These schemes, of course, would make a mockery of nationalisation and let the company keep its influence in Iran. Mossadegh and his allies moved fast. On April 25 the majles oil committee approved a bill providing for the dispossession of Anglo-Iranian and the establishment of a new Iranian company whose statutes would be ratified by the majles. Compensation would be paid to the ‘former Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’, as Mossadegh and his friends now called it, for the loss of its concession.
For the British there was one way to salvage the situation, and that was to bring back Mossadegh’s old enemy, the Anglophile Seyyed Zia, as prime minister. Zia had told the British that he would accept a 50:50 deal with the company. Sir Francis Shepherd and his colleagues were not concerned by Seyyed Zia’s tremendous unpopularity, or his reputation as a stooge. They were fixated by the idea of saving Anglo-Iranian.
When he presented the repossession bill to the majles, on Thursday, April 25, Mossadegh was aware that Zia was on the verge of the premiership, and he warned his fellow-deputies of the possibility that ‘in the very near future an event takes place that completely undoes the work that you have accomplished’. Mossadegh demanded that the majles vote on the bill at the earliest opportunity: ‘Don’t let the people’s sacrifices and the services you have rendered go to waste.’ But the majles, while in awe of Mossadegh’s authority and intimidated by the nationalist mob in the streets, contained many pro-British and royalist deputies.
The following day being a Friday, the day of rest, the repossession vote was set for Saturday April 27. Then came the unexpected news of Ala’s resignation. He was annoyed at having been kept in the dark by Mossadegh, and felt unable to implement repossession. With Ala’s departure, the majles’s agenda changed. Before they voted on repossession, the deputies would have to nominate a prime minister, and there seemed no alternative to Seyyed Zia, who had gone to the royal palace and was waiting to kiss hands.
There was an alternative, of course: Mossadegh. But Mossadegh was famous for his aversion to office.
The mood in parliament on the morning of April 27 was electric. The public gallery was packed and worried-looking senators paced up and down the corridors. The square outside was filling with ordinary people, curious to see how the crisis would end. The majles speaker was in consultation with the Shah, so it fell to the deputy-speaker, Jamal Emami, to propose a candidate for prime minister. An experienced political operator, Emami did not want to be seen to be foisting Seyyed Zia on the country, so he proposed Mossadegh, confidently expecting him to refuse. Only then would Emami propose Seyyed Zia, thereby avoiding accusations of a stitch-up.
If Zia came to power, Mossadegh knew that nationalisation would be a dead letter and that he and his supporters would be jailed or exiled. On the other hand, if repossession could be ratified, the majles would have done its job and the onus would be on the government to implement it. He seized the opportunity that Emami had unknowingly presented.
‘Ghabbalto,’ he said in Arabic. ‘I accept.’ It is the word that bridegrooms use in their marriage vows. The deputies gave a roar and in the straw poll which followed Mossadegh received 79 votes out of 90 present. In fact, Mossadegh’s support in the majles was nothing like as strong as the vote suggested. As Shepherd wrote, ‘Members were extremely doubtful of the wisdom of the oil resolution, but having passed it they seem to have taken the easiest way out in confiding to Mossadegh the solution of the problem which he himself had created.’22 Mossadegh declared that he would accept the post only if repossession were ratified that very day. Seeing that his stratagem had backfired, Emami scrambled to prevent repossession from coming to vote, but his procedural objections were overruled and the bill became law.
Muhammad-Ali Safari wrote in Bakhtar-e Emrooz that the celebrations by Mossadegh’s supporters outside the parliament building lasted until 2 a.m. Safari himself got home at three in morning. ‘Long live the memory of those glorious days.’
Chapter 10
Mossadeghism
It is not often that Iran finds itself at the centre of the world, and when it does, as preachy westerners like to point out, it is generally for the wrong reasons. Now, for the first time since the advent of modern communications, Iran was at the centre of world politics, though the title that Time magazine would bestow upon Mossadegh at the end of 1951, ‘Man of the Year’, was less an acknowledgement of his achievement than an expression of rage and befuddlement.
