All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  Realizing the immense value of this new resource, the British in 1919 imposed the harsh Anglo-Persian Agreement on Ahmad Shah’s impotent regime, assuring its approval by bribing the Iranian negotiators. Under its provisions the British assumed control over Iran’s army, treasury, transport system, and communications network. To secure their new power, they imposed martial law and began ruling by fiat. Lord Curzon, who as foreign secretary was one of the agreement’s chief architects, argued its necessity in terms that crystallized a century of British policy toward Iran:

  If it be asked why we should undertake the task at all, and why Persia should not be left to herself and allowed to rot into picturesque decay, the answer is that her geographical position, the magnitude of our interests in the country, and the future safety of our Eastern Empire render it impossible for us now—just as it would have been impossible for us any time during the last fifty years—to disinherit ourselves from what happens in Persia. Moreover, now that we are about to assume the mandate for Mesopotamia, which will make us coterminous with the western frontiers of Asia, we cannot permit the existence between the frontiers of our Indian Empire and Baluchistan and those of our new protectorate, a hotbed of misrule, enemy intrigue, financial chaos and political disorder. Further, if Persia were to be alone, there is every reason to fear that she would be overrun by Bolshevik influence from the north. Lastly, we possess in the southwestern corner of Persia great assets in the shape of oil fields, which are worked for the British navy and which give us a commanding interest in that part of the world.

  The Anglo-Persian Agreement removed the last vestiges of Iran’s sovereignty, but it also infused the nationalist movement with new passion. Iranian patriots were inspired by the emergence of anticolonial forces in other countries, including several under British rule. Radicals in northern provinces established a Communist party, and after Soviet troops landed on the Caspian coast and declared the surrounding area an “Iranian Soviet Socialist Republic,” it seemed possible that two world powers might soon be waging war on Iranian soil. In much of the country, millions of people were living in worse conditions than they had ever known. Separatist movements gained force in several provinces. Iran was on the brink of extinction. Conditions were ripe for the rise of a charismatic leader. In 1921 he burst into the nation’s consciousness, a rough man on horseback named Reza.

  Born in the remote Alborz Mountains near the Russian border, Reza left home as a teenager to follow the family tradition of military service. Rather than join the private army of a local chief, he chose to enlist in the Cossack Brigade, the only unit in the country that was modern, disciplined, and well commanded. It had been founded by Russian officers dispatched by the Czar and served principally as a private guard for the interests of foreigners and the Qajar kings who served them. Reza signed on as a stable boy but was soon given a uniform and began rising through the ranks as Reza Khan. He was six feet four inches tall, as fierce a fighter with his scimitar as with his machine gun, and much admired for his bravery. Profane and hot-tempered, his face deeply pockmarked as a result of smallpox in childhood, he cut a fearsome figure.

  During his years as a soldier, Reza had the chance to travel through Iran and see the misery in which most of its people lived. He participated in many operations against the tribes, gangs, and bandits who controlled much of the countryside. “Whenever an expedition was sent to any part of the country to round up brigands or quell a disturbance,” one British diplomat reported, “he seems to have taken part in it.”

  Reza quickly came to share his people’s disgust with their Qajar rulers. That made him a logical tool for the British, who had tired of dealing with mercurial tribal leaders and wanted a stronger central government. They saw in the Cossack Brigade the means to impose it. To seize control of the brigade and oust its Russian officers, they resolved to stage a coup and replace the Shah’s prime minister with one of their choosing. Their candidate was a fiery ex-journalist, Sayyed Zia Tabatabai. To provide Sayyed Zia with the military power he needed, they approached Reza. He was willing. On the evening of February 20, 1921, he and a handful of his fellow officers led two thousand men to the outskirts of Tehran. He roused them with a passionate speech: “Fellow soldiers! You have offered every possible sacrifice in the defense of the land of your fathers…. But we have to confess that our loyalty has served merely to preserve the interests of a handful of traitors in the capital…. These insignificant men are the same treacherous elements who have sucked the last drop of the nation’s blood.”

