The Shah

by Abbas Milani

In the early morning of July 26, 1944, Reza Shah died of what doctors described as a heart attack and his family believed was heartbreak. He died a broken man. Days before his death, a local paper published a scathing attack on Reza Shah—“an article full of insults and accusations” according to his Chief of Staff—and Reza Shah was not only saddened by the article, but believed it to be the work of “secret hands” pursuing him even as far away as Johannesburg. Now he was dead, and he had requested to be buried back in Iran. But bringing the body back to the country at the time was, for political reasons, untenable. Leaving it in South Africa, a non-Muslim land, was also a political liability. The embalmed body was laid to temporary rest at the royal Al-Rifa’i mosque in Cairo. Some £5,000 were spent moving Reza Shah’s coffin from South Africa to Egypt.68

  After many months, the Shah finally decided to re-inter the body of his father. Even the Iranian cabinet was opposed to this relocation, worried about the public reaction to such a move. The Shah sent the cabinet an angry message, saying their attitude was “an insult to his father which he would not brook.”69 The Shah went on to show unusual determination to bring the body back and overcame the cabinet’s resistance. He still had two other obstacles to overcome. The Egyptian government, by then indignant at the Shah’s relations with Fawzia, had said it would refuse to “stage any ceremonies in Cairo to mark the re-interment.”70

  Finally, when the body was on its way to Iran, the Shah declared his intention to inter the body in the grounds of the Sa’ad Abad Palace, a place he knew his father loved. But the clergy opposed the idea, producing a “ruling to the effect that a body which had been temporarily interred in non-Shia ground must, if re-interred in Persia, lie in the proximity of a Shrine of an Imam.”71 Obviously, the most important shrine in Iran was in Meshed, where Imam Reza was buried, and the Shah decided he wanted his father buried there. The choice was dictated more by the Shah’s own desires and beliefs than by those of his father, who had, in his prime, used heavy artillery against rabble-rousing clerics who had taken refuge in the Meshed shrine. The clergy had not forgotten this transgression and, helped by the more-religious members of the bazaar, they successfully opposed the idea of Reza Shah’s burial in the city.

  The Shah’s second choice was Qom, but the clergy in that city also successfully blocked the move. After all, a few years earlier, Reza Shah had defied tradition and transgressed against that shrine too, walking into the most sacred parts of the monument in his military boots. Ultimately, a new mausoleum, inspired by Napoleon’s burial place at Les Invalides in Paris, was built for Reza Shah in the city of Rey, not far from Tehran.72

  Chapter 8

  DAWN OF THE COLD WAR

  Well, well, I see the issue of these arms.

  I cannot mend it, I must needs confess,

  Because my power is weak and all ill left.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.3.151–153

  As the Big War was ending in Europe, the Cold War was beginning in Iran, and the Shah was faced with increasingly serious challenges to his rule. He was a virtual single parent, as his Queen continued her long stay in Egypt—officially described by the Court as a holiday. Two of his most tenacious adversaries were becoming the indispensable poles of Iranian politics, while the power and relevance of his allies were waning. A burgeoning nationalist movement threatened the status quo, while cells belonging to the rapidly spreading Communist Party continued to penetrate every part of the Iranian body politic, including the military.

  The Shah’s precarious position and his tenuous hold on power in the early part of the forties became most evident during the Tehran Conference of 1943. The meeting brought together leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. It was, in his words, his “first brush with international diplomacy.”1 He wrote, “although I was technically the host of the conference, the Big Three paid me little notice . . . we were after all what the French called a quantité négligeable, . . . I was a king barely 24 years old.”2

  The three big powers had decided to adopt the severest measure of secrecy and chose to tell the Shah about the meeting only at the last moment. Still more insulting for the Shah was the fact that “neither Churchill nor Roosevelt bothered with international protocol that required they call on [him], their host.” Instead, they both summoned the Shah to their embassies. The Shah’s recollections of what transpired in these meetings changed as his sense of his self and his place in the world changed. In his 1980 Answer to History, written in exile when he felt betrayed and rejected, he called the meetings “perfunctory” and “without real significance.”3 In 1976, when he basked in the glory of his own accomplishments, and when he was constantly reminded by those he met of his genius for leadership and for matters military, his iteration of the meeting with Churchill was far from perfunctory. In 1976, the Shah claimed, with what he called “justifiable pride,” that he had essentially changed the course of the war by telling Churchill “that the Allies should open the second front through the soft underbelly of Italy.” According to the Shah, Churchill “sat in thought and a strange light came into his eyes.”4

