In January 1953 Mossadegh’s delegated powers expired and he caused uproar by demanding a year’s extension. Makki resigned his majles seat in protest and Kashani vowed in a letter to parliament to use his powers as speaker – to which post he had been elected in the summer of 1952 – to prevent discussion of the bill, ‘which is in clear contravention of the constitution’.
Kashani’s mistake was to assume that Mossadegh’s popularity was a reflection of his own; while the reverse was true. Barely had the ink dried on the ayatollah’s letter than pro-Mossadegh strikes broke out in the oil region and men in funeral shrouds gathered to march on Tehran. Telegrams flooded in from small towns the length and breadth of the country, and the slogan ‘Death or Mossadegh!’ crackled down the telephone wires. The following day the Tehran bazaar was shuttered and Baharestan Square filled with people holding the prime minister’s picture aloft. All this was in support of Mossadegh’s renewed powers, and Kashani and the others beat a hasty retreat. The ayatollah issued an emollient statement, Makki retracted his resignation, and 59 out of 67 deputies present in the chamber voted in favour of the extension.
In a game of chicken Mossadegh was supreme, but the strains of incessant combat had left their mark. Ghollamhossein was on hand every morning to test his father’s blood pressure and inject him with vitamin supplements. Mossadegh’s habitual sleeplessness had been exacerbated by the demands of office. His staff went home at 10 p.m., but he would answer the phone late into the night, dealing with such trivialities as the arrest of someone who had been out after the 11 p.m. curfew. He scarcely set foot in Ahmadabad during his premiership, let alone took a proper holiday.
He was seventy years old and there were rumours that he was suffering from a ‘nervous disorder’.18 Henderson took account of the prime minister’s ‘mental instability’ when analysing their interminable, sometimes fractious conversations. By the time the British were expelled, even Middleton, who had some sympathy for Mossadegh, was noting a deterioration in the prime minister’s mental state. Mossadegh was becoming ‘more and more Messianic’, believing that he was ‘the only person who could handle the situation’, and ‘obsessive’ about the wickedness of the AIOC. Wherever there was trouble, Mossadegh saw the hand of traitors and patsies. Middleton likened his attitude to a tendency that he had noted in the French (Middleton had grown up in France, and had a French wife), to say, ‘”We are betrayed!” when everything goes wrong. “Nous sommes trahis. Not us! Someone else has betrayed us”.’ He summed up Mossadegh’s attitude as ‘everyone go away, and we’ll be very happy growing melons.’19
It would be remarkable if the struggle Mossadegh had been waging since 1949 had not taken a toll on such a taut, emotional personality, particularly since his distrustful nature led him to take vital decisions on his own. And now, in the winter of 1952–53, the challenges came in swarms. Civil servants were not being paid, the Tudeh was resurgent, the National Front was collapsing as a consequence of defections, and finally General Zahedi was suspected of stirring up the Bakhtiari rebellion that flared in February.
The senate had been dissolved and the general no longer enjoyed parliamentary immunity. He was arrested, along with the Rashidians (again) and some other troublemakers. But Mossadegh’s government had never been any good at crackdowns. The prime minister had too much respect for the law to be a despot, and many senior men in the army and the police were of doubtful loyalty. Within days, Zahedi and the Rashidians walked free.
For Mossadegh, the ‘someone else’ who had betrayed him was the Shah. There is irony in this, for by this time the Shah had become the least threatening of his adversaries. Ignored by the government, spending his time playing canasta and reading detective novels, the Shah had lost his bravest ally, Princess Ashraf, to foreign exile. He had been slapped down so effectively that he had become the ideal constitutional monarch: quiet, shiny and denuded of authority. And yet there was an ominous sense that this state of affairs could not continue, what Middleton called a ‘very insecure feeling of the end of an era . . . like being in a quicksand – you don’t know where you’re going . . . I imagine it felt like this in the French Revolution.’20
On February 19, 1953 Mossadegh went on the offensive, complaining that the Court was fomenting unrest to destabilise him and threatening to resign . The Shah was suffering from psychological problems of his own, and Hossein Ala feared that he might have a ‘complete nervous breakdown’ in the face of this fresh attempt to bring him to a state of ‘servile dependence’.21 Thrown into a panic by the prime minister’s threat, the Shah took the extraordinary step of offering to go abroad.