  The fervor in camp was intense, and Reza, not a patient man, seized on it. Before dawn the next morning, his soldiers entered Tehran and arrested the prime minister and every member of his cabinet. To the dissolute Ahmad Shah, Reza made two demands: Sayyed Zia must be named prime minister and he himself commander of the Cossack Brigade. The Shah had neither the will nor the means to resist. Within the space of a few hours, with almost no resistance, the coup had succeeded. It was a testament to the power of the British, the weakness of the dying Qajar dynasty, and the bold self-confidence of Reza Khan.

  Cossack regiments immediately set about pacifying the country and suppressing tribal armies. Power flowed into Reza’s hands. He dismissed Sayyed Zia just three months after the coup and then forced him to leave the country. Soon afterward he persuaded the Shah himself to leave, ostensibly on a temporary trip for health reasons. Soon this ambitious soldier was prime minister, army commander, and effective head of the resurgent Iranian state.

  Reza had proclaimed himself a nationalist, but he recognized the power of his British backers and the debt he owed them. One study of the coup concluded: “There can be no doubt about the involvement of British army officers…. The day before the march to Tehran, Sayyed Zia had paid 2,000 tumans to Reza Khan and distributed 20,000 among his 2,000 men. No Iranian could have raised such a substantial amount of cash over a short period of time.”

  Once he had completed his drive to power, Reza had to choose a political framework in which to rule. He fervently admired the Turkish reformer Kemal Atatürk and for a time considered following Atatürk’s example by declaring Iran a republic and installing himself as president. That idea terrified the religious class, which had been deeply shocked by Atatürk’s decisions to abolish the sultanate and the Islamic caliphate. They insisted that Reza preserve the monarchy, and finally won him to their side.

  Although Reza was uneducated and barely literate, he had a deep understanding of the Iranian style of politics. A couple of years after his coup, he conceived a theatrical drama that he correctly calculated would carry him to the pinnacle of power. He retired to a small village, supposedly to reflect and meditate, and resigned from all his government posts. Before departing, he had arranged to be bombarded by demands that he return to power. For a time Reza pretended to resist, but then, as he had hoped, the hated Ahmad Shah announced his intention to return home. The Majlis, which had reconstituted itself after the debacle of 1911 but never managed to accumulate any real power, was horrified at this prospect. United in rebellion, it pronounced the Qajar dynasty dead and offered the Peacock Throne to Reza. He assumed it on April 25, 1926, and proclaimed himself Reza Shah. His new dynasty, he announced, would be known by the family name Pahlavi, after a language that Persians spoke before the Muslim conquest.

  Reza Shah was not averse to denouncing the British in public, but he and they had fundamental interests in common. He was the strongman they had sought, a reliable figure with whom they could bargain and whom they could, if necessary, depose. “The old Persia was a loose-knit pyramid resting on its base,” observed the always-perceptive British diplomat Harold Nicholson. “The new Persian pyramid is almost equally loose, but resting on its apex; hence, it is much easier to overthrow.”

  It was impossible for Reza Shah to pull his country out of the orbit of foreign powers, especially the all-powerful British, but after consolidating his power, he worked steadily to limit their influence. He accepted no loans from
foreign financiers, banned the sale of property to non-Iranians, revoked a concession that gave the British-owned Imperial Bank of Iran the exclusive right to issue Iranian currency, and even forbade officials of his foreign ministry to attend receptions at foreign embassies. When the British insisted that he hire European engineers to build the rail line that was one of his grandest dreams, he did so on the condition that the engineers and their families agree to stand beneath each bridge they built when a train passed over it for the first time.

  Subduing the vast expanse of Iran by military force would have required an enormous army. Instead, Reza Shah imposed his will by exemplary terror. Stories of his ruthlessness terrified and then pacified his people.

