All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  A courtier met Roosevelt, escorted him up the palace’s twenty-nine wide steps, and brought him to the Shah’s lavishly appointed sitting room. The monarch motioned him to be seated. Vodka was served, and each man took a glass. The Shah raised his and told Roosevelt, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!” They drank quietly, savoring their triumph.

  “It is good to see you here, rather than in an anonymous car on the street outside,” the Shah told Roosevelt after that first toast.

  “It is good, Your Majesty.”

  “The new prime minister, who is now your good friend, as you know, will be coming shortly. Is there anything you would like to discuss before he arrives?”

  “Well, sir,” Roosevelt ventured after a moment’s hesitation, “I wonder if you have had a chance to make up your mind on what you will do with Mossadegh, Riahi and the others who plotted against you?”

  “I have thought much about that. Mossadegh as you know surrendered himself just before my return. He will be sentenced, if the court follows my suggestion, to three years of house arrest in his village. After that he will be free to move about in, but not outside, that village. Riahi will spend three years in jail and will then be released to do as he pleases—if what he pleases is not objectionable. A few others will get similar punishment. There is one exception. Hussein Fatemi cannot be found yet, but he will be. He was the most vituperative of them all. He urged on the Tudeh gangs that pulled down statues of me and my father. When we find him, he will be executed.”

  Roosevelt said nothing in reply. A few moments later Prime Minister Zahedi was escorted in. He bowed to the Shah and smiled broadly at Roosevelt, who repeated that the new regime owed nothing to the United States since “the outcome is full repayment.”

  “We understand,” Zahedi answered. “We thank you and will always be grateful.”

  The three people in that palace room were among the few who had any idea how Operation Ajax was engineered. They took a silent moment to share their satisfaction. “We were all smiles now,” Roosevelt wrote afterward. “Warmth and friendship filled the room.”

  After a few minutes, the Shah rose to escort Roosevelt back to his car. On the way out he reached into his jacket, pulled out a gold cigarette case, and presented it to his guest “as a souvenir of our recent adventure.” Then, unexpectedly, a barrel-chested military officer appeared. It was Colonel Nasiri, who had played key roles in both the failed coup on Saturday and the successful one four days later.

  “I have made only one promotion,” the Shah said. “I present you now to General Nasiri.”

  It was after one o’clock in the morning when Roosevelt returned to the embassy compound. Ambassador Henderson was waiting for him. Henderson had arranged for Roosevelt’s departure later that morning, aboard the naval attaché’s plane to Bahrain.

  Roosevelt barely slept. Soon after dawn he was driven to a remote hangar at the Tehran airport. Several of the men with whom he had carried out the coup were there to send him off. “I stumbled onto the plane,” he wrote later, “with tears in my eyes.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Purring Like a Giant Cat

  A few days after Mossadegh surrendered to the new regime, a platoon of soldiers appeared at his suite in the Officers Club. The new prime minister, Fazlollah Zahedi, had ordered him transferred to a military prison. There he remained for ten weeks while an indictment was drawn up. When it was ready, Mossadegh was brought before a military tribunal and charged with treason for having resisted the Shah’s dismissal order and for “inciting the people to armed insurrection.” He defended himself vigorously, asserting that the firman had been delivered as part of a midnight coup d’etat and was in any case illegal, since Iranian prime ministers could not be dismissed without a no-confidence vote in the Majlis.

  “My only crime,” Mossadegh told his judges, “is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth.”

  The guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. Along with it came the sentence: three years in prison, followed by house arrest for life. Mossadegh served the full prison term and upon his release in the summer of 1956 was brought to his home in Ahmad Abad. One morning soon after his arrival, the new secret police, called Savak, organized a crude maneuver to impress upon him the terms of his incarceration. A gang of thugs turned up in front of his home, and they began shouting violent anti-Mossadegh slogans. At their head was none other than the gang leader Shaban the Brainless, who had become one of the regime’s favorite enforcers. For a time the mob seemed ready to storm the house. It retreated after one of Mossadegh’s grandsons fired several rifle shots into the air from inside. Several minutes later two Savak officers arrived and asked to see the prisoner. They carried a letter for him to sign. It was a request that Savak agents be assigned to protect him. Mossadegh, who understood the realities of power, signed it without protest. Within an hour Savak agents took up posts outside and inside the walled complex where he lived. Their standing orders, which did not change for the rest of Mossadegh’s life, were to allow no one other than relatives and a few close friends to visit him.