He and Sorayya had been planning a trip to consult European doctors on their inability to have children. Now that preparations were advanced, their absence could be passed off as innocuous and temporary – although Iranians’ experience of monarchs going abroad under pressure was that they rarely came back. An ill, republican wind was blowing in from the West. In July 1952 Egypt’s King Farouk had been sent into exile and the country declared a republic, dominated – as it would become clear – by an ambitious colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Soon, Farouk remarked, there would only be five kings left in the world: the British and those belonging to a deck of cards. Was Mossadegh complicit in this scheme?
There is no evidence that he was. Had Mossadegh been a closet republican, he would now have done all he could to get the Shah out of the country. Instead, he advised him to stay, and it was the monarch himself who insisted on travel preparations continuing. They did not remain secret and, with the Shah’s fate in the balance, Mossadegh’s opponents sensed an opportunity.
On the morning of February 28, the date that had been set for the royal departure, rumours spread that Mossadegh was running the Shah out of the country. Kashani and a royalist ayatollah, Muhammad Behbehani, joined forces with the network of retired officers to generate a big loyalist crowd to encircle the palace and beg the Shah to stay. ‘People, be warned!’ Kashani declared. ‘If the Shah goes, whatever we have will go with him. Rise up and stop him, and make him change his mind!’ Groups yielding sticks patrolled the bazaar, shouting to the shopkeepers, ‘Close up! Close up! The Shah has abdicated!’
Mossadegh had been summoned to the palace to wish the Shah godspeed. He came out again with the intention of hurrying home to receive Loy Henderson, who had unexpectedly requested an appointment, but found his way blocked by a large, hostile crowd. Helped by a royal employee, Mossadegh escaped by a side entrance and was driven home in time to receive the US ambassador.
By the early afternoon it was clear that the Shah would find it physically impossible to leave the Marble Palace. The loyal delegations threw themselves at his feet, the demonstrators grew more vociferous, and the royal resolve faltered. First the Shah sent Ala to tell the crowd that he had postponed his departure, but Ala was booed away and the Shah himself appeared to announce the news. Still the crowd was not satisfied, and, after more distraught visitors and loyal indignation in the street, the Shah informed his subjects through a radio broadcast that their ‘pure and stainless emotions’ had moved him to cancel his trip altogether.
Mossadegh had also been confined – but less benignly. Following Henderson’s departure, 109 Palace Street was attacked by thick-necks and retired officers and their followers, who screamed for Mossadegh’s death and tried to break into the compound through the iron entrance gate. Shinning up a plane tree overlooking the compound, one cut-throat showed his knife to a terrified servant inside, vowing, ‘With this knife I’ll finish you off and Dr Mossadegh!’ Later the notorious thick-neck Brainless Shaban, an acolyte of Kashani, succeeded in breaking down the gate by ramming it with a jeep. Shaban had vowed to send Mossadegh’s severed ear to the Shah, but nationalist students rushed to the scene, and they and the prime-ministerial guards were able to repulse the attackers.
By that time, Mossadegh was gone. Using a ladder, he had climbed over the wall with his son Ahmad and escaped to the army headquarters. Later t
hat evening, deputies in the majles were astonished when the prime minister entered the chamber in pyjamas and dressing gown, the head of the army supporting his right arm, a retainer his left.22 The account he gave to parliament of what had transpired showed that he regarded the events of that day as an orchestrated plot.
For the rest of his life, Mossadegh would insist that the Shah and Henderson had been in cahoots to bring him to the royal palace, and then out again, in such a way that he would meet a hostile crowd which would kill him. No doubt Mossadegh would have been lynched had the crowd got to him, or if 109 Palace Street had fallen with him inside, but this would have been the consequence not of a premeditated murder plot but of the rabble-rousing of the ayatollahs. Mossadegh’s insistence on a plot is of a piece with Middleton’s depiction of an exhausted, highly-strung prime minister who saw no way out of the hole he had dug for himself but to dig through to the other side.