  Of the three Allied leaders meeting in Tehran, only Stalin decided to bother with protocol and call on the Shah. It was an indication of the Shah’s beleaguered state in 1943 that even this visit did not take place without embarrassing preconditions. The Soviets did not trust the guards around the Shah’s palace and insisted on using Red Army soldiers to guard the building in the hours leading to the meeting. The Shah accepted the condition. On the day of the visit, he was nervous and excited; he anxiously moved about the Court, making sure every detail was taken care of. “This is my most important meeting,” he told his confidante, Hussein Fardust.5

  Stalin began the meeting by reassuring the Shah that he should “have no worry about the next fifty years” and advised him “to keep a strong hold over his people.”6 In recounting the conversation to the British Ambassador, the Shah wondered whether this was Stalin’s way of offering him a guarantee of power. The Shah was “burning to talk to [Stalin] about [Iran’s] need for planes and tanks.” No sooner had the Shah raised his concern than Stalin offered “a tank regiment and a squadron of planes, with troop training and method of delivery to be discussed later.” Was the gift too good to be true?

  “Thirty tanks, and thirty airplanes, some fighters and some bombers,” were to be offered, along with a bevy of 250 Soviet experts whose salaries the Soviet government offered to pay.7 The tank regiment would remain under the command of Russian officers and would be based in Qazvin, a two-hour drive west of Tehran. It was, after all, rumors of movement by the Soviet army based in Qazvin that had led to Reza Shah’s abdication and speedy departure from Tehran. The tanks and the rest of the gift were, in short, Stalin’s Trojan Horse, and the Shah had no desire to accept it. The British and American Embassies encouraged him to reject the Soviet offer. He was also reminded by his advisors that the actual price of the Soviet “gift” was less than the economic loss Iran suffered every year it was forced “to sell rice to [the Red Army] at an uneconomic price.”8

  Aside from his lifelong distrust of the Soviet intentions in Iran, there was an added reason for the Shah’s refusal of the Russian offer. The Shah had come to believe that Stalin was the real victor in the Second World War—a view shared by some in the West who either believed Roosevelt was duped by “Uncle Joe,” or accused him of betraying the fate of East and Central European nations by relegating them to the Soviet Union’s “sphere of influence.”9 It was, the Shah believed, “Stalin who pulled the strings at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam and he imposed a Soviet peace on the world that has now lasted for thirty-five years.”10 Allowing a couple hundred Soviet advisors to roam around the country was, for the Shah, a recipe for disaster. In the months after the offer was made, the Shah’s distrust of the Soviets only increased, putting him on the certain path of confrontation with Stalin.

  To some Western diplomats, the Shah’s views on the Soviet Union around the
time the Second World War ended seemed “unrealistic and alarmist.” The views became particularly disturbing when the Shah “held forth . . . about the atom bomb” and appeared to be immensely impressed with its military potential.11 Aware of America’s post-Hiroshima nuclear monopoly, he advocated that the West should have used that monopoly to wage “a preventive war” against the Soviets.12

  Once the Shah decided to reject Stalin’s disingenuous gift, he tried to parlay it into some benefits for Iran. He told Sir Reader Bullard, the British ambassador, that “Stalin’s call [on him] had made a very good impression” on the Iranian public. They construed it “as a sign of respect for Persian sovereignty.” He then suggested that “His Majesty’s Government must not allow themselves to be left behind but should come forward with something equally striking.”13

