I will never start anything against [him].
—MOHAMMAD MOSSADEQ
Has there ever been a monarch who has
plotted against his own government?
—THE SHAH
On the pale winter afternoon of February 4, 1949, gunshots rang out in front of the University of Tehran, where crowds were gathered to witness the Shah’s arrival. He was walking in plain sight of dozens of onlookers when a man pulled a revolver from a camera box, took aim at his head, and opened fire at point-blank range. With no time for the Shah to take cover, the first three bullets “passed through my military cap without touching my head. But the gunman’s fourth shot penetrated my right cheekbone and came out beneath my nose. He was now aiming at my heart.… So I suddenly started shadow-dancing or feinting. He fired again, wounding me in the shoulder. His last shot stuck in the gun. I had the queer and not unpleasant sensation of knowing that I was alive.” The young King’s bodyguards returned fire, killing the assassin on the spot, while the Shah was rushed to the hospital “bleeding like a young bull whose throat had been slit.” Later in the evening, bandaged and propped up in bed, he delivered a radio address to the nation to assure the people he was not seriously harmed.
The attempted assassination was the Shah’s second remarkable escape from death in less than a year. Some months earlier he had been piloting a light aircraft when it inexplicably lost power and dropped from the sky. “We had to make a forced landing in a mountainous region in a ravine full of rocks and boulders,” he said, describing the moment when he braced for impact. With no engine to throttle, and unable to maneuver the body of the plane, he managed to pull the nose up just in time to clear a barrier of rocks. The propeller slammed into a boulder, tore off the undercarriage, and the plane landed in a somersault. “There we were, hanging by our seat belts in the open cockpit,” he said. “Neither of us suffered so much as a scratch. I remember that the scene amused me so much that I burst out laughing, but my upside-down companion didn’t think it was funny.” The plane crash and the shooting outside the University of Tehran reaffirmed his fatalistic belief that he enjoyed God’s protection.
Faith and luck were in short supply in Iran in the late 1940s and early fifties. The end of the Second World War did not usher in peace or stability but instead hurled Iran into the treacherous currents of the Cold War. Iran’s oil wealth and its proximity to the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf made the country a prize worth fighting for. Though the wartime allies had signed a pact to evacuate their forces from Iranian territory within six months of Germany’s defeat, Stalin decided to test British and American resolve by keeping Russian troops on the ground supporting a puppet Communist state in the northern province of Azerbaijan. It was only in the face of tough diplomatic pressure from the Truman administration that Moscow backed down and Azerbaijan was liberated from Communist rule. This first major international crisis of the Cold War convinced the Shah and the army generals that they should cultivate close ties with the United States if Iran was to avoid falling behind the Iron Curtain.
Political disturbances also roiled Iran’s southern provinces, where the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, founded in 1908, still dominated oil production, ruling over a vast swath of territory with all the hubris of a colonial overseer. Iranians angrily protested when the company refused to adopt a more generous compensation agreement in line with favorable taxation deals struck with other oil producers in the Middle East. They clamored for oil nationalization, which would strip Great Britain of its control over Iranian oil assets and end half a century of British interference in their internal affairs. Extremist political and religious groups emerged from the shadows to exploit the unrest and agitate against the royalist establishment. Though police were quick to blame Communists for the attack on the Shah outside the University of Tehran, investigators were well aware that the gunman was in league with the “Warriors of Islam” or “Fedayeen-e Islam,” a Shiite group dedicated to the implementation of religious law and ridding Iran of all secular and Western influence. In the same year the Shah escaped assassination, religious fanatics succeeded in murdering his minister of court, and two years later Prime Minister Haj-Ali Razmara was assassinated inside the Sepah Salar Mosque in Tehran.
