Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  The Shah’s narrow escape fed his sense of mission – now anointed with a miracle. Housed in a cabinet, his bullet-ridden uniform was a conversation piece at the Officers’ Club, while the royalist press and toadying mullahs harped on about divine intervention. The Shah banned the Tudeh and steamrollered a raft of constitutional amendments through a hastily convened constituent assembly, which gave him the right to dissolve the majles and a new senate. He congratulated the assembly on furthering the cause of constitutionalism. In fact, he had accomplished a judicial coup d’état.

  Mossadegh was in the doldrums once more. He had tried to prevent Qavam’s election rigging of 1947, writing open letters, addressing public meetings and taking sanctuary in the Shah’s palace in the hope of forcing him to intervene on the side of democracy. To no avail: the monarch was not yet ready to take on Qavam, and Mossadegh was lambasted at every turn for his ‘negativity’. He withdrew from the race and slunk back to Ahmadabad, where he suffered another sharp deterioration in health.

  Now parliament came within an ace of asking him to become prime minister after Qavam’s fall, even though he was in Ahmadabad and not seeking nomination, but he had been hurt by Qavam’s criticism of the ‘negativists’ and wallowed in self-pity. He told people that he had retired from politics and mutely referred unwelcome visitors to a doctor’s order, displayed on the wall, instructing him to refrain from speaking. He later complained that parliament did not consult him and that he might as well be dead for all the attention he received. It was an epic sulk.

  Watching Qavam and the Shah slug it out, Mossadegh wanted neither man to win, but rested his hopes in young admirers like Nasser Najmi, to whom he wrote in the winter of 1948, ‘The pain is great and there is no doctor; let us hope that one of you guides our benighted ship to shore.’17

  Chapter 9

  Victory or Death

  The Soviets and the British both regarded Iranian nationalism as political froth, generated by unscrupulous politicians and easily dealt with. They operated on the assumption that Iran contained jingoists in abundance, but not a single patriot. And yet national feeling had existed since the turn of the twentieth century, first among the elite, then on a much wider scale. Now, nationalism had grown to such a degree that it was poised to take over politics and set the country’s course, for after oil nationalisation Iran’s history would be about secular nationalism fighting religious nationalism, with the Left in attendance and the Shah fearing all.

  Mossadegh was the first and only Iranian statesman to command all nationalist strains because his probity could not be doubted and because he elevated national independence over everything else, turning it into an existential question that needed an answer before the other questions could even be asked.

  Ordinary Iranians were disregarded by almost everyone who mattered in public life. In general, the men who decided Iran’s destiny made policy on the premise that deals would be done, that no one would get everything but everyone something, and that the people would swallow the lie that their interests had been served. But this was no longer the case. Iran’s parliament was grubby, but to a degree it reflected public opinion. New pressure was being applied, from the press, from the merchants in the bazaar – and increasingly from a few outspoken clerics, for the ayatollahs were now clawing back prestige after the ravages of Reza Shah. Meanwhile, foreign visitors still wrote about sleepy, medieval Iran – unchanging Iran. It was what they expected to see, so they saw it.

  The British view was that the recent unrest in the oilfields was a political glitch. They focussed on communist troublemakers and ignored the wider threat posed by a people fully awakened. The British believed that the company had done the Iranians a huge favour by finding and extracting oil. Now the natives were stamping their feet but this owed nothing to a maturing sense of nationhood and everything to the infelicities of the oriental mind. When it suited them, company directors hid behind the letter of the concession agreement. Few saw that it was the spirit of this document, a disadvantageous concession negotiated by a defunct dictator, which damned it in the eyes of so many. And almost everyone, from the communists to the religious Right, could unite to decry an arrangement whereby, in 1947, the Iranian government received royalties of £7m and the British government £15m in income tax.

  The company was prepared to negotiate a supplemental agreement that would give the Shah more money to modernise his country, but would not recognise Iran’s operational ownership of its own resources. Anglo-Iranian was firm: there would be no caving in to the government’s demands, a 50:50 profit-sharing arrangement of the kind that other companies had negotiated elsewhere in the world, and a statutory revision of the agreement every fifteen years.

  Pressured by the Shah, who wanted a quick result, Iran’s chief negotiator settled for an increased royalty and a new minimum annual payment, but by the time the supplemental agreement came before the majles, public opinion was roused. One deputy had called for the industry to be nationalised, and the veteran constitutionalist Hassan Taqizadeh, recently returned from exile, sensationally disowned the 1933 concession which bore his signature. The opposition bayed that the concession was illegal. However beneficial the small print, a supplemental agreement would imply the opposite.

  The debate started on July 23, 1949, a few days before the majles went into recess prior to elections. The British and the Shah were in a hurry and no one expected the next majles to be any less nationalist, so tremendous pressure was applied in favour of ratification, with deputies being bought and pro-Court journalists painting the opposition as British lackeys trying to save the company from paying an increased royalty. In an atmosphere of intimidation and dread, there was no telling which way the majority would jump, and Hossein Makki and the other nationalists in parliament were resolved to filibuster until the end of the session, and in this way stop the supplemental agreement from coming to a vote.

