The Shah
Page 11
Reza Shah took false comfort in the belief that Iran’s often-declared neutrality would suffice to keep him and the country safe from the engulfing flames of the coming war. He might have been banking on a Nazi victory in the war. He was more interested in training his Crown Prince to assume power, and preparing the army and the nation to take orders from a new king. In fact, in his memoirs, the Shah claims that a few years before the advent of the war, his father had even contemplated resigning from the throne, to “stay around as an elder statesman, and avail me of his advice.”19 It is impossible to confirm this claim. Even for the Shah, the story was nothing but hearsay. As the Shah himself admits, his father never discussed the resignation idea even with him. Only long after Reza Shah’s death did a close aide reveal the alleged plan to the Shah. There is, however, no doubt that from 1939, Reza Shah was beginning to groom his Crown Prince more actively for his future responsibilities. He took the Crown Prince to more official functions and inspections and ordered every new ambassador to Tehran to call on the Crown Prince after they had presented their credentials to Reza Shah—as diplomatic protocol required.
Reza Shah also began to use his Crown Prince as an interpreter in some of the most sensitive negotiations with foreign officials. On June 17, 1939, when Lord Cadman, the storied British oilman, met with Reza Shah, “HIM, the Crown Prince was also present and acted as interpreter.” The conversations were reportedly useful, and as a result, “it is openly stated in the capital” that the Anglo-Iranian oil company would pay 2 million pounds “as advance on royalties, or as a gift to the Shah.”20
Amongst those making courtesy calls on the Crown Prince was Sir Reader Bullard, the British ambassador, who made just such a visit in January 1940. He found the “manner of the Prince . . . more engaging than that of [Reza] Shah, but the cynical gloom of the father” had become “in the son a pessimistic petulance which he does not attempt to restrain.” According to the same report, the Crown Prince “[took] a keen interest in public affairs” and followed events in Europe rather carefully. He considered the war “a nuisance” and thought it could have been prevented. He criticized Western strategies on both the diplomatic and military plains. It was, he believed, “a great pity” that “Germany had been driven into the arms of Russia.”21 And foreshadowing his future love of military matters, and his tendency to think himself a great military strategist, he even offered strong opinions about the conduct of the war, and the military decisions of generals. Bullard reported this part of his conversation with the equivalent of a smirk on his prose. By then, he had developed this prosaic smirk into an art.
Another sign of the changing times came on October 27, 1940. The Crown Prince’s twenty-first birthday was celebrated throughout the country with greater-than-usual fanfare. In the morning there was a ceremony at the Court where government officials and commanding officers of the armed forces offered their congratulations and paid allegiance to the future king.
As in previous years, the centerpiece of the celebration had been a grand exhibit by Iran’s Boy Scouts. Participation in paramilitary exercise had become part of the curriculum for every school in the country, and the Boy Scouts were one of the ways of inculcating Spartan ways and values in the impressionable minds of the youth. Boys often practiced up to six weeks preparing for the Crown Prince’s birthday celebration, rehearsing their march and other feats of wondrous discipline and coordination. That year the Crown Prince attended the event with a special guest. His name was Baldur von Schirach, the storied leader of Hitler’s infamous youth movement, the Hitlerjugend. Von Schirach participated in the celebrations standing next to the Crown Prince.22 He later became a poster boy for Nazi propaganda and an infamous convict at the Nuremburg Trials.
Part of that year’s program called for the Boy Scouts to exhibit their dexterity and prowess in putting out a fire. The script called for them to set up tents in a makeshift camp, and then, when one of the tents caught fire, the Scouts would work in tandem, quickly creating a queue and passing buckets of water to put it out. But instead of a controlled fire, as the script stipulated, the tent was suddenly engulfed in flames. Instead of a choreographed show of discipline and creativity, hundreds of frightened boys, forgetting any semblance of order, panicked and fled the scene in utter chaos, embarrassing the grown-ups.23 In retrospect, the Boy Scout spectacle, the failure of the organizers to practice even once with an actual fire, and the poor planning in setting a tent on fire, all foreshadowed what would be the surprisingly quick collapse of the Iranian military.
