America's Great Game (11 page)

Despite the United States’ wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, Archie’s anticommunism intensified during World War II, especially in its later stages, when he began to perceive signs that Joseph Stalin intended to expand the Soviet empire after the war was over. The possibility appalled him: in his eyes, the Nazis had never really stood a chance of defeating the United States because the appeal of German nationalism was limited by its very nature, but communism was a philosophy that transcended national boundaries. Nowhere was the danger it posed greater than in the Middle East, where, despite British attempts to shore up its empire, the colonial powers were clearly overstretched and the Soviets had spied an opportunity to relaunch the old tsarist push toward, as Archie put it, “domination of the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf.” Unfortunately, the Hyde Park Roosevelt in the White House was “apparently unaware of past Russian empire-building.”
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Dismayed as he was by FDR’s yielding approach, Archie was comforted to realize that some in government shared his more realistic view of Soviet intentions. One such was Edwin Wright, his supervisor in Egypt and a long-time foe of the Soviets; another was the US ambassador in Baghdad, Loy W. Henderson, a career foreign service officer who had previously served with distinction in Moscow and, indeed, was only in Iraq because his implacable anticommunism had made him persona non grata in Washington. Together with other officials such as George Kennan, chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy and father of the US Cold War strategy of “containment,” these men formed a distinct anticommunist network within the State Department—and exercised a
formative intellectual influence on the young Archie Roosevelt. Interestingly, Archie spent a lot of his time in Baghdad socializing with the Soviet representative there, Nikolai Klimov, an undercover officer of the NKVD (the predecessor organization to the KGB). His conversations with the Russian spy, conducted over numerous glasses of vodka, were friendly, even fraternal: Klimov once told Archie that he reminded him of his younger brother, who had died fighting the Nazis. Still, the American’s hostility to communism was in no way softened by these encounters; Klimov, evidently a sensitive man underneath his pallid exterior, struck Archie as a pathetic victim of an inhumane system. Such perceptions were common currency among anticommunists in the US foreign service at the time. George Kennan, for example, hated the Soviet state yet loved the Russian people. Archie also shared with Kennan a profound admiration for high Russian culture, reading Dostoevsky and Pushkin for pleasure (in the original, of course, not in translation). Even before the end of World War II, then, Archie Roosevelt was looking at the world through a Cold War lens.
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Archie returned home a few months after the Japanese surrender, in December 1945, joining his wife, KW, and their son, Tweed, now a boisterous four-year-old, for a family Christmas in New Hampshire. It was not a festive occasion. After the desert sun, Archie found his snowy New England surroundings depressing, and he and his wife were soon arguing about their future together. Having expected that Archie would pursue a university career in the United States, KW was dismayed to learn that he had turned down a number of academic offers (including a personal invitation from the eminent Arab American scholar Philip Hitti to join him at Princeton) and was considering a return to the Middle East. She much preferred the contemplative to the active life, and she urged Archie to follow in the footsteps of her personal hero, the poet T. S. Eliot, not some crass power politician like Loy Henderson. “I don’t think your comparison . . . is fair,” Archie responded. “Eliot . . . can do nothing about Russia and . . . the coming crisis except to whistle in the dark.” Biding his time (and turning down another job offer, this time of a State Department desk directly under Henderson), Archie waited for an assignment that would put him as close as possible to the coming battle with communism. In January 1946 he got it, thanks in part to the intercession of Ed Wright: another posting as assistant military attaché, this time in Iran, the scene of his revelation the previous year. He arrived in Tehran in March, having vaguely agreed with KW that she and Tweed
would join him there some time afterward. Archie’s marriage, entered into at a young age perhaps as much out of duty as out of love, was beginning to unravel. His mission to Iran was an act of both service to his country and flight from his domestic life.
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FOR A CENTURY AND A
half before Archie’s arrival there, Iran had been a playing field in the Great Game. Its location, adjoining Afghanistan (the classic arena of Anglo-Russian rivalry), British India, and Russia itself, ensured this. So too did its vast oil reserves, “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams,” as Winston Churchill described them in the 1920s. After the Bolshevik Revolution, it was the British who held the upper hand in Persia, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company reaping fabulous profits from its controlling stake in the country’s petroleum industry. During World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union, now allies, marched into Iran and deposed the shah, Reza Shah Pahlavi, ostensibly because he had been courting Nazi Germany but really in order to protect their control of the country’s oil fields and open a corridor for moving Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR (the operation witnessed by Kim Roosevelt when he visited Tