Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  The following day, the capital slid into disorder, while the news from the provinces was dire. The workers at Abadan had shut down the refinery, which had been operating at reduced capacity to meet domestic needs, and from the western provinces processions of men wearing martyrs’ mantles set out for Tehran. Kashani declared his readiness to die in order to be rid of ‘this murderous magnate’. In a letter to Ala, he threatened his sovereign in no uncertain terms. ‘Inform his Majesty’, he wrote, ‘that if he does not take steps tomorrow to restore Dr Mossadegh, I will personally direct the sharp teeth of revolution against the court.’

  It is tantalising to imagine what Mossadegh was thinking on the eve of July 21. By the simple device of resigning he had brought the country to the brink of revolution. He was certainly aware of what was going on, but he spent most of the time resting. That night, also, Mossadegh spent at Palace Street, and not, as many of the reports stated, at Ahmadabad. In Makki’s words, Mossadegh ‘has no need to go to Ahmadabad. Today for Dr Mossadegh all of Iran has become Ahmadabad.’

  A general strike was held on July 21. There were no buses and the bazaar and all petrol stations were closed. Only military vehicles roared around, and there was a build-up of security forces in the vicinity of Baharestan Square. But the people stood firm. Rallied by Kashani’s network and the pro-Mossadegh parties, swelled by the Tudeh, which had belatedly thrown its weight behind the uprising, shopkeepers, bazaaris, students and factory workers came out to show their hatred for the government of Qavam al-Saltaneh.

  At nine in the morning a few people were seen carrying a funeral bier at speed away from the bazaar, and the crowd following swelled to several hundred by the time they reached the parliament building, where the police fired over their heads and the corpse got up and ran. There was pandemonium. The security forces had been given authority to fire into the crowds and the shirts of the dead were raised on sticks as standards, their blood being used to daub slogans on the walls. In Ekbatan Street, leading into Baharestan Square, a policeman shot a child and was lynched by the crowd.11 A tank made as if to roll over the people but they stood their ground. The tank stopped dead and its occupants emerged weeping and were embraced by the crowd. The Shah’s brother Ali-Reza narrowly escaped death as his car was pelted with stones. He fired back using his revolver. Six hundred detainees from earlier demonstrations escaped from jail after the police abandoned their posts.

  The majles was aghast. Parliament employees yelled, ‘Death to Qavam!’ A woman whose child had been shot ambushed the speaker as he tried to set off for the palace, thrusting the little corpse before him and screaming, ‘You are not your father’s son!’ The Shah promised to rein in the violence but still it went on, and one of the deputies yelled at him over the telephone, ‘Under what authority did you hand control of the country to that decrepit old bird whose record shows nothing but treachery?’ Later that afternoon, large crowds gathered with the intent of pulling down statues of the Shah and attacking the royal palaces; nationalist deputies helped disperse them.

  Qavam al-Saltaneh had become what he had never expected to become: an irrelevance. His heartbeat was irregular and he chafed because he knew so little of what was going on. He requested an audience but now it was the Shah’s turn to keep him waiting. The Shah received more nationalist deputies, who warned him that the people would no longer tolerate a government that was imposed on them on the basis of consultations behind closed doors. Hours passed before Qavam was finally granted the audience he craved, late on the afternoon of July 30, when the Shah once again disregarded his demand for the dissolution of the majles and Kashani’s arrest.

  After leaving the palace around the time the radio announced his resignation, Qavam took sanctuary in the house of a friend, where the shouts of the mob, calling, ‘Death to Qavam!’ brought home to him the depth of his failure. His reaction was perfunctory and defiant. Even in defeat, he would not show fear. He consulted his host’s copy of Hafez to see what was in store. Then he asked, ‘Got any cards?’

  After five decades of sharing the political field, the two Qajar grandees had faced each other, and Mossadegh’s masterly inaction had won the day. Hauteur and cunning had brought Qavam to the pinnacle but his radio declaration told of a titanic arrogance and a disassociation from the people he was meant to serve. The old qualities were less useful now that Mossadegh had moved politics out of the mirrored halls, and into the street. It was there, in the street, that Qavam’s fate had been decided.

  That evening, after a self-imposed purgatory lasting five days, Mossadegh responded to the crowds that had gathered outside 109 Palace Street. Appearing on the balcony, he declared to the adoring people, ‘The independence of Iran was going but you have won it back with your bravery.’

  On July 22, the majles voted him back into power. The previous night, the International Court at The Hague had ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the dispute between Anglo-Iranian and Iran.* It was nothing more than Mossadegh had argued all along. He seemed invincible.

  These were great victories, achieved in the teeth of immense pressure, but they did not make Mossadegh reflect on his debts and obligations. On the contrary, they spurred him to a new level – one of total leadership, alone with his people.

  Between July 1952 and the coup thirteen months later, hardly a week passed without some urgent challenge rattling his position or threatening his safety. Plots, assassinations and public disorder became almost banal occurrences. Tehran was under martial law, generals and businessmen were arrested for plotting, and Iran severed its relations with Great Britain. The senate was dissolved by a combination of pro-Kashani and pro-Mossadegh forces, a referendum was held, and there was a revolt in the Bakhtiari hills. Even for Iran, the situation was combustible.

