“Jamie, we’re gonna have to get a taxi instead,” Leyla turned to me and said from the back of Pedram’s car as we careened through the streets of northern Tehran.
Soon after setting off together for the bazaar, it had become apparent that there was something of a personality clash between Leyla and Pedram. This had boiled over into a heated discussion in Farsi culminating in Leyla’s comment to me. I had no idea what was going on and felt somewhat caught in the middle. I was staying at Pedram’s house and therefore felt obliged to spend time with him, but on the other hand had also promised to go out with Leyla and Ricardo, whose last day it was in Tehran.
Pedram pulled over, and as Leyla and I got out, he asked me to call him later in the day. As his car wheels spun off, disappearing into the torrent of traffic racing along the road, Leyla gave me her take on the situation. Pedram, she said, had wanted to go and pick up a CD at his friend’s house in the north of the city and didn’t really want to go to the bazaar with us but wouldn’t admit it. She said that by the time we’d gone all the way to his friend’s place it would be too late to see Ricardo. She added that she thought Pedram was an idiot.
Without further ado, we headed to a little taxicab office, which Leyla had a special prepaid taxi card for. When the driver asked our location, she said “Imam Khomeini Square.” The driver turned around and said something in Farsi. She translated, saying that he’d told her not to call it Imam Khomeini Square as Khomeini was no Imam and had no right to use the title. He clearly didn’t like Khomeini but told her this in a friendly enough way. We got down to the square, driving past the missiles and other displays we’d seen the night before.
After going around in circles for a bit, we managed to locate Ricardo’s hotel, where he was waiting outside. With Ricardo on board, we headed for the bazaar. On the way there, our taxi approached a mullah, standing by the side of a the road. On approaching the mullah, the taxi driver slowed down and yelled something at him through the open window. Leyla began laughing herself silly and took a minute to compose herself before she managed to translate: “I hope all the shit in the world falls down on you and washes you away.”
Ricardo and I were hugely surprised at the driver’s audacity and apparent fearlessness in abusing the establishment. He then went on to say, Leyla translated for us, that his dream was to see all the mullahs hanging from the trees, and to one day see them walk naked through the streets. He continued and told us that mullahs find it very difficult to get a taxi in Tehran as none of the drivers will pick them up. He was a real character and told Leyla to tell Ricardo and me to inform everybody about this when we got back to our own countries. He shook our hands warmly with a huge beaming smile as we left the car for the sprawling bazaar.
Although our taxi driver was fervently against the government, there was, apparently, a lot of support for the establishment amongst the men running the Tehran Bazaar, which we were about to enter. These men are, on the whole, extremely wealthy, well-connected individuals who wield a massive collective political power, with the vast majority of them being ultraconservative in both religion and politics. Traditionally, the Tehran Bazaar is the Iranian equivalent of Wall Street, where staple commodity prices are fixed. Some estimates put Tehran’s Bazaar in control of up to a third of the country’s total trade and retail output. And many bazaar merchants, the bazaris, have access to foreign currency and can give loans just as easily as a bank. The Shah tried to reduce the enormous power held by the bazaris by creating new roads running through the bazaar, and providing subsidies to their competitors running supermarkets. He also formed state purchasing organizations to handle some of the products sold in the bazaar. Predictably, during the revolution the bazaris got their own back by shutting up shop, which caused chaos in the national economy.
The streets outside the bazaar were crowded, but inside it was several times worse. There was a sea of people, and if you stopped for a second, you got swept along with the current. It was a confusing labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels, which almost formed a city in its own right. It contained hotels, mosques, several banks, a church, and even its own fire station. We managed to escape the worst of the crowds and found a more secluded spot specializing in wonderful Persian carpets.
This was the first time I’d been out during the day with Leyla in the city, and I noticed now how much attention she drew from every single male she passed. Simply walking through the bazaar, she turned heads all over the place. I pointed this out to her and she said, “Iranians have a staring problem.”
