CHAPTER 11
I Knew It! They Love Me!
A sharp knock on the door of an apartment in one of Tehran’s northern suburbs brought two audacious co-conspirators together for the first time. One was the most wanted man in Iran. The other would have been even more wanted if the police knew he existed.
Kermit Roosevelt had much to worry about as he knocked. The night before, he and his men had failed in an attempt to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh. His superiors at the CIA in Washington were urging him to flee. Roosevelt, however, had resolved to risk a second attempt.
Extra police officers were on the street that Sunday morning, August 16, 1953. Sirens wailed as security agents swooped down on conspirators implicated in the abortive coup. Roosevelt drove carefully, stopped at red lights, and arrived at General Zahedi’s apartment without incident.
By this hour Zahedi had hoped to be prime minister. Instead, he was a hunted fugitive. If he had any hope of success now or even of saving his skin, it lay with Roosevelt. Zahedi knew who must be knocking and opened the door himself.
Roosevelt skipped the pleasantries. He had come to ask just one question: Was Zahedi prepared to try again? Without hesitation, Zahedi said that he was. That was the answer Roosevelt needed.
Both men then agreed that it was too dangerous for Zahedi to remain where he was. Roosevelt had arranged to hide him at the villa of a fellow agent, three blocks from the American embassy. They walked down the apartment stairs and slipped into Roosevelt’s car. The putative leader of Iran lay on the floor in back, covered with a blanket, as he was driven to his new hideout.
After stashing Zahedi, Roosevelt drove back to what he had begun calling his “battle station” at the embassy compound. There he met two American diplomats who had been assigned to monitor the plot. Both told him frankly that they thought the game was up. The handful of officials in Washington who knew about Operation Ajax were also ready to surrender. Beedle Smith, the undersecretary of state who had been one of the coup’s most fervent promoters, sent a gloomy note to President Eisenhower saying that the United States would now “probably have to snuggle up to Mossadegh.”
Roosevelt, however, still had considerable assets. One was General Zahedi, who had many friends in the officer corps and was willing to do whatever necessary to reach power. Equally formidable was a far-flung network of Iranian agents and subagents. This network had been assembled at great cost and had shown its ability to spread inflammatory rumors, place provocative articles in newspapers, manipulate politicians, influence mullahs, and produce hired crowds on short notice. It had not yet been fully tested.
Roosevelt also had the two treasured firmans, decrees that the Shah had signed dismissing Prime Minister Mossadegh and naming Zahedi to replace him. They gave the planned coup an air of legitimacy. Few Iranians would stop to debate whether the Shah had the legal right to issue such decrees. For them, respecting royal power was an ancient tradition. The firmans gave the plotters of Operation Ajax a way to wrap themselves in that tradition.
At their hurried meeting that morning, General Zahedi had urged Roosevelt to make copies of the firman naming Zahedi prime minister and to distribute them throughout the city, especially in the tough southern neighborhoods where mobs were recruited. This was a brilliant idea, and Roosevelt immediately embraced it. By midday he had commandeered one of the few copying machines to be found in Tehran. He not only sent copies of the firman out with every agent he could find but also arranged for facsimiles to appear on the front pages of the next day’s newspapers. Later he dispatched trusted couriers, including two Iranian officers armed with false identity papers, to carry copies to military commanders in outlying cities.
To assure that the firman reached as wide an audience as possible, Roosevelt sent a message to the two American news correspondents in Tehran, who represented the Associated Press and the New York Times. It was an invitation to a secret meeting with General Zahedi. Both eagerly accepted, and a car was dispatched to pick them up. When they got to the safe house, however, they were brought not to Zahedi but to his sharp-minded son Ardeshir. He presented them with copies of the firman and, in perfect English, delivered an impassioned speech about its importance.
Even given the circumstances, it was a very odd meeting. The man on whose behalf it was called never appeared. Security was provided by the host’s young wife, who sat in a rocking chair close to Ardeshir Zahedi with a pistol under her knitting. Most curious to the reporters, however, was a large and unfamiliar machine that was clattering loudly nearby.
