All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  After the column departed, Roosevelt crept out of his hiding place, walked back to his car, and drove through the tumultuous streets toward the embassy. There he and his aides toasted impending victory. “Actually, to all intents and purposes it was no longer impending but won,” he wrote afterward. “Our colonel from the west [Kermanshah] would not reach Tehran until evening, but the rumor of his movement had given us all we needed. The actual arrival of his troops simply added more enthusiasm to a town already drunk with victory.”

  The tank on which Zahedi was riding turned first toward Radio Tehran. There, surrounded by delirious admirers, he made his way toward the upstairs studio. It had been decided that martial music should be played before Zahedi spoke to the nation, and one of Roosevelt’s agents had brought along a likely-looking record from the embassy library. As Zahedi approached, a technician played the first song. To everyone’s embarrassment, it turned out to be “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Another, more anonymous tune was quickly chosen and played. Zahedi then stepped to the microphone. He declared himself “the lawful prime minister by the Shah’s order” and promised that his new regime would do everything good: build roads, provide free health care, raise wages, and guarantee both freedom and security. About oil he said nothing at all.

  Military and police units loyal to Zahedi were taking control of Tehran. One seized the telegraph office and sent messages across the country declaring that Mossadegh had been deposed. Another found and captured General Riahi, the army chief of staff. Several joined the battle outside Mossadegh’s home.

  At this moment, completely unaware of these events, the dejected Mohammad Reza Shah was dining at his Rome hotel, accompanied by his wife and two aides. Suddenly, a handful of news correspondents burst into the dining room, pushed their way to the Shah’s table, and thrust wire service reports from Tehran into his hands. At first he was incredulous. “Can it be true?” he blurted. The color drained from his face. His hands began shaking violently. Finally he jumped to his feet.

  “I knew it!” he cried out. “I knew it! They love me!”

  Empress Soraya, less moved, rose and placed her hand on her husband’s arm to steady him. “How exciting,” she murmured.

  After the shock passed, the Shah regained his composure. He turned to the correspondents and told them, “This is not an insurrection. Now we have a legal government. General Zahedi is premier. I appointed him.” After a pause he added, “Ninety-nine percent of the population is for me. I knew it all the time.”

  Still in something of a daze, the young monarch made his way to the hotel lounge, where a throng of reporters and curious tourists was gathering. His first desire, he told them, was to return home. “It is a cause of grief to me that I did not play an important part in my people’s and my army’s struggle for freedom and, on the contrary, was away and safe,” he said. “But if I left my country, it was solely because of my anxiety to avoid bloodshed.”

  Although the coup was now on the brink of success, Mossadegh still resisted. As fighting raged around his house, he sat with remarkable calm in his bedroom. Bodyguards had covered most of the window with a steel plate, so he could hear but not see what was happening outside. When his personal aide, Ali Reza Saheb, urged him to flee, he shook his head and replied, “If it’s going to happen, if it’s going to be a coup d’etat, I think it is better that I stay in this room and I die in this room.”

  The attackers outside felt momentum on their side. They had heard Zahedi proclaim his victory over the radio, and they knew that a friendly column of soldiers from Kermanshah was approaching. As ammunition supplies inside the house began to dwindle, they tightened their circle.

  Loyal military officers might have rushed to defend Mossadegh if they had known what was happening. They did not, largely because General Riahi, who would have called them into action, was under arrest. Before being arrested, however, Riahi managed to call his deputy, General Ataollah Kiani, who commanded the Ishrat Abad barracks in what was then an outlying Tehran neighborhood. Kiani immediately ordered an infantry battalion and a tank battalion to assemble and follow him toward the city center. Before he had gone far, he ran into a rebel column commanded by General Daftary. Of the two men, Daftary was by far the more sophisticated and persuasive.

  “We are colleagues and brothers, all faithful to the Shah,” he told Kiani. “We should not fire at each other.”

