The incoming secretary of state was John Foster Dulles. At the same time his younger brother Allen was named director of the CIA. Grandsons of one secretary of state, nephews of another, these Washington insiders had been wartime spies and had more than a passing interest in Iran. Foster feared that the country was a prime target for communist expansion, and Allen knew the Shah through his business contacts in the Middle East. Neither brother needed much persuasion that Mossadegh was a dangerous madman tipping his country into the abyss, and that he needed to go.
The change in US administration was also significant for those British officials hoping for decisive action against Mossadegh. With the expulsion of British diplomats and spies from Tehran, America’s enthusiastic participation was now essential if a covert operation was to succeed. Travelling to Washington to put the case for intervention, the MI6 officer Monty Woodhouse played to the American gallery, downplaying the importance of Britain’s oil interests and dwelling on the dangers of communism.4 In fact, most British officials took a much less dramatic view of the Tudeh than the Americans, and Churchill would soon tire of what he regarded as Foster Dulles’ ‘obsession’ with communism in Persia to the detriment of British interests. ‘Mossadegh had done all he could to ruin his country,’ Churchill’s private secretary would recall, ‘but there were no signs that Persia was nearer Communism.’5 The irony was that Mossadegh had done as much as anyone to fix American attention on the communist bogey, even though he, like the British, believed it to be exaggerated.
Building that bogey into a terrifying monster would be a key part of the coup, as it now began to be conceived by the CIA and MI6. From their earlier operations to counter Soviet influence, the CIA had a network of assets in Iran, who were being used to organise attacks on Tudeh rallies and to blacken the party’s name by showing that it was a creature of the Soviets. To these agents would now be added Britain’s assets, notably the Rashidian brothers. Using a massive campaign of alarmist propaganda, and fomenting chaos to demonstrate that Mossadegh was no longer in control, the coup planners aimed to instil panic that the country was sliding towards a communist takeover.
There was a parallel, overt campaign: to impress on Mossadegh as well as his enemies that the Iranian government no longer enjoyed American goodwill. Eisenhower took a month to reply to Mossadegh’s plea for ‘prompt and effective aid’ to stave off ‘great economic and political difficulties’, and the terms he used were cold and unsympathetic. The release of the exchange into the public domain caused Mossadegh much embarrassment. Loy Henderson signalled that he was washing his hands of Mossadegh by going abroad indefinitely, while Iranian officials of all kinds found that the US government representatives they were used to dealing with had become much less friendly. It was all part of a campaign to unnerve the government, and it worked.
Mossadegh had never believed that the communists would be able to challenge him, and he boasted that it was he who manipulated the Tudeh, not the other way around. He was right, but events in Tehran were being manipulated to give a different impression.
To mark the anniversary of the July uprising against Qavam, pro-government nationalists planned a rally in Baharestan Square, but the Tudeh also wanted to take part. Mixing the two groups was considered risky, so Mossadegh agreed that separate rallies should be held, one in the morning for the nationalists, and a second one after lunch for ‘other groups’ – meaning the Tudeh.
These arrangements only strengthened the impression that the Tudeh had gone from being an enemy of the prime minister to an ominous and threatening element of his support base. The Tudeh rally was by far the better organised and attended. In the words of Kennett Love, a correspondent for the New York Times, the nationalist rally mustered a ‘straggling assembly of a few thousand demonstrators and idlers’ which broke up an hour ahead of schedule. The Tudeh, on the other hand, ‘turned out a vibrantly disciplined throng . . . the capacious square and the approaching avenues appeared to be paved with faces as far as the eye could see.’ Observing the discipline and size of the Tudeh rally, one of the party leaders asked Love, ‘“Do you think they can refuse our support much longer? You have seen for yourself how small they are and how big we are.”’6
‘The Tudeh have put us to shame,’ agreed one of Mossadegh’s most astute supporters, Khalil Maleki, himself a former communist, and the effect of the anniversary on public opinion outside Iran was as he feared.7 In Washington, Foster Dulles publicly deplored ‘the growing activity of the illegal communist party’, which appeared to be ‘tolerated by the Iranian Government’.8 Tolerated it was, for Mossadegh refused to ‘wage war on the beliefs of the people’, and although Soviet foreign policy had been in limbo since Stalin’s death in March, the two countries were now negotiating Iranian financial claims which had been outstanding since the war.
