Ike's Spies (32 page)

The situation was intolerable. It presented a marvelous opportunity to any Iranian politician who had the courage to lead. The one who seized the chance was a remarkable old man, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, leader of the National Front. Seventy years old in 1951, he was a rich landowner, educated in France and Switzerland, worldly wise, a successful spellbinder of a speaker who had been elected to the Majlis (the second house of the Parliament) in 1915, and who was generally regarded by those Westerners who dealt with him as a completely unreasonable, demagogic, and xenophobic man.

Tall, thin, bent, a semi-invalid who often appeared in public clad only in pajamas, he would burst into tears at the most inappropriate moment, or faint dead away. He had a huge nose that was always dripping. (One State Department official said, “Mossadegh has a nose that makes Jimmy Durante look like an amputee!”)
¹¹
His favorite place for doing business was his bedroom, where he would recline, propped up by pillows, and alternatively cackle and cry.

Dean Acheson depicted Mossadegh as “small and frail, with not a shred of hair on his billiard-ball head; a thin face protruding into a long beak of a nose flanked by two bright shoe-button eyes. His whole manner and appearance was birdlike and he moved quickly and nervously as if he were hopping about on a perch. His pixie quality showed in instantaneous transformations.”
¹²

Mossadegh was the first Middle Eastern politician to demand the complete nationalization of his country's oil fields. The Shah's Prime Minister, General Razmara, opposed such drastic action. On March 7, 1951, a member of the Crusaders of Islam, one of the groups in Mossadegh's National Front, assassinated Razmara while he was attending a ceremony in a mosque. Mossadegh was the
overwhelming popular choice to succeed Razmara. As the Shah later wrote, “How could anyone be against Mossadegh? He would enrich everybody, he would fight the foreigner, he would secure our rights. No wonder students, intellectuals, people from all walks of life, flocked to his banner.”
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Reluctantly, the Shah appointed him Prime Minister. The same day, May 2, 1951, the Parliament passed a bill nationalizing the oil industry. A week later the Majlis gave Mossadegh's government a vote of confidence by a majority of ninety-nine to three.

For the British, the wogs were on the rampage. For the Iranians, a war of liberation had begun against the colonialists.
¹⁴
For the Americans, here was an opportunity to get a foothold in the rich Iranian oil fields, and a window to Russia. The British refused to accept the compensation payment for the company offered by Mossadegh, shut down Abadan cold, refused to buy oil from Iran, and put various legal obstacles in the way of any country that was willing to purchase Iranian oil, arguing that such oil was in fact stolen goods and threatening to take any purchaser to court.

Truman and Acheson tried to serve as honest brokers, offering to mediate to bring about a compromise. Mossadegh came to Washington and was put up at the Blair House. Meeting with Truman, Mossadegh, looking old and pathetic, said in trembling tones, “I am speaking for a very poor country—a country all desert—just sand, a few camels, a few sheep …” Acheson, grinning, interrupted to say that with all its sand
and
oil, Iran reminded him of Texas. Mossadegh laughed delightedly. They talked of oil prices, with Mossadegh complaining about the vast gap between what the British paid Iran per barrel and what they charged for the product on the world market. Acheson “explained oil economics to him in terms of the wide spread between the price we got for beef cattle on the hoof on our farms and the price we paid for a prime roast of beef in the butcher's shop.” Mossadegh responded that “peasants were always exploited.”

