The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Some sources have suggested that for the Eisenhower administration the die was cast on the first anniversary of July 21, 1952, when Mossadeq had been returned to power. On that day in 1953, his followers organized a demonstration in the morning while the Tudeh had a rally in the afternoon. New York Times journalist Kennett Love was in Tehran at the time. In his words, the pro-Mossadeq forces “mustered up a straggling assembly of a few thousand demonstrators,” while the Tudeh “turned out a vibrantly-disciplined throng of at least 100,000.”23 At the end of the mammoth rally, a resolution was passed calling for, “among other things, the liquidation of American spy-nests.”* This was more than enough to convince the Eisenhower administration that the Shah and the British had been right and that Mossadeq would be no match for Tudeh Party militancy. Eisenhower thus finally signed off on the plans developed in Cyprus for the overthrow of Mossadeq.

  The “field commanders” of the joint American–British operation to overthrow Mossadeq were American Kim Roosevelt and a British intelligence officer named C. M. Woodhouse. In later years, some sources claimed that Shapour Reporter was the real master of British mischief. He claimed as much himself in a remarkable note he prepared on behalf of MI6 for President-Elect John F. Kennedy. He called himself “the permanently accredited liaison officer of my service to his person,”24 the Shah, and claimed that he was in fact chief of Operation Boot.

  While Reporter had by then served in Tehran for many years, Roosevelt and Woodhouse were in comparison relative novices on Iran. Woodhouse had spent most of his time in places like Greece; Roosevelt had had his first experience in intelligence when he worked with “Wild Bill” Donovan during World War II. The world of cloaks and daggers, spies and covert operations, had for him the air of romance—part Hollywood, part Rudyard Kipling, with a pinch of “Bond, James Bond.” In his memoirs, with obvious relish, Roosevelt noted that for some, he conjured Graham Greene’s “Quiet American.”25 For security reasons, he had given everyone involved in the operation an alias. His was “Rainmaker,” while the Shah was called “the Boy Scout.”26

  Aside from Roosevelt’s tendency toward self-adulating exaggeration—evident in his memoir when, amongst other things, he claims that he had picked Kim Philby as a double agent when he first saw him27—in life he had a knack for turning his political connections to the Shah into substantial personal financial gain. In the sixties and seventies, he was, on the order of the Shah, one of the preferred “middlemen” in some of the big deals between the Iranian government and American corporations. Wheat purchases, for example, were in his monopoly.28 He was also reported to have acted as a middleman for Northrop’s controversial sale of military hardware to Iran. Finally, even the time and the manner in which he chose to publish his memoir revealed his pragmatism. He waited until the Shah was in his political death throes; only then did he publish what he knew would be a bonanza to the Shah’s critics, validating their claims about events in August 1953. But even then, he did not burn all his bridges—he asked Assadollah Alam, the Court minister, whether His Majesty would object to the publication of his memoir.

  The tumultuous events leading to August 19 began early in the month as talk of Mossadeq’s planned referendum to dissolve the Majlis became reality. He had by then also dissolved the Senate, using a legal technicality. For months, he had been ruling with the “special powers” he had demanded and received from the Majlis. Amongst these rights was the power to make legislation. He even dissolved the equivalent of Iran’s Supreme Court, retiring a large number of judges. The economic situation grew more dire by the day; the government was at times even unable to make its payroll, and its efforts to print more money were blocked by Mossadeq’s opponents in the Majlis. The government began to develop plans for an oil-less economy. Some have suggested that Mossadeq’s initial impulse to dissolve the Majlis developed directly in response to his opponents’ success in taking over the committee with oversight over money matters. Eisenhower’s rejection of Mossadeq’s latest request for financial aid made the economic horizon even more ominous. The referendum was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  For weeks, the Shah had been under pressure from the American Embassy and his Court minister, Hussein Ala, to at least meet with General Zahedi,29 who had emerged as the clear candidate to replace Mossadeq. The Shah’s reluctance to meet the General had several roots. Zahedi had been minister of the interior when a large number of National Front candidates were elected to the parliament. He had served in a Mossadeq cabinet and, finally, he was a charismatic officer with a history of independence. The combination did not bode well for the Shah. As late as April 15, 1953, the Shah had “taken definite position he would not take any steps to replace Mossadeq unless the parliament gave the Prime Minister a vote of no confidence.” The Shah’s hesitance to move against Mossadeq was at least partially rooted in his suspicion that the British government was responsible for much of the existing tension between himself and Mossadeq; he believed they were hoping to create “a civil war so that they would have a pretext to divide Iran between themselves and the Russians.”30 The Shah even refused to accept Ala’s proposal to use the occasion of large demonstrations by the Tudeh Party, coupled with a letter of concern from Kashani, then still speaker of the Majlis, to dismiss Mossadeq and appoint a “Director of Public Security” to take over the government until the Majlis could give a “vote of inclination to a new Prime Minister.”31

