Rene — Fisk — Another Fine Mess
Topic(s): Iran | Comments Off on Rene — Fisk — Another Fine MessRobert Fisk: ANOTHER FINE MESS
It began as a quiet plot to protect UK and US interests in Iran. Fifty years
on, the fall-out of Operation Boot can still be felt through the Middle
East. Robert Fisk, who knew the British classical scholar who helped
mastermind it, reflects on a saga of unintended consequences and unlearnt
lessons
The Independent, UK — 01/09/03
Not long before he died, old “Monty” Woodhouse asked himself if his role in
the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran had led, indirectly, to Ayatollah Khomeini’s
Islamic Republic. “Regime change” hadn’t attracted President Truman, but
when Eisenhower arrived at the White House in 1953, the overthrow of
Mohammed Mossadeq’s democratically elected government was concocted by the
CIA with the help of Woodhouse, an urbane Greek scholar and ex-guerrilla
fighter and Britain’s top spy in Tehran. America was fearful that Mossadeq
would hand his country over to the Soviets; Woodhouse was far more concerned
to return Iran’s newly nationalised oil fields to the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company (AIOC). The restoration of the young Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi –
our policeman in the Gulf – was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of
million dollars, a plane-load of weapons and 300 lives. And 26 years later,
it all turned to dust.
The Americans called their plot to restore the Shah Operation Ajax. The MI6
plan, dreamt up by Woodhouse, had the more prosaic title of Operation Boot.
It was all a long way from Operation Iraqi Freedom, although there must be a
few conservatives in the Pentagon now wishing that they’d dusted off their
archives of the early Fifties to see how to topple Middle East leaders
without an invasion. But then Operation Ajax/Boot – though it was undeniably
about oil – was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let
alone bring “democracy” to Iran. Democracy, in the shape of the popular,
effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested
in cultivating. This was to be regime change on the cheap.
The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit
Roosevelt (the 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 today’s President George Bush. But Mossadeq did have one
thing in common with the Iraqi dictator: 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, and the French writer
Gerard de Villiers described Mossadeq as “a pint-sized trouble-maker” with
the “agility of a goat”. On his death, The New York Times claimed that he
had “held cabinet meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and
nourished by transfusions of American blood plasma”. True, Mossadeq had a
habit of dressing in pink pyjamas and of breaking down in 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 a mass popular support.
Woodhouse was practised in the art of subversion. He had distinguished
himself as an SOE leader with the Greek partisans during the Second World
War, and his vigorous pursuit of his opposite number in the Wehrmacht, a
certain Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim, continued to the day of his death. My
own investigations into Waldheim’s activities as intelligence officer for
the Wehrmacht’s Army Group “E” in Bosnia had unearthed Waldheim’s familiar
“W” initial on the bottom of a report of the interrogation of one of
Woodhouse’s young officers – a man who was subsequently executed by the
Nazis – and this brought Woodhouse and myself together. But the war had cast
a dark shadow over Woodhouse, who to his death was haunted by the image of a
young collaborator whom he had hanged in the mountains of Greece.
When he arrived in Tehran – officially he was the British embassy’s “informa
tion officer” – Iran was already on the brink of catastrophe. Negotiations
had broken down with the AIOC. 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 plane-load of guns into Iran,” Woodhouse told me late in his life. He
travelled on the aircraft from the Iraqi airbase at RAF Habbaniya west of
Baghdad – decades later, it would be one of Saddam Hussein’s fighter-bomber
stations – and then bought millions of Iranian riyals with gold sovereigns,
handing them over at a secret Tehran location to two brothers called
Rashidian. They were to be organisers of the mobs that would stage the coup.
The guns were to serve a similar purpose – 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 Zagros Mountains,”
Woodhouse was to recall. “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 thought 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.”
When Woodhouse took up his job at the embassy, the plot to overthrow
Mossadeq and give the oil fields back to the AIOC was in the hands of a
British diplomat called Robin Zaehner, later a professor of Eastern
religions at Oxford. It was Zaehner who had cultivated the Rashidian
brothers, each 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. “He was a really admirable colleague,” Woodhouse
said. “He came from a French family, was bilingual and extremely intelligent
and likeable… an invaluable ally to me when Mossadeq was throwing us out.”
Once back in London, Woodhouse took his plans to Washington: the Rashidians,
along with an organisation of disenchanted army and police officers,
parliamentary deputies, mullahs, editors and mob leaders, would seize
control of Tehran, while tribal leaders would take over the big cities with
the weapons that Woodhouse had buried. Mossadeq rejected the last proposals
for a settlement by the AIOC and threatened the Shah – who had already left
Iran. His fate was sealed. Kermit Roosevelt travelled secretly to Tehran,
while Woodhouse met the Shah’s sister in Switzerland in an attempt to
persuade her brother to stay on the throne. The Shah himself received a
secret American emissary bent on the same purpose, a certain General Norman
Schwarzkopf – father of the Norman Schwarzkopf who led US forces in the 1991
Gulf War.
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, the mobs that Roosevelt and Woodhouse had organisedduly took to the
streets of Tehran. Woodhouse never changed his view of Mossadeq. “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 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 have got steadily worse.
There would have been no restoration of AIOC. And the Shah would have been
overthrown immediately, instead of 25 years later.”
History might not regard the coup quite so kindly. The first street violence
actually failed to topple Mossadeq and Roosevelt had to summon the mobs for
a second attempt. The Iranian army initially obeyed the Prime Minister’s
orders to attack the crowds. Along with the 300 dead, many thousands of
Iranians were wounded. When the US ambassador approached Roosevelt to seek
his advice on what he should say to Mossadeq after the first coup attempt
had failed, Roosevelt persuaded him to lie. “I will make it quite plain that
we have no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of a friendly
country.” Roosevelt was later to write that “to this noble sentiment I made
no comment. Diplomats are expected, if not required, to say such things.”
But if American intervention “saved” Iran from communism – Stalin had just
died and the Russians were, in fact, in no mood to invade Iran – it also
ended a century of American-Iranian friendship. The Shah would henceforth
always be seen as a tool of the US and Britain. As James A Bill wrote in his
excellent book The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian
Relations, “the fall of Mossadeq… began a new era of intervention and
groping hostility to the US among the awakened forces of Iranian
nationalism”. Another American author warned after Mossadeq’s overthrow that
the new US-installed Iranian government “won’t be with us long unless it can
prove that being nice to the West is more profitable for Iran than being as
consistently nasty as old Mossy was”.
Woodhouse was more phlegmatic. “It’s quite remarkable that a quarter of a
century passed between Operation Boot and the fall of the Shah. In the end,
it was Khomeini who came out on top – but not until years later. I suppose
that some better use could have been made of the time that elapsed.”
Khomeini’s 1979 revolution left Woodhouse deeply depressed. “I felt that the
work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once
the Shah had been restored in 1953. Things were taken for granted.”
Woodhouse went on to become an Oxford MP, but always remembered what Allen
Dulles, the CIA director, told him when he returned to Washington: “That was
a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!”
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 fail so quickly and, in the case of Iraq, 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 that Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction. But the final
word must go to 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.”