Patriot of Persia- Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup

314 Pages·2011·5.4 MB·English

by  Bellaigue Christopher de

PATRIOT OF
PERSIA
Muhammad Mossadegh
and a
Tragic Anglo-American Coup
CHRISTOPHER
DE BELLAIGUE
Epigraph
Author’s note
Persia is the old European name for Iran. Iran is an even older, indigenous name.
In the 1930s Reza Shah told foreigners to stop using the name Persia, but some
ignored him. Later on his son Muhammad-Reza Shah revoked the ban. It is now
customary for Iranians and foreigners alike to refer to the country as Iran,
although some Iranians living outside the country introduce themselves as
Persian. I use both terms interchangeably.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s note

Acknowledgments
Prologue - Father of the Nation
Chapter 1 - The Unchanging East
Chapter 2 - A Silver Spoon
Chapter 3 - Fokoli
Chapter 4 - Razing Caesarea
Chapter 5 - Eclipse of the Qajars
Chapter 6 - Isolation
Chapter 7 - The Tragedy of Khadijeh
Chapter 8 - The Prize
Chapter 9 - Victory or Death
Chapter 10 - Mossadeghism
Chapter 11 - Winning America
Chapter 12 - Riding Satan’s Donkey
Chapter 13 - A Coup of his Own
Chapter 14 - Mussy Duck Shoot
Chapter 15 - Unperson
Epilogue - A Movement in Men’s Minds
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Index
Photo Insert
About the Author
Also by Christopher de Bellaigue
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgements
It would not have occurred to me to write this book without the experience of
living and working in Iran, an inspiration, in different ways, for so much that I
write. To several scholars of Iran, most notably the late Iraj Afshar, Kaveh
Bayat, Ali Dehbashi, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, John Gurney, Homa Katouzian,
Paul Luft, Abbas Milani, Mustafa Nouri, Kamal Parsi-Pour, Morteza
Rassoolipour, Yann Richard and Kamran Safamanesh, I am grateful for
inspiration and practical help, while others, including my parents-in-law Abtin
Ghezelayagh and Manijeh Amini, Muhammad-Hossein Zeynali and Mahmoud
Emami-Naini, were also forthcoming with encouragement and support.
I enjoyed important institutional backing. In 2007–2008 I was the beneficiary
of the fellowship that was endowed by that fine historian, Sir Alistair Horne, at
St Antony’s College, Oxford, where I also received much kindness from
Margaret Macmillan, Avi Shlaim and Timothy Garton-Ash. The British
Academy gave me a generous grant. I used superb resources: in Tehran, the
Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (where I am particularly
grateful to Akbar Mashouf, Ahmad Fazeli and Ghollamreza Sharifi-Ashtiyani)
and the Library of the Majles, and, in Britain, the library of the Middle East
Institute at St Antony’s, the British Library, the National Archives, the library of
the School of Oriental and African Studies and, most pleasurably, the London
Library.
From the Mossadegh family, Hedayat Matine-Daftary and Majid Bayat gave
generously of their time – to recall, advise and, not infrequently, correct. Farhad
Diba was forthcoming with counsel and suggestions. John Gurney, Homa
Katouzian and Hedayat Matine-Daftary were kind enough to offer comments on
the finished manuscript. My father Eric de Bellaigue, performed his usual task of
suggesting stylistic improvements. My agent, Peter Straus, ably assisted by
Jenny Hewson, my publishers, Will Sulkin at The Bodley Head and Terry Karten
at HarperCollins, Kay Peddle of The Bodley Head, who prepared the book for
publication, and Clara Womersley, my publicist, were something of a dream
team for a writer. My homeland dream team, Bita, Jahan and Kiana, endured,
grew and came out smiling.
Prologue
Father of the Nation
I have an Iranian friend who is too young to remember Mossadegh, but her
parents were in public life and were close to him. When my friend was a small
child and Mossadegh was living out his last years under house arrest, he sent her
sweets. Her mother picked the wrappers from the floor, flattened them, and put
them somewhere safe. Now my friend is a middle-aged woman with two
strapping sons, but she has kept the sweet wrappers. They are like a sign, planted
in the soft soil of her childhood, showing what she owes to whom.
