In 1965 the Shah told a French journalist that Mossadegh had been confined to his estate for his own safety, for the people ‘would lynch him if he returned to his home in Tehran . . . he is happy where he is. He eats well and, at eighty-six, engages in his favourite sport: riding donkeys. What more could he wish for?’11 The Shah’s uneasy bragadaccio confirmed the truth of the adage about two dervishes happily sharing the same rug and two kings who cannot share a continent.
The Shah swaggered and philandered; he assembled wealth; he dropped friends like Ernest Perron as brutally as he dropped his wives. And yet, he wanted to be known as a good man. How could he be? The country had had experience of a good man.
Mossadegh was three years younger than the Shah had made him out, and he did not ride donkeys – indeed, the Savakis crawling over his estate would probably not have let him do so. While the Shah strove to be loved and respected, growing only more feared and detested, Mossadegh had to do nothing for his reputation to grow. His actions as prime minister spoke for themselves. He had done his duty and played no part in his supporters’ post-mortems of the coup and his government. He was not heard expressing regret for anything he had done. The Shah, by contrast, would buck-pass and fish for sympathy to his grave.
Mossadegh’s existence had now been reduced to a few elements: family, correspondence and overseeing the Najmiyeh Hospital and bits of property. He was forever engaged in small acts of generosity. Hundreds of letters were smuggled into Ahmadabad from supporters and well-wishers, and none went unanswered. He was no longer performing, and the sobriety of his decline belied the old caricature of the bed-ridden maniac. There was no shrieking or writhing in pyjamas. That had been part of the performance, and now the performance was over. The tears, when they came, were real.
After the coup, his picture on exercise books was pasted over with that of the Shah, but schoolchildren found that by holding the books up to the light they could see Mossadegh’s face looking straight through the sovereign. When Zahra went out to buy bread in Tehran, strangers would sidle up and request a signed photograph of her husband. ‘They seem to think this ne’er do well is a prophet!’ she joked, but she took to carrying around with her a wad of such photos.12
Once, permission was given for a handyman to come to Ahmadabad to fix a fault, without being told whose house he was entering, and he was bent to his task when the former prime minister appeared at the door. The man stared, his tools clattered to the floor, and he dropped to kiss Mossadegh’s hand.
His legend shone all the brighter next to the growing irrelevancy of those erstwhile allies who had thrown their lot in with the Court. Ayatollah Kashani had revelled in the coup, but he soon fell out with the government he had helped bring to power, and his influence leaked away long before he died in 1962. Neither Hossein Makki nor Muzaffar Baghai achieved the high office both had coveted, and the latter died in 1987 in a revolutionary jail after falling foul of Khomeini’s regime.
Former possessions arrived at Ahmadabad in the last years of Mossadegh’s life, chattels surfacing from the wreck of 109 Palace Street. In the spring of 1958, for instance, Mossadegh received a book which had been looted and found its way into the hands of a bookseller in Baharestan Square. Mossadegh gave it away, as a ‘keepsake’, to the man who had returned it to him.13
Mossadegh continued to receive letters from the family of Hossein Fatemi, and they consoled each other on their shared loss. ‘Whenever I think of the suffering that was inflicted on that brave man,’ he wrote to Fatemi’s nephew, ‘I cannot help but be affected, and I am sure that his good name will forever remain on the pages of the history of Iran.’14 In another letter, to one of the tribal leaders of Fars, Mossadegh recalled the man’s offer on the day of the coup for him to flee to Shiraz and accept his protection. Mossadegh had rejected this offer for the same reason he had rejected all the others, because he hated bloodshed and would not be its cause.
Such a harmless old retiree – but the Shah would not leave him alone. No sooner had Mossadegh taken up residence at Ahmadabad than a crowd of hoodlums was dispatched to threaten him, and he was forced to ask for guards. They came in the form of a contingent of soldiers and two Savakis, and one of their first acts was to prevent him from walking around the estate and chatting with his tenants. With the overthrow of King Faisal, and the Shah once more shivering in the republican breeze, the guard around Mossadegh was supplemented.
