Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  In the summer of 1946 the industry was paralysed by a general strike that was caused by, among other things, the company’s refusal to pay wages on the Friday holiday as required by law, and this in turn sparked ethnic violence involving the province’s indigenous Arab population – old British clients from the days of Sir Percy Cox and before. The company capitulated on the Friday wage but did not learn its lesson. Rather than address the wider Iranian concerns, it simply redoubled its propaganda efforts. It was another example of ‘the stupid attitude of the Europeans out here – to antagonise rather than cooperate with the Iranians. Even among quite intelligent people here, this racial antipathy is to be found – and unless it goes, this company will.’ These words were not written by a Tudeh agitator but an Englishman called L. P. Elwell-Sutton, a scholar and sometime employee of Anglo-Iranian and the British Embassy in Tehran, whose later book, Persian Oil, devastatingly laid bare the company’s ethos.

  Elwell-Sutton was an exception and his former colleagues in the company and the embassy would never forgive him his siding with the natives. It did not seem to matter that he was right.

  The Allied occupation had been significant in another way, for the United States had modified its long-held policy of benevolent inaction in Iran, landing a military force to operate a section of the great railway and sending technical missions of assistance. Then, in August 1944, the British-backed prime minister, Muhammad Saed, reluctantly acknowledged that the government was considering applications by the Anglo-Dutch corporation Royal Dutch Shell and two American companies, Socony-Vacuum and Sinclair, for oil concessions. It was obvious that Saed’s government was preparing to entrust more of Iran’s mineral wealth to the capitalist West. Rumours also swirled that Socony-Vacuum stood to get a concession in the northern provinces, which the Russians regarded as their sphere of influence. In this way, the Cold War started in Iran long before it did in Europe, and the early advantage lay with the Soviets.

  Many Iranians had been thrilled by the Soviet defence against Hitler, and the Tudeh basked in Stalin’s glory. Six Tudeh MPs had been elected at the 1943 parliamentary elections, advocating socialist reforms under the monarchy, and the party also supported a burgeoning trade-union movement. In the north of the country, the Soviets drilled for mineral resources without authorisation, while in Tehran Bullard complained that the ‘behaviour of the Soviet Ambassador in general resembles that of a Commissar in a Baltic State rather than of a diplomat in a foreign independent country.’ Bullard’s own pro-consular style more than qualified him to make this sort of assessment.

  The Soviets reacted swiftly to news of the impending concessions. An abrasive assistant foreign minister, Sergei Kavtaradze, was dispatched on a tour of the northern provinces under Russian occupation. Ending up in Tehran, Kavtaradze sat down with Saed and demanded an oil concession to cover the same provinces, but the prime minister rebuffed him by saying that all concessions were off the table until the war’s end. Kavtaradze’s rejoinder came on October 24, 1944, in an infamous press conference at the Soviet Embassy. He repeated his demand for a concession, denounced the ‘unfriendly’ actions of Saed’s government, and obliquely invited Iranians to bring it down.

  By any measure, Kavtaradze’s behaviour as Iran’s guest was extraordinarily coarse, and it had an immediate effect, pushing many neutrals to harden their opinion of the Soviet Union and causing consternation among the Tudeh. Up until now the party had been able to dodge the vexed question of where its loyalties would lie if Iranian and Soviet interests collided. Now Iran’s pro-Tudeh press bent over backwards to explain the difference between a good concession (Russian) and a bad one (British or American), shrieking all the while for the downfall of the ‘crypto-fascist’ Saed. With the wartime allies at loggerheads, and no mutually acceptable government likely to emerge, the Tudeh and its Russian backers arranged a shocking escalation.

  A few days after Kavtaradze’s press conference tens of thousands of Tudeh supporters marched from the party building to parliament, calling for Saed’s resignation and the granting of the concession. The effect of this well-disciplined crowd chanting slogans and waving banners on the rather chaotic and basic town of Tehran might have had a decisive effect in favour of the Soviets – were it not for Kavtaradze, scheming ineptly behind the walls of his embassy. Photographers and reporters were on hand when lorry-loads of armed Red Army troops arrived to ‘protect’ the marchers as they approached parliament. The images they captured, of bayonet diplomacy by a ‘friendly’ neighbour, a stone’s throw from Iran’s sovereign legislature, could hardly have been more damaging.

