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

320 Pages·2012·0.65 MB·English

by  Christopher de Bellaigue

PATRIOT OF
PERSIA
Muhammad Mossadegh
and a
Tragic Anglo-American Coup
CHRISTOPHER
BELLAIGUE
DE
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 Shah lived
to tell the tale, and he had pretensions to captaincy of his own. With America’s help he
built a magnificent ship which turned out to be made of paper and was swamped by the
first wave.
Years later, the United States would recognise publicly that, in toppling Mossadegh,
they had made a terrible mistake, for in the process they stifled values that were in
sympathy with their own. In 2000, Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of
state, acknowledged that in 1953 the United States played a ‘significant role in
orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh’,
and that this had clearly been ‘a setback for Iran’s political development’.
Mossadegh was the first liberal leader of the modern Middle East. He was a rationalist
who hated obscurantism and believed in the primacy of the law. His understanding of
freedom was exceptional in Iran and the wider region. Indeed, the West would have
liked him more if he had been less committed to freedom. He would not back down
from his demand for economic independence from Britain. He would not lock up
communists to please Washington.
The plot to oust him was benighted. In the long run, it did great harm to western
interests. It was the start of a US policy in support of shoddy Middle Eastern despots,
which suffered its first defeat in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic
revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, and unravelled further with the Arab Spring of 2011.
The undeclared logic of this policy was thus: ‘Middle Easterners cannot be trusted with
independence and freedom; pro-American strongmen offer the best hope of stability.’
Saddam Hussein was such a strongman. So was Hosni Mubarak. The rogues’ gallery is
long and well lit.
In his bellicose way, President George W. Bush tried to challenge this policy. More
subtly, President Barack Obama did too. But it is the people of the Middle East,
indifferent to the occupant of the White House, who will eventually shrug it off.
I first understood the importance of Mossadegh after I went to live in Iran in 2000. A
political thaw was underway in the Islamic Republic, and while the ruling hardliners
had little good to say about a secular, nationalist prime minister from the 1950s, he was a
poster boy for many younger Iranians. A considerable number of books and articles
were being published in Persian about him and his era. His hangdog face seemed to be
everywhere. And yet he was spoken of with regret and even guilt, as well as reverence.
Could more have been done to save him when the coup-makers closed in on August 19,
1953? Were the people, ultimately, complicit in his overthrow? Most important of all,
why did his vision for Iran not materialise?
I was one of a tiny number of westerners in Tehran during the unrest which followed
the contested election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in 2009, and never in that torrid, terrible
summer, as thousands of people did battle with their inestimably better-equipped
adversaries, and were eventually crushed, was Mossadegh far from my mind. I
researched this book as the capital smouldered and crackled – going to the historical
institutes and taking notes, poring over newspaper archives – and the more I researched
the past, the more I realised that events in the streets were a new battle in an old war.
Democracy and authoritarianism faced each other. Nationalism and religion were the
bugle calls. Mossadegh would have been at home.
In Iran, it is not always wise to acknowledge links between the present and the past.
During one confrontation between protesters and the security forces, I found myself
trapped in the house of Iraj Afshar, an eminent historian. We sat on his terrace and I
asked him what he made of the events unfolding outside his gate. He smiled and invited
me to admire his tomato plants.
Afshar was one of several distinguished historians who encouraged me to recount for
a western audience this extraordinary life. I was also drawn by the continuities that
Afshar did not acknowledge – the relevance of Mossadegh’s ideals to the aspirations of
millions of others in the Middle East, and the warning that his story serves to any
adventurer occupying the White House or Downing Street. As the region inches along
its path to change, and the West asks itself how to react, our decision-makers must look
at 1953 and vow: never again!
Mossadegh has not been neglected by historians writing in English. He has been the
subject of fine political biographies. American scholars such as Mark Gasiorowski of
Louisiana State University have painstakingly investigated the West’s machinations
against him. But nowhere have the man and his fullness been brought out, and this is