To his jailers, he showed the same consideration he had shown during his incarceration at Birjand. In Ghollamhossein’s recollection, the Savakis were treated as ‘part of the household’. They appropriated two rooms that Mossadegh had had built as schoolrooms for the village, and were given their share of whatever Mossadegh ate. One winter Ghollamhossein bought ten woollen coats on his father’s orders. Mossadegh took one, a few were distributed among the villagers, and two went to the Savakis.15
More than ever, he returned to the ascetic tradition, where simplicity is associated with virtue. He would rise early, dress in his barak costume, and drink a cup of tea with bread and cheese. Then he went out and sat in the small wooden hut he had had built in the garden, from where he could watch the farm workers come and go. Lunch and dinner were simple and repetitive. An earthquake caused cracks to appear in the walls; he stopped them with newspaper. When he learned how expensive oranges had become in Tehran, he told his children not to buy him oranges any more.
He was mostly subdued, and often depressed by the state of the country, but he livened up when the family came to visit. After sharing the first few months of his exile with him, Zahra had returned to her place in Heshmat ul-Dawleh Street, and after that she came on Fridays with the children or whoever else happened to be visiting – their grandson Hedayat Matine-Daftary, for instance, or Mossadegh’s nephew Farhad Diba. The family treated him with that combination of affection and respect which gives texture and meaning to relations between the old and the young. A donkey might be saddled up for one of the great-grandchildren, and Ghollamhossein would dole out medicines to ailing villagers. Mossadegh studiously avoided the favouritism that mars many Iranian families, and he retained his old-world courtesy, on one occasion abstaining from breakfast until a thoughtless house-guest bestirred herself from bed several hours after he had risen.16
In 1960 the newspapers serialised the Shah’s memoirs, complete with an account of Mossadegh’s premiership and the events of August 1953. Mossadegh was amused by the Shah’s egregious misrepresentations, but they spurred him to give his version of events and he began a second volume of memoirs dealing with his premiership and his dispute with the Shah, copies of which he gave Ghollamhossein and Ahmad for safekeeping. The Savakis got wind but did not manage to find the memoirs.
Zahra Zia al-Saltaneh died in 1965. She had caught pneumonia after taking a dip at her summerhouse in the hills. A woman of independent means and connections, she had kept her door open to all; she had been the centre of a huge extended family and was much loved. The couple ended their married life on terms of wry affection. Mossadegh would tease her for being so often at prayer, saying, ‘Madam, I should like to know what it is that you want from this God of yours, that you should disturb him day and night.’ And she would reply with her usual put-down, ‘What would you know? Away with you!’17 The Shah did not allow Mossadegh to go to her as she lay in the Najmiyeh Hospital, and she died without him by her side.
Mossadegh was devastated by the loss. Zahra had ‘endured everything that befell me . . . and when she came to Ahmadabad she was a consolation and had a great effect on me. It was my desire to leave this world before her but now I have stayed and she has gone and there is nothing to be done but to ask God to take me as soon as possible and to release me from this pitiable existence.’18 Mossadegh had expressed similar sentiments periodically over the past quarter of a century, only for politics to scatter the morbid cloud. He had shown himself to be physically and mentally stronger than he had led anyone to believe. Now, he had had enough.
> His mind remained alert until quite near the end, when a backgammon partner caught him removing his pieces before he was allowed to. ‘You can remove yours too, if you want,’ he said, and the games stopped. At the end of 1966 visitors noticed a swelling on Mossadegh’s left cheek and he was allowed to visit Tehran for tests. His minders came with him.
In Tehran, between tests, he was astonished by the number of cars on the streets, and saddened by the superficiality of modern life, referring to one of the magazines he never saw in Ahmadabad, and saying, ‘Nowadays people are only interested in the surface and the appearance of things.’19 Sometimes he was in good humour, teasing a young well-wisher by asking her what sort of husband she would like: ‘Fat or thin? Bald or with a full head of hair?’ But the test results were ominous. The swelling was cancerous.
