The World

Mosaddegh, talking in riddles in his barricaded mansion, had alienated all sides. ‘Our authority throughout the Middle East,’ said Churchill, ‘has been violently shaken.’ Eisenhower agreed; his advisers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, founding director of the CIA, believed that Mosaddegh was an ineffective dictator who would be forced into the arms of the Soviets. ‘Is there,’ asked Eisenhower, ‘any feasible course of action to save the situation?’

In July 1953, Roosevelt drove into Teheran with a million dollars in cash to arrange a coup against Mosaddegh: Operation Ajax. An ambitious if venal general, Fazlollah Zahedi, Mosaddegh’s former interior minister and cousin, also married to a Qajar shah’s granddaughter, was already planning his own coup and was happy to receive western help. The shah distrusted everyone, particularly the Anglo-Americans.

On 1 August, Roosevelt was smuggled on the floor of a limousine into the Golestan Palace to see the shah. Coups do not usually have soundtracks but Roosevelt chose Sinatra’s ‘Luck be a Lady’ as his theme song. He and his British SIS colleagues Woodhouse and Darbyshire massively exaggerated their own importance and competence amid this welter of conspiracies. Their portrait of all Iranians, starting with the shah and Zahedi, as childish, corrupt panickers and themselves as ice-cool, swashbuckling manipulators was delusional braggadocio and racist orientalism of the worst sort. Roosevelt revealingly codenamed the shah Boyscout, Mosaddegh Old Bugger and himself Rainmaker.

On 16 August, outside Teheran, the shah signed decrees that dismissed Mosaddegh and appointed Zahedi, but Mossadegh mobilized a mob with the aid of Communists and tried to arrest Zahedi. A mob funded by Roosevelt was vanquished, but Zahedi went underground. The coup had failed; the shah, now in danger of assassination, flew Soraya to Baghdad then to Rome.

 

 

* In 1898, a Polish physicist, Marie Skłodowska, born in Romanov Warsaw, and recently married to a French colleague, Pierre Curie, developed the theory of what she called ‘radioactivity’, revealing the enormous energy within her newly discovered elements polonium and radium, which would have immense implications for both war and medicine. In 1905 a German-Jewish physicist, the twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein, son of a failed technical entrepreneur from Württemberg, had written a paper demonstrating the physical reality of atoms and molecules, which had been known about since the early nineteenth century. He showed through his theory of relativity that energy and matter are equivalent and provided a precise equation to show how much energy is contained in a particular amount of matter. After 1933, when Einstein had escaped Germany and moved to the US, physicists had discovered that certain isotypes of uranium had the potential to sustain a chain reaction that split atoms. The energy this released could be calculated from Einstein’s formula of decades earlier. In 1939, realizing that this energy could be prodigious, Einstein had advised FDR to develop its potential. Hitler decided not to concentrate on the development of a nuclear bomb, perhaps his biggest mistake, while persecution of Jewish scientists meant that many of its creators were German refugees.

* A World Health Organization was founded that through a massive vaccination programme – 150 years after Jenner – managed to eradicate smallpox globally. As Steven Johnson writes, ‘Global eradication was as dependent on the invention of an institution like the WHO as it was on the invention of the vaccine itself.’ The Covid pandemic only underlined this.

* Mountbatten was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, descended from an illegitimate son of a Hessian prince, the marquess of Milford Haven, who had made his career in Britain, rising to command the Royal Navy. Edwina was granddaughter of a German-Jewish magnate, Sir Ernest Cassel, banker of Edward VII.

* Pakistan means Land of Purity in Urdu, but it is also an acronym for Punjab, A

fghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir and Indus-Sind, combined with the -stan suffix from Baluchistan, coined in 1933 by a law lecturer of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Rahmat Ali, and his three colleagues at the time of Round Table negotiations between Britain and Indians, none of whom embraced it. It was only after 1940 that Jinnah co-opted the idea. Rahmat got little credit and when he arrived in 1948 in the new state he had conceived, he was expelled, dying penniless soon afterwards at Cambridge.