Patriot of Persia Read online

  Life was a mixture of Iranian tradition and European-inspired innovation. Progressives like Mossadegh had rejected the practice, common in their fathers’ day, of taking several wives, and yet he felt that other traditions were well worth keeping. He married three of his children to their first cousins, a mechanism for bolstering family unity and preventing the dissipation of wealth, and the unsuspecting Ghollamhossein, home on university vacation from Europe, was bounced into marrying a girl he had not seen before.8 For all that, Mossadegh was not a snob and he welcomed his niece’s marriage to a doctor from a middle-class background, Yusuf Mir. Family lore has it that Zahra pretended to be ill and asked for Mir; his ministrations were secretly observed by the other women in the family, and they formed a positive opinion of him.

  Mossadegh’s financial situation was never less than comfortable, but by the time of his retreat from public life much of his land had been sold to finance his own education and that of his children. He hung on to one estate, however, at Ahmadabad, in the agricultural region of Savejbolagh, some sixty miles west of Tehran. It was here that he found true seclusion.

  A big holding even by Iranian standards, Ahmadabad was made up of several villages that Mossadegh had bought from a Qajar cousin. It was watered by way of underground water channels and a tributary of the local river. Set in a garden at the centre of the estate was a two-storey brick house surrounded by trees, punched with big windows and with a slanting metal roof. It was comfortable, but far from luxurious.

  Most of Mossadegh’s land was tenanted and administered through an estate office. Mossadegh himself grew watermelons, but they were small, on account of the irregular water supply, and rarely acceptable to the Tehran wholesalers. The area was malarial and visiting children and grandchildren were put to work inserting quinine into capsules for distribution to the tenants. Quinine was expensive, so Mossadegh applied himself to finding a substitute, discovering after much trial and error that the boiled sap of juniper roots kept the infection at bay. One of Khadijeh and Majid’s jobs when they came to Ahmadabad was to cut the dried sap into pellets, which Mossadegh and Ghollamhossein, who operated a free surgery every Friday, gave out to tenants.

  With his natural authority and easy, humorous manner, Mossadegh was popular among his tenants. Rent was paid in kind and the law as it then stood allowed Mossadegh to keep three parts of the harvest, to the tenants’ one part. Mossadegh favoured a more equitable, fifty-fifty division. And when, many years later, the government transferred thousands of hectares of land from landowners to their tenants, inspectors found the accounts at Ahmadabad to be exemplary.9

  To begin with, at the start of what his family would call his ‘first isolation’, Mossadegh divided his time between Ahmadabad and Tehran. As the tempo of his work dropped, he made himself available to the government for informal consultation, and interested himself in the publication of La Cité Antique – whose translation he financed from his own pocket. In 1929, his mother opened the Najmiyeh Hospital, with half the beds reserved for the needy, and he became its trustee, devoting much time to the accounts. Mossadegh’s involvement with the hospital grew after Najm al-Saltaneh’s death, when caring for the endowment became a way of honouring her memory.

  Increasingly, he attended to essential business by handwritten note or by using emissaries, rather than in person. ‘I have a tendency to isolation,’ he told a friend, ‘and never leave the house to go anywhere.’10 He occasionally slipped behind the wheel of his Buick to attend a memorial service, but usually communicated with old friends and relations via couriers. The Tehran postal service was now the preserve of Reza’s spies, who pored over letters for subversive intent. Increasingly, the gateman was told to inform callers that ‘Agha is not at home,’ or ‘Agha is at Ahmadabad.’11

  He listened to the radio and read the newspapers, including those sent by friends from Shiraz, where he had spent some of his happiest days. When going out, he went bare-headed in defiance of convention – until Reza Shah, that inveterate meddler, obliged Iranian men to wear the peaked ‘Pahlavi cap’. Sensitive to the cold, in winter Mossadegh wore loose trousers and a tunic made of soft, velvety wool called barak. He was no longer fussy about tailoring, and had these suits made up by the sheet-maker at the Najmiyeh Hospital.

