All the Shah’s Men
Page 9
For a time, Tudeh thrived as the party of modernity and European ideas. Its pro-Soviet faction, however, grew steadily stronger and finally, in 1944, seized control. Tudeh turned decisively toward Marxism and launched an intensive organizing campaign among the urban poor. It was so successful that on May Day 1946, it was able to fill the streets of Tehran and Abadan with tens of thousands of enthusiastic demonstrators. Several of its leaders won election to the Majlis that year and went on to help pass laws limiting child labor, establishing a forty-eight-hour workweek, guaranteeing maternity leaves, and setting a minimum wage.
Tudeh’s growing power tempted the Soviet Union to make a daring strike against Iran. During World War II, the three Allied powers had agreed that they would withdraw their occupation forces from Iran six months after the end of hostilities, but when that deadline came in early 1946, Stalin ignored it. Citing vague threats to Soviet security, he declared that the Red Army would remain in Iran’s northern province of Azerbaijan. When Tudeh activists there proclaimed a People’s Republic of Azerbaijan, he ordered his troops to prevent Iranian soldiers from entering the province to reestablish their authority. Soon a local militia emerged, flush with weapons from Moscow. For a time it seemed that Azerbaijan might secede entirely, perhaps to join the Soviet Union or serve as a jumping-off point for a Soviet move against Turkey. But Azerbaijanis remembered Reza Shah and rebelled at the prospect of another dictatorship. Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam, an exceptionally talented statesman, traveled to Moscow and managed to persuade Stalin to step back from the brink of confrontation. He withdrew his soldiers as General Schwarzkopf’s gendarmes marched into Tabriz, the provincial capital. The People’s Republic of Azerbaijan passed into history. Jubilant Azerbaijanis celebrated by summarily executing all the Tudeh leaders they could find.
Mohammad Reza Shah rightly feared Tudeh, which was strongly antimonarchist, but for several years after the Azerbaijan episode he could find no way to act against it. After the assassination attempt of 1949 he came up with one. All evidence suggested that the failed assassin was a religious fanatic, but the Shah ignored it and accused Tudeh of organizing the attempt. He banned it and imprisoned dozens of its leaders.
Seizing on the public sympathy that the shooting had generated, the Shah also took several other steps to increase his power. He ordered the creation of a second legislative chamber, the Senate, which had been authorized by the 1906 constitution but never established; he liked the provision that gave him the right to appoint half the senators. Then he persuaded the Majlis to pass a bill allowing him to dissolve both chambers and call new elections at his pleasure. Finally and perhaps most important, he won from the Majlis a change in the way prime ministers were appointed. Under the constitution, the Majlis chose them and the Shah gave his assent. Now the system would work the other way, with the Shah choosing and the Majlis voting afterward to confirm or reject his nominee.
Mohammad Reza Shah took all of these steps with the discreet advice and support of the British. For many years, British officials had taken it as a matter of simple logic that since they had such a vital commercial stake in Iran, they must keep it stable and friendly. Without their assent, Mohammad Reza would not have been able to ascend the throne, and he fully understood the debt he owed them. When violent protests broke out at their refinery in 1946, they came to collect.
The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers’ cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operated. In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million—the equivalent of $112 million dollars—and gave Iran just £7 million. To make matters worse, it never complied with its commitment under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah to give laborers better pay and more chance for advancement, nor had it built the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, who in 1949 became director of Iran’s petroleum institute, was appalled by what he found at Abadan:
Wages were fifty cents a day. There was no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation. The workers lived in a shantytown called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, without running water or electricity, let alone such luxuries as iceboxes or fans. In winter the earth flooded and became a flat, perspiring lake. The mud in town was knee-deep, and canoes ran alongside the roadways for transport. When the rains subsided, clouds of nipping, small-winged flies rose from the stagnant waters to fill the nostrils, collecting in black mounds along the rims of cooking pots and jamming the fans at the refinery with an unctuous glue.
Summer was worse. It descended suddenly without a hint of spring. The heat was torrid, the worst I’ve ever known—sticky and unrelenting—while the wind and sandstorms whipped off the desert hot as a blower. The dwellings of Kaghazabad, cobbled from rusted oil drums hammered flat, turned into sweltering ovens…. In every crevice hung the foul, sulfurous stench of burning oil—a pungent reminder that every day twenty thousand barrels, or one million tons a year, were being consumed indiscriminately for the functioning of the refinery, and AIOC never paid the government a cent for it.