Poverty and illiteracy were a breeding ground for extremism and violence. “Iran’s chief city, like the country as a whole, is still only in the shadow of the machine age,” wrote a visitor to Iran. “Though the city boasts broad streets, traffic lights, dial phones, and pretentious buildings, it still lacks sanitary water and sewage systems.… Tehran is a city of rags to riches. Expensive American automobiles are legion. Palaces and pretentious walled villas dot the city and its northern suburbs. On the sidewalks well-dressed men brush elbows with barefooted porters, well diggers, and other laborers in rags, while flanking the main road south to the shrine city of Rey families live like animals in caves.” The Shah, his ministers, and Western legations worried that Iran’s backward economy and weak government made the kingdom susceptible to Communist subversion. The future of the Pahlavi Dynasty hung in the balance at a time when other monarchies were toppled in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Queen Fawzia’s decision to abandon Tehran for Cairo in 1948 and sue for divorce was yet another reminder that the Pahlavi line was only a bullet away from extinction. Anxious to provide his people and mother with a male heir, the Shah began the search for a new wife.
* * *
SORAYA ESFANDIARY WAS descended from the chiefs of the Bakhtiary tribe. Her father, Khalil Esfandiary, had left Reza Shah’s Iran for Germany in the late twenties to escape political persecution, and it was while pursuing his university studies in Berlin that he met and fell in love with Eva Karl, the daughter of a wealthy German chemicals industrialist. Following a lengthy courtship, the couple married and moved to Iran, where a daughter, Soraya, was born in 1932. Eva struggled to adjust to Iranian life, and the Esfandiarys soon returned to Berlin. Fearing the outbreak of war, the family moved back to Iran before decamping, this time for good, to Switzerland as soon as peace was declared.
Soraya once explained that her back-and-forth existence meant she felt at home everywhere and nowhere, identifying as Muslim and Christian but feeling neither fully Iranian nor German. “It was a sort of rupture,” she explained. “With my eyes which were too light and my skin which was too white for some of them, with my Persian manners which were a little too haughty for the others. I was alone, isolated.” After leaving school Soraya decided to take English classes in London in the hope of becoming an actress. She had no idea that she was about to feature in a real-life screenplay, one far more dramatic than any Hollywood starring role. Word of her exquisite beauty had reached Tehran, where Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk, the indomitable Pahlavi matriarch, investigated her son’s prospects for marriage. After a close friend and relative of Khalil Esfandiary handed her a photograph of Soraya, the Queen Mother asked her daughter Shams to summon the girl with the blue-green eyes and luminous complexion to Paris for an inspection. Shams met Soraya and was quickly won over. She informed her mother that their search was over—Iran had its new queen.
The teenager was oblivious to the intrigue. All that Khalil Esfandiary told his daughter was that the Shah had requested her presence back in Tehran and that a marriage proposal was a possibility. Elders in both families, he explained, believed that a union between the Pahlavi and the Bakhtiary clans was desirable. But he made it clear she would have the final say in her fate and that marriage was not a fait accompli. “If he doesn’t like me,” Soraya pleaded, “promise me that you will send me to drama school in America.” Her father agreed to this condition and assured her that a refusal would not cause scandal. Khalil’s sentiments may have been well intentioned but they were hardly realistic, and Soraya was passing through Rome when she spotted a newspaper headline that referred to her as the next Queen of Iran. She later admitted that she became swept up in the drama and romance of the moment, behaving like a naive schoolgirl with celluloid dreams of marrying “Prince Charming.” Soraya recalled how genuinely impressed she was when she saw the young King stride into a palace reception room wearing the uniform of an army general. He was “imposing, magnificent.” He was smitten, too, and before dawn of the next day asked for her hand in marriage. Their passion for each other was obvious, and the Shah made no effort to hide his disappointment when his fiancée fell ill with typhoid on the eve of the wedding ceremony, forcing a six-week postponement of the nuptials.
The bride was still gaunt and feverish when she drove to the Marble Palace on February 12, 1951, dripping in emeralds and wearing a Dior wedding gown so weighty it threatened to topple over like a melted meringue. When Soraya’s legs gave out while trying to shake two thousand pairs of hands at the reception, the new Queen was half-carried to an anteroom and revived with smelling salts. Her anxious husband hovered over her and suggested that her lady-in-waiting use a pair of shears to tear off the ten meters of wedding train and petticoats. All the while he tenderly whispered in her ear, telling her how much he loved and desired her. Yet Soraya was struck by her husband’s modesty. Even in private, away from the servants, they addressed each other using the formal Persian word for “you.” “In spite of a first marriage, in spite of countless mistresses he had before me,” she recalled, “he did not like to show his feelings, still less to find expressions of love which his modesty forbade him. His eyes alone were expressive. Dark brown, almost black, shining, at times hard, at times sad and gentle, they exuded charm and reflected his soul.” She also remembered the words of Princess Shams, who had warned her in Paris that her brother was insecure and petulant, browbeaten by his mother, humorless and thin-skinned.
