Authors: Stephen E. Ambrose
Ike was also upset, Wainwright related, because he felt that Wainwright, as a former
SLU
and member of the
SHAEF
staff, should have known better. “I asked him one day,” Wainwright recalled, “why the hell do you call me Wainwright and Peter, Peter? He said, âWell, because you were on my staff and worked for me.'
*
Consequently he was really shocked and horrified that I would have chosen, in his view, to attack the intelligence services with this bill, or attack the
CIA
with a bill requiring a certain amount of disclosure to a select committee.”
12
Eisenhower tried to head off the Mansfield bill by appointing a committee to investigate the
CIA
and report to him personally. The
committee was headed by the famous World War II aviator General James Doolittle.
The prose of the Doolittle Report's conclusion was chilling: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of âfair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”
13
The Doolittle Report was a concise summary of Ike's own views. As President, he intended to fight the Communists just as he had fought the Nazis, on every battlefront, with every available weapon. His arsenal was a mighty one, capped by the atomic bomb. One important element in it, the one the Doolittle Report had been designed to protect, was the newly born but rapidly growing Central Intelligence Agency.
*
The Rosenberg case is almost the American Dreyfus affair. It has excited more controversy than the Hiss case, and continues to do so. In 1979
The New Republic
(June 23) published an article that contended that Julius was involved in a Communist espionage ring, while Ethelâalthough certainly an active Communistâwas innocent of any spying. The article brought forth a virtual avalanche of angry letters from both sides (see the August 4, 1979, issue of
The New Republic
). There is a very active National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case.
*
Wainwright, in his early twenties during the war, was a very junior member of Ike's staff. He could recall seeing Eisenhower only four or five times in 1944 and 1945, and was much impressed that Ike remembered his name eight years later. “He had a politician's kind of memory,” Wainwright said.
MIDNIGHT, AUGUST
1â2, 1953. A large, ornate garden in Teheran, Iran. A medium-sized, medium-height, rather nondescript American, wearing a dark turtleneck shirt, Oxford-gray slacks, and Persian sandals, opens the gate to the garden, slips out, glances up and down the street, and silently climbs into the back seat of an ordinary-looking black sedan. Without a backward glance, the driver pulls away slowly, smoothly, and heads toward the royal palace. In the back seat, the American huddles down on the floor and pulls a blanket over him.
At the palace gate, the sentry flashes a light in the driver's face, grunts, and waves the car through. Halfway between the gate and the palace steps, the driver parks, gets out, and walks away. A slim, nervous man walks down the drive, glancing left and right as he approaches. The American pulls the blanket out of the way and sits up as the man enters the car and closes the door.
They look at each other. Then His Imperial Majesty, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran, Light of the Aryans, allows himself to relax, and even smile.
“Good evening, Mr. Roosevelt,” he says. “I cannot say that I expected to see you, but this is a pleasure.”
“Good evening, Your Majesty. It is a long time since we met each other, and I am glad you recognize me. It may make establishing my credentials a bit easier.”
His Imperial Majesty laughs. “That will hardly be necessary. Your name and presence is all the guarantee I need.”
RooseveltâKermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's grandson and FDR's cousinâquickly explains that he has entered Iran illegally, that his cover name is James Lochridge, and that he is there as a personal representative of President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “President Eisenhower will confirm this himself,” Roosevelt states, “by a phrase in a speech he is about to deliver in San Franciscoâactually within the next twenty-four hours. Prime Minister Churchill has arranged to have a specific change made in the time announcement of the
BBC
broadcast tomorrow night. Instead of saying, âIt is now midnight,' the announcer will say, âIt is now'âpauseââ
exactly
midnight.'Â ”
Having established his bona fides, Roosevelt explains that his purpose in coming is to assure the Shah that he has the full backing of the American and British governments, that Washington and London are anxious to help him overthrow his prime minister and ensure that H.I.M. retains his throne.
The thirty-four-year-old Emperor smiles, as well he might. To have the complete, unquestioning support of a Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill is, after all, a reassuring feeling, especially to a shaky monarch surrounded by rumors of coups, countercoups, plots, and revolutions, with the additional problem of sharing a long, virtually undefended border with the Soviet Union. Even better than the general promise of support from Eisenhower and Churchill is Roosevelt's pledge that he would personally set in motion a series of events that would rid the Shah of his Iranian enemies.
After giving H.I.M. a brief outline of his proposed countercoup, Roosevelt indicates that they had best part before their meeting is discovered. They agree to meet again the following midnight under identical circumstances.
“Good nightâor should I say good morning?âMr. Roosevelt. I am glad to welcome you once again to my country.”
“And I am very glad to be here, Your Majesty. I am full of confidence that our undertaking will succeed.” The Shah leaves the car, the driver returns, Roosevelt pulls the blanket over his head again, and is returned to his garden. The
CIA'S
first major covert action under Eisenhower's orders is launched.
1
HOW HAD THINGS COME TO SUCH A PASS
that a Roosevelt was sneaking around at midnight, hiding under blankets, while Eisenhower altered a speech and Churchill used the
BBC
for personal messages, all in support of a potential dictator whose sole political objective was to overthrow a highly popular prime minister in favor of a pro-Nazi general? A brief answer is that oil and communism make a volatile mixture. A fuller response takes into account the complexities of postwar international relations and the recent history of Iran.
