Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  Now these loyalists were scattered, some of them to their constituencies outside Tehran, where they expected elections imminently. The opposition MPs, by contrast, had been encouraged by the CIA to dispute the legality of the referendum, and they continued to plot.

  The referendum was held in Tehran on August 3, the day after Kim Roosevelt’s first meeting with the Shah. On August 4, President Eisenhower declared acidly that Mossadegh had ‘moved toward getting rid of his parliament, and of course he was in that move supported by the Communist party of Iran’. In Washington, the Iranian ambassador was denied access to senior US diplomats. America could hardly have made its position clearer.

  On August 10 the referendum was held in provincial towns. Back in the United States, Donald Wilber and his team of propagandists had spent the intervening week in overdrive, producing dozens of articles and anti-Mossadegh cartoons for publication in Tehran. Kashani and the others raved. Finally, around the time of the provincial vote, the Shah came off the fence.

  To Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, subject to immense pressure from Roosevelt, Assadollah Rashidian and the army plotters who came to see him, it now seemed that Mossadegh would stop at nothing to obtain absolute power. Mossadegh gave every impression of mounting his final challenge, but in closing the majles he unwittingly offered the Shah an opportunity to get rid of him while staying within the law. In the absence of a majles the Shah would be acting within the constitution if he fired his prime minister. It was this, as much as the urging of Roosevelt and the others, that gave the Shah the courage to act.

  On August 10, the Shah told Assadollah Rashidian that he would sign two royal orders, one sacking Mossadegh and the other appointing Zahedi, and that he would keep himself out of the way while the coup took place. There was elation in the plotters’ camp. By the evening of August 13, Colonel Nematullah Nassiri of the royal guard was in possession of the two imperial orders bearing the Shah’s signature. The Shah and his Queen were at Kelardasht. But there was now an inexplicable delay, and the CIA lost contact with Zahedi’s people. In Wilber’s recollection, ‘No more news came in from Tehran on the fourteenth, and there was nothing that either the station or Headquarters could do except to wait for action to begin.’21

  Chapter 14

  Mussy Duck Shoot

  Shortly before midnight on August 15, Hossein Fatemi was brushing his teeth when his wife let out a piercing scream. Rushing out of the bathroom, the foreign minister found that his home was full of soldiers, two of whom had trained their rifles on him. Fatemi was taken in an army truck to a guardhouse in the Saadabad compound, where he was joined by a second member of the cabinet and another senior Mossadeghist – both still in their pyjamas. Fatemi was told that he would be executed at dawn. He asked one of his jailers, ‘Who could have put you up to this?’ The answer came, ‘Who else but the Shah?’1

  The plotters had failed to arrest their principal target, General Riyahi, because he had got wind of what was happening, and had left his house shortly before a military jeep arrived to pick him up. Zahedi’s men had cut telephone lines and occupied the exchange, but Riyahi was able to deploy more troops at strategic points. By the time Colonel Nassiri of the royal guard arrived at Palace Street, followed by a large force with which to arrest Mossadegh, the defenders were ready.

  At around 1.30 a.m., standing at the door of the prime minister’s house, Nassiri handed over the Shah’s decree to be taken in to Mossadegh. Twenty minutes later, he was given a receipt in the prime minister’s hand, but by that time Riyahi had been informed, and Nassiri was arrested. Nassiri’s forces had also been surrounded. The royal guard was immediately disbanded.

  Mossadegh had known about the coup before it happened. An army informant had been giving him regular information by phone, and he had strengthened the defences at 109 Palace Street. That same night he had been roused by a call from a concerned citizen telling him of suspicious troop movements.2 Following Nassiri’s arrest, the cabinet and other prime-ministerial allies were raised from their beds and converged on 109 Palace Street. Hossein Fatemi was freed at 5 a.m. and went home. Then he too came to the prime minister’s house. At 7 a.m. it was announced on the radio that a coup attempt had been foiled. ‘The government is in complete control of the situation,’ ran the announcement, ‘and a number of treacherous and misguided people have been arrested, and will shortly pay the price for their anti-national actions.’

