Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

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 was a nuisance, a troublemaker.’ Others thought differently. Kashani, it has been said, spoke for the ‘democracy 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 eraof 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 nicelittle egg you laid when you were here last time!’ he told the man from MI6.