The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  By the time of the referendum, officers deemed more “loyal to the Shah than to Mussadeq” were increasingly forced to retire and were at times even arrested. This resulted in what the American Embassy called the continuous surreptitious discussion of a military coup d’état by Shah loyalists. The brutal execution of General Mahmoud Afshartus, the chief of police and a staunch Mossadeq supporter, whose badly tortured body was found outside Tehran on April 14, only added to the air of menace and confrontation in the country. Sensational allegations that many of the royalists were complicit in the murder—from Baghai and General Zahedi to the Shah himself—only added to the tension. The Shah sent “secret messages to the [Mossadeq] opposition in the Majlis and other groups loyal to him, asking for their continued support,” and explaining that “if he has so far been passive . . . it is only because of his belief that he is not yet in a position openly to resist Mossadeq.” The embassy officer reporting this message was incredulous, adding that “it is difficult to believe that the Shah would really have the necessary courage or resolution.”141 At the same time, it was increasingly clear that General Zahedi was emerging as the only man capable of standing up to the popular and populist Mossadeq. The fact that the General had been given a surprisingly “sympathetic reception by [the] Majlis” when he sought asylum there against Mossadeq’s attempt to arrest him further convinced both the British and American governments that he was the man to replace Mossadeq. The main obstacle to the General was the fact he was not “able to obtain support of Shah.”142

  Gradually, the Shah’s options for finding a moderate leader to take the place of Mossadeq dwindled. After he lost hope in Alahyar Saleh, for a few days he tried to convince the new speaker of the Majlis, Abdollah Moazzami to accept the post. He too was unwilling to move against Mossadeq. When the referendum did take place on March 3, according to government sources, in Tehran alone 1.5 million people voted in favor and only 20 against the resolution to dissolve the parliament.143 The Shah believed that in the absence of the Majlis, he had the constitutional authority to dismiss Mossadeq.

  Although Mossadeq had bet that the Shah would never dare use this power, and although Mossadeq and most of his supporters have argued since 1953 that the Shah in fact had no legal authority to dismiss Mossadeq even during parliamentary recess, both historical precedence and Mossadeq’s own writings indicate otherwise.144 First of all, there had been at least fourteen recess appointments of prime ministers when there was no parliament in session. Mossadeq not only knew this well but had often spoken favorably of Ahmad Shah, the King who had made these appointments.145 More crucially yet, in a hitherto surprisingly overlooked letter, Mossadeq himself, as late as October 1948, confirmed that the Shah had the right to make such appointments. At that time, he and a group of opposition figures—what in fact became the embryo of the future National Front—had organized a sit-in at the Court to object to what they considered a clumsily stolen election. Mossadeq wrote a letter to Court Minister Abdol-Hussein Hajir—soon to be assassinated by Islamist terrorists close to Kashani—in which he wrote, “His Majesty is of course the source of all reforms, and the main reason for our sit-in is that in this period of parliamentary recess (fetrat) when the appointment of a Prime Minister does not require a vote of inclination by the Majlis, we hope His Majesty can appoint a government whose goal is to preserve the interests of the monarchy and the nation.”146 In other words, absent a parliament, the Shah does have the right to dismiss a prime minister. The referendum thus put into place the last piece of the puzzle that has since come to be known as Operation Ajax.

  Chapter 10

  AJAX OR BOOT

  What must the king do now? Must he submit?

  The king shall do it. . .

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.3.143–144

  In history, Ajax was a buffoon. In Sophocles’ play, while under a spell, Ajax slaughters a whole flock of sheep, imagining them to be enemy warriors. Realizing his folly, he commits self-slaughter.1 In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Ajax is a man into whom “nature hath so crowded humors that his valor is crush’d into folly, his folly sauc’d with discretion.. . .He is melancholy without cause. . .many hands and no use. . .all eyes and no sight.”2 Strange as it may seem, Ajax was also the CIA’s cryptonym for an intelligence operation intended to overthrow the Mossadeq government. The British chose a more appropriate name for their part of the same operation. They called it Boot.

  On the afternoon of June 23, 1953, eleven men—including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen Dulles, and Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, a CIA operative with some experience in the Middle East—gathered in Foster Dulles’s roomy offices. It was raining outside, while inside the room there was the bubbly buoyancy of the Dulles brothers’ optimism about U. S. power in “the American century.” On the agenda was a twenty-two-page document, initially proposed by the British and worked over in days of intense planning in Cyprus by American and British intelligence operatives. Allen Dulles summarized the goal of the meeting and the gist of the document: “So that is how we get rid of that madman Mossadeq.”3 There was little or no discussion of the morality of the operation. The dominant theme of the meeting was the possibility of Mossadeq’s forming an alliance with the Tudeh Party. Ambassador Loy Henderson chimed in, saying that while he did not like “this kind of business,” the “madman would ally himself with the Russians.”4 Finally John Foster Dulles got up and brought the meeting to an end, saying, “Then let’s get going.” And thus began Operation Ajax.

  Until early August 1953, the Shah had resisted the idea of a coup against Mossadeq. Yet behind the scenes, he had often worked, particularly with British officials, to weaken Mossadeq and to find a constitutional way to get rid of him. Even after Mossadeq ordered the British Embassy closed in Iran, the State Department not only shared dispatches from the American Embassy with the British government, but, more crucially, British intelligence succeeded in having its top man in Iran, Shapour Reporter, hired by the U.S. Embassy as a consultant and accredited by Western magazines as a journalist. His regular trips to the Court were easily camouflaged by the fact that he was tutoring the new Queen in English. She spoke perfect German, had a fair command of French; now MI6’s top man in Iran was helping her learn the language of Shakespeare. Moreover, during this period, Ernest Perron had “regular contacts with Robin Zaehner,”5 the British professor-spy.

  Regardless of the overwhelming evidence that a series of events planned by the British–American Ajax operatives did take place in Tehran, there is still some ambiguity about what actually sealed Mossadeq’s fate on August 19. A CIA memorandum for President Dwight Eisenhower, written in the immediate aftermath of August 19, says that “an unexpected strong upsurge of popular and military reaction to Prime Minister Mossadeq’s Government has resulted according to late dispatches from Tehran in the virtual occupation of that city by forces proclaiming their loyalty to the Shah and to his appointed Prime Minister, Zahedi.”6 But Mossadeq and his supporters have long rejected this claim, suggesting that the “strong upsurge” of support was paid for and procured by the CIA and British operatives. In the last two decades, Ardeshir Zahedi has offered yet a third narrative, wherein the clumsy efforts of the CIA and the British worked in parallel with the efforts of his father, General Fazlollah Zahedi, and his supporters to resist Mossadeq. The two forces intersected occasionally, but were not identical. In fact, the support of thousands of patriotic Iranians and politicians like Ayatollah Kashani and Mozzafar Baghai, and not the Ajax operation, was, in Ardeshir’s view, the determining factor in his father’s victory.7

  For the last quarter century of the Shah’s rule, his life was to a considerable degree plagued by the question of what had happened in Tehran on August 19, 1953. Was it a coup, or a countercoup? A proud day of national resurrection (Ghiam-e Melli) in support of an abused Shah, or a day of foreign infamy and intrigue against a democratic Mossadeq? Or, are such attempts at certainty about labyrinthine real
ities of history the result of a proclivity for Manichaeism, the desire to see the world as an arena wherein forces of good and evil are in constant cosmic conflict? Before the 1979 revolution, throughout the Shah’s thirty-seven years on the throne—making him the fifth-longest serving monarch in the recorded history of monarchy in Iran8—no set of events was more crucial than that of August 1953.

  The Shah and Mossadeq have both written with passion about what happened on those fateful days. Mossadeq’s version declares that he was a strict constitutionalist whose only “crime” was challenging the colonial power of Britain. The Shah claims that Mossadeq was a demagogue, a sworn enemy of the Pahlavi dynasty, who used the issue of the nationalization of Iranian oil to seize despotic power and risked inadvertently turning the country over to the Communists.

