Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  The coup-makers played on the perennial fear of chaos, and in this they received valuable aid from an unlikely source: the Tudeh Party. Thanks to its network of army officers, the Tudeh had known in advance of the army plot against Mossadegh, and one of its leaders may have given him warning. After August 15 all the available intelligence suggested that Zahedi would retreat to the south of the country, and the party turned its attention back to politics. The communists believed that Iran was on the cusp of change and that they must not be left behind. If there was to be a republic, the Tudeh, not the nationalists, must bring it into being.

  August 18 dawned, hot and torrid, and groups of Tudeh supporters came into the streets wearing their regulation white shirts and shouting for a ‘democratic republic’. This was code for a Soviet client state of the kind that had been set up in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria – the communists were showing their hand. Tudeh supporters gathered at the street corners and delivered passionate speeches. Then they rampaged through the city. Signs were torn down (Churchill Street was a predictable casualty), Reza Shah’s mausoleum was attacked and his statue upended with a crane.12 The evening papers were full of pictures of stricken royal bronzes.

  No one was more delighted than Kim Roosevelt. It was ‘the best thing we could have hoped for.’ The next day there was more rioting and the nationalists and the communists were in violent competition to rid the city of all signs of the monarchy. Mossadegh gave the order that the surviving statues of Reza Shah be removed in an orderly fashion, a decision he later justified on the grounds that he could not oppose the will of the people. Goaded to a frenzy by Roosevelt’s agents provocateurs, the Tudeh smashed the windows of mosques, ransacked the headquarters of a Mossadeghist party and bayed for the expulsion of US diplomats. The New York Times correspondent Kennett Love was nearly pulled from a taxi-cab and lynched by demonstrators fresh from toppling a statue of Reza Shah. Love was not the only American to be attacked, and it was all, of course, grist to Roosevelt’s mill.

  Through their actions on August 18, the Tudeh showed that they considered the ban on the party to be inoperative. State factories were paralysed by demonstrations to demand the release of communists from jail. The party’s banned organ was being touted openly and cadres in Sepah Square, a short distance from Palace Street, unfurled a large banner which read, ‘Long Live the Tudeh Party of Iran.’

  The impression was of a rampant Tudeh on a collision course with all that traditional Iran held dear, and the coup-makers were egging the pudding. Pro-Shah newspapers played up the communist menace and mullahs received threatening letters in red ink, purportedly from the Tudeh. In fact, they had been forged in the house of Ayatollah Behbehani.14

  After lunch, Mossadegh was alarmed enough to order the security forces to stop the demonstrations. He also gave instructions for anyone calling for a republic to be pursued judicially. With these decisions Mossadegh signalled that he would not become hostage to the Tudeh and its demands. But the Tudeh was the most disciplined force standing between him and defeat, and he was taking them out of the game.

  For the royalist armed forces, Mossadegh’s new attitude was an opportunity to expiate their hatred of the communist enemy. Trucks screeched around the capital disgorging armed men, who turned on the protesters with savage joy. In Kennett Love’s telling, soldiers sent to quell fighting between the Tudeh and a group of Mossadeghists ‘clubbed both factions impartially while shouting “Long Live the Shah, Death to Mossadegh”. Carried away by excitement, the soldiers swarmed into Lalehzar Street and forced people emerging from movie theatres to repeat the same slogans on pain of a drubbing from a rifle butt or a jab from a bayonet.’15

  According to Love, the soldiers were ordered back to barracks ‘as hastily as possible’, but the damage had been done. Hundreds of Tudeh supporters had been arrested and injured. Tear gas hung in the air. The communists licked their wounds and the coup-makers plotted for tomorrow.

  Mossadegh was imperfectly aware that he presided over a situation of great peril. Few in his entourage had more than an inkling. He and his advisers were occupied with issues that now seem insignificant. The early morning of August 19 found Mossadegh discussing provisions for the widows of men who had been killed in the July uprising. Ghollamhossein was intending to view a potential site for the mental hospital he and his father had been planning. Sanjabi drove off to address cadets at the staff college and Shayegan brought his wife and infant child down to the city from his house in the mountains in order to have a bath. Muhammad-Ali Safari was bent over his desk in the offices of Bakhtar-e Emrooz. The first he would know of the sedition was the crash of breaking glass and the roar of a mob intent on killing him.