Soraya was still a stubborn and highly strung teenager used to getting her way. She had a fiery temper and once banned her husband from the marital bed. He tolerated the outburst and for a while patiently slept outside her door on a camp bed. Several weeks passed before a senior courtier politely suggested that perhaps Her Majesty might allow His Majesty back into his bed. The Queen pointed to a corner and briskly retorted, “He can put his bed over there!” Acclaimed abroad as one of the great beauties of the postwar era, Soraya’s glacial charm and brusque manner won her few friends at court. She was not afraid to cause a scene. One evening the couple bickered during a dinner with family and friends. Soraya stunned the room into silence by picking up a vase and hurling it against the wall. Courtiers took to calling her “the German woman.” She frequently disregarded protocol, refused to wear formal dress when it was required, and absconded from official duties that bored her. Her behavior embarrassed foreign dignitaries and angered her ladies-in-waiting and government officials. During a state visit to India she retired to her suite in the middle of a formal reception, not bothering to offer thanks to her hosts. But her husband adored her and tolerated her petty humiliations. During one dinner party the conversation turned to the sort of qualities that made for the ideal woman. “Well, I’m very lucky, because the Queen is exactly the kind of woman that I like,” the Shah told the other guests. Soraya’s brisk retort shocked the room into silence: “Well, I cannot say the same for His Majesty.”
Palace officials were embarrassed at the hold Soraya had over her husband and dismayed at her treatment of Shahnaz, the Shah’s teenage daughter to Fawzia. In her memoir, Soraya claimed she made an effort to get to know the young girl and make her feel welcome. But after their wedding the Shah packed his daughter off to boarding school in Europe, where the girl suffered terribly from homesickness and felt abandoned. One time, when he and Soraya visited Shahnaz at school, the jealous Queen made her feelings clear and “threw an embarrassing temper tantrum.” Soraya “wasn’t very kind to [the Princess],” said Fatemeh Pakravan, wife of a senior courtier. “For those who knew, it wasn’t very pleasant. The Shah liked his daughter very much. I was witness to that. Then he stopped. He completely cut her off, because Soraya didn’t like her.” He would later pay dearly for the neglect of his firstborn child.
* * *
THE NEWLYWEDS’ HONEYMOON cruise in the Aegean was canceled when the Fedayeen-e Islam assassinated Prime Minister Razmara, who supported a negotiated settlement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to resolve the dispute over ownership of Iran’s oil fields. The speaker of parliament was a clergyman, Ayatollah Abul-Qasem Kashani, a wartime sympathizer of the Nazis, fervent proponent of oil nationalization, and spiritual godfather to a generation of young clerics who wanted religious law to replace secular rule. Kashani’s circle of admirers included Ruhollah Khomeini, an ambitious young mullah who was developing new ideas on how the Shia ulama could become more politically involved in public life. Kashani was supported by the Fedayeen-e Islam.
Amid mounting political turmoil the Shah felt obliged to accept the Majles’s nominee for prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who commanded a majority of votes in parliament. Mossadeq was the founder of the National Front, a political party composed of left-wing nationalists who demanded an end to Britain’s oil concession. Passionate and charismatic, Mossadeq captured the hearts of the people. The Shah granted his assent to Mossadeq’s nomination to the post of prime minister, as he was bound to do under the Constitution, and he offered no resistance when the new government voted to nationalize the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. With an alliance sealed between Mossadeq’s leftist National Front and Kashani’s right-wing religious radicals, who also supported oil nationalization, Iranian political life entered a perilous new era. The Shah labeled the two groups “the Red and the Black,” and for the rest of his life warned against the unholy alliance of socialists conniving with the clergy to seize power. Mossadeq’s ascension to the premiership set the scene for a titanic showdown between two men whose personal relationship dated back to 1940, when the young Crown Prince had intervened to save the older man’s life against his own father’s advice.
* * *
“I WILL NEVER forget what your husband did. I will never start anything against [him].”