  There is no doubt that events of that August left an indelible mark on the Shah and the nature of his regime. There is also overwhelming evidence that the United States did in fact belatedly and at times begrudgingly join the British effort to overthrow Mossadeq. What is less clear is the precise role of these two countries’ operatives in actually determining the outcome of the formative events of August 19. An answer to this question can only be given when the whole episode is sufficiently “historicized”—viewed through Cleo’s cold, calculating, impartial eyes. The generation of Iranians who participated in or witnessed the events of those fateful days, as well as some of the American and British intelligence officers involved in Ajax, continue to see the day in epic terms, not as a simple moment of history. Moreover, many of the most important documents—archival material from the CIA, British MI6, the Iranian military, the Tudeh Party, the Soviet intelligence and embassy in Tehran, the offices of the Shah, and Ayatollahs Kashani and Boroujerdi, to name only the most important—are still not available for scrutiny.

  Even if all of these documents were declassified and made available for careful study, it might still be impossible to answer the question of whether it was better to go down in flames of defeat while insisting on the complete fulfillment of lofty ideals and principles—as Mossadeq claimed to have done—or to accept the “best possible” offer made by the West in terms of an oil agreement—as the Shah favored—and spare the country the gaping wound that was August 1953. At one point, Mossadeq told Vernon Walters, a member of the team of Americans negotiating with him, that he did not “really want an oil agreement.” Any agreement, he said, might taint his reputation with the Iranian people, as they would invariably assume foul play, even bribery. Returning to Iran empty-handed, Mossadeq said, “I return in a much better position.”9

  No less pertinent is the question of what would have happened in Iran had the events of August 19, 1953, not occurred. How long could Mossadeq have lasted in the face of the increasingly powerful Tudeh Party? Mossadeq’s mystique and the Shah’s constant harping against him created a romance of a “democratic utopia” that awaited Iran had the dark forces of the “Other” not intervened and overthrown Mossadeq. A reminder of the power of this mystique came in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, when at the first chance the Iranian people had to commemorate Mossadeq, more than a million of them converged on his estate a few kilometers outside Tehran and paid their tribute to an icon of their anti-colonial and democratic longings.

  For the Shah, August 1953 was both the cruelest and the most triumphant month. After that August, Mossadeq became the Shah’s lifelong nemesis. The Shah also became more successful in the effort to concentrate power in his office; he grew far more ambitious in his goals, and more insistent on the need for his authoritarian leadership. Moreover, in spite of the Shah’s assertion that he fully supported the nationalization efforts between 1951 and 1953, his actual views and his behind-the-scenes moves and stated preferences on this issue were more complicated.10

  Though the Shah had personally only a marginal role in the events of that August 1953 day, he nevertheless considered it the beginning of his elected monarchy. “I knew they loved me,” he told his wife, “before I was merely a hereditary monarch but today I really have been elected by my people.”11 For the last twenty-five years of his rule, he ignored the tormented national psyche about events of that August day and insisted on having the nation celebrate it as a triumphant moment of National Resurrection (Ghiam-e Melli).

  Mossadeq and his supporters, on the other hand, have called August 19 a day of infamy, when a dastardly coup, masterminded by the CIA and British Intelligence, overthrew his democratically elected nationalist government. In this narrative, a “rented crowd,” and a motley crew of pimps and prostitutes, all bought and paid for by the CIA and MI6, overthrew the government of Mossadeq. Advocates of the Mossadeq narrative received a boost when, in March 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered an apology for the U.S. role in the August events. She offered carefully worded regrets for the fact that the United States had “played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister” in 1953.12

  Memoirs by CIA and British intelligence officers involved in planning or implementing Operation Ajax, as well as the “leaked” CIA “official history” of its role in the affair, have boosted the advocates of this theory.13 As some scholars have pointed out, even a careful reading of the CIA’s self-laudatory “official history” raises as many questions as it answers.14 Ardeshir Zahedi, himself a key player in the events of those days, has been the most relentless critic of this “secret history,” often asking sardonically how a vodka-drinking American named Roosevelt who spoke no Persian, along with a motley crew of paid agents, overthrew a popular government.