When Mossadegh was prime minister in the early 1950s, and the world was
coming down around his ears, a grizzled villager called Ayub found himself in
the great man’s presence. Mossadegh was lying on his famous iron bed, which
had been moved to the balcony on account of the heat. Ayub felt awkward and
embarrassed until suddenly the prime minister seized him with his surprisingly
strong arms and embraced him. Ayub had never met Mossadegh before. His eyes
filled with tears and he was unable to speak for emotion. Iran was not a place
where prime ministers embraced peasants.
A lot of sentimentality surrounds Muhammad Mossadegh, and at first sight
there is something startling about this. Mossadegh was a peculiar man. He was
quite bald and had a long, drooping, rather bent nose, and thin, sensual lips, and
he fainted and howled in public. He was a shameless hypochondriac and quite
often threatened to die. He seemed always to have been ancient – from around
the age of forty, when the last of his hair abstracted itself from his head, he
looked a decade older than he really was. He ran Iran, which is a big and
complicated country, wearing a pair of pyjamas.
In many western countries, eccentrics are barred from high office by the innate
caution of the party machine. There was no party machine in Iran in the 1950s;
politics was about personalities and Mossadegh was the biggest of them all. Far
from disbar him from the public’s affection, advanced age meant respect and a
licence to behave oddly. Mossadegh used these advantages to bamboozle his
enemies and captivate his friends. Winston Churchill considered ‘Mussy Duck’,
as he called him, to be a lunatic. To millions of his compatriots, Mossadegh
personified their country more completely than anyone else. Quite simply, he
was Iran.
He started life conventionally enough, a product of the Persian upper class, in
the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s he achieved fame
with a struggle against royal despotism which almost cost him his life.
Mossadegh became notorious around the world in 1951, when he dared to
nationalise Britain’s biggest overseas asset, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He
went on to lead the most enlightened government his country has ever known.
The British wanted revenge and they enlisted the help of the United States on the
grounds that Mossadegh was a communist stooge. On August 19, 1953, he was
overthrown by a conspiracy hatched by the American and British secret services
in favour of the Shah. He was banished to his estate and became a non-person
under the Shah’s new dictatorship. The father of the nation had been cast aside,
but he was impossible to forget.
‘Father of the Nation’ – many Middle Eastern rulers have claimed this title for
themselves. It exempts them from popular scrutiny, indulges their every beastly
act. ‘Don’t give me grief for knocking my people about,’ the dictator chides, ‘for
one occasionally has to be cruel to be kind.’ Mossadegh was remarkable in his
region in that he did not feel the need to be cruel. He was not a soldier, deriving
prestige from the pips on his shoulders and the shine on his shoes. He did not
borrow his authority, like a mullah, from God. It was all his own.
He was more than a politician, and less than one. As a reader of his public, he
was unrivalled. But he spent his life running fleeing from office and his refusal
to compromise his principles for the political good was pure obstinacy and pride.
He was an old-fashioned hero and this explains another, rather surprising
element in his renown. Mossadegh did not end up a political winner. The 1953
coup was a catastrophe which slammed him to the floor, and from which Iran
never fully recovered. But Iranians are kind towards heroes who fall. It depends
on the manner of the fall, because a valiant defeat against overwhelming odds at
the hands of a malignant evil is regarded as victory on a higher, metaphysical
plane. The epics are full of such heroes, and the story of Islam would not be
complete without them.
Mossadegh was instrumental in his own downfall. His judgement failed him at
the zenith of events, for it is a captain’s job to steer his ship into calmer waters
and Mossadegh was driven on by his obsession, into the teeth of the storm. The