  In the weeks following the coup, most of Mossadegh’s cabinet ministers and prominent supporters were arrested. Some were later released without charge. Others served prison terms after being convicted of various offenses. Six hundred military officers loyal to Mossadegh were also arrested, and about sixty of them were shot. So were several student leaders at Tehran University. Tudeh and the National Front were banned, and their most prominent supporters were either imprisoned or killed.

  Hussein Fatemi, who had been Mossadegh’s foreign minister, was the most prominent figure singled out for exemplary punishment. Fatemi was a zealous antimonarchist, and during the turbulent days of August 1953 he had attacked the Shah, whom he called “the Baghdad fugitive,” with special venom. Iran had fallen into its misery, Fatemi asserted at one point, because “for the last ten years a dirty, hateful and shameful royal court has been the servant of the British embassy.” In one speech he addressed the absent monarch: “O traitor Shah, you shameless person, you have completed the criminal history of the Pahlavi regime! The people want revenge. They want to drag you from behind your desk to the gallows.” Now that the tables were turned, the Shah had his chance, and he did not miss it. Just as he had promised Kermit Roosevelt, he arranged for Fatemi to be summarily tried, convicted of treason, and executed.

  Fatemi had once compared the Shah to a snake “who bites mortally when the opportunity presents itself.” In the end he was among those who suffered the deadly bite. Because of his fate, and also because he was the only member of Mossadegh’s inner circle who was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, his memory is honored in Iran today. One of the main boulevards in Tehran is Dr. Hussein Fatemi Avenue.

  In the years after Mossadegh fell from power, Mohammad Reza Shah made him a nonperson about whom it was considered unseemly to speak. Little could be published about him, and nothing at all that was positive. In 1962, having consolidated his increasingly repressive regime, the Shah allowed the National Front to emerge from its illegality and hold a rally, on the condition that each speaker mention Mossadegh’s name just once. One hundred thousand people turned out. They knew the stipulation the Shah had placed on speakers, and when each mentioned Mossadegh the allotted one time, they let out a thunderous cheer. That was the last time the Shah allowed the National Front to gather in public.

  Mossadegh’s wife died in 1965, and although she had stayed in Tehran during the years he was at Ahmad Abad, they remained very close and her death severely affected him. In a letter to a friend he wrote that he was “deeply in pain from this tragedy … and now I pray God to take me soon, too, and relieve me of this pathetic existence.” Several months later he developed an ailment that was diagnosed as throat cancer. Mohammad Reza Shah sent him a message suggesting that he seek treatment abroad,
but Mossadegh refused and chose an Iranian medical team instead. He traveled to Tehran with a police escort and spent several months there under medical treatment. Doctors succeeded in removing his tumor but then subjected him to heavy doses of cobalt. That may have done more harm than good. His health continued to decline. On March 5, 1967, at the age of eighty-five, he died. No public funeral or other expression of mourning was permitted.

  The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which later changed its name to British Petroleum, tried to return to its old position in Iran, but public opinion was so opposed that the new government could not permit it. Besides, the logic of power dictated that since the United States had done the dirty work of overthrowing Mossadegh, American companies should share the spoils. Ultimately, an international consortium was organized to assume the rich concession. Anglo-Iranian held 40 percent of the shares, five American companies together held another 40, and the remainder was distributed to Royal Dutch/Shell and Compagnie Française de Pétroles. The non-British companies paid Anglo-Iranian $1 billion for their 60 percent of the concession. Although the consortium was run by foreigners, it retained the name Mossadegh gave it—National Iranian Oil Company—to preserve the façade of nationalization. It agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis but not to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors.

