Patriot of Persia Read online

  The new Shah was also haunted by the memory of his father, who had terrified and inspired him, and whose fate he strove to avoid.

  Mossadegh, one of those ‘older men of knowledge and wisdom’, visited the young monarch in October 1941, barely a month after he came to the throne. Mossadegh had asked Ghollamhossein to take him so he that he could thank the Shah for securing his liberation from jail. Muhammad-Reza was the sixth Iranian monarch Mossadegh had met, and the fifty-nine-year-old was over-generous with his advice on how the stripling of twenty-two should behave, illustrating his argument with barbed analogies. He compared Reza Shah to the Qajar tyrant Muhammad-Ali, who had bombarded the majles before fleeing into exile, and urged the young monarch to emulate Ahmad Shah, who had refused to endorse the Anglo–Persian Agreement. When the new Shah noted that Ahmad had been deposed, hardly commending him as a role model, Mossadegh replied that he had been deposed by the British, not the people.3 In the case of Reza Shah, he went on, ‘when the British wanted to depose Reza Shah all the Iranians raised their voices in agreement with them.’

  It is hard to think of an analysis less likely to ingratiate Mossadegh with Muhammad-Reza. The new Shah soon let it be known that he would rather abdicate than be another Ahmad. For all that, Muhammad-Reza knew that he must show himself to be different from his father if he was to survive, and this is what he did in the early months of his reign, granting an amnesty to political prisoners and razing the jail in Tehran where so many of his father’s opponents, real and imagined, had been imprisoned or murdered. The uproar against Reza had started before his ship was over the horizon, with deputies who had been famous for their obsequiousness now fulminating against the fallen dictator. Reopened newspapers and liberated politicians competed to abase the man they had once lauded to the skies.

  For the Allies these were unimportant details. There was a war to win, and in Iran their concerns were to maintain the flow of oil and to supply the Red Army using Reza’s railway and roads. They took over the country’s security in the absence of a functioning army, deporting German suspects, interning prominent Germanophiles and keeping a close eye on the tribes. In Tehran the British and Russian ministers manipulated internal politics to a degree unknown since Ahmad Shah, choosing governments and subsidising friendly newspapers, but the results were disappointing. The deputies over-exploited their new freedom and operated a quorum veto to bring down a succession of weak governments. The corruption and hoarding were outrageous.

  For the British, in particular, it was not a happy occupation, and Bullard’s attempts to rehabilitate his country’s image met with predictable failure. He told his superiors, ‘The Persian now has a double pleasure in stealing, raising prices to famine level, and so on; he always blames the British. He never mentions the Russians, as the Russians might be a little rough.’4

  According to a treaty signed in 1942 by Russia, Britain and Iran, Allied forces were to withdraw within six months of the end of hostilities, leaving the Iranians to decide their destiny. But the treaty was mocked by the facts. Iran had huge oil reserves that the belligerents would covet once the reconstruction of their own countries was underway. In the absence of a strong central authority, the country’s minorities were beginning to stir, particularly the Azeris and Kurds, and there was a new, well-disciplined communist movement that seemed capable of threatening the young Shah. Many of the country’s established politicians remained in thrall to one or other of the powers. A few went down on their backs for both. In short, Iran was rich, potentially unstable and susceptible to interference – qualities that guaranteed the close attention of the powers as they gathered their forces for the new Cold War.

  With the end of dictatorship, politics came stomping through the capital. The number of newspapers soared, many of them sponsored by the British or Soviet legations, and no street frontage was complete without the fluttering banner of some new political organisation. The best organised of these groups was the country’s communist party, the Tudeh (‘the Masses’), which had formed as a loose front around Marxists who had been imprisoned under Reza Shah and would gradually come under Moscow’s control. Having returned from exile, conservative old-timers also found a market for their ideas. Prominent among them were Mossadegh’s two old sparring partners: Seyyed Zia, the coup-master of 1921, whose impressively funded party attracted anti-communist elements and British support, and the shrewd, inscrutable Qavam.