  From being the wronged party, overlooked in favour of western interests, the Soviets now looked like bullies. Tudeh members turned in their cards in droves, but still Kavtaradze refused to go home, and the country seemed ominously poised between the communists on the one hand and Seyyed Zia’s right-wing goons on the other. Then one man came through the middle to confound them all: Muhammad Mossadegh.

  His momentous speech to parliament following the Tudeh rally, and the bursts of un-parliamentary applause which interrupted it, showed his ability to articulate the popular mood. Mossadegh was too iconoclastic and too attached to the principle of private property to be a communist, but he had been regarded by the Tudeh as not unfriendly to them. He was certainly aware that, by speaking passionately against the northern concession, he would become their enemy, but that probably did not worry him, for he did not shrink from subjecting political alliances to the needle light of principle.

  He started his speech by settling scores across a dozen years, showing the pivotal importance of the D’Arcy Concession as Reza Shah had renegotiated it in 1933, and which Mossadegh unpicked, clause by ignominious clause. Mossadegh favoured what he called ‘negative equilibrium’ in foreign affairs, which meant rebuffing all foreign claimants to concessions and privileges, but D’Arcy redux was thirty-two years longer in duration than the original, and this pointed in quite another direction. Kavtaradze was known to have claimed a far bigger area than that covered under D’Arcy, and it later emerged that he planned for much of northern Iran to be a Soviet ‘security zone’. The awful truth was that Reza’s disadvantageous 1933 concession was a benchmark, and the Soviets were determined to better it.

  Amid bursts of applause, Mossadegh made it clear that he regarded Kavtaradze’s behaviour as a breach of the assurances of non-intervention that Iran had received from the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution. ‘If the Saed government went,’ he asked, ‘and its successor also did not want to agree [to the concession], what would [the Soviets] do? Would the Soviet government cut relations each time the Iranian government turned down one of their requests?’ Mossadegh proposed that the Russians have first refusal on any northern oil and that they join an international consortium to extract it, but he also issued a threat: ‘The people of Iran do not take kindly to countries that betray them; where possible, they nail these traitors to the wall.’10

  This cannot have pleased Kavtaradze. Nor can Mossadegh’s sarcastic quip, which got play around Tehran: ‘Mr Kavtarazde arrived too late, and now he is going home too soon.’ The vice-commissar did not in fact return to Moscow until Mossadegh had steered legislation through the majles prohibiting any government from negotiating a concession with a foreign interest without first getting permission from the deputies. Kavtaradze lashed out against the law and flew away.

  The Tudeh and their newspapers poured vitriol on Mossadegh – especially when he refused to endorse a bill to annul the revised D’Arcy Concession. Mossadegh was playing a tactical game, for he expected the bill to be rejected by the current parliament, allowing the British to say (as Mossadegh told the bill’s sponsor), ‘You claim that this concession was renewed during a period of [Reza Shah’s] dictatorship, and that it is illegal – well, now you have a free parliament, which has declined to reject it.’11 Mossadegh’s words suggest that he was already searching for ways to annul the D’Arcy Concession.

  Mos
sadegh was not alone in contemplating action against southern oil, but he knew he must offer an alternative to Anglo-Iranian. He regarded oil both as a weapon and as a goal in Iran’s struggle for true independence. Iran’s poverty demanded that it develop its resources for the benefit of the people, but the country had neither the financial means nor the technological expertise to do so. Mossadegh proposed an indigenous oil industry financed by advances against future sales and employing foreign technicians alongside Iranian managers. ‘Let us negotiate with every state that wishes to buy oil,’ he declared, ‘and get to work without delay to liberate the country.’12

