ALTHOUGH THE FREE OFFICERS’ JULY 1952 COUP PUT PAID TO British influence in Egypt, it also gave the British elsewhere an idea. Four days after the revolution in Cairo, a British diplomat named Sam Falle met a well-known opponent of Iran’s prime minister Mosaddeq in Tehran. On his return to his embassy, Falle reported that his contact, Seyyid Zia Tabatabai, had recommended that the British support a military coup d’état. And since the British had just failed again to oust Mosaddeq by parliamentary means, Falle was inclined to agree with him.
The following day Falle met the man most likely to be able to make this happen, Zia’s enormously influential sidekick, Asadollah Rashidian. Like Zia, the Rashidians had been allies of the British since the 1920s, a family of fixers who had grown even more rich and powerful when the British made them their sole purchasing agents following the 1941 invasion and occupation of the country. By the war’s end, the family knew everyone: the shah and his twin sister (with whom they had some sort of financial connection), his chief of protocol, the court and anglophile members of the Majlis. They also wielded enormous influence deep in Tehran’s society—inside the government, within the army and police, with clerics like Ayatollah Kashani, and with the newspapers. They also—crucially, as it turned out—had connections with the bosses of the thuggish underclass that toiled in the meat, fruit, and vegetable markets of south Tehran, men with names like Mohammad the Simpleton, Mehdi the Butcher, and Shaban the Brainless. By mid-1952 the family was on a retainer from MI6 of ten thousand pounds a month.
The name of the general whom Asadollah Rashidian now recommended to replace Mosaddeq was all too familiar to Falle and his colleagues. As a commander of a provincial garrison during the war, Fazlollah Zahedi had been responsible for the deaths of a number of British officials. When intelligence then suggested he was conspiring in a German attempt to take over the country, the British had abducted him and exiled him to Palestine. His kidnapper recalled “a dapper figure in a tight-fitting grey uniform and highly polished boots” in whose bedroom he had discovered “a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium [and] an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan.” Since then Zahedi had served as Mosaddeq’s minister of the interior and was now a member of the Senate. At first sight, he was an insalubrious and unlikely candidate. And that, as Falle quickly realized, was what made him so ideal: his career path would make it hard for any claim that he was a British stooge to stick.1
The British had been hunting for someone to replace Mosaddeq for over a year. Originally, they had hoped that Zia himself might be that man, until they decided that the Seyyid was too openly pro-British to have any chance of selling any oil deal to a skeptical Iranian public. They then transferred their allegiances to Zia’s rival, Ahmad Qavam, but he too had failed spectacularly that summer. Made prime minister when Mosaddeq theatrically resigned after an altercation with the shah, Qavam had ordered troops onto the streets to break up the demonstrations that followed his appointment. After seventy-nine protestors were killed, he was forced to resign, and the shah had no choice but to recall Mosaddeq, who saw his triumph capped a day later when, at The Hague, the International Court of Justice ruled in his favor, declaring that it had no power to judge the dispute, which the British government had referred to it back in 1951.2
IT WAS AGAINST this backdrop that Sam Falle met Zia and then Rashidian. Falle’s boss, the chargé d’affaires George Middleton, thought Rashidian’s suggestion that they might back General Zahedi was worth wrapping into a letter he was writing to Eden describing the unstable situation in the country. By now the British-orchestrated boycott of Iranian oil was clearly working. A few days earlier, Mosaddeq had offered to negotiate if Britain would give him financial assistance, before abruptly withdrawing his offer, amid reports that his overture had triggered rioting around the country. Describing his impression that Mosaddeq’s “megalomania is now verging on mental instability,” Middleton reported that “it now looks as though the only thing to stop Persia falling into communist hands is a coup d’état.” Although there was “no outstanding candidate” from the military to replace Mosaddeq, he thought Zahedi “might be adequate.”3
