Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  Iran and Britain would spend much of the next two and half years engaged in oil negotiations, but never would there be mutual understanding. Both felt wronged and expected redress, but neither understood the grievance nursed by the other – or else they dismissed it as humbug. For Mossadegh, the nation’s oil represented life, hope, freedom. For his opponents, it symbolised a stronger, more intrepid England, something to cling on to as the empire collapsed. Mossadegh did not see why the British could not accept their new, lower status. After all, they would be amply compensated for nationalisation and retain full access to Iran’s oil. The British could not understand a statesman prepared to forego prosperity and justice in order to satisfy some spiteful reflex from the past. Both were surprised by the other’s intransigence.

  The Americans, who began the dispute as peace-brokers and ended it irreversibly implicated, saw things from their own perspective. The US was preoccupied with the communist threat. The day after North Korean forces invaded the south, Truman had expressed his fear that Iran would be communism’s next target. ‘If we stand by,’ he told an aide, ‘they’ll move into Iran and they’ll take over the whole Middle East. There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.’10 For the president, nothing was as important as saving Iran for the free world – not Anglo-Iranian, and certainly not Muhammad Mossadegh.

  Over the summer of 1951 the Iranians received three negotiating missions, one composed of senior company executives, a second led by an adviser to President Truman, the millionaire diplomat Averell Harriman, and a third by a bluff minister in the British cabinet, Richard Stokes, with whom Mossadegh would find himself in cheerful disagreement. All three, from varying angles, tried to reinterpret nationalisation to enable the British to carry on controlling the industry, and all were rebuffed.

  Meanwhile, against the odds as Bazargan later boasted, a handful of heroic Iranian technicians succeeded in maintaining oil production to the extent that ‘not for a single day did the country’s automobiles, or its bakers’ ovens, or its bathhouses’ shut down for lack of fuel. The Iranians looked after the installations and oilfields well. Nationalisation united the country to an extraordinary degree, with women donating wedding rings and civil servants handing back some of their pay, while the prime minister himself declined to draw a salary and paid his own passage when representing Iran abroad.

  Mossadegh had manoeuvred brilliantly, outwitting domestic and foreign rivals to get nationalisation onto the statute books, but the triumph of repossession turned out to be pyrrhic on almost every level. Soon enough, reality would bite – the reality that he had shut down an export business on which the country depended. How would the prime minister lower the expectations he had raised? How to lay the ground for the inevitable retreat?

  The foreign delegations drummed into the Iranians their unpreparedness to step into Anglo-Iranian’s shoes, and it was true; Mossadegh and his advisers had not anticipated Britain’s determination to engineer a world embargo on Iranian oil. A few months before nationalisation, he had declared that even if Iranian production were to fall by two-thirds following nationalisation, the country would not suffer a loss in revenues because Anglo-Iranian would no longer get the lion’s share. ‘Oil nationalisation’, he said, ‘will bring no economic suffering in its train.’11

  It was moonshine. Within weeks of nationalisation, the US oil majors and Royal Dutch Shell had decided that it would not be in their interests for concession-busters to prosper. The six sisters rallied around their wronged sibling, refusing to extract or buy Iranian oil – even at a substantial discount – and pressuring tanker owners not to take Iranian crude to market. George McGhee, the US assistant secretary of state, was trying to establish 50:50 profit-sharing as the standard concessionary formula, and regarded nationalisation as a dangerous precedent. Anglo-Iranian quickly overcame the supply shortfall by tapping other sources, while the emerging Middle Eastern exporters, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, compensated so effectively for the absence of Iranian oil that production in the non-communist world actually rose over the year following nationalisation.

