All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  Not satisfied with that threat, the Ayatollah had another for Harriman himself. He asked if Harriman had heard of a Major Embry, and when Harriman said he had not, Kashani explained, “He was an American who came to Iran in 1911 or 1912. He dabbled in oil, which was none of his business, and aroused the hatred of the people. One day, walking in Tehran, he was shot down in the street, but he was not killed. They took him to the hospital. The enraged mob followed him to the hospital, burst into the hospital and butchered him on the operating table. Do you understand?”

  With some effort Harriman managed to control his temper. “Your Eminence,” he replied coldly, “you must understand that I have been in many dangerous situations in my life and I do not frighten easily.” Kashani shrugged and said, “Well, there was no harm in trying.”

  Kashani’s contempt for the idea of compromise, which was even more visceral than Mossadegh’s, was not all that frustrated Harriman. The British disgusted him just as much, as he told Acheson in one cable:

  In spite of the fact that the British consider oil interest in Iran their greatest overseas asset, no minister has visited Iran as far as I can find out, except Churchill and Eden on wartime business. Oil company directors have rarely come. Situation that has developed here is tragic example of absentee management combined with worldwide growth of nationalism in undeveloped countries. There is no doubt Iranians are ready to make sacrifices in oil income to be rid of what they consider to be British colonial practices. Large groups are in mood to face any consequences to achieve this objective. It is clear that British reporting and recommendations from here have not been realistic, and it seems essential that member of British government find out for himself what is going on here.

  For a time it seemed that despite all the obstacles, some solution might be reached. Harriman finally managed to persuade Mossadegh to issue a statement saying that he would negotiate with a British envoy if “the British government on behalf of the former Anglo-Iranian Oil Company recognizes the principle of nationalization of the oil industry in Iran.” To his immense irritation, however, the Foreign Office rejected this overture. He decided to fly to London himself to plead for reason. There he met for three hours with the British cabinet. Its members were divided. Some argued for a continued hard line, but others agreed that it might be wise to send an emissary to Tehran. Prime Minister Attlee decided to dispatch the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Richard Stokes, a wealthy member of the British elite with no experience in the Middle East.

  Stokes was instructed to tell Mossadegh that the oil company would accept the principle that Iran’s oil belonged to Iran, and also that it was now willing to share its profits on a fifty-fifty basis. The British must, however, remain in control of all drilling, refining, and export operations. This was in essence the same offer that Basil Jackson had brought to Tehran six weeks earlier, though Stokes was told not to admit this fact. He was to remain within the limits of Jackson’s offer but could “dress it up and present its main points in different order, together with trimmings or sweetenings as might be required.”

  The first question Mossadegh asked Stokes when the two men met for the first time was whether he was Roman Catholic. When Stokes replied that he was, Mossadegh told him that he was unsuited for his mission because Catholics do not believe in divorce and Iran was in the process of divorcing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Stokes was not amused. What Mossadegh was doing to Anglo-Iranian, he replied, was closer to murder than divorce.

  That exchange set the talks off on a sour note. They were further complicated by Anglo-Iranian’s decision on July 31 to shut the Abadan refinery. Company officials said they had no alternative. Storage tanks were full, and tankers could not sail since their captains had been instructed not to sign the receipts Iran was demanding. It was a shattering step that reflected how deep the crisis had become.

  Stokes knew full well that he was offering Mossadegh a deal that the prime minister had already rejected. In a cable home, Stokes said that the essence of his offer was to keep Anglo-Iranian operating as before but “under a new name” and lamented that he had tried “a number of devices by which we could disguise this hard fact, but found nothing that was not either dangerous or too transparent for even the Persians to accept.” For his part, Mossadegh declared himself willing to negotiate three points only: the continued sale of Iranian oil to Britain to meet its domestic needs, the transfer of British technicians to the service of the new National Iranian Oil Company, and the amount of money Iran should pay for Anglo-Iranian’s nationalized assets.

