by Terence Ward
“Despicable, those English,” sneered Philippe. “We French would surely have treated them better.”
“Like in Algiers?”
“But, Patrick, that was different. Algérie was zee France.”
“At any rate, the British had been pumping oil in Iran for fifty years and there wasn’t a single trained Iranian technician. It was a scandal. In Arabia, where I had been working, a whole generation was being trained.”
The Frenchman rolled his eyes, nursed his thoughts, puffing on his Gitanes. He was that odd dapper foreigner who can be found in every Near Eastern country, a self-appointed expert on all things, who always explains why the local regime is worthy of support. He praised the mullahs, with whom he’d been negotiating oil concessions. “They’re quite amusing, you know. Some have a fine sense of humor.”
It was just the three of us sitting in what had been a swinging bar before the Revolution. A sleepy concierge served us a round of Zam Zams. A photograph of turbaned Khamenei stared down from the wood-paneled wall. A travel poster advertised the sun-bleached columns of Persepolis; its arabesque turquoise script read, “Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Having recently returned from the Khuzestan oilfields in the west, Philippe was now surveying the refinery in Shiraz for possible business opportunities. He put down his Zam Zam and sighed. “You speak of history? L’empereur once had great plans for this country. Iran missed her big chance. Napoleon’s grand army could have marched all the way to Calcutta. Then, no more British.” He slapped his thigh.
“Bolshaya Igra,” said Pat.
“ ’Zcuse me?”
“The Great Game.”
“Ah, yes. Well, that would have changed many things.”
I had first found Philippe insufferable, with his pinched mustache and darting eyes. Yet he had a point. What if Napoleon had made it all the way to India? It’s not often, I realized, that a Frenchman abroad gets to relive the joys of Napoleon’s aspirations.
“L’empereur, ah yes, on the Neman River they divided the world. But the czar wanted Istanbul. Napoleon refused. First we take India, he said, then we’ll see.”
“So they planned to march across Iran?” I asked.
“Of course. Well, look here, in those days one didn’t ask permission for that sort of thing.”
Philippe’s eyebrows twitched. He lit another cigarette. The murky intrigues of the Great Game filled the smoky room. He sketched out the route along the coffee table, navigating around our Zam Zams. His finger traced Levantine ports, then passed through the cedars of Lebanon and across the napkin that served as the Syrian Desert.
“Voilà, now we go down zee Euphrates and up over the Zagros. It must be in spring, for the good weather. Then we cross the plateau to India.” He was panting with excitement. I noticed beads of sweat on his brow. It felt surreal, in this darkened lounge, to be marching like this. I looked over at my father, who winked at me.
We both watched as Philippe’s finger made its way through the treacherous Hindu Kush, another crumpled napkin, stained cola-brown on the far side of the table. The sleeping plains of India lay below. Finally Dad leaned over to utter one word, “Moscow.” It all ended then and there. Philippe came crashing to earth with his Zam Zam. The entire Syrian Desert was covered in dark, sticky soda.
In a Baltic town, there is a plaque. Peter Hopkirk describes it in his book The Great Game. It sums up the Russian winter. On one side is written, “Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 400,000 men.” On the other, “Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 9,000 men.”
“Ah, Napoleon,” Philippe moaned, wiping at his spilled Zam Zam. “Why did he have to go to bloody Russia? Why?” I helped mop up his mess.
When Philippe’s partner entered the tavern, we all stood up and shook hands. Reza wore a trimmed beard and the kind of tieless suit so popular in Iran today. His eyes shone like dead moons.
Yes, he told us, he had overheard our comments. But it was not the French or the Russians that Iranians feared, and not even the Americans. It was the British.
“The British hand has been in everything. Even taking down the Shah and bringing back Imam Khomeini.”
Listening to Reza, I remembered Hassan’s joke: “When a neighbor is talking rough, insulting his wife, the English must be behind it.” For centuries, Anglophobia had explained virtually every vice in Iran.
