Patriot of Persia Read online

  Mossadegh would surely have met the same fate had he been in Tehran. Instead he became one of a few provincial governors who refused to recognise the new regime – Qavam was another – provoking from Zia a blunt threat against his life. Mossadegh was encouraged in his defiance by the British consul, Meade, who differed from his superiors in Tehran in that he regarded Zia with great suspicion, but their shared hope that Ahmad Shah would summon the courage to get rid of his new prime minister proved unrealistic. Encouraged by Norman and reassured by Zia’s protestations of loyalty, Ahmad had uneasily blessed the putsch; he accepted the resignation letter which Mossadegh reluctantly sent him, and ordered him back to Tehran.

  On his way to the capital, Mossadegh got wind that Zia intended to arrest him, so he slipped into the rugged mountainous summer quarters of the Bakhtiari tribe, to the south-west of the central city of Isfahan. Although some of the Bakhtiari chieftains were famous Anglophiles, and had enriched themselves guarding Britain’s oil installations further south, others had supported the Axis powers during the First World War. They would welcome Mossadegh, one of them promised, as warmly as they had welcomed the most daring of the German agents.

  While enjoying Bakhtiari hospitality, Mossadegh learned that Zia himself had been overthrown, barely three months after taking power. The prime minister had alarmed the Shah with his loathing for the Qajar elite. But Zia’s departure did not signify the advent of a rigorous, independent-minded Shah. Ahmad would now be manipulated by his war minister, the same Colonel Reza Khan who had led the Cossacks into Tehran.

  Chapter 5

  Eclipse of the Qajars

  Six-foot-three of glowering, muscle-bound ambition, Reza Khan crushed the shell of Qajar power. He wrote no foreign language, and barely his own; his culture was cards and wenching, though later he acquired the genteel vices of opium and extortion. Following the inverted social logic of the English upper class, Sir Percy Loraine, the new British minister in Tehran, approved of Reza’s disdain for aristocratic Persian flimflam, his calling a spade a spade. Loraine liked Reza, indulged his lapses in etiquette, and expected him to ‘do with Persian hands that which the British had wished to do with British hands, i.e. create a strong army, restore order and consolidate a strong and independent Persia’. Loraine and his Soviet counterpart both considered Reza a friend of their respective countries. It was a remarkable feat for a man who had learned geopolitics in the barrack room.

  Iran seethed as he started his ascent. Banditry and insurgency threatened the whole flimsy structure. It was one of those times when the Persian longing for a strongman capable of dragging the country back from the precipice seems like the summit of logic and good sense.

  Reza posed as a loyal servant of Ahmad Shah, but Ahmad’s instinct for self-preservation told him to beware. In the last years of his rule the Shah’s love of travelling became a mania. He ended up reigning from Deauville and Monte Carlo, playing the money markets and communicating via telegraph with a series of short-lived governments, and with his brother, the Crown Prince. In Tehran the minister of war bided his time. He shared the pit with a succession of prime ministers, and pole-axed every one. His power base was the European-style army which he built and then used to put down regional seditions. Patriotic Iranians gave him the longest of leashes; he needed to be indulged in order to be enjoyed.

  Reza fooled almost everyone, or perhaps they wanted to be fooled. ‘It is in the power of Reza Khan’, Loraine wrote in May 1923, ‘to become PM, to close the majles or rule as a dictator, even to overthrow the Qajar dynasty; any of these courses would diminish the difficulties which beset his path, but the fact that he has abstained from all of them pretty well disposes of any idea that he is solely actuated by personal ambition.’1 Within three years, Reza would have realised all but one of Loraine’s hypotheses, and the only one he neglected to essay, the closing of the majles, he would achieve in all but name, by rigging elections and crushing dissent. But Reza guarded himself with inscrutability. One moment, he was a paragon of loyalty to the Shah; the next, a coarse and seedy sergeant major on the make; and then again, Persia’s saviour.

  Mossadegh too had become impossible to ignore. He had shed his youthful caution and his political objectives were becoming clear: unconditional independence from the powers, democracy and a solvent, frugal state. His honesty and forthrightness were in demand to shore up those rickety governments which came and went after Zia’s departure. Between October 1921 and October 1923, Mossadegh served at different times as finance minister, foreign minister and governor of the province of Azerbaijan. But each time he was installed, those same qualities came to be seen as liabilities. He attacked prerogatives, corruption and the powers. He seemed to believe that every battle was worth fighting.