Throughout the spring and summer of 1951, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq repeatedly assured Queen Soraya that he understood he owed her husband a debt of gratitude for ordering his release from Reza Shah’s prison cell. Now age sixty-nine, Mossadeq, the “Old Lion” of Iranian politics, symbolized Iran’s search for democracy and identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Mossadeq had married the granddaughter of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, whose fifty-year reign over Persia was ended by an assassin’s bullet in 1896. Educated in France and Switzerland in politics and law, Mossadeq returned to Persia to enter public life during the Constitutional Revolution. He served in parliament, as governor of the provinces of Fars and Azerbaijan, and later as Iran’s minister of finance, and as one of the few parliamentarians to oppose the election of the House of Pahlavi his fierce criticism of Reza Shah’s autocracy had earned him a spell in jail. In the late forties Mossadeq founded the National Front, whose central platform called for oil nationalization.
Mossadeq’s elevation to the premiership in April 1951, and the swift passage into law of his oil nationalization bill, sent shock waves through capitals in the anti-Communist West. Nowhere was the impact felt more than in Great Britain, whose ailing postwar economy was kept afloat by Persian oil revenues. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company pumped hundreds of millions of pounds into British coffers and supplied the Royal Navy with 85 percent of its fuel. After losing its base in Iran the British economy faced national bankruptcy. Almost immediately, British officials began planning a coup to depose Mossadeq and take back control of Iran’s oil fields. They rushed paratroopers to Cyprus, imposed an oil blockade to choke off oil exports, and sued the Mossadeq government for restitution. In Washington, where the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era were under way, U.S. officials braced for a wave of copycat nationalizations targeting Western economic interests in newly independent countries throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. British officials harped on the threat of communism, clearly hoping to rally American support for covert action by implying that Iranian oil would soon fall under Soviet domination. President Harry Truman and his national security team refused to be rushed into action. Secretary of State Dean Acheson hoped for a negotiated solution, and he and Truman hosted the Iranian prime minister at the White House. They dismissed the hysteria over communism as a canard. “The cardinal purpose of British policy is not to prevent Iran from going Commie,” Acheson advised Truman. “The cardinal point is to preserve what they believe to be the last remaining bulwark of British solvency.”
Iran’s young King was intimidated by Mossadeq’s street appeal and awed by his reputation as a giant-slayer. It must have appeared to him as though Mossadeq and not he laid claim to the farr. The Shah supported oil nationalization in principle but preferred a negotiated outcome to prevent a full-blown international crisis. Officers in the Imperial Guard watched fascinated as the prime minister’s car pulled up outside Saadabad Palace for his weekly audiences with the Shah. Visitors to the palace grounds were required to park outside the gate and walk in. “But Mossadeq was frail and walked slowly with a cane,” said the head of the Imperial Guard. “The Shah said several times, ‘Open the gate and let him come into the palace grounds with his car.’” But Mossadeq insisted on following protocol and refused to be treated any differently than his predecessors. “He would get out of the car, walk through the gate, pay his respects to the royal flag and then walk on to the palace. The guards were impressed with the loyalty he showed the King. Then he would walk up the stairs.” The Shah always made sure his schedule was cleared fifteen minutes before Mossadeq’s arrival and patiently stood at the window waiting for his guest to arrive. Then the drama began. Mossadeq had a well-known habit of throwing fainting fits to draw attention to himself, and the sight of the young King at the window was enough to bring on the vapors. “Mossadeq would, when he saw the King, pretend to be about to collapse, and the King would rush down the stairs and help Mossadeq up the stairs. Twice this nearly led the King to fire the head of the Imperial Guard.”
The breakdown of their relationship had all the bitterness of an estrangement between father and son. Mossadeq was determined to curb imperial powers and prerogatives and confine the Shah to his palace. Disdainful of compromise, he resorted to demagoguery and adopted a strategy of bluff and threats to get his way. One of Mossadeq’s more sympathetic biographers noted his political genius but also concluded that he probably knew in advance of the plot to assassinate Prime Minister Razmara, yet did nothing to stop it. Nor did Mossadeq express any regret or remorse when the minister of court, a man he knew well, was brutally murdered. The assassinations and the wave of terror carried out by his ally Ayatollah Kashani’s Fedayeen-e Islam “saved the National Front in its infancy,” wrote Christopher de Bellaigue, and “removed the last obstacle to oil nationalization and a government dominated by the National Front.”