There are only two facts about modern PersiaâIranâthat truly matter to the rest of the world. It has oil, and it is Russia's southern neighbor. Because of the oil, the British had moved in on Iran in 1909, when the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (in which the British Government controlled 52 percent of the stock) obtained a sixty-year concession which gave it exclusive rights to explore and exploit the oil of Iran. Because of the border, Britain and Russia (with American support) had invaded Iran in 1941, where in a matter of hours they destroyed the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces. This was as much an act of great power highhandedness and brutality as Hitler's invasion of Denmark, although in this case the voices of outraged protest were exclusively Iranian. The purpose of the invasion was to provide a corridor for the shipment of American lend-lease goods into Russia.
The ruler of Iran in 1941 was Reza Khan, an illiterate officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade who had led a coup against the Qajar regime in the 1920s and established himself as Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Iran was a constitutional monarchy with a two-house Parliament.
2
The British and Russians believed that Reza Khan was potentially pro-Nazi, so they forced his abdication, sent him into exile, and put his twenty-three-year-old son on the throne. At the same time the British also kidnaped General Fazollah Zahedi, a dashing, handsome, six-foot-two ladies' man with a taste for silk underwear, expensive prostitutes, and opium. According to the British, Zahedi was also pro-Nazi, and they kept him in jail in Palestine for the duration.
The new, young Shah looked the part of a monarch. He carried himself stiffly and was strikingly handsome, despiteâor perhaps
because ofâa highly prominent nose. But despite the impression of strength he gave, he had been a sickly boy, dominated by his stern and cruel father, and was filled with self-doubt and fears of his own weakness.
3
He was easily manipulated by the occupying powers (which after 1942 included the Americans).
The Allies gave the Shah a sense of importance. Churchill accepted an invitation to lunch at the palace, and the Big Three held one of their famous conferences in Teheran, where the young Shah met, briefly, both Stalin and Roosevelt. Stalin offered him arms (with Soviet advisers to go with them); Churchill pretended to discuss seriously military strategy; FDR displayed great interest in a reforestation program and offered to return to Iran after the war to advise the Shah on the subject.
4
At the Teheran Conference, the occupying powers pledged themselves to withdraw their troops from Iran within six months of the end of hostilities. In late 1945, Britain and America kept their word, but the Russians stayed on in the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan, where they attempted to inspire a revolt that would lead to a secession of the province and its incorporation as a “republic” into the Soviet Union. This was the first real crisis of the Cold War. President Truman sent America's newest aircraft carrier, the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
, to the eastern Mediterranean as a show of force to back his demand that the Russians get out of Iran. After negotiating a deal that gave the Russians access to Iranian oil, Stalin did pull his troops out. The Iranian Parliament then refused to ratify the deal, and Russia suffered a major diplomatic setback.
5
The American attitude toward Iran in the immediate postwar years was set by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who believed the United States should play a supporting role in Iran's resistance to the Soviet pressure. As a result, relations between America and Iran were excellent. The Shah visited the United States, where he had a successful audience with Truman and met Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University (Ike recorded in his memoirs, “At that time I developedâon short acquaintanceâsome confidence that he would prove an effective leader of his people”).
6
In 1947, Kim Roosevelt, Harvard graduate, historian,
OSS
Mideastern expert during the war, was writing a book called
Arabs
,
Oil and History
, and he had a long interview with the Shah in his palace. Roosevelt was then thirty-one, the Shah twenty-eight.
They impressed each other favorably, or so Roosevelt later claimed. The Shah, he wrote, was “an intense young man, with a wiry body and a wiry spirit alsoâdark, slim, with a deep store of barely hidden energy.” Roosevelt did admit that “his [the Shah's] personality was subdued at that time.”
7
The most important American in the Shah's life in the mid-1940s was not Truman, nor Acheson, nor Kim Roosevelt, but rather a fabulous character named Schwarzkopf. Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf of the U. S. Army had been the chief of the New Jersey State Police and was internationally known for his success in handling the Lindbergh kidnaping case.
He was one of the first of those experts sent by the United States to underdeveloped countries to teach their governments how to maintain law and order and preserve themselves in power. The Iranians had asked for his help in reorganizing their police force. From 1942 to 1948 he commanded the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie with firmness and determination, turning it into a modern, efficient force that was loyal to the Shah and extremely hostile to the Tudeh (Communist) Party. Schwarzkopf also helped organize the secret, or security, branch of the police, the notorious
SAVAK
. During the crisis in Azerbaijan the Gendarmerie helped ensure firm government control by arresting some three hundred Tudeh Party leaders. Schwarzkopf personally showed up wherever trouble was brewing and was thus singled out as a target for special attacks from the Soviet press, which accused him of being the front man for American imperialism.
8
In 1948, Schwarzkopf was promoted to brigadier general and left Iran for a new post in West Germany.
The United States, delighted at Iran's successful resistance to Soviet encroachment, rewarded the Shah's government with new programs of technical and financial aid, including a military mission of some eighteen officers who oversaw the distribution of weapons from American war surplus stocks worth some $60 million.
9
The badly burned Soviets, meanwhile, fearful of an increased American presence on their southern border (at this time the United States was replacing Britain as the chief supporter of the Greek monarchy, in accordance with the recently announced Truman Doctrine), adopted a cautious and rather conservative attitude toward Iran. The Russians preferred a weaker British presence in Iran to an aggressive American intrusion, but there was little they could do to stop the incoming Yanks.
10
With the Russians checked and the Americans providing support, the Iranians were in a position to turn on their real enemies, the hated British. They had much to complain about. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company paid more in taxes to the British Government than it did in royalties to Iran. Equally galling, the company used the huge profits it earned in Iran to expand its oil output in other parts of the world. Further, to the British the Iranians were just another set of “wogs,” to be treated with contempt and excluded from any but the most menial posts in the operation of the Abadan refinery.