Soraya once explained that her back-and-forth existence meant she felt at home everywhere and nowhere, identifying as Muslim and Christian but feeling neither fully Iranian nor German. “It was a sort of rupture,” she explained. “With my eyes which were too light and my skin which was too white for some of them, with my Persian manners which were a little too haughty for the others. I was alone, isolated.” After leaving school Soraya decided to take English classes in London in the hope of becoming an actress. She had no idea that she was about to feature in a real-life screenplay, one far more dramatic than any Hollywood starring role. Word of her exquisite beauty had reached Tehran, where Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk, the indomitable Pahlavi matriarch, investigated her son’s prospects for marriage. After a close friend and relative of Khalil Esfandiary handed her a photograph of Soraya, the Queen Mother asked her daughter Shams to summon the girl with the blue-green eyes and luminous complexion to Paris for an inspection. Shams met Soraya and was quickly won over. She informed her mother that their search was over—Iran had its new queen.
The teenager was oblivious to the intrigue. All that Khalil Esfandiary told his daughter was that the Shah had requested her presence back in Tehran and that a marriage proposal was a possibility. Elders in both families, he explained, believed that a union between the Pahlavi and the Bakhtiary clans was desirable. But he made it clear she would have the final say in her fate and that marriage was not a fait accompli. “If he doesn’t like me,” Soraya pleaded, “promise me that you will send me to drama school in America.” Her father agreed to this condition and assured her that a refusal would not cause scandal. Khalil’s sentiments may have been well intentioned but they were hardly realistic, and Soraya was passing through Rome when she spotted a newspaper headline that referred to her as the next Queen of Iran. She later admitted that she became swept up in the drama and romance of the moment, behaving like a naive schoolgirl with celluloid dreams of marrying “Prince Charming.” Soraya recalled how genuinely impressed she was when she saw the young King stride into a palace reception room wearing the uniform of an army general. He was “imposing, magnificent.” He was smitten, too, and before dawn of the next day asked for her hand in marriage. Their passion for each other was obvious, and the Shah made no effort to hide his disappointment when his fiancée fell ill with typhoid on the eve of the wedding ceremony, forcing a six-week postponement of the nuptials.
The bride was still gaunt and feverish when she drove to the Marble Palace on February 12, 1951, dripping in emeralds and wearing a Dior wedding gown so weighty it threatened to topple over like a melted meringue. When Soraya’s legs gave out while trying to shake two thousand pairs of hands at the reception, the new Queen was half-carried to an anteroom and revived with smelling salts. Her anxious husband hovered over her and suggested that her lady-in-waiting use a pair of shears to tear off the ten meters of wedding train and petticoats. All the while he tenderly whispered in her ear, telling her how much he loved and desired her. Yet Soraya was struck by her husband’s modesty. Even in private, away from the servants, they addressed each other using the formal Persian word for “you.” “In spite of a first marriage, in spite of countless mistresses he had before me,” she recalled, “he did not like to show his feelings, still less to find expressions of love which his modesty forbade him. His eyes alone were expressive. Dark brown, almost black, shining, at times hard, at times sad and gentle, they exuded charm and reflected his soul.” She also remembered the words of Princess Shams, who had warned her in Paris that her brother was insecure and petulant, browbeaten by his mother, humorless and thin-skinned.
Soraya was still a stubborn and highly strung teenager used to getting her way. She had a fiery temper and once banned her husband from the marital bed. He tolerated the outburst and for a while patiently slept outside her door on a camp bed. Several weeks passed before a senior courtier politely suggested that perhaps Her Majesty might allow His Majesty back into his bed. The Queen pointed to a corner and briskly retorted, “He can put his bed over there!” Acclaimed abroad as one of the great beauties of the postwar era, Soraya’s glacial charm and brusque manner won her few friends at court. She was not afraid to cause a scene. One evening the couple bickered during a dinner with family and friends. Soraya stunned the room into silence by picking up a vase and hurling it against the wall. Courtiers took to calling her “the German woman.” She frequently disregarded protocol, refused to wear formal dress when it was required, and absconded from official duties that bored her. Her behavior embarrassed foreign dignitaries and angered her ladies-in-waiting and government officials. During a state visit to India she retired to her suite in the middle of a formal reception, not bothering to offer thanks to her hosts. But her husband adored her and tolerated her petty humiliations. During one dinner party the conversation turned to the sort of qualities that made for the ideal woman. “Well, I’m very lucky, because the Queen is exactly the kind of woman that I like,” the Shah told the other guests. Soraya’s brisk retort shocked the room into silence: “Well, I cannot say the same for His Majesty.”
Palace officials were embarrassed at the hold Soraya had over her husband and dismayed at her treatment of Shahnaz, the Shah’s teenage daughter to Fawzia. In her memoir, Soraya claimed she made an effort to get to know the young girl and make her feel welcome. But after their wedding the Shah packed his daughter off to boarding school in Europe, where the girl suffered terribly from homesickness and felt abandoned. One time, when he and Soraya visited Shahnaz at school, the jealous Queen made her feelings clear and “threw an embarrassing temper tantrum.” Soraya “wasn’t very kind to [the Princess],” said Fatemeh Pakravan, wife of a senior courtier. “For those who knew, it wasn’t very pleasant. The Shah liked his daughter very much. I was witness to that. Then he stopped. He completely cut her off, because Soraya didn’t like her.” He would later pay dearly for the neglect of his firstborn child.
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THE NEWLYWEDS’ HONEYMOON cruise in the Aegean was canceled when the Fedayeen-e Islam assassinated Prime Minister Razmara, who supported a negotiated settlement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to resolve the dispute over ownership of Iran’s oil fields. The speaker of parliament was a clergyman, Ayatollah Abul-Qasem Kashani, a wartime sympathizer of the Nazis, fervent proponent of oil nationalization, and spiritual godfather to a generation of young clerics who wanted religious law to replace secular rule. Kashani’s circle of admirers included Ruhollah Khomeini, an ambitious young mullah who was developing new ideas on how the Shia ulama could become more politically involved in public life. Kashani was supported by the Fedayeen-e Islam.
Amid mounting political turmoil the Shah felt obliged to accept the Majles’s nominee for prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who commanded a majority of votes in parliament. Mossadeq was the founder of the National Front, a political party composed of left-wing nationalists who demanded an end to Britain’s oil concession. Passionate and charismatic, Mossadeq captured the hearts of the people. The Shah granted his assent to Mossadeq’s nomination to the post of prime minister, as he was bound to do under the Constitution, and he offered no resistance when the new government voted to nationalize the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. With an alliance sealed between Mossadeq’s leftist National Front and Kashani’s right-wing religious radicals, who also supported oil nationalization, Iranian political life entered a perilous new era. The Shah labeled the two groups “the Red and the Black,” and for the rest of his life warned against the unholy alliance of socialists conniving with the clergy to seize power. Mossadeq’s ascension to the premiership set the scene for a titanic showdown between two men whose personal relationship dated back to 1940, when the young Crown Prince had intervened to save the older man’s life against his own father’s advice.
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“I WILL NEVER forget what your husband did. I will never start anything against [him].”
Throughout the spring and summer of 1951, Prime Minister Moh
ammad Mossadeq repeatedly assured Queen Soraya that he understood he owed her husband a debt of gratitude for ordering his release from Reza Shah’s prison cell. Now age sixty-nine, Mossadeq, the “Old Lion” of Iranian politics, symbolized Iran’s search for democracy and identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Mossadeq had married the granddaughter of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, whose fifty-year reign over Persia was ended by an assassin’s bullet in 1896. Educated in France and Switzerland in politics and law, Mossadeq returned to Persia to enter public life during the Constitutional Revolution. He served in parliament, as governor of the provinces of Fars and Azerbaijan, and later as Iran’s minister of finance, and as one of the few parliamentarians to oppose the election of the House of Pahlavi his fierce criticism of Reza Shah’s autocracy had earned him a spell in jail. In the late forties Mossadeq founded the National Front, whose central platform called for oil nationalization.
Mossadeq’s elevation to the premiership in April 1951, and the swift passage into law of his oil nationalization bill, sent shock waves through capitals in the anti-Communist West. Nowhere was the impact felt more than in Great Britain, whose ailing postwar economy was kept afloat by Persian oil revenues. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company pumped hundreds of millions of pounds into British coffers and supplied the Royal Navy with 85 percent of its fuel. After losing its base in Iran the British economy faced national bankruptcy. Almost immediately, British officials began planning a coup to depose Mossadeq and take back control of Iran’s oil fields. They rushed paratroopers to Cyprus, imposed an oil blockade to choke off oil exports, and sued the Mossadeq government for restitution. In Washington, where the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era were under way, U.S. officials braced for a wave of copycat nationalizations targeting Western economic interests in newly independent countries throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. British officials harped on the threat of communism, clearly hoping to rally American support for covert action by implying that Iranian oil would soon fall under Soviet domination. President Harry Truman and his national security team refused to be rushed into action. Secretary of State Dean Acheson hoped for a negotiated solution, and he and Truman hosted the Iranian prime minister at the White House. They dismissed the hysteria over communism as a canard. “The cardinal purpose of British policy is not to prevent Iran from going Commie,” Acheson advised Truman. “The cardinal point is to preserve what they believe to be the last remaining bulwark of British solvency.”
Iran’s young King was intimidated by Mossadeq’s street appeal and awed by his reputation as a giant-slayer. It must have appeared to him as though Mossadeq and not he laid claim to the farr. The Shah supported oil nationalization in principle but preferred a negotiated outcome to prevent a full-blown international crisis. Officers in the Imperial Guard watched fascinated as the prime minister’s car pulled up outside Saadabad Palace for his weekly audiences with the Shah. Visitors to the palace grounds were required to park outside the gate and walk in. “But Mossadeq was frail and walked slowly with a cane,” said the head of the Imperial Guard. “The Shah said several times, ‘Open the gate and let him come into the palace grounds with his car.’” But Mossadeq insisted on following protocol and refused to be treated any differently than his predecessors. “He would get out of the car, walk through the gate, pay his respects to the royal flag and then walk on to the palace. The guards were impressed with the loyalty he showed the King. Then he would walk up the stairs.” The Shah always made sure his schedule was cleared fifteen minutes before Mossadeq’s arrival and patiently stood at the window waiting for his guest to arrive. Then the drama began. Mossadeq had a well-known habit of throwing fainting fits to draw attention to himself, and the sight of the young King at the window was enough to bring on the vapors. “Mossadeq would, when he saw the King, pretend to be about to collapse, and the King would rush down the stairs and help Mossadeq up the stairs. Twice this nearly led the King to fire the head of the Imperial Guard.”
The breakdown of their relationship had all the bitterness of an estrangement between father and son. Mossadeq was determined to curb imperial powers and prerogatives and confine the Shah to his palace. Disdainful of compromise, he resorted to demagoguery and adopted a strategy of bluff and threats to get his way. One of Mossadeq’s more sympathetic biographers noted his political genius but also concluded that he probably knew in advance of the plot to assassinate Prime Minister Razmara, yet did nothing to stop it. Nor did Mossadeq express any regret or remorse when the minister of court, a man he knew well, was brutally murdered. The assassinations and the wave of terror carried out by his ally Ayatollah Kashani’s Fedayeen-e Islam “saved the National Front in its infancy,” wrote Christopher de Bellaigue, and “removed the last obstacle to oil nationalization and a government dominated by the National Front.”