  In the US Embassy a few blocks away, Kermit Roosevelt heard the announcement and felt close to despair.3 General Zahedi had spent a sleepless night monitoring events. Now, rather than take up the reins of government, as he had hoped to do, he watched as pro-government tanks rumbled through the streets. In a meeting with his son and other allies, he spoke of leaving Tehran and mounting a resistance in some distant part of the country.

  The Shah was told by long-wave radio what had happened. He and Sorayya flew by small airplane to Ramsar, where a larger craft was standing by. Soon, the royal couple were in the air again, heading out of the country. In his haste to leave, the Shah had omitted to put on his socks. The Queen was distraught; her beloved Skye Terrier, Tony, had also been left behind.

  In Tehran the night curfew ended and people tried to come to terms with what had happened. With amazing suddenness, the country had emerged from a dismal shaft of strife and confusion and the horizon seemed without limit. People gathered in the streets to discuss events and speculate about the future. They hung around the cafés so as not to miss the radio announcements. The putschists were being rounded up and rumours flew of their imminent execution. If the coup had been successful, the people reasoned, Mossadegh and his allies would now be up against a wall; justice must be meted out to the coup-makers commensurate to their crime. Around lunchtime, a new stir: the Shah had landed in Baghdad.

  Mossadegh now faced the task of his life. The departure of the Shah had left a hole in Iran that he could fill as he saw fit. The country’s system of government; its orientation in foreign affairs – all could be planned anew. But would it be wise, or right, to do so? Economically, the country was on its knees. The true statesman must keep his eye on the future. Iran would eventually have to find a market for its oil, and that market could only be in the West. The prime minister’s job was to narrow the possibilities and take control. He must calm his excited supporters and prevent the Tudeh from manipulating events. He must guide the country to the next stage. Above all, he must beware any attempt to revive the coup.

  A younger and fitter man might have felt liberated by the unexpected turn of events, and come forward with joy. But Mossadegh was exhausted by the cares of office, and the United States, his greatest hope of succour, had abandoned him. Furthermore, Mossadegh had not changed, even if the circumstances had. He had made his oath to preserve the Crown in all sincerity and could not lightly abandon it.

  The first challenge came early on August 16 from those who were closest to him. When Hossein Fatemi arrived at Palace Street after being freed, his fury could not be assuaged. Fatemi had got home that morning to find his house ransacked and his wife inconsolable. She had been roughly handled by the soldiers and their eleven-month-old child had been woken and subjected to a bizarre interrogation. These were the images that Fatemi carried into the first confabulation of the new era. He and many of the other men in the prime minister’s first-floor meeting room had not slept the previous night. They were tired and emotional.

  Suddenly, voices were raised and Fatemi’s carried through the clamour, down to the journalists below: ‘It’s all right for you sitting here to speak about observing the law! You didn’t have the bitter experience of watching the Royal Guard invade my house . . . if you had only felt the villainy and lack of mercy in these coup-makers, you wouldn’t react in this way!’4

  Fatemi had been addressing Mossadegh. He was insisting that the detained coup-makers be executed. Others agreed. Anything less would be a dangerous indulgence. But Mossadegh was firm; the law must take its course. Later on Fat
emi told Muhammad-Ali Safari, his correspondent at Bakhtar-e Emrooz, ‘The old man bangs on about the law, and I am afraid he is going to get us all killed.’5 Appalled at the invasion of his family life, desperate for revenge, Fatemi spent the next four days trying to force the prime minister’s hand, and his goal went way beyond retributive justice. He wanted regime change. He wanted a republic.

  Fatemi hated the Shah. He regarded the monarch as a lackey of the British, and the British, ultimately, as responsible for the attempt on his own life by the Warriors of Islam, which had left him in constant pain. On August 15, Fatemi had the satisfaction of ordering the staff of the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad to have no contact with the Shah when he landed there. Three days later, when the royal couple flew on to Rome, the Iranian ambassador refused to hand over the keys to a car that Queen Sorayya had left there on an earlier trip. These insults were designed to show Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi that he was no longer Shah of Iran. They would not be forgotten.