Though hardly a glowing endorsement, Middleton’s suggestion had a significant effect on Eden nonetheless. On July 29 the foreign secretary told the cabinet that Mosaddeq “must be nearly mad” to have withdrawn his offer and that all hopes of a settlement had vanished. Accepting Middleton’s contention that the communist-backed Tudeh Party was the most likely beneficiary of Iran’s growing turmoil, he told his colleagues that he had asked the American ambassador in London if they couldn’t “find someone else to back… a military man, as in Egypt?” His impression was that the ambassador was “not averse” to that idea.4
Eden became all the more determined to find a “local Neguib” to solve his problem in Iran when Acheson then came up with a new set of proposals designed to break the deadlock before Truman’s presidency finished at the end of the year. At the end of July, the secretary of state proposed to give Mosaddeq $10 million to tide him over, the establishment of an international arbitration to determine the amount of compensation Iran should pay Anglo-Iranian’s shareholders, and that the British should further improve Iran’s financial position by buying the oil trapped in Iran by the boycott at a discount.5
Since this would undo all the pressure that the oil boycott had heaped on Mosaddeq, Eden instinctively opposed it. But, given the uncompromising American mood since the Egyptian coup, he realized that Acheson would probably release the money anyway. Having heard promising news from Tehran that Zahedi—whom Falle had just met—believed that he could count on the support of several disaffected members of Mosaddeq’s National Front, he told the cabinet that, while Zahedi’s plans developed, he planned to string Acheson along by showing a willingness to discuss the terms of the arbitration, “though mainly as a delaying tactic” designed to put off the moment when the secretary paid out the money.6
Acheson, however, immediately saw through Eden’s conceit. “The only resemblance I could see between the aide-memoire we had given the British government and Mr Eden’s reply,” he wrote, “was that they were both written on paper and with a typewriter.7
BY THE SECOND half of August 1962, Mosaddeq was aware that there was plotting against him, but he does not appear to have known precisely by whom, because he then took a step that played straight into Zahedi’s hands. On August 23, he took the rash decision to press 136 military officers into an early retirement. Their unexpected new status did give them one right—to join the Retired Officers’ Association, the president of which was none other than Zahedi. “I saw General Zahedi today,” Falle reported a fortnight later, “and found him full of the joys of Spring.”8
Zahedi’s role did not remain secret for long. In late September the general met Ayatollah Kashani, the rabble-rousing mullah who had played a vital role in destroying Ahmad Qavam’s premiership earlier that year and whose support Zahedi clearly needed if his own attempt to topple Mosaddeq were to succeed. News of their meeting soon leaked. On October 4, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zahedi was trying to persuade Kashani and others to support him against Mosaddeq. Describing the general as “a sort of prospective Iranian ‘strong man’ in the style of Egypt’s Naguib,” the paper said that “he has tried to conduct these overtures with careful secrecy—but it’s known Mosaddeq is already aware of them.”9
The revelation that his rivals were conspiring to remove him only increased the pressure on Mosaddeq. Already desperately short of money, early in August he had had to absorb the news that Kashani had just been elected president of the Majlis. The American ambassador happened to be with him at the time. “Mosaddeq was obviously shocked,” he reported to Washington. “For a moment he seemed to forget my presence and did not seek to hide his distress and agitation. He fell back on his bed and closed his eyes. I thought he might lose consciousness.” Then, toward the end of the month, he received a joint message from Truman and Churchill, who offered him the prospect of $10 million and an end to the oil sanctions if he would agree to put the question of compensation to the International Court of Justice. The powers, which he had tried so hard to divide, now appeared to be ganging up against him.10
On October 13, Mosaddeq took action against his opponents, arresting a senior general, as well as Asadollah Rashidian, his brothers, and their father. Zahedi and several other opponents enjoyed parliamentary immunity, however, and took sanctuary in the Majlis. The prime minister could only accuse them of complicity in a plot to overthrow him. Three days later, as he had long threatened he would, he finally severed diplomatic relations with Britain. Middleton, Falle, and their colleagues were given ten days to leave.
