Patriot of Persia Read online

  Khadijeh and Majid had been out bicycling when the police arrived for Mossadegh, and they were in the street, aghast observers, as their ‘Papa’ was driven away. In the days that followed, Zahra was sustained by her religious faith, and spent many hours in prayer. For the children, however, there was the stark fact of Mossadegh’s absence. A man who had built a wall around himself to preserve his dignity and integrity – a man who knew his own frailties – now found himself at the mercy of an indiscriminate terror.

  Mossadegh was taken to Palace Street, where the police sealed a cabinet containing his documents and some books pending examination. They then took him to the police station, where he was formally arrested, and from there to Tehran’s forbidding central prison, where his personal possessions were confiscated and he was thrown into solitary confinement. His interrogation started the next day, and he may have considered this to be a good sign, for Reza’s jails were full of long-term prisoners who had not been questioned, let alone charged.

  Meanwhile the police returned to Palace Street and went through Mossadegh’s papers and books. They found just one incriminating document – the constitution of a defunct political party. The investigator in question slipped the document to Ghollamhossein, who was accompanying him, and told him to stuff it out of sight, an act of selfless bravery which may have saved Mossadegh from the capital charge of treason.

  Back at the central prison Mossadegh asked on what grounds he was being detained. One of the policemen told him, ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, but you should stay in jail for the time being.’ A few days later, having been told he was free to go, he was given the ominous news that he was to be transferred to the desert citadel of Birjand, near the Afghan border. It was obvious that, having failed to find a legal pretext to destroy him, the authorities had decided to distance him from his family and the public. Later on they could announce his death from natural causes. Mossadegh turned to a picture of Reza on the wall and quoted from Saadi, ‘“Oh, cunning tormentor of the helpless, how long will this charade go on?”’

  After Mossadegh’s arrest his family had received instructions to provide food and spare clothes for the prisoner, and they had moved from Shemiran back to Palace Street to be closer to him. Hearing that Mossadegh had been earmarked for a transfer, they got permission to send a family cook, Javad, to care for him. A friend in the police told Ahmad the precise time when Mossadegh was due to begin his arduous transfer. (Again, he would have to go in his own car, and meet his own expenses while in jail.) ‘Be there’, Ahmad’s friend told him, ‘if you want to see your father for the last time.’

  On the appointed afternoon a party set out from Palace Street: Ahmad, Zia Ashraf and the two teenagers, Khadijeh and Majid. Opposite the central police station, the road was lined with a hedge. The family crouched behind it and looked through the gaps, towards the police station.

  At around 6 p.m. an elderly man, trussed like a chicken, was hustled into the street. Even though he was weak, he struggled. He would not go. The policemen kicked him and the old man shouted, ‘Whatever the government wants to do to me, it should do it right here!’ He hurled himself onto the ground and the policemen dragged him towards the car. Mossadegh gripped onto the wheels of the car, but they prised his hands off the tyres and shoved him in with a cop on either side. Crouching behind the hedge across the road, Mossadegh’s family watched, stupefied and appalled.

  He tried to commit suicide as he was driven east, swallowing a lethal quantity of the opium-based tranquillisers his wife made up for his occasional use, but bringing them up again because of the bumpy road. The trip was also interrupted at Mashhad, where Mossadegh received medical attention, and yet again as they approached Birjand, so that the officer escorting him could shoot deer. (The dead game was beheaded and loaded up in the car.)

  Arriving at the citadel, Mossadegh lent his car to the same police officer, who had been on leave and was returning to his post further south. It was typical of Mossadegh, at a time of agony and tension, to discern the human being even in someone wearing the uniform of a despised government.

  Mossadegh was very feeble for most of his imprisonment, especially when the authorities put him in a tiny, suffocatingly hot cell. He was denied communication with his family, and the national police chief gave orders that the slightest negligence on the part of the Birjand police should be ‘severely punished’. The prisoner was given a single book, on natural remedies, which was then taken away from him. His frailty compounded by the heat and a short, physically devastating hunger strike, he survived on the devotion of Javad and a remarkable volunteer from Tehran, a female nurse who was allowed to care for him provided she also live as a prisoner.

