Throughout the spring and summer of 1953 the Shah refused to budge under intense pressure from Washington and London to acquiesce to a coup. U.S. ambassador Loy Henderson, frustrated and perplexed with the Shah’s attitude, bluntly informed him that if he did not “take leadership in overthrowing Mossadeq … you bear responsibility for [the] collapse of [your] country.” His warning reflected the official sentiment in Washington and London that the Shah was expendable: “If the Shah fails to go along [with the coup] his dynasty is bound to come to an end soon. In spite of the Shah’s previous misconceptions the United States and the United Kingdom have been and continue to support him but if the Shah fails now, this support will be withdrawn.” Ambassador Henderson had no use for the King’s sentimental approach to leadership, his reverence for the farr, or his aversion to bloodshed, and in telegrams back to Washington dismissed him as a weakling. Henderson threatened to withhold all U.S. aid to Iran and cabled Washington that the Shah would probably not approve covert action “unless extreme pressure was exerted, possibly including the threat of replacing him.” He warned his superiors that “the [Iranian] army would not play a major role in the coup without the Shah’s active cooperation, and he urged that an alternate plan be prepared.” The Shah faced the likelihood of ouster at the hands of Mossadeq if he tried to sack him, and removal by American and British agents if he did not. Unsure which way to turn, he dug in his heels and waited, apparently in the hope that events would take care of themselves. He came under pressure from all sides—even from his beloved Soraya. “I could no longer bear the weak man he had become,” she recalled in dramatic detail in her memoir, “a king incapable of making a decision, a pawn manipulated by great powers, a puppet ceaselessly torn between the advice of some and the warnings of others.”
In a scene worthy of a Wagnerian opera, Soraya confronted her husband with brisk Teutonic firmness and demanded that he pull himself together for the sake of the country. The people, she insisted, wanted action to save them from poverty and communism. She ended her pep talk with a bold appeal to raw power: “Only a coup against Mossadeq can save the country.”
“But that’s impossible,” the Shah replied, the cigarette trembling between his fingers. “Has there ever been a monarch who has plotted against his own government?”
“Well then,” she snapped, “you will be the first one to do it!”
The Shah agreed to secretly meet with the leaders of the coup conspiracy but would not say one way or another whether he approved their intentions. “You are pitiful!” Soraya blazed. “You no longer have the right to revel in your depression. You must be the man you once were and whom I respected. If you allow Mossadeq to remain in power, you will be selling Iran off to Moscow.”
With tensions mounting, on August 3, 1953, the Shah received Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, former president Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson and the lead CIA operative sent to Iran under cover to organize a coup. Roosevelt was working with army commanders, senior clergy, and wealthy merchants to raise funds, pay bribes, organize street mobs, spread false rumors, and agitate against the government. The conspirators were anxious to strike before Mossadeq uncovered their plot machinations. But they needed the Shah to sign the firman or letter of dismissal that would terminate Mossadeq’s premiership to provide the coup with the fig leaf of legitimacy. Roosevelt arrived at the palace under the assumption that the Shah had finally changed his mind and consented to sign the firman. He was stunned when the Shah informed him that “he was not an adventurer and could not take chances like one.”
General Fazlollah Zahedi, the bravest of the army generals, and the man the conspirators agreed would replace Mossadeq as prime minister, was next ushered into the Shah’s office in the second week of August 1953. By now, the monarch had settled on a course of action. If Zahedi was surprised to see the strong-willed young Queen at her husband’s side he did not let on.
“When can I act?” he asked, fully expecting to be given the green light to set a date for Operation Ajax to unfold.
“Don’t do anything against Mossadeq,” the Shah counseled. “It would be dangerous.” He had decided that he could not support a coup after all. With these words, the Shah made it clear that he preferred to leave the country and lose his throne than risk the spilling of innocent blood.
These were not the words Zahedi and Soraya had expected to hear, and an awkward silence ensued. The Shah looked first at his wife, and then at the general, who stared back and said nothing. They were not about to provide him with the cover of moral legitimacy he craved. Finally, he conceded defeat. “I will sign a decree,” he said with a sigh.