The closure of Britain’s embassy in Tehran meant that the British would now be dependent on the Americans for their plan to remove Mosaddeq to succeed, but there was no sign at this point that the Americans were interested. Although the American ambassador reported in September, following a meeting with an unnamed man who was most likely Zahedi, that “hints of a coup d’état or resort to tactics of violence are becoming more open,” he refused to get involved and had extracted a commitment from his British counterparts that neither of their embassies should encourage or support a coup—a promise that the British had promptly broken. By October 1952, the CIA took a more sanguine view of Mosaddeq’s prospects. It now reckoned that the Iranian leader would survive “at least for the next six months” and would probably see out 1953, providing he could stave off Kashani. That helped explain why Acheson, right up to the end of Truman’s presidency, remained committed to the diplomatic track, complaining that there was “not enough cheese” in Britain’s offer. “We are both very fed up of being lectured by Acheson,” Eden’s adviser Evelyn Shuckburgh wrote in his diary.11
WINSTON CHURCHILL HOPED that Truman’s successor would view the situation differently. On November 4, 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidential election. “Ike” was a familiar and hugely popular figure in Britain: he had commanded the D-Day landings and, in extremely trying circumstances, had managed to ensure good relations between his own forces and Montgomery’s. Eden, on the other hand, was under no illusions that the new president would make their lives any easier. Although, like Churchill, he admired Eisenhower, he recognized that the Republicans distrusted the British even more than the Democrats did, none more perhaps than the man whom Ike had chosen as his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. It was an appointment, one British diplomat noted with uncanny foresight that November, that “will make great difficulties for us in the immediate future.”12
It would be fair to say the British had never taken to the dour new secretary of state. He was “the woolliest type of useless pontificating American.… Heaven help us!” Eden’s chief wartime adviser Alec Cadogan exclaimed, when he first met him a decade earlier. Eden himself was nauseated by Dulles’s bad breath and his tendency to talk down to him. “Dull, Duller, Dulles,” intoned Churchill. Even Ike admitted that his pick could seem “a bit sticky at first” and—and this would be crucial—had “a curious lack of understanding as to how his words and manner may affect another personality.” He clearly knew how Dulles’s appointment would go down in London because his tone was “almost apologetic” when he confirmed to Eden that Dulles would be his secretary of state.13
Dulles, however, seemed born for the role: certainly, he had coveted it all his adult life. His grandfather—to whom his name Foster was a tribute—had been secretary of state; so too had his uncle, Robert Lansing. The family connection explains why, in 1919 as a thirty-year-old, he joined the American delegation at the Paris peace conference. As it was for Roosevelt, Paris was a formative experience: in Dulles’s case it left him with a very low opinion of the British. Disillusioned, he departed for the blue-chip law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, but he did not give up thinking about foreign policy. When it became clear, midway through the Second World War, that the Roosevelt administration had begun considering the postwar era, he accepted the chairmanship of an independent commission examining the basis for “a just and durable peace.” No doubt Dulles was promoting the commission’s proposal for a postwar world government when Cadogan encountered him. That notion was utopian, but three years later Dulles was on hand to witness the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco.14
Although Dulles had worked for Truman, he was a Republican by instinct. Around the time that Harold Macmillan was likening Churchill’s cabinet to the board of a bankrupt company, Dulles went to see Eisenhower, then running NATO, at his headquarters outside Paris and urged him to run as the Republicans’ candidate for president. Alarmed by the Soviet threat, he put to Ike a “policy of boldness” that advocated pushing back aggressively against communism and threatening to use nuclear weapons as a first resort in a way that was designed both to deter Russian expansionism and also save money.
