All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  Razmara took office convinced that destiny had chosen him to lead Iran back to greatness. Mossadegh believed the same about himself. So did the Shah. Only one of the three could emerge victorious from the coming confrontation.

  Razmara’s first days in office during that summer of 1950 would have discouraged a less formidable man. The arrival of a new American ambassador, Henry Grady, sparked an outbreak of rioting in which several people were killed; no one had anything against Grady personally, but politicized Iranians had become so angry at foreign interference in their country’s affairs that the mere appearance of what seemed to be a new proconsul was enough to send thousands onto the streets. Prime Minister Razmara had to take this rising nationalism into account as he planned his political strategy. He told his British patrons that he could win approval of their Supplemental Agreement, but only if they revised it. Let Anglo-Iranian sweeten its offer, he suggested, by agreeing to open its books to Iranian auditors, train Iranians for managerial jobs, and make some of its royalty payments in advance as a sign of support for national development.

  This was a shrewd proposal. By accepting it, Anglo-Iranian might well have undercut the National Front and stabilized its own position for years to come. Much to Razmara’s dismay, however, the British rejected it out of hand. Ambassador Shepherd told him the company’s offer was final and that the only sweetener it would accept “was perhaps free medical treatment of certain hysterical deputies who continued to denounce the Supplemental Agreement.” By failing to recognize that the colonial era was ending and that they could maintain their world power only by working with the rising forces of nationalism, the British passed up a historic opportunity.

  Razmara had no choice but to reconcile himself to the will of the Shah, the Foreign Office, and Anglo-Iranian. He named a finance minister known for pro-British views and resumed his campaign for ratification of the Supplemental Agreement. One of his key allies was a radio celebrity named Bahram Sharogh, who had risen to fame as a Nazi propagandist. During the early 1940s, Sharogh had been chief of Radio Berlin’s Persian service, and his was the enthusiastic voice that brought Iranians their daily diet of news about Axis victories and the glorious future of German–Iranian relations. His broadcasts were filled with anti-British vitriol, and they fueled the hatred of British imperialism that spread through Iran. When the tide of the war turned, he mysteriously lost his job; some Nazi security officers suspected him of being a British agent. Not long afterward, to the astonishment of his listeners, he turned up at Radio Tehran and began broadcasting lavishly pro-British commentaries. Razmara named him director of “radio and propaganda,” and he embraced Anglo-Iranian’s cause with a fervor every bit as intense as that he had shown for the Nazis a decade earlier. Besides broadcasting streams of passionate reports himself, he helped Anglo-Iranian single out and bribe pliable newspaper columnists and editors.

  By this time the Majlis had named the members of its oil committee. Mossadegh was of course among them, and at the committee’s first meeting he was elected chairman. The committee met twice a week. Many of its members were no more interested in finding a compromise than Anglo-Iranian was. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, the director of Iran’s petroleum institute, attended many of the sessions and later wrote about them:

  The committee was ostensibly set up to investigate the Supplemental Agreement and find grounds for settlement, but the technical and economic aspects of the agreement were rarely raised. The deputies were not well versed in oil and were interested in it only insofar as it related to politics. Instead, they fixated on the human costs…. Mossadegh dominated the proceedings. He criticized everything with great sarcasm, a technique he’d mastered in the twenty-five years in which he’d done nothing but carp and bestow blame…. Mossadegh did not care about dollars and cents or numbers of barrels per day. He saw the basic issue as one of national sovereignty. Iran’s sovereignty was being undercut by a company that sacrificed Iranian lives for British interests. This is what infuriated him about the government’s willingness to compromise—and it was what made him decide unequivocally that AIOC had to go.