“Let me ask you something about the British,” Reza said. “Didn’t they force their way into Iran from India? And didn’t one Englishman, D’Arcy, buy the concession for everything that lay under the soil? How in God’s name,” Reza asked, “could the Shah sell the right to all our oil to an Englishman? But he did. And didn’t another Englishman, Reuters, buy the rights to the national railroad and the national bank? And wasn’t the entire tobacco crop given to the British for nothing? And didn’t all this begin the constitutional revolution of 1906?”
Reza went on to remind us why it failed. In 1907 the Russians and the British secretly divided up Persia, with the north going to the czar and the south going to the king. But in 1917 the British occupied the country with the intention of making it a protectorate. And with the long-awaited fall of the hated Qajars, he asked, wasn’t the new Shah Pahlavi really chosen by General Ironside? “Of course, he was,” Reza sniffed. “And during the Second World War, in 1941, when England and Russia invaded us, wasn’t the Shah unceremoniously bundled off?”
“To Johannesburg,” I replied.
“And by whom?”
I ventured a guess. “The British?”
“Of course, baba.” He smiled warmly.
I told Reza that George Bernard Shaw once wrote that an Englishman “does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.”
“Yeeees! Exactly.” He was beaming.
* * *
The refrain “The English, of course” lives on in the Iranian psyche of conspiracy theories. Its literary epicenter is one of the best satires ever written in Farsi, Da’i-i Jan Napuli’un, or My Dear Uncle Napoleon.
Published in the early 1970s, Iraj Pezeshkzad’s howlingly funny bestseller also aired as a highly successful series on Iranian television. Its cast of much-loved characters lampooned the inbred belief that every detail of Iran’s destiny has been manipulated for the last two centuries by the “hidden hand” of the British. Yet the comic character of Uncle Napoleon did more to confirm long-held views of English manipulation than dispel them. “Satire,” Jonathan Swift wrote, “is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
My Uncle Napoleon takes place during World War II, behind the walls of a leafy garden estate in northern Tehran, where the fidgety megalomaniac Uncle Napoleon, a retired colonel, holds court with his extended family, repeating tales of exaggerated bravery in inflated battles as the invading British troops approach the capital. Comic household intrigues move among love stories, mistaken identities, henpecked husbands, family rifts and Uncle’s obsession that Churchill’s agents are plotting night and day to seize him.
Uncle Napoleon, the neurotic patriot, steals our hearts. He has earned his nickname through an undying admiration for the French general, whom he quotes with passion. Pezeshkzad, a cultivated, worldly and long-serving officer in Iran’s diplomatic corps, masterfully weaves Uncle Napoleon’s imaginary battles with windmills as the narrative builds to a fever pitch.
The family’s collective Anglophobia reaches a climax when Uncle accuses Mash Qasem, his faithful servant, of being a British agent. Uncle points a rifle at him, and Qasem confesses to plotting with the enemy, yet the reader knows he’s never met an Englishman in his life. Qasem is so consumed by his master’s delusion that he actually believes he has unwittingly become a spy. Such are the powers of the British that they are capable of making anyone a spy, even without him knowing!
When I uttered the magic words “Uncle Napoleon,” Reza bro
ke into laughter. Philippe perked up.
“ ’Zcuse me. Napoleon, you said?”
“Is a very famous story. Very funny too,” Reza said.
Philippe was thrilled to hear the story. “Voilà. I knew the Iranians would have loved our empereur.”
“Of course,” sighed Reza, playing Mash Qasem.
“I’m not so sure,” I said.
“Of course they would,” Philippe insisted.
“Baba, it’s true. Anything but the English. Anything.”
The two partners gleefully shook hands.
* * *
In 1941, when British and Russian forces seized the Iranian lion by the throat and occupied the country, Reza Shah’s young Swiss-educated son, a playboy, was thrust upon the peacock throne. The old Shah was sent off on a British warship, first to Mauritius and then to the Transvaal—surely not the retirement spot he had in mind. And there he died.