“Lo and behold, there was a huge copying machine,” Kennett Love of the New York Times recalled later. “Now this was 1953, and a copying machine is about the size of two refrigerators. But at that time neither I nor most American journalists or most American people would have been able to tell you what the initials CIA stood for.”
By Sunday afternoon Roosevelt had conceived his new plan. On Monday and Tuesday his agents would spread across Tehran to bribe politicians, mullahs, and anyone else who might be able to turn out crowds at a crucial moment. During those same two days he would send mobs into the street to commit mayhem in Mossadegh’s name. Then on Wednesday he would pull his mobs off the street, use military and police units to storm government buildings, and strike the final blow by capturing Mossadegh.
To accomplish all this, Roosevelt relied on a handful of proven Iranian agents. Most important were the three Rashidian brothers. Roosevelt had known them for several years, had arranged for them to be flown to CIA headquarters in Washington for what he called “thorough tests of their veracity,” and had developed great admiration for their tradecraft. Besides the Rashidians, who were originally British assets, Roosevelt also used several Iranians who had been trained by the CIA. The two best, Ali Jalili and Farouk Keyvani, began working for the CIA in early 1951 as organizers of the propaganda and sabotage network known as Bedamn. They had organized riots and carried out other clandestine tasks so successfully that the CIA came to consider them “vitally important principal agents of the Tehran station.” Like the Rashidians, they had been brought to Washington, debriefed at length by Kermit Roosevelt and other CIA operatives, given code names (sometimes “Nossey” and “Cafron,” other times “Nerren” and “Cilley”), and chosen as key operatives in the plot against Mossadegh. They and the Rashidians, however, never met. Roosevelt kept the identities of his main Iranian operatives secret even from each other.
As Roosevelt prepared his second attempt against Mossadegh, he ordered these and other agents to begin circulating a false version of the first one. The story they were to give out was that Mossadegh had tried to seize the Shah’s throne but was thwarted by patriotic officers. Corrupt newspaper editors gave this lie front-page coverage. Only a few reported the truth, which was that Mossadegh had been the coup’s intended victim, not its instigator.
Mossadegh and his aides, however, paid little attention to the newspapers. They believed that the Shah had been behind Saturday’s rebellion. If that was true, then his flight into exile meant that there would be no more attempts at what Foreign Minister Fatemi called “royal robbery of the rights of the people.” They never imagined that the plotters who launched the Saturday coup would soon try again.
When a reporter asked Fatemi how his government would deal with captured plotters, he replied offhandedly that officials were “considering what to do” but had “not yet reached the stage of decisions.” Other cabinet ministers, including Mossadegh himself, also let their guard down. They withdrew loyal troops from the streets and spent crucial hours asking one another questions raised by the Shah’s flight into exile. Had he abdicated? Must a regency council be appointed? Was there to be a new dynasty? Should the monarchy be abolished?
While government officials airily debated their country’s long-term future, Kermit Roosevelt was hard at work trying to shape its next few days. He knew he would need military units to help carry out his coup and asked the military attaché at the A
merican embassy, General Robert McClure, to find some. McClure, who was well acquainted with Iranian officers, decided to start at the top, with the chief of staff, General Riahi.
He could not have had high hopes, because Riahi was known for his loyalty. Even if Riahi would not switch sides and join the plotters, however, McClure hoped that at least he would remain neutral. His first gambit was to suggest that Riahi leave town. Perhaps, he ventured, the two of them could head out to the countryside for a few days of fishing. Riahi coldly declined. Then McClure, who was not known for subtlety, abruptly changed his tone. He told Riahi that his military mission was accredited to the Shah, and therefore he would always recognize the Shah’s legitimacy. Iranian commanders, he added bluntly, should do the same. Riahi became indignant and showed him the door.
