Patriot of Persia Read online

  What did they think, as they looked into the abyss? Did they suffer for themselves and their families, or for the country they had served and failed? Each had reason to regret. Hassibi, who had set his face against the oil deal which might have saved the government; Ahmad Zirakzadeh, the Iran Party stalwart who had only that morning led the charge for a republic; Shayegan, whose witticism – ‘the delicacy that should have come to Tehran has gone to Baghdad’ – would never be forgotten. Perhaps now, in the awful pause before oblivion, they found humility.

  Mossadegh was . . . Mossadegh. He who had greatest cause for self-censure was thinking of how best to serve the moment. ‘If I am murdered,’ he declared, ‘it will be more useful for the country and the people than if I stay alive.’ Here was a manifesto for martyrdom. Even his thoughts of death were quintessentially Persian.

  Suddenly the window behind Mossadegh’s head shattered. The others dragged the bed away from it. They implored Mossadegh to move out of the bedroom and into another room, further from the line of fire. There might even be a chance of escaping over the wall – as Mossadegh had done on the previous occasion that his house had been attacked. These proposals seemed to irritate Mossadegh. Again, he insisted he would stay. He had no such expectations of his comrades. ‘I implore you, gentlemen, go wherever you want to go.’

  Mossadegh must have known they would not leave him. Mahmud Nariman, a nationalist member of the seventeenth majles, suggested mass suicide. ‘Why are we sitting here waiting for those low-lifes to come and kill us?’ Mossadegh angrily rejected the idea and his own and Nariman’s revolvers were locked in the safe.

  Over the next few minutes, Mossadegh had a change of heart. The defence was collapsing. It was only a matter of time before the attackers launched their final assault. Perhaps he did not want to die, after all. Perhaps he decided that the men around the bed should be saved so they could perpetuate his ideals. After another near-miss he agreed that they should all move to another room. His companions helped him out of the bedroom.

  Now there was hope. With Mossadegh on his feet, everyone thought of escape. The eastern extremity of 109 Palace Street was adjacent to other houses set in gardens, and the attackers had been unable to approach it. The party came out into the garden by the eastern wall. They were twelve in all, and they were joined by six of Mumtaz’s men, three of them covered in blood.

  They leaned a ladder against the perimeter wall and some of them went over. Then it was Mossadegh’s turn. He stood at the foot of the ladder and remembered Mumtaz. The colonel was summoned. The cause was lost and Mumtaz was encouraging those of his men who could, to get away. Mumtaz himself would not throw down his weapon until Mossadegh was out of danger. Mossadegh said, ‘God bless your mother’s milk.’ Then he was helped up the ladder and over the wall.

  The idea was to get as far away from 109 Palace Street as possible. In the next property, which was deserted, they found a wooden bed which they tipped onto its side and used to get over the next wall. And so it went on – inching eastwards, away from the chaos, through one house that contained women and children, where they were not welcome, and another whose inhabitants had spread a carpet on the flat roof and were watching the spectacle while drinking tea. They crawled along high walls and lowered themselves down tree trunks. Steadied by his comrades, Mossadegh survived intact. Zirakzadeh was less lucky. He fell and broke his leg.

  The fourth property they entered belonged to a merchant who had gone away for the summer, leaving the house empty except for a caretaker to look after things. The merchant was contacted by phone, and graciously put his home at their disposal for the night.

  Shortly after seven o’clock that evening, the sounds of battle ceased. The sky darkened and flames rose from the direction of 109 Palace Street. Mossadegh and Sadiqi stood and watched. Sadiqi recalled that ‘a queer feeling came over us all, and dreadful visions and painful thoughts passed through us, which are difficult to describe.’*

  They spent the night on the floors of the unfurnished house. There was nothing to eat save a few scraps of old bread. Zahedi’s goons came knocking, looking for the fugitives, but the servant fobbed them off and they went away. Then it was the fire brigade asking for water to douse the flames in Palace Street.