  The August 16 edition of Bakhtar-e Emrooz was a vessel into which Fatemi poured every drop of venom. Addressing the Shah, he wrote, ‘You looted the wealth of a nation . . . and now, like a thief or a whore, you use the black of night to launch a coup, before going to Kelardasht to take your ease.’6 Late that afternoon came a victory rally reeking of republicanism. One after another, the Mossadeghists took the microphone, and Shayegan quipped, ‘The delicacy that should have come to Tehran has gone to Baghdad.’ The crowd shrieked, ‘Death to the treacherous Shah!’ and ‘Let the infamous Pahlavi Court be obliterated!’

  Then it was Fatemi’s turn. The Shah, he thundered, had ‘wanted to go to war with God. He wanted to go to war with the people and the society which are the embodiment of the will of God. But God slammed him to the floor . . .’ The crowd raised their hands to approve ‘motions’ to punish swiftly those who had been behind the failed coup, and to convene a regency council to determine the country’s future.

  Now there was a kind of madness. There was no parliament. The Shah was gone. The prime minister was in his bunker, holding meeting after meeting. Politics had one place to go: the street. That evening, Shayegan and Razavi came back to Mossadegh’s house, where the prime minister and his interior minister, Ghollamhossein Sadiqi, had been informed about what had been said in Baharestan Square. Sadiqi was furious. What, he demanded, had they hoped to achieve with such inflammatory speeches? Sadiqi was in touch with the chief of police, and the news was of riot and disorder. Did that not play into the hands of the government’s adversaries?7 Now, more than ever, the people needed to stay calm and alert. Mossadegh was silent. Shayegan and Razavi went out to try to restore order. But control was already slipping away.

  The crowd in Baharestan Square had been intoxicated by the speeches. Now they roamed in groups, shouting slogans against the Shah. The attacks began. The window of a photographer’s studio was shattered because it had a big picture of the Shah. Then the studio was looted. Fearing the mob, shopkeepers tore down their own royal pictures and hurled them into the road. Groups with picks and shovels started hacking at statues of the Pahlavis.8 Some arrests were made but in general the forces of law and order were conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, that evening, the security forces had no orders to suppress the demonstrations.

  Now Mossadegh needed his crowd-managing heavyweights: Baghai, Haerizadeh and the network of Ayatollah Kashani. During the uprising against Qavam they had shown how to fill the streets with people, denying space to the opposition. The Tudeh had been elbowed aside and nationalists had protected the royal statuary. But now, in the flush of victory, crowd management was nowhere on the government’s list of priorities. The battle was on to design the new Iran.

  It was not Mossadegh’s battle of choice. A de-fanged Shah had been useful. His continuing presence had been reassuring to the Americans and was a message to the Soviet Union that Iran would not go communist. Besides, Mossadegh continued to believe that a constitutional monarchy was the best system of government. But now the Shah had fled after conspiring against his own prime minister; it would be hard to put the case for his return. In the meeting room at 109 Palace Street, Fatemi and Razavi and some of the others demanded a republic. Others would be content with the abolition of the Pahlavi dynasty. The constitution provided for a regency council in the Shah’s absence, but it was the Shah’s job to appoint one. Should the government do his job for him – or the people, through a referendum?

  Between August 15 and 19 these questions were examined minutely by the prime minister and his coterie, and the spectre of a republic would not fade away. Fatemi, no doubt on Mossadegh’s orders, declared that a republic was not on the agenda.9 No one believed him. A visit by the nation’s Dr Johnson, Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, fuelled speculation that he was to be the republic’s first president. The reporter Safari asked him the purpose of his visit. ‘To enquire after [Dr Mossadegh’s] health,’ the ancient lexicographer replied, and shuffled away.