  After a few more minutes of honeyed words, Kiani was won over. The two generals and their aides embraced in what Iranians call a “kissing party.” Kiani’s men, who might have saved Mossadegh, returned to their barracks.

  Fighting at Mossadegh’s house raged for two hours. After the firing from inside stopped, a platoon of soldiers stormed in. They found the house empty. Mossadegh had escaped at the last moment, pushed over a back garden wall by fleeing aides. Officers poked around the house for an hour or so, packed the best pieces of Mossadegh’s furniture onto waiting trucks, and drove off. They had chased the old man away, and even though they did not have him, they knew they had done well.

  As the victorious soldiers melted into the night, rioters who had cheered them on swarmed into the house to loot and destroy. Some set fires. Others pulled doors, windows, and appliances onto the sidewalk and began selling them, haggling over prices as flames lit up the night behind them. Mossadegh’s refrigerator went for the equivalent of thirty-six dollars.

  Back at the embassy compound, the handful of covert agents who had planned the coup were, in Roosevelt’s words, “full of jubilation, celebration, and occasional totally unpredictable whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with enthusiasm.” Diplomats on the embassy staff looked on curiously. They asked nothing and Roosevelt told them nothing.

  Around the time that Mossadegh’s house was being set afire, a car pulled up at the gate of the American embassy. The driver honked wildly, and Roosevelt hurried out to see who it might be. It was Ardeshir Zahedi. He jumped from the car, and the two men hugged each other fervently.

  “You must come now to my father, to pay your respects to the new prime minister!” Ardeshir said.

  “Let’s have a brief word with Ambassador Henderson before we go,” Roosevelt replied. “I think he deserves to be told officially, and you are the proper person to do it.”

  Arm in arm, the two co-conspirators half-danced their way along a path that led to the ambassador’s residence. Henderson was sitting beside his swimming pool. He had put a bottle of champagne on ice, and when his visitors arrived, he popped the cork. They told him the glorious news, including the fact that the new prime minister had named two of Roosevelt’s Iranian agents as cabinet ministers. First they drank to the new government, then to the Shah, then to Eisenhower and Churchill, and finally to one another. When the bottle was empty, Ardeshir said that it was time for him to take Roosevelt to meet the country’s new leader. He took his leave from Henderson with a warm embrace.

  General Zahedi had established temporary headquarters at the Officers Club near the center of town. The mood there was ecstatic, and when Roosevelt arrived, he was swamped by well-wishers. He didn’t recognize most of them, but many seemed to know him. Everyone, even people he had never seen, wanted to hug him and kiss both his cheeks. Zahedi finally rescued him and called for order. He made a brief speech and then called on Roosevelt.

  Wild cheers erupted as Roosevelt stepped forward. A few people in the club knew that he had organized the coup, and others no doubt suspected it. This, however, was no time for gloating. Roosevelt spoke only a few disingenuous sentences, with Ardeshir translating.

  “Friends, Persians, countrymen, lend me your ears!” he began, and the din subsided. “I thank you for your warmth, your exuberance, your kindness. One thing must be clearly understood by all of us. That is that you owe me, the United States, the British, nothing at all. We will not, cannot, should not ask anything from you—except, if you would like to give them, brief thanks. Those I will accept on beha
lf of myself, my country and our ally most gratefully.”

  There was another round of hugging and kissing, and then, as quickly as he could, Roosevelt withdrew. For days he had been working without a break, the fate of a nation in his hands. Now exhaustion began to overwhelm him. He commandeered a car and driver, made his way back to the embassy compound, walked through the darkness to the home where he had been given lunch, and knocked on the door. Minutes later he was sound asleep.

  About three hundred people died in Wednesday’s fighting, half of them in the final battle at Mossadegh’s house. Some of the civilian victims were found with 500-rial notes still in their pockets. Roosevelt’s men had distributed the notes that morning to dozens of their subagents.

  The next day, newspapers around the world reported Mossadegh’s fall. Most of their accounts were as perceptive as could have been expected, given the fact that the true story was a closely guarded secret and would remain so for decades.