  They went their separate ways as soon as the curfew was lifted the following morning. Mossadegh, Sadiqi, Shayegan and Seifullah Muazzami, the minister of posts and telegraph, went to Muazzami’s mother’s house nearby. Mossadegh had been trying to work out the safest way of surrendering, but in the event a team of detectives found him first. One of them wandered into an upstairs room and saw the deposed prime minister, lying on a mattress. The detective called for a car and they all sped off to police headquarters.

  That evening Mossadegh and his three colleagues were taken to the officers’ club where General Zahedi had set up his new government. The coup-makers were there to greet them; Brigadier Fouladvand, commander of the force that had attacked Mossadegh’s house; General Batmanghelich, the new head of the army; and Colonel (now Brigadier) Nassiri, who had delivered the Shah’s edict to Mossadegh – an age ago, it must now have seemed.

  The new prime minister received them magnanimously. Zahedi came forward to shake Mossadegh’s hand.

  ‘I am very sorry to see you here,’ he said.

  In the days that followed, a great number of people came and wandered around Palace Street, gawping at the annihilation of a neighbourhood. They saw the smouldering ruins of No. 109 and the blood and pieces of flesh on the road where the fighting had been most intense.

  Among these visitors was a Keyhan reporter. He spoke to neighbours who had cowered with their terrified children during the fighting and seen the looting of their own houses – even though they had nothing to do with Mossadegh’s government. Talking to them and other witnesses, this reporter was able to piece together what had happened after Mossadegh climbed over the wall.

  As the defence crumbled, the tanks had rolled towards No. 109. One of them smashed through the door into the compound, drawing fire from inside the house and responding furiously. Eventually the last of the defenders were silenced and a second tank entered the compound. Two unidentified men were spotted among the ruins and shot. Then the few surviving defenders came out and surrendered.

  From the first stirring of the crowds that morning, the putschists and their followers had been waiting for this moment. The tanks were followed by more tanks, and trucks loaded with soldiers. The mobs arrived; thick-necks like Teyyeb and Brainless Shaban (newly freed from jail); soldiers, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes; the prurient and the macabre. They came to gloat, steal and destroy. Photographs were taken of Teyyeb and the others, posing like conquering heroes.

  The evening curfew was due to start shortly, but the people did not need much time. They annihilated the headquarters and spiritual home of Iran’s national movement. They ransacked Mossadegh’s offices and bedroom, taking or destroying tens of thousands of documents and letters – the record of the man. They broke tiles from the wall and wrenched electrical wires from the wainscots. Some of the booty was immediately auctioned to passers-by. A new electric fridge went for $36. The door of the prime minister’s safe was wrenched off its hinges and the contents taken away. What they could not take, they trashed. As Keyhan’s correspondent reported, ‘Within minutes the house had been completely destroyed and levelled, and nothing that could be of the slightest use remained.’

  In his new prison, Mossadegh was unexpectedly reunited with one item that had been looted from 109 Palace Street – a set of reading glasses he ordered during his trip to America. One of the guards at the officers’ club told him, ‘I know where your glasses are,’ and a few minutes later they were in Mossadegh’s hands.

  The same diligence was applied to the houses of both Ghollamhossein and Ahmad Mossadegh, and a fourth house on the same plot, which – irony of ironies – Mossadegh had let out to the development arm of the United States government. It was not qui
te a free for all. The military did not let the mobs cart off some of the most valuable items, which were requisitioned and taken for safe-keeping. Once order had been restored to the streets and the mobs had gone, they were shared out among the valiant officers.

  Ghollamhossein had lived in a fine family home with all the amenities. What he retained from this home was the set of clothes he put on that morning and the latchkey in his pocket. When he was captured a few weeks later and hauled before a military prosecutor, he could hardly believe his eyes. ‘No doubt’, he said, ‘you are aware that my house and possessions and those of my father and brother were looted on August 19. It is a surprise to find one of the carpets from my own house here, under your feet!’20

  According to the Keyhan reporter, some 35 people were killed in the battle for Palace Street, and 350 wounded. (Kennett Love put the dead at more than 300 across the capital, and 200 in the battle for the prime minister’s home.) Over time, the ruination of Mossadegh’s house would become a symbol of his fall and the wantonness of those who pushed him. His personal effects achieved a strange concatenation. Years later, Majid Bayat was contacted by an Iranian émigré in Australia, asking if he would like to buy some of his grandfather’s personal papers. And Ghollamhossein’s exercise bicycle, a new-fangled contraption, perplexing to the looters, achieved notoriety when it was presented as a transmitting device used by Mossadegh to contact his foreign masters.21

  At the other end of the town, one of Mossadegh’s supporters heard what had happened to his house, and was distraught. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘they will do exactly the same thing to the house of the Shah.’