By 1951, all eyes had turned to oil and the Persian Gulf. A newly elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had shocked London and Washington by nationalizing Iran’s oil, ending all of Britain’s claims. No wonder. He had discovered that Iran’s royalty income was less than the taxes paid to the British treasury. And that was the end of that.
Overnight, Mossadegh became the darling of Third World leaders. Time made him its “Man of the Year.” The London press labeled the defiant leader “Mossy.” Meanwhile, the world’s most powerful oil companies—Standard Oil, Shell, Socal, Socony, Texaco and Gulf—rallied round the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. These “seven sisters” refused to load a single drop of Iranian crude onto their tankers. Their collective boycott worked.
Two years later, Iran’s economy lay in shambles. Mossadegh’s popular dream of national sovereignty was in grave danger. The young Shah, fearful of being stripped of his monarchical powers, secretly fled to Rome. Sulking in his Via Veneto haunt, he waited for news from British agents in Tehran directing an archetypal cold-war coup that would end “Mossy’s” bold experiment. U.S. dollars flooded the bazaars and financed mobs that surrounded Prime Minister Mossadegh’s home in northern Tehran. In 1953, the Shah returned on a magic carpet stitched together by MI6 and its eager new partner, the American CIA.
The year of the infamous coup, Freya Stark, the indomitable Middle East traveler, looked out over the skyline of Abadan, the focus of Britain’s interests in Iran that drove both nations to the brink of war: “I am sitting contemplating the beauties of civilization—a forest of tall chimneys, an expanse of iron aluminum-painted tanks, a belching column of smoke which burns year in and year out—the Anglo-Persian oil port … Looking south the great river flows quiet and flat between palm groves just as the Sumerians saw it; and north it might be Glasgow except for the sun.”
All for the oil. With the Shah back on the throne, CIA operatives strutted into the spotlight, taking more credit than was due, though everyone in power knew that British intelligence ran the operation. Such grandstanding helped divert public and congressional criticism from American fiascoes in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs. Kermit Roosevelt, the Middle East CIA station chief and grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, spoke proudly and openly about the newly formed agency’s first successful coup. The British were only too happy to see him do so.
Unabashedly, he chronicled the glamorous plot line in his book, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran. Roosevelt detailed numerous highlights: his original summons to London by the British secret service, flying into Iran in disguise, hiding in car trunks, sneaking into Golestan Palace, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to street toughs, staging popular demonstrations and, finally, welcoming the Shah back home at Mehrabad Airport. At that historic moment when his feet touched the tarmac, the Shah shook Roosevelt’s hand and said, “I owe my throne to my God, my people—and to you.”
In time, Iranians would transfer their suspicion and anger from the British to the brash Americans and their eager pupil, the Shah. Conspiracy theories were fueled for generations to come.
* * *
We heard a bang on the glass door and looked up. The door opened and Vaz was holding his nose as he entered the bar. He was in obvious pain. He had been listening when his nose got caught in the motion of the swinging doors.
“Mr. Ward, you forgot to talk about the Trilateral Commission of Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger? Or the Freemasons who want to dominate the world?”
No one replied. It was too late. Philippe was tired and Reza was yawning. We had become pleasantly exhausted of conspiracy talk. We all got up to leave.
But what about Vaz, I wondered, walking past the sleeping night guard before climbing the stairs with Dad. Was he simply a translator randomly assigned to join us from Richard’s travel agency? Just who was Vaz really working for?
7. Every Place Is Kerbela
Every day is Ashura, every place is Kerbela.
—AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI
A hundred miles north of Shiraz, on the way to Yazd, the desert road was blocked by a Qashqai tribe migrating to higher pastures on frisky horses and mules. Barking dogs herded flocks of sooty white and black sheep, scruffy plump mutton wagging their drooping tails—fortunes of kebab on the hoof.
“Turks … barbarians,” Vaz muttered under his breath.