She told me that when she first came to Iran she found it difficult, but now she was used to it. It was interesting to see her deal with guys, who, perhaps like Pedram, assume she’ll be all submissive and respectful to them. Instead she was a real haggler, confident, and took no crap from anyone. It was great to see. She gave Ricardo and me a tip when negotiating for anything in Iran, whether for goods in a bazaar or a hotel room, which was to make your first offer just under half of the asking price and then work from there.
We spent the next hour just wandering, browsing, and soaking up the place. We passed hundreds of people gathered around a speaker system clapping and jumping about enthusiastically. It looked great fun but even Leyla didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. We left the intensity of the bazaar for the streets outside and walked to a lovely little restaurant opposite the sprawling British embassy. The embassy was set in a huge enclosed parkland right in the center of Tehran. It looked far too big for such a small island nation and must have dated back to when Britain, or “the old fox” as it is referred to in Iran, was far more important and really was a superpower. In a moment of fantasy, I imagined popping inside the embassy for a nice cup of tea and a “good to see you, old boy” chat with the ambassador.
Instead, I settled for a large cola in the restaurant opposite—a charming place called Café Naderi, which Leyla said had once been the preserve of writers, artists, and intellectuals in the days before the revolution. The food was great and we all got stuck into a juicy steak with creamy mushroom sauce, served with chunky fries and carrots. Leyla struggled with hers, so I helped out and polished off the rest along with mine. By the time I’d finished, I was feeling very full, very fat, but very satisfied. When it came time to pay, Leyla tried to treat us but without the support of her mother or Iranian friends, she didn’t have the necessary back up and gave in to my and Ricardo’s insistence that we pick up the tab.
When we handed over our money to the waiter, he looked at it, then back at us and stated simply, “Tip!” whilst gesturing for us to cough up more. We’d already left the standard 10 percent but he wanted extra and justified this by telling Leyla that we’d caused him a lot of trouble—the lying prick. He got his extra tip though, as we all quite admired his cheek.
During the meal, Ricardo had been selling me on the idea of catching a flight south instead of getting the bus and, although it seemed at odds with all the hitching I’d done to get to Iran, I decided to go for it. With this in mind we all went down to a travel agency, and I booked a flight to the jewel of ancient Persia, the historic city of Esfahan, which for many visitors is the highlight of Iran, and then on from there, a couple of days later, to the city of Shiraz.
After some quick browsing around an old antiques shop, Ricardo had to leave to catch his flight. Leyla was sad to see him go, and so was I, but at least I’d get to see him again down south. After Ricardo’s departure, Leyla and I went for a drink together and chatted away until I thought it time to give Pedram a call. Pedram, it turned out, was nearby and said he’d be with us in fifteen minutes. Leyla seemed slightly disappointed on hearing of his close proximity, so in an attempt to smooth things over between them, I invited her to join us when he turned up. She declined and told me straight that she didn’t like him. Again I wondered what they’d said to each other in the car this morning. I also invited her to the illegal party tonight but she was even less keen on this, and told me to be careful as parties got raided all the time. I thanked her profusely for all her generosity, asked her to pass on my regards to her mother, and wished her all the best at University in New Zealand. We parted when Pedram arrived.
He turned up with Behzad and Ali and explained that after meeting up with the other lads, they were going to take me to see the Shah’s former summer palace. The palace was located in northern Tehran and we drove all the way there only to discover it was closed. It was set in hilly parkland and contained two main palaces called the White Palace and the Green Palace, as well as several other specialist museums. In particular, I wanted to see the White Palace and the odd sight out front—two huge towering bronze boots, which are the only remnants of a giant statue of Reza Shah. Also on the “to see” list at the palace complex was a 1,539-square-foot carpet woven with 150 knots per square inch, making it one of the biggest carpets ever made.
The White Palace’s recent history was also of great interest to me; it was the location where the Shah had hosted leading CIA agents when plotting the 1953 coup to remove the democratically elected government of prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from power.
The coup was initially proposed to the CIA by Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, in response to Mossadegh’s proposal to nationalize Iran’s vast oil wealth to better the lives of the Iranian people, as opposed to lining the pockets of the British. Iran’s oil had up until then been controlled solely by the British through the only oil company operating in Iran, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (later to become BP). Mossadegh stated at the time that the Iranian people “were opening a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon.”
