All the Shah’s Men

by Stephen Kinzer

  On the long Turkish Airlines flight across the Atlantic and then on to Tehran, I wondered what awaited me. My first hint that I was not entirely welcome came when I checked into the Laleh, which is one of the city’s largest hotels. Less than a year had passed since the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, and the desk clerk gave me the key to Room 911. To my protests, he could only shrug and reply that this was the room to which I had been assigned.

  A few hours later the telephone rang. I had asked an Iranian friend to try to find people who might have known Mossadegh or been loyal to the National Front, and she now insisted that I come to see her immediately. When I arrived, she told me that a government official had called her with a stern warning. She was not to telephone anyone on my behalf and should also tell me that if I met with anyone at all, I would be summarily deported. What, then, about our plans to travel to Ahmad Abad on the anniversary of the August 19 coup?

  “I can’t go with you,” she said. “They don’t want me to do any work for you at all.”

  The anniversary was still a few days away. Tehran offers little in the way of diversion, and on my visa application I had expressed a desire to return to Isfahan, which I had visited on an earlier trip. I spent several days there and found the spectacular tiled palaces and mosques as dazzling as I had the first time. On my flight back to Tehran I sat next to a middle-aged businessman who, like everyone I met in Iran, detested the Islamic regime and thought well of Americans. Naturally I asked him about my favorite subject.

  “You’re too young to remember Mossadegh,” I ventured, “but you must have heard about him. What did you hear? What did you learn?”

  He paused for a moment to reflect. To speak of Mossadegh is not forbidden in Iran, nor would Iranians obey any such prohibition. But for five decades, excepting only a brief couple of years after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he has been cast as a dubious figure at best, more likely a traitor.

  “I don’t know that much about him,” my new acquaintance told me. “I know he nationalized our oil industry. But the main thing about Mossadegh is that he represents freedom. In his time there was free speech, there were free elections, people could do what they wanted. He reminds us that there was a time in Iran when we had democracy. That’s why our government is afraid of him.”

  When I arrived back at the Laleh, I was assigned once again to Room 911. My guide—American tourists in Iran must travel with a guide—was not happy to learn that I wished to visit Mossadegh’s home at Ahmad Abad. I had planned simply to hire a taxi and go there, but the guide told me that was quite impossible. This struck me as odd, since Ahmad Abad is a farm village far from any military base or secret installation. Still, it is inextricably linked with the man who for eleven years was its sole prisoner and most famous citizen.

  It was August 18, the night before the anniversary of the coup, when my guide appeared with good news about the miracle he had worked. I asked him why arranging such a seemingly innocuous trip should be so difficult. By his expression he seemed to tell me that if I understood Iran better, I would not have asked such a foolish question.

  “For three reasons it is difficult,” he explained. “First of all, this is not a routine site. It’s not on the tourist program. The ministry of culture has a list of places that tourists can visit, and you’re supposed to stick to those places. No tourist ever goes to Ahmad Abad! Second, you did not list Ahmad Abad as a place you wanted to visit when you requested your tourist visa. We made a program for you based on your requests, and that program has been approved by the ministry. You’re supposed to stick to the program. And third, you don’t have the right visa to visit a place like that. If you had a journalist’s visa, you could travel anywhere, but not on a tourist visa. It was all very difficult and very complicated. A whole machinery had to be set in motion.”

  The guide must have noticed my scowl, because after this litany he hastened to add, “You don’t have to feel specially obligated to me. I would have done it for any of my tourists.”

  Ahmad Abad lies an hour’s drive west of Tehran. A highway runs most of the distance, and after leaving it, visitors wind their way past small factories and through barley and sugar beet fields. No sign points the way, nor does any mark the entrance to the village. There is only a small kiosk where sweets are sold. On the day I arrived, two small boys were sitting in the shade in front of it.

  “Ask them who Mossadegh was,” I said to my guide. He did, and the boys broke into smiles, shaking their heads as if we must be dunces.

  “He nationalized the oil industry!” one of them replied. The other one laughed. I was impressed.