  He spent a lot of time lying on his bed in his pyjamas. He was in a state of extreme tension, what a local official called ‘chronic hysteria’, and was convinced that the authorities intended to put him in front of a firing squad.2 In fact, this was not the case. The prison governor was so nervous that his distinguished prisoner might try to slit his wrists, he personally supervised him whenever he shaved, and the police chief talked him into abandoning his hunger strike with the aid of a glass of milk, some biscuits and a Qoran.

  Tension and emotion weakened Mossadegh further, and he would lie down and close his eyes before Javad revived him by breaking open capsules of camphor and holding them under his nostrils. He was assaulted by fleas, which Javad was also able to deal with. It is a striking image, that of the elder son of a Qajar princess, a minister several times over, and a future world statesman, standing trembling and emaciated in a tub of water in the corner of his cell, being subjected to a full-body shave.

  Mossadegh’s behaviour when his morale was at its lowest is highly revealing. The other political prisoners did not have cooks and carers. They received nothing to eat but bread and a little kaleh joosh, a poor person’s dish made of fried onions, crushed walnuts and whey. Mossadegh made sure that Javad bought more bread than was needed, and ordered him to make extra food, all for distribution among the others. Mossadegh himself insisted on sharing his own food with the guard on duty, and gave out medicines from his own supplies.

  Then, suddenly, came a remarkable stroke of luck. Ghollamhossein had been introduced to the Shah’s eldest son, Crown Prince Muhammad-Reza, when the latter was studying at a Swiss boarding school in the early 1920s, and they had maintained friendly contact ever since.3 Muhammad-Reza had also made friends with an ambitious Swiss of modest background, Ernest Perron, who had moved to Tehran and become his close confidant. It so happened that in December 1940, Perron was successfully treated for an intestinal problem at the Najmiyeh Hospital, which Ghollamhossein was now running. Ghollamhossein waived Perron’s fee, and the Swiss’s gratitude proved decisive.

  As Perron recovered he was visited several times by the Crown Prince, and on one of these occasions Perron requested his help to get Mossadegh freed. Muhammad-Reza was a diffident, vulnerable young man, but he was not without compassion, and he duly signed the order – approved by his father, the ultimate cause of Mossadegh’s incarceration – for the prisoner to be transferred from Birjand to Ahmadabad, where he would be under house arrest.

  It was a cold winter’s day more than five months after his arrest when the prison authorities informed Mossadegh that one of his servants had come to see him. Mossadegh assumed that this was to do with arrangements for his will, and that he would soon be executed. Instead, he was told that he was free. Before leaving Birjand, he presented a farewell gift of money to every one of the jail’s 120 prisoners and several of the guards. He gave his left-over food supplies to the local police chief. A week later he was back at Ahmadabad.

  Had he survived a few more months in jail, Mossadegh would have been freed under the general amnesty that was declared shortly after Reza Shah was unseated by the Allies in 1941. But he was so feeble when he was released, it is possible that the amnesty would have come too late.

  The Crown Prince would appreciate the irony of his in
tercession in favour of the man who would mount the biggest challenge to his rule. ‘At my urging,’ he wrote, ‘my father released many people from prison. Possibly I should regret it, but one of them was Mossadegh, the man who later bankrupted the country and almost ended the dynasty established by my father.’4

  Mossadegh would not get over his incarceration. He came out with a new condition, rheumatism, and would never again walk any distance without a cane.5 And there was a more private anguish, impossible to assuage. Mossadegh’s arrest had left a second casualty – collateral damage from the scattergun paranoia of Reza Shah.