  But by early August the Shah’s attitude, as well as his options, began to shift. The sea change might well have begun on July 27, when his twin sister, Ashraf, exiled earlier on the order of Mossadeq, traveled to Tehran incognito. She was there at the behest of the British and American governments and had been sent to encourage the Shah to go along with plans for an attempt to topple Mossadeq. Only hours after she conveyed the message, Mossadeq learned of her return. He angrily forced not only her speedy departure, but demanded—and received—a public statement from the Shah distancing himself from his sister’s return to Iran.

  A few days after his twin sister’s controversial trip, on August 1, the Shah met with U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. The Shah had first met the General when he was an advisor to Iran’s Gendarmerie. He was now back in Iran to encourage the Shah to join the plan against Mossadeq.32 If all of this was not enough, Kim Roosevelt made it clear to the Shah that plans to topple Mossadeq would go ahead even without his approval. Even in his August 3 meeting with Roosevelt, the Shah still resisted the proposed operation by saying he was “not an adventurer.” But Roosevelt was stern in his warnings. Failure to act, he said, would turn Iran into another Korea and lead to the Communist takeover of the country.33

  At the same time, the Shah agreed to meet not with General Zahedi but with his son, Ardeshir. Father and son were both in hiding in those days, with a price on their heads. These meetings were conducted in great secrecy, with Ardeshir entering the Court through the backdoor, hidden in the trunk of a car.34 On August 3, when Mossadeq held his controversial referendum in Tehran, the Shah told a confidante “that great changes would take place shortly” in the country.35 Meeting with Zahedi was preparation for these “great changes”; not only were future plans discussed, but the Shah was also briefed on what the Zahedi camp was hearing from their secret allies within the Mossadeq government. These included the military governor of Tehran and the head of the police intelligence unit.36

  The Shah’s key meeting with General Zahedi took place on August 10, when the referendum to dissolve the Majlis was also taking place in the rest of the country. No sooner had the referendum ended than Mossadeq sent a formal appeal to the Shah for a firman (royal mandate) to hold new elections. But instead of giving such an order, the Shah summoned General Zahedi to the Court and informed him that he would shortly be appointed prime minister. In his own mind, the Shah could finally abide by his own rule not to take part in a coup against Mossadeq, but to remove him legally. With the dissolution of the Majlis, he believed, he had the const
itutional right to issue two firmans—one dismissing Mossadeq and the other appointing General Zahedi as his replacement.

  To give himself plausible deniability or, in his own words, “in order to put Mossadeq off,”37 on August 11, the day after the meeting with Zahedi, the Shah and his wife, along with a small entourage, went to his favorite summer resort, Kalardasht. The official announcement declared it to be the royal couple’s routine summer vacation. The decision to go to Kalardasht, at least according to Roosevelt, was made in consultation with him, and only after he and the Shah had rejected Shiraz, Meshed, Isfahan, and Tabriz as other possible destinations for the ostensible vacation. Each city was rejected for a different reason. Shiraz, for example, was deemed unfit because of its proximity to Qashgai tribes, in those days no friends of the Shah.38

  At Kalardasht, the Shah apparently signed the two orders and asked Colonel Nematollah Nasiri, the commander of the Imperial Guard, to deliver them to Zahedi and Mossadeq. Despite considerable controversy on whether and exactly when the Shah signed the orders, it remains incontestable that the Shah more than once affirmed in those days his intention to issue the two orders.