In spite of the joyous mood of official celebrations in 1940, “The Annual Political Report” prepared by the British Embassy in Tehran for that year offers a grim image of realities in Iran. The 1940 report describes Reza Shah as “the mainspring of all activities” in the country. He appeared to many in the diplomatic corps “more greedy, more arrogant, and more unpopular” than before. By 1940, there was a palpable perception amongst the populace that every mailbox in the country was under police surveillance, and that anyone seen putting a suspicious envelope, particularly one critical of the King, into a mailbox would be arrested.24
Reza Shah did not even see foreign diplomats except at “formal visits.” The British Ambassador, for example, had not met Reza Shah in private for more than three years. Reports from the American Embassy in Iran confirm that the same was true about other ambassadors. There is “ample evidence that Ministers habitually give the Shah hasty and optimistic reports.” A shortage of bread causing long lines had created new waves of public resentment. Nobody in the royal family, according to the British Embassy, including the Crown Prince, enjoyed the support and goodwill of the people.25
Reza Shah, according to the “Annual Report,” continued to be “morbidly sensitive” to any reference in the foreign press that is not adulatory, and thus within a year, this led to diplomatic rows with “the American, Swedish, and Swiss legations.” In 1939 Iran broke diplomatic ties with France over a magazine’s use of two homophonic words—the Persian word Shah, and the French chat, meaning cat—for a comical pun. Two years later, another article in the French press led to another suspension of diplomatic ties. The Crown Prince was intimately involved in the way Iran responded to what it considered the insulting pun, telling his father of a new law in France prohibiting attacks on heads of state.26 In fact, in the heat of negotiations between Iran and France over this controversy, the Iranian ministers of Foreign Affairs and Culture met directly with the Crown Prince instead of with Reza Shah and took orders from him about how to proceed.27 The experience seemed to have had a formative influence on the Crown Prince: all his life, he too remained obsessively sensitive to every imagined slight in the Western media, and he invariably saw an elaborate conspiracy behind each such criticism.
The “Annual Report” went on to say that Reza Shah “entertains for economic development a feverish passion which in many cases is heightened by a personal and financial interest.”28 In spite of the economic gains in the country, according to the British Embassy, dissatisfaction was widespread, and the government’s only “remedy . . . is a vigilant police, a controlled press and now a controlled wireless broadcast service. Tehran radio was opened in April.”29 The Crown Prince took part in the official launch of the studio.
Fear of public incitements to riots and regicide were great enough that the Iranian press remained silent on the subject of the failed attempt on the life of King Farouk, the Crown Prince’s brother-in-law, and even on the Munich assassination attempt against Hitler.30 The accumulated result of the discontent and political dysfunction was the British Embassy’s conclusion that there is little chance “that the Pahlavi dynasty will maintain itself.”31 What makes this prediction less an indication of British prescience but more of rancor between them and Reza Shah is the fact that the British had made the same dire predictions as early as 1926. In October of that year, for example, the British chargé in Tehran wrote that, “I do not think there are too many intelligent men in Per
sia who imagine that [Reza] Shah can for long maintain his throne.”32
For the royal family, maybe the only good news of that year came on October 27, when the Crown Prince and his wife, Princess Fawzia, had their first child, a girl named Shahnaz.33
While Reza Shah was preoccupied with domestic developments, the European war inched closer to Iran every day. He made every effort to maintain an air of normalcy in the country, but try as he might, the European war was never as remote as he liked to pretend. Even his attempt to assuage British anxieties by appointing, in June 1941, the notoriously Anglophile Ali Mansur as prime minister and dismissing the no less Germanophile prime minister, Ahmad Matin-Daftary, was of no avail. Only four days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Britain and the Soviet Union delivered a threatening note to Iran about what they perceived was the danger of Nazi presence in the country. In the note they claimed that there were more than 5,000 German nationals in Iran. In the parlance of World War II, such a large population was the perfect embryo for a Nazi “fifth column.” By then, Hitler had reneged on his 1939 Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union—a disingenuous pact both sides signed only to buy themselves time for what they knew was the inevitable war between them. When the pact was broken, the Soviet Union and Britain became allies and worried about the German presence in Iran—a presence made even more dangerous by the fact that many Germans worked in the Iranian state-run railroad system. By then it was clear that this railroad was a key to supplying the badly beleaguered Soviet army. The rapidly advancing Nazi forces inside the Soviet Union were moving toward the oil fields of Baku, and thus the Iranian border. The fact that eight Axis ships were also anchored off the Iranian port of Bandar Shapur made the Russo-British fears about a German threat more plausible.34
