Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  No matter how perceptive and enlightened, a mid-ranking American official, a novice meddling in the British sphere, would get no more than a cursory hearing in Whitehall. McGhee would have stood more chance had Attlee won a third term, but now Churchill was back to power after six years in opposition. Here was a change from the ‘long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender’ (Eden’s words) that had constituted Labour’s foreign policy. Tory imperialists were back in the saddle, and their stride was lengthening.

  Churchill acknowledged the shift in power that had taken place since the end of World War II, but he saw British interests as being preserved through as close as possible an association with the source of that power, in Washington. Attlee’s socialism, he had declared, marked ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world which has occurred since the loss of the American colonies nearly 200 years ago’.

  Churchill’s determination to preserve Britain’s position in the world cannot be attributed solely to pig-headedness and nostalgia. The country was afflicted by a palpable sense of economic crisis. It had gone from being the world’s biggest creditor to its biggest debtor, and its gold and dollar reserves were enough to cover just a few months of imports. Dean Acheson, for one, saw the agony of a close ally. ‘Britain’, he wrote in a remarkable cable,

  stands on the verge of bankruptcy . . . despite the ravages of the wars and post-war periods, Britain still retained [sic] important overseas interests and the invisible items in her balance of payments are of overwhelming importance to her. Without them she cannot survive. Mossadegh’s seizure of the [Anglo-Iranian] properties and concessions were a serious blow. But they were [sic] a loss which Britain can stand. Refining capacity can be built elsewhere. Iranian oil is not essential, and, with firm support from her friends, Britain can recover from this blow.

  But Britain cannot recover from the course of action which would destroy the last vestige of confidence in British power and in the pound. If it should be believed abroad that Britain would acquiesce in the despoliation of Iran and even cooperate to make that despoliation profitable to the Iranians, she would have no properties left within a few months – and, indeed, the same would happen to all Western investments.

  Therefore, in my judgement, the cardinal purpose of British policy is not to prevent Iran from going Commie; the cardinal point is to preserve what they believe to be the last remaining bulwark of British solvency; that is, their overseas investment and property position. As one of the British said to me . . . ‘the choice before you is whether Iran goes Commie, or Britain goes bankrupt. I hope you would agree that the former is the lesser evil.’9

  On his way home, Mossadegh received an invitation he could not refuse. The world watched his entrance to Cairo, which was aflame with anti-British feeling and where he was greeted like a conquering hero. ‘From early morning,’ the correspondent of The Times reported, ‘crowds blocked the streets around Shepheards Hotel where he is staying, and when he entered, in a bath chair, the crowd broke through a double police cordon into the hotel lounge.’10 There were banquets and a radio address, in which Mossadegh promised Iran’s full support for the Egyptians’ ‘sacred struggle’ for freedom.

  He was received graciously by King Farouk, the Shah’s sybaritic former brother-in-law. The Crown Prince came calling when Mossadegh was resting, and went away again insisting that he should not be disturbed. Mossadegh urged the Egyptians to reclaim their ‘property’ – an allusion to the Suez Canal.*

  He returned home to Tehran to massive crowds in the streets, shuffling into parliament and bowing, with his hand on his chest, just like the old days.

  Chapter 12

  Riding Satan’s Donkey

  Mossadegh’s premiership lasted almost two and a half years, with a short entr’acte for the people to rush out and holler for his return. In other less dramatic circumstances that might have been long enough for the country’s first fully legitimate prime minister in decades to carry out reforms and leave his mark for ever. But Mossadegh’s time in power was like a flood, with the waters rising inexorably and the people moving their belongings onto the roof – and then receding with appalling suddenness, leaving debris and acrimony in their wake. Within a few years, the shop-fronts repaired, the drama no longer discussed, Mossadegh would be effaced from Iran’s official past. And then, like a great and noble pain, his memory would sear the people and they would realise what they had lost.

  His enemies called him a malignant, negative personality, but his vision was broad and progressive and had ripened over a lifetime. From his actions as prime minister and his long-established beliefs, it is possible to conjecture the Iran he might have made.