  For several months after the invasion and the formal lifting of his house arrest, Mossadegh had shown little sign of wanting to resume a high-octane political career, and it was not until the autumn of 1942 that he returned to Tehran. He was sixty but looked ten years older. His standing with the public was higher than ever. There was general admiration for his painful purgatory and his refusal to deal with Reza Shah, and he was recognised as the pre-eminent representative of the patriotic and democratic ideals that had animated the Constitutional Revolution. It was an extraordinary revival in fortunes for the captive of Birjand.

  Young activists beat a path to his door. An account by one, Nasser Najmi, describes the visit that he and other members of the newly formed Patriots Party paid to Mossadegh in the spring of 1943. Arriving at Palace Street, the group was greeted by Mossadegh’s valet before being conducted through the courtyard and up a flight of steps to a first-floor room lined with chairs. Mossadegh entered wearing a homespun suit and smiling beatifically, and Najmi felt that this was ‘the very man’ he was looking for, with his ‘elevated personality, political strength and unique qualities,’ bidding them to sit and make themselves comfortable, resting his ‘right hand on his chest in a gesture of extreme courtesy’.

  Mossadegh arranged his feet underneath a low table which was covered with pills and medicines, and invited his guests to help themselves from a box of nougat. His voice was still feeble from incarceration, but the young activists were captivated as he expressed the hope that a new generation would rescue the country from occupation and uncertainty.

  Reza’s departure had left an empty space that the new parties and newspapers, the returnees and the young Shah were trying to fill. Iranian democrats had the chance to prosper as never before, while the Tudeh set down roots in factories and the majles organised itself into self-serving caucuses that were compromised by their loyalty to one or other of the powers. The Shah chafed at his own lack of real power. He had no intention of remaining a rubber stamp.

  In 1943, as elections to the fourteenth majles approached, Mossadegh’s admirers made it hard for him not to stand. Playing to pious, nationalist sentiment, one of them wrote puff pieces for the papers, stressing Mossadegh’s historic opposition to the British and Reza Shah. In the event, Mossadegh was triumphantly returned, winning more votes than any other candidate in Tehran. He began his opening address in the chamber he had not expected to revisit with the rousing words, ‘I haven’t seen the Iranian people for twenty years. I do reverence to the Iranian people.’

  There was an opportunity to set out his stall when the deputies connived in acquitting two court favourites on charges of vote-rigging and corruption. Mossadegh suspected the Shah of arranging a whitewash and suggested that the majles ask him to conduct a separate enquiry on their behalf, with access to the relevant files.5 The speaker refused to hold a vote on the subject and there was a slanging match, with Mossadegh threatening never to set foot in parliament and his opponents yelling, ‘So much the better! Off with you!’ Mossadegh retorted, ‘This is not a parliament – it’s a den of thieves!’6

  Mossadegh stalked out but his prestige was now so high that when he turned away in disgust, his supporters would call him back. Two mornings later, a crowd of students and bazaaris gathered outside 109 Palace Street, shouting slogans against the acquitted men and demanding that Mossadegh accompany them to parliament. Mossadegh set out with them on foot, but soon tired and had to be driven the rest of the way, while the marchers shouted, ‘Long Live Mossadegh!’ The crowd ignored soldiers’ orders to disperse, lif
ting him aloft as they approached the parliament building, which was protected by soldiers with fixed bayonets.

  Inside parliament news spread that Mossadegh and his supporters were at the gates. Gunfire was heard and several deputies rushed out to see what was going on. The troops had been ordered to fire over the heads of the demonstrators, who were trying to force their way into the parliament enclosure, but a handful aimed at the crowd. Mossadegh was unscathed but several demonstrators were injured and one student later died. Mossadegh fainted and another deputy was struck with a rifle. Both men were taken to the parliament sanatorium and dozens of Mossadegh’s supporters succeeded in storming into the chamber. They only left when he asked them to. The bazaaris shuttered their shops in protest.