  Bullard was both surprised and angered by the Shah’s words and what they implied. He told the Shah that his was a preposterous suggestion and warned against the idea of trying to pit the Soviet Union against Britain. In another of his long litany of racist disparagements of the Persian character, Bullard concluded his report to the Foreign Office by saying, “throughout the interview, the Shah showed how thoroughly Persian he is in character and how thin the veneer is which he acquired in Switzerland.”14 For Bullard, being Persian was synonymous with cowardice, duplicity, and depravity of character. Bullard’s demeanor and disposition were so soundly insulting that on numerous occasions, American envoys to Iran clashed with him. Eventually, the Shah informally requested that someone else replace Bullard as ambassador—something well within Iran’s rights as a sovereign nation. The British government ignored the request.15

  Even something as innocuous as giving a gift to the three visiting heads of state became a quandary for the Shah, a potential political minefield. The three leaders were allies at the time, but they were also competitors and were destined to soon become adversaries. It was crucial that none feel slighted. The Persian habit of hospitality and the culture’s knack for survival, for bending with prevailing winds and waiting for the occasion to rise again, was handy in solving the gift quandary.

  The best living Iranian miniaturist was given the commission. He prepared three paintings that were exactly alike, save in one minor detail. Inspired by miniatures depicting scenes from the Shahnameh, Iran’s epic mytho-history, the gift paintings show two battling armies on horseback, swords and spears in hand. On one side are the Allies, obviously victorious and poised to deal the final blow to the retreating Axis forces. Emperor Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler are shown fleeing or fallen, pursued by the victorious Allied forces led by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Behind a small hill, in the far corner, stand the people of Iran, watching but unmistakably disengaged from the raging battle. The only difference between the three paintings is that each head of state received a painting that showed him riding the white horse of victory and leading the other two Allied leaders in the charge against the defeated and retreating Nazis and their hapless Italian and Japanese allies.

  The miniature ploy solved the gift quandary, but the end of the war created for the Shah a far bigger challenge. The very idea of Iran as a multiethnic quilt faced an existential challenge. Such ethnic pluralism had hitherto been a source of richness for Iranian history; now it threatened to become the country’s Achilles’ heel. At the end of hostilities in Europe, the United States and Britain swiftly abided by their earlier pledges and withdrew their forces from Iran. Stalin had other plans, and the first hints of them came during the Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945. At that time, the Soviet Union announced its intention to keep its troops in Iran past the agreed date.

  Two years earlier, in June 1943, unbeknownst to the Shah and the Iranian government, the Soviet Union had dispatched to Iran’s northern provinces geologists disguised as military engineers. Their mission was to explore for gas and oil. They concluded that oil and gas reserves in Iran’s northern provinces “were not less than those controlled by the British” in the South.16 Ever since the early years of the century, when Stalin was a sometime gangster, sometime revolutionary in the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, he had known that the Caspian region was rich in oil. In fact, Baku was called at that time “the greatest oil city in the world.”17 It was in Baku that Stalin became, in the words of his brilliant biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, the “godfather of a small but useful fund-raising operation that really resembled a moderately successful Mafia family, conducting shakedowns, currency counterfeiting.”18 Half a century later, it was Iran’s turn for a “shakedown.”

  But the riches of Iran’s northern provinces surprised even Stalin. Soon after the receipt of the geologists’ report, on August 16, 1944, Stalin’s infamous last chief of police, Lavrenty Beria, sent him a telegram suggesting that the Soviet Union must “set out vigorously to negotiate with Iran with the goal of obtaining a [Soviet] concession in Northern Iran.”19 In this effort, Beria could count on the support of the Soviet leaders running Soviet Azerbaijan who had long been advocating plans to force Iran’s northern provinces to join the Soviet Union and create what they imagined was “the Greater Azerbaijan.” With the war’s end in sight and the Soviet Union’s power and status increasingly recognized and feared around the world, the vast oil riches of Iran’s northern provinces finally convinced Stalin to make his move.