  For reasons that have never been fully explained, there was a three-day delay before the letter of dismissal was delivered. Some attribute it to sheer incompetence, others to the fact that two of the three missed days were in fact Thursday and Friday—normal weekends in Iran—and some, like the Shah, suspected conspiracy. Whatever the cause, the delay allowed Mossadeq to learn of the plans. Interestingly, Nasiri delivered the Shah’s letter of appointment to Zahedi on Friday, August 14; he immediately accepted and understood himself to be the country’s constitutional prime minister. Until Mossadeq’s letter was delivered the next day, there were two men who each claimed to be the lawful prime minister of the country.

  The letter dismissing Mossadeq was delivered the next evening around midnight. Mossadeq was waiting for the belated arrival of Nasiri; after receiving and signing the letter from the Shah, he had the messenger arrested. According to Ardeshir Zahedi, aside from the tardy delivery, Nasiri made another error by tarrying at the Prime Minister’s home. “He had not gone there to arrest Mossadeq,” Zahedi says, so “he should not have waited around.”39

  As these events were unfolding in Tehran, in Kalardasht, the Shah spent anxious days waiting. He was, in his wife’s words, too nervous to even play cards. Their “only link to the capital,” Soraya says, was a “private transmitter/receiver which connected [them] to the headquarters of Colonel Nasiri.” They drank coffee all day and spent often-sleepless nights in nervous anticipation. On the night of the fifteenth, the Shah warned his wife to prepare for the possibility of a speedy departure. “At any moment,” he said, Mossadeq’s supporters might attack the chalet, and we “would have to leave without delay.”40

  A few hours later, the Shah’s fears became reality. At four o’clock in the morning of August 16, he woke Soraya to tell her, “Nasiri has been arrested by Mossadeq’s supporters. We have to flee from here as soon as possible.” As the Shah wrote in Mission for My Country, when Nasiri was arrested, all contact between him and the Shah ceased. But at four that morning, Nasiri’s driver found his way to the two-way transmitter and informed the Shah what had transpired.41 The Shah was traumatized, believing that the entire operation had failed, and that his life and his throne were now in jeopardy. Without telling their guests, he and his wife, along with an aide, Abolfath Atabi, and a pilot, Mohammad Khatam, took a small four-seat plane to Ramsar, where the Shah’s twin-engine Beechcraft awaited them in the royal hangar. They speedily boarded, worried that guards loyal to Mossadeq might arrive at any moment. Only when they had boarded did Soraya remember that she had left her dog behind, “a Skye terrier [she] adored.”42 But there was no question of retrieving the dog now. The Shah reassured his distressed wife that the servants and the friends they had left behind at the chalet would take care of the dog. The Shah piloted the plane.

  Before long, their small aircraft approached the control tower in Baghdad. The Shah thought it unsafe to identify himself. Instead he told Baghdad tower that he was the pilot of a plane of tourists, that they had developed engine trouble and needed permission to land. After some confusion and delay, the Shah’s plane was allowed to land. Fortuitously, King Faisal, the Iraqi monarch, was returning from a trip, and his plane landed at the airport shortly after the Shah’s. The plume-plucked Shah waited for about half an hour in the 104-degree heat before King Faisal learned of his arrival and decided to grant him and his entourage asylum. On the other hand, the Iranian ambassador—Mozaffar A’lam—refused to meet with the Shah and, on instructions from the Mossadeq government, tried to have the royal couple arrested.43 The Iranian Foreign Ministry had sent a directive to its embassies around the world that the Shah no longer held a position of authority in Iran.