  “The sudden reversal was nothing more than a mutiny by the lower ranks against pro-Mossadegh officers,” Kennett Love wrote in the New York Times. “Wednesday morning at about nine, a group of weightlifters, tumblers and wrestlers armed with iron bars and knives began marching toward the center of the city shouting pro-Shah slogans. That was all the troops needed. Ordered to break up the demonstration, they turned their weapons against their officers. Spontaneously the mobs shifted from Mossadegh’s to the Shah’s bandwagon.”

  Don Schwind of the Associated Press, who like Love had been on the streets watching the coup unfold, filed a chronology of the day’s events. He reported that the coup “started rolling” at nine o’clock in the morning, as “mobs armed with sticks and stones,” together with soldiers and police officers, began marching toward the city center. “By 7:00 P.M. local time, the last nest of resistance in the capital, Mossadegh’s home and the compound surrounding it, was in the hands of Zahedi’s forces,” he concluded. “The first Zahedi men to break into Mossadegh’s room found only the body of his personal bodyguard. Mossadegh and his cabinet colleagues are still missing.”

  For Roosevelt and his co-conspirators, this was, as the CIA postmortem put it, “a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation that it is doubtful any other can come up to it.” Festivities at the Officers Club continued through much of the night. Zahedi, realizing instinctively that he must take quick and decisive steps to consolidate his new power, slipped out for a quick tour of police stations, accompanied by Hamid Reza, the crown prince, who symbolized Zahedi’s ties to the royal family. The tour convinced him that police commanders were loyal to his new regime. Thus assured, he returned to the Officers Club and slept for a few hours.

  Immediately after rising on Thursday, Zahedi summoned General Nader Batmanqelich, a veteran officer who had provided valuable military help the night before in exchange for a promise that he would be named chief of staff if the coup succeeded. When Batmanqelich arrived, Zahedi quickly swore him in and then gave him his first orders. He was to suppress all demonstrations, close all borders, and purge pro-Mossadegh officers from the army and the police.

  There was much more for Zahedi to do in his first hours as prime minister. First he convened a quick meeting of his newly named cabinet. Then he drafted an order replacing several governors suspected of pro-Mossadegh sympathies. He ordered the release of many prisoners, including twenty who had been charged in the murder of the police chief Mahmoud Afshartus earlier that year. His only trip outside the Officers Club was to Radio Tehran, where he broadcast a brief speech giving Mossadegh twenty-four hours to surrender.

  It was a quick role reversal. Just four days before, Zahedi had been the fugitive and Mossadegh the prime minister who demanded, in a broadcast over the same radio station, that he turn himself in within twenty-four hours. Mossadegh had offered a reward of 100,000 rials, the equivalent of $1,200, for information about Zahedi’s whereabouts. Now Zahedi offered the same sum for information about Mossadegh.

  At midmorning the new prime minister dispatched a telegram to Mohammad Reza Shah, telling him that Iranians were “counting the minutes” until his arrival. The Shah’s departure from Rome, however, had hit some minor snags. Empress Soraya had not borne up well under the pressure of recent months, and at the last moment it was decided that she should stay in Rome for treatment of “nervous strain.” Then someone pointed out that although the British had placed a chartered airliner at the Shah’s disposal, his already battered nationalist credentials might be further weakened if he returned to Tehran in a plane with British markings. It was decided that he should wait for another one.

  Mossadegh could not have hidden for long even if he wanted to, so Zahedi was not surprised when he telephoned the Officers Club at six o’clock that evening to arrange his surrender. Zahedi asked him where he was hiding, which turned out to be a private home downtown, and sent General Batmanqelich to pick him up. As a precaution against an assassination attempt by Mossadegh’s enemies—or a rescue attempt by his friends—Zahedi ordered tanks onto the street and machine-gunners onto rooftops along the route.