  Makki needed an elder statesman’s clarion call. One evening he went to Palace Street and implored Mossadegh to write the deputies a resolve-stiffening open letter, but Mossadegh was in one of his self-pitying moods and waved him away. Makki spent a fruitless hour trying to break Mossadegh down before leaving him with the words, ‘Woe betide the nation that spends fifty years nurturing a politician for its time of need, only for such a man at such a time to duck his responsibilities.’1 It was a well-aimed jibe, given Mossadegh’s image as a shirker, and after Makki had left the old man sat for hours on his own, deep in thought, before eventually taking out pen and paper.

  Fearing assassination, Makki was not staying at home, so early the next morning Mossadegh telephoned another nationalist deputy, Abdolhossein Haerizadeh, and asked him to take his letter to the majles. Makki read out Mossadegh’s missive as soon as he was handed it, and while it was not a masterpiece and started with a reproach to the deputies for not consulting him earlier – ‘Is he an oil expert?’ one retorted – it had a galvanising effect.

  Certainly Makki himself was inspired enough to perform heroics, particularly on the final day of parliamentary business, when, half-stupefied from lack of sleep, a high fever and the stimulant methedrine, he filibustered for well over ten hours, ending all hopes of a vote before parliament was dissolved. Makki’s colleagues urged him to carry on talking even if it meant keeling over and dying – and they were not joking. For the new nationalists, it was nothing less than victory or death.

  It was past midnight before Makki, confident that the vote could not be taken before the end of the session, finally stopped speaking. In the rapture of the moment, Makki’s fever miraculously subsided.

  The disciplinarian Reza Shah had fathered Iran, and his son tried to adopt his mantle, but Muhammad-Reza’s irresolution was often exposed and he turned in misery to the surrogate parent he so resented: the British Empire. He may have been the unquestioned head of the armed forces, and able to pervert elections and dismiss governments at will, but the King of Kings often found himself scurrying to a foreign function
ary – Bullard, Le Rougetel and, from the spring of 1950, Le Rougetel’s successor, Sir Francis Shepherd – for guidance and reassurance. The Shah needed to be told that the British approved of what he was doing, and this did not make him seem very father-like. The Mossadegh family referred to him contemptuously as ‘that boy’ – except for Mossadegh himself. Even in private he called the Shah ‘His Majesty’.

  From the time the British made clear that they would brook no tinkering with the supplementary agreement, and its fate hung in the balance, Iran came anarchically alive with the realisation that more than oil was at stake. Britain’s prestige was again being tested, this time in a spread-eagled Middle Eastern monarchy. The banned Tudeh were making a come-back, working the underground presses and building support in the provinces. A people susceptible to messianic signs contributed to an atmosphere of drama and skulduggery. It was a high-water mark for conspiracies and their theorists. Even the journal of a sophisticated French-educated Iranian such as Ali Shayegan, the dean of law at Tehran University, alludes to the practice of besmirching one’s opponents – as well as one’s friends. The most common accusations concerned membership of a semi-clandestine fraternity – the Freemasons, say, or the Bahais – in the pay of the British (who else?) and dedicated to debauching Iran. The novelist Iraj Pezeshkzad has rightly described the anti-British paranoia that gripped the country as an illness, and it is an irony of the British Empire that, at the very moment when its power had waned decisively, Iranians considered it invincible. Expatriate students, glimpsing the White Cliffs of Dover for the first time, reported experiencing unsettling palpitations and presentiments. There was something about the damp little island that was both repellent and entrancing. It was touched by evil, and yet, in the majestic logic and stability of its institutions, it showed the way.

  Mossadegh himself regarded Britain’s constitutional monarchy as the best model for Iran’s government. And yet his hatred for the British as a malignant force in his country’s affairs, and his intuition for what he regarded as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s essential evil, was profound. Not for him the glib modern distinction between a people and their government. In a democracy as smooth as Britain’s, one was bound to reflect the other.

  In no country that was colonised by the British may these attitudes be observed to the same degree. But Iran was never formally colonised, and there was to be no formal independence. Here, in the poisoned ambiguity of a relationship that was never defined, and in which the British were automatically assumed to be hiding something, mistrust became a pathology.

  There was no such pathology with regard to the United States – not yet. But, as the Shah and the British pondered solutions to the oil impasse, and the opposition considered ways of prolonging it, the Americans’ hands-off approach to Iran was giving way to a closer engagement. It was what the Shah desired, for he considered the US to be Britain’s natural counterweight, and now, revelling in post-war wealth and productivity, a source of aid and arms. The Truman administration had undertaken to protect the northern Mediterranean, investing massively to stabilise Turkey and Greece and keep them out of the Soviet orbit; what, Muhammad-Reza asked, about Iran?

  Although the Americans sympathised broadly with the Shah’s plans to carry on his father’s programme of modernisation, and while they acknowledged the Soviet menace from the north, they could not make up their mind about the sovereign himself. The first question was whether he had the mettle to see through his vaunted seven-year plan of investment and reform. The second was whether the US should help him become a dictator.