  Each day brought fresh meetings that no one wanted to talk about. Sanjabi and Shayegan and the others came out of Palace Street and joked awkwardly with reporters. Agreement was imminent – on what, they would not say. Platitudes gushed forth. Sentences trailed off unfinished. On August 18, Safari reported discussions on the composition of a regency council but did not know what the council would deliberate. Hossein Fatemi went about with an expression of thunder. Safari begged his permission to write in favour of a republic in the pages of Bakhtar-e Emrooz, and Fatemi replied, ‘Don’t be so obstinate! I don’t have the final say, and he who has the final say isn’t satisfied yet.’10

  Much legitimate criticism has been directed at Mossadegh for absorbing himself in legal niceties as the ground was laid for his overthrow, but it is worth recalling that he faced a constitutional crisis of the greatest magnitude, and he was convinced that its resolution would determine the future position of Iran in the world. In particular, Mossadegh was guided by his desire not to isolate himself completely from the Eisenhower administration. He only had one foreign policy, to lean on the United States, and even now he hoped to preserve it.

  Loy Henderson flew in to set him right. On August 17, after an absence of almost three months, the US ambassador arrived in Tehran to help resurrect the coup, and Mossadegh’s decision to receive him speaks volumes for his desperation. Military investigators had found proof of American involvement in the failed coup. The commander of the US military assistance mission had tried to persuade General Riyahi to defect. Kennett Love and a second American correspondent were acting as Zahedi’s unofficial public-relations team. What more evidence did he need that America was trying to destroy him?

  When he received Henderson at 6 p.m. on August 18, Mossadegh still regarded the US as the most likely saviour of his government. He was probably hoping for crumbs of comfort and some guidance on future constitutional arrangements. He got neither. The meeting came at the moment when, in American eyes, the capital seemed to be falling to the Tudeh, and Henderson made it clear that the United States regarded Zahedi as the country’s lawful prime minister, and the Shah as the rightful head of state. Convinced, at last, that the US was implacably hostile to him, Mossadegh vowed that his government would resist to the last man, even if its members were ‘run over by British and American tanks’.11

  Everything now suggested that the Pahlavis were doomed. The Shah’s brothers were under house arrest. His portrait had been removed from ministries and his name erased from the staff college oath. Mossadegh’s later claim that he intended to urge the Shah to return is far-fetched. Any attempt to bring him back would have caused mutiny in the government. The Shah himself would certainly not have come. On August 18, the royal couple arrived in Rome, and the Shah was contemplating a new life in the United States.

  At dawn the following morning, the prime minister summoned Sadiqi, the interior minister, and ordered preparations to be made for nationwide elections to a three-man regency council. It was the first step to a regime that Mossadegh did not want but which
he was powerless to resist. Iran was a republic in all but name.

  Friend and foe alike have recognised that Kim Roosevelt and his fellow agents engineered a remarkable reversal in fortunes between August 15 and August 19. They turned defeat into triumph and their methods would enter the training manuals. The Harvard tie and tennis-playing have bred the idea that Roosevelt was something of a ‘gentleman spy’, but his methods were anything but chivalrous. Roosevelt’s initial plan to divest Iran of its government was relatively modest and would probably have led to a few salutary executions. His second was hideous. It called for havoc on a vast scale and maximum loss of life, and contained ample provision for civil war.

  The plotters’ military network had been damaged in the wake of August 15, but the main players were at large. Zahedi had kept copies of the Shah’s edicts appointing him and dismissing Mossadegh, and herein lay an opportunity. The government had not mentioned the edicts in their version of events, but the plotters would use them to show that Mossadegh was a rebel against the constitution. Second, they would whip up public fears that the country was about to fall to the Tudeh – and Islam with it. Finally, the military network would be expanded to include the commanders of garrisons outside Tehran, who would prepare to march on the capital. Roosevelt disregarded orders that he should abandon the project and leave Iran. The project, he concluded, was ‘not quite dead’.

  Over the next three days it was brilliantly revived under a draconian regime of secrecy. This time, there would be no leaks. Publicity for the Shah’s edicts was arranged in the American and the anti-government domestic press, and copies handed out among army units. A declaration in Zahedi’s name called on all Iranian officers to be ready to sacrifice themselves for God and the Shah. The CIA had handed its hirelings tens of thousands of dollars to generate propaganda, and to ensure that crowds would riot through the capital. Some of this money found its way to the royalist Ayatollah Behbehani, and some, perhaps, to Kashani.*