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03.09.03, 15:09
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
02 September 2003
Not long before he died, old "Monty" Woodhouse asked himself if his role in
the 1953 coup d'état 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 Gérard 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 "information 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,