All this was useful for the CIA propaganda operation, which was now working with impressive precision. The man in charge was Donald Wilber, a Princeton scholar who had a background in the Office of Strategic Studies, the forerunner of the CIA, and would go on to write a hagiography of Reza Shah.9 Articles commissioned by Wilber appeared with miraculous rapidity in the Tehran papers, and several new publications appeared in the spring and summer of 1953, all harping on an anti-government theme. One newspaper proprietor was extended what Wilber described as a ‘personal loan’ of $45,000, while a stream of ‘black’ propaganda emanated from local stooges posing as Tudeh enforcers, who threatened mullahs with ‘savage punishment’ if they stood against Mossadegh. There were attacks on mosques and rumours that the prime minister was secretly a Jew.10 It was not pretty.
By now Zahedi had begun to receive the $60,000 which he had been allocated in order to build up the military and tribal network that would propel him to power. (This sum would be doubled as the coup approached.) In an astonishing act of negligence, Mossadegh had allowed the general to be escorted safely out of the majles in July, upon which he went into hiding in preparation for the coup. But Zahedi proved a less accomplished networker than his CIA contacts had anticipated, and they ended up having to build a military support base for him. This was difficult, for the armed forces were split between the Mossadeghists – notably the head of the army, General Taqi Riyahi, and most of the Tehran commanders – and the royalists, including the Royal Guard and some forty officers commanding units in the capital. These officers would in the end provide the military firepower for the coup.
That still left the key man: the Shah himself, who would be a figurehead for the plotters and provide the legal basis for Zahedi to be appointed prime minister. But the only constant thing about the Shah was his inconstancy. He would not lend his support to a coup until he was convinced that it had the personal support of Eisenhower and Churchill – his terror of the old ‘hidden hand’ still induced palpitations that the British sought his removal. The Shah needed to be chivvied into supporting an operation that could, if it failed, cost him his throne or his life. He was an ‘unaccountable character’, mused Allen Dulles, capable of pulling out ‘at the last minute’.11
The exiled Princess Ashraf, kicking her heels in France, might be able to goad her brother into action, and agents were dispatched to convince her to return to Iran and speak to him. This too was risky, for Ashraf had been driven out of the country at Mossadegh’s insistence and was under suspicion of siphoning money from a public bank. But the princess more than made up for her brother’s lack of spunk. Besides, the MI6 agent who met her in Paris was brandishing a mink coat – at which ‘her eyes lit up’.12
Two days later, Ashraf was on a flight to Tehran, where she was met by a friend and whisked off to Saadabad. The nationalist and Tudeh press reacted violently to the news that she was home without permission, and Mossadegh forced the Shah to call for the ‘severest measures’ in case she transgressed against ‘court rules’ again. During her ten-day stay in the royal compound, after which she returned to Paris, Ashraf managed to get a morale-stiffening letter to the Shah, and e
ven to see him, though the siblings feared eavesdroppers and spoke in guarded platitudes.13
Still the Shah wrung his hands; rarely can a monarch have been so resigned to his own extinction. The CIA arranged another envoy, General Norman Schwarzkopf, who had commanded the Iranian gendarmerie and who knew the Shah (and whose son, of the same name, would expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991). But there was uproar in Tehran when the general arrived, and his conversation with the Shah was nerve-wracking and inconclusive. Other methods were employed to stiffen the monarch. A message came from Churchill: ‘We should be very sorry to see the Shah lose his powers or leave his post or be driven out.’ To avoid bugging devices and eavesdroppers, the Shah held covert conversations in the palace gardens (not too near the trees), or in the middle of a ballroom. Even now he wavered. Finally, on August 1, he agreed to receive in secret an American claiming to speak for both Eisenhower and Churchill: the coup-master himself, Kermit ‘Kim’ Roosevelt.