  As the weather cooled in Tehran that autumn, the temperature of public opinion rose steadily. The British, by their refusal to compromise, had managed to unite a broad cross-section of the politically active population against them. They even pushed religious groups committed to Islamic law into a coalition with Mossadegh and other secular liberals. A few mullahs, including the young Ruhollah Khomeini, who thirty years later would emerge as the country’s supreme leader, refused to join this coalition because they believed that Mossadegh and his allies had forsaken Islam. Most of the important ones, however, entered into a tactical alliance with the National Front. The most influential among them was the flamboyant and impassioned Ayatollah Abolqasem Kashani, who had never been considered a great religious scholar but who became a central figure in Iran’s anti-imperialist movement. Kashani’s father had been killed fighting the British in Mesopotamia during World War I, and he himself was held in a British prison camp during the Allied occupation of Iran in World War II. After his release, he quickly emerged as an incendiary popular leader. Mohammad Reza Shah tried to silence him by sending him into exile after the 1949 assassination attempt, but from Beirut he ran for a seat in the Majlis and won. Popular pressure forced the Shah to allow him to return, and hundreds of thousands turned out to welcome him. In his speech to the multitude, he hailed Mossadegh and the National Front as Iran’s truest patriots.

  Kashani was fiercely anti-Western, hated liberal ideas, and believed that Muslims should obey secular laws only if they were in harmony with the Islamic legal tradition known as sharia. If he was a nationalist, it was only in a limited sense; he wanted Iranians to control their own affairs but also imagined that once the infidels were pushed out, Iran would become part of a pan-Islamic commonwealth that would challenge both the Western and communist blocs. Yet like mullahs who had supported the Constitutional Revolution nearly half a century before, he saw the anti-British campaign as a sacred duty. In pursuit of that duty he plunged into politics, building his own faction in the Majlis and working tirelessly to mobilize the masses to Mossadegh’s cause. “Islam warns its adherents not to submit to a foreign yoke!” he thundered at one rally.

  With the bearded holy man Kashani and the Swiss-educated aristocrat Mossadegh stoking the anti-British fire, opinion in the Majlis turned ever more strongly against the Supplemental Agreement. Prime Minister Razmara tried to make a speech there in October appealing for its ratification but was drowned out by a stream of invective. After he took his seat, more than a dozen deputies rose to reply. All condemned Anglo-Iranian as a rapacious monster and Razmara as its lackey. Mossadegh was the most passionate. He denounced the Supplemental Agreement as an instrument of bondage and then, in an inspired coda, turned dramatically to Razmara and told him: “If you endorse this Agreement, you leave yourself with a disgrace which you will never be able to wash away.”

  On November 25 Mossadegh brought the Supplemental Agreement to a vote in his parliamentary committee. The committee assembled as usual in an anteroom at the Majlis. Bright sun shone on a light snow cover outside. Mossadegh and the four other committee members who belonged to the National Front proposed the radical option of nationalizing Anglo-Iranian, but the rest of the committee was not ready to go that far. On the question at hand, though, there was no dissent. The committee voted unanimously to recommend rejection of the Agreement.

  Events now began to take on a momentum of their own. Iranian politics was moving into uncharted territory, and there was no steady hand at the tiller of state. Every day positions grew more polarized. No faction believed in the goodwill of any other. Discourse was conducted by insult and tirade.

  At the end of December, news reached Tehran that the Arabian-American Oil Company, known as Aramco, had reached a new deal with Saudi Arabia under which it would share its profits with the Saudis on a fifty-fifty basis. Ambassador Shepherd immediately disp
atched a cable to London urging that Anglo-Iranian make a similar offer to Iran. Both the Foreign Office and the oil company rejected the idea. By doing so, they lost another chance to resolve the looming crisis before disaster struck. Anglo-Iranian’s manager in Tehran, E. G. D. Northcroft, advised the home office not to “attach much importance” to the nationalist movement.