The Time cover, with a clenched fist piercing the Persian plateau and the oil derricks idle while Mossadegh looks on, evokes the moral contest that lifts world affairs from mere discussion of surpluses and bottom lines. What Mossadegh and his supporters considered a victory of right over wrong was for the British a theft and a violation. Besides, there was disquiet across the white world at this latest show of oriental bad form. It was bad form to flaunt the rules as they were laid down in London and Washington. To do so when communism threatened freedom everywhere was a further betrayal. To this outbreak of nihilism and ingratitude, the British attached a name, which soon gained currency across the Atlantic: Mossadeghism.
The danger was that Mossadeghism would spread and infect others. ‘If Britain gives in to the Persians,’ the Daily Express argued, ‘then the time is near when we give in to the Egyptians and hand to them the Suez Canal – and Sudan. If we bow to Tehran, we bow to Baghdad later.’1 Most Britons agreed with the Attlee government’s argument that nationalisation was an illegal violation of an agreement that had been freely entered into by Reza Shah and the AIOC. There was support for the government when it froze Iran’s sterling accounts and stopped exporting sugar, iron and steel to the country. Solving the crisis was a different matter, however. The world had been preoccupied with war on the Korean peninsula when the nationalisation bill went through the majles. Having not given the question much thought, Britain’s press barons and their editors had little to suggest.
Newspapers aligned to the Conservative Party knew they wanted action from the government, but did not know what form it should take. The Daily Mail of April 4, 1951 called on the government to ‘do something about Persia before the rot spreads further’. The Daily Express urged resistance to the ‘law of gangsters’. Reacting to Iran’s claims that it was only doing what the Attlee government had done in Britain, the Express differentiated between British socialists, who were nationalising the country’s property, and the Persians, who were ‘trying to grab something which does not belong to Persia at all’. One Whitehall mandarin described as ‘bunk’ Iran’s alleged moral entitlement to even 50 per cent of the profits of ‘enterprises to which they have made no contribution whatever’.
Only the New Statesman, representing the views of the left wing of the Labour Party, sympathised with the Iranians. ‘Persia’, it wrote, ‘has nothing for which to thank the Labour government. Moreover the proportion of profits retained in Persia is miserably low.’
The outrage and discussions returned to the man himself: this gnarled trunk of mischief with his veneer of old-world charm. Mossadegh understood nothing of the oil industry, nothing of modern power politics. Again and again, over the summer of 1951, the emissaries and delegations tried to tutor their bed-ridden rival and to make him see how, by picking a fight with the world’s most powerful interests, he was condemning himself and his government. Again and again, he pretended not to hear, sent them away with a smile.
He was abandoning the trappings of the westernised oriental gentleman. The mild dandification of his youth had given way to flaming old age, its truculent honesty and absence of pretension. He had no weakness for girls, boys, money, wine, the pipe or Karl Marx. Any of these vices would have made him more understandable, and, as a consequence, easier to deal with. But to his western interlocutors he was a riddle. They found him in his camel’s wool aba, or cackling on his haunches in bed, or lying low with his hands fluttering up and down under his neck. It is possible to sympathise with Mossadegh’s rather unimaginative visitors when faced with such a man
.
Sir Francis Shepherd had come to Tehran after a torrid posting in Indonesia, where he had almost been killed during the war of independence against the Dutch. The foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had promised him ‘a place where we never have any trouble with the natives’ – and then sent him to Iran. Personally courageous – at the height of anti-British feeling he might be glimpsed in his Rolls-Royce with a huge Union Jack fluttering from the bonnet – Shepherd failed utterly in the first duty of a diplomat, which is to understand and interpret the actions of his hosts. His dispatches in the early days of the Mossadegh premiership were absurdly sanguine. Mossadegh’s ascent was a ‘blessing in disguise because he will prove a failure in a very short time’. Here, again, is the British diplomat who allows his hatred for the Persians, ‘however understandable’, to cloud his judgement. His descriptions of Mossadegh himself were romantic, mildly slanderous, and useless as an aid to policy-making. ‘He did not make a pleasant impression on me when I saw him the other day,’ the ambassador wrote on 6 May.
