Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Churchill’s last government was mainly devoted to digesting the massive overload of change it had inherited, with little effort made to identify, still less address, the major structural flaws on which the edifice of the New Jerusalem rested. Historians have found little to say about this administration, which testifies to its generally emollient management of the nation’s affairs. One can be too censorious about Churchill’s lack of interest in tackling domestic issues, because he was surely correct to focus on the danger of nuclear war, which clouded his optimistic vision of ‘broad sunlit uplands’ in the future far more than the Nazi menace ever had. Britain’s inferiority and vulnerability were manifest. A month after Britain had tested its first, Nagasaki-sized atomic bomb in October 1952, the US exploded the first hydrogen bomb. After Ike had partially restored the wartime nuclear weapons co-operation the US had broken off in 1946, Churchill authorized work on a British hydrogen bomb, keeping most of his cabinet in the dark about it. It was partly a British version of ‘more bang for the buck’, partly a way of securing Britain’s continued place at the top table.

  During the early 1950s elections Churchill had been stung by Labour’s revival of its 1930s taunt that he was a ‘warmonger’. He was acutely aware that the Soviets, who in November 1955 tested their first hydrogen bomb, might not be able to hit the US but could certainly drop them on Britain; and that ten H-bombs targeted on Britain would bring its civilization to an end.52 To some degree this deep concern lay behind Churchill’s vain obsession with a Big Three summit, which he pursued despite the indifference of Ike and Dulles and the alarmed lack of support of his own ministers.53

  When Churchill’s ministers, prompted by Macmillan, finally summoned up the collective courage to urge the old man to go, Eden went to Buckingham Palace on 6 April 1955.54 With strikes afflicting the docks, transport and newspapers, he decided to seek a fresh mandate from the electorate and in May won a majority of sixty seats. Macmillan was rewarded with the office of chancellor of the exchequer, with Butler demoted to leader of the House, while the Welsh lawyer Selwyn Lloyd became foreign secretary, a tricky remit since Eden regarded the field as uniquely his own.55

  If one subtracts the concluding disaster of Suez, the most striking feature of the Eden government was its inconsequentiality beneath the facile Etonian glamour. Eden had no grasp or interest in economics – which lay at the heart of Britain’s problems – and, having been foreign secretary for so long, he found it difficult to adjust to a job in which Jack is obliged to be master of all trades. Even in his area of greatest expertise, he haughtily abstained from participation in the institutions of the European Common Market. The monuments to his domestic policy were meagre – a dozen technical schools founded half a century after the Germans had instituted theirs – and overall one must conclude that he was more of man of the past than the high-Victorian throwback he replaced.56

  ‘Luck be a Lady’

  One notable upward blip in the generally downward trend of Anglo–American relations was the two countries’ collaboration in the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq of Iran. Mossadeq had become the de facto leader of a National Front in which secular nationalists such as himself combined with the supporters of Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani, speaking for the Shia clergy. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara in March 1951, the Majlis (parliament) imposed Mossadeq on the reluctant Shah and voted to nationalize the oil industry in the same parliamentary session.57

  As we have seen, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had it coming. It had behaved in a manner outrageous even by the generally low standards of the oil industry, paying the Iranian government a pittance for its vastly profitable monopoly and treating Iranian employees like helots. It bribed parliamentary deputies to get its own way, and all promises of better pay or improvements to local amenities were broken. The company’s scabrous Glaswegian chairman, William Fraser, refused to negotiate a more equitable settlement, confident that the AIOC could always rig Iranian politics to suit its interests.58 In this he was encouraged by Labour’s Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison, of whom it is difficult to decide whether his diplomatic or his genetic legacy – in the form of his grandson Peter Mandelson, New Labour’s fixer-in-chief at the turn of the twenty-first century – has done more to depress Britain’s international standing.