  Mossadegh’s message was attractive but simplistic in the extreme, for the international oil industry was changing in ways that would make his scenario impossible. Internationalism permeated western political and economic thinking in the aftermath of the war, with the Bretton Woods agreement on capital flows and globalism slipping its halter. The dominant ‘Seven Sisters’ of the international oil industry – Anglo-Iranian, Royal Dutch Shell and the American ‘five’, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California, Socony-Vacuum, Texas, and Gulf Oil – were becoming an all-powerful cartel across the Middle East. Supported by their governments, which regarded stability in the energy sector as a condition of containing communism, the majors reached co-ordinating and integrating agreements or bought each other’s oil – as in the case of Standard of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum, which undertook to buy a huge proportion of Anglo-Iranian’s output. New and developing sources were being tapped in Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar and especially Saudi Arabia, and all were following a concessionary model.

  There would be little toleration for independent spirits under the new dispensation, and no enthusiasm for an independent Iranian oil industry caring little for cartel rules. Mossadegh was vulnerable on this score, and an Iranian communist leader told a bitter truth when he taunted him, ‘Are you really so naive as to suppose that they will let you extract oil using domestic capital? . . . You expect them just to give you the wherewithal to set up shop – bang in front of the oil company?’13

  Ahmad Qavam, still known by his theoretically defunct title, Qavam al-Saltaneh, had profited from Reza’s departure and become a giant once more. He lacked Mossadegh’s popular touch but arguably surpassed him as a tactician. He was cold, rich and well tailored, and his life after the Qajar abolition was a long raspberry blown in the direction of the Pahlavi family. His eyes were sensitive to the light and hidden by dark glasses, contributing to his inscrutability. Mossadegh was his opposite – helpless, heroic, asking to be read. Qavam doled out land to his supporters; Mossadegh, squares of nougat.

  Qavam had met the Shah when the latter was a tousled four-year-old, patting him on the head and slipping him some gold coins. Twenty years later, ushered into the sovereign’s presence, he murmured, ‘Good Lord! You have grown!’ It was the contempt of the Qajar nobility for the Cossack line, and Qavam was widely rumoured to favour a republic with him as president. For his part, the Shah sardonically referred to Qavam as ‘le père du peuple’, a moniker that Qavam encouraged and which the Shah, whose main attribute was his yawning sense of inadequacy, no doubt coveted.

  Qavam knew where his and the country’s interests overlapped, and here he conducted his politics. He concealed his aims and beliefs with displays of tactical artistry, and this equipped him to deal with a foreign crisis which arose in 1945 – and which parliament made him prime minister in order to resolve. In November of that year, in a sign of the USSR’s continuing ambitions, Soviet-backed separatists declared an autonomous regime in the north-western province of Azerbaijan, and, the following month, a smaller one in Kurdistan, the Red Army in each case preventing Iranian forces from intervening.

  It was an early experiment in satellite creation, with the Soviets showing no sign of preparing to withdraw from Iran – as they were treaty-bound to do, now that the war had ended. But the experiment was tactical. For now, the Soviets were less interested in accumulating dependencies than forcing the Iranians to give them their northern oil concession.

  Qavam had been educated in tsarist Russia and had tea estates in the Soviet-occupied zone. He knew his adversary. He opened negotiations with the Soviets after his appointment in January 1946, and soon won their confidence. In April, well after the last American and British troops had exited Iran, and as Harry Truman’s new American administration applied pressure on the Soviets, Qavam approved a deal under which Iran and Russia would set up a combined oil venture across the northern provinces in return for Soviet recognition that the Azerbaijan crisis was an internal Iranian matter, and a promise to withdraw their forces without delay.

  Qavam was popular in Moscow, and he was truckling to the Soviets in other ways, bringing communists into his cabinet and giving the Tudeh latitude to hold strikes. The British distrusted him but wanted the Russians’ demands met as far as possible. This was, of course, because they feared that Persian intransigence on the question of northern oil would have a symmetrical impact on their own activities in the south.14

  Any parliament with Mossadegh in it would surely have impeached Qavam for making policy on the basis of an unauthorised foreign concession, but the majles was in recess and Qavam ruled as a virtual dictator, with a new political party, the Democratic Party of Iran, to follow and adore him. The law was also on Qavam’s side, for it allowed fresh elections only after the last of the foreign troops had left the country. The Red Army duly hurried home after reclaiming arms they had doled out to their Azeri clients, whom they now urged to reach terms with the government.