He is rather tall but has short and bandy legs so that he shambles like a bear, a trait which is generally associated with considerable physical strength. He looks rather like a cab horse and is slightly deaf so that he listens with a strained but otherwise expressionless look on his face. He conducts the conversation at a distance of about six inches at which range he diffuses a slight reek of opium.* His remarks tend to prolixity and he gives the impression of being impervious to argument. He refused to be called ‘Excellency’ and does not use the ministerial motor car.2
Citing the threat posed to him by the Warriors of Islam, Mossadegh spent the first three weeks of his premiership sleeping in a cot in the parliament building. It is doubtful whether the militants would have dared assassinate a figure of his immense popularity, but the constant tension told on his health. He made periodic attempts to resign in disgust at the court’s intrigues, but he expected, as usual, to be talked out of his decision.
There was a farcical scene one morning during his stay in the majles, with Mossadegh clutching a resignation letter and Hossein Makki forcibly preventing him from leaving the room to deliver it. The two men grappled and grunted near the door, and eventually Makki was able to turn the lock, but not before hurting his elbow. Sinking into a chair, the prime minister admitted defeat, and Makki angrily went home. The prime minister was not the apologising sort, but he wanted Makki’s signal that there was no bad blood between them, so he telephoned the younger man and insisted he be his guest for lunch. Makki was sore and showed reluctance, so Mossadegh declared that he would not touch his food until he joined him. To this emotional blackmail Makki had no answer, and he hurried back to the majles.
Shepherd visited Mossadegh in his ‘lair’ in parliament, and relayed a detailed description – part spy novel, part bedroom farce. On crossing the spacious hall at the entrance to the majles, he wrote, ‘I became aware of footsteps behind me and turning round found several unshaven types who were walking behind in a way that made me feel like Molotov scuttling into a conference in Paris.’ At the top of a grand staircase,
there was [an] ante-room containing four more thugs. I was then taken into a sort of board room occupied by three more. Mossadegh’s bedroom opened out of this. It was a small room with a French window looking out into a garden and contained two other doors, each of which was blocked by a wardrobe. The Prime Minister, who was wearing two suits of pyjamas, one khaki and the other green, was stretched upon a bed in one corner. He is certainly in an unhealthy state and is not able to walk much so that there is some excuse for his living near the scene of his labours, but the thugs and the blockade of wardrobes are certainly unnecessarily bizarre.’3
The caricaturists loved him. He was, wrote Anthony Eden, Britain’s once and future Foreign Secretary, ‘the first bit of meat to come the way of the cartoonists since the war’.4 The work of a caricaturist is to take some facet of a person and turn it into a stupendous, carbuncular motif. Mossadegh was a dream, with his long, mournful nose and billiard-ball head, and his sudden changes of mood and demeanour.
There was now a voluminous literature devoted to the oriental troublemaker. Time’s appreciation of its ‘Man of the Year’ was a pastiche of the Thousand and One Nights. ‘Once upon a time,’ it began, ‘in a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar, there lived a nobleman’ – and the nobleman turned out, as in Burton’s beloved version of the tales, to be cunning and to revel, sprite-like, in his own irresponsibility. ‘His weapon’, the magazine went on, ‘was the threat of his own political suicide, as a wilful little boy might say, “If you don’t give me what I want I’ll hold my breath until I’m blue in the face. Then you’ll be sorry.”’ The nobleman had the whole world ‘hanging on his words and deeds, his jokes, his tears, his tantrums,’ but behind his ‘grotesque antics’ lay ‘great issues of peace or war, progress or decline’.5
In early June the prime minister dispatched his emissaries, including Hossein Makki and the provisional head of the newly formed Iranian National Oil Company, Mehdi Bazargan, to take over the southern oil facilities. The missions entered Abadan amid scenes of delirium, with tens of thousands of people on the route and kisses planted on the dust-caked official cars, while verses were declaimed comparing the British to the tyrants of Persian mythology. There was angst amid the jubilation, though, for the British had dispatched warships to the Persian Gulf and paratroopers were in a state of readiness on Cyprus. Later, the cruiser Mauritius would anchor opposite Abadan, where it sat within easy range of an Iranian navy ship. Makki, who boarded the Iranian vessel to jolly up the crew, reckoned the Mauritius could cripple it with one shell.