To the management of AIOC in their pressed ecru shirts and air-conditioned offices, the workers were faceless drones…. In the British section of Abadan there were lawns, rose beds, tennis courts, swimming pools and clubs; in Kaghazabad there was nothing—not a tea shop, not a bath, not a single tree. The tiled reflecting pool and shaded central square that were part of every Iranian town, no matter how poor or dry, were missing here. The unpaved alleyways were emporiums for rats. The man in the grocery store sold his wares while sitting in a barrel of water to avoid the heat. Only the shriveled, mud-brick mosque in the old quarter offered hope in the form of divine redemption.
Under the leadership of Sir William Fraser, a famously obstinate Scotsman who hated the idea of compromise, Anglo-Iranian rejected every appeal to reform. Fraser’s militancy and that of the British government were easy to understand. Britain had risen to world power largely because of its success in exploiting the natural resources of subject nations. More than half of Anglo-Iranian’s profits went directly to the British government, which owned 51 percent of the shares. It paid millions of additional pounds each year in taxes and also supplied the Royal Navy with all the oil it needed at a fraction of the market price. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was not exaggerating when he observed that without oil from Iran, there would be “no hope of our being able to achieve the standard of living at which we are aiming in Great Britain.”
Iranians, of course, found it difficult to generate much sympathy for the British. Members of the Majlis began demanding that the oil company offer Iran a better deal, and in 1949 ten of them went so far as to submit a bill that would revoke its concession. Their pressure and the evident threat of continued violence at Abadan became too intense for the British to ignore. They needed a new framework to relegitimize their position in Iran.
Three months after the attempt on the Shah’s life, Fraser arrived in Tehran to make his offer. The contract he proposed became known as the Supplemental Agreement, since it was intended to supplement the one Reza Shah signed in 1933. It offered Iran several improvements: a guarantee that Anglo-Iranian’s annual royalty payments would not drop below £4 million, a reduction of the area in which it would be allowed to drill, and a promise that more Iranians would be trained for administrative positions. It did not, however, offer Iranians any greater voice in the company’s management or give them the right to audit the company’s books. The Iranian prime minister took this proposal as a basis for discussion and invited Fraser to negotiate their differences. Fraser dismissed him, declared that his offer was final, and flew back to London aboard his private plane.
“The British want the whole world,” Finance Minister Abbasgholi Golshayan lamented after Fraser stormed out of Tehran. But Mohammad Reza Shah, who knew he must do what Britain wanted, ordered the cabinet to accept the Supplemental Agreement, and o
n July 17, 1949, it did so. To take effect, however, it had to be approved by the Majlis, which was beyond the Shah’s control.
Many members of the Majlis publicly denounced the Supplemental Agreement even before the cabinet accepted it. Others turned against it when Finance Minister Golshayan, whose position should have made him a faithful servant of the British, presented a fifty-page report he had commissioned from Gilbert Gidel, a renowned professor of international law at the University of Paris, that documented the accounting tricks by which Anglo-Iranian was cheating Iran out of huge sums of money. One outraged deputy, Abbas Iskandari, gave an impassioned speech denouncing the agreement that finished with a warning so far-reaching that even he may not have grasped its implications. Iskandari demanded that Anglo-Iranian begin splitting its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis, as American oil companies were doing in several countries. If it refused, he warned, Iran would “nationalize the oil industry and extract the crude itself.”
The Majlis’s term was expiring and elections were approaching. Many deputies did not want to anger the Shah by voting against the Supplemental Agreement, but given the highly agitated state of public opinion they could hardly vote in favor. They chose to filibuster. For four days the Majlis chamber echoed with long denunciations of both the agreement and the generalized perfidy of Albion. Finally the clock wound down. The Supplemental Agreement was left to the next Majlis.
Mohammad Reza Shah was not amused by this turn of events, and he resolved to do whatever necessary to assure that the next Majlis would heed him. Using a variety of techniques ranging from the recruitment of royalist candidates to bribery and blatant electoral fraud, he managed to secure the election of many pliable deputies. His presumption that he could cheat voters as his father had, however, proved quite mistaken. Iranians were thirsty for democracy and could no longer be terrorized into silence. Several cities exploded in protest. Outrage was strongest in Tehran, where nationalist candidates led by the hugely popular Mohammad Mossadegh were declared losers.
Mossadegh issued a statement inviting all who believed in fair elections to gather in front of his home on October 13. Thousands turned up, and he led them through the streets to the royal palace. When they reached the gate, he turned to face them, delivered a fiery speech, and declared that he would not move until the Shah agreed to hold new and fair elections. He kept his word. For three days and nights he and several dozen other democrats sat on the palace lawn. Finally the Shah, who was about to embark on a tour of the United States and was anxious to avoid embarrassment, gave in.
By choosing to travel to the United States, the Shah was recognizing the emergence of a new world power, one whose will would shape Iranian history more decisively than anyone could have then imagined. President Truman hoped to use the visit, which stretched over several weeks in November and December of 1949, to persuade the young monarch that he must devote himself above all to improving the daily lives of his people. He was convinced that only social reform, not military power, would keep Iran safe from communism.