In retrospect, however, it seems clear that for the Allies, talk of the German “fifth column” was as much a tactical tool of propaganda as it was a genuine military concern. While the American Embassy in Tehran put the number of German nationals in Iran at about 2,500, about half the figure claimed by the British, even the British Embassy in Iran considered its own government’s claims exaggerated. As late as July 1941, Sir Reader Bullard had indicated that, in his view, the “number of Germans in Iran is not more than 2000 including dependents.”35 When the Ambassador finally wrote a memo to the Foreign Office, indicating his belief about the exaggerated nature of the British government’s claim, Winston Churchill was angry enough to write a terse note to the Foreign Secretary himself, saying, “Your Minister in Tehran does not seem to be at all at the level of events. . . . I feel this business requires your personal grip.”36 Churchill had declared earlier that “we mean to get the Germans [in Iran] in our hands, if we have to come to Tehran and invite the Russians there too. . . . Undoubtedly, we must acquire complete military control of Persia during the war.”37
Reza Shah all but ignored these increasingly threatening notes and other hints of British and Soviet anxiety. Clearly, the Crown Prince, who accompanied his father constantly in those days, made no effort to change Reza Shah’s views. Father and son both believed, and reiterated often to foreign or domestic visitors, that Iran, and only Iran, could decide which foreigners worked in the country.
While spending his days with his father, the Crown Prince’s nights were spent at Court with a small group of friends, nearly all foreign-trained technocrats or married to a foreigner, gambling, playing parlor games, or watching movies. One night early in 1941, when he and his friends were enjoying a few drinks and playing a card game, Reza Shah suddenly walked in. He had never come to any of these events unannounced, and his appearance shocked everyone into silence. The Crown Prince was a serious smoker in those days and had a cigarette in his hand. He too got up, standing at military attention, and, lest his father see him smoking, he hid the cigarette in his hand behind his back.
Reza Shah had come to inquire about progress on a building project. The visit, to the Crown Prince’s relief, lasted only a few minutes. While Reza Shah’s nocturnal visit showed his desire to attend to all affairs of state, he nevertheless ignored threatening notes from Britain and the Soviet Union. Was his failure to take them seriously the result of his arrogance, his ignorance of international realities, his calculation, or even the hope that Hitler’s early victories on the Eastern Front would translate into Axis victory in the war? Some have argued that Anglophile politicians, particularly Ali Mansur, Iran’s prime minister at the time, intentionally kept Reza Shah in the dark about the seriousness of the threats. Theirs, it is claimed, was a premeditated act of treason intended to pave the way for the British invasion of Iran. After the British Ambassador met with Reza Shah to deliver the first serious note of threat, he came away convinced that Reza Shah “had been kept badly informed by his ministers as to the state of negotiations.”38 When reminiscing about his life while he was in exile, Reza Shah offered a different reason for his inaction. He told Fereydoon Jam, his favorite son-in-law, that in his view, “Iran had no reason to help the Allies, and besides the war did not indicate who would emerge as the victor.”39 The Shah, on the other hand, suggests that the cabinet did not tell his father the truth because they were “too afraid . . . to tell him that the Allies were intent on forcefully carrying out their threats.”40 Even after twenty years, when the Shah looked at the letters exchanged between Iran and the Allies, he still categorically rejected the idea that the Germans’ presence presented any threat to the Allies. Furthermore, Mohammad Reza Shah rejected the claim that his father harbored Nazi sympathies. With surprising candor and naiveté, he declared, “because my father had himself dictatorial tendencies, he could not have tolerated another dictator like Hitler.”41
After the receipt of the initial note of protest from the Anglo-Soviet allies in 1941, the Iranian government had initially declared, in a defiant tone of wounded nationalist pride, that the work of Germans in Iran was a matter concerning the sovereign Iranian government and no one else. Two days after the receipt of the initial threat, Reza Shah gave one of his characteristically short speeches—this one to a class of graduating officers—and though he made no direct reference to the threat, he declared that all leaves of absence for officers had been cancelled. He ended by suggesting that “the army and its officers must take an active interest in the present situation and if need be, must be prepared to sacrifice their lives.”42
The next day, the semi-official daily paper, Etela’at, published an editorial calling on the people to “action and sacrifice to save the nation’s honor.”43 In meeting with diplomats, Reza Shah insisted that “the war was no business of his” and when a cash-strapped British government asked for a respite in the annual payment of oil revenues to Iran—increased substantially after a new round of negotiations in 1940—Reza Shah demurred, insisting instead “on a guaranteed minimum four million pounds a year, for two years, and a payment down of arrears.”44 Iran’s urgent need to industrialize, Reza Shah told the British Ambassador, was far more important than the war in distant Europe. After the meeting, Bullard poignantly captured his government’s frustrations with Reza Shah when he wrote that “Reza Shah has twisted the lion’s tail often enough over the oil concessions to get the erroneous idea that our patience is almost unlimited.”45 The angry notes Britain delivered to Iran on those August days signaled the end of the “lion’s patience.”