  The British position was so far removed from reality that Northrop’s assistant, Mostafa Fateh, the company’s highest-ranking Iranian employee and for decades its faithful servant, felt compelled to protest. He wrote an impassioned twenty-three-page letter to a member of Anglo-Iranian’s board of directors, Edward Elkington, whom he had known when Elkington was posted in Iran. The letter was an eloquent warning that the company needed to recognize the “awakening nationalism and political consciousness of the people of Asia” and show “breadth of vision, tolerance for other people’s views and clear thinking to avoid disaster.” It described Anglo-Iranian’s alliance with “corrupt ruling classes” and “leech-like bureaucracies” as “disastrous, outdated and impractical.” Fateh said there was still enough support in the Majlis to ratify the Supplemental Agreement if the company would revise it to include a fifty-fifty profit share and shorten its term; otherwise the Agreement was doomed, since the company’s policies had “alienated the liberal and progressive classes from Britain.” His eloquent cri de coeur went unheeded. Fateh “is not to be trusted far,” sniffed one British diplomat to whom Elkington showed it.

  Confrontation now seemed inevitable. The prospect thrilled Iranian nationalists, who believed that history was finally giving them a chance to pull their country out from under the rule of British imperialists. In January 1951 they called a rally to launch a mass-based campaign aimed at forcing the nationalization of Anglo-Iranian. A huge crowd turned out. The first speakers were from the National Front, and they were duly cheered as they laid out their case. That was just the beginning. After the politicians were finished, a succession of mullahs came to the podium to proclaim that every good Muslim had a sacred duty to support nationalization. The last of them read a fatwa asserting that from his place in paradise, the Prophet Mohammad himself had condemned the Razmara government for selling Iran’s birthright to infidel foreigners. Neither the secularists of the National Front nor the religious fundamentalists who followed Ayatollah Kashani were comfortable in alliance with each other, but they put aside their very deep differences in the interests of the great cause.

  Poor Razmara was now in an impossible position. The masses had long since decided that he was at best a pawn of the British and at worst a traitor. He replied by insisting time and again that protesters, both inside the Majlis and outside, were pursuing a mad dream, and that the country’s interest required it to make a deal with the British. But although he worked feverishly to salvage the British position, neither Anglo-Iranian nor the Foreign Office gave him a shred of support. Ambassador Shepherd went so far as to send him a letter advising that he take “a strong line” against ingrates who did not appreciate “the immense service to mankind of the British people in recent times.”

  Razmara soldiered bravely on. On March 3 he appeared before Mossadegh’s oil committee and once again explained his opposition to the idea of nationalization. He said it would be illegal, would drive the British to unpredictable retaliation, and would devastate Iran’s economy. That night Ambassador Shepherd cabled home that he himself had written “the gist” of Razmara’s speech.

  Iranians suspected as much and reacted with another outburst of protest. At a mass rally on March 7, calls for nationalization were replaced with chants of “Death to the British!” Razmara was out of time. Even the Shah knew it. Quietly, he had begun asking politicians of various stripes whom they would suggest as a new prime minister. Each gave the same answer: Mossadegh.

  Everyone recognized that Razmara’s days were numbered, but few anticipated how violently his career would end. On the same day that thousands of demonstrators gathered in Tehran to shout their hatred for Britain, Razmara and a friend of the Shah named Assadollah Alam drove to a Tehran mosque for the funeral of a religious leader. A young man with a pistol stepped from the crowd and fired. Razmara fell dead. Police officers seized the gunman, a carpenter named Khalil Tahmasibi who was a member of a religious terror group called Fedayeen-i-Islam.

  “If I have rendered a humble service,” he told interrogators, “it was for the Almighty in order to deliver the deprived Muslim people of Iran from foreign serfdom.”

  The circumstances of Razmara’s assassination were never clarified. Evidence emerged to suggest that the fatal shot had been fired not by Tahmasibi but by a soldier acting on behalf of the Shah or members of his inner circle, and that Assadollah Alam had knowingly driven him to his fatal rendezvous. Years later a retired Iranian colonel wrote in his memoir that the fatal shot had come from a Colt revolver, available only to soldiers.

  “An army sergeant, in civilian clothes, was chosen for the deed,” he asserted. “He had been told to shoot and kill Razmara with a Colt, the moment Tahmasibi began to shoot…. Those who had examined the wounds in Razmara’s body were in no doubt that he had been killed by a Colt bullet, not by the bullet of a weak gun.”