The arrival of a new president in Washington in January 1953 led to a sea change in U.S. policy toward Iran and oil nationalization. President Dwight Eisenhower and his national security team led by the two Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, took a more hard-line view of Mossadeq’s decision to take back the oil fields. Mindful of Moscow’s intrigues in Azerbaijan seven years earlier and haunted by the fall of China, the invasion of South Korea, and Communist coups throughout Eastern Europe, the Americans geared up for intervention. Sixty percent of the world’s known oil reserves were in the Persian Gulf region, and the idea that they might fall into Soviet hands was untenable. Eisenhower also worried that his British allies were so desperate they might launch a military operation to seize Iran’s southern oil fields and provoke Soviet military retaliation. “Had the British sent in the paratroops and warships as they were wont to do a few years later against the Egyptians at Suez, it was almost certain that the Soviet Union would have occupied the northern portion of Iran by invoking the Soviet-Iranian Treaty of Friendship of 1921,” concluded a secret CIA study written in the seventies. “It was also quite possible that the Soviet army would have moved south to drive British forces out on behalf of their Iranian ‘allies,’ then not only would Iran’s oil have been irretrievably lost to the West, but the defense chain around the Soviet Union that was part of US foreign policy would have been breached.” At the dawn of the nuclear age, a covert operation provided Eisenhower’s men with a menu of options that satisfied Britain’s sense of urgency, avoided the risk of a superpower showdown and world war, and allowed for a “hidden hands” regime change operation that ensured the president would not be held publicly accountable if things turned out badly.
While planning for a coup dubbed TPAJAX (Operation Ajax) was under way in Washington, in Tehran the noose tightened around the Imperial Court. Mossadeq cited the economic crisis caused by the shutdown of oil exports as the excuse to dissolve the Supreme Court and the upper house of parliament, impose censorship, reshuffle the senior army command, and propose stripping the Shah of his role as army commander in chief. The prime minister publicly snubbed the monarch when he refused to attend the Pahlavis’ traditional New Year celebrations and demanded that the Queen Mother and Princess Ashraf, whose influence he most feared, leave Iran for exile. Since the end of the war, Ashraf had emerged as her brother’s lightning rod and the undisputed and greatly feared first lady of Iranian politics. Dubbed the “Black Panther” by her critics, a title she relished, the Princess and her second husband, Ahmad Shafiq, used her inheritance from Reza Shah to build a substantial real estate empire in northern Iran. She plunged into the maelstrom of postwar Iranian public life determined to “make political friends for the regime and to neutralize some of the opposition. Every day I met with individuals and groups representing various points of view.” His sister’s exile deprived the Shah of his fiercest defender.
Mossadeq was determined to strip the Shah of his remaining powers. Isolated in the palace and ignored by his ministers, the Shah’s moods vacillated between elation and despair. The previous year his former brot
her-in-law King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed and the Shah was keenly aware of the speculation that surrounded his own future. “I have lost my status,” he complained to his wife. “Staying in Tehran would mean that I approved the policies of my prime minister. It is absolutely imperative that we go abroad.” He sank into such a fitful state of depression that his closest aides “feared complete nervous breakdown and irrational action.” Months of continuous stress also triggered severe abdominal pains that required him to have emergency surgery performed by a medical team secretly flown in from the United States. The Queen, already under pressure to conceive a child after two years of marriage, and “wild with anxiety” about the political crisis, suffered her own nervous collapse. She succumbed to anorexia and locked herself in her room for hours at a time, sobbing and barely able to muster the energy to rise from her bed.
Finally, in February 1953 the couple decided to leave the country for what was officially described as an extended overseas vacation, though their final destination of Switzerland raised suspicions that they planned to settle permanently in Europe. The Shah failed to realize that events were turning in his favor. By now many of Mossadeq’s allies worried that the prime minister’s brinkmanship risked the country’s unity and created opportunities for the Communist Tudeh Party and its Soviet backers to seize power. Ayatollah Kashani, who had made Mossadeq’s elevation to the premiership possible, dispatched an intermediary to the palace to urge Soraya to change her husband’s mind. Kashani also sent crowds to the palace gates to plead with the Shah to stay. For months the Shah had been waiting for some sign that his people still wanted him, and now he had it. “I promise you that I will stay in Tehran!” he cried through a megaphone. The Queen, who presumably knew a ruse when she saw one, looked on and wept. Yet the Shah refused to take the next step, which was to bestow his blessing on a coup against his own prime minister. Though under the Constitution he was well within his legal right to sack the prime minister and appoint a replacement, he knew that doing so would likely provoke street riots and tarnish his own legitimacy. His training as a young prince had taught him that the role of the king was to unify and not divide the people, and he remembered that any monarch who shed the blood of innocents risked forfeiting the farr.
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