The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
attracted President Truman, but when Eisenhower arrived at the White House in 1953, America was already fearful that Mossadeq would hand his country over to the Soviets. The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit Roosevelt – grandson of the buccaneering ex-president Theodore – and his victim was the very opposite of Saddam Hussein. ‘No nation goes anywhere under the shadow of dictatorship,’ Mossadeq once said – words that might have come from President George W. Bush’s speechwriters half a century later. But one thing Mossadeq did have in common with the later dictator of Iraq; he was the victim of a long campaign of personal abuse by his international opponents. They talked about his ‘yellow’ face, of how his nose was always running; the French writer Gérard de Villiers described Mossadeq as ‘a pint-sized trouble-maker’ with the ‘agility of a goat’. On his death, the New York Times would claim that he ‘held cabinet meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and nourished by transfusions of American blood plasma’. True, Mossadeq, an aristocrat with a European education, had a habit of dressing in pink pyjamas and of bursting into tears in parliament. But he appears to have been a genuine democrat – he had been a renowned diplomat and parliamentarian – whose condemnation of the Shah’s tyranny and refusal to sanction further oil concessions gave his National Front coalition mass popular support. When Woodhouse arrived in Tehran – officially, he was the British embassy’s ‘information officer’ – Iran was already on the brink of catastrophe. Negotiations had broken down with the AIOC, whose officials, Woodhouse admitted, were ‘boring, pig-headed and tiresome’. The British ambassador was, according to Woodhouse, ‘a dispirited bachelor dominated by his widowed sister’ and his opposite number an American business tycoon who was being rewarded for his donations to the Democratic Party.*
‘One of the first things I had to do was fly a planeload of guns into Iran,’ Woodhouse said. He travelled on the aircraft from the Iraqi airbase at Habbaniya – decades later, it would be one of Saddam Hussein’s fighter-bomber stations, and later still a barracks for America’s occupation army – and then bought millions of Iranian riyals, handing them over at a secret location to the Rashidian brothers. They were to be the organisers of the mobs who would stage the coup. The guns would be theirs, too – unless the Soviet Union invaded Iran, in which case they were to be used to fight the Russians.
‘We landed in Tehran after losing our way over the Zaghros mountains. They were mostly rifles and sten guns. We drove north in a truck, avoiding checkpoints by using by-roads. Getting stopped was the sort of thing one never thinks about. We buried the weapons – I think my underlings dug the holes. And for all I know those weapons are still hidden somewhere in northern Iran. It was all predicated on the assumption that war would break out with the Soviet Union. But let me clarify. When I was sent to Tehran, it was not for the purpose of political interference. In fact, political interference at the British embassy in Tehran was in the hands of a quite different personality, Robin Zaehner. He was very good company, very intelligent but very odd. His function was to get rid of Mossadeq. This only became my function when Zaehner despaired of it and left Tehran.’
In fact, Zaehner, later to become Professor of Eastern Religions at Oxford, had been involved in Britain’s disastrous attempt to raise a revolution in communist Albania, based in Malta, and later accused by American agents of betraying the operation – Woodhouse never believed this – and was now the principal liaison with the Shah. It was Zaehner who cultivated the Rashidian brothers, both of whom had worked against German influence in Iran during the Second World War. Iran was on the point of throwing the British embassy staff out of Tehran, so Woodhouse made contact with the CIA station chief in the city, Roger Goiran, ‘a really admirable colleague … he came from a French family, was bilingual, extremely intelligent and likeable and had a charming wife … an invaluable ally to me when Mossadeq was throwing us out’. Once back in London, Woodhouse took his plans to the Americans in Washington: the Rashidians, along with an organisation of disenchanted army and police officers, parliamentary deputies, mullahs, editors and mobs from the bazaar, all funded by Woodhouse’s money, would seize control of Tehran while tribal leaders would take over the big cities – with the weapons Woodhouse had buried.
Mossadeq rejected the last proposals for a settlement with the AIOC and threatened the Shah – who had already left Iran – and from that moment, his fate was obvious. Roosevelt travelled secretly to Tehran while Woodhouse met the Shah’s sister Ashraf in Switzerland in an attempt to persuade her brother to stay on the throne. The Shah himself received a secret emissary bent on the same purpose, a certain General H. Norman Schwarzkopf – father of the Norman Schwarzkopf who would lead US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. The Shah went along with the wishes of his superpower allies. He issued a firman dismissing Mossadeq as prime minister, and when Mossadeq refused to obey and arrested Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri – who had brought the Shah’s order – the mobs whom Roosevelt and Woodhouse had bought duly appeared on the streets of Tehran.
Woodhouse was always unrepentant. ‘It was all Mossadeq’s fault. He was ordered by the Shah’s firman to leave. He called out his own thugs and he caused all the bloodbath. Our lot didn’t – they behaved according to plan. What if we’d done nothing? What would relations have been between Mossadeq and the mullahs? Things would only have got worse. There would have been no restoration of AIOC. And the Shah would have been overthrown immediately, instead of twenty-five years later.’*
In retirement, and still mourning his wife Davina who had died two years earlier, Woodhouse was now keeping his mind alert by translating into English a history of modern Greece by his old friend and fellow scholar, Panayotis Kanellopoulos.† It was easy to see him, a gentle old man who had just become the fifth Baron Terrington, as a romantic figure of history. Here, after all, was a man who knew Churchill and Eden and the top men in the CIA in Washington. But British agents who engineer coups can be remorseless, driven people. At one point in our conversation, Woodhouse talked about his own feelings. ‘I don’t want to be boastful,’ he said. ‘But never – neither in Athens during the German occupation nor in Tehran during this operation – was I afraid. I was never afraid of parachuting, even in the wrong place. I ought to have been, I realise. And when I look back on it, a shudder comes over me. I was always fascinated by the danger and fascinated by the discoveries that come out of being in danger.’
There was, I felt, a darker side to this resolve. In his autobiography, Woodhouse described how during his Second World War service in Greece, a gypsy was captured carrying an Italian pass and working for the Axis powers. With two Greek guerrilla leaders, Napoleon Zervas and Aris Veloukhiotis, Woodhouse formed a court martial. ‘The outcome was inevitable,’ he wrote. ‘We could not afford the manpower to guard a prisoner; we could not risk his escape. He was hanged in the village square.’
Did Woodhouse still think about this youth? I put this question to him gently, at the end of our conversation as the gale outside hurled snow at the window of his library. There was a long silence and Woodhouse shook his head very slowly. ‘It was terrible – I felt terrible. I still bring the scene back to me from time to time. He was a wretched youth. He didn’t say anything really – he was so shaken. He was a sort of halfwit. I was at the hanging. He was hanged from a tree. They simply pulled a chair from beneath his feet. I don’t think it took long for him to die, I don’t know exactly how long. We were only a hundred men or so – it was the early days of the occupation. If we had let him go, he would have told the Italians … He had been following us from village to village. After that, I told Zervas not to take any prisoners.’
Woodhouse, I suspect, viewed the Iranian coup with the same coldness of heart. He certainly had as little time for Ayatollah Abul Qassim Kashani as he did for Mossadeq. Kashani was Khomeini’s precursor, a divine – albeit of a slightly gentler kind – whose opposition to the British gave him nationalist credentials without making him an automatic ally of Mossadeq. Woodhouse was not impressed. Kashani, he said, was ‘a man no one really took seriously – he became a member of the Majlis [parliament], which was an odd thing for an ayatollah to do. He had no power base … Kashani was a loner. One didn’t think of him in terms of any mass movement. He