Patriot of Persia Read online

  On the morning of October 13, after hundreds of telegrams alleging fraud had arrived from the provinces, Mossadegh prepared to walk to the Marble Palace to demand that the tainted majles elections be annulled. Tormented by premonitions of bloodshed, he had barely slept the previous night, but his resolve stiffened when the chief of police threatened violence if he went ahead. ‘We will endure whatever befalls us,’ Mossadegh replied.

  Several thousand people thronged the area around 109 Palace Street when Mossadegh came out to march the few hundred yards to the palace gates. Kashani’s supporters yelled religious slogans but Mossadegh ordered them to stop. ‘Silence is our slogan!’ he announced through a megaphone. In this way he was able to camouflage the differences between his supporters. As the assembly moved off, Mossadegh would recall, ‘Other than the sound of footsteps, there was no sound at all.’ An agent provocateur shouted, ‘Mossadegh for President!’ but was immediately silenced.

  Hossein Makki would later claim that Mossadegh and he linked arms on the way to the palace – Mossadegh’s cane was in his other hand – but another account suggests that Mossadegh was arm-in-arm with Hossein Emami, a member of the Warriors of Islam who had achieved notoriety by assassinating an outspoken secularist, and who had been freed through the court minister Hazhir’s intercession. Given Mossadegh’s pluralist views, Makki’s account is the more plausible, but Emami seems to have been close by when Mossadegh arrived at the palace gates and Hazhir received his letter to the Shah and a demand to take sanctuary inside.

  Mossadegh had warmed up by now, and he poked Hazhir in the chest, shouting, ‘Abdolhossein Hazhir! Do you have a conscience? If so, tell me the elections are free!’ Then he said, ‘Go and tell the Shah that this is the house of the people, and the people want to come in.’5 Then there was an argument between Hazhir and Hossein Emami, with Emami threatening, ‘If I don’t kill you I’m a bastard!’ Mossadegh told him to shut up.

  The Shah and Hazhir now showed tactical acumen. They let just twenty of the marchers into the palace, including Mossadegh, who made the mistake of sending the crowd home. With Mossadegh thus disarmed, Hazhir was free to toy with the royal guests, regaling them with superb food and solicitous conversation. Realising their mistake, Mossadegh and his colleagues abruptly went on hunger strike, accepting only water when Hazhir invited them to eat, but Mossadegh weakened physically after just a few hours and Zahra showed her disapproval of this dangerous tactic by sending in a kilo of homemade biscuits. For three nights, the fasters held out – until Zahra’s biscuits became impossible to resist. In the meantime, the Shah denied all knowledge of electoral fraud. Thus Mossadegh’s first mass action ended in fiasco.

  Eventually Mossadegh and his supporters left the palace and went back to Palace Street, where they cemented their alliance by setting up a new umbrella group, led by Mossadegh, called the National Front. The mood was far from exultant; the Tehran elections were at hand, and Hazhir was doing his best to rig them.

  The count for votes cast in Tehran was being held at the Sepahsalar mosque, next to parliament, and over the next few days this substantial Qajar pile was the backdrop for a game of cat-and-mouse over sealed ballot boxes, with government agents trying to tamper with them and Mossadegh’s supporters standing guard. Royalist thick-necks piled in but were repulsed by rival groups loyal to the Warriors of Islam, while pro-Kashani seminarians raised a ruckus from the rooftop of an adjacent theological college. Mossadegh’s secretary arrived with nuggets of intelligence, and Zahra sent food. ‘You must defend the people’s votes until your dying breath,’ ran Mossadegh’s instructions, and with two-thirds of the votes counted, he, Kashani and five more National Front leaders were on course to capture seven of Tehran’s twelve seats.6

  Faced with a major reverse, the government dropped all pretence at propriety. Mossadegh and Kashani’s election watchdogs were overwhelmed and locked in a room in the mosque. Mossadegh rushed by car to the palace to remonstrate with Hazhir – to no avail. Then the authorities moved the count to another building and denied access to the opposition. As the count continued the fortunes of the government’s candidates miraculously revived, and soon enough the sole National Front representative on course to win a seat was Mossadegh himself, in twelfth place, with every chance that he too would be eliminated before the end of the count.