The die was cast, and planning for the overthrow of the Mossadeq government moved into high gear. Fearing assassination, for the next few days the King and Queen changed beds and rooms in the middle of the night, slept with revolvers under their pillows, and worried that their meals might be poisoned.
* * *
THE ARMY COUP that deposed Mohammad Mossadeq was a near-run thing.
Originally scheduled for August 15, 1953, logistical delays meant that government agents uncovered the plot in advance and rounded up many of the leading conspirators. Two days later the Shah and Queen were at their summer residence at Kelar Dasht on the Caspian Sea, about thirty minutes’ flight from the town of Ramsar, when news came through that Operation Ajax had collapsed. They grabbed a suitcase with clothes and a few valuables, dashed to an airfield, and boarded a small plane and flew across the border to Iraq, where they landed at a quarter past ten in the morning. Iraq’s King Faisal II offered the couple and their two attendants safe haven. The Shah assumed he was finished and gloomily informed his wife that he thought they had just enough money to buy a small plot of land in California.
Late on the evening of the first day, the Shah requested a meeting with the American ambassador to Iraq, Burton Berry, whose secret cable back to Washington provided officials with the most detailed account yet of the monarch’s fragile state of mind about his agonizing decision to sack Mossadeq. “I found the Shah worn from three sleepless nights, puzzled by turn of events, but with no (repeat no) bitterness toward Americans who had urged and planned action,” Berry reported to the State Department. “I suggested for his prestige in Iran he never indicate that any foreigner had had a part in recent events. He agreed.” The Shah told Berry that only in the past two weeks had he resolved to sack the prime minister for “flouting the Iranian Constitution.” But he explained that after initially approving Roosevelt’s idea of a coup he had changed his mind and insisted that any action taken must be within “the framework of his constitutional power.” When he heard the plot had collapsed he had decided to leave Iran “to prevent bloodshed and further damage.” The Shah added that he hoped to fly on to America, where “he would be looking for work shortly as he has a large family and very small means outside Iran.”
Back in Tehran, the coup plotters, who had gone to ground, were beside themselves. “He just took off,” exclaimed Kermit Roosevelt when he heard of the Shah’s decision to run for the border. “He never communicated with us at all—just took off.”
Mossadeq’s loyalists crowed over their triumph. “O traitor Shah, you shameless person, you have completed the criminal history of the Pahlavi reign,” thundered Foreign Minister Hossein Fatemi. “The people want to drag you from behind your desk to the gallows.” In the streets of the capital, CIA agents witnessed Communist mobs “tearing down statues of the Shah and Reza Shah, defiling them, and dragging them through the streets.”
The National Front and the Tudeh Party may have won this first round, but overconfidence led them to disaster and defeat. Fatemi’s fiery rhetoric alarmed many Iranians who until now had either backed Mossadeq or sat out the escalating strife. The young King, for all his faults, was still revered by the majority of the Iranian people, who dreaded a Bolshevik-style bloodletting. Zahedi, Kashani, and Roosevelt took advantage of the reduced security measures in Tehran to launch a second attempt. On
the morning of August 19, Kashani handed out bribes of 200 tomans ($26.65) to anyone prepared to march against the government, though bribes likely never touched the hands of the many Tehranis who, fearing Communist mob rule, poured into the streets at the first sight of tanks to cheer Mossadeq’s downfall. “Sensing that the army was with them,” reported U.S. intelligence, “the demonstrators not only began to move faster but took on a festive holiday atmosphere … it had become a mob wholly different from any seen before in Tehran; it was full of well-dressed, white collar people, carrying pictures of the Shah and shouting, ‘Zindebah, Shah!’ (Long live the Shah!). Then, the troops began to join the demonstrations.” The size and enthusiasm of the crowds suggested a groundswell of support for retaining the monarchy. Though opposition groups later claimed hundreds of casualties, only forty-three deaths were reported by nightfall, at which time Mossadeq and his ministers were in detention. General Zahedi imposed martial law and declared himself Iran’s new prime minister.