“They’re Irani, Vaz,” said Rich.
“Not really.”
“Sure they are.”
“You don’t know. They’re dirty and uneducated. The Shah settled them down and built cement houses for them. For free.”
“And what happened?”
“They pitched their tents in the middle of the courtyards and slept outside.”
“So who slept inside?”
“Their sheep. They put them in the rooms. You call that civilized?”
“In a Qashqai kind of way.”
“Richard, come on, I thought you were a modern guy.”
“But their permanent homes were short-lived. In the chaos of the Revolution, they packed up and hit the road,” Akbar added, pulling out his map of Fars and pointing to a valley wedged deep in the mountains. He called it “hidden heaven.” In the summer, the Qashqai pitched their tents by the River Kor, high up on the green-flecked Zagros, where their sheep grazed and their campfires blazed under the stars. “One day we must go there,” he said.
* * *
Our journey continued through hostile landscape. Nasrollah weaved his unwieldy van over a heartless pass known as Couly Kush, Killer of Gypsies. In winter, he said, even the toughest nomads could not cross it. Stretches of scrub desert opened across the eastern horizon. Blue snowcapped mountains rose to the west. Crows flew overhead, gray wings and bellies with black heads and tails. We stopped at a roadside checkpoint. A bored-looking policeman began his search.
“They’re looking for taryak, opium,” Akbar told us while Nasrollah was being questioned. “Many smoke taryak. It comes in from Afghanistan. They are the biggest opium producers, thousands of tons a year.”
Above us on the flanking hill, I could spot Qashqai freely moving ahead in a thin line. A bald, grumpy soldier in ill-fitting khakis asked where I was from. He looked far too serious for my usual answer, “The Great Satan.”
“Amrika,” I replied, using my best Farsi accent. He nodded and then shouted at a waiting truck packed with young Afghan men. Illegal immigration was as much a problem here as in Southern California. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a brutal civil war, and now the fundamentalist Taliban had forced millions of refugees into neighboring Iran. Once across the border, they found work and safety instead of hunger and fear. But after two decades, their hosts’ welcome was wearing thin.
“Better than them, bah.” He spit. “You tourist?”
“Yes.”
“You come to Iran, you leave, insha’allah.”
I looked at his gun. “Insha’allah.” I laughed nervously.
“Then you are better than them.”
“Why?”
“They come, never leave.”
&n
bsp; Tipping his plastic-brimmed cap, the soldier squinted to study the ridgeline above us. The faint tinkling of sheep’s bells could be heard. The Qashqai had crossed over to the other side of the hill and were far from any checkpoint.
“And they,” he sighed, “they came long time ago and never left.”
In Iran there has always been tension between farmer, city dweller and nomadic shepherd. It is an age-old rivalry. Over the centuries, waves of tribes from central Asia rode into the country, searching for grazing land. Still today nomads herd their flocks to pasturelands with the changing seasons. Forever on the move in the mountains, they offer two contributions to the Iranian economy are carpets and mutton. Townspeople and peasants view these wandering sheepherders in the way that many Europeans view Gypsies. Few admire their proud nomadic tradition.
Iran emerged as a complex, ethnically rich mosaic of Farsi-speaking urban dwellers, making up only about half of the population, and Turkic-speaking clans and tribes of Azeris, Baluchis, Turkomans and Qashqai.
* * *
“Imagine my village only fifty years ago,” Hassan never tired of saying. “Mud walls and four towers. The wooden gates closed at night, and outside, robbers roamed freely. Travel was dangerous business, like a time of cowboys and Indians.”
Each village was its own walled island. Beyond was a cruel ocean with few ports for shelter. Any journey was filled with fear and uncertainty. Few brave souls risked it. And they never traveled alone. “When my father went out in his caravan with twenty or thirty people,” Hassan told us, “he knew he might never come back. That’s why each time he said to his brother, ‘I have this much money. If I don’t come back, then give it to my family.’ ”