  A month before Mossadeq became prime minister a new US ambassador had arrived in Tehran. This was our old friend the Anglophile Loy Henderson, who had won a reputation as the man who had cleaned up after the British in Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Palestine and India, his most recent posting. Iran was the final mess the British got him into. The State Department was aware that Morrison’s intransigent stance served only to increase the popularity of the volatile Mossadeq, and at this stage the US administration was reluctant to accept British attempts to depict Mossadeq as a fanatic or madman. Objectively, the melodramatic Iranian was an aristocratic secular-minded man who wanted neither political soldiers nor clerics in power. His problem was that he excelled in the negatives; he offered no positive vision to replace what he hated.59

  Confident that the Iranian Majlis could be rigged into compliance, the AIOC had offered the Iranians a Supplemental Agreement, allegedly improving on the original terms forged with Reza Shah in 1933 and, like them, set to run until 1993. Popular outrage prevented the parliamentarians from simply accepting this, and Fraser refused to improve his offer. With nationalization in the air the Majlis formed a committee chaired by Mossadeq to study the Agreement, while the British pressured the Shah to sack his Prime Minister and replace him with General Haj-Ali Razmara, a former head of the army. On 3 March 1951 Razmara addressed the Majlis with an appeal not to vote for nationalization in view of Iran’s treaty obligations and lack of capacity to run its own oil industry. Four days later he was assassinated at prayer in a mosque by a member of the militant Muslim group Fadayan-e Islam.

  Iranian outrage had been stoked when the US oil corporation Aramco signed a 50:50 profit-sharing deal with its Saudi Arabian partners, in line with arrangements already in place in Venezuela since the late 1940s. Indeed, in November 1950 four Venezuelan diplomats arrived in Iran, proposing something very like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the international oil cartel which only came into existence a decade later.60 Although the AIOC unwillingly offered Iran the same deal, it did so too late to halt the momentum towards outright nationalization. The inept combination of Fraser and Morrison could think of no better response than to reduce oil workers’ pay and to station five Royal Navy vessels in the waters off Abadan. Instead of caving in, the Majlis rejected the Shah’s (and AIOC’s) nominee Prime Minister and elected Mossadeq, who nationalized AIOC’s assets in May 1951. Morrison’s attempts to garner US support collided with the State Department’s assessment that ‘Mossadeq’s National Front Party is the closest thing to a moderate and stable political element in the national parliament.’

  After Fraser had ordered all British managers and technicians to leave, in a preview of the attack on the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 raids on the AIOC’s offices and the homes of senior personnel found proof that the AIOC had run its own intelligence service in Iran, whose personnel were in regular social contact with SIS officers in the vast British embassy, which occupied fifteen acres of central Tehran. At the home of the head of the AIOC’s Tehran office enough papers were left unincinerated for Mossadeq to show the world how the company’s tentacles had reached into every corner of the Iranian government, bribing some and forcing others from office. There was even documentary proof that the company had paid overtly nationalist newspapers to print the canard that National Front leaders were AIOC stooges.61

  Mossadeq refused to pay compensation to the AIOC, instead demanding £50 million in unpaid taxes. He also refused to accept the mediation of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, on the grounds that AIOC was a private company, leading the apoplectic Morrison to ente
rtain the idea of military intervention to depose him. Apprised of this, Acheson observed that Morrison knew nothing of foreign affairs. Both Britain and Iran looked to the US for support, and Truman’s judicious response was to send to Tehran the most venerable emissary available, tycoon and diplomat Averell Harriman. Despite his close wartime dealings with London, Harriman had no hesitation in identifying as the root of the problem the AIOC’s mismanagement and a total failure by Whitehall to comprehend Iran. This was despite being greeted by a huge demonstration shouting ‘Death to Harriman,’ which was violently suppressed with some loss of life.

  Accompanied by oil-industry experts and with the future CIA Director Vernon Walters acting as his interpreter, Harriman sought to defuse the situation by concentrating on the technical difficulties thrown up by precipitate nationalization: how would the Iranians make up for their lack of expertise, where were their oil tankers? But Mossadeq, who when he met Harriman’s wife kissed her hand as far as her elbow, was – to put it kindly – elliptical in his approach to negotiations. When Harriman spoke of oil prices, Mossadeq mused that ‘it all started with that Greek Alexander’ who had burned ancient Persian Persepolis 2,000 years before. Nor was Harriman prepared for the depth of Mossadeq’s resentment towards the British. ‘You do not know how crafty they are,’ he raged. ‘You do not know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch.’62