  The road into Ahmad Abad stops at the gate of a compound surrounded by a high brick wall. There is no name on the gate, but a quick look around made clear that there is no place in town nearly as imposing as this. It had to be Mossadegh’s home. I rang the bell and waited.

  After a minute or two, a young woman opened the gate. Before us stretched a footpath about eighty yards long, lined on both sides by tall elm trees. Through the trees we could see a handsome two-story brick home with green frames around the doors and the windows.

  For more than a decade Mossadegh never left this compound. He could have, because his sentence confined him only to the village, not strictly to the compound. Police agents, however, were under orders to follow and observe him if he stepped beyond the gates. He preferred solitude to their company.

  The compound is quite a pleasant place, with paths through gardens and arbors, and the manor house is comfortable though hardly luxurious. Mossadegh was not idle here during his long imprisonment. He supervised the work of about two hundred peasants who worked in nearby fields, training them in the use of modern farm equipment and even winning an agricultural prize for a scheme that increased sugar beet production. His family had traditionally produced lawyers and doctors, and since he had already learned most of what there was to know about law, he devoted himself to studying medicine. He read medical texts and boiled local roots to make antimalaria medicine. When villagers became sick, he treated them. For those who fell seriously ill, he wrote notes that gained them admission to the Najmieh Hospital in Tehran, which his mother had founded. Many brought him their small problems and found him unfailingly attentive and generous.

  During his long hours of solitude, Mossadegh spent much time in his upstairs library. He immersed himself in old interests, reading Islamic philosophy and the works of political theorists like Montesquieu and Rousseau, and developed new ones like cooking. He eliminated fried foods from his diet and ate only those that had been steamed or boiled. One of his favorite books, which is still in his study, was the Larousse Gastronomique.

  Still, for one who lived within the walls of this compound for so long, it must have taken on something of the air of a prison. During his years there, Mossadegh was often unwell, suffering from periodic bouts of bleeding ulcers and other ailments. Relatives who visited him say that he was depressed, discouraged, and demoralized. He mourned not for the loss of his own power but for the collapse of his dreams for Iran. Nothing he did in Ahmad Abad was able to raise his spirits.

  “I am effectively in jail,” he wrote in his memoir. “I am imprisoned in this village, deprived of all personal freedoms, and wishful that my time would be up soon and I would be relieved of this existence.”

  The caretaker who escorted my guide and me into Mossadegh’s compound said that visitors appear there regularly, especially on weekends. On this day, however, the forty-ninth anniversary of the coup that brought down his government on August 19, 1953, we were the only ones. I had come halfway around the world to be here.

  In his will Mossadegh expressed a desire to be buried at the Ebne Babooyeh cemetery in Tehran, alongside the graves of those killed defending his government during the clashes of July 1952. Mohammad Reza Shah, fearing that Mossadegh’s grave might become a focus of opposition, would not permit that. Relatives then decided to bury his remains without ceremony in Ahmad Abad. He had inst
ructed them to construct no memorial, not even a gravestone, to mark the place. Those wishes were carried out. He now lies beneath the floor of what was once his dining room.

  The carpeted room is small but pleasant, with windows that admit streams of sunlight. Over the years it has taken on the air of a shrine. A low wooden table covered with woven cloth stands over the spot where Mossadegh’s body is buried. On it there are two candles and a Koran. Most Iranian visitors follow tradition by laying a hand lightly on the cloth and reciting a verse that acknowledges God’s mercy and compassion.

  Walls of this room are covered with images of Mossadegh. Some are painted in oil, others sketched in pen or pencil. One is an embroidery that shows him against the background of an Iranian flag. A silk-screen print carries a quote from one of his speeches: “As I am an Iranian and a Muslim, I oppose anything that is against Iran or Islam.” There is a photo of him vigorously defending himself at his trial and another, more plaintive one of him sitting alone and lost in thought during his house arrest. The one I liked best shows him at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, laying his finger on the famous crack.

