to miss this. Infusing British policy, the stink in the corner of the room, was a profound contempt for Persia and its people.
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