  At 8 a.m. Ghollamhossein Sadiqi got to the interior ministry and busied himself with preparations for elections to the forthcoming regency council.16 News came that groups of people, gathered in Sepah Square, were shouting for the Shah and that the police were urging them on. Sadiqi ordered a junior to take a ministry car and investigate, but the keys could not be found. He telephoned the chief of police, who professed complete ignorance of events. Then General Riyahi phoned to say that the chief of police had been sacked.

  The situation in southern and central Tehran was getting worse. Several groups, two or three hundred strong, had been disgorged by military trucks and were on the move around the bazaar. There was a fight in Baharestan Square between royalists and government supporters, while the security forces sat and watched. Roosevelt’s local agents led rioters to the offices of Bakhtar-e Emrooz, which were plundered and burned. (Muhammad-Ali Safari fled down a fire escape.) The premises of pro-Tudeh newspapers, a communist theatre and several Mossadeghist parties met the same fate.

  At about 10 a.m. another group had set out from the fruit and vegetable wholesale market in south Tehran. Recruited from the ‘houses of strength’, traditional sports clubs with links to protection rackets, fired up with rumours that the Tudeh planned to fly their flag over the town hall, these muscle-bound wrestlers were led by the celebrated thick-neck Teyyeb Haj-Rezai, and carried knives, clubs and pictures of the Shah. Their numbers swollen by bystanders, many of them young boys or soldiers, they commandeered buses and trucks and forced passing drivers to turn on their headlights and honk in support of the monarch.

  Another group of thick-necks, this one led by ‘Icy’ Ramazan, joined Teyyeb’s. There was also a contingent of bare-foot slum-dwellers. ‘Anyone they didn’t like the look of,’ recalled one Mossadegh supporter, ‘they beat up.’ The most picturesque column was organised by a celebrated madam, and was constituted of prostitutes with names like Sugar-lip Zeynab and Saucer-eyed Azam.17 They shouted, ‘Immortal Shah!’

  In the administrative heart of the city, the marchers forced their way into official buildings, where they pinned the Shah’s picture to the walls. Sadiqi saw them from his window in the interior ministry and phoned the martial-law rule administrator to ask why they were not being challenged. ‘We don’t trust our own men,’ came the reply. The mayor of Tehran called Sadiqi and told him in French that the mayoralty had been overrun and the guards were doing nothing.

  In Rome, Shah Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi was unaware of any of this. While he sipped his morning coffee at the Hotel Excelsior, the royalist tide rolled north.

  Something extraordinary was happening. A centralised, modern government of men with French PhDs was being challenged by gangs of cut-throats while the army and police looked on. From the side of the road, students, civil servants and other citizens also watched, dumbfounded. Shopkeepers shuttered their shops and stood around protectively. Even so, it was hard to believe that this movement could amount to much. The crowds were not particularly big, and many streets were unaffected. The road from Tehran to Shemiran was quieter than usual – if only because the shops were closed.

  Everyone with a radio tuned in. The 12.30 p.m. bulletin concentrated exclusively on foreign news. When would Mossadegh call his supporters onto the streets to sweep the trash away? />
  The picture we have of the prime minister on August 19 is not a flattering one. He oscillated between inertia and unfounded optimism. His judgement was fatally impaired. Ultimately, he tied himself up with his own principles. Then he lay down to die.

  Several times before and during the events of that day, Mossadegh rejected offers of armed intervention in his favour. He recognised the danger of armies within armies and quashed the idea of a government militia. Offers came from the tribes: let us march on Tehran. Communists begged to form a ‘national guard’ under his command. Each time, he said no. Whether or not, as has been claimed, he received and rejected Tudeh offers of aid on the 19th, it is clear that Mossadegh neither hoped for nor solicited communist help as his government went under.