Later that Sunday, McClure had a second failure. Roosevelt sent him by plane to Isfahan, with instructions to try to enlist the garrison commander there, but once again McClure’s imperious style worked against him. He waved a copy of the firman and brusquely told the commander that he must send troops to fight Mossadegh. The commander replied that he took orders only from Iranians, not Americans. Two rebuffs in the space of a few hours cost McClure his temper. As he left the Isfahan garrison, he turned back to the commander and angrily vowed, “I will kick Mossadegh out of office!”
By the time McClure’s plane landed back in Tehran, he had calmed down and decided what to do next. Accompanied by a couple of aides, he set out on a tour of small military outposts in the capital itself. At each post he offered the commander money and a promise of promotion if the coup succeeded. This time he had better luck. Several officers accepted his emoluments, including two who commanded infantry regiments and one who commanded a tank battalion. They promised to be ready when called.
Roosevelt now had military units standing by to crush street disorders. His next task was to arrange the disorders. For this, he called on his energetic and well-connected agents Jalili and Keyvani. First, he told them, he wanted “black” crowds that would rampage through the streets shouting their allegiance to communism and Mossadegh. They were to break windows, beat innocent bystanders, shoot at mosques, and generally arouse the outrage of citizens. Then there had to be “patriotic” mobs that would suppress these rowdies, preferably with the help of friendly police officers.
Jalili and Keyvani were worried. They had provided services like this before, but what Roosevelt was now proposing would be by far their biggest operation. It could also place them in great danger, especially if the operation failed. At one point they went so far as to suggest that they would like to pull out of the plot altogether. Roosevelt persuaded them to stay by offering them a simple choice. If they stayed, they would receive $50,000 for their rowdies and themselves. If not, he would kill them. They decided to take the cash. Roosevelt handed it to them on the spot.
That Sunday had begun in abject defeat. By the time evening fell, Roosevelt could feel his confidence returning. Before retiring for the night, he sent a cable to Washington saying that there might still be a “slight remaining chance for success.”
No one in Washington shared Roosevelt’s optimism. Soon after he awoke on Monday morning, he was handed a cable from headquarters urging him to leave Iran as soon as possible. It was the second time in thirty-six hours that his superiors had advised him to flee. This time he obliged by preparing an escape plan—it involved him, Zahedi, and a handful of others fleeing on a plane owned by the American air attaché—but thought no more of it.
At midmorning news from the street began to trickle in. It was all good. Gangs of thugs pretending pro-Mossadegh sympathies were making their way from the slums of Tehran’s south side toward the center of town. Some true nationalists and communists innocently joined them. By the time they reached Parliament Square, which was dominated by a towering equestrian statue of Reza Shah, they numbered in the tens of thousands. How many were true militants and how many provocateurs is uncertain, but there were plenty of both.
Cheers went up when several men began climbing up to the monument. One carried a heavy chain coiled around his neck. He wrapped one end of it around the bronze horse’s neck and tossed the other end down to the ground, where it was hooked to the bumper of what Kennett Love called “a sort of military-looking command car.” Then the men began sawing and chiseling away at the horse’s feet. Finally, with a great crash, the statue fell to the ground. It was another victory in Roosevelt’s campaign to polarize Iran.
“This was the best thing we could have hoped for,” he wrote later. “The more they shouted against the Shah, the more the army and the people recognized them as the enemy. If they hated the Shah, the army and people hated them. And the more they ravaged the city, the more they angered the great bulk of its inhabitants. Nothing could have dramatized the guts of the conflict more effectively or more rapidly. On Sunday there had been some rioting and pillaging, but Monday put the frosting on the cake.”
Mossadegh had naively ordered police officers not to interfere with people’s right to demonstrate, so the mob was able to rampage more or less at will. This was a great boon to Roosevelt, since any riots at all, even ones that he did not control, served to persuade Iranians that their country was sinking into chaos and needed a rescuer. Still, Roosevelt worried that Mossadegh might change his mind and order the police to crack down. The police might even prove bold enough to fight against rebellious soldiers when the coup reached its climax. Roosevelt cast about for a way to blunt their power.