  As the talks ground on toward inevitable failure, Stokes and Harriman flew to Abadan for a look around. The different ways they occupied themselves reflected their vastly different approaches to the crisis. Stokes was quickly caught up in a diplomatic flap when the British consul first tried to expel Iranian officials from Abadan and then flew into a rage when an Iranian car drove ahead of his in the caravan escorting Stokes from the airport. The consul wrote an angry letter to the local governor demanding assurances that “in the future, the representative of His Majesty’s Government is not subjected to such indignities.” Iran’s foreign ministry responded by expelling him from the country. Before departing, he cabled London to suggest that he wait in Basra so that he could be of assistance “in the event of a military action.”

  Harriman made better use of his time. He toured Abadan and sent a cable to Truman reporting that the slums he saw were “shocking for housing of employees of a large Western oil company.” In later cables he complained that the British held “a completely nineteenth-century colonial attitude toward Iran.” Instead of negotiating seriously, they issued only “rash statements” and “impulsive expressions of resentment” about what they considered the theft of their property in Iran. “I frankly feel that if the British government does not cooperate,” he concluded, “it will make the success of my mission extremely doubtful if not impossible.”

  Harriman’s nerves were further frayed by an attack of intestinal disorder and the sweltering midsummer heat. The palace where he was staying in Tehran was lavish but had only a few languid fans to stir the oppressive air. Desperate for relief, he began taking long flights to provincial capitals aboard his official plane, which was air conditioned. He ordered that the cabin be made as cold as possible, and he and his aides wrapped themselves in blankets while they enjoyed the chill. When Vernon Walters suggested that using a plane that burned eight hundred gallons of fuel per hour in order to cool off was a bit excessive, Harriman bristled in reply: “If you had seen my income taxes over a period of years, you would know that I have bought a number of these for the United States government.”

  Mossadegh met several more times with Stokes and at one point handed him a memorandum that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. If the British would accept the right of Iranians to control their oil industry, he wrote, he would “fully and fairly” negotiate the oil company’s “just claims” for compensation. Stokes was intrigued and cabled the Foreign Office, asking permission to explore what seemed to him a promising offer. The reply was stern, containing two brusque orders: there were to be “no further concessions,” and Stokes was to break off the talks and return forthwith to London.

  On August 22 the British cabinet imposed a series of economic sanctions on Iran. They prohibited the export of key British commodities, including sugar and steel, to Iran; directed the withdrawal of all British personnel from Iranian oil fields and of all but a “hard core” of about three hundred administrators from Abadan; and blocked Iran’s access to its hard currency accounts in British banks. The next day Stokes left Tehran.

  “The result is nothing,” Mossadegh admitted at a news conference. “It is no good. Everything is finished.”

  As Stokes departed, Prime Minister Attlee sent a triumphant cable to Truman. “I think you’ll agree breakdown in talks entirely due to Persian side,” he wrote. “Only course now is, we hope, for complete U.S. public support of His Majesty’s Government’s position.”


  His appeal fell on deaf ears. Truman was mightily disappointed by the failure of Harriman’s mission but placed much of the blame on Britain’s intransigence. In a reply cable, he insisted that neither the British nor the Americans should take any steps that “would appear to be in opposition to the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people.”

  Harriman paid a call on the Shah before leaving Tehran, and during their meeting he made a discreet suggestion. Since Mossadegh was making it impossible to resolve the crisis on a basis acceptable to the West, he said, Mossadegh might have to be removed. Harriman knew the Shah had no way of removing Mossadegh at that moment. By bringing up the subject, however, he foreshadowed American involvement in the coup two years later.

  “It was a mission unlike any other,” Vernon Walters wrote afterward. “There was an Alice in Wonderland quality to it which led me after three days to write back to Mr. Harriman’s secretary in Washington to ask her to send me a copy of that book so I would know what was next on the program. It was in a sense a mission that failed, but it was a mission that cast a long shadow ahead on the great problems that the Western world was to have with oil two and a half decades later. These Dr. Mossadegh was not to live to see, yet in a way their true origin led back to him.”