Nothing we know about the Shah during this period suggests that he would have dared condone a plot to kill Mossadegh, let alone take part in one, and he was reported to have been shaken by the sound of firing from the direction of Palace Street, and gave orders for Mossadegh’s house to be made secure. The Shah was not an instigator of the events of February 28, but was caught up in them to the extent that he was obliged to foreswear his plans to depart. It is highly unlikely that Henderson would have connived so directly in the skulduggery, and Mossadegh’s later claim that the ambassador had called him away from the palace on a matter of trifling importance is not convincing. Henderson wanted to let Mossadegh know how concerned he was by reports of the Shah’s imminent departure, and begged the prime minister to prevail on him not to go.
Mossadegh got home at eleven o’clock that night to find his family waiting up for him. Ghollamhossein recalled that
he came up the stairs with difficulty and with the help of myself and [Ahmad]. He had not rested from five in the morning until that moment – around sixteen hours . . . he was not strong enough to stand. I had never seen my father so broken and shattered. As soon as he had entered his room, he sat on his bed and started crying.
He said: ‘Today I lost all hope. No longer do I trust that man. I swore allegiance to him in a way I did not do to his father . . . I thought that this young man, with all that happened to his father, would serve the people and the country. How I counselled him, and told him to be with the people and not to lean on foreigners. In times of hardship it’s the people who will support you . . . today, I realised what kind of a man he is! He lied to me. He deceived me and he wanted me killed . . .’23
Chapter 13
A Coup of his Own
The coup of August 19, 1953 challenges the axiom that history is about irresistible social movements and not the characters of individual men and women. An unlikely assortment of people commanded events, and were commanded by them, from the Shah to the CIA’s agents on the ground, not forgetting the thick-necks, agitators and charlatans on the streets of the Persian capital. Their qualities left as deep an impression as any current running through Persian society. Above all, the coup was Mossadegh’s coup, for it found its form according to his own personality, and it was defeated, and then resurrected, on the pitching, lunging foredeck of his conscience.
Whether it was true or not, the dominating belief for Mossadegh in the aftermath of February 28 was that the Shah wanted him and his government out of the way, even if it meant killing him, and that to concede would be to condemn nationalisation and the patriotic movement – indeed, Iran itself. In fact the monarch, however much associates like Ala conspired at the fringes, was more reluctant than ever to endorse an alternative candidate for prime minister, and he tried desperately to patch things up with Mossadegh. Well into the summer, the Shah refused to allow himself to become the figurehead for any attempt to remove the prime minister, and he was minded to accept a majles report interpreting the royal prerogatives in such a way as to emasculate himself politically. Time and again, the Shah showed Mossadegh that he wished to cooperate in his own disarmament. Time and again, he was snubbed and humiliated.
Mossadegh had not allowed the abolition of the Qajars or the fate of his daughter Khadijeh to dictate his attitude towards the Pahlavi dynasty. His politics had been blessedly free of personal resentment, to the extent that he had defended his great rival Seyyed Zia when the latter had been unfairly jailed, and he had been heavily criticised for not pursuing Qavam vigorously after the July uprising. Now, though, he believed that the Shah had crossed a line and become a traitor to his country and an ally of its foes. Inevitably, the prime minister turned against his sovereign.
Mossadegh now refused to see the Shah and it was a scandal. His failure to visit the Shah on the occasion of the Persian New Year was a grotesque breach of convention. A few weeks later Mossadegh sent Hossein Fatemi – who had recovered sufficiently from the assassination attempt against him to be named foreign minister as well as government spokesman – to see the monarch. Fatemi demanded the dismissal of Ala, whose conversations with anti-government plotters had come to light, and Ala was duly replaced with a Mossadeghist who issued a statement associating the Shah with the nationalist movement – itself a breach of the principle of royal impartiality.