  The episode had demonstrated Mossadegh’s ability to manipulate a crowd, which would become one of his sharpest weapons. His protest against parliament had been rowdy and had ended in tragedy, but he had exhausted all other means of contesting the despotic actions of parliament and the Court. Mossadegh later apologised for the undiplomatic words he had used in parliament, but his conduct was strongly criticised by opponents on the Left and the Right. The deputies had, in fact, changed their minds and given him the mandate he sought, but the enquiry he eventually carried out did not get far.

  Mossadegh’s health and nerves had been undermined by the dictatorship. Why did he not take an elder-statesman role, rather than throw himself back into the fray? Part of the answer has to do with the Persian love of age and experience – the baby-faced Shah knew all about this – and the expressions of support that Mossadegh had received from young men who had known only the sterile politics of Reza Shah. This was a mighty force to resist, and while he remained an outwardly diffident participant, forever threatening to retire or go away, a sense of destiny prevented him from doing so.

  His instinct in the past had been to stand on his own, declining formal alliances and playing the role of the contrarian outsider, but now he had a large number of supporters, some of whom would become favourites. Mossadegh would form no political dynasty, not only because of his aversion to nepotism, but because his children were occupied with other things. Ahmad, now a senior civil servant at the ministry of roads, was by temperament an intellectual and an artist. Ghollamhossein was a devoted personal physician but a political ingénu. In another age, Mossadegh’s middle daughter Mansoureh might have carried the torch, for she was a committed activist and her husband, Mossadegh’s nephew Ahmad Matine-Daftary, was a former prime minister, but politics was not yet considered an acceptable feminine vocation. It would be twenty years before women won the vote and were able to stand for parliament. As for Zahra, she preferred perennials to politics.

  The composition of Iran’s political elite was changing. Mossadegh found his closest supporters among a generation of able younger men, many of them from middle-class backgrounds, who had received their education under Reza Shah and were now prominent in the bureaucracy, academia and the press. They were inspired by Mossadegh’s colossal personality and were prone to hero worship. Prominent among these was a tall, balding bruiser from the trading town of Yazd: Hossein Makki.

  Makki was the son of a merchant who travelled to Russia once a year to sell hats, and had none of the advantages of wealth and breeding that Mossadegh had taken for granted. He was an impenitent self-promoter and, though he had studied engineering, he made his name after Reza’s fall as a bureaucrat, journalist and historian. Ahmad Mossadegh was a friend; he introduced Makki to his father after the old man took a liking to a book that Makki had written about Iran under the dictatorship. Makki was too young to remember many of the events he described, but he was inspired by the figure of Mossadegh – so different, he found, from the usual ‘marionettes’ performing their allotted roles on the political stage.7

  Mossadegh quickly took Makki into his confidence and Makki in turn was charmed by the older man, with his modesty and frugality (drinking just a little tea when he returned Makki’s call, slipping an orange into his pocket for later). And so began an intense political friendship, with Mossadegh writing Makki letters of easy, almost paternal familiarity, and Makki campaigning for Mossadegh at the 1943 elections and then helping out as dogsbody and adviser.

  Makki introduced Mossadegh to another future ally, the provincial deputy’s son Muzaffar Baghai, and he tried to bring Mossadegh and Qavam together. But the two Qajar survivors were far apart and Mossadegh recoiled when Qavam applied all his guile to rig the 1945 parliamentary elections. Makki was himself elected, but his alliance with Qavam did not last.

  The majority of Mossadegh’s family regarded Makki as a bumptious parvenu and an opportunist. But Mossadegh would have use for Makki, and others like him, because these men of the new Iran responded with an unquenchable enthusiasm to his call to arms.