  The victim on this occasion was Khadijeh, Mossadegh’s beloved youngest daughter. She had been among the little group crouching behind the bushes when Mossadegh was dragged out of the central police station and shoved into his car for the trip east. Everyone watching, naturally, was touched by this scene, but for her the effects were of a different magnitude. After witnessing Mossadegh’s forced removal, she and the others had gone back to the house in Palace Street, where she howled and screamed: ‘Papa! Papa!’ It was particularly terrifying for Majid, shocked to see his playmate in such distress. It was decided that Khadijeh should go up to her uncle’s house in Shemiran, to be with her cousin, a girl of roughly her age, to whom she was close. But that did not work. A couple of days later, at first light, the gateman was startled to see a slight figure wearing only a nightdress streak across the garden towards the gate leading onto the street. It took the combined efforts of the gateman and several others to prevent her from getting out and to dress her properly. Then she went into a coma.

  She awoke four days later, but she was lost. Much of the time she was quiet and subdued. She seemed to be deep in sorrowful thought. But whenever she got agitated, and especially when she wept and screamed for her father, it was difficult to calm her down. Sometimes it seemed as though Majid was the only person who could communicate with her. He would sit with her, speaking gently and holding her hand, and the fit would subside.

  Tehran’s doctors were perplexed. They dunked her in cold water. They tried a course of insulin injections, which induced a deathly calm; that meant traumatic scenes as members of the family and household chased Khadijeh around the garden before pinning her down and forcing her to submit to the needle. For a while the doctors told the family that she should be away from familiar faces, so she lived for a while with a nurse in a small house at the end of the garden, and ate meals on her own.

  At other times she had visitors. Family members would come to see her and, if she was calm and in good humour, they would take her out for a drive or a stroll. Sometimes this worked well and she would return in good spirits. But Khadijeh’s fits could not be predicted. On one occasion, Zahra declared her daughter cured, only for the girl to have a dramatic relapse.

  It is not hard to imagine the effects of Khadijeh’s collapse on the family. Her mother Zahra had a strong, conventional faith, the kind that demands no explanations, and this helped her overcome adversity. She was resigned to ‘whatever God wills’. But Mossadegh himself was not pious. He could not take refuge in prayer. Also, he was without sensual props. He asserted time and again that the tragedy was his fault, and he wept for it in his room with the door shut.

  Mossadegh ordered holes to be drilled in the walls of Khadijeh’s room so that she might be observed unobtrusively – presumably to make sure she did not harm herself. Hopes rose and fell of a cure. In 1946 Mossadegh took her as far as Beirut, from where he hoped to cross to Jerusalem (then part of the British mandate of Palestine), which boasted a famous specialist, but Khadijeh had a turn in the hotel and the local doctor who was summoned advised him to turn back to Tehran. There was nothing, he said, that any specialist in Jerusalem could do.

  Mossadegh would devote the rest of his career to fighting the legacy of Reza Shah and the ambitions of Muhammad-Reza Shah. For many, the traumas of an imprisonment and the agony of a daughter would have injected personal venom into political matters. But for Mossadegh, the division between the personal and the public spheres came naturally. He undoubtedly loathed both Pahlavis, but not for what they had done to him, but to Iran.

  For all that, it would be remarkable if the events of 1940 had not had a profound effect on so compassionate a politician as Mossadegh. When he achieved ultimate power, he was absorbed in one issue alone, oil, but oil for him meant dignity, and he had an instinctive feel for the dignity of the ordinary Iranian. It is richly appropriate that one of his early acts as prime minister was to visit a notorious jail and recommend an immediate improvement in conditions, and that, on the day of his overthrow, he was close to setting up a refuge for mentally ill vagabonds, whose horrifying colony, in a suburb of Tehran, had moved and appalled him.

  By that time, Khadijeh had passed into other hands. In 1947 she was taken to a clinic in Switzerland, where the doctors were kind and the pills were good, and where she was able to live in a pleasant environment, visited by her beloved Majid, who had moved to nearby Geneva. Eventually a lobotomy, which had been recommended to Mossadegh and Ghollamhossein by American doctors, was performed, and subsequently bitterly regretted, for it snuffed out the last light in Khadijeh’s eyes.