  In November 1951, The Economist wrote that ‘the world’s refinery arrangements have not waited on events in Abadan. With a small sacrifice in quality at other refineries, 55–60 per cent of Abadan’s refining capacity has been replaced . . . while Dr Mossadegh talks, the world’s oil industry gets on with its work and Persian oil is being left in a backwater.’12 Mossadegh and his colleagues had anticipated none of this. They believed that the West needed Iranian oil more urgently than Iran needed revenues from that oil. The French-educated mandarin and majles deputy who would become Mossadegh’s main oil adviser, Kazem Hassibi, had described the Iranian industry as ‘a child which the Western world would fondly nurture in any circumstances’.13 And the nationalists were convinced that the Attlee government would go to any lengths to avoid a repeat of the energy shortages that had crippled Britain during the severe winter of 1950–51.

  In the event, Attlee took a hard diplomatic line, while Mossadegh, even after intensive tutoring on the realities of the market, continued to inhabit what Truman’s envoy Averell Harriman called a ‘dream world’, expecting foreign staff ‘to work on his terms, foreign oil companies to buy and distribute oil on his terms, and Iran to get all of the profits’.14 Later in the dispute, Mossadegh would pour scorn on those Iranians who had supposed that oil could be ‘extricated with the utmost ease from foreign dominance, and exploited, and that gold would flood from London to Tehran’. But no one had bought into this assumption more damagingly than he.

  The British also deceived themselves, and their efforts at diplomacy were aimed at persuading Mossadegh to accept something less than nationalisation as it is understood around the world. A mission of senior company executives was an exercise in wishful thinking – ‘so steeped in colonialist pride,’ as one Iranian negotiator recalled, they were ‘not prepared to say or hear anything about nationalisation’.15 Averell Harriman alone seemed to appreciate that what the nationalists really feared was the physical presence of the company and its ability to influence internal Iranian affairs, but the plan he endorsed did nothing to assuage these fears. In fact, the scheme had been authored by Stokes of the British government, and would have handed the industry to a British-run operating agency, allowing, as Harriman admitted, for the ‘complete return of British control’. Stokes told the British government that it was essential, ‘from the point of view of the Company’s future, public opinion at home and our balance of payments, to keep effective control of distribution of Persian oil in [the] world market’. Under his plan, he had computed, Iran stood to earn three times as much as it had received in 1950. But Mossadegh was not hanging on for a better deal. He would accept nothing but nationalisation.

  Mossadegh’s rejection of the Stokes plan, and his decision to evict the last of the company staff when it became clear that the British would not cooperate, ended a rancorous negotiating season. Stokes advised the Shah that the ‘only solution’ was a ‘strong government under martial law and the bad boys in prison for two years or so’. The Iranians had seized highly incriminating documents which staff of Anglo-Iranian had been trying to hide, and which provided further proof of the company’s malign interference in Iranian public life. It is not difficult to imagine the outraged reaction in Britain were it discovered that an Iranian company had influenced ministerial and other appointments and bribed newspaper editors to run articles in its favour. This is what Anglo-Iranian had done in Iran. The British press painted the company as the innocent victim of Iranian spite and Shepherd got the BBC’s Persian service to deny the documents’ veracity.

  The Americans stumbled through the crisis. They were instrumental in persuading the British to accept 50:50 profit-sharing and the ‘principle’ of nationalisation, and to abandon some very advanced plans for a military intervention.* Harriman himself brought Mossadegh to the negotiating table, getting him to reconsider his refusal to deal directly with
the British government because, as he saw it, Iran’s opponent in the dispute was Anglo-Iranian. But both parties expected the Americans to do more.

  The embargo which the British hoped would break Mossadegh’s resolve was above all an American embargo. At the same time, the Truman administration was considering making a loan to Mossadegh’s government. The British saw the loan as an incentive to Mossadegh to defy them; the Americans saw it as a way of protecting a broadly pro-western prime minister from his communist rivals. Mossadegh exacerbated these tensions with operatic flair. Upon being warned in a meeting with Harriman and Shepherd that Iran’s oil industry might collapse, he retorted, ‘Tant pis pour nous. If the industry collapses and no money comes and disorder and Communism follow, it will be your fault entirely.’17 In fact, Mossadegh believed the Tudeh menace to be overblown, and he had been appalled when the security forces opened fire on pro-Tudeh rioters who had gathered in protest against Harriman’s arrival on July 15, killing several.