  In 1935 religious leaders called a protest against Reza Shah’s ban of the veil for women and his order that men wear billed caps that would prevent them from touching the floor with their foreheads during prayer. They gathered with several hundred believers in the sacred Khorasan mosque. As soon as Reza Shah learned of their assembly, he ordered soldiers to storm the mosque and massacre them. More than one hundred were killed. There were no further protests against his religious reforms.

  Time and again, Reza Shah resolved problems with this brand of brutal decisiveness. Once during a visit to Hamedan in western Iran, for example, he is said to have learned that people there were going hungry because bakers were hoarding wheat in order to drive up prices. He ordered the first baker he saw thrown into an oven and burned alive. By the next morning, every bakery in town was filled with low-priced bread.

  Many Iranians were appalled by stories like these, but many others, remembering that their country had enjoyed glory only when it was ruled by a powerful leader, remained silent or applauded. None could deny Reza Shah’s achievements. He began by wiping out gangs of bandits that terrorized many parts of Iran. Then he embarked on a huge construction program that gave the country new avenues, plazas, highways, factories, ports, hospitals, government buildings, railroad lines, and schools for both boys and girls. He created the country’s first civil service and the first national army it had known for centuries. He introduced the metric system, the modern calendar, the use of surnames, and civil marriage and divorce. Ever ready to scorn tradition, he restricted traditional clothing and forbade camel caravans to enter cities. He promulgated legal codes and established a network of secular courts to enforce them. In 1935 he announced that he would no longer tolerate references to his country as Persia, a word used mainly by foreigners, and would insist on Iran, the name by which its own citizens knew it. With typical resolve, he ordered that any mail from abroad addressed to Persia be returned unopened.

  Yet for all Reza Shah’s reformist passion, he did not manage a true social transformation. Under his rule, newspapers were strictly censored, labor organizing forbidden, and opposition figures murdered, jailed, or forced to flee. He forced nomadic tribes, which he considered relics of the past incompatible with a modern state, into barren settlements where thousands suffered and died. Commerce was centralized in the hands of the state and a small cadre of loyal entrepreneurs. The Shah himself became enormously wealthy by extracting bribes from foreign businesses and extorting money from tribal leaders. He confiscated so much land that at the peak of his power, he was the country’s largest landowner.

  “Reza Shah eliminated all the thieves and bandits in Iran,” one member of the British Parliament observed, “and made his countrymen realize that henceforth there would be only one thief in Iran.”

  In 1934 Reza Shah traveled to Turkey to meet Atatürk. The two men got along famously, but as they toured the Turkish countryside, the Shah became depressed and frustrated as he realized how quickly Turkey was progressing toward modernity and secularism. He returned home determined to redouble his campaign to transform Iranian society. In his zeal, he charged ahead without regard to the country’s long-established social patterns or its religious beliefs. Utterly lacking Atatürk’s statesmanship and political skill, he turned much of the population against him.

  Reza Shah was fascinated by the fascist movements that emerged in Europe during the 1930s. Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler seemed to him to be embarked on the same path he had chosen, purifying and uniting weak, undisciplined nations. He launched an oppressive campaign to obliterate the identity of minority groups, especially Kurds and Azeris, and he established a Society for Public Guidance to glorify his ideas and person. Baldur von Schirach, head of Hitler Youth, led a stream of Nazi dignitaries who visited Iran and spoke glowingly of the emerging German-Iranian alliance.

  “The cardinal goal of the German nation is to attain its past glories by promoting national pride, creating a hatred of foreigners, and preventing Jews and foreigners from embezzlement and treason,” one of the Shah’s newspapers declared. “Our goals are certainly the same.”

  Partly because he needed a foreign friend who shared his growing enmity toward Britain and the Soviet Union, Reza Shah developed great sympathy for the German cause. When World War II broke out, he declared a policy of neutrality that tilted decidedly toward Germany. He allowed hundreds of German agents to operate in Iran. Many worked to build support networks among regional warlords. Western leaders feared that the Nazis were planning to use Iran as a platform for an attack across the Soviet Union’s southern border that would greatly complicate the Allied war effort. To prevent that, British and Soviet troops entered Iran on August 25, 1941. Their planes dropped leaflets over Tehran. “We have decided that the Germans must go,” they said, “and if Iran will not deport them, then the English and the Russians will.”