The Pahlavis had just sat down to lunch in the Hotel Excelsior’s dining room in Rome when a reporter from the Associated Press ran up to them with a wire service report in his hands: “MOSSADEQ OVERTHROWN—IMPERIAL TROOPS CONTROL TEHRAN—GENERAL ZAHEDI PRIME MINISTER.” The stunned Shah was heard to exclaim, “Can it be true? I knew it! I knew it! They love me!” Speaking amid a crush of reporters, he explained his reasons for leaving Iran. “Ninety-nine percent of the population is for me,” he said. “I knew it all the time. But if I left my country, it was solely because of my anxiety to avoid bloodshed.” Soraya steadied her agitated husband and was overheard to cooly remark, “How exciting.” To further bolster the Shah’s spirits, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, the paramount figure within Shia Islam, sent the monarch a telegram expressing his goodwill and support. “I hope the well-augured return of Your Majesty to Iran will put an end to [temporal] ills therein and will bring glory to Islam and welfare to Muslims,” Borujerdi wired the Shah. “Do return, as the Shiism and Islam need you. You are the Shiite sovereign.” The Shah interpreted these messages, and the public rallies that greeted him on his return from exile, as proof that he owed his recall to God and the people and not to the generals and foreign mercenaries. Galvanized by this most remarkable reversal of fortune, he concluded that he had finally earned the crown. “Before I was merely a hereditary monarch but today I really have been elected by my people,” he told Soraya.
More than two years of political drama, street violence, economic collapse, and international isolation meant that many Iranians, perhaps even a majority of the population, were grateful for a return to peace and stability. But for a hardened minority, and especially the left-wing intellectual class who adored Mossadeq, the Shah’s decision to stand back while the army collaborated with foreigners to depose their hero made him a usurper and traitor. Mossadeq’s trial on charges of violating the Constitution evoked pity and lingering resentment that turned him into a martyr for democracy. Although CIA complicity in the coup was never publicly admitted in Washington, the U.S. role was widely known inside Iran. American motives were indirectly revealed the next year, when General Zahedi’s government was pressured by Eisenhower to accept a new arrangement that allowed American oil companies to dominate an international oil consortium to replace the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s one-hundred-thousand-square-mile monopoly on oil production. Prime Minister Churchill and his ministers realized only too late that their American partners in the coup had hoodwinked them. From now on the U.S. oil majors determined how much petroleum was pumped in Iran and the price it was sold for on the open market. In return for surrendering control over its own purse strings, the Zahedi government was granted emergency financial assistance and generous economic aid and military hardware.
Many years later, the Shah was asked about the role the CIA played in saving his throne. His interviewer noted that even one of his brothers was on record as saying the “counterrevolution had been scheduled for two weeks later.”
“I can’t think how he would know it,” the Shah answered, “but I can tell you one thing: women in their chadors and children of eight and nine were on the streets. I am certain they weren’t paid for it.”
“To what extent were you apprised of this plot?”
“The plans that I knew were to issue the order for Mossadeq’s dismissal,” he replied. “Then, if it didn’t work, to leave Iran—for various reasons.”
He never doubted that his relationship with his people had forever changed. Reminded many years later of how quickly his father had lost power in 1941, the Shah harked back to the events of August 1953 to offer an assurance that history would not repeat itself. “Ah, but the people called for me to return,” he chided Court Minister Alam. Alam was no romantic and he gently reminded his master that the people of Iran were fickle souls, capable of turning with stunning speed against the same rulers they once held up to acclaim. Don’t forget, he warned, that “it was precisely this nation of ours that fell into line with Mossadeq, so that you were forced to leave the country.” The Shah listened but he would not be swayed: he was convinced that he now enjoyed the people’s confidence and that the farr was his to lose.
The deposed Mossadeq was placed under lifetime house arrest in his own country residence, a “green-shuttered yellow brick villa” sixty-two miles outside Tehran. The eighty Iranian Army soldiers who surrounded his residence were camped out in the fields in tents stamped “U.S. Army.”