  Indeed. Before departing, AIOC personnel attempted to sabotage vital equipment at Abadan, while both the company and the British government discouraged foreigners from taking jobs with the new Iranian Oil Company. Legal threats were used against countries which sought to import Iranian oil. Meanwhile Robin Zaehner, a brilliant linguist who had run Britain’s counter-intelligence and counter-sabotage operations in the north of Iran during and after the Second World War, was recalled to Tehran by SIS from his post as lecturer in Persian at Oxford. He was unsuccessful in organizing a plot to overthrow Mossadeq and return the oilfields to the AIOC, after which he returned to Oxford, where he was elected Spalding professor of Eastern religions and ethics in 1952.

  Failing to sway Mossadeq, Harriman turned to the Shah, who was terrified of the mob, and then to Ayatollah Kashani, the leading clerical member of the National Front. When Kashani pointedly brought up the subject of an American oil man who had been murdered in Iran before the First World War, Harriman calmly replied: ‘Eminence, you must understand that I have been in many dangerous situations in my life and I do not frighten easily.’ ‘Well, there was no harm in trying,’ shrugged the cleric. Before leaving, Harriman indicated to the Shah that Mossadeq might be the obstacle that would have to be removed before a settlement could be patched up with the British. Under the Truman administration, this was but a thought left in the air.

  By the summer of 1951 Morrison had persuaded Prime Minister Attlee to impose sanctions on Iran and to permit planning for military operations, codenamed Buccaneer and Plan Y, that were unrealistic at a time when Britain was committed to the Korean conflict and when ‘Mossadeqism’ in Egypt made it imprudent to use troops normally stationed there. British military thinking had still not adjusted to loss of the Indian Army, which had previously maintained British power in the Middle East. British hopes that the US would support intervention were unequivocally dashed by Acheson and Truman, as well as by much of the US press. The Wall Street Journal deprecated ‘nineteenth century methods’ and the Philadelphia Inquirer warned of a third world war. Attempts to talk up the minimal prospect of a Communist Tudeh Party takeover in Iran did not at this time resonate in the US and Attlee cancelled the military preparations. He later lamented that Morrison was the worst appointment he had ever made.

  Mossadeq rubbed it in during a visit to the US, where he trounced Britain’s Ambassador Gladwyn Jebb at the United Nations. The Labour government had gone in for wholesale nationalization itself without damaging world peace, he said, adding slyly that Iran had no gunboats patrolling the Thames. This went down very well with the delegates of the many countries that had past experience of British high-handedness.63 Mossadeq also knew which buttons to push to win over the Americans, posing beside the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to remind them that they, too, had once rebelled to win independence from Britain. When he met Truman and Acheson in October 1951 he kissed the Secretary of State but was stopped by the President’s cold glare. ‘Mr President, I am speaking for a very poor country, a country all desert – just sand, a few camels, a few sheep . . .’ he ventured. ‘Yes, and with your oil, just like Texas,’ Truman interrupted.

  To British ears, the thud of the other shoe dropping was plainly audible when the US government tried to broker a deal by creating a neutral company to extract and market Iran’s oil, which was seen as an advance guard for the US oil interests the AIOC had long battled against. Unsurprisingly the US gambit was rejected by the new Churchill government in Britain; but it was also rejected by Mossadeq, perhaps too exalted by being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year to recognize a lifeline when it was thrown to him.64 Acheson had belittled the British argument that Mossadeq would necessarily turn to the Tudeh Party for support, and in the process help to push Britain towards bankruptcy; the Eisenhower administration was to take another view.65

  During 1952 Mossadeq’s domestic position weakened. He tried unsuccessfully to wrest control of the armed forces from the Shah, but desisted when he heard sabres rattling. Suspecting, not without reason, that British agents were fixing elections to the Majlis in the more rural provinces, he suspended them. In addition to his always erratic behaviour, his conduct became increasingly arbitrary and he resorted more often to raving radio appeals directly to the people. The economic situation deteriorated sharply, with the small but influential middle class badly squeezed, but it did not affect the 80 per cent of the population who were subsistence farmers.