  All this is in keeping with Mossadegh’s character and politics. He was instinctively a pacifist. Also, he did not trust the Tudeh. He would not give guns to a group that would inevitably turn against him. But this does not explain why he refrained from using the popular support which remained at his disposal. Even now, without his intervening, his supporters in the bazaar had repulsed the royalists. The bazaar stood, a beacon of Mossadeghism! Why was there no declaration from 109 Palace Street, no word from the nationalist parties? Why did he stay transfixed as the sedition gained momentum and eventually overwhelmed him?

  At least until late morning, Mossadegh seems not to have taken seriously the threat posed by the disturbances. Riot and affray had been features of Tehran for four days – why should this be any different? Mossadegh also had an exaggerated faith in the willingness of his security forces to quell the crowds. But the men who had pummelled the communists the previous night would not pummel citizens marching at the behest of a senior retired general and in the name of the Shah. And, as the morning wore on, the mobsters and servicemen were joined by ordinary, traditional-minded Iranians. Some of them had been supporters of Mossadegh, but Fatemi’s radicalism had convinced them that the nationalists and the communists sought the same thing. The CIA’s propaganda had encouraged them in that verdict. So, they joined the royalists.

  Now Mossadegh made a terrible error of judgement. The police chief’s chair lay vacant. A brigadier called Shahandeh was to fill it. Then, around noon, Mossadegh phoned his interior minister to announce that he had had a change of heart. The new police chief would not be Shahandeh. It would be Mossadegh’s own great-nephew, Brigadier Muhammad Daftary.

  Daftary was in league with Zahedi. Everyone knew it. A warrant for his arrest had been drafted, but Mossadegh had suppressed it. The prime minister could not believe that a member of his own family would betray him. That morning, Daftary came to his uncle and wept. He beseeched him: ‘What better time than now for me to perform a service for you?’ Mossadegh was at his most vulnerable, and was swayed by the younger man. ‘Go and take over the police,’ he told Daftary. This is what Daftary did, and his first significant action was to order his men to desist from interfering with the marchers. Then he turned events decisively in the plotters’ favour.

  Just before noon, Brigadier Riyahi ordered a force of infantry and Sherman tanks to deal with the crowds heading north. The force was met by Daftary, who issued an emotional appeal. ‘We are all comrades and brothers,’ he declared. ‘We all love the Shah.’ For the members of this punitive force to be reminded of their sworn obligation to the Crown must have been excruciating. They wavered, dissolved. There was a love-in instead of a slaughter. The royalists commandeered the Shermans and went off to take the radio building.

  The Shah’s supporters would call the events of August 19 a popular uprising in favour of the monarchy. In fact it was a military coup, with the fate of a government decided by men in uniform. An account in the daily newspaper Keyhan makes this graphically clear: ‘At 2pm the police headquarters and army headquarters were encircled by six tanks and several lorries carrying soldiers . . . Brigadier Daftary came to the police headquarters with several jeeps belonging to the customs police, and occupied it.’ The Keyhan reporter also observed ‘several lorries carrying soldiers and a number of policemen and a great many fully-equipped armoured cars, in addition to several trucks . . . all bearing pictures of the Shah and Reza Shah, front and back.’18

  Brigadier Riyahi had instilled in Mossadegh a specious sense of optimism. Now the chain of command collapsed. Daftary was by no means the only traitor. Commanding officers kept their men out of the way or steered them towards benevolent neutrality. One major led a successful attack on the police jail to free the prisoners, who included General Nader Batmanghelich, Zahedi’s choice as chief of the army staff. From noon onwards the crowds took their orders from the army and the police. A handful of treasonous officers were arrested. One Mossadegh supporter dismissed the arrests as ‘an antidote administered after death’.

  At 2.30 p.m. Ghollamhossein Sadiqi abandoned the interior ministry and drove north. He found the prime minister huddled on the first floor with his shell-shocked inner circle of allies and secretaries, and Palace Street defended by tanks and troops. The talk was no longer of summoning supporters onto the streets, but of a radio statement to reassure the mob that the government harboured no hostile designs on the Shah. Mossadegh refused: ‘I have no issue with the Shah that I should put out such a statement.’