Those who loved him wanted to save him but he was already thinking about his legacy. He was furious when he found out that Ghollamhossein had applied to the Shah for permission to take him out of the country. ‘Why should I go to Europe? What good are you, who claim to be doctors and who studied abroad? If you really are doctors, then treat me here!’ In the event, the Shah granted permission for foreign doctors to come and treat Mossadegh in situ. This made him even crosser. ‘The curses of God be upon anyone who wants to spend the equivalent of several poor families’ living expenses to bring in a foreign doctor to treat me!’
The cancer made it difficult for him to eat, and he got thinner. There was a successful operation to remove the tumour, followed by an ill-advised course of electrotherapy, which had a calamitous effect, bringing on a recurrence of the old internal bleeding that had troubled him since his youth. He was moved to the Najmiyeh Hospital, where the family mounted a vigil in the corridor outside his room, and he whispered to them his last words of love.
He died shortly before 7 a.m. on March 5 1967.
Epilogue
A Movement in Men’s Minds
Mossadegh lived to see his ideals submerged under a tide of petrodollars, and the tide would become a flood after the big oil-price rises of the early 1970s. Oil had turned the Middle East into the most coveted region on Earth, and it was increasingly the producers, not the companies, that called the shots. World demand followed a steep trajectory upwards, fuelling hitherto unimaginable booms in Iran, Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Participation agreements, in which the producers acquired partial ownership of the oil they sold, superseded the old concessions, and in 1972 the Shah forced through a deal whereby the consortium companies became service contractors to the National Iranian Oil Company. On the face of things it was nationalisation redux, but it occasioned little jubilation for the Shah’s Iran remained as tightly wedded to America as ever and could not absorb all the new money. Inflation, corruption and discontent rose to smite him.
The Shah had become a dictator and the most noticeable of his adversaries were radical Islamists and Leftists. Mossadegh’s ideals were also being expressed as the national struggle reached its climax, but the 1979 revolution was only partially Mossadeghist, even if its nationalist tenor owed much to memories of 1953. In fact, as Ayatollah Khomeini quickly showed, he was no more sympathetic to Mossadegh’s ideas than the Shah had been. ‘We are not interested in oil,’ he quickly announced after his triumphant return from exile. ‘We want Islam.’ As for western-style democracy, it amounted to ‘the usurpation of God’s authority to rule’.1 Khomeini had worked out a way of reassuring people that republicanism would not be a danger to religion, and that was to make his republic an Islamic one.
Here was Khomeini’s solution to the fissures created by rapid social change and the Cold War. His was not the only answer being proposed. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Nasser’s pan-Arabism had evolved into despotic National Socialism, spawning such undistinguished offspring as Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad. US-backed Turkey oscillated between military juntas and sclerotic civilian democracy, and Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies continued to prosper materially under American tutelage, while barely advancing towards democracy or an independent foreign policy. The United States and the Soviet Union both helped Saddam Hussein in his eight-year war with Khomeini’s Iran, while the US promoted radical Islamism of the Saudi variety as a counterweight to communism in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
For as long as the Cold War was prosecuted with vigour in the historic lands of Islam, the rights of the individual and national independence were unlikely to prosper. And once it had finished, and the Soviet empire collapsed, the region’s autocrats used various ruses to retain the support of the sole remaining superpower. They promised to be a bulwark against radical Islam, or Iran, or Saddam, and to tolerate Israel. In return, the United States forgave them a multitude of sins. No American president wished to ‘lose’ Saudi Arabia or Egypt, the way Jimmy Carter had ‘lost’ Iran in 1979.
Only with the passing of George W. Bush’s presidency and America’s declining appetite for overseas intervention did the US stop seeing foreign policy as a zero-sum game. Egypt was neither won nor lost when Hosni Mubarak fell at the beginning of 2011; rather, its people took a step towards autonomy that they should have been able to take decades before. The Arab spring has not only affected American clients, as Syria’s upheavals have shown, nor has it been confined to Arabs – it was prefigured by Iran’s Green Movement of 2009. On the contrary, it is connected to the ‘wider movement in men’s minds’ that Mossadegh’s friend George McGhee identified in the 1950s, and which later American governments very often disregarded in their pursuit of short-term US goals. The movement will take decades to spend itself and it is hard to predict how it will turn out. It is a hazardous and unruly exploration of new ways to live and to run society – modernity itself.