  Chapter 15

  Unperson

  On August 20, the Shah started for home. He broke his journey in Iraq, where he visited the Shia holy places to thank God for his restoration. Photographs were taken of him with his hands on the grill around the tomb of Ali, the first Shia imam, and this image would be used by the propagandists in years to come. He touched down in Tehran, dressed in the uniform of the commander-in-chief of the air force (which had been flown to Baghdad specially), and was greeted by the new prime minister. Now a tsunami of sycophancy was unleashed. ‘As soon as his feet were on the ground,’ Kennett Love reported, ‘high officials and old court retainers rushed forward to kiss his knees and shoes. His progress was impeded by these attentions, which visibly embarrassed him. At one point he was tripped by persons rushing at him and he barely saved himself from falling headlong.’1

  The Shah’s route to the palace was lined with the rowdies and royalists who had saved his throne. ‘Flowers were strewn along the route,’ wrote Love, ‘over which there were triumphal arches built of wood and covered with rich Persian carpets.’ That evening, in a radio broadcast, the sovereign thanked the people and told them that he had been prepared to sacrifice his life for them ‘on numerous occasions’ in the past, and would not shrink from doing so in future. How this accorded with his disgraceful flight from the country, he did not explain.* For a while, he was buoyed by the illusion that his subjects loved him after all.

  In the days and weeks that followed the coup, he and Zahedi doled out rewards: cash, promotions and, in the case of Brainless Shaban, a convertible Cadillac. The toadies and editors changed their tune according to altered circumstances. Royal statues that had been treacherously uprooted were triumphantly re-erected. The tribes came to Tehran to affirm their loyalty. Anyone with an eye on preferment or promotion laid into Mossadegh without mercy. The radio called the former prime minister a liar weeping crocodile tears.

  The monarch gathered up his discarded trappings. He meddled in the new government of General Zahedi, received Henderson and made plans for the bristling army which, he hoped, would dissuade anyone from challenging his authority in future. The distribution of Crown lands was resumed, and photos of the Shah giving out beribboned scrolls to sun-burned peasants became another feature of his publicity. In foreign policy, his goals were the same, only more so: to get the oil flowing and use the proceeds to save his country and himself.

  In Washington, John Foster Dulles believed that the coup had given the United States a ‘second chance’ to save Iran, and emergency aid was pledged pending resolution of the oil crisis. The British could hardly protest: the Americans had pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. The world had pivoted perceptibly with the actions of Kim Roosevelt and his colleagues. From now on, the Americans would steer Anglo-US policy towards Iran, and their tone would be brisker than it had been, and less friendly to the so-called ‘freedom-seekers’. Loy Henderson recommended to the Shah an ‘undemocratic independent Iran’, by which he meant an authoritarian regime pledged to the West.3 The Shah thought this was a capital idea.

  The new regime made up for the excessive toleration shown by its predecessor. Thousands of Mossadeghists and leftists were thrown behind bars. There were dozens of executions. The nationalist and pro-Tudeh newspapers whose premises had been torched on August 19 never reopened. Anti-government demonstrations were suppressed, and political detainees flung into dungeons in remote and sun-blasted parts of the country. With American and Israeli help, the ground was laid for a new secret police, called after its acronym, Savak, and soon it would be dangerous for intellectuals and writers even to meet in the cafés of central Tehran. There was a campaign of persecution against the Bahais – the Shah’s concession to the mullahs, who had threatened to expose his philandering. The features of the last quarter century of Pahlavi rule were coming into focus: philistinism, intolerance and sops under pressure.

