In the Shadow of the Ayatollah. William Daugherty

arrival of foreign troops, was forced into exile on the island of Mauritius (later to die in South Africa), and his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the Peacock Throne in a figurehead status. During this period Iranians came to view both Soviet and British troops as uninvited transgressors who were looting their country while bringing to Iran’s frontier a war in which they had no perceptible stake.

      The thirty thousand U.S. troops committed to support the occupation were stationed in southwestern Iran, where they provided logistical support and transport for the Lend-Lease materials arriving at Persian Gulf ports.²⁷ The tripartite occupation deepened Iranians’ suspicions and hostility toward foreigners, feelings entirely merited in the north, where the Soviets used their position to subvert the provinces under their control by supporting the Iranian communist Tudeh party against the central Iranian government. Conversely, the British never received credit for the humanitarian assistance they gave to the Iranian people throughout this period.²⁸

      The U.S. government’s stake in Iran, as well as its diplomatic and military presence, concomitantly increased as a consequence of its support for Britain and the Soviet Union. The war’s end found the United States calling on its allies to end their occupation of Iran by 2 March 1946, as agreed to in the 1942 Tripartite Treaty of Albania signed by all three governments.²⁹ With the onset of the Cold War, however, the Soviet Union had no intention of honoring that agreement. And in the wake of British retrenchment in the Middle East in early 1947, the United States found itself replacing the British lion as the tacit protector of Iran.

       CHAPTER 3

       THE SOVIET CALCULUS

      The Iranian coup of 1953 was a direct consequence of the perceived Soviet threat to Iran in 1953 and its impact on U.S. national security interests. It was this potential menace that ultimately convinced Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to consider replacing the Iranian government with a regime more in line with the goals of Western governments. While some observers blessed with hindsight claim that this danger was overstated, senior U.S. government officials of both political parties had no doubt at the time that the Soviets and communism posed very real threats to U.S. national security interests and to world freedom.

      And, indeed, events in the postwar years were alarming. In 1946 and 1947 the Soviets solidified their control over Eastern Europe and local Communist parties attempted to gain control of governments in Italy, France, Turkey, and Greece. In Czechoslovakia, the elected president, Edvard Beneš, allowed Communists to participate in his government. They proceeded to undermine him, gain control of the government, and corrupt it into a Soviet satellite. In 1947, after two years of obstruction and deceit, Stalin initiated serious attempts to force the British, French, and American occupiers out of West Berlin, culminating in the blockade of 1948. In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, built from plans stolen by spies operating in the United States and Great Britain; these acts of treason helped inspire the anticommunist mania that came to be known as McCarthyism. The Soviet A-bomb also moved President Truman to consider including the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in the U.S. national security policy; he signed the approval on 31 January 1948.¹ It is also not without significance that in 1946 the Soviet intelligence service (called the MGB at the time) had intelligence officers in London, Rome, Paris, Washington, and New York while there was not a single Western intelligence officer, from any service, in Moscow.² That these hostile intelligence officers were obtaining American secrets and recruiting important American officials as well as “regular” citizens became evident with the trials of State Department officer Alger Hiss and those involved in the theft of America’s deepest secret, the atomic bomb.

      Truman and Eisenhower were further alarmed by a series of Soviet policies between 1945 and 1953 that could or would have threatened Iran. Undeniable evidence of the Soviet mischief that abounded in Europe, on the western approaches to Iran (e.g., Greece and Turkey), and inside and adjacent to Iranian frontiers generated serious worries about the future independence of Iran. Both presidents viewed U.S. security interests, in Jeffery Kimball’s words, “in holistic terms: security comprised an interrelated global system of military balances, geographic positions, political stability, ideological unity, national prestige, and economic resources.”³ And both leaders were determined to prevent further communist expansion. Meanwhile, on mainland Asia the victory of Mao Zedong turned the world’s most populous nation into a communist dictatorship. In June 1950 communist North Korea, with the (albeit reluctant) assent of Stalin, invaded South Korea, followed six months later by massive Chinese intervention in the conflict. U.S. leaders feared that the USSR would exert its growing influence in other weak spots in the world as well.⁴ In the spring of 1953 the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb and commenced a build-up of military forces.

      These actions alone were sufficient to stimulate aggressive counterpolicies on the part of the United States and its allies. Neither President Truman nor President Eisenhower could ignore a potential communist challenge in a nation of such crucial strategic importance to the West as Iran. And Ike remembered well the beating the Democratic party had taken following the communist victory in China, gaining the damning label of “the party that lost China”; he had been elevated to the presidency partly because of it. No Republican president (and probably no Democratic president, for that matter) would have been willing to lead the party that “lost Iran.”⁵

      As for Iran itself, the official record shows beyond doubt that the Soviet Union planned to bring Iran into its camp by dint of programs intended to “establish dominance through subversion and outright military occupation. . . . During the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet operations were freewheeling, blatant—and unsuccessful.”⁶ In the spring of 1945, even before the end of the war, the central government in Tehran suddenly found itself the recipient of Soviet hostility and threats when Stalin accused the Iranians of planning to assault and occupy the Soviet oil capital of Baku in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, a preposterous imputation in light of the abysmal state of the Iranian military.⁷ Next, a pro-Soviet puppet supported by the growing Tudeh party proclaimed the northwestern Iranian province of Azerbaijan to be the “autonomous Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan” and employed Soviet military forces to maintain order. Stalin imperiously informed the Iranian prime minister on 11 March 1946 that Soviet troops would remain in Azerbaijan until Iran agreed to grant the province autonomy (which the Soviets would then easily subvert). Concurrently he proposed a joint Iranian-Soviet company—with the Soviets holding 51 percent—to develop oil resources in all of the northern provinces.⁸ If that was not sufficiently ominous to Truman and the West, many in the U.S. and British governments unhappily discerned that the Soviets were additionally obsessed with the possibility that the Western allies might use Azerbaijan as a staging area for incursions into Soviet territory.⁹

      Stalin did not withdraw Soviet military units from Azerbaijan by 2 March 1946 as he had agreed to do in the 1942 Tripartite Treaty and had affirmed during the Tehran Conference of 1943. Instead, Soviet agents continued working to undermine the central Iranian authority in Azerbaijan and turn the province into an autonomous entity that could be brought into the Soviet bloc.¹⁰ During most of that year the U.S. government engaged in intensive diplomatic activities to bring about the Soviets’ withdrawal.¹¹ Had the USSR not eventually complied with the treaty and evacuated from Iran, it might have succeeded in annexing most or all of the northern third of Iran, giving the Soviets a decided geostrategic advantage against the West. The situation was so serious that President Truman remarked to Averell Harriman, “We may be at war with the Soviet Union over Iran.”¹² To the relief of the Western allies, and the Iranians, the Soviets finally withdrew from Iran in May 1946.

      The successful resolution of this crisis convinced Truman that the U.S. support had thwarted the USSR’s efforts at imperialism.¹³ This conviction was strengthened by a top secret intelligence summary dated 14 June