  Mossadegh’s Iran would have tilted to the West in foreign affairs, bound by oil to the free world and by wary friendship to the US, but remaining polite to the big neighbour to the north. In home affairs, it would have been democratic to a degree unthinkable in any Middle Eastern country of the time except Israel – a constitutional monarchy in a world of dictatorships, dependencies and uniformed neo-democracies. The broad strokes of his government would have been egalitarian and redistributive, with a planned economy eroding the power of the ‘thousand families’, but dappled with elitism (a literacy condition for voters; a penchant for French-educated cabinet ministers). In social affairs, secularism and personal liberty would have been the lodestones, and the hejab and alcohol a matter for personal conscience. Sooner or later, women would have got the vote.

  He triumphantly upheld Voltaire’s aphorism, ‘I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.’ One of his first acts on coming to power was to order the police chief not to pursue any newspaper editor for insulting the prime minister. ‘Let them write what they want!’ This was unprecedented and there followed a cascade of press abuse such as no other Iranian head of government has faced, before or since. Later on, he agreed to the opposition’s demand that majles sessions be broadcast live on the radio, even though these sessions were dominated by vitriolic attacks on himself and his government. He lambasted some well-meaning fools who proposed to erect a statue of him, inviting ‘the curses of God and of the Prophet’ onto anyone ‘wishing to raise an icon in my name in my lifetime or after my death’.1

  His probity and civic sense were exceptional for a national leader, anywhere. One of his first acts as prime minister was to ask for his elder son Ahmad’s resignation as deputy minister of roads. His eldest grandson, Majid, who was studying in Geneva, was told that he would no longer receive the help to which he was entitled as an Iranian student abroad. Mossadegh drew no salary and would pay his own and his children’s passage when representing Iran abroad.

  On one memorable occasion the prime minister’s wife and her driver were stopped by a traffic policeman after they entered a street with a no-entry sign. Upon being informed who was in the back of the car, the policeman said, ‘I don’t care who it is,’ and demanded that a fine be paid. Zahra was cross and when she got home she gave Mossadegh the policeman’s name. Mossadegh immediately phoned the chief of police and had the officer in question promoted to head of the traffic police.2

  Shortly after coming to power, he made an impromptu visit to the police jail, where he was so disgusted by conditions, and especially by the broth the prisoners were given for lunch (he insisted on tasting it), that he delivered a moving speech to parliament asking MPs to visit this ‘madhouse’ and legislate to ‘get these people out of jail’.3 The visit must have brought back disagreeable memories of his own incarceration, but his reference to a ‘madhouse’ suggests that Khadijeh, in her Swiss clinic, may have still been on his mind.

  Mossadegh had ended his stay in the majles but he would not occupy the prime ministry in the Golestan Palace in central Tehran. Instead, 109 Palace Street became his office. He maintained his secretariat in the prime ministry, from where staff brought him correspondence, but Palace Street was the nerve centre of his premiership. It was here
that the cabinet usually met, in the first-floor meeting room when he was well enough, around the famous bed when he was not, and spilling onto the balcony if necessary.

  Mossadegh would be criticised for rarely showing his face but his premiership turned on a single great question and was not a ribbon-cutting exercise – such frivolities he happily left to the Shah. From Palace Street he deployed his forces in pursuit of the ultimate prizes, oil and honour, emerging for a speech and then ducking back inside for more brainstorming and negotiations. He gave rousing radio speeches and addressed both houses of parliament in epoch-making terms, challenging his opponents to bring him down in a vote. They did not dare.

  He saw everything through the prism of oil and the struggle and neglected peripheral issues.4 Even the appointment of an important official might not hold his attention, or he would end up asking someone else to choose for him. At least he knew what sort of man he did not want. He turned down one candidate for a provincial governorship on the grounds that he ‘opposes oil’.