  Mossadegh’s reaction to the threats against him was not to seek protection in a huddle. The only person the prime minister trusted completely was himself. His solitude was his strength; everyone knew that he had sunk Qavam simply by going home and shutting the door. Mossadegh, in his second, abbreviated term of office, became a radical prime minister who insisted on complete freedom of manoeuvre. He resisted the advice of men who had formerly had his ear, which hurt and angered them. Those comrades in the majles who had been at the forefront of the nationalisation campaign, Hossein Makki, Muzaffar Baghai and Abolhassan Haerizadeh, regarded themselves less as his disciples than as co-founders of a movement. Ayatollah Kashani’s ambitions observed no national boundaries. All were convinced that they had rescued Mossadegh on July 21, and all expected rewards. The prime minister did not hesitate to disabuse them.

  Mossadegh’s vision of his immediate task was clearer than it had been for some time. The oil negotiations went on with American brokerage but he did not expect them to succeed, for he saw with dismay the success that Churchill was now enjoying in closing the gap between the British and US positions, and that there was no longer any realistic hope of a loan from Washington.* At home, Mossadegh was hemmed in by rivals who would howl that any deal, no matter how beneficial, was a sell-out. His secretive, mercurial conduct of negotiations in late 1952 and early 1953 on the question of international arbitration betrayed his terror that his critics (and even so-called friends) would maliciously misinterpret any deal he made. Absorbed in the domestic maelstrom, he may not have appreciated fully the distance that the British government had travelled to meet his demands.

  In the spring of 1953 Mossadegh was offered an arrangement whereby the Iranians would retain charge of the oil industry and Anglo-Iranian would be reduced to the status of a participant in an international consortium that would market Iranian oil exports. The essence of privatisation, not merely its form, would be preserved. This would be the last serious deal Mossadegh was offered, and his rejection of it was as grave a failure of leadership as any in his premiership. He continued to declare that a negotiated settlement was within reach so long as the people continued to support him and his enemies stopped their conspiracies, but he probably
did not believe his own propaganda.

  He had been more frank in his announcement of the severance of relations with Britain, the previous autumn, when he described the strategy of his foes as one of ‘wasting time until our country is in such a state that the economy has breathed its last and surrenders to [British] demands’. Mossadegh’s belief that the British were bent on toppling him through skulduggery was only partially correct, for some senior British officials were opposed to covert action, and for a while, at the beginning of 1953, these sceptics were in the ascendant.13 But it was Mossadegh’s nature to simplify the challenges he faced, and to regard his many foes as implacably united in his pursuit. In the end, his suspicion became self-fulfilling.

  The response could only be resistance, and he had a plan. The Iranians would modify their economy so that it could withstand an indefinite oil embargo. Soon after coming to power, Mossadegh had laid the foundations for a pared down, ‘non-oil’ economy. The government had depreciated the riyal, promoted non-oil exports (there was a helpful boom in the international commodities market), and penalised non-essential imports. The new economy was not without pain. Inflation rose, growth stalled and there were factory closures and unemployment, but the country did not buckle as so many had expected – and as Mossadegh, angling for his US loan, had said it would. There was neither famine nor major industrial unrest. Between 1951 and 1953, when oil all but ceased to contribute to state revenues, the current-account deficit actually came down.

  To an economic policy of austerity and self-reliance, Mossadegh’s second government hitched a much broader reform agenda. The prime minister was no longer content to react to events; his instincts told him that in this moment of peril lay a unique opportunity. His old coterie had been superseded by a new one, bolstered by progressive, left-leaning intellectuals in the cabinet and parliament – men like the law dean Ali Shayegan, and the cabinet minister and newspaper editor Hossein Fatemi. In league with men such as these, Mossadegh showed himself to be a bold reformist.

  Many of the policies which Mossadegh unveiled after the uprising of July 1952 were not implemented, or were reversed after the coup. Had they survived, Mossadegh would now be remembered as an agent of extraordinary change. Exempt from parliamentary scrutiny, the prime minister passed pro-poor land reforms and introduced social security and rent controls to help the working class. He retired corrupt and hostile senior army officers and strengthened the separation of powers by removing responsibility for judicial appointments from the government and handing it over to the judiciary. Laws were prepared for the holding of the country’s first provincial elections in which women would have the vote.

  Wealth distribution; a military under civilian control; modestly enhanced rights for women in the face of clerical unease; these were the most visible parts of a modernisation programme that would have brought Iran substantially closer to a secular, constitutional regime. The final year of Mossadegh’s premiership is a salutary episode in modern Middle Eastern history – an opportunity spurned because of the British obsession with lost prestige and the American obsession with communism.