  This was the room where Mossadegh ate his daily meals and often received visitors. I spent a long time there, allowing my imagination to take me back to those days. Finally I thanked the caretaker and asked if I could walk around the grounds. She had no objection. I wandered among the shade trees and peered into a garage where a pale green 1948 Pontiac that belonged to Mossadegh’s wife sits unused.

  After a few minutes, another, more intriguing object caught my attention. Leaning against the back wall were the tall double doors of a sturdy iron gate. It was the only object salvaged from the house in Tehran where Mossadegh lived most of his life, including his tumultuous years as prime minister.

  What history this gate has seen! Through it, the American and British ambassadors to Iran, along with special emissaries like Averell Harriman, passed countless times as they sought to persuade Mossadegh to give up or modify his plan to nationalize his country’s oil industry. Crowds of thugs banged on it as they shouted “Death to Mossadegh!” during the aborted 1952 uprising. During that same uprising, a jeep carrying Shaban the Brainless crashed through the gate as Mossadegh scurried to safety over a back wall. There is still a large dent near the bottom that is probably a result of that crash.

  The house before which this gate once stood was wrecked and burned on the night of August 19, 1953, and later the debris was bulldozed to make way for an apartment building. All that remains is the gate. This gives it great historical importance and, for those who knew Mossadegh or have tried to learn about him in the years since his death, an almost spiritual aura. I placed my hand on it and held it there for a long time.

  Only a few people in Ahmad Abad could remember Mossadegh. I found one of them, Abolfathi Takrousta, working on his car in the dusty street outside his home. He is a truck driver and a farmer who worked as a cook in the Mossadegh complex when he was a teenager. When I told him why I had come, he brightened instantly and invited me onto his patio for tea and pistachio nuts. Birds sang as we sat under a grape arbor and talked about bygone days.

  Although many accounts describe Mossadegh as having suffered from various ailments, especially in his later years, and although his three years in solitary confinement cannot have been healthy for a man his age, Mr. Takrousta remembered him as strong and vigorous. Once Mr. Takrousta began talking, stories flowed out. Mossadegh had opened a pharmacy where medicine was distributed free to villagers, loaned money to those in need, built an insulated shed to keep ice in summertime, and distributed free bags of grain to each of his laborers at Ramadan and on New Year’s Day. “Mossadegh was not like a normal landlord,” Mr. Takrousta told me. “He ran his estate like a charity. Most of what he grew, he gave back to the workers. Everyone here loved him. Any kind of a problem that you had, you would go to him and he would take care of it. From the highest official to the poorest worker, he treated everyone the same.”

  One day, my new friend told me, a peasant came to Mossadegh to complain that he had been detained by some of the local Savak agents, taken to their headquarters, and beaten while they shouted questions about Mossadegh’s habits and conversations.

  “It was the only time I ever saw him get angry. He called the police chief and shouted at him to come to the house immediately. When he got to the house, Mossadegh pushed him against a wall, held his cane against the guy’s throat and shouted: ‘You are here to watch me, and you have no right to abuse anyone else. If you have a problem, you come to me and only me! Don’t ever, ever lay a finger on one of my people again!’ This was a Savak officer and not a nice man at all, but when this happened he started apologizing and begging forgiveness. After that, the police never went near us. The jailer was afraid of the prisoner!”

  I asked if Mr. Takrousta and his neighbors felt different from people in other villages, and he assured me that they did.

  “We not only feel different, we are different,” he told me. “We’re different because of the effect Mossadegh had on us. Visitors come here from far away. They don’t come to any other village. People here are proud that we had the privilege of having such a great man here. We try to behave according to the example he gave us. We have a sense of charity, cooperation, unity, solidarity. We take the hands of people in need. People from other villages know we’re like this, and when they have problems, they come to us and we help them. You can’t think of Ahmad Abad without thinking of Mossadegh. He’s the father of our nation but also the father of this village. It’s really a shame that they destroyed his government.”

  I asked who “they” were. Mr. Takrousta paused, unsure of himself. He stared up at the sky for a long moment and then spoke slowly.