  He expected similar dedication from his colleagues. Any cabinet minister who happened to be a European-trained lawyer was liable to be called away from his office for days at a time to labour over a legal document or fly to The Hague to prepare Iran’s defence. On the eve of the repossession of the southern oil facilities, he personally telephoned members of the cabinet to remind them to be at the airport to see off the government’s emissaries.

  As a boss he could be mercurial, tolerating insubordination from some ministers while in other cases taking exception to the slightest deviation from his wishes. He wavered between his desire to see the struggle through to the bitter end and his instinct to crawl away. When negotiations failed at the end of the summer of 1951, he confessed to longing for parliament to bring him down. Then, the next morning, he would be up as usual before dawn, thinking of new ways.

  Over the course of the second half of 1951, parliament gradually fell from his affections as it became a centre of opposition and deputies were cultivated by the British and the Court. He approached his office as a war premiership, but he had not sat with his generals and worked out that he could win. He was unable to strike that balance, between interests and ideals, of which a true politician is made. But Mossadegh was not a conventional politician. He was a moral force, and in no time he had offended almost every institution in the country.

  Arriving at the majles to brief deputies before his trip to America, he had been infuriated to find that the opposition had stayed away and were operating a quorum veto. Leaving the building with the intention of going home, he had a change of heart and asked for a stool. Reverting to the opposition role he so relished, he went up on the stool and addressed the crowd that had gathered in Baharestan Square, explaining how he had tried to reach an honourable agreement but had been thwarted by that ‘merciless butcher’, Britain. He burst into tears and the people also wept. He was handed flowers and raised the bouquet to his forehead before handing it back. ‘People,’ he declared, ‘benevolent and patriotic, who are gathered here! You are the majles and that place’ – he indicated the parliament building behind him – ‘that handful who do not want the best for their country, are not parliament at all!’

  Another leader – Qavam, for instance – might have seized the opportunity to step back from the maximalist position and accept massively enhanced revenues and the appreciative friendship of a new superpower, then bend his propaganda arm to sell the deal to the public. Mossadegh had no propaganda arm except for his patriotism and integrity, and these could not be repaired if he tried to strike a dishonourable peace. The Tudeh screamed that he pursued a relationship of subservience to the United States – a more sinister enemy, in their eyes, than the British. The radicals in his own entourage watched for any chink in his resolve, heaping odium on the ‘ill-omened owl of London’, as Hossein Fatemi, the government spokesman and editor of Bakhtar-e Emrooz, put it. Beyond legality, other fanatics circled menacingly, and in February 1952 Fatemi was shot and almost killed by the Warriors of Islam.

  Many people, including members of the cabinet, deplored his indulgent attitude towards the Tudeh. The party remained banned and many of its leaders were abroad, but it boasted front organisations and a powerful network in the factories and schools. In the prime minister’s view, the freedom being exploited by the Tudeh could not be separated from the freedom that the country as a whole was in the process of attaining. Only with great reluctance did he impose martial law in the capital, in March 1952, after violent street clashes between the Tudeh and a right-wing group supportive of the government. But Mossadegh never believed that Iran was close to falling under Moscow’s thumb, and events would prove him right.

  There had been violence when he was in the United States, with Tudeh students and factory workers battling Baghai’s thugs and the police. A Tudeh newspaper excoriated the ‘murderous and marauding regime of Mossadegh al-Saltaneh’, and the opposition’s goons shouted ‘Death to Mossadegh!’ from the public gallery in the majles. The government was helped by Ayatollah Kashani, ever ready to summon the people for another huge, anti-imperialist, anti-communist rally. ‘Nothing but rallies happens in our country,’ lamented one opposition stalwart. ‘One day this lot have a meeting, and the next day the other lot . . . our oil is beneath the ground and hidden away like the other sources of our wealth . . . enough!’

  The impression was sometimes of a government that did not know how to take charge, but Mossadegh was proving far more durable than Shepherd and many others had expected. He was a daring improviser and some of his tactics, such as taking the cause abroad to shore up his position at home, and his later promotion of an economy that was not reliant on oil receipts, succeeded well. Even Loy Henderson acknowledged his ‘masterly’ dominance of the domestic arena. Above all, he was helped by Britain’s unabashed hostility. By hating Mossadegh, the British made him even more loved.