  In trying to drive a wedge between the two giants, Mossadegh was using the traditional expedient of the less strong, and which Iran, during the long years of Anglo-Russian rivalry, had refined into an art. In private, the British complained that America’s indulgent attitude brought out the worst in Mossadegh, encouraging him to believe that, whatever happened, the US would step in and save him. Henry Grady advised his government to distance itself from British policy, which ‘may well lead to disaster’. Grady had taken up his posting in the hope of establishing a flow of aid and credit to Iran, and thus binding it to the West. In September 1951, he told Mossadegh that for ‘technical’ reasons a promised loan would not materialise. The real problem, both men knew, was British pressure. The same pressure would lead to Grady’s recall, in September, and his replacement by the solid Anglophile Loy Henderson.

  For a while in 1951, strains appeared in the alliance between Britain and the US, but the opportunity detected by the nationalists in Iran turned out to be an illusion. Whatever their differing concerns, Britain and the US were not rivals, and their ties of history, strengthened by the common struggle against communism, were stronger than any challenge Mossadegh could mount.

  In the eyes of an undiscerning public, the titans of nationalisation were a triumvirate uniting the three main elements in Iranian life: the government, represented by Mossadegh; the monarchy, by the Shah; and clerical authority, which Kashani claimed. The Shah wobbled from the start.

  Muhammad-Reza Shah was not an unpatriotic man and he was attracted to oil nationalisation as an eventual goal, but he believed that Iran had no alternative but to do a deal with the company. Still, he could not openly resist the wave of nationalism that was sweeping the country. Certainly, he would not indulge Shepherd’s extraordinarily reckless demand for Mossadegh’s removal, which would surely imperil his throne. He would grit his teeth and wait.

  It may be imagined how galling this was to the young king. Muhammad-Reza had eked out extra powers for himself, married a beautiful young woman who would, it was hoped, give him an heir, and mapped out a path to development that kept Iran aligned with the West. Now he found himself superseded by a geriatric prime minister whose popularity vastly exceeded his own and who insisted that he must reign, and not rule. The Shah felt alone and unloved but he had few confidants he could trust, and tended to unburden himself to foreigners. Henderson, the new American ambassador, must have been startled when the monarch revealed his distress during their first one-on-one meeting – repeating again and again, ‘What can I do? I am helpless.’18

  Mossadegh was implementing his long-cherished plan for the monarchy: to make it a political irrelevance. He harboured no republican designs, and had filled his cabinet with moderate, even conservative figures, but he did not allow the Shah to influence policy and restricted his ability to appoint officials. Mossadegh received Hossein Ala, who had gone back to being court minister, with his usual courtesy, and the cabinet went dutifully along to wish the Shah luck when he was admitted to hospital for an appendectomy, but the prime minister often pleaded indisposition when summoned to the palace and his responses to royal messages could be mischievous and flippant. On one occasion Ala told him of the Shah’s worries of a British attack and Mossadegh responded by comparing Britain’s bluster to his own in Neuchâtel all those years back, when the boys had stolen grapes from the neighbours and Mossadegh had sworn to kill them. Mossadegh particularly asked that this analogy be transmitted to the monarch.

  Mossadegh returned the Shah’s distrust for him. He was not alone in suspecting the Shah of having had a hand in Razmara’s assassination, and when, early in his premiership, the Shah warned him that his life may be at risk, Mossadegh refused the offer of an armed guard if it was composed of the same men who had guarded Razmara. Mossadegh recounted this exchange with the Shah to parliament, adding gleefully that he had quoted to the Shah the following couplet, ‘If my protector is that person I know him to be, he uses rock to protect glass.’