  “I’m a simple, uneducated villager,” he said. “I don’t know who ‘they’ are. But whoever they are, they don’t want our people to be free and raise ourselves up.”

  We had spent more than an hour talking, and my host followed Iranian tradition by inviting me to stay for lunch. I declined as politely as I could, shook his hand, and thanked him profusely. For a while afterward I wandered aimlessly through the village. Later I checked back at the manse to see whether any other guests had appeared to mark this anniversary. None had. A group of Mossadegh’s admirers had considered holding a rally that day, but several were facing prosecution for various political offenses and did not want to provoke the authorities.

  Beginning in the 1990s, and especially after the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami was elected president in 1997, Iranians used Mossadegh as a symbol in their political debates. Anyone who paid tribute to him or waved his portrait was implicitly challenging the principles of Islamic rule. Laws forbade calling for a democratic republic to replace the Islamic regime, but praising Mossadegh’s legacy was another way of doing the same thing. I found that many Iranians still associated his name with the idea of freedom.

  “Oh, he was a good leader,” one young man told me. “When he was in power, you could say what you wanted. Not like today. Shah killed him, right?” Not exactly, I replied. But in a sense perhaps yes.

  Islamic leaders do not know quite what to make of Mossadegh. They take his defeat as proof of their view that Iran is the eternal victim of cruel foreigners. Because he was a secular liberal, however, they cannot embrace him as a hero.

  The Iranian press reflected this ambivalence in the way it covered the forty-ninth anniversary of the 1953 coup. One television station broadcast a damning documentary about it, but there was hardly a mention that Mossadegh was the victim. A small group of pro-government students rallied outside what was once the American embassy, but they, too, limited themselves to condemning “the crimes of the Great Satan against the Iranian nation” and did not refer to Mossadegh.

  Only two of Tehran’s fourteen daily newspapers ran stories to mark the anniversary. One of them, Entekhab, which is a mouthpiece for hard-liners, described the coup as having been launched “against Mossadegh and also Kashan
i,” a bizarre rewriting of history that portrays Ayatollah Kashani as a victim of foreign intervention rather than as one of its agents. The lesson of the coup, this article said, was that Iranians must support their leaders because dissent only served the interests of “warmongers in the White House.”

  The other article, in the moderate paper Fereydoon Shayesteh, was quite different. It described August 19, 1953, as “the day despotism returned,” and although carefully avoiding any praise of Mossadegh, it summarized the episode quite well: “The coup was carried out by professionals from both inside and outside Iran, and it cost millions of dollars. It is not at all true that, as some people have said and written, the coup happened because of internal opposition and mistrust of Mossadegh. It became possible when various well-known politicians, many of whom owed their careers to Mossadegh, broke with him and used all their means to ruin his reputation. These accusations have had no lasting effect, and in the years after the coup, those who made them never managed to win back the people’s respect.”

  During my stay in Tehran, I tried to find some of the buildings associated with the coup, but without much success. Tehran has grown enormously since then, and as in many big cities, growth has meant the destruction of many old neighborhoods. I did drive slowly past the now-empty American embassy compound from which Kermit Roosevelt worked and where American hostages were imprisoned years later. Slogans were painted in large letters on the outside walls, conveniently translated into English. “We Will Make America Face a Severe Defeat,” one says. Another proclaims: “The Day the US Praises Us, We Should Mourn.”

  The only other landmark I could find that Mossadegh would have recognized was the Saad Abad Palace. On the lawn outside, he sat for three days in 1949, demanding that the Shah annul that year’s fraudulent election. Inside are rooms where he met often with the Shah, including on the day in 1952 when he had his dramatic fainting fit. The palace is now open to visitors. As I approached, I asked my driver to pull to the side of the long driveway before we reached the entrance. He was mystified, but I had calculated that this must have been where the car carrying Kermit Roosevelt stopped on the nights when he had his clandestine meetings with the Shah. I could easily visualize the Shah walking down the steps ahead, coming through the darkness, and sliding into the car beside him.