  In the years that followed, Mohammad Reza Shah became increasingly isolated and dictatorial. He crushed dissent by whatever means necessary and spent huge amounts of money on weaponry—$10 billion in the United States alone between 1972 and 1976. He had that amount of free cash because of the sharp increase in oil prices during those years. The $4 billion that Iran received from the consortium in 1973 reached $19 billion just two years later.

  On the rare occasions when he mentioned Mossadegh, the Shah was contemptuous of his “infantile xenophobia” and “strident nationalism.” He told one friend: “The worst years of my reign, indeed of my entire life, came when Mossadegh was prime minister. The bastard was out for blood, and every morning I awoke with the sensation that today might be my last on the throne.”

  When Iranians’ anger began boiling over in the late 1970s, the Shah found that since he had crushed all legitimate political parties and other opposition groups, there was no one with whom he could negotiate a compromise. In desperation, he named a prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, who had been deputy minister of labor in Mossadegh’s government. The Shah must have felt history’s breath on his neck when Bakhtiar visited Mossadegh’s grave in Ahmad Abad immediately after taking office, made a speech there pledging fidelity to “Mossadegh’s ideals”, named a government made up largely of National Front sympathizers, and placed a photo of Mossadegh behind him whenever he addressed the press. At that point, however, doom was so close that the Shah had no choice but to accept such effrontery.

  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who as a young mullah had strongly opposed Mossadegh, emerged in the late 1970s as Mohammad Reza Shah’s most potent enemy. The Shah had sent him into exile in 1964, but from Turkey, Iraq, and finally Paris, he continued preaching his fundamentalist message. When Bakhtiar became prime minister, Khomeini scorned and denounced him. “Why do you talk of the Shah, Mossadegh, money?” he demanded in one radio speech. “These have already passed. Islam is all that remains.”

  In one of the most stunning political collapses of the twentieth century, the Shah was forced to flee his homeland in January 1979. This time the CIA was not able to return him to his throne. The next year he died in Egypt, reviled by almost everyone. Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him as the arbiter of Iran’s destiny.

  Men associated with Mossadegh and his ideals dominated Khomeini’s first government. The prime minister was Mehdi Bazargan, whom Mossadegh had dispatched to Abadan in 1951 to run the refinery there after the British departed. Ibrahim Yazdi, the head of a small political party dedicated to preserving Mossadegh’s legacy, became deputy prime minister and then foreign minister. In the first postrevolutionary election, Khomeini permitted another Mossadegh admirer, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, to run for and win the presidency.

  For a brief period after the revolution, it seemed that from the grave, Mossadegh was returning to power. The high school in Ahmad Abad was named after him. So was the main street in Tehran, which had formerly been Pahlavi Avenue. A commemorative stamp was issued in his honor. On March 5, 1979, the twelfth anniversary of his death, an enormous crowd flooded into Ahmad Abad. It was one of the largest gatherings in modern Iranian history. People had to park their cars miles away and walk the rest of the distance. President Bani-Sadr led the tributes and announced plans to move Mossadegh’s body to a mausoleum in Tehran. The family demurred, wisely suspecting that if political tides changed, the mausoleum might be desecrated.

  These tributes to Mossadegh were in part an effort by Iranians to give him the homage they had not been permitted to give while the Shah was in power. They were also intended as a message to Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullahs. By celebrating Mossadegh, Iranians were expressing their wish for a regime like his: nationalist, democratic, and based on the rule of law. It soon became clear that Khomeini had not the slightest intention of establishing such a regime. He had broadened his mass appeal by embracing supporters of the National Front, but as soon as he consolidated power, he pushed them out. Before long, he began arresting them. Among those who had to flee the country to save their lives was Hedayat Matine-Daftary, the only one of Mossadegh’s grandchildren who had been bold enough to venture into politics.