  Early on he looked Reza Khan in the eye and refused to endorse a bond issue aimed at raising funds for the army. The reason was that an endorsement would also be needed from the government’s British financial adviser, and Mossadegh did not believe that the government should have such an adviser. He stirred up a whirlwind in his short time as finance minister (under Qavam again, who had been named prime minister), booting time-servers into retirement, slashing salaries and cutting the privy purse for well-born friends and cousins. He brought out the first properly organised budget in Iranian history – typically, it was balanced – and demanded that a deputy who had allegedly dispensed favours to win office lose his immunity from prosecution. It was the first time the majles had heard such a request, and the deputies were outraged.

  He was cold-shouldered by men he had known for years, and the Shah’s brother was aghast when Mossadegh froze his stipend. Summoned to answer his critics in parliament, he had his first public fainting fit.2

  Mossadegh reasoned that he should have ‘wide authority in all areas to end without delay any state of affairs not to his liking’. To be fettered by rules and bureaucrats was to allow his mission to be imperilled. It irritated him that others could not see this as clearly as he could. He shared this impatience with Reza Khan. What separated him from Reza was that he would not arrange for his opponents to be defamed in the newspapers, or taken in on trumped-up charges, or killed. If he was defeated, he would throw up his hands and move to Switzerland.

  He thought of emigrating after Qavam’s government fell in January 1922 but reconsidered when his old friend Moshir, who was once again prime minister, offered him the governorship of Azerbaijan. In accepting this post, Mossadegh hoped to distance himself from the hostility he faced in the capital. No doubt he also hoped to replicate the success he had enjoyed in Fars.

  Azerbaijan was another huge border province, dominated by tribes and supervised by a powerful neighbour – in this case, Russia. Mossadegh knew it well. As a boy, he had lived in the provincial capital, Tabriz, with his mother and stepfather, and had learned some Azeri Turkish. But Mossadegh had triumphed in Fars because of his autonomy there. Azerbaijan would be different. In Reza Khan, the country now had a war minister who took a controlling interest in any region that suffered unrest, cultivating allies among the local leaders and building his network of spies. Azerbaijan was such a region.

  Reza’s forces had recently smashed a rebellion in Tabriz, leaving the bazaar a smouldering wreck. Further west he was battling another revolt, this one led by the Kurdish blackguard Simko Shikak. Reza had a reputation for pressing for the appointment of rivals to sensitive positions, only to undermine them. Mossadegh was famous for his probity and patriotism. He could only be regarded as a rival.

  It was perishing winter when Mossadegh arrived on horseback, with a high fever, to take up his post. Tabriz was sullen and tense. Death sentences and prison terms had been handed down to the captured rebels, and innocent citizens also languished behind bars. (Mossadegh, typically, had them released.) Pay was in arrears. Persia’s honeymoon with the Bolsheviks was starting to sour, and the Soviets were proselytising energetically in a city which they considered part of their natural zone of influence. The red
flag had been solemnly hoisted over the Soviet consulate. Mossadegh immediately riled the consul by having a troublesome Soviet citizen arrested.

  The most important challenger to Mossadegh’s authority was the tribal leader Sardar Ashayer. The sardar extorted produce without pity from the local people. The territory under his sway was the region’s bread-basket and he only need give the word for the supply of wheat in Tabriz to stall. The sardar also happened to be one of Reza Khan’s favoured warlords and an ally in the fight against Simko.

  By a strange coincidence, Najm al-Saltaneh’s niece had married the sardar in order to safeguard her estates in the region. But Mossadegh did not shrink from a confrontation. He ordered the arrest of an indebted official who had taken sanctuary at the sardar’s house. The sardar responded by obstructing the wheat supply. Mossadegh telegraphed desperately for wheat but was stonewalled by landowners who answered to the sardar. The city mayor – another of the sardar’s stooges – reduced the amount of flour being given to the city bakers, thereby sparking riots at the ovens.