  And so, with this blatant electoral theft, a parliament seemed poised to form that would end Mossadegh’s national movement before it had even begun. Mossadegh had exhausted his options because they were exclusively peaceful and constitutional. The Warriors of Islam, on the other hand, did not consider themselves bound by constitutionalism and the law.

  It was the middle of the month of Moharram, when Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, when Hazhir sauntered into the Sepahsalar mosque, by now returned to its intended function, to receive phalanxes of black-clothed men as they trooped in beating their chests and venting a mourning chant. The intensity of these occasions, with the participants staggering under the weight of iron standards and the air thick with lamentation, lends itself to intrigue – and so it was that evening, for in a corner of the mosque lurked the assassin Hossein Emami.

  Emami had vowed publicly to kill Hazhir three weeks before, then witnessed the fraud at the Sepahsalar mosque. Now he advanced and shot Hazhir, the bullet traversing the base of the left lung an inch below the heart.7 Emami’s weapon jammed and he tried to hit Hazhir in the face with it before he was seized. The following day the court minister died in hospital. The Warriors of Islam demanded that the elections be held again – only this time, freely.

  Hazhir’s death robbed the Shah of one of the few subordinates he trusted completely. He reacted with typical inconsistency, ordering the detention of opposition figures of all stripes, including Mossadegh (who was placed under house arrest at Ahmadabad), but also agreeing to rerun the Tehran poll. The Shah and his advisers were undoubtedly influenced by a fear of yet more assassinations – including, perhaps, the monarch’s own – and there was, indeed, an immediate abatement of tension in the capital. The royal volte-face had confirmed the efficacy of violence as a political tool. The national movement was saved.

  Robbed of his protective court minister, the Shah now felt intensely vulnerable to his chief of staff, Haj Ali Razmara. The Shah distrusted Razmara, but could not easily dispense with him, as he was popular in the army and had admirers among the British and Americans. Here, Mossadegh and his supporters might come in useful. A point in their favour was that they had a visceral dislike of Razmara, suspecting him of dictatorial tendencies, and would attack him without relent if given a platform to do so. The Shah decided to give them that platform, and it was one of the most crucial miscalculations of his reign.

  Barely a month after they were arrested, the Front’s leaders were free. Kashani’s religious supporters held a big campaign meeting. Returning to Tehran, Mossadegh declared that Iran would never accept a parliament that had been set up through the intrigues of foreigners.

  The Shah had blinked and in the rerun poll Mossadegh was returned as Tehran’s top deputy. Kashani (in absentia) and six other National Front leaders were also elected – all but one from the capital. The legislature was 100-strong but its Tehran members enjoyed an influence out of proportion with their number. Mossadegh and his allies would exploit this to nationalise the oil industry and capture the attention of the world.

  In June 1950 the Shah let Kashani come back after eighteen months of exile. Mossadegh was there to embrace him on the tarmac – the mullah and the doctor of law, pledging mutual devotion. The people had flocked to the airport by bicycle, car and donkey, and makeshift triumphal arches swayed precariously over the route into town. Kashani was driven home through the packed streets with unruly supporters on the bonnet of the open-top Buick, while the alleyways ran with the blood of ewes that had been sacrificed in his honour. The long narrow road where Kashani lived had been covered in carpets, and the seminarians shouted, ‘God! Independ
ence! Freedom!’

  Kashani’s conception of a political principle was more elastic than Mossadegh’s. He had maintained good relations with the unabashed Anglophile Seyyed Zia. He received the families of jailed communists and zealots like the leader of the Warriors of Islam, who was theoretically being sought in connection with Hazhir’s death but felt safe enough to give humdinger speeches in the ayatollah’s house. Kashani aspired not to office but to a cleric’s spell-binding authority. He would not descend to the ranks of ordinary deputies and appear in the parliament, nor would he formally join the National Front. He would watch severely over these bodies – another of Iran’s fathers.