Later, Acheson wrote that the United States was slow to realize that Mossadegh was “essentially a rich, reactionary, feudal-minded Persian inspired by a fanatical hatred of the British and a desire to expel them and all their works from the country regardless of cost.”
¹⁵

The shutdown at Abadan, meanwhile, forced a crisis in Iran. With no moneys coming in from oil royalties, the government was
rapidly going bankrupt. In July 1952, Mossadegh demanded authority to govern for six months without recourse to Parliament, and that he be given the additional post of Minister of War. The Shah refused and instead demanded (and got) Mossadegh's resignation. Immediately the National Front, supported by the Tudeh Party, launched riots and demonstrations. Mossadegh's replacement inflamed the situation by indicating that he was going to give in to the British on the question of oil nationalization. The riots grew worse. Unable to control them, the new Prime Minister resigned. Five days after the Shah had fired Mossadegh, he had to reappoint him.
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In October 1952, Mossadegh broke off diplomatic relations with Britain. Meanwhile, Winston Churchill once again became Prime Minister of Great Britain, and, in November 1952, Eisenhower was elected President of the United States. The two comrades in arms from World War II now had their opportunity to solve the Iranian “problem.”

IN JANUARY 1953
, Mossadegh sent President-elect Eisenhower a three-page cable in which he congratulated Ike on his election victory, then plunged into an extended discussion of Iranian affairs. The theme was summed up in one sentence: “For almost two years,” Mossadegh wrote, “the Iranian people have suffered acute distress and much misery merely because a company inspired by covetousness and a desire for profit supported by the British government has been endeavoring to prevent them from obtaining their natural and elementary rights.” In a hand-drafted reply, Ike said his own position was impartial, that he had no prejudices in the case, and that he hoped future relations would be good.
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In fact, however, everything the President-elect was hearing was anti-Mossadegh. Churchill and the British seized on the Tudeh's support of the Prime Minister to make the point that the old man was either a Communist or a victim of Communist intrigue. The American ambassador to Iran, Loy Henderson, a career Foreign Service officer who had served in Moscow before the war, was bitterly anti-Communist. When asked to assess the extent of Mossadegh's support, Henderson told the incoming Eisenhower administration that “old Mossy” relied on “the street rabble, the extreme left … extreme Iranian nationalists, some, but not all, of the more fanatical religious leaders, intellectual leftists, including
many who had been educated abroad and who did not realize that Iran was not ready for democracy.”

Henderson also took a dim view of Mossadegh's action on the point at issue, the nationalization of the company. “We did not believe,” he declared later in an interview, “that such an expropriation was in the basic interest of Iran, Great Britain, or the U.S. Acts of this kind tended to undermine the mutual trust that was necessary if international trade was to flourish.”
¹⁸

The British, meanwhile, had approached Kim Roosevelt, well known to them from
OSS
days and currently one of the top
CIA
agents. Sir John Cochran, acting as spokesman for the Churchill government, proposed that the British Secret Service and the
CIA
join forces to overthrow Mossadegh. “As I told my British colleagues,” Roosevelt later wrote, “we had, I felt sure, no chance to win approval from the outgoing administration of Truman and Acheson. The new Republicans, however, might be quite different.”
¹⁹

Roosevelt expected a different approach because of the nature of Republican attacks on the Truman-Acheson foreign policy. Ike criticized the Democrats for spreading American resources too thin, accepting the status quo too willingly, and concentrating too heavily on Western Europe. Eisenhower contended that the United States must wrest the initiative from the Soviet Union, and if possible “liberate” areas from Communist control. Eisenhower seemed so much tougher than Truman that the New York
Times
wrote, “The day of sleep-walking is over. It passed with the exodus of Truman and Achesonism, and the policy of vigilance replacing Pollyanna diplomacy is evident.”
²⁰
Roosevelt also felt, based on his wartime experiences, that Eisenhower would be much more likely to use his covert-action capabilities than Truman had been.

The essence of the plan the British presented to Roosevelt was to keep the Shah while dumping his Prime Minister. Somehow Mossadegh learned of the plot. He then denounced the Shah for his intrigues with foreign interests and began to agitate for the Shah's abdication.