  To peruse the literature emanating from the propaganda bureau of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is to meditate upon the qualities of corporate ambition and social duty and their sublime enactment beneath the Union Jack. Photographs of hearty Iranian employees at play on the basketball court, neat lines of workers’ cottages and a display of native flowers at the Abadan Gymkhana attest to a happy and well-cared-for community, while behind the scenes throbs one of the world’s most remarkable industrial complexes, centred on the great refinery at Abadan and spreading like a smile of civilisation across one of the world’s least hospitable regions. The future of the British Empire may be uncertain. Not that of Anglo-Iranian.8

  Iranian oil had helped drive the Allies to victory, and crude production continued to rise during post-war reconstruction, from 19,190,000 tons in 1945 to 31,621,000 tons in 1950. The high demand for oil during the post-war reconstruction of Europe enabled the company to achieve a rapid expansion in pre-tax profits, which rose from about £29m in 1946 to some £41m in 1949, before more than doubling to around £86m in 1950. Anglo-Iranian was a private company, but its Iranian operation was Britain’s largest single overseas investment and it was an important source of revenue for the shattered British economy, with taxes to the home exchequer greatly exceeding royalties to the Iranian government. Finally, there was the symbolism of it all, for the British Empire had been forced to retrench on all fronts, India was independent, and Anglo-Iranian, with its growing involvement in Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil, was a rare example of rising British prestige. Clement Attlee’s new Labour government was socialist at home, nationalising industry and planning a welfare state. Abroad, particularly in Iran, red-faced men went around in tailcoats as if nothing had changed.

  The British Embassy’s daily bulletin gave much space to Anglo-Iranian puff, but it had little effect on Iranian public opinion because it was not believed. The company was not indifferent to the needs of a burgeoning workforce, and its efforts to recruit Iranians at management level were hampered by the disdain of Tehranis for the baking flats of Khuzestan, but the biggest obstacle to Anglo-Iranian’s success in its endeavours, and as a consequence the biggest factor in its unpopularity, was Anglo-Iranian itself.

  Under the concession agreement, the company was bound to provide housing, healthcare and other amenities for its Iranian workers, but in 1949 some five-sixths of them (more than 40,000 men) had no official housing of any sort, and many lived in hovels. The company’s much-vaunted training programme was inadequate; even without attrition, the company was training only about half the number of Iranians needed to fulfil its obligations with respect to Iranian participation in the higher grades.

  Anglo-Iranian regarded the provision of amenities for dependents of Iranian workers as the responsibility of the government, effectively asking the Iranians to invest philanthropically for a population whose problems had been created by the company and whose labours benefited Britain more than Iran. The Iranians declined to do so. In 1950, the town of Abadan had only enough electricity to supply a single London street. Of 20,000 school-age children, there were places for just 2,500. The company argued that conditions for Iranian workers in the rest of t
he country were no better, or even worse, but there was no British elite lording it over the rest of the country as there was in the concession zone. This being England, society was organised into classes: a top class of Europeans and some British-educated Iranians, a second class of white-collar Iranians and imported Indians, and, at the bottom (and much the largest), a third, blue-collar class.

  Racial segregation was practised not only at work, but also in housing allocation and the use of buses, cinemas and clubs. Just one club was mixed, with a majority of Iranian members, but this did not mean that the Iranians controlled the club. It was controlled by the company management – by the whites. From British India, the company borrowed a cantonment culture and colonial nomenclature. The Britons were ‘sahibs’ and their wives ‘memsahibs’. Back in England they were nice middle-class people. Out here, under the blazing sun, they were kings.

  Their attitude is encapsulated by correspondence from 1950, when a British employee wondered if it was beyond the company to clean up the filthy bazaar that lay next to the great refinery. The answer was that ‘we should not interfere too much and, anyway, if we gave a little they would ask for more so it was best not to give at all.’ So the company gave as little as it could get away with, and was loathed everywhere, while the Tudeh Party experienced a surge in popularity in the concession zone.

  For Iran’s nationalists it was a truism that the company’s employees were spies. Starting in 1931, the company had enjoyed close relations with the industrial intelligence unit in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, contributing to a stream of reports, mostly on Soviet Russia and Germany. Flouting an agreement that agents should only be recruited through Britannia House, the company’s headquarters in London, the SIS’s Baghdad station established a network of company assets in World War Two. Anglo-Iranian was nervous because, if the Iranians came to know about the network, the effects on the company’s prospects could be disastrous. After the war, the SIS agreed to disband the network but Anglo-Iranian executives assured the SIS that they would volunteer any information ‘of real inside importance’ – and it can only be assumed that they did.9