  The coalition formed by Mossadegh and Kashani would have as fundamental an effect on Iran as the Constitutional Revolution itself, inspiring urban and provincial Iranians alike. Kashani was respectful to Mossadegh, his senior in age and his equal (at least) in political courage. The ayatollah carefully crafted his statements to parliament so that Mossadegh would not be embarrassed when he declaimed them. On June 18, 1950, for instance, Mossadegh read out Kashani’s declaration that the Iranians would dispose of their oil as they saw fit, and his call that the country would not submit to another dictatorship. Kashani described himself as the ‘voice of the people’. As time would show, the cleric’s words belonged more properly to the layman who uttered them.

  The Shah was squeamish about imposing a dictatorship, but he was prepared to close down parliament if he felt the alternative was chaos or the erosion of his own power. By his lights he had done the National Front a favour by admitting them into parliament, but no sooner was Mossadegh back in the chamber than he launched an impertinent attack on the monarch and Princess Ashraf. The court was unhappy and Sir Francis Shepherd, in one of his marathon lunches at the palace, reported the Shah as saying that the National Front was even more dangerous than the Tudeh, and as referring to Mossadegh as ‘our Demosthenes’.8

  The Shah had appointed the timorous, venal Ali Mansour to be prime minister, but Mansour angered him by courting the National Front and dallying over the supplemental agreement. Rather than try to force the agreement through parliament, as the Shah and the British had hoped he would, Mansour deputed a parliamentary committee – Mossadegh, inevitably, was its chairman – to examine it and make recommendations. By this time the Shah’s tic, his desire for a ‘strong’ government, was re-emerging. The obvious choice to set up such a government was Razmara.

  Haj Ali Razmara was one of those talented and problematic generals that Iran’s army produced from time to time, winning the monarch’s attention by competently running a cherished institution, and his suspicion for the same reason. Educated at St Cyr, the French military academy that had produced General de Gaulle, Razmara was married to the sister of Iran’s leading avant-garde novelist. He was stocky, laconic and ruthless enough to attract comparisons with Reza Shah, but the junior officers respected him for working hard and living modestly. Razmara had proved himself on the battlefield, commanding the forces that had liberated Azerbaijan in 1947, and he and the Shah were now in close cooperation on defence plans against a possible Soviet invasion. For all that, the Shah still did not fully trust his chief of staff. Razmara’s enemies whispered that he had been behind the royal assassination attempt of the previous year, while his friendship with Princess Ashraf probably went beyond the platonic. Above all, there was Razmara’s ambition. He promised foreign diplomats that he would end the oil impasse and provide the firm, efficient leadership they despaired of finding in the Shah.

  Ordinarily, the British and the Americans would have baulked at promoting this budding generalissimo, but these were not ordinary times. The optimism engendered by the fall of Reza Shah had given way to despair, and both western powers considered Iran to be in danger of collapse. Nancy Lambton, Britain’s most influential Iran scholar at the time, had written in an influential paper of a general hatred for the ‘ruling class’. She evoked the febrile atmosphere in the capital, where conversation might veer from a fancy dress ball attended by outlandishly dressed members of the royal family to the suicide of a soldier sent on guard duty while suffering from pneumonia.

  Western worries were compounded by the tense international situation. In June 1950, communist North Korea had crossed the 38th parallel, drawing in the United States and its allies and raising fears of a wider conflagration. In Tehran the US ambassador, John C. Wiley, raised the spectre of ‘the complete disintegration of the country and its absorption immediately or eventually into the Soviet bloc’.9

  Mossadegh and his allies in turn focussed obsessively on the grand themes of national independence and democratic reform, and one is struck by their apparent indifference to the poverty and wretchedness suffered by the vast majority of their countrymen. It might have been expected for the capital’s top deputy to rail at these maladies and suggest solutions, but Mossadegh’s speeches, statements and letters from this time are dominated by his opposition to the government, and particularly to the supplemental agreement. This agreement would inject vital funds into the economy, helping civil servants, whose pay was now in arrears, and allowing the government to start implementing the Shah’s development plan. But Mossadegh had not returned to parliament to fill bellies.