  As Reza’s dictatorship got harder, so the list of casualties grew. Prince Firooz, whose brilliant brain had propelled him as far as the finance ministry, was convicted on trumped-up corruption charges and confined at home. Other personalities were jailed or killed. Tribal leaders, including the British patsy Sheikh Khazal, were strangled at their dinner tables or had fatal shaving accidents, while police chiefs competed to unearth dastardly plots, real and imagined. In 1938 the exiled Modarres was interrupted while saying his prayers, forced to drink poison and then beaten and strangled to death.

  In this way Reza’s promising new order degenerated, and the monarch showed the traits of dictators everywhere. Thousands were wrongly imprisoned and hundreds killed at his behest. Vast properties and other assets were confiscated. At the end of his reign it was discovered that Reza had acquired the most productive 10 per cent of the country’s farmland. A climate of fear settled over the administrative class, with the emergence of a praetorian coterie controlling access to the Shah, who in turn learned to trust no one, particularly those who appeared to be closest to him. Poor Davar, who had been at the forefront of Reza’s legal reforms, was driven to distraction by the monarch’s irreconcilable demands for a modern judiciary, savage retribution, and land. In 1937, he sat down at his desk and swallowed a fatal dose of opium. Even the indispensable Teimurtash, who did more than anyone to turn Reza into the prowling, leonine tyrant he became, was the victim of his own success. He died in a jail he himself had built.

  The Shah retained some popularity among the elite and the small (but growing) middle class, but the mass of ordinary people had the uneasy feeling that he had turned against their religion. Reza had long nurtured a hatred of the clerics. Many of his reforms were aimed at relieving them of their historic functions, such as registering births and presiding at marriages, and devolving these to secular professionals. In this, Reza was strikingly successful. By the end of his reign the destitute mullah was a stock figure in Persian towns and villages.

  In step with his fellow reformers, Turkey’s Ataturk and King Amanullah of Afghanistan, Reza ventured into social engineering. In 1928 he obliged his male subjects to wear European-style clothes and the Pahlavi cap in place of the brimless hat which many Muslims prefer because it allows their foreheads to touch the ground during prayer. He later decreed European-style headgear for men, which caused more confusion. In 1936 the chador was outlawed after the Queen and her elder daughters appeared in public unveiled and in European dress.

  Reza did not hesitate to use force when the people resisted his edicts, turning machine guns on protesters in Mashhad and rampaging through the shrine at Qom with a whip after the Queen was slighted there. He was as distrustful of heterodox as he was of mainstream religion. ‘I shall not permit any prophets to appear during my reign,’ he declared.

  The results of Reza’s experiments in social engineering were tragicomic. Many Persian women did not set foot out of doors after the ban on the hejab. Others found ingenious ways around the regulations, bribing local policemen to look the other way during their weekly trip to the bathhouse, or, as in the case of Zahra, shopping through the open window of a car. Bidden to bring their unveiled wives to mixed tea parties, some bureaucrats contracted temporary marriages with prostitutes, who played the part of an emancipated spouse.

  Mossadegh was by no means opposed to the idea of women leaving off the veil. His two daughters wore smart headscarves when going out, but more as a fashion statement than a pious gesture. What offended him was the arbitrary and extreme nature of the Shah’s edict, and that it should be brutally applied – such as when veiled women were assaulted in the street and their chadors ripped from their heads.

  Mo
ssadegh had shown that he would not associate with Reza Shah, but it was not his character to court death or hardship. ‘A broth is on the boil,’ he told Moshir, ‘and I will not be the legumes.’ On the contrary, he went to great lengths to convince the authorities that he was harmless, and to deny Reza a pretext to arrest him. Fearful that his library contained volumes that might be considered seditious, he donated most of them to Tehran University. He avoided expressing political opinions in front of the servants in case they had been recruited as informants by Reza’s secret police. This had become a common practice, and one of Mossadegh’s cousins got around it by employing a deaf mute.