Few foreign interventions in the Middle East have been as ignoble as the coup of 1953, and few Middle Eastern leaders have less deserved our hostility than Muhammad Mossadegh. His understanding of independence and democracy was the result of a long immersion in the ideas of the West, and an even more profound identification with his own society and people. Nationalism had been a force for decades, but he was the first to try to build a modern Middle Eastern state on the basis of collective and individual liberty. The freedom of a person to speak or associate is a charade if the government representing him makes policy on the basis of outside pressure, or spirits criminal suspects away to foreign jurisdictions. This is why George W. Bush’s promotion of democratic reform in the Arab world aroused such mistrust; it was accompanied by strong-arm tactics redolent of Britain’s colonial administrators.
With Mossadegh’s fall Iran was condemned to a quarter of a century of vulgar tyranny, and the explosion of 1979. This is not to postulate a heavenly outcome had there been no coup, for myriad other calamities might have befallen Mossadegh’s government, but it is likely that Iran’s history would have been much happier than it has been. Mossadegh’s Iran might have become a positive example for other countries, and the region’s human development accelerated, for his dream was substantially the same as the dream that became manifest with the Arab Spring of 2011 – and it anticipated those events by sixty years.
What can also be said, with as much confidence as the opacity of the Russian archives permit, is that in August 1953 Iran was not about to go communist.* For all their ability to disrupt, the Tudeh were nowhere near strong enough to take power on their own, and Mossadegh had no intention of being their cat’s paw. With Soviet foreign policy in stasis following Stalin’s death, Moscow was taken by surprise by the second coup, and its response was muted and confused; and the Tudeh, of course, had followed Mossadegh’s orders not to take to the streets. Years later, American officials who had been responsible for monitoring the Tudeh admitted that the party had been ‘really not very powerful’, and that ‘higher-level US officials routinely exaggerated its strength’.2 In the end, Marxism would only have mass appeal in Iran when it accommodated elements of Islam – at which point, of course, it became somet
hing other than Marxism.
Mossadegh’s overthrow was as much a British as an American action, and the jubilation was shared. In the jovial but not always reliable account he wrote of events, Kim Roosevelt described the meeting he had with a recumbent Churchill on his way back to the US through London. The prime minister was recovering from a stroke, and drifted in and out of sleep, but he was wide awake for the climax, which prompted him to declare, ‘If I had been but a few years younger, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture.’3 Roosevelt dined out on that in his later life as a consultant with interests in Iran – as he did on everything else to do with the coup.
For all Churchill’s pleasure, the writing was on the wall for Britain and its overseas mission. Mossadeghism struck again in 1956, when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, and Eden, Churchill’s successor as prime minister, launched an invasion along with France and Israel. This time Eisenhower did not cooperate. He was furious at Eden’s precipitate action, and US and Anglo-French vessels came within an ace of attacking each other on the high seas. There was a run on the pound and Eisenhower would only approve emergency financial aid if Eden withdrew his forces. Broken, embittered, Eden did as he was told, and it was a débâcle from every angle. The canal was lost and Anglo-American relations poisoned. Nasser’s government lived on, more powerful than ever, and his pan-Arab ambitions became an instrument of Soviet penetration of the Middle East.
After that the British were in constant retreat. In the thirteen years following Suez, nearly all the African, Far Eastern and West Indian colonies gained independence. Huge sections of the armed forces were dismantled. Britain ceded its place to America under the Middle Eastern sun, and in 1968 the British withdrew militarily from the Persian Gulf. The Shah of Iran hoped to fill the gap and become the region’s policeman. The Nixon administration agreed that he should, and by the mid-1970s Iran accounted for half America’s total arms sales abroad.
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