  Here, months before he came to power, is the conundrum of Mossadegh and his movement. For the National Front, the question of spending oil revenues and lubricating a reforming state could not be addressed while the state was in servitude. No cosmetic alleviation should conceal the flaw running through the country. That had been the way of traitorous leaders of the past and as a consequence the flaw ran as deeply and painfully as ever. Repeatedly, National Front leaders told their supporters that if Iran did not control its own oil, it would be better if it stayed underground or was consumed by fire. Mossadegh declared that he was more interested in what he called the ‘moral aspect’ of oil nationalisation than its ‘economic aspect’.

  In these remarks the western powers identified hysteria, irrationality and caprice – anything but an authentic movement of national independence. And yet Iran now had, for the first time, exactly that. Around the world, decolonisation was bringing independent nations to life and the Iranians looked on enviously. Caught up in what they believed to be a life or death struggle, it is perhaps understandable that Iran’s nationalists turned their backs on the relative security offered by the supplemental agreement. In the search for a nation there was no room for petty bookkeeping.

  To start with, the British government and their supporters in the press damned Mossadegh with faint interest. The Tudeh Party seemed more threatening. Later, as he grew in stature, they rarely neglected to underestimate him, and discussion of Mossadegh acquired a tone of highly varnished condescension – used so often by the British against any adversary they did not understand. The correspondent of The Times sketched Mossadegh with the strokes of a caricaturist: ‘He weeps with sincere emotion at the spectacle of his own patriotism, which is as genuine as it is hysterical, and if ardent love could make Persia strong and prosperous without the help of knowledge, sagacity or diligence, Dr Mossadegh would be an ideal prime minister.’10 And barely had Sir Francis Shepherd arrived to take up his post in Tehran than he treated his superiors to a disquisition on the ‘oriental mind’.11

  The Americans drew on different traditions. There was a strongly anti-colonial conscience among many foreign-service officers, but the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern, African and Far Eastern Affairs was young and in awe of Britain’s experience. George McGhee, the assistant secretary of state with responsibility for the region, and a self-confessed Anglophile, described the Iranian nationalists as a ‘so-called “opposition”’, while in Tehran, Wiley and other US diplomats shared the British view that the Iranians were incapable of governing themselves – even if they were more sympathetic to the idea that the Iranians should be helped out of their pathetic disability.

  There was a third foreign body with a controlling stake in Iranian affai
rs – the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Here, progress had been made at a glacial pace. The board had barely advanced past a state of Victorian paternalism and was condemned by one of its own directors as ‘helpless, niggling, without an idea between them, confused, hide-bound, small-minded, blind’, and generally ineffective.12 The company’s scabrous chairman, Sir William Fraser, had learned his industrial relations in the Edwardian era. But no longer could Britain boss around the rest of the world, and Iran was not the monolithic dictatorship that the company had dealt with in 1933. Finally, other rival companies, notably the American giant Aramco, were signing concessionary deals whose generosity to the producer nation would make the supplemental agreement look like parsimony itself.

  Separately and together, these three groups of foreigners tried to shape Iran’s future at a critical time, and eventually they prevailed upon the Shah to hand the premiership to Razmara. They had high hopes of the plausible, hard-working general.

  Mossadegh was at least a generation older than most of his colleagues in the National Front. They venerated him and many of them would have laid down their lives for him. So it is not outlandish to suggest that he could have disciplined and moderated them as they bayed like animals in the parliament chamber, slamming down their wooden desk tops until they splintered on their hinges, and as the sulphurous atmosphere of threat and counter-threat consumed Razmara’s premiership. But Mossadegh did not urge civilised behaviour on his comrades. He allowed their passions to fertilise his own. Things became so heated that the parliamentary speaker interrupted one barrage of nationalist invective with the words, ‘Isn’t this meant to be a constitutional country?’13

  It was, and Mossadegh was meant to be its champion. He personified constitutionalism. His understanding of democracy was based on a profound knowledge of its guiding principles and an intuitive appreciation of how, and with what limitations, it might be applied in Iran. But Mossadegh and his colleagues would disrupt the full eight months of Razmara’s premiership, blocking his every legislative move – while at the same time keeping his government alive for fear that the alternative would be parliament’s dissolution and an out-and-out despotism. It was a travesty of the parliamentary democracy that Mossadegh had suffered to achieve.