  The Tehran which Mossadegh found on his return from the US was saturated in threats, disinformation and paranoia. The economy had been sapped by the international embargo and severe austerity measures were in place. An internal loan did not raise much and the armed forces could not afford to buy spare parts. Parliamentary life had sunk to new depths with the galleries groaning under the weight of brawling spectators, while the street corners saw vicious skirmishes between pro- and anti-government groups brandishing crowbars and knuckledusters.

  The hazards of domestic politics made it all the harder for him to continue with oil negotiations. The prime minister felt safest while engaged in negotiations, a position from which attempts to topple him could be denounced as unpatriotic, but he was distracted by his chronic mistrust of the British, and now he was reliant on a tiny number of advisers around him, the most influential of whom, Kazem Hassibi, revelled in his ability to scupper a deal. Mossadegh had earned the trust of the Iranian people with his pursuit of nationalisation, and the great mass of them would have accepted whatever concessions he deemed necessary for an honourable resolution. The tragedy is that he never asked them to do so.

  Mossadegh accused the British of negotiating in bad faith, but after his failure in America his preference was not for an oil deal but for short-term finance to tide the country over, and to this end he engaged in reckless brinkmanship. He was spending emergency funds and it was feared that soon the government would be unable to pay salaries or bills for services and supplies. Mossadegh told Henderson that if the United States did not step in immediately to cover Iran’s monthly budget deficit of $10m, he would have no choice but to seek help from the Soviet Union, and the Tudeh would take over the government. This plunged the Americans into panic, with the CIA predicting that Iran would start selling oil to the communist bloc and Henderson hinting that if aid was not promised within twenty-four hours the country would be overtaken by revolution or bankruptcy. The risk of ‘sitting tight and letting events take their course’, he said, was ‘too great’.5

  In trying to thwart British designs with
the help of Britain’s greatest ally, Mossadegh showed more chutzpah than wisdom. He had gone too far with his dire predictions and the State Department recoiled from his ‘extortion’ and ‘blackmail’.6 London assured Washington that Mossadegh had no intention of getting into bed with the Soviets, and that the communist bloc had neither the wherewithal, nor the need, to buy Iranian oil in big quantities. The British knew from historical experience that no Iranian statesman could ally himself with the Soviet Union and hope to survive.

  In the end, the Americans called Mossadegh’s bluff. They would offer aid only if Iran and Britain reached an agreement. Mossadegh shrugged his shoulders but his games would have a baleful, longer-term effect. They contributed to the erosion of his credibility in American eyes.

  Also at the beginning of 1952, Mossadegh was supposedly engaged in serious negotiations with officials from the World Bank. A scheme had been proposed whereby the bank would take over the oil industry as a neutral trustee, allowing Iran to receive income and Anglo-Iranian to sell part of the oil. Mossadegh was receptive at first, but negotiations snagged on disagreements over price, the question of whether or not British technicians could be engaged, and Mossadegh’s insistence that the bank should state that it was acting on behalf of the Iranian government – anathema to the bank, whose guiding principle, in public at least, was its neutrality.

  In rejecting the deal, Mossadegh was influenced by the extreme positions of Hassibi, and the poisonous atmosphere in Tehran. There were certainly grounds to doubt the sincerity of the British, but Mossadegh’s diplomatic strategy had been based on driving a wedge between London and Washington, and, by playing spoiler, he inadvertently facilitated a rapprochement between the two. Later, he would denounce the World Bank proposals as a ‘black stain’ and a ‘road to hell’. They were nothing of the sort. The bank’s terms would not have undermined the principle of nationalisation, nor would the return of a number of British technicians under the bank’s aegis. Mossadegh rejected the deal partly on the basis of Hassibi’s computation of a fair price, but Hassibi’s sums have been shown to be badly out.7 They were no grounds for a landmark decision of state.