Bespectacled, balding and somewhat cherubic, Roosevelt was the grandson of the ‘rough rider’ president, Theodore. Born in Argentina, where his father had business interests, he had left a junior position in the Harvard History Department to join the Office of Strategic Studies, and ran its Arab operations in the war. Roosevelt had disapproved of British policy in the region, accusing his MI6 counterparts of ‘shoddy cynical intrigues’ and of cultivating mediocre local allies.14 Not that Roosevelt disapproved in principle of the dark arts; his PhD was entitled ‘Propaganda Techniques in the English Civil War’ and he was known in the CIA as a ‘bold Easterner’ – an Ivy Leaguer of private means urging cloak-and-dagger operations while the policy wonks churned out learned papers. The British double agent Kim Philby described Roosevelt as ‘well-educated rather than intellectual . . . the last person you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks’.15
Now thirty-seven, Roosevelt was the head of the CIA’s Middle East Department, and charged with carrying out the coup plan. He entered Iran on July 19 under an assumed name and began his activities in leisurely fashion from the house of another agent in the foothills. In between meetings with CIA and SIS contacts, Roosevelt drank Johnnie Walker, sunned himself by the pool and worked up a sweat on the diplomatic tennis circuit, almost giving himself away with the cry, ‘Oh, Roosevelt!’ whenever he missed an easy shot. To undo the damage, he recalled later, ‘I did my best to pass myself off as a black-hearted reactionary Republican to whom ‘Roosevelt’, meaning FDR, was a heartfelt obscenity.’16
Shortly after midnight on August 2, Roosevelt was admitted in great secrecy to the compound at Saadabad. The Shah was friendly but wary. Roosevelt would exert himself over several meetings to persuade his host that the US government would not sit idly by while Iran turned communist, and that if he, the Shah, did not participate in the plan to save his country, he would be overtaken by events. The Shah was already being strong-armed by other secret assignees, including Assadollah Rashidian and Zahedi’s swashbuckling son, Ardeshir. Arguably, though, it was Mossadegh himself who did more than anyone to convince him to act.
The prime minister was a mixture of visionary and fusspot. He had failed to solve the oil problem because he had not identified the best deal that was available to Iran, far less pursued it. After the failure of his talks in Washington he had blustered and time-wasted and hoped against hope, squandering America’s goodwill, and as the dismal process went on so the discomfort of his own position increased until there was no deal, however beneficial, to which he could put his name.
By contrast, in choppy domestic waters, Mossadegh was accustomed to taking decisions on a basis of complete self-reliance before unveiling them to an astonished public. This formula had brought him remarkable success. His tenure (if one discounts the brief Qavam interregnum) was already the longest-lasting since the fall of Reza Shah. It had survived extraordinarily determined opposition. Only Mossadegh’s genius as a popular leader explains his longevity.
Now, in the early summer of 1953, he sensed the majles falling to the enemy and his solution, as ever, was to take succour from the people whose exclusive representative he had become. He had raised a storm by demanding plenary powers and then insisting they be renewed. Now he would deal with the chamber.
It started on July 14, when twenty-seven deputies professing their loyalty to Mossadegh resigned their seats at his behest; by July 28, the number had risen to fifty-six. This was more than enough to stop the majles from convening, but Mossadegh also wanted to end the parliamentary immunity of those opposition deputies, like Baghai, who carried on plotting against him. ‘In a democratic and constitutional country’, he told a radio audience, ‘there is no law that is higher than the will of the people.’
Mossadegh’s plan was brutal. He would ask the people, through a plebiscite, to dissolve parliament. If the answer was yes, elections to the eighteenth majles would take place. If it was no, the prime minister would walk away and the nation would have to get itself out of the mess he had made for it.
Mossadegh’s spoliation of the majles is presented as a blot on his character and career, and needs examination. The referendum was won, of course, by a landslide and with an unprecedented turnout. But the prime minister was exploiting his personal magnetism at the expense of democracy. With the opposition boycotting the vote, it was more reverential bow than referendum. Like an alchemist Mossadegh converted the national will into law, but it would not have occurred to his constituents to dissolve the majles; the people’s ‘will’ had been concocted by Mossadegh himself. What if ‘the people’ had demanded war with Russia or that the Bahais be herded into camps? Would that too have been the highest law?