  Some Iranians must have appreciated the irony of these two countries positing themselves as Iran’s friends and protectors, but there was little they could do. Iran’s army yielded in a matter of days. After seizing strategic points around the country, Allied commanders demanded that Reza Shah sever his government’s ties to Germany and allow the free use of his territory by their forces. If he had not alienated himself from almost every segment of Iranian society, and if he had kept a cadre of wise advisers around him instead of systematically exiling or murdering them, he might have been able to resist. Instead he found himself alone, his dreams shattered by his own narrow-mindedness, corruption, and boundless egotism.

  Reza Shah did not wish to work for the Allies, and they had no use for him either. He abdicated on September 16, 1941. The next day his eldest son, twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Reza, was sworn in to succeed him. No more was heard from Reza, who died in Johannesburg three years later.

  Although Reza Shah imagined himself a modernizing visionary, in fact he reinforced the tradition of istibdad, or absolute rule, that lies at the heart of Iranian history. His reforms were superficial and, because of the brutality with which they were imposed, deeply resented by his subjects. He made no progress toward creating the sense of shared enterprise and civic responsibility that is at the heart of successful societies. His efforts to rid Iran of foreign influence were praiseworthy in theory but disastrous in effect. In the end, his dictatorial impulses brought him down by driving him toward an alliance with fascist powers. His departure left Iran in the hands of foreigners and a weak, confused young king. Monarchy had once again failed to resolve the country’s continuing crisis of development and identity. When World War II ended, Iranians were desperate for a new kind of leader.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Wave of Oil

  Years in the rocky Iranian desert, where smallpox raged, bandits and warlords ruled, water was all but unavailable, and temperatures often soared past 120 degrees, might have driven lesser men than George Reynolds to madness or worse. Reynolds, however, was one of those legendary figures whose persistence and audacity have changed world history. He was a self-taught geologist and a petroleum engineer with several expeditions in the Sumatran jungle to his credit. During the first decade of the twentieth century, already in his fifties, he crisscrossed the barren wastelands of Iran in search of oil. To help him pull his wagonloads of equipment and dig
his wells, he had at his service a ragged band that included a handful of Polish and Canadian drillers, a comically incompetent Indian doctor, and several dozen tribesmen who had trouble even understanding what oil is. “A more helpless crew I seldom saw,” he lamented in one letter home.

  Home for Reynolds was London, and there his patron, the millionaire dandy William Knox D’Arcy, waited anxiously for good news. D’Arcy had made a fortune prospecting for gold in Australia but was not satisfied. He sensed that oil would prove even more valuable than gold and knew that Iran was, in the words of one geologist who had surveyed its terrain, “unquestionably petroliferous territory.” In 1901 he signed an agreement with the Shah of Iran, Muzzaffar al-Din, under which he assumed the exclusive right to prospect for oil in a vast tract of Iranian territory larger than Texas and California combined. To secure it, he gave the Shah, whom the British minister in Tehran described as “merely an elderly child,” the sum of £20,000, an equal amount in shares of his company, and a promise of 16 percent of future profits.

  D’Arcy, an elegantly mustachioed lion of London society known for extravagant gestures like hiring Enrico Caruso to sing at private parties in his Grosvenor Square mansion, never considered traveling to Iran himself. He hired Reynolds instead, and month after month, year after year, he wrote checks to support their venture. His spirits soared in January 1904 when Reynolds finally struck oil but crashed a few months later when the well ran dry. Bit by bit, his fortune slipped away. Finally he was forced to sell most of his rights to a Glasgow-based syndicate, the Burmah Oil Company, that was even wealthier than he was.