  These questions were bound up with money and prestige. The recent example of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, who had absorbed millions of dollars of US help only for the communists to drive him into the sea, was a persuasive argument against anti-Red largesse. And so, to the Shah’s frustration, the argument over aid and arms ground on in Tehran and Washington, and his representations acquired a sour, resentful undercurrent.

  On one matter, however, the Shah, the Americans and the British were at one, and that was the need for the supplemental agreement to be ratified and Iran to begin receiving increased revenues which would permit investment and reform. For that, a new parliament was required.

  Mossadegh would never be a very determined retiree, though he was affected by lordly indecision and his famous charm soured if he was not paid enough attention. He remembered how the previous elections had been rigged, and as the polling for the sixteenth majles approached in the autumn of 1949 he worried that this would be repeated. His young acolytes flattered him, calling him ‘Iran’s great national leader’, and he was susceptible to the argument that there was no one but him to save the day. As he wrote later, ‘After much consideration, I concluded that if I sat silently, I would be doing wrong.’2

  He now shared the stage with another formidable personality, Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani, who had been exiled in 1949 at the Shah’s behest but continued to influence events back home. Kashani was the latest in Iran’s line of charismatic political clerics. A few years younger than Mossadegh, educated at the seminary at Najaf, in Ottoman Mesopotamia, he had taken part in a religious rebellion against the British in the First World War which cost the life of his father (also a prominent cleric) and fuelled his own abiding Anglophobia. The British gave Kashani further grievance when they jailed him during the Second World War for being a German fifth columnist, and he had known rough treatment and exile after that.

  Now he was a thorn in the establishment’s side, denouncing the oil company and its Iranian stooges and godfathering a group of armed fanatics called the Warriors of Islam. Kashani aspired to lead a worldwide Islamic revival, but in theological terms he was decidedly junior to Shiism’s top ayatollah, Seyyed Hossein Burujerdi. Burujerdi believed that the clergy would lose public respect if it involved itself in politics, but as the Shah grasped for power and Anglo-Iranian showed its talons, the perils of abstinence became apparent.

  Kashani appealed both to Muslim fanatics and the western-educated secularists who had gathered around Mossadegh. Before his exile, the ayatollah’s house near parliament had been the haunt of journalists and politicians of all stripes, as well as the usual straggle of beggars and supplicant widows. His political engagement raised his prestige among Tehran’s pious bazaaris, who were ready to slam down their shutters and march at his word. Using contributions from the guilds, he filled the bellies of his supporters hundreds at a time. Even now, from Beirut, he remained a vital presence in Iranian politics. His devoted network of supporters saw to that.

  For anyone of Mossadegh’s generation, the idea of cooperation between lay and ecclesiastical leaders was normal, even if Mossadegh on occasion showed disdain for the stock figure of the coarse, hypocritical priest. The rapport between the two men was warm, but they had little ideological common ground. They had a shared hatred for monarchical dictatorship and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but Kashani abominated other things that Mossadegh did not: the sale of alcohol and women without the hejab. Kashani’s backers, the Warriors of Islam, believed that parliament should repeal all un-Islamic laws and consider its work done. This view of politics was at odds with Mossadegh’s, which centred on a strong representative parliament to check the Shah and the army.

  Mossadegh had always taken his own decisions, and he had spent his career fastidiously side-stepping the violence that was an integral part of Iran’s social and political life. Now, in his late sixties, he became a politician of the masses, chumming up to Kashani and others, such as the rabble-rouser Muzaffar Baghai, who did not baulk at brutality and intimidation. These men drew support from the Tehran bazaar, a vast community of traders, porters and guild leaders, with a demi-monde of mobsters and hoodlums – the ‘thick-necks’, as they were called – with names like Icy Ramazan and Skull-Cooker Mehdi, whose understanding of morality admitted pilgrimages to Mecca as well as roistering on an epic scale, and who were usually prepared to switch allegiances so long as the price was right.


  Elections to the sixteenth majles were held first in the provinces, and they were conducted so dishonestly that even the British were shocked.3 The machinery of fraud was operated by two members of Princess Ashraf’s clique: the Shah’s court minister, the suave but insubstantial Abdolhossein Hazhir, and the ambitious chief of the general staff, General Hajji Ali Razmara. For their part, the supporters of Mossadegh and Ayatollah Kashani were determined to stop royal placemen from winning the twelve most important seats of all, in Tehran. Their candidates would be mainly nationalists – but supported by religious militants, Kashani’s seminarian supporters and conservative bazaaris.

  An upper house, a senate, was also being convened, and Mossadegh was a member of the college from which Tehran’s fifteen ‘elected’ senators – another fifteen were appointed by the Shah – would be chosen by secret ballot. But Mossadegh had no faith in the vote, and before it began he announced theatrically that the government had already decided who would be ‘elected’. Drawing a sealed envelope from his pocket, he declared that it contained the names of the winners. The ballot was duly held, and when Mossadegh’s envelope was opened and his list of names read out, they corresponded, with one omission. (He had tactfully left off the name of his own nephew and son-in-law, Ahmad Matine-Daftary, who continued to have good relations with the Court.) Mossadegh’s own name was not among the winners.4