  Here, brutally distilled, was Persian politics. From the prime minister to the humblest village headman, political survival depended on filling the bellies of the people, and bread shortages could quickly turn into serious threats to public order. Mossadegh discovered this almost to his cost when he was in a local mosque for a memorial service and found himself surrounded by angry citizens demanding bread. Mossadegh did not hesitate to raise the stakes, promising to resign if there was not enough flour for everyone by the following day. ‘I saved my skin,’ he recalled, ‘but coming back from the mosque I was not at ease for a single moment, and asked myself how on earth I would manage to keep my promise.’3

  The following morning, Mossadegh convened an emergency meeting of the great and the good to discuss the bread situation, and this gave his military commander a chance to lure the sardar into a side room and arrest him. The mayor was dealt with in similar fashion and the other notables were astonished at the ease of Mossadegh’s victory. He had the sardar’s ammunition stores stripped and his weapons brought to Tabriz. At a stroke, the bread crisis was solved.

  Security improved after the sardar’s arrest and some local landowners thanked Mossadegh for ending years of ‘torture’ at his hands.4 But there was disquiet in Tehran at the detention of a man who was loyal to the central government. Mossadegh brushed off an attempt by his own cousin, the sardar’s wife, to bribe him into releasing her husband. But now Reza Khan waded in, ordering Mossadegh to dispatch the sardar to Tehran, where he was placed in gilded captivity.

  By arresting the sardar, Mossadegh had shown unwelcome independence, and it was the death knell of his governorship. Critical articles started appearing in the press, and gradually he lost control over provincial security. Small humiliations mounted up and eventually he was prevented even from sending ten men to deal with an outbreak of unrest. He received pathetic telegrams from officials in outlying districts, deploring their powerlessness. ‘As God is my witness,’ Mossadegh wrote, ‘it’s as if I have been plunged in fire.’ It is likely that Reza Khan was the author of his discomforts.

  The horrendous winter also took its toll. Mossadegh had arrived in Tabriz in a high fever. To this was added an outbreak of stress-related bleeding in his mouth. When he finally resigned in the spring of 1922, he used the excuse of his failing health. So threatened did he feel, he returned to Tehran with an escort of 120 men.

  Back in the capital he was named foreign minister, but soon the Moshir government was on its last legs and the eyes of all were fixed on Reza Khan and his increasingly overt manoeuvring for power. Moshir fell on his sword in late 1923, and Reza became prime minister.

  Back in August 1922 Sir Percy Loraine had reported that Reza had markedly improved internal security. Simko had fled into Iraqi Kurdistan and socialist insurgents in the Caspian forests were in retreat. Reza had sidelined many of his former rivals, including Qavam, who was allowed to go into exile after being accused of involvement in a plot to kill him. Reza, Loraine wrote, had achieved this and more in spite of the Shah, the majles and the mullahs. Now the Shah’s deficiencies would encourage Reza to bid for absolute power.

  Ahmad Shah was a sad vestige of a warlike race. He had famously declared that he would rather sell cabbages than rule over Iran.5 He commanded a residual loyalty among some patriots, including Mossadegh, but this was less for his virtues than the relatively benign nature of his vices. He had refused publicly to defend the Anglo–Persian Agreement, and had made no attempt to replicate his father’s tyranny. And yet this was no way for a monarch to behave: vigilant in defence only of his allowance, perpetuating his rule from the Riviera. When the Shah returned in December 1921 from his second trip to Europe, Reza greeted him with a triumphal cavalcade from Bushehr to Tehran, but the minister’s shows of military pomp were designed less to reassure the monarch than to intimidate him. Relations between the two men deteriorated as several governments came and went and Reza showed his contempt by rarely turning up to cabinet meetings. At length, with Moshir’s resignation, the Shah was left with no one else to choose; he bowed to the inevitable and asked Reza to form a government.