  News of the Shah’s flight created quite a stir in Tehran. The many papers belonging to the Tudeh Party and its numerous front organizations began to attack the Shah, the monarchy, and U.S. influence, calling for the immediate establishment of a republic. Kennett Love, the American journalist in Tehran, reported that in one Tudeh Party rally, angry demonstrators shouting anti-American slogans attacked him, and only the kind protection of a wiser member of the party saved him from the wrath of the roused crowd.

  The Tudeh Party’s use of such concepts as “people’s democracy” and a “united front” conjured the fate of Eastern European democracies that had by then all fallen into the hands of the Communists. Members of the Iranian middle class, merchants of the bazaars (called bazaaris) and industrialists, were all particularly wary of the Tudeh Party’s increasingly militant and assertive discourse. Certainly, the efforts of the British agents and the CIA’s own operations—like using agents provocateurs and publishing anti-Communist articles and books—worked to augment these fears and anxieties. At the same time, the new swagger in the demeanor of the Tudeh Party leadership was probably in itself enough to foment these middle-class fears.

  Even more controversial than the Tudeh Party reaction was what appeared on the pages of Bakhtar, the paper founded and edited by Hossein Fatemi. Even during his tenure as foreign minister and spokesperson for the government, Fatemi continued to edit the paper. Beginning on August 16, the paper published increasingly incendiary reports about the Shah’s departure. The most critical were written by Fatemi himself. One of Fatemi’s articles was titled, “The Traitor Who Wanted to Shed the Nation’s Blood Fled.”44 In it Fatemi wrote, “Go, you traitor, because even the foreigners now find you so worthless and useless that they will not pay you any wages for your most recent criminal act.. . .You must now pay your bills in European cabarets from the dollars and pounds you and your father have plundered.. . .Go you traitor who completed the thirty year history of the Pahlavi dynasty’s criminal record.”45 The language of these editorials was particularly remarkable for a paper edited by a member of the cabinet that still claimed allegiance to the constitution. The underlying assumption of the articles was the idea that the end of the monarchy and the Pahlavi dynasty was a cherished and foregone conclusion.46 Yet, as the spokesperson for the Mossadeq government, the same Fatemi declared that the cabinet did not plan “regime change.”

  In Bakhtar’s rendition of what happened on August 15, and in the government’s official announcement broadcast at seven in the morning on August 16, there was no mention of the Shah’s firman dismissing Mossadeq. There are some reports that Mossadeq initially planned to broadcast a radio message to the nation, informing them that he had been dismissed by the Shah. But Fatemi and other more radical members of the National Front changed his mind.47 Instead, the official broadcast only said that a military coup against the government had been successfully thwarted. Fatemi’s editorial only referred to Nasiri’s coming to the Prime Minister’s home “for confidential business and giving a letter,” and said that “the Prime Minister wrote the time and date of the letter’s receipt on its back.”48 Yet another interest
ing aspect of the Fatemi editorial is that it refers to the coup attempt as solely the work of Britain, with no mention of the United States. It is a remarkable fact of historical transubstantiation that eventually the events of August became known as the “CIA coup,” with all but no mention of the British role in the affair.

  By the evening of August 18, all seemed lost for the Shah. Both the CIA and the British and American governments had concluded that the attempt to overthrow Mossadeq had failed. Concurrent with the CIA’s report to Eisenhower on August 18 about the failure of “the move,” some in the small coterie of aides working with General Zahedi had arrived at the same conclusion. They decided that they should declare the creation of “a free Iran” and send personal emissaries to the three units of the military that were still loyal to the Shah and were stationed in the provinces—one in Rasht, led by Colonel Gharani, the second a cavalry unit commanded by Colonel Bakhtiyar in Kermanshah, and the third in Isfahan, commanded by Colonel Amirgoli Zargam—and ask them to move toward Tehran and, if necessary, overthrow Mossadeq through what was beginning to look like a civil war.49