  The Shah was the sum of his contradictions. He was an avowed moderniser, but he was also superstitious and in thrall, so the queen noted, to his Swiss svengali Ernest Perron, that ‘diabolical . . . homosexual’ who intrigued without relent and pried into the royal couple’s private life.19 The Shah longed to be loved, but he lacked Mossadegh’s spontaneity and humour; he was stiff with his subjects and demanded formality from his courtiers. The patriot Shah became international when it was convenient. He saw nothing odd in summoning three American doctors and three nurses to perform his appendectomy, or in presenting his wife with a customised Rolls-Royce as his country embarked on a titanic struggle with the British.

  Mossadegh’s patriotism could be quixotic, but no one could plausibly suggest that his sense of national identification was less than complete, or that he was more at home with foreigners than with his own compatriots – accusations that were levelled at the Shah. Mossadegh acknowledged the beneficial effect of his long years in Europe, but they had served to strengthen his Iranian identity. Muhammad-Reza, on the other hand, had acquired European manners while in Switzerland, and his school days were among the happiest of his life.20 His new wife, Sorayya, had a German mother and had been partly raised in Europe. She admired anything European and was shocked by Iran’s squalor. Her alienation can only have sharpened his sense of not quite belonging to the land he ruled.

  In many ways, the Shah was a tragic figure, sensitive and intelligent but taking no pleasure from the burdens of his station. Sorayya found him shy and endearing in private but wounded by the slightest rebuke. The monarch drove his Packard convertible at imprudent speed along the twisting passes of the Alborz mountains. When flying, he wished never to land. These were expressions of the Shah’s fatalism and his desire for liberation. Mossadegh, too, was a fatalist and wanted freedom from the cares of office, but rather than camouflage these traits, as the Shah did, he magnified them, turned them into glinting angles of his personality. Indeed, as the attention of the world surrounded him, and he was the object of increasing scrutiny, Mossadegh became an accomplice in his own caricature.

  Mossadegh’s international persona was established with oil nationalisation and the attention of the world. Vernon Walters, Harriman’s translator and a future deputy director of the CIA, described a charming, rather repetitive old wizard, very small and slight, feeble and deaf when it suited him.21 Harriman’s biographer drew attention to Mossadegh’s astonishing physiognomic versatility; at will, it seemed, the prime minister could transform himself from a ‘frail, decrepit shell of a man into a wily, vigorous adversary’. He was too much the galant when meeting Mrs Harriman: ‘He took hold of her hand and didn’t stop kissing until he was halfway to her elbow.’22 A few months later, when Mossadegh went to the United States, he was met at Union Station in Washington by Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state. Acheson recalled watching ‘a bent old man hobble down the platform supporting himself with a stick . . . spotting me at the gate, he dropped the stick, broke away from his par
ty, and came skipping along ahead of the others to greet us.’23

  It was generally agreed that Mossadegh had a profound hatred for the British and all their works. ‘You don’t know how crafty they are,’ he told Harriman. ‘You don’t know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch.’24

  In these and other tellings, which generally have the savour of an after-dinner anecdote, Mossadegh is usually in bed, by turns winning and manipulative, and never afraid to upstage himself by dissolving into laughter. ‘I have had a bad day,’ he greeted Harriman one day in an ecstasy of hypochondria; ‘this morning I fainted three times.’ Acheson was charmed, Shepherd driven to white-knuckled distraction. Flying back home after being flummoxed by the old man, Averell Harriman confessed, ‘I am simply not used to failure.’

  Like the Shah, Mossadegh behaved differently with foreigners than he did with Iranians, though, in contrast to the Shah, he was less himself in their company. His act was calculated to unnerve; the more he mistrusted someone, the more playful, gnomic and inconsequential he became. Few foreigners knew where they stood with him. Vernon Walters wrote: ‘One minute one had the impression that Mossadegh was really trying to find a solution [to] the oil problem, that an agreement was in sight. But the next conversation he would take up on a note that made clear that any agreement was remote. He seemed to enjoy this. It was like dangling fish on a line.’ After two months in Tehran, Walters wrote, he and Harriman ‘realised that Mossadegh simply did not want to arrive at any agreement because he did not feel he could sell it to his nationalists’.