  Razmara had represented the last hope for conciliation. His cause was all but lost even before his assassination, and the day after the fatal shots were fired, Mossadegh’s oil committee took the fateful step toward which it had been marching. By unanimous vote, it recommended that the Majlis nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

  The next day, thousands of people gathered at a festive rally to hear Ayatollah Kashani applaud the committee vote and demand that the Majlis act quickly. No public figure could now oppose nationalization without fear of provoking the ire of the masses or worse. Even the newly named prime minister, Hussein Ala, a British-educated diplomat who understood the difficulties that nationalization was sure to bring, dared not speak against it.

  At the British embassy, Ambassador Shepherd still believed that he had a chance to hold back the flood. He launched a campaign to persuade Majlis members to stay home on the day of the nationalization vote, thereby preventing a quorum. First he sent a message to the Shah urging him to “use all his influence” with monarchist and conservative deputies. Then he met with Prime Minister Ala and informed him curtly that “the company’s operations cannot be legally terminated by an action such as nationalization.” He suggested for the first time, though, that Anglo-Iranian might now be ready to consider the idea of a fifty-fifty profit split.

  “A fifty-fifty arrangement might have been accepted a little while ago,” Ala replied, “but now something more would be required.”

  The Majlis met on March 15 to cast its historic vote. Ninety-six deputies turned up, including several who had promised the Shah they would stay away. Every one voted in favor of nationalization. Five days later the largely ceremonial Senate, which had come into existence only a few years earlier and half of whose members were appointed by the Shah, also voted its unanimous approval.

  Mossadegh was now a hero of epic proportions, unable even to step onto the streets without being mobbed by admirers. Tribal leaders in the hinterlands celebrated his triumph, Ayatollah Kashani lionized him as a liberator on the scale of Cyrus and Darius, and even the communists of Tudeh embraced him. Over the next few weeks the Majlis voted overwhelmingly for every bill he presented. He was so clearly the man of the moment that Prime Minister Ala found no reason to remain in office, and in mid-April he resigned.

  The British government, however, had no intention of surrendering. Its resolve was stiffened when Foreign Secretary Bevin, who had shown some sympathy for the Iranian position, resigned for health reasons and was replaced by the colossally unprepared Herbert Morrison. Morrison had spent thirty years working his way up through Labor Party ranks and had never claimed expertise in world affairs. His proudest achievements were building a new Waterloo Bridge and reorganizing London’s transit system. He considered the ch
allenge from Iran a simple matter of ignorant natives rebelling against the forces of civilization. In one of his first public statements as foreign secretary, he urged that British troops be moved toward Iran and stand “ready if necessary to intervene in Persian oil fields.”

  At Morrison’s urging, top-level policymakers from the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Bank of England, and the Ministry of Fuel and Power joined to form a “Working Party on Persia.” It commissioned several studies to use as background in dealing with the crisis, including one on the psychology of Iranians. The author, a British diplomat, asserted that the typical Iranian was motivated by

  an unabashed dishonesty, fatalistic outlook, [and] indifference to suffering…. The ordinary Persian is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perseverance and energy, but amenable to discipline. Above all he enjoys intrigue and readily turns to prevarication and dishonesty whenever there is a possibility of personal gain. Although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed. They easily acquire a superficial knowledge of technical subjects, deluding themselves into the belief that it is profound.

  To deal with such people on an equal or respectful basis would, of course, be absurd. Instead, the Foreign Office devised a three-pronged strategy to bring them back under control. First, Mohammad Reza Shah should be persuaded to dissolve the Majlis. Second, he should appoint Sayyed Zia, the aging British favorite who had helped Reza Shah come to power thirty years earlier, as prime minister. Third, the Truman administration in Washington should be urged “at least not to indicate any disagreement or divergence from our point of view.” As this policy was being formulated, Anglo-Iranian decided to prove its resolve by reducing the living allowances it paid to Iranian workers. Thousands walked off the job in protest.