  Qavam then surprised everyone by dramatically changing direction. His overtures to the Soviets, it turned out, had been a ruse to get the Red Army out of the country. An anti-communist tribal uprising gave him an excuse to turn against his Tudeh friends; he drove them out of government, suppressed their newspapers and unleashed his party workers on Tudeh offices. He also started showing marked pro-American tendencies, buying US surplus war materiel and asking a US firm to draft a development plan. Qavam’s triumph came with the reconquest by government forces of Azerbaijan, which also killed the Kurdish ‘republic’ of Mahabad. The Soviets were furious but continued to hope for confirmation of their oil concession by the next majles, which Qavam had predicted would be pro-Soviet.

  Again, the Soviets were disappointed. Qavam rigged the 1947 elections, stealing a slim majority, but now his luck ran out. His party fell apart, mainly because it was a kleptocracy united by avarice. The deputies rejected Qavam’s Soviet oil concession almost to a man and, striving to be even-handed, imposed a legal obligation on the government to renegotiate Anglo-Iranian’s southern oil concession and ‘regain the nation’s rights’. At the time, Sir John Le Rougetel, who had succeeded Bullard as British ambassador – the British legation had been upgraded to embassy status – warned Anglo-Iranian that this law ‘may give the Persians the right to nationalise the petroleum industry’.15 The significance of this prophecy eluded most people at the time.

  The premiership finally slipped from Qavam’s grasp in December 1947, to the Shah’s satisfaction, for the dilatory youth of Bullard’s description was no longer satisfied with tennis and ribbon-cutting. On the contrary, the Shah nowadays gave the impression that his royal birth confirmed an innate aptitude for affairs of state. Nothing pleased him so much as the trip he made in 1947 to the newly ‘liberated’ parts of Azerbaijan, where the warmth of the reception convinced him that he, not Qavam, had saved the country. In 1947 he was divorced from his lovely Egyptian wife, who had failed to sire him an heir and who in any case pined for the Nile. In 1951 he would take a second, Iranian wife, the even lovelier Sorayya Esfandiari – who failed him in the same way.

  The Shah came late to intrigue, guided by his fathomlessly manipulative twin sister, Ashraf, who of all the Pahlavi children most resembled Reza Shah in pluck and want of scruple. Separated from her brother when he was sent away to boarding school, she had accompanied her father into exile a
fter his abdication, amusing herself in Mauritius, the exiles’ first port of call, by buying all the shoes she could find in the local bazaar. (Reza had been more concerned for his supply of opium, which he pretended was for his cook.) Beautiful, high-spirited and fiercely independent, Ashraf was devoted to her brother, if exasperated by his repeated failures of nerve. She had a lively rivalry with her elder sister, Shams, and cultivated parliamentary deputies in an attempt to build support for the throne.

  The Shah now wanted to increase his powers and harness the country to the West. He feared the British, who had brought him to power and who might (or so he believed) dispense with him, and he admired the United States. Friendship with the West, he believed, would allow Iran to disengage itself further from the Soviet Union.

  Obstacles needed to be cleared, and these included Iran’s obligation, imposed by its own parliament, to renegotiate the Anglo-Iranian concession by reaching a supplemental agreement providing more funds for development. Negotiations between the company and the government turned on Iran’s demand for higher revenues from its oil – but they turned slowly, for the Iranian side was under heavy fire from nationalists and the Tudeh.

  The Shah was impatient both for power and progress on the supplemental agreement, and his chance came after February 4, 1949, the day he narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a young man with a Tudeh affiliation, Nasser Fakhrarayi. The Shah was extraordinarily lucky. Of the five bullets to leave the assailant’s revolver, two grazed the royal person and three passed through the peak of his hat. The Shah reacted by lunging at his assailant, twisting his body as he did so to present a narrower target, and was lucky that the sixth cartridge failed to explode, for it would probably have been fatal. The revolver jammed and Fakhrarayi was killed.*