  In neighbouring Turkey, the Ottoman Sultan with his much grander lineage had been deposed by a nationalist soldier. Ahmad was terrified that Reza meant to be a second Ataturk. Mossadegh went to see his royal cousin. Having endorsed Mossadegh’s concerns about the worrying train of events, the Shah regretted that he could do nothing. ‘When I heard this,’ Mossadegh wrote, ‘I expressed my sorrow and never again went to see the Shah.’6

  In August 1923 Ahmad steamed westwards for the last time. At Nice he waddled, round and dapper and solemnly unnoticed by the locals, up and down the Promenade des Anglais, his mind full of plots and suspicions, causing procedural squalls if a fellow Iranian spotted him – for how to take one’s leave of the Pivot of the Universe when he passes you in the street? And later, when the attractions of bougainvillea and sharing a hotel with American millionaires wore off, he lapsed into self-pity. ‘What did I do wrong?’ he pleaded with a Persian visitor. ‘Do you want me to be a tyrant in order that the people love me?’7

  Back in Tehran Reza engineered a ‘spontaneous’ movement in favour of a republic, but the bazaaris and mullahs abominated such godless arrangements and stirred the rabble. Reza turned bayonets and rifle butts on an anti-republican crowd, giving a voluble preacher a taste of his horsewhip. But he got the message, and the bill to institute a republic was shelved.

  In the words of Seyyed Hassan Modarres,* the bravest of the mullahs and an electrifying critic of Reza, ‘however good the guard-dog is, it stops being useful the moment it bites the hand of its master’s child, and must be banished’.8 And yet others, appreciating Reza’s success as a pacifier, only wanted him muzzled. Reza went to the seminary at Qom and, having poured honey into the ears of the clerics, declared the republican movement dead. He visited Modarres in his threadbare digs in Tehran, where the divine held a dervish’s court amid scattered theological treatises and a brazier of hot coals for his pipe. Reza proved to be an effective arm-twister. His supporters forgave him the impurity of his beliefs, his shambolic oratory and his poker-playing with Sir Percy Loraine at all hours. They called him father of the nation and a symbol of all that was virile in Iran.

  Reza did not like critical journalists. The director of one paper had his teeth knocked out. The editor of another was whipped. Many more were arrested and their publications suppressed. A young poet who had dared lampoon Reza’s republican ambitions was found at home in a pool of blood.

  Again, the mob rose up. This time an American diplomat, Robert Imbrie, was murdered after taking photographs at a public fountain that was reputed for its healing powers. Imbrie had fled into a tea-house whose owner doused him with boiling water. Led by a mullah, the crowd caught up with Imbrie at the infirmary where he was being treated, and a camel driver bashed in his head with a stone.9 Imbrie had been involved in negotiations that were
being conducted by two US oil companies for drilling rights, and conspiracy theorists blamed the British, with their own much larger oil interests, for his death. Reza executed the ringleaders and imposed martial law. Every crisis was an opportunity to push forward the juggernaut of intimidation.

  Reza continued his provincial forays. His subjugation of the Arab Sheikh Khazal was a masterpiece of theatre and diplomacy, for the sheikh had been Britain’s protégé and Sir Percy Loraine was gulled into giving him up to captivity. Each victory was an excuse for Reza’s supporters to erect bunting and triumphal arches, to call him ‘Conqueror’.

  Reza now went on pilgrimage to the holy places of newly-created Iraq, where he assured the top clerics of his devotion to Islam. A triumphal ode appeared under his name, presenting Iran as a sunken nation that had not, all the same, ‘forgotten that it too, in its own time, was the crucible of civilisation’.10 Not that Reza knew much about civilisation. He slept on the floor (his bed was too soft) and was incapable of pronouncing quite elementary words.

  Ahmad Shah flirted with the idea of coming home but put it off when bread shortages once again plunged the capital into chaos. Another movement was whipped up, this one viciously anti-Qajar, with a blizzard of telegrams blowing in from all over the country and a sit-in of hirelings demanding an end to the dynasty.

  It remained for Reza to bow to the will of the people.

  Mossadegh had watched Reza’s rise with misgivings, but was cheered by the fall in lawlessness and banditry that he had brought about. Seventeen years after his first attempt to enter parliament ended in disqualification on procedural grounds, Mossadegh had been elected to the fifth majles. But the parliament building was no longer a congenial habitat for a constitutionalist of the old school, especially one whose mother was a Qajar princess. Using his regional allies, many of them army officers who had been rewarded with provincial governorships, Reza had manipulated the elections in the outlying seats, and while Tehran returned a fair number of traditional moderates and there was a socialist rump, the majority was in thrall to the prime minister.