  Real trouble loomed after the Royal Navy had intercepted a tanker attempting to ship oil to Italy. The seizure, legitimized by a court in the British colony of Aden, meant that no more oil would be exported from Iran. Japan strongly protested against the British action, thereby winning a friend for life in Tehran, a relationship that endures to this day. Mossadeq tendered his resignation, to be replaced by his elderly cousin Ahmad Qavam, an SIS asset. His appointment did not last a week since it united Mossadeq’s supporters, the Muslim clergy and the Communists against him. Uncertain of the loyalties of the army in the face of protesting crowds, the Shah recalled Mossadeq, which came as a shock to the CIA and SIS station chiefs who were on trout-fishing vacation together.

  Mossadeq’s reinstatement coincided with victory for Iran in its dispute with Britain at the International Court in The Hague, to whose judgments he had reluctantly submitted, but he was not content with that and compounded his earlier misstep of rejecting the US compromise solution by trying to blackmail Ambassador Henderson with the threat of turning to the Soviets for economic aid. Henderson patiently sat through bedside meetings with the hypochondriac Mossadeq, but began to wonder whether he was entirely sane.66 Previously distant contact between the Americans and Mossadeq’s opponents at court and in the army began to get closer.67

  Before Iran broke off diplomatic relations with Britain in October 1952, the SIS station had developed what would become the essentials of any future anti-Mossadeq plot. Since street protesters sustained Mossadeq against both the British and the timid Shah, there would have to be a countervailing force. There also needed to be a plausible alternative ruler to Mossadeq, but not from the old elite, who were tainted by their association with the British. Their candidate was General Fazlullah Zahedi, the Nazi-sympathizing commander of Iranian forces in Isfahan who had been kidnapped in 1942 by the Member of Parliament and irregular warrior Fitzroy Maclean and had spent the rest of the war interned in Palestine. The General was perfectly ready to let bygones be bygones in return for a slice of the action when he reinstated the AIOC.

  Whatever might have come of the secon
d British conspiracy became moot when the embassy had to close and the SIS station lost its ability to keep in close contact with its many agents. Once again in a preview – in reverse – of the events of 1979–81, it had to pass its assets to a CIA station made markedly more co-operative by the imminent Republican victory in the November 1952 election. Planning for the coup now went forward on a joint basis, with the CIA’s Donald Wilber and SIS’s Norman Darbyshire laying the groundwork in Cyprus during May 1953.

  When CIA station chief Roger Gioran showed insufficient enthusiasm for gambling his nexus of agents in a coup against Mossadeq, Allen Dulles appointed Kermit Roosevelt, a senior officer in the CIA’s Middle Eastern division and a grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt, to go to Iran and co-ordinate what was now named Operation Ajax; the British bluntly codenamed it Operation Boot. Kermit Roosevelt, a graduate of the elite Groton private school and Harvard, was polished, courteous, tall and lean, and had the intelligence officer’s blessing of a forgettable face. Throughout the events that followed he endlessly played on the gramophone and hummed ‘Luck be a Lady’, a song from the hit musical Guys and Dolls. She needed to be.

  In early June, Kermit Roosevelt flew to Beirut to review the plan, and then to London, where he took part in discussions at SIS headquarters. Meanwhile Monty Woodhouse of SIS was in Washington representing Winston Churchill, who had given the green light to the operation while acting as his own foreign secretary in the absence of the ailing Eden. Woodhouse dispelled his CIA friends’ reservations by agreeing that Fraser and his AIOC co-directors were ‘stupid, boring, pigheaded and tiresome’, while emphasizing the threat of a Soviet-backed Tudeh coup in Iran. He had been a stellar Oxford classicist whose academic career had been truncated by the war, in which he saw distinguished service with SOE.68 Gradually the number of people in Washington, London, Nicosia and Tehran with intimate knowledge of the coup grew to nearly ninety.69 The key players were SIS’s George Young, CIA London station chief Ray Clines, Darbyshire in Nicosia and Roosevelt’s team in Tehran. Others included the American political warfare expert Miles Copeland.70