  After the failure of these last attempts at negotiation, Foreign Secretary Morrison and Ambassador Shepherd intensified their efforts to depose Mossadegh. Shepherd broached the idea with his Iranian friends, and Mossadegh learned of these discussions almost immediately. On September 6 he made a speech to the Senate condemning them and warned that if the British did not cease their plotting, he would expel all remaining British citizens from Abadan in two weeks. Prime Minister Attlee responded by ordering the Royal Navy to strengthen the flotilla of warships hovering off Iran’s coast.

  For at least a year, the British had been considering the possibility of landing troops in Iran to secure what they considered to be their refinery and oil fields. In the autumn of 1950 Ambassador Franks had told American officials in Washington that his government believed that “the dispatch of a small U.K. force to southern Iran would have a steadying and not a provocative influence.” The following April Sir George Bolton, the executive director of the Bank of England, passed to the Foreign Office a report from his Middle East adviser saying that the political tempo in Iran “is such that the possibility of direct intervention by taking over by force the fields and refinery must be considered.” Minister of Defense Emanuel Shinwell told the cabinet that tolerating nationalization of Anglo-Iranian would set a terrible precedent and that “we must be prepared to show that our tail could not be twisted interminably.” Anglo-Iranian officials predicted in a memorandum to the Foreign Office that if British troops landed at Abadan, “the Persians would probably climb down” and the company could import “thousands of colored men from East Africa to do labor that Iranians might refuse to perform.”

  In May 1951, two months before Harriman’s arrival, the British drew up two detailed plans for the invasion and occupation of Iran. The first, code-named at different stages Buccaneer and Plan Y, contemplated the use of seventy thousand troops in a “seaborne assault combined with the arrival of the maximum possible forces by air” that would “seize and secure” the refinery and oil fields. A more limited alternative, Operation Midget, envisioned the seizure of only the refinery, either for a two-week period while tankers removed the oil in storage there or indefinitely, so that it could be used to refine oil from elsewhere in the Gulf. Advocates of these plans argued that they would not only keep oil flowing to Britain but would also send a patriotic thrill through the country. Lord Fraser, First Lord of the Admiralty, said that a bold military strike would dispel Britain’s “dumps and doldrums” and prove that it would not tolerate “being pushed around by Persian pip-squeaks.”

  Some British officials doubted the wisdom of these plans, but sentiment for invasion was strong and might have carried the day had it not been for implacable opposition from the Truman administration. On May 16 the American ambassador to Britain, Walter Gifford, cabled Acheson that he was becoming “increasingly concerned” about the “belligerent atmosphere” in London. The Foreign Office, he warned, had come to believe that American objections to an invasion “are not very large and can probably be overcome.”

  “Against this background we fear that Brit, having made implied threat use of force, may eventually be faced with alternatives of either, against their better judgment, making good on this threat and risking unpredictable consequences or backing down and suffering resultant loss prestige and perhaps fatal weakening of their position,” Gifford wrote. “It is our estimate that ultimate UK decision whether or not to use force will be in last analysis determined by extent to which US prepared support.”

  Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed “the use of force or the threat of the use of force” against Iran, and that Truman himself had “stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.” His bluntness had the desired effect. Franks immediately sent a message home warning that if Britain went ahead with its invasion plans, Washington’s “opposition to the British would probably become even more violent than it is at present.”

  Truman’s position found much support in the American press. The Wall Street Journal lamented Britain’s reliance on “nineteenth century threats.” The Philadelphia Inquirer warned that a British invasion of Iran might bring “a quick outbreak of World War III.” A popular CBS commentator, Howard K. Smith, asserted that many countries in the Middle East and beyond supported Iran, and that an invasion might “stir all the Southern Asians to a rebellion against the Western foreigner and cause serious trouble for both Britain and the United States.”