  In a memorandum dated July 6, 1945, and signed by the Communist Party’s Politburo but believed to have been written by Stalin himself, the Communist Party of Soviet Azerbaijan was ordered to take all measures necessary to “organize a Separatist movement in Southern Azerbaijan and other provinces of Northern Iran.” Stalin ordered the creation of a “national autonomous Azerbaijan with broad powers within the Iranian state” as well as “work among the Kurds of Northern Iran to draw them into the separatist movement to form a national autonomous Kurdish district.” The leader of the Tudeh Party, Samad Kambaksh, was summoned to Baku, where he was ordered to dissolve the Tudeh Party apparatus in Azerbaijan and meld its members into the new organization. The Tudeh branch in the city of Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan, had only been created in 1942, and four of its five founding members had spent some time in the Soviet Union in the decade before the war.20

  Some Tudeh leaders, driven more by their genuine nationalist sentiments than by the servile “internationalist spirit” favored by Stalin, objected to this Soviet policy. They wrote a surprisingly harshly worded letter to Soviet leaders, but their effort was of no consequence. It was, after all, an article of faith and part of the bylaws of the Third International of Communist Parties (Comintern), created by Lenin and Stalin after October 1917, that the interests of the Soviet Union, as the “bastion of the Proletarian Revolution” always took precedence over the parochial interests of any Communist Party that joined the organization.21

  Stalin’s directive even offered detailed guidance on the number of publications the separatist movement in Iran should have (“an illustrated magazine [published] in Baku for distribution in Iran and also three new newspapers on Southern Azerbaijan”) as well as the policies it should follow (land reform and “radical improvement in Soviet–Iran relations,” amongst others). Stalin ended by allocating “a special fund of one million foreign-currency rubles (for conversion into toomans)” to defray some of the movement’s costs.22 Less than two months after the Moscow directive, in August 1945, sympathizers of the newly launched movement took over government buildings in the city of Tabriz and issued a manifesto. The continued Soviet occupation of Iran and the creation of a separatist movement in Azerbaijan (and, before long, also in the Iranian region of Kurdistan) led to the first major political crisis in the Shah’s reign.

  In December 1944, Dr. Mossadeq, who had easily won a seat in the Majlis, shepherded through the parliament a bill prohibiting the Iranian government from negotiating about or granting any new oil concessions during the war. In arguing for the virtues of his proposed new bill, Mossadeq articulated the essential elements of his philosophy for I
ran’s foreign policy. It came to be known as movazeneye manfi (negative balance). He criticized the idea of “positive balance,” propagated at the time by both the Soviet Union and Britain. It “advocated a concession for the Soviets to balance the British concession. If Iran does so,” Mossadeq said, “her action would resemble that of a person with one hand amputated who, in pursuance of balance, would consent to have his right hand amputated.”23

  By the time Mossadeq introduced his bill, the Soviet Union had already begun pressuring Iran for oil concessions in the North. Their first mission demanding such a deal had arrived in Tehran in September 1944. Their demand was based not just on what they had found in Iran, and what Iran had given to the British, but also on the incredible idea that without concessions in Iran’s northern provinces, the “Baku oil fields” would be threatened. Stalin told an American diplomat that “saboteurs, even a person with only one box of matches . . . could risk our oil resource.”24

  The Russians were not the only ones seeking a new concession in Iran. By then, American-owned companies like Standard-Vacuum and Sinclair Oil and European concerns like the Shell Oil Company were also asking for oil concessions in Iran. The Shah had also let it be known that he favored “more American oil concessions” at the time.25 As these companies competed for a deal with Iran, the Tudeh Party also began to unabashedly defend Russia’s “legitimate interests” in Iran’s northern provinces.26

  Worried that the Tudeh Party members in the Majlis—not incidentally, nearly all elected in the Soviet-occupied territories—would filibuster his bill, Mossadeq maintained complete secrecy about his intentions, and the Tudeh deputies were apparently taken completely by surprise when the bill was introduced.27

  The Shah called Mossadeq to the Court in 1944, around the time of the bill’s passage, and offered the surprised deputy the job of prime minister. Much to the Shah’s surprise—and to his perpetual derision afterwards—Mossadeq predicated his acceptance of the prime minister’s job on the prior approval of the British government. For the Shah, the condition was a sign of Mossadeq’s cowardice or political chicanery, or even an indication that he was working in collusion with the British government.