He found his instrument that afternoon, when Ambassador Loy Henderson unexpectedly turned up. After attending the meeting in Washington at which the coup was given final approval, Henderson had thought it wise not to return to his post until Mossadegh was overthrown. He traveled to a resort in the Austrian Alps and waited for news. On August 14, unable to sit still so far away from the action, he flew to Beirut. When he heard radio reports that the coup had failed, he commandeered a Navy plane from the local American embassy and flew to Tehran. Upon arriving at the embassy, he went straight to Roosevelt, who briefed him on the state of affairs.
Roosevelt confessed with considerable understatement that he had “run into some small complications.” Henderson asked if there was anything he could do to help. After a moment of reflection, Roosevelt came up with an outlandish idea. He would make Henderson his tool in an attempt to unnerve Mossadegh.
Roosevelt knew that Mossadegh was a deeply compassionate man who could be moved to tears by the plight of a single widow or orphan. Not a conspirator by nature, Mossadegh had an almost childlike faith in the sincerity of most other people. He was also a very decent, even chivalrous man who appreciated form, ceremony, and diplomacy. Despite the troubles of recent months, he had a soft spot for Americans. If Roosevelt could find a way to exploit these traits in his adversary’s character, he might throw “the old bugger” off balance or force him to make a false move. It was a classic challenge of psychological warfare, and it would produce the most surreal encounter of Operation Ajax.
“What in heaven’s name do I do?” Henderson asked when Roosevelt proposed sending him to Mossadegh.
“My suggestion,” Roosevelt replied, “would be to complain about the way Americans here are being harassed. Anonymous telephone calls saying, ‘Yankee go home!’ or calling them obscene names. Even if a child picks up the phone, the caller just shouts dirty words at him.”
Henderson agreed to do as Roosevelt wished. He added that if Mossadegh asked him about American support for subversion in Iran, he would “make it quite plain that we have no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of a friendly country.” Roosevelt considered this a noble sentiment but said nothing.
Monday evening was “a most active and trying time for the station,” according to the CIA’s postmortem. Roosevelt spent four hours in an intensive planning session with his key operatives, among them the Rashidian brothers, General Zahedi and his son Ardeshir, and General Hedayatollah Guilanshah, a former
air force commander who had committed himself to the plot. All were smuggled into and out of the embassy compound under blankets or in car trunks.
Roosevelt was now acting entirely on his own. There had been no backup plan in case the first coup failed, so he simply improvised as he went along. He was in constant motion and had neither the time nor the desire to clear his decisions with superiors. Even if he had wanted to do so, communications technology was cumbersome and unreliable. So during those crucial days, no one in Washington or London had any idea what he was doing.
From the beginning, Roosevelt had realized that the fate of Mossadegh’s government would ultimately be decided on the streets. His Iranian agents were able to produce crowds almost instantly. He devised a plan to use both pro-and antigovernment riots, but in the end the nature of the mob’s demands was almost irrelevant. A mob crying for Mossadegh’s ouster was, of course, ideal, but one that supported him was also helpful because it would help polarize opinion and perhaps even provoke royalist soldiers into repressive reaction. All that really mattered was that Tehran be in turmoil.
The riots that shook Tehran on Monday intensified on Tuesday. Thousands of demonstrators, unwittingly under CIA control, surged through the streets, looting shops, destroying pictures of the Shah, and ransacking the offices of royalist groups. Exuberant nationalists and communists joined in the mayhem. The police were still under orders from Mossadegh not to interfere. That allowed rioters to do their job, which was to give the impression that Iran was sliding toward anarchy. Roosevelt caught glimpses of them during his furtive trips around the city and said that they “scared the hell out of me.”
All the Shah’s Men Page 21