  She died in 2003, perhaps the last victim of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

  Chapter 8

  The Prize

  Reza Shah did not achieve his main foreign-policy objective, which was to distance Iran from Britain and Russia and find new allies elsewhere. He improved relations with neighbours such as Turkey and Afghanistan, and, by marrying Crown Prince Muhammad-Reza to the sister of King Farouk of Egypt, consolidated his place in the declining circle of Middle Eastern monarchies.* He was puzzled and disappointed by the United States, whose interwar isolation and economic difficulties precluded ambitious overseas engagements, and turned to Hitler’s Germany as an emerging power that had not trodden on Iranian feelings in the past. The Reich was delighted to win friends and contracts under the noses of the British and Russians. By the eve of the Second World War, Iran had a big community of German advisers, lecturers and spies, and Germany accounted for nearly half the country’s overseas trade.

  In the First World War, German propagandists had benefited from rumours that the Kaiser was a secret Muslim toiling for Islamic regeneration. In the Second, Aryan brotherhood between the Germans and their Iranian ‘cousins’ was the favoured theme. After the war began in September 1939, rapid Nazi gains convinced Reza that Germany was invincible, and he did not take very seriously Britain’s demands that he expel thousands of Germans on the grounds that they constituted a third column of agents and saboteurs. He certainly saw no advantage in antagonising the side everyone expected to win.

  Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941 and the Nazis’ lightning advance towards the Caucasus increased Iran’s strategic importance. In the event of a German victory over the Soviets, Churchill anticipated a German assault on Britain’s oil interests in Iran and Iraq, while, if the Russians held out, they would need reinforcing through Iran from the Persian Gulf. The British and their new Soviet allies pressured Reza to expel the Germans, but the Shah’s concessions were too little, too late. Reza’s prime minister was awoken at 4 a.m. on August 25 by the Soviet and British ministers, informing him that the country was being occupied.

  Iran was in no state to deal with an invasion. Cabinet members had been concerned only to avoid the Shah’s wrath and the majles had been busy with a bill to allow Reza to acquire yet more land. The Shah was perplexed by the Allies’ actions and spent a lot of time pacing with an expression of thunder under the tall oriental plane trees outside his summer palace at Saadabad, running his hand along the manicured hedges and fuming at the collapse of his vaunted army. He summoned his top generals and tore off their epaulettes. The Shah’s fury was also drawn by radio broadcasts from London depicting him as a tyrant and a land-grabber.

  The anti-Reza broadcasts were directed by Sir Reader Bullard, the British minister in Tehran whose antipathy towards Iranians wo
uld draw comment from Winston Churchill. The Shah believed that the Allies had invaded Iran in order to force his abdication, and Bullard, for one, was determined that Britain’s reputation should not suffer further from its association with a monarch whose unpopularity it ‘would be difficult to exaggerate’. The Allies were soon discussing possible replacements and the Shah’s nerve broke when he got news that the Soviets had advanced to within a few miles of the capital. Convinced that only by quitting could he save his dynasty, Reza abdicated in favour of the Crown Prince, whose hand he placed in that of the elderly prime minister before setting out on the long journey into exile – first, to the British colony of Mauritius, and eventually to South Africa. The following day, the prince was crowned Shah Muhammad-Reza, even if the British and Russians were still undecided about him.

  Muhammad-Reza must have felt intensely lonely as his father and the rest of his family sailed off in a British warship, but he was more complicated than the shy, rather diffident youth that Bullard cared to see. The new Shah was, as the historian Homa Katouzian has written with admirable economy,

  a young, timid as well as intimidated man, suffering from a basic sense of insecurity which was further exacerbated by his own superficiality as well as lack of knowledge and experience. He disliked older men of knowledge and wisdom because he felt dwarfed by them. He enjoyed the company of women and sycophants but did not trust them. He was acutely worried about a foreign (mainly British) plot to dislodge him, and he therefore took extreme care not to displease them . . . he wished to increase his personal hold over the country, but lacked courage and decisiveness, and hoped that others would do it for him.2