The arrival of a new president in Washington in January 1953 led to a sea change in U.S. policy toward Iran and oil nationalization. President Dwight Eisenhower and his national security team led by the two Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, took a more hard-line view of Mossadeq’s decision to take back the oil fields. Mindful of Moscow’s intrigues in Azerbaijan seven years earlier and haunted by the fall of China, the invasion of South Korea, and Communist coups throughout Eastern Europe, the Americans geared up for intervention. Sixty percent of the world’s known oil reserves were in the Persian Gulf region, and the idea that they might fall into Soviet hands was untenable. Eisenhower also worried that his British allies were so desperate they might launch a military operation to seize Iran’s southern oil fields and provoke Soviet military retaliation. “Had the British sent in the paratroops and warships as they were wont to do a few years later against the Egyptians at Suez, it was almost certain that the Soviet Union would have occupied the northern portion of Iran by invoking the Soviet-Iranian Treaty of Friendship of 1921,” concluded a secret CIA study written in the seventies. “It was also quite possible that the Soviet army would have moved south to drive British forces out on behalf of their Iranian ‘allies,’ then not only would Iran’s oil have been irretrievably lost to the West, but the defense chain around the Soviet Union that was part of US foreign policy would have been breached.” At the dawn of the nuclear age, a covert operation provided Eisenhower’s men with a menu of options that satisfied Britain’s sense of urgency, avoided the risk of a superpower showdown and world war, and allowed for a “hidden hands” regime change operation that ensured the president would not be held publicly accountable if things turned out badly.
While planning for a coup dubbed TPAJAX (Operation Ajax) was under way in Washington, in Tehran the noose tightened around the Imperial Court. Mossadeq cited the economic crisis caused by the shutdown of oil exports as the excuse to dissolve the Supreme Court and the upper house of parliament, impose censorship, reshuffle the senior army command, and propose stripping the Shah of his role as army commander in chief. The prime minister publicly snubbed the monarch when he refused to attend the Pahlavis’ traditional New Year celebrations and demanded that the Queen Mother and Princess Ashraf, whose influence he most feared, leave Iran for exile. Since the end of the war, Ashraf had emerged as her brother’s lightning rod and the undisputed and greatly feared first lady of Iranian politics. Dubbed the “Black Panther” by her critics, a title she relished, the Princess and her second husband, Ahmad Shafiq, used her inheritance from Reza Shah to build a substantial real estate empire in northern Iran. She plunged into the maelstrom of postwar Iranian public life determined to “make political friends for the regime and to neutralize some of the opposition. Every day I met with individuals and groups representing various points of view.” His sister’s exile deprived the Shah of his fiercest defender.
Mossadeq was determined to strip the Shah of his remaining powers. Isolated in the palace and ignored by his ministers, the Shah’s moods vacillated between elation and despair. The previous year his former brother-in-law King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed and the Shah was keenly aware of the speculation that surrounded his own future. “I have lost my status,” he complained to his wife. “Staying in Tehran would mean that I approved the policies of my prime minister. It is absolutely imperative that we go abroad.” He sank into such a fitful state of depression that his closest aides “feared complete nervous breakdown and irrational action.” Months of continuous stress also triggered severe abdominal pains that required him to have emergency surgery performed by a medical team secretly flown in from the United States. The Queen, already under pressure to conceive a child after two years of marriage, and “wild with anxiety” about the political crisis, suffered her own nervous collapse. She succumbed to anorexia and locked herself in her room for hours at a time, sobbing and barely able to muster the energy to rise from her bed.