Although originally a British proposal, in the end the coup turned out to be much more an American operation than an Anglo one. The coup plan, known as Operation Ajax by the Americans and Operation Boot by the British, was to manufacture huge internal unrest in Iran by carrying out a wave of CIA-led shootings, bombings, and attacks, which would then be blamed through gray propaganda on Mossadegh. Many of the manufactured “terrorist” attacks would target Iran’s religious establishment in an attempt to turn the country’s religious community against him. The Shah, who was in on the deal, would then issue royal decrees dismissing Mossadegh from power while a handpicked army general would spearhead the actual coup itself and take Mossadegh’s place.
The CIA bombings went ahead, one of which targeted a cleric’s home. Muslim leaders who opposed Mossadegh were threatened by CIA-hired thugs in order to tarnish his name and turn the people against him. Mosques were stoned and rocks hurled at priests. At the same time, the CIA arranged for leading newspapers to carry articles denouncing Mossadegh’s supposed brutality, and one newspaper owner was granted a whopping personal loan of $45,000 to bring him on side.
But when pro-Shah soldiers were sent to arrest Mossadegh, they were themselves arrested, and one of the top generals who was in on the plot lost his nerve and fled. The Shah did the same the next day, leaving for Iraq without so much as packing a suitcase.
The coup looked to all intents and purposes to be over, but Mossadegh unknowingly played into the CIA’s hands by dissolving parliament. The CIA responded by holding a “council of war” in the U.S. embassy compound with their prominent Iranian agents to discuss the situation. They decided that all was not lost. From the American embassy vaults came a million dollars with which to rent a mob and arrange for a leading cleric to quickly travel to the holy city of Qom and lead a call against Mossadegh.
The next day, a nine-hour bloody battle raged in Tehran between soldiers supporting Mossadegh and those in support of the Shah. Three hundred people lost their lives and many hundreds more were wounded before Mossadegh’s forces were finally overcome. The Shah returned to Iran and took control of the country for the next twenty-six years.
With the Shah now in the driver’s seat, a new oil deal was struck. The U.S. and Britain shared a 40 percent stake each in Iran’s oil wealth with the rest going to other countries in a new international consortium. The Shah thanked the U.S. by letting them do as they pleased in Iran, and the country soon became dotted with U.S. military and intelligence sites. For their part, the Iranian people got abysmal poverty and the terrifying Iranian secret police, the SAVAK, who were tutored in the tactics of torture by the CIA, and established under their and Israeli guidance. Their appalling methods included the insertion of broken glass and boiling water into detainees’ rectums.
The Shah’s grip on power over the next quarter of a century was only possible with huge U.S. arms and support. A surprised Senator Hubert Humphrey stated, “Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid—it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. The Army isn’t going to fight the Russians. It’s planning to fight the Iranian people.”
The backlash to all this led in 1979 to the Islamic Revolution and massive anti-Americanism. This in turn led to the Iranian hostage crisis, where fifty-two U.S. embassy staff were held captive by students who stormed the embassy compound that had been used to orchestrate much of the 1953 coup. The students declared that they had unmasked a “nest of spies” that had been manipulating Iran for decades. The hostage crisis, along with the new regime’s open hard-line hostility toward America, contributed greatly to the spread of Islamic militancy and Iran’s pariah status in the West.
Although oil had been the coup’s real motivating factor, the “textbook” Western justification for the CIA’s action was that Mossadegh had to be removed to prevent a communist takeover of Iran since he was something of a communist sympathizer. Mossadegh was actually a rich feudal-minded Persian who had not only kept the ban on the Iranian Communist Party in place but had brutally crushed one of their demonstrations. He had also successfully campaigned against the lingering Soviet occupation of northern Iran after the Second World War, and had been instrumental in parliament’s rejection of proposals to form a joint Soviet and Iranian oil company. In 1951, Time magazine described Mossadegh as “the Iranian George Washington” and named him “Man of the Year.”
A classified CIA document obtained by the New York Times that details the secret history of the coup had the following to say about the day hundreds lost their lives, the CIA successfully destroyed democracy in Iran, and in its place was installed a barbaric police state: “It was a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.”