Anglo-Iranian’s general manager was Eric Drake, and the tenacity and superciliousness he displayed during the crisis (and in an unapologetic interview he gave in later life, along with the refined Lady Drake), mark him as the quintessential company man.* Drake was in constant communication with Britannia House and Northcroft’s replacement in Tehran, Norman Seddon, as well as Shepherd himself. His instructions were simple: to obstruct the Iranians at every turn.
The two sides duelled for most of June. To the emissaries, Drake expressed bland ignorance of the nationalisation law, and pointedly billetted them in the dingier kind of company housing – so stiflingly hot, the Iranians were forced to lug their cots onto the lawn to sleep. He ignored Bazargan’s demands to provide information about the workings of the industry and to hand over three-quarters of the export proceeds the company had received since nationalisation. (The government proposed putting the remaining 25 per cent into a mutually acceptable bank, against future compensation claims.) But he was powerless to prevent the Iranians raising the national flag over the company headquarters, to the strains of a navy band and roars from a mighty crowd, and he suffered the indignity of watching Bazargan slip behind his desk during a meeting, and refuse to budge.6
Drake and the Iranians conducted point-scoring tours of the pitiful Iranian workers’ dwellings and an airborne sweep over the great Abadan refinery, which the Englishman hoped would drill into his adversaries a sense of their inadequacy. This latter trip may have inspired Drake to concoct a ‘dream’ which he related to Makki and the others. In this dream, Drake was piloting a plane when Makki, one of the passengers, announced that he would now take over the controls even though he had not flown before. Drake refused to hand over, arguing that he was responsible for the plane and the lives of its passengers, so Makki asked whether he might press a black knob on the instrument panel to satisfy his desire for some measure of control. Again, Drake demurred, pointing out that pressing the knob would cut the engines dead, but suggested that once the plane was landed, Makki should arrange for a press photographer to take a picture of him, at the controls, from an angle that suggested the plane was flying at a great altitude. Bazargan and the others were much amused by Drake’s ‘dream’ – which had no effect whatever.7
Drake and his subordinates then set about making Iran
’s new assets impossible to exploit. Mossadegh insisted that oil be sold in the government’s name, so Drake ordered tanker masters to pump their oil ashore, effectively ending the export of Iranian oil. Then began the gradual evacuation of the British staff and their families, while the remaining workers wound down refining operations and deliveries of crude from the fields came to a halt. ‘There was no question of violent resistance,’ Drake would recall, ‘but it’s extraordinary how pieces of the plant would go wrong.’8
One stifling afternoon, Bazargan was awoken from his postprandial nap by the first shipload of evacuees. ‘I was flabbergasted,’ he wrote; ‘at a time when it seemed possible there would be an attack on Abadan, the British were embarking of their own accord in order to leave Abadan, with all its power and bounty and prestige!’9
For Iranian nationalists the drama of the repossession, which culminated in Drake fleeing to Iraq under fear of arrest for sabotage, and the occupation of the refinery by Iranian troops, amounted to the liberation of occupied territory. Events were followed avidly in Tehran – not least by Mossadegh. The prime minister was in constant contact with Bazargan, Makki and the others, issuing detailed instructions and urging them to avoid provocative actions. Mossadegh tried to give the British technicians every excuse to stay. He diverted customs receipts to pay salaries and told Iranian workers to carry on obeying their British managers so long as the instructions they received were consistent with nationalisation.
According to Grady, the US ambassador, Mossadegh was backed by at least 95 per cent of Iranians. The Abadan evacuation marked a nadir in fortunes for the Attlee government, which had opposed this move by the company – but not strongly enough to stop it happening. Churchill, who was now the leader of the opposition Conservatives, was aghast. ‘It is only when the British government is known to be weak and hesitant’, he warned, ‘that these outrages are inflicted upon us and upon our rights and interests.’ It took a sophisticated Iranian nationalist to grasp that the British departure from Abadan did not amount to surrender. On the contrary, it was the harbinger of a long, embittered revenge.
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