Finally, in February 1953 the couple decided to leave the country for what was officially described as an extended overseas vacation, though their final destination of Switzerland raised suspicions that they planned to settle permanently in Europe. The Shah failed to realize that events were turning in his favor. By now many of Mossadeq’s allies worried that the prime minister’s brinkmanship risked the country’s unity and created opportunities for the Communist Tudeh Party and its Soviet backers to seize power. Ayatollah Kashani, who had made Mossadeq’s elevation to the premiership possible, dispatched an intermediary to the palace to urge Soraya to change her husband’s mind. Kashani also sent crowds to the palace gates to plead with the Shah to stay. For months the Shah had been waiting for some sign that his people still wanted him, and now he had it. “I promise you that I will stay in Tehran!” he cried through a megaphone. The Queen, who presumably knew a ruse when she saw one, looked on and wept. Yet the Shah refused to take the next step, which was to bestow his blessing on a coup against his own prime minister. Though under the Constitution he was well within his legal right to sack the prime minister and appoint a replacement, he knew that doing so would likely provoke street riots and tarnish his own legitimacy. His training as a young prince had taught him that the role of the king was to unify and not divide the people, and he remembered that any monarch who shed the blood of innocents risked forfeiting the farr.
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.”
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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 disagreement 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.”
* * *
TIME WAS ALSO running out for Soraya.
General Zahedi’s son Ardeshir had not followed his father into exile in 1955 but chose to stay behind in Iran to continue his service to the crown. His romance the next year with sixteen-year-old Princess Shahnaz brought the Shah’s insecurities into painful relief. The Shah had fired General Zahedi because he feared his talents and his ambitions. Now his daughter’s wish to marry Ardeshir raised the nightmare possibility that a grandson of the general would one day inherit the throne. The Princess, barely on speaking terms with her stepmother, made no effort to dispel the rumors. “If I have a son before my stepmother [Queen Soraya], he would inherit the Iranian crown,” said the Princess. “There is no special law on this issue, but when I was getting married there was an understanding in my family that if I gave birth to a boy, the problem of the inheritance would be solved.” Though the Shah finally consented to his daughter’s engagement, others in the Imperial Family weren’t prepared to let the matter drop. Princess Ashraf was likely behind an effort to smear the Zahedi name in the popular press and portray Ardeshir as unworthy of marriage to the Shah’s daughter. More drama followed at the couple’s engagement party when Soraya and Taj ol-Moluk exchanged insults and stormed out on each other. Soraya had already hurt her mother-in-law’s feelings by refusing to visit her in the hospital after foot surgery, and now she snubbed the old lady’s reciprocal engagement party. The intrigue and gossip created such a poisonous atmosphere that Ardeshir Zahedi considered breaking off his engagement to the princess. The Shah felt compelled to invite a senior clergyman to the palace to counsel his embittered relatives.
Still, by July 1957 the truth could no longer be avoided: Soraya could not bear children and provide the dynasty with the long-awaited male heir. Nothing could be done after medical tests revealed she had the womb of a twelve-year-old girl. Ali Reza’s premature death meant there was no insurance policy for the dynasty and that in the event of the Shah’s sudden demise the Pahlavi line would expire. Legally, his surviving half-blood brothers were ineligible to succeed because of their Qajar lineage, though the idea of a constitutional amendment to legitimize them was briefly mooted. One other possibility remained open to the couple. In Shia Islam temporary contract marriages called siqeh allowed men to marry women for periods ranging from a few hours to a few months. These marriages of convenience removed the stigma attached to brothel visits, premarital sex, casual sexual encounters, and affairs. The Shah told Soraya that he was prepared to enter into such a temporary arrangement, promising to divorce the woman as soon as she provided him with a son. The Queen, however, expressed revulsion. “How could you envisage such a thing?” she asked him sadly. He looked away and said nothing. “Then all we can do is separate,” she said.
Desperate to keep his wife but also resolve the succession, in February 1958 the Shah threw himself on the mercy of a council of respected elder statesmen, who agreed to study the issue of an amendment to the Constitution. They failed in their task. Though they expressed sympathy for his plight, former prime minister Hossein Ala made it clear that he for one preferred to see Soraya go. He did not regard her as a particularly suitable consort or a positive influence on her husband. The Shah was devastated but understood their decision. Three emissaries were dispatched to Geneva to negotiate the terms of a handsome divorce settlement with the embittered Soraya and her father, who expressed his frank relief that his daughter was now free from the machinations of the Pahlavi Court.
On March 14, 1958, Iranians listened as the Shah announced over national radio his decision to divorce, his voice barely audible over the sobs. Surely his listeners knew that in Persian the name Soraya was taken from the constellation of stars that guided lovers.