But Iran gradually changed its defiant tune and took, particularly in private, a far more conciliatory attitude. Iranian officials began to declare repeatedly that the actual number of German officials in the country was less than a thousand, and that all of them were under the tight control of the Iranian police. To assuage Britain’s concern about Nazi sabotage in Iran’s oil-rich regions, Iran “ordered all German nationals to leave those provinces.” 46 The day after receiving the first threatening note, Iranian officials informed the British Embassy that they had already arrested three of the top Nazi operatives in Iran, and that they had launched “a program . . . of expelling about thirty
Germans a month.”47 Yet, it was far too little and far too late.
Reza Shah and the Crown Prince both failed to recognize how serious the British and Soviet governments were about the Nazi threat, and this failure provided the British and Soviet governments with the excuse they so desperately needed for their planned invasion of Iran. Finally, around four o’clock in the morning on August 25, 1941, in an operation code-named Countenance, the British and Soviet forces invaded Iran from the south and the north.
On the day of the invasion, Reza Shah came to lunch with his family looking so tense that none of his children, including the Crown Prince, dared to speak. The Allies have invaded Iran, Reza Shah told his family, and that “will be the end for me—the English will see to it.”48 Earlier that day, immediately upon hearing of the invasion, Reza Shah had asked for an emergency meeting with the ambassadors of both countries. His anxiety at lunch was at least partially the result of what had transpired during this dread meeting.
When the two ambassadors arrived at the Court around ten in the morning, Reza Shah tried to reassure them by suggesting, “if [your countries’] only objection was about the Germans . . . I am ready to send away all Germans within one week, with few exceptions.”49 But by then armies of both countries had already entered Iranian territory.
Before the end of that day, Reza Shah also wrote an urgent plea to President Roosevelt, declaring that “Russian and British forces have crossed brusquely and without prior notice” into Iran and had begun bombing open cities “without defense.” Reza Shah went on to “beg Your Excellency to take efficacious and urgent humanitarian steps to put an end to these acts of aggression.”50 In those days, and well into the next decade, the United States enjoyed a special position in the minds of many in the Iranian political class. From the nationalist Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq—as subsequent events showed—to Reza Shah, as his telegram to President Roosevelt exhibited, many in Iran’s elite saw the United States as a potential ally in the country’s fight against the two chief colonial foes—Russia and Britain. Indeed Iran’s relationship with the United States had begun in 1850, during the tenure of Amir Kabir, the reformist prime minister who wanted to use the Americans as a countervailing force against his colonial enemies. In the same spirit, even before sending his urgent plea to Roosevelt, Reza Shah had tried to get the United States interested in Iran’s security by offering to buy eighty American warplanes for Iran’s fledgling air force.51 Iran also asked an American company to undertake the construction “and equipment of an airline factory in Iran.”52 Even more enticing was the fact that representatives of Standard Oil were invited to Iran, and a major new trade agreement was put on the table by Iran.53