In a democracy, the legislature is the place where the urges of the nation are consummated or rejected according to propriety and the constitution. Now there was no legislature: just the leader and the people, covering each other in kisses. It was possible that Mossadegh would take exception to the next chamber and get the people to close that one too. An ominous circle was being formed.
The Mossadeghist hard kernel – the oil-adviser Kazem Hassibi, along with the prime minister’s legal experts, Karim Sanjabi and Ali Shayegan – came to 109 Palace Street to protest. His support in the majles was stronger than he supposed, they said. Referendums were not recognised by the constitution. How could he circumvent the Shah, who alone was empowered to dissolve parliament? But the prime minister was impervious to their arguments. When Sanjabi proposed that he ask the Shah to dissolve parliament, Mossadegh snapped, ‘It looks as though you have smoked hashish this morning.’17
By shutting the majles he tied one of his own hands behind his back, and put his supporters in a terrible bind. A second delegation had come to 109 Palace Street, this one led by Khalil Maleki, and was similarly rebuffed. Seeing that further discussion was useless, Maleki rose to his feet and exclaimed, ‘Dr Mossadegh! This road that you are on leads to hell, but we will follow you there!’18
There is a shelf-full of arguments against Mossadegh’s assault on the seventeenth majles. Crucially, there is one even stronger argument in its favour, which can be made with some assurance from our distant, historical perspective. Looking at the records – the official CIA history of the coup; the Foreign Office files in south-west London; the valuable work done by American scholars such as Mark Gasiorowski – it is clear that Mossadegh’s government was by now the object of pitiless acts of war by two hostile powers. The crippling embargo; the bombardment of disinformation; the conspiracies to riot, murder and abduct; it is not necessary to send armies in order to wage a war, and there is no glossing the ruthlessness of the Anglo-American campaign.
The majles was a crucial part of this. Two months earlier, in June, the CIA had been allotted a large weekly budget of $11,000 to purchase the cooperation of Iranian MPs. By the time of the dissolution, Mossadegh claimed that thirty deputies had been bought and that it was only a matter of time before ten more went over – enough to threaten the government. Sitting MPs plotted mu
rders and kidnappings whilst hiding behind their parliamentary immunity.19 In these circumstances, it is hard to argue that Mossadegh’s pre-emptive action was disproportionate. It might be considered mild.
His foes screamed that he was a dictator. If so, he was a shockingly dilatory one. Faced with a choice between stability and freedom, he veered unerringly towards the latter. On the eve of the coup, most of those who had been arrested for trying to kill Mossadegh in his home the previous February were once again at liberty. Mossadegh continued to give most un-dictatorial latitude to the Tehran newspapers. The prime minister had been consumed by a ‘syphilitic madness’, said one paper.20 Another published a call for armed insurrection. These and other outrages went unanswered.
There is not one sole reason for the government’s failure to protect itself. The unreliability of the security forces, some of whom were in league with the coup-makers, is a partial explanation. The elimination of Brigadier Afshartus had deprived the government of a canny police chief. The torpor of the legal system was well known. The main factor, however, was Mossadegh himself. The prime minister had not stopped believing in the importance of an individual’s freedom to the freedom of a nation. He never would. Liberty of expression could not be taken from a group of citizens, for the country had achieved independence under its shade-giving branches. Even as the Tudeh’s activists flexed their muscles and Khalil Maleki implored Mossadegh to lock them up, he refused. ‘You say they should be jailed, but who should jail them? It’s the job of the law and the judiciary.’ And the judiciary was not up to the task.
The main objection to Mossadegh’s gambit in closing the majles is not moral, but practical. It turned out to be a grave miscalculation which helped bring the government down. Even allowing for Mossadegh’s pessimistic assessment of the support he enjoyed in the chamber, at least half the seats were still occupied by his supporters and he could probably have hung on if a vote of confidence had been held. Even more important, supportive deputies would have been able to react to any coup attempt by turning the majles into a nationalist fortress. They had done so enough times in the past.
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