  In retrospect, there seems little doubt that while the Shah won the battle on August 19, he might well have lost the war. Much anecdotal evidence indicates that, in the collective memory of the nation, after that August the Shah never shook off the tainted reputation of being a puppet—a ruler forcefully restored to the throne by foreign powers. Martin Herz, a seasoned American diplomat working in Iran in the mid-sixties, observed that even though by then the Shah and his regime had achieved impressive accomplishments, in private, even regime stalwarts were unwilling to defend him.15

  Mossadeq was a masterful politician and parliamentarian, as adept in bending the most arcane bylaws of parliamentary rule to his expedient political ends as he was at brushing the big strokes of symbolic politics. Everything about him, including his date of birth, has become a subject of contention.16 He was given to wild swings of emotion, easily going from melancholic stupor and tears to joyous exuberance and hyperactivity. Friend and foe concur that he was deeply distrustful of others, his behavior sometimes bordering on paranoid. When traveling overseas for important negotiations, he kept sensitive documents in a briefcase he personally carried at all times. In the words of George McGhee, the American assistant secretary of state who spent “approximately 80 hours of conversation” with Mossadeq and who was considered so sympathetic to the cause of Iranian nationalization that the British government tried to remove him from his post,17 Mossadeq was “not only a patriotic Iranian nationalist,” but was “absolutely obdurate in his views. . .displayed a startling naivety about economics and business in general, not just the oil business.” McGhee also emphasized that, in his view, the British too acted stubbornly and instead of negotiating in goodwill “preferred to wait for Mossadeq’s expected fall.”18 Much the same image of Mossadeq is offered by Loy Henderson in several of his dispatches from Tehran.19 The British, of course, never tired of repeating that Mossadeq was a madman, a demagogue, and utterly unreliable as a negotiating partner. Their goal from the outset was to remove him.

  But Mossadeq was an intractable but powerful adversary for the Shah and the British, as much a masterful thespian as a clever populist politician, always aware of the mise-en-sène of his actions. He feigned weakness and fragility when it served his purpose and resolute defiance when the occasion called for it. More than anything, he was also aware of his own iconic reputation, thus avoiding any dec
ision that might jeopardize this stature.

  After the February confrontation between the Shah and Mossadeq, the relationship between the two deteriorated considerably. Mossadeq was then at the center of Iranian politics—domestic and international, economic and military—with the Shah playing at best a symbolic role. The retirement of many top generals in the military was ordered without even the knowledge, let alone the approval, of the Shah. The fact that the army had not come to Mossadeq’s help in February 1953 had only increased his distrust of the military. He had created a commission and made General Mahmoud Afshartus, his most reliable ally in the army, its secretary; it was this commission that forced the retirement “of some two hundred senior officers.”20 From that February, there was essentially a race against time between Mossadeq and the Shah. The army was obviously the Shah’s trump card. Could Mossadeq purge it before it could be used to remove him from power? The retirement of the officers was part of Mossadeq’s strategy to win this race.

  But a number of factors worked in favor of the Shah. Further complicating the situation for Mossadeq, and rendering it favorable to the Shah, was the fact that Mossadeq refused every offer made by the British and American governments, and even from international organizations like the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IRBD). With every refusal, he lost some part of his social base. When on February 20, 1953, he decided to reject the final Anglo–American offer, he used what one Western observer called surprisingly “intemperate” language, decrying the “plunder” of Iran and advocating the eradication of all foreign influence.21 By then, the Eisenhower administration had given up its effort to find a negotiated resolution to the crisis. With every passing day, the Tudeh Party became more assertive in its ambitions. In an effort to frighten the Americans, Mossadeq increased his public contacts with the Soviet government. As early as November 1952, the American Embassy in Tehran was reporting that the “spirit of extremism in the National Front” was on the rise, and there was more and more evidence of Tudeh Party influence in the cabinet. Mossadeq was said to be “receiving [a] considerable amount of Tudeh slanted advice,” and several of his ministers and undersecretaries were “not above suspicion as Tudeh tools.”22 All of these developments were inadvertently benefiting the Shah and increasing the rift between Mossadeq and the clergy. The United States finally succumbed to the two-year-old British campaign and decided to join the effort to topple Mossadeq in Operation Ajax/Boot. Even then, the Shah was hesitant to move.