  By the turn of the 1930s, Mossadegh was spending more time at Ahmadabad. Ghollamhossein would drive Zahra, Khajideh and Majid there at weekends, and Mossadegh would come out of the house when he heard the car and invite his guests to sit on the terrace and refresh themselves after their journey. The children had donkeys and carts to play with, or they would go into Mossadegh’s room and trampoline on the springy metal bed he had brought home from Russia years before. After decades of frenetic activity and stress, the gentle rhythms of the countryside were a source of solace. ‘I am content with this quiet village,’ he wrote. ‘I am in touch with no one on account of the distance that separates me from the city and from society.’12

  It served Mossadegh’s purpose for it to be known that he was at Ahmadabad and out of circulation. At the beginning of 1930, he wrote to an old friend, ‘Most of the time I am at [Ahmadabad], engaged in farm work, or reading,’ adding that he came to Tehran only ‘when I have something specific to do’. He was without family during the week, waited on by the villagers, attending to the estate and monitoring the Najmiyeh Hospital from afar. At night he would play Turkish ditties on his tar, a string instrument he had been taught as a young man at Tabriz. In this case, isolation was a blessing, for he had a tin ear.

  In early 1940 Mossadegh and Zahra took possession of a new town house, built by Ahmad, at the northern end of the Palace Street property. Built in a modernist idiom over two floors and a basement, it also incorporated Iranian elements such as a private internal courtyard where Zahra could garden, and a division between the private apartments and the reception rooms at the front of the house. This was now the family base in Tehran. Ahmad and his wife (they were childless) lived next door. Zia Ashraf, Ghollamhossein and Mansoureh, together with their respective families, were also close by.

  Mossadegh occupied himself with domestic details, but could not remain indifferent to what was happening in the country at large. One event would cause him as much agony as the signing of the Anglo–Persian Agreement, and have an even greater effect on his life. In 1933, Reza Shah renegotiated the D’Arcy concession governing relations between the Persians and Britain’s oil interest in the country – the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

  In line with the D’Arcy concession, Persia had received an annual royalty of 16 per cent of company profits, but enjoyed almost no influence over the company’s activities and no access to its accounts. The arrangement had allowed the company, boosted by its status as fuel supplier to the Royal Navy, and paying no Persian income tax, to expand into Iraq and Kuwait and become one of the world’s great producers. For years, although oil revenues financed Reza’s new army, the Persians had fumed that the country was being fleeced. Nationalist anger ran high against a company which channelled most of its profits back to Britain and which employed few Persians in either skilled-worker or management positions.

  In 1932 the Shah had been furious to learn of a dramatic fall in royalties on account of the world economic crisis. He famously tossed his copy of his dossier concerning oil negotiations into the stove, declaring it void and in need of radical revision. His decision was greeted with illuminations and festivals around the country, and a flood of telegrams congratulating the monarch on his patriotic action.

  Soon it became clear that Reza had overplayed his hand. Iran could not steer the industry without the company’s help, and the country’s foreign-exchange needs had spiralled thanks to his reforms. After negotiations and arbitration by the League of Nations, Reza was forced to accept a revised royalty, based on tonnage at an official gold exchange rate, that many considered little improvement on the original concession. The company was formally exempted from Persian customs duties and income tax. (It was, on the other hand, a big contributor to the British exchequer.) Finally, and most importantly, the term of the concession was extended from 1961 to 1993, which meant that for a further thirty-two years Iran would be denied the vast majority of the profits accruing from its main asset.

  The government’s propaganda machine declared victory, but Mossadegh keenly felt the humiliation. ‘I longed’, he wrote, ‘to warn people about the harmful effects of [the concession’s] renewal, but the circumstances didn’t permit this, and it was impossible for anyone to utter a word in defence of the nation’s interests.’