* * *
MUCH TO THE Shah’s displeasure, General Zahedi emerged from the coup as Iran’s undisputed new strongman. Government ministers might address the Shah to his face as “Your Imperial Majesty,” but behind his back they scoffed at the weakness he had shown during the crisis and referred to him with patronizing disregard as “the boy.”
The prime minister’s contemptuous treatment of the Shah revealed itself in an incident that occurred shortly after Prince Ali Reza, Reza Shah’s widely admired and highly capable second son, was killed in 1954 in a plane crash. Ali Reza’s death came at the end of another difficult year for the Pahlavis. Relations between Soraya and the Queen Mother and her sisters-in-law had all but broken down, with Taj ol-Moluk and the princesses spreading poisonous gossip about Soraya’s barren state. The Queen Mother confronted her daughter-in-law with matter-of-fact firmness: “So when are you going to give my son a boy?” She encouraged courtiers to spy on Soraya and watch her waist and appetite. “Nobody was entitled to forget that it was from her loins that the kings of Persia were born,” Soraya later recalled with great bitterness. She found the pressure unbearable and looked forward to leaving with her husband on a state tour of the United States and Europe. “It is good that we are going on the visit, we can have a break,” she admitted to the prime minister one day over lunch at the palace. “No, no, you are not going there to have a break,” Zahedi reprimanded her. “You are visiting the United States on national business, and should not regard the time spent there as a holiday.” The Shah blanched when he heard his prime minister address his wife in this way. Zahedi’s son, Ardeshir, a royal adjutant, kicked his father’s leg under the table to silence him. “Why did you kick me?!” General Zahedi shouted. Turning to the Shah, Zahedi tried to restrain his anger: “As you also need a medical checkup, of course you also need some time off [from official duties].”
The damage was done—the Shah had been humiliated at his own table. There were also serious policy differences between the two men. The Shah opposed Zahedi’s decision to rehabilitate army officers who had gone over to Mossadeq’s side in August 1953. Zahedi disagreed with the Shah’s support for Iranian membership in the Baghdad Pact, a security alliance that Washington and London hoped would anchor Muslim states to the cause of anticommunism. Zahedi believed that membership in the Baghdad Pact would only aggravate the Russians. He had no confidence in pledges made by statesmen in far-off capitals—treaties had not prevented invasions of Iran in the past, and he doubted they would do so during the Cold War. The main d
isagreement between the Shah and his prime minister was over whether the monarch should rule as well as reign, a highly charged question that went to the very heart of Iran’s fifty-year struggle to establish constitutional boundaries. Where did the influence of the King end and that of his prime minister begin? Zahedi and the Shah debated this point on several occasions in the presence of the prime minister’s son and the Queen. Zahedi argued that government ministers provided an invaluable buffer for the crown should things go wrong. “If you are directly involved in the talks and if you agree with them a few times, they will get into the habit of asking you for what they wish to gain,” he explained. “A day will come when the foreigners will make some demands that you will not be able to agree with. At that time, they will take action against you. However, if the government is in charge it will not matter. One government will go and another government will be appointed and the crown will remain immune to any intrigues against it.”
Zahedi was fighting a losing battle. Unbeknownst to Zahedi or anyone else in government, for quite some time the Shah had decided that he would do it all without benefit of constitutional restrictions on his role in politics. Indeed, during his visit to the White House in 1949, he had received encouragement from Harry Truman to do so. “Rule, your country needs it!” the president had advised him. Six years later, he was restless and ready to move and take a more active role in the nation’s political life. “You know, there is no more lonely and unhappy life for a man than when he decides to rule instead of reign,” he confided to a visitor in 1955. “I am going to rule!” Though he realized it was too soon to seize the reins alone, the King fully intended to share power with his prime ministers. In April 1955 the Shah invited Zahedi to lunch and retired him during the main course. Soraya watched the pitiful scene unfold. Her husband, she admitted, “was afraid of General Zahedi’s huge popularity. What if one day he tried to topple him from the Iranian throne to have himself proclaimed the Shah of Shah, the sort of thing Nasser had done with Farouk of Egypt? Persecution mania.”
The Fall of Heaven Page 11