  An hour later the car carrying Mossadegh pulled into the courtyard of the Officers Club. The prisoner, haggard and dressed in pajamas, leaned heavily on a yellow Malacca cane as he emerged. Guards saluted him, and he saluted them back. Inside, he was helped to an elevator and taken to Zahedi’s office on the third floor.

  “Peace be with you,” Mossadegh told the man who had defeated him.

  “And also with you,” Zahedi replied.

  The two men spent twenty minutes behind closed doors. From all indications they spoke without rancor. When they emerged, Zahedi ordered that Mossadegh and the three aides who had surrendered with him be brought to comfortable suites upstairs. He then directed Tehran Radio to stop calling them insulting names and to refer to them instead as “their excellencies.”

  The Shah was less generous. As Mossadegh was surrendering in Tehran, he was touching down in Baghdad aboard a Dutch airliner that had been chartered at a reported cost of $12,000. Eight Iraqi air force fighters escorted his plane to the airport, and as he stepped off, a military band played the Iranian national anthem. When reporters asked him what he had planned for the deposed prime minister, he turned serious.

  “The crimes of Mossadegh are the most serious a person can be responsible for,” the Shah said solemnly. “Mossadegh is an evil man who wanted only one thing out of life: power at all costs. To accomplish this end he was willing to sacrifice the Iranian people, and he almost succeeded. Thank God my people finally understood him.”

  What a difference six days had made! On Sunday the Shah had passed through Baghdad as a ragged exile. Now he was on his way home as a triumphant monarch. The Beechcraft in which he had fled was still on the tarmac. He flew it home himself.

  The Shah’s plane touched down in Tehran at seventeen minutes after eleven o’clock on that Saturday morning and taxied to a stop in front of a stiff formation of soldiers from the Imperial Guard. He emerged resplendent in an air force uniform that had been flown to him in Baghdad for the occasion. Prime Minister Zahedi was the first to pay his respects, falling to his knees and pressing his lips to the monarch’s proffered hand. Hundreds of other admirers had turned out, and when Zahedi stepped back, they surged forward. Several of them, including Colonel Nasiri, General Batmanqelich, Ayatollah Kashani, Shaban the Brainless, and Ambassador Loy Henderson, had given crucial help to Operation Ajax. The Shah greeted each of them and then turned to survey the delirious crowd. “His eyes were moist,” one correspondent reported, “and his mouth was set in an effort to control his emotions.”

  In a radio address that evening, the Shah promised to “repair the damage done to the country.” He left no doubt that he blamed Mossadegh for most of it. “I nurse no grudge in my heart, and extend clemency,” he said. “But when it comes to violations of the constitution which we are under oath to preserve—an oath that was
forgotten by some—and to dissolution of the Majlis, disintegration of the army and the dissipation of treasury funds, the law must be carried out, as desired by the people.”

  Prime Minister Zahedi, who was with the Shah as he spoke, embraced this tough line. Reporters asked him why Mossadegh, now accused of such high crimes, was being held in relative luxury at the Officers Club. “That bad man has been treated too well so far,” he replied. “Tomorrow I will send him to the city jail.”

  Zahedi was emboldened not just by his victory but by concrete, though secret, expressions of support from the United States. The CIA had decided in advance to give his new government $5 million immediately after he took power, and it was provided as planned. There was also an extra million for Zahedi himself.

  With the new regime now firmly in control, it was time for Kermit Roosevelt to leave Iran as quietly as he had arrived four weeks earlier. Before departing, however, he wished to see the Shah one last time. Discretion dictated that their meeting should be as secret as their previous ones, since Roosevelt’s presence in Tehran, not to mention the nature of his activities, was still unknown to all but a very few Iranians. He sent word that he would like to stick to the midnight schedule of past weeks and suggested Sunday evening.

  That final meeting was unlike any of their previous ones. The car that brought Roosevelt through the gates of the Saad Abad Palace was officially marked as property of the United States. Roosevelt sat tall inside instead of lying under a blanket. Royal guards who had looked away when he arrived for past visits saluted him crisply.