  The window that had been opened for Mossadegh’s admirers was now closed. Tehran’s main street was renamed again, this time in honor of the Twelfth Imam. Mossadegh’s secularism was as abhorrent to the new regime as his democratic vision had been to the old one. The mullahs, like Mohammad Reza Shah before them, came to realize that allowing Iranians to honor Mossadegh would inevitably lead to calls for a government based on his principles. That they could not tolerate, and so they did all they could to suppress his memory.

  The men who organized and carried out the 1953 coup soon scattered. General Zahedi, the prime minister who replaced Mossadegh, pleased the Shah with his repressive campaign against nationalists and leftists. Before long, however, the two men had a falling out. Zahedi, like Mossadegh, was a strong figure who believed that prime ministers should be free to run their own governments. The ambitious Shah could not abide that. Just two years after the coup, he forced Zahedi from office and later sent him abroad as ambassador to the United Nations office in Geneva. He died there in 1963.

  Zahedi’s son Ardeshir, whose quick wits and perfect English made him a valuable asset to the coup plotters, went on to a long and successful career. Although he was still in his midtwenties when his father became prime minister, he quickly emerged as a highly influential figure, serving simultaneously as his father’s closest adviser and as a chamberlain to the Shah. His influence did not diminish after his father’s fall, and in 1957 he married the Shah’s eldest daughter, Princess Shahnaz. Wary of his growing power, the Shah sent him off to golden exile as ambassador to Great Britain, where those who knew of his role in the coup embraced him. Later he returned to Tehran for a term as foreign minister and then became the ambassador to the United States. In that post he defended the Shah to the bitter end. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he moved to a villa in Switzerland. He never admitted his role in the coup and even published a rambling article asserting that the CIA was not involved either.

  “Mossadegh’s fall was not due to any dirty tricks the CIA might have played,” he wrote. “My father never had any meetings with CIA agents.”

  Asadollah Rashidian, whose subversive network of journalists, politicians, mullahs, and gang leaders was crucial to the success of Operation Ajax, prospered in the years that followed. He and his brothers remained in Tehran, and his business ventures flourished under the Shah’s patronage. His home became a salon at which politicians and other influential figures spent many evenings
discussing the nation’s future. Several times the Shah used him as a secret emissary to foreign governments. In the mid-1960s, however, the Shah became uncomfortable with the presence in Tehran of such a sophisticated and well-connected figure, especially one who knew so many secrets. Rashidian sensed this and moved to his beloved England to live out his remaining years in comfort.

  Not everyone who helped stage the coup was lucky enough to live into retirement. One to whom the Shah was especially ungrateful was General Nasiri, the officer who led the first, unsuccessful coup against Mossadegh and who also played an important role in the one that succeeded. For years after Mossadegh’s defeat, Nasiri served faithfully as commander of the Imperial Guard. He did the Shah’s bidding so willingly and discreetly that in 1965 he was placed in charge of the brutally repressive Savak. In that post he did the Shah’s dirtiest work without complaint for more than a decade. Enemies of the Shah accused him of horrific crimes. When they began their final drive to power in the late 1970s, the Shah sought to placate them by removing Nasiri from office. Later, claiming to be shocked at reports that Savak had employed torturers, the Shah threw his old friend into prison. Soon after the 1979 revolution, mullahs dispatched Nasiri to a firing squad. Tehran newspapers published photos of his bloody corpse.

  Mossadegh’s loyal chief of staff, General Riahi, spent a year in prison after the coup and then returned to his original profession, engineering. After the 1979 revolution, he became minister of defense. He served for a few months, until the tide of radicalism overwhelmed Mehdi Bazargan’s government, and then returned to private life until his death several years later in Tehran.

  The Shah gave Shaban the Brainless, the most famous leader of the mob that rampaged through Tehran during the fateful days of August 1953, a yellow Cadillac convertible. He became a familiar figure on the streets of Tehran, driving slowly around town with a pistol on each hip, ready to jump out and attack anyone who seemed pro-Mossadegh or anti-Shah. Savak agents called on him from time to time when they wanted someone beaten or otherwise intimidated. After the Islamic Revolution, Shaban moved to Los Angeles and published a memoir denying that he had done much of what Iranians had seen him do.