Truman sent his personal plane, the Independence, to bring the Shah to Washington and put him up at Blair House. Later the Shah went on to New York, where he was feted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to a variety of destinations not usually on the itinerary of foreign dignitaries, among them Idaho, Kentucky, Arizona, and Ohio. Companies like Lockheed and General Motors held lavish dinner parties for him. The State Department arranged for him to be honored at Princeton and the University of Michigan. He attended a football game between Georgetown and George Washington, and before the game he was made an honorary captain of the George Washington team. At West Point and Annapolis he was welcomed with twenty-one-gun salutes.
Behind the scenes, however, the Shah’s visit did not go well. In meetings with Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he insisted repeatedly that what Iran needed most was a bigger army and more weapons. He asked for tanks, antitank weapons, trucks, and large stores of ammunition, as well as money to pay for tens of thousands of more soldiers and advanced training for a greatly expanded officer corps. His single-mindedness was understandable. Under the Iranian constitution he controlled the military but nothing else, so a strong army was the key to his personal power. When his hosts tried to steer their conversations to the subject of Iran’s social needs, he lost interest. Acheson warned him to pay attention to what had happened in China, where the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had enjoyed vast military superiority but lost power to ragtag Communists because he had sought “a purely military solution.” The two sides could not come to an understanding. In the end, Truman sent his guest home without the military aid he had sought. The joint communiqué issued as the Shah departed said only that the United States would “bear in mind” his request for military aid.
After failing to persuade the Americans to pay for the military buildup that was his most fervent desire, the Shah returned to Iran to find his adversaries better organized than ever. His agreement to cancel the results of his rigged election had shown the limits of his power. It also had another, more far-reaching effect. After leaving the palace grounds following their successful sit-in, twenty of the triumphant protesters had met at Mossadegh’s house and made a historic decision. They resolved to build on their victory by forming a new coalition of political parties, trade unions, civic groups, and other organizations devoted to strengthening democracy and limiting the power of foreigners in Iran. They christened it the National Front and by unanimous vote chose Mossadegh as its leader. With a formal organization behind him for the first time and aroused public opinion at his side, the sixty-seven-year-old patriarch now had all the tools he needed to launch his shattering challenge to the political order.
Mossadegh and six other founders of the National Front were elected to the Majlis in the new election they had forced the Shah to call. Their victories marked the arrival of something new in Iranian politics: an organized, sophisticated opposition bloc fired with nationalist zeal and confident of broad public support. Its emergence posed a considerable obstacle both to the Shah’s immediate goal, which was to secure approval of the Supplemental Agreement, and to his longer-term project of reestablishing royal power. Two opposing visions of Iran’s future were now in sharper conflict than ever before.
The Shah preferred weak prime ministers because he could bend them to his will, but at the beginning of 1950 he and the British needed one strong enough to force the Majlis to approve the Supplemental Agreement. His first choice, Mohammad Saed, was decidedly unenthusiastic about the agreement and refused even to present it for a vote. After two months the Shah replaced him with a more strongly pro-British figure, Ali Mansur, but Mansur also proved unwilling to fight for the agreement. The British became impatient. In April they sent a new ambassador to Tehran, Sir Francis Shepherd, whose diplomatic experience had been in countries run by tyrants or foreign powers: El Salvador, Haiti, Peru, the Belgian Congo, and the Dutch East Indies. In one of his first cables back to the Foreign Office, Shepherd reported that although the Shah had ordered Mansur “to secure as soon as possible the passage of Supplemental Oil Agreement,” Mansur seemed to have “no intention of carrying out his master’s orders.”
It did not take long for both the Foreign Office and Anglo-Iranian to conclude that Mansur was not their man. They needed a tougher prime minister. Their candidate was not a civilian, as was traditional in Iran, but General Ali Razmara, who had been one of General Schwarzkopf’s most trusted officers and had then become chief of staff of the army. Only a man with his fierce determination, they believed, would be strong enough to face down Mossadegh and the National Front.
On June 20 the Majlis voted to create an eighteen-member committee to study the Supplemental Agreement. The British took this as an act of defiance and advised the Shah that he must respond by sacking Prime Minister Mansur and naming General Razmara to succeed him. Such advice could not be ignored.
The Majlis met at the end of June to debate Razmara’s nomination. No one was surprised when Mossadegh delivered a blistering speech denouncing him as a tool of foreign powers and a dictator in the making. Nor was there any surprise when, after the speeches were over, Razmara was confirmed by a comfortable margin. He had used his power to help the campaigns of more than half the deputies, and they were repaying their debts.