But politics intruded on our idyllic life in Arak and roiled the lives and opinions of our usually apolitical family. The British were determined to undo the oil industry’s nationalization, which had meant the loss of a valuable asset as well as a challenge to their imperial authority. They feared a precedent that would threaten their other holdings (indeed, President Nasser of Egypt would nationalize the Suez Canal five years later). In retaliation for the nationalization of the AIOC, the British had frozen Iran’s sterling assets, had successfully imposed a boycott on the sale of Iranian oil, and although we didn’t know it then, were secretly plotting to overthrow Mossadegh and persuade the United States to join them in the scheme. As a result of the oil boycott and assets freeze, the economy was suffering, business was slow, and imports had dwindled. Mossadegh was also locked in a struggle with the shah over power and constitutional authority; things seemed unstable as demonstrators took over the streets.
In the evenings, my relatives heatedly debated the situation. The family was divided, some loyal to Mossadegh and others to the shah; some enthusiastic about oil nationalization, others worried about the direction in which Mossadegh was taking the country: “He is allowing the left and the Communists too much power.” “No, he is the only politician who dared stand up to the British and defend Iran’s honor.” “Yes, but he is leading the country into anarchy.” So went the arguments, back and forth. I remember a younger cousin, an ardent supporter of Mossadegh, accusing his aunts and uncles of caring more about their villages than about Iran. For the two branches of the family, the Bayats and the Esfandiaris, the issues were especially fraught. Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative. His mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, a lion of a woman, was the second wife of my great-grandfather Vakil ol-Molk-e Dovvom and the grandmother of many Bayats. Mossadegh’s son, Gholam Hossein, and his wife, Malekeh, were close friends of my mother and father.
The family was proud that once again one of their own was now prime minister; and they both admired and were awed by Mossadegh’s crafty political maneuvering and the oratorical skills that turned him into a popular hero. But Mossadegh, irascible and headstrong, had also released radical forces. Workers were organizing and demanding higher wages. Talk of land reform was threatening to large landowners, including the Bayats and the Esfandiaris. The Tudeh, or Communist, Party was rising in popularity and influence. The endless political turmoil, strikes, and street demonstrations made members of the family nervous. Vigilante violence hit close to home. Brigadier General Mohammad Afshartous, Mossadegh’s police chief, who was kidnapped and murdered, had married into the Bayat family. Worried by the rising radicalism and violence, the Bayats sent a family delegation to visit Mossadegh and to beg him to curb the disorder. He heard them out but did nothing to assuage their anxieties.
Mossadegh was also challenging the shah’s authority, asserting the primacy of parliament and his prerogatives as prime minister. In July 1952, Mossadegh resigned when both he and the shah claimed the right to name the minister of war. After two days of pro-Mossadegh rioting, the shah stood down, and Mossadegh returned to office in triumph, more powerful than before. Members of the family were torn: they felt instinctive loyalty to their famous relative; some found attractive the idea championed by Mossadegh that authority should rest with the parliament and that the shah should reign and not rule. But they also feared for the stability of the throne and the long-term stability of the country; and Mossadegh’s seeming radicalism made them uneasy.
Affairs between Mossadegh and the shah, and Mossadegh and the British, came to a head in August 1953. Early that year, the British government succeeded in persuading the incoming Eisenhower administration to join their plan to overthrow Mossadegh. The CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) went to work. A reluctant shah was brought on board. Royalist officers in the army were won over; newspaper editors, members of parliament, and politicians were paid off; the cooperation of political operators who could mobilize the street crowds was secured.
The plot was set in motion in August, and after two days of seesaw battles on the streets, the royalist forces finally prevailed. The shah, who had left the country for Rome when the plot initially appeared to have failed, returned to Iran to reclaim his throne. During that turbulent week, I happened to have gone with my parents to the Caspian city of Rasht. We arrived at the very height of the crisis and saw the statue of the shah, which had dominated the main city square, lying on the ground, smashed to pieces. It had been pulled down from its pedestal by anti-royalist crowds. A few days later, after royalist forces had prevailed, someone had put the broken-off head of the shah’s statue back on its pedestal. There was the shah, albeit somewhat reduced in stature, gazing across the square again.
These momentous national events left the family with mixed feelings. They were devastated to see Mossadegh’s home ransacked, and the prime minister put on trial and jailed. But they were relieved that the threat of upheaval had been averted, and that Mossadegh’s immediate family had not been harassed. When we gathered in Arak during the summer of the following year, all talk of politics had come to an end and, at least to a child, life had returned to its normal, lazy rhythm.
I WOULD NOT COME INTO contact with such fierce political loyalties again until I attended university—in Vienna, at my mother’s insistence—five years later. Many of my fellow Iranian students were active in the opposition movement against the shah. The principal student organization, the Confederation of Iranian Students, was left of center rather than revolutionary, dedicated to the memory of Mossadegh and loyal to his political party, the National Front. But more radical currents, some Marxist, some Islamic, were already stirring among the students, and two decades of authoritarian rule in Iran would turn a future generation of students into outright revolutionaries.
While I stayed clear of the student movement (my father having instilled in me both patriotism and caution about getting mixed up in politics), my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture. I studied journalism, philosophy, and art history, but I also attended poetry readings and literary debates. I heard Sviatoslav Richter play the piano and Yehudi Menuhin play the violin; I even heard a young and yet unknown Zubin Mehta conducting a student orchestra. I spent a summer in London improving my English, and traveled to East Berlin, Munich, Rome, Venice, Paris, and Geneva. Even if I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, it was during these years that I came to appreciate the value of freedom of thought and expression, the right to travel and explore, and freedom from authoritarianism.
HOME, AGAIN
I returned to Tehran in the summer of 1964 and was hired by the publisher of Kayhan, the largest daily newspaper in the country. Since I knew French, English, and German as well as Persian, I was assigned to the foreign news desk. When the publisher, Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, known to everyone as “Doktor,” introduced me to my colleagues on the foreign news desk, I was met with skeptical stares. The foreign news veterans were all men in their early fifties, educated, but from modest backgrounds. Most of them, I later learned, were former Communists or had dabbled in left-wing ideologies popular among students and the new educated middle class in the postwar period. They had spent time in prison after the overthrow of Mossadegh, and some of them had been tortured. Times had changed, but they remained attached to their radical political beliefs.
I was twenty-four, the only woman on the foreign news desk, one of the very few in the entire newsroom. I was also from the wrong social class in their eyes, with a well-known family name and family members in senior positions in the civil service. These “enlightened radicals” clearly did not think a woman capable of doing their weighty work, and they were not comfortable having a woman in their midst. “Does this zaifeh—this weak one—understand anything?” an older reporter once sneered, using a traditional