  One of the remarkable things about Mossadegh during his second government was his readiness to abandon former allies. Smarting at their rebuffal, Baghai, Makki and Haerizadeh gradually made common cause with the government’s enemies at Court and among the purged army officers. They spoke out against Mossadegh’s plenary powers and excoriated some eccentric appointments. Baghai was exercised by Mossadegh’s refusal to pursue the fallen Qavam, who after a period in hiding was allowed to go home to live out his final years. Baghai and the others particularly loathed the anti-Court secularists, who included suspected Tudeh-sympathisers, and who now had the prime minister’s ear.

  Above all, the malcontents fretted for their lost influence and prestige. Makki and Baghai would surely have laid down their lives for Mossadegh early in the struggle. Now, their trouble was thwarted ambition; they had been touted as possible heirs to Mossadegh and it hurt to be frozen out.

  Mossadegh’s rift with Kashani widened less rapidly, but to even greater effect. The ayatollah and his network had enjoyed much influence over Mossadegh’s first government. Few were the departments that had not been bombarded with letters from Kashani, requesting special consideration for a client, or advising on appointments. The ayatollah had even interfered in the manufacture of salt.

  Kashani had always had delusions of grandeur, announcing that ‘all the Muslims of the world acknowledge me as their leader’. His alliance with Mossadegh had been – for them both – one of convenience. The prime minister’s triumph in July 1952 had emboldened him to try to eject the meddling mullah from politics. Mossadegh ordered government departments to ignore the ayatollah’s missives, and, when Kashani fell ill, he stopped prayers for his recovery from being read out on the radio.14 Kashani was not a great religious scholar; to ignore him politically was to put him in the shade. So, while the outward professions of mutual respect continued, the ayatollah’s opposition hardened.

  Now the accusations came thick and fast. Haerizadeh compared Mossadegh unfavourably to Reza Shah. Makki claimed to see something of Hitler in him. Mossadegh accused his detractors of using the law to advance along a crooked path. Amid the chaos and recrimination and the shuffle of men switching sides, Mossadegh’s was the only voice which rang clear and unambiguous. He was not a dictator in the sense of a tyrant lusting after power, but he shared the dictator’s sense of his own indispensability. There is no reason to assume that this sense would have diminished had he not been toppled.

  He was an unrivalled moral manipulator, addressing the nation through the radio and hurling all-comers from his high ground of patriotism and purity of intent. He accused those who opposed him of wielding ‘a dagger, from behind’. From the majles he wrung his plenary powers and an almost unanimous vote of confidence. The reason for his success in a chamber he had come to loathe and revile was his opponents’ fear that they would be accused of martyring Iran’s saviour, bringing the wrath of the people crashing over their heads. And when their plans were defeated, these opponents scuttled back and adopted pained, wronged expressions. Baghai protested that it was not Mossadegh he opposed, but his extra powers. ‘Hypocrite!’ snarled a prime-ministerial loyalist.

  One of these loyalists, Ahmad Razavi, described the moral authority wielded by Mossadegh as ‘unparallelled in the history of Iran. No prime minister in the constitutional era and no chief minister during the period of despotism has ever enjoyed this degree of popular trust and faith . . . from the farthest point on the Gulf of Oman to the Caspian, all the people of this country have fixed their eyes on him so that he may heal their wounds.’15

  His new adversaries had to go cautiously. Over the second half of 1952, Ayatollah Kashani renounced the anti-Court ideals on which his politics had been founded. He was looking for a candidate to replace Mossadegh, and his eye fell on a military man. General Fazlullah Zahedi was a retired general whom the Shah had raised to the senate – though the Shah, typically, did not trust him. The general had been Mossadegh’s interior minister but had lost his post following the violence that had greeted Averell Harriman’s arrival in Tehran in August 1951, and he had gone on to become one of the government’s most effective critics. Plausible, well-connected and good-looking (he bore a passing resemblance to Ataturk), Zahedi had been arrested for pro-German proclivities during the British occupation, a search of his bedroom yielding a small arsenal, some opium and a register of local prostitutes.16 The British had interned him but there were no hard feelings and he let himself be courted by British spies and diplomats following the Qavam débâcle. Both the British and the Americans regarded him as the best candidate to replace Mossadegh.

  George Middleton had become British chargé d’affaires after Shepherd’s departure in November 1951. The Iranians had refused to admit Shepherd’s successor as ambassador on the pretext that he had served in a British colony, so Middleton remained as Britain’s top diplo
mat in the country. The following summer, Middleton reported that Zahedi was in touch with Kashani and ex-Mossadeghists such as Makki and Baghai, but in October another retired general and two of the Rashidian brothers were arrested for what the government called ‘plotting and incitement in favour of a foreign embassy’. In the words of a British diplomatic report, ‘This in no way disconcerted the brothers, who continued to operate from jail, where they also obtained all the good food they desired.’ Soon they were freed for lack of evidence.

  General Zahedi had also been publicly accused of involvement in the plot, but he could not be arrested because he was a senator and enjoyed immunity. The British denied any role, but Mossadegh had been looking for excuses to close down a mission which he regarded, with perfect justification, as a hotbed of intrigue against him, and on October 17 he announced the final rupture. A few days later, Middleton and his colleagues were on their way back to London.*