  Why did Reza Shah agree to such a revision, which would surely invite patriotic odium in years to come? According to Hassan Taqizadeh, who as finance minister had put his signature to the new agreement, the Shah had started out adamantly opposed to an extension of the concession, but his attention had been caught by the company’s undertaking to reduce the concession area – something of a red herring, as the company had never shown an interest in the territories which were now to be excluded. To others, the revised concession was proof that Reza, despite his nationalist rhetoric, was no less of a British lackey than the signatories of the Anglo–Persian Agreement had been.

  News of the revised concession came the year after Najm al-Saltaneh’s death, and it may be assumed that these events contributed to the physical and mental deterioration that Mossadegh now underwent. In the summer of 1933 Mossadegh wrote that he had suffered heart problems and was following a diet. His thoughts were morbid. ‘At the end of the day, life in this world is nothing but unhappiness and I am sure this is the case for us all until we die. Let us hope things are better on the other side.’13

  It was the beginning of a long period of ill-health, which coincided with the apogee of Reza’s tyranny, when Mossadegh expected arrest at any moment. At the beginning of 1936 he complained of malaria, fever and enteritis, and he let blood – a treatment that had all but died out in the West. ‘If I let blood,’ he wrote, ‘I get short of breath and tight in the chest, and if not I am weak and powerless.’14 He was also suffering from chronic insomnia. ‘I have never enjoyed this life, and have always asked God to grant me death.’15

  Later that year Mossadegh suddenly started to bring up large amounts of blood, and Ghollamhossein insisted that they go to Europe for treatment. Permission was granted and Mossadegh was hospitalised in Berlin, though no one could provide a medical reason for his condition. After the symptoms had subsided, Mossadegh went to see a neurologist, who asked him, among other things, what level of education he had attained and what he did for a living. Mossadegh replied that he was a doctor of law and political science, but that he farmed. The doctor replied, ‘That in itself is a kind of illness – to have a doctorate, and be a farmer.’16

  We have no record of Mossadegh’s impressions of Hitler’s Germany – whose rise had filled many Iranians with hope that the old Anglo–Russian hegemony was coming to an end – and certainly no indication that he echoed the casually pro-Nazi sentiments of many of his compatriots. He hurried back from Germany, apparently because he feared that Reza Shah would associate him with a dissident movement of expatriates which had gathered there.

  Chapter 7

  The Tragedy of Khadijeh

  It was a hot summer’s day in 1940. Mossadegh had come to Tehran to procure quinine. He, Zahra, Khadijeh and Majid were at a rented summerhouse in Shemiran, in the foothills of the Alborz mountains. Shemiran was nothing like the high-rise jungle it is today. It had not truly become part of Tehran. It was rural and sparsely populated and only Reza Shah’s Rolls-Royce disturbed the peace. Mossadegh’s family stayed in simply furnished roo
ms in a big garden, which also had a tent for meals and entertaining standing over a pool in the middle.1

  It was dusk when the local police chief and two constables arrived at the gate. The valet said, ‘Agha isn’t at home,’ but the policemen knew otherwise, and were eventually admitted and told to wait for Mossadegh in the tent. When he entered, Mossadegh said, ‘I’ve been expecting you for the past ten years.’ The policemen asked him to accompany them in his own car and to bring what notes and documents he had about the place. They would go to the town house in Palace Street, pick up more documents, and then go to the police station. They would look at what Mossadegh was writing, ask him a few questions, and let him go. Mossadegh did not believe the policemen’s reassuring words, though he repeated them to his wife as he left.

  Several factors may have contributed to Mossadegh’s arrest, all involving the kind of real or alleged foreign links that obsessed Reza Shah. Mossadegh had perhaps erred in employing a Frenchwoman to tutor Majid and Khadijeh. He may have aroused suspicions with his Berlin trip. Finally, and most tantalisingly, there is evidence for a renewal of contacts between Mossadegh and his old crush Renée Vieillard. She wrote to him at least once in 1940, and her letter was returned, inscribed with the words, ‘It is impossible to communicate with M. Mossadegh.’ From that she ‘understood that it was imprudent to write to that distant land, from which no echo reached us save a rare press dispatch. All that I know is that Mossadegh is alive.’