At this point the Shah lost his nerve. On February 28, 1953, he announced that he would leave the country, along with his queen and entourage. The announcement brought on riots in the streets of Teheran. The Tudeh Party, along with the United Front, marched in support of the Prime Minister; at the other end of
town, as H.I.M. recorded in his memoirs, “the mass demonstrations of loyalty to the Shah were so convincing and affecting that I decided to remain for the time being.” He canceled his agreement to abdicate.
²¹

The active support of the Tudeh for Mossadegh fed the impression that the Prime Minister had gone over to the Communists, and for their own reasons the British—who had since the war lost colonies all around the world, a situation the new Churchill government was determined to reverse—clamored about the dangers of a Communist takeover in Iran. Strangely enough, no one seemed to notice that throughout this crisis, in which the stakes were nothing less than one of the world's greatest oil pools, the Russians were content to stand aside. Nor did anyone in the West ever point out that Mossadegh had not appealed to his northern neighbor for help.

The idea that this reactionary feudal landlord was a Communist was, in fact, quite ridiculous. The old man has his own explanation of what was going on. When Henderson complained to him about Communist mobs demonstrating against the West in the streets of Teheran, Mossadegh replied, “These are not real Communists, they are people paid by the British to pretend they are Communists in order to frighten the United States into believing that under my Premiership the country is going Communist.” That may well have been true, but to Henderson it appeared that Mossadegh “had become a paranoiac so far as the British were concerned. He held them responsible for all of Iran's ills and gave them credit for almost superhuman machinations.”
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Mossadegh's policy was to attempt to split the United States and Britain. To that end, in May 1953, he once again appealed to Ike. In a long personal message he begged the President to help remove the obstacles the British had placed on the sale of Iranian oil and to provide Iran with substantially increased American economic assistance. “I refused,” Ike recorded bluntly, “to pour more American money into a country in turmoil in order to bail Mossadegh out of troubles rooted in his refusal to work out an agreement with the British.”

To Mossadegh, Ike wrote directly. “I fully understand that the government of Iran must determine for itself which foreign and domestic policies are likely to be most advantageous to Iran.… I am not trying to advise the Iranian government on its best interests.
I am merely trying to explain why, in the circumstances, the government of the United States is not presently in a position to extend more aid to Iran or to purchase Iranian oil.”
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(It should be pointed out here that in those happy days, the United States was itself an exporter of oil, and in the world as a whole far more oil was being pumped out of the ground than was being consumed. Mossadegh's problem was that the world of the early 1950s could get along quite well without Iranian oil.)

Iran was by now on the edge of financial and economic ruin. The Truman administration had increased American aid from $1.6 million before Mossadegh came to power to $23.4 million for the fiscal year 1953, but that was not even close to enough money to make up for the lost oil revenue. When Ike turned down his plea, Mossadegh was forced to draw money from the pension funds and the national insurance company.
²⁴

Moderates in Iran began to turn against the Prime Minister. In response, he suspended elections for the National Assembly and held a referendum to decide if the current National Assembly should be dissolved. He arranged the election so that those in favor of dissolution and those against it voted in separate, plainly marked booths, which were, of course, closely watched by his supporters. Under those circumstances, it was no surprise that Mossadegh won the referendum by 99 percent to 1 percent.

To Ike, the rigged election looked for sure like Communist tactics. He concluded that if old Mossy was not a Communist himself, then he was either a fool or a stooge for the Communists.
²⁵
His ambassador (he had kept Henderson on the job) told him that if Mossadegh got rid of the Shah, “chaos would develop in Iran, a chaos that would be overcome only by a bloody dictatorship working under orders from Moscow.”
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This impression was very much strengthened when Mossadegh, having been spurned by Eisenhower, turned to the Soviets for help. On August 8 the Russians announced that they had initiated negotiations with Iran for financial aid and trade talks.

Mossadegh, Ike wrote in his memoirs, “believed that he could form an alliance with the Tudeh Party and then outwit it.” To the President, this was improbable at best. He feared that “Mossadegh would become to Iran what the ill-fated Dr. Benes had been in Czechoslovakia—a leader whom the Communists, having gained power, would eventually destroy.”
²⁷
In addition to his determination
to stop Communist expansion, the Republicans had just won an election, in part, by demanding to know “Who Lost China?” They were not going to expose themselves to the question “Who Lost Iran?”