Ike, who was also being courted by the Democrats, would accept the Republican nomination and put Dulles’s idea at the heart of his campaign. He quickly became reliant on Dulles. As Macmillan observed later, “he couldn’t do without him.”15
What Dulles thought therefore mattered. He believed, as he had always done, that American leadership was key to the security of the world. The British, on the other hand were something of a menace, “a rapidly declining power” whose “clumsy and inept” behavior encouraged nationalists like Mosaddeq, causing tensions that the communists could then exploit. According to one of his assistants, the new secretary of state felt that “you simply could not count on the British to carry on in any responsible way” and “he had no admiration for them.” He thought Eden was a dandy.16
ONCE AGAIN OBLIVIOUS to this thinking, Churchill traveled to New York in January 1953 to bid farewell to Truman and, more important, to meet Eisenhower for the first time in several years. His aim, he told the cabinet before departing, was to “do all we can to get the United States involved.” He believed that he could rekindle the close wartime relationship he felt he had enjoyed with Roosevelt.17
“I admired and liked him,” Eisenhower wrote of Churchill in his 1948 memoir of the war. He also acknowledged that Churchill “knew this perfectly well and never hesitated to use that knowledge in his effort to swing me to his own line of thought in any argument.” Forearmed with this knowledge, the president-elect met Churchill three times in early January. Churchill started out by describing the enjoyable sensation of sitting “on some rather Olympian platform” with Roosevelt during the war and “directing world affairs from that point of vantage.” He clearly hoped that it might be possible to establish a relationship with Ike that worked along exactly the same lines. Together, he suggested the two allies could tackle the two most pressing foreign policy problems, Egypt and Iran. With Britain and America jointly sharing the burden, he ventured, “other nations should recognize the wisdom of our suggestions and follow them.”18
Like others, Ike was struck by Churchill’s decline. Although the prime minister was “as charming and as interesting as ever,” he recorded in his diary, he was “quite definitely showing the effects of the passing years.” Most striking was the fact that he seemed to have “developed an almost childlike faith” that any problem could be solved by an Anglo-American partnership.19
Ike thought that Churchill was making a strategic error that stemmed from wishful thinking. In line with Dulles, he believed that the “two strongest Western powers must not appear before the world as a combination of forces to compel adherence to the status quo.” Moreover, he clearly also thought that the assumption on which Churchill was basing his suggestion that the two powers work arm-in-arm was flawed. From personal experience, he knew that the wartime alliance had been far rockier than the prime minister was either able to remember or willing to admit. And so his reaction to Churchill’s hope of a special partnership was withering: “any hope of establishing such a relationship is completely fatuous.” He wished the prime minister would retire.
These were Eisenhower’s thoughts, not what he said, and so Churchill pressed on oblivious. In a further meeting on January 7, he made a proposal. He was planning to go on to Washington to see Truman and from there to visit Jamaica for some winter sun. Building on his idea of a special Anglo-American relationship, he suggested that he might return from the Caribbean to Washington a fortnight after Eisenhower’s inauguration for a summit. Ike dodged a direct answer, saying that he would defer to Dulles’s advice.
The same day after dinner, Dulles paid Churchill an unexpected visit at his hotel and poured cold water on the prime minister’s idea, which he described as “most unfortunate.” The American people feared Churchill’s ability to “cast a spell” on their leaders, he explained; it would be wise to wait awhile before holding any summit. After Dulles left, Churchill launched an angry attack on “the Republican Party in general and Dulles in particular.” He told his private secretary that he wanted to have “no more to do with Dulles, whose ‘great slab of a face’ he disliked and distrusted.” Piqued by his failure to get Ike to agree with him, he would later call the president “weak and stupid.”20
With no signs of support either from Truman in Washington or Eisenhower in New York, Churchill and Eden realized that they had no choice but to offer to negotiate with both Neguib in Egypt and Mosaddeq in Iran. “I ended today extremely gloomy about British prospects everywhere,” admitted Eden’s aide Shuckburgh on the same day that Churchill received the bad news from Dulles. Shuckburgh saw the very international framework that the new secretary of state had helped to create as conspiring against Britain. “International law and the temper of international opinion is all set against the things which made us a great nation, i.e. our activities outside our own territory,” he feared. “Bit by bit we shall be driven back into our island where we shall starve.”21
Britain’s hopes of ousting Mosaddeq now looked extremely remote. It took a change of heart on the part of the Americans to revive them.