  Foreign Secretary Morrison, who led the war party in London, urged the Americans to change their position. He argued that it would be disastrous for the West if Britain were made to look “feeble and ineffective” at the hands of a man like Mossadegh, “whose fanaticism bordered on the mental.” After the World Court issued its “indication,” he asked Acheson whether the Americans would support an invasion if Iran refused to climb down. Absolutely not, Acheson replied; a British invasion of Iran under any circumstances would have “disastrous political consequences.”

  That was enough for Prime Minister Attlee, who had never been enthusiastic about the idea of occupying Iran. On July 19 his cabinet voted to defer the military option, balancing its decision by approving the dispatch of three army battalions to neighboring Iraq. Morrison, however, did not give up. After Mossadegh announced in September that the last Britons would soon be expelled from Abadan, Morrison told the cabinet that the time for invasion had come. Attlee agreed to a show of naval force in the Gulf, but definitively ruled out any more drastic military action.

  “An occupation of Abadan Island would not necessarily bring about a change in the Persian Government and might well unite the Persian people against this country, and neither the oil wells nor the refinery could be worked without the assistance of Persian workers,” Attlee told the cabinet. “If we attempted to find a solution by force we could not expect to find much support in the United Nations, where the South American governments would follow the lead of the United States and Asian governments would be hostile to us.”

  Having failed to persuade Attlee to order an invasion, Morrison decided to begin covert action. He turned first to two distinguished scholars who had spent years studying Iran and were sympathetic to the British position there. The first, Ann K. S. Lambton, had been press attaché at the British Embassy in Tehran during World War II and gone on to become one of Britain’s leading scholars of Iran. At Morrison’s request, she began suggesting “effective lines of propaganda” that the British might use to turn Iranian public opinion against Mossadegh.

  Lambton’s role was limit
ed to giving advice in London. The other scholar Morrison recruited—at Lambton’s suggestion—was a more flamboyant figure, and from him Morrison wanted much more than advice. He was Robin Zaehner, a veteran covert operative who had worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Iran. Zaehner was fluent in Persian and well acquainted with the leading figures in Iranian politics. A Foreign Office memorandum described him as “a man of great subtlety,” but with his squeaky voice and eccentric manner, he was hardly a conventional spy. An American who studied his career portrayed him as a colorful, multifaceted figure:

  Zaehner possessed extraordinary capacity to combine high thought with low living. He relished the lighter side of his duties. He held his own in gossip or discussion, whether about philosophy and religion or about human foibles. He drank heavily. Rather in the tradition of Aldous Huxley, Zaehner also experimented with drugs to increase his sensory perception of eternal verities…. To those who wished to learn about Iranian politics he recommended Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. He tended to tell his superiors what he believed they wanted to hear. His temperament did not draw him to the more sinister side of intelligence operations, nor did he have the discipline for rigorous secrecy. Zaehner was an Oxford bon vivant transmogrified into a quasi–Secret Service agent.

  In mid-1951 Morrison appointed Zaehner to a post as “acting counselor” at the British Embassy in Tehran. Although technically not an intelligence officer, Zaehner devoted most of his time to meeting with opposition figures and suggesting ways they could help undermine Mossadegh’s government. His work greatly encouraged them, and his reports to the Foreign Office also had an important effect. He was the first outsider sent to Iran with the specific assignment of trying to subvert Mossadegh. The progress he made strengthened the hand of those in London who believed that a covert action campaign against Mossadegh might succeed.

  As British leaders ordered military steps to intimidate Iran and launched their covert campaign against its government, they also took a series of steps designed to cripple its economy. This might have seemed a logical strategy, since inflicting pain often breaks the will of nations just as it breaks the will of human beings. What the British failed or refused to realize, however, was that Mossadegh and the great majority of Iranians were ready to accept and even embrace much pain in their sacred cause. The Shiite religious tradition blended perfectly with the nationalist passion sweeping through Iran. Together they steeled the will of Iranians.