‘Now that the disagreement has been solved,’ one newspaper asked hopefully, ‘will the prime minister have an audience with the Shah, or not?’1 The answer was negative, and rumours of a rift went around again. Mossadegh claimed that by visiting the Shah he would put himself in danger of assassination by the royal guard. But he also refused the Shah’s offer to come and see him at Palace Street. Such a visit would ‘damage his majesty’s prestige’.2
Barely two years before, Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi had bullied a constituent assembly into giving him the power to sack governments and prorogue parliament. Having got these powers, he was terrified to use them. The leftists surrounding Mossadegh did not hide their contempt for the throne. Queen Sorayya felt like a thief whenever she wanted to wear jewels, having to sign a chit and return them to an official after use. Ahmad Razavi warned that ‘we cannot accept interference by the holders of ceremonial office, which is in clear contravention of the constitution.’ Only one man answered this description, driven from the centre of politics to what Sorayya called his ‘palace of solitude’. Trusting no one, sleeping with a revolver under his pillow, the Shah flew up to Ramsar, on the Caspian coast, or to the hill station of Kelardasht, where he refused to read the newspapers or listen to the radio, occupying himself with swimming and riding. In Tehran, all the while, the conflict hurtled on.
The Shah’s isolation may have given Mossadegh grim satisfaction and pleased his radicals, but it was a heaven-sent opportunity for those who wanted to paint the prime minister as a closet republican driving the country into the arms of the communists. Although the people continued to adore Mossadegh, the idea that the monarchy might be abolished filled many with unease. The last serious effort in this direction, by Reza Khan, had provoked a popular reaction because people believed that the end of the Crown would signal the end of Islam and the beginning of Bolshevism. Mossadegh assured the Shah that he harboured no republican designs. Had he not sent the Shah the very Qoran upon which he had sworn fealty?
Violence in all its forms overwhelmed Iran during the spring and early summer of 1953. The bound and mutilated body of Mossadegh’s chief of police, Brigadier Mahmud Afshartus, was found in the mountains outside Tehran, and two of the main suspects in the case, Baghai and Zahedi, were welcomed by Ayatollah Kashani into the majles, where they took sanctuary. Parliament was now the centre of an epic struggle to decide the country’s fate, with obstructions to prevent a quorum, fisticuffs on the floor and the anti-government deputies requesting arms to protect themselves.
The accusations and counter-accusations grew more and more extreme: the ‘diabolical’ Mossadegh, as bad as Genghis Khan, was planning to close down the majles and end the dynasty; he should be committed to an asylum; the government intended to ma
ssacre its opponents; a bloodbath was in store.
Into these turbid waters waded another competitor, sensing an opportunity – the banned Tudeh Party. The communists had profited from Mossadegh’s democratic indulgence over the past two years, building up front organisations and impressing the CIA with their discipline and size. This may not have displeased Mossadegh, for by depicting himself as a bulwark against an ever-present communist threat, he had hoped to retain American support. Now, though, he had lost key anti-communist allies, such as Kashani and Baghai, whose supporters had battled the Tudeh in the streets.
Some of the prime minister’s left-leaning allies may have secretly favoured a tacit alliance with the Tudeh against the army and the Court. To such an alliance, the Tudeh could bring huge manpower, discipline and an invaluable network of agents in the army. On the other hand, the danger of shackling the government to an illegal party following orders from Moscow was obvious. The Tudeh had made inroads in factories, schools and government offices. Its military network boasted some 600 officers in the police and armed forces. Its newspapers had attacked Mossadegh from the first day of his premiership. What if the Tudeh overtures were a trap?
The limited and wary cooperation that the nationalists and the Tudeh now embarked upon would have a decisive effect on Mossadegh’s relations with the US. In November 1952, American voters had ejected Truman’s Democrats in favour of the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. The new president was a gloves-off cold warrior who believed that America was pitted against ‘an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination’, and that ‘long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered’.3 Fair play had gone by the board at home, where Senator Joe McCarthy was directing a persecution of suspected communists in the State Department and across national life. It was a good moment for a muscular assertion of American values abroad.
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