  Mossadegh, the cause of all the problems, was behind bars. His prominent allies were too – or, as in the case of Hossein Fatemi, on the run. And yet, even now, cautionary notes were sounded. ‘A revolution is in progress in Iran,’ ran a State Department memo. ‘The old pattern of rule has been irrevocably shattered and any leader must shape his programme on the basis of nationalist aspirations.’4 In January 1954, after Britain reopened its embassy in Tehran, the new chargé d’affaires noted ‘much latent support for Mossadegh’. It had taken three years and a coup for the British to acknowledge the bond that Mossadegh had with his people. The penny had dropped rather late in the day.

  Even so, it would soon be impossible to mention Mossadegh except to deprecate him. The coup was given the grand title of a ‘national resurrection’ and a heroic statue was unveiled to mark its first anniversary. Under the surface, however, the events of August 19 were insinuating their way into the nation’s psyche. Long before the extent of the foreign involvement became widely known, August 19 carried the odour of injustice and anomaly – ‘that which should not have happened’, in Muhammad-Ali Safari’s plangent words. It could only be explained through religion. Mossadegh had gone willingly to heroic defeat like Imam Hossein, the ‘prince of martyrs’, when he and his seventy-two followers faced the caliph’s army in 680. As with the imam, if there was any historical inevitability in all this, it was the inevitability of moral vindication.

  The Shah gifted him a platform. Mossadegh was one of the world’s most recognisable men. Executing him was out of the question; a canny dictator would have sent him to Ahmadabad and let him rot. But Henderson urged a prompt trial and the Shah agreed because he sought vindication of his own. The Court’s line was that Mossadegh had become a rebel the moment he rejected the imperial edict dismissing him. He had presided over an orgy of republican schadenfreude and brought the Tudeh out of their lairs. The Shah hoped that the public, always so tolerant of the old lion, would see him for the snake he really was.

  It was another of the Shah’s miscalculations based on a false reading of his own virtues. With Mossadegh’s fall from power, the old doubts over his political scruples also fell away. During his trials he was once again an old-fashioned hero, risking his life to speak what he believed to be the truth. Those whose faith in him had faltered on August 19, 1953, and who had been drawn onto the streets by a fear of communism and the unknown, were now hot with shame. They knew that the Shah and Zahedi
had been marionettes twitched from Washington and London. Mossadegh’s aura brightened with each insult and depredation.

  On October 1, 1953, the indictment was issued charging Mossadegh with treason, and on October 13 the deposed prime minister received his first visit from Jalil Buzorgmehr, the staff colonel who had been assigned to represent him in court.5 In the event, Mossadegh would conduct his own defence, but Buzorgmehr became his indispensable link with the outside world. Here, again, was an outsider forcing his way into Mossadegh’s affections, and not without resistance from some other members of the family, who were now, more than ever, protective of the patriarch.

  After being held at the officers’ club following his arrest, Mossadegh had been transferred to the palace at Saltanatabad, a few miles north-east of Tehran. The complex had been a Qajar summer retreat. Now part of it had been turned over to a munitions factory, and another part to the corrupted machinery of military justice. Mossadegh was kept in an ornate room with barred windows in a polygonal tower which also contained a mirrored hall for use as a courtroom and cells occupied by other members of his cabinet. Saltanatabad was not a jolly prison, with the bark of the crows and the tatters of a bucolic past. Mossadegh complained about the light bulb that stayed on all night over his bed, and the snoring of the guards outside his window.

  In these unpropitious circumstances, at life’s nadir, Mossadegh might easily have abandoned himself to ill health and bitterness. But his sulks had never been deep or long-lasting. They had always been a preamble to renewed vigour. Moreover, no one with an ounce of poetic feeling could miss the fact that he was now a legend. He himself was quite aware of this, and he continued to be inspired by the same sense of responsibility he had felt while in power. The picture that Buzorgmehr has left us of Mossadegh in the weeks after his fall does not show a broken old man affected by doubt or self-pity. On the contrary, they show a younger person fizzing with the prospect of a new battle.