The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
of Islam’; he was a man ‘completely fearless, unscrupulous, completely free from self-interest … With these qualities he combines humility and ready access, kindness and humour, wide learning and popular eloquence.’* In November 1951, Kashani stated that ‘we don’t want any outside government interfering in our internal affairs … The United States should cease following British policy otherwise it will gain nothing but hatred and the loss of prestige in the world in general and in Iran in particular.’ Much the same warning would be given to Britain in the Middle East fifty-two years later when Tony Blair’s government followed American policy over Iraq.
Woodhouse was right in one way: after Mossadeq’s overthrow and subsequent trial – he was given a three-year jail sentence and died under house arrest ten years later – Kashani moved into obscurity. Woodhouse would record how the Ayatollah later sent a telegram of congratulations to the Shah on his return to Iran. But Mossadeq’s rule and the coup that ended Iran’s independence in 1953 would provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979. If the Shah was ever to be dethroned, there could be no flirtation with constitutional rights, no half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries left to restore Western power in Iran. A future revolution would embrace more than five thousand dead; it must be final, absolute – and unforgiving. The spies, the ancien régime, would have to be liquidated at once.
There were also lessons for the Americans and British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadeq, as James A. Bill has written, ‘began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism’. Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. ‘I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,’ he said. ‘Things were taken for granted too easily.’ After Mossadeq had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup: ‘That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!’ he told the man from MI6.
But we don’t go in for ‘little eggs’ any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies – and bigger egos – are involved in ‘regime change’ today. Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War – and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. ‘If we are ever going to try something like this again,’ he wrote with great prescience, ‘we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.’
The ‘sort of complacency’ which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak – Sazman-i Etelaat va Amjiniat-i Keshvar, the ‘National Information and Security Organisation’ – was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret US mission was attached to Savak headquarters. Methods of interrogation included – apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction – rape and ‘cooking’, the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri, the man who had served Mossadeq with the Shah’s eviction order, controlled Savak for almost the last fifteen years of the monarch’s reign and employed up to 60,000 agents. At one point, it was believed that a third of the male population of Iran were in some way involved in Savak, either directly or as occasional paid or blackmailed informants. They included diplomats, civil servants, mullahs, actors, writers, oil executives, workers, peasants, the poor and the unemployed, a whole society corrupted by power and fear.
For the West, the Shah became our policeman, the wise ‘autocrat’ – never, of course, a dictator – who was a bastion against Soviet expansionism in south-west Asia, the guardian of our oil supplies, a would-be democrat – the ‘would’ more relevant than the ‘be’ – and a reformer dedicated to leading his people into a bright economic future. Over the next quarter-century, the international oil industry exported 24 billion barrels of oil out of Iran; and the ‘policeman of the Gulf’ was more important than ever now that the British were withdrawing from ‘east of Suez’. But the Shah’s rule was never as stable as his supporters would have the world believe. There was rioting against the regime throughout the 1960s and four hundred bombings between 1971 and 1975. In early 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly condemned the Shah’s rule. On 3 June, the day marking the martyrdom at Kerbala of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, he publicly denounced the Shah’s corruption and was promptly arrested and taken to Tehran. An outburst of popular anger confirmed Khomeini as a national opposition leader. Sixteen months later, on 4 November 1964, he delivered a speech in which he condemned a new law giving American forces immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed inside Iran. Henceforth, an American who murdered an Iranian could leave the country; an Iranian who murdered an Iranian could be hanged.* Next day, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey.
The Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ succeeded in alienating the middle classes by legislating for land reform and the clerics by increasing the secular nature of the regime, especially by giving electoral power to women. By 1977, less than two years before the Islamic revolution, the Shah was predicting that within ten years Iran would be as developed as western Europe, and shortly thereafter one of the five most powerful countries in the world. President Jimmy Carter’s US administration, burdened with a liberal desire to spread human rights across the globe but still anxious to maintain the Shah’s power, continued the American policy of supporting the reforms that were causing so much unrest among Iranians. Israeli leaders paid frequent visits to Iran – David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon all visited Tehran, often in secret. Iranian military officers travelled to Tel Aviv for talks with senior Israeli army officers. There were regular El Al flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.
Like all absolute monarchs, the Shah constantly reinvented himself. In 1971, he invited world leaders to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his rule at a massive birthday bash in the ancient city of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire under Darius the First. The city would become ‘the centre of gravity of the world’ and everyone and almost everything – from Imelda Marcos to US Vice-President Spiro Agnew, from King Hussein of Jordan to the fine wines and furnishings in the vast ‘Big Top’ tent beside the ruins – was imported from abroad. The Shah was to be worshipped as spiritual heir to the empire of Cyrus the Great, whose rule included a landmass stretching to the Mediterranean, later extended to Egypt and east to the Indus river. Alexander the Great had conquered Persepolis in 330 BC and, so legend would have it, ordered its destruction at the request of a courtesan. For the Shah’s ‘birthday’, Iranian troops were dressed up as Medes and Persians, Safavids and Kajars and Parthians. All that was missing was any reference to the Prophet Mohamed and the Muslim invasions that brought Islam to Persia. But that was the point. The Shah was presenting himself not as a Muslim but as the kingly inheritor of pre-Islamic Persia. Khomeini naturally condemned the whole binge as obscene.
This act of self-aggrandisement counted for nothing when the end came. Indeed, the very detritus of the banquet was effortlessly turned by the Ayatollah’s regime into a symbol of emptiness. When the Shah, long exiled, was undergoing surgery in New York, I travelled down to Persepolis from Tehran and found his special