  From around noon, hostile groups of civilians and soldiers, including members of the officially disbanded royal guard, had started arriving in the vicinity of Palace Street, but were scattered by the defenders. Gradually, more and more attackers arrived and the battle for the prime minister’s house began in earnest with rifle and machine-gun fire. The prime-ministerial guard had taken over a four-storey building dominating the northern entrance to Palace Street, and there were machine-gun nests in the prime minister’s own compound. From these positions, the guard responded with fusillades of their own.

  Zahra and her female servants were among the last people to leave before the siege was complete. They were taken away by one of Mossadegh’s nephews to Mansoureh and Ahmad Matine-Daftary’s home nearby. Inside the besieged house there was an ominous calm. Hassibi was on a chair in the meeting room, lost in thought. Fatemi sat opposite him. Shayegan and Razavi were in an adjoining room, resting on the carpet. Sadiqi said he was hungry and a servant brought bread and jam and tea. ‘I had just put in my second mouthful,’ he recalled, ‘when I heard the sound of a commotion and a struggle from the radio in the next room.’ Everyone gathered around the set. There was more commotion, followed by a long silence. Then it was announced that the government had fallen and that the Shah was on his way home.

  These were lies, of course, but who was to know? The radio had replaced the pulpit as the country’s chief means of communication and propaganda, and Mossadegh had taken no special measures to protect it. The radio station had fallen with the loss of just three lives.

  Mossadegh was sitting on his bed in his own room. Suddenly he let out a wail and the others rushed in and found him weeping bitterly. Mossadegh was not crying for himself or his government, but because the radio had announced that Fatemi and Sanjabi had been killed. This, too, was a lie. Fatemi was still in the building! Sadiqi calmed the prime minister ‘with difficulty’. Then Brigadier Riyahi phoned. He was choking with emotion. He announced that all strategic locations in the capital had fallen and that there was no point continuing the struggle. At 5 p.m., Riyahi fled his post and went into hiding.

  By then, the military equation at Palace Street had changed in favour of the putschists. The decisive event was the arrival of the Sherman tanks which had been standing outside the radio station. These had been sent by the New York Times correspondent Kennett Love, who later bragged about his role in ‘speeding the final victory of the royalists’.* Shells fired by the Shermans destroyed first-floor rooms looking onto Palace Street, and disabled the tanks of the defenders.

  In the heat of the battle, Colonel Ezzatullah Mumtaz, who had taken command of the defence force, came to Mossadegh and explained the bleakness of the situation. M
umtaz’s men had mounted a furious defence, inflicting severe casualties and fighting on even when badly wounded. Now they were outgunned, and ammunition was running low. Mumtaz promised Mossadegh that he would fight to the death. Mossadegh embraced him and sent him out again.

  Mossadegh then received Brigadier Fouladvand, the commander of the attackers, who advised him to resign. He refused, but he did agree to the raising of a white flag. The shelling only intensified. The radio announced that Mossadegh had resigned: another lie. At 5.25 p.m., General Zahedi broadcast to the nation. He declared that he was the country’s legal prime minister, named by the Shah.

  The occupants of 109 Palace Street were now unable to communicate with the outside world. They were utterly alone.

  Mossadegh waited to die. He sat on his bed in a pair of grey pyjamas. Around him were some of his closest allies. From the seventeenth majles, the cabinet and his own secretariat, they had gathered that morning to consult and aid their leader. Only Fatemi and Sanjabi had subsequently left.* The others sat in the prime minister’s stifling little room with the iron door that Mossadegh had had installed shut against the corridor outside.

  A few hours earlier, these same men had been giants striding into a new epoch. Now they were isolated and debased, sitting or slouching around the famous bed as the bullets slammed into the brickwork and ricocheted off the metal roof, and the dust from the ruined perimeter walls swirled around them. There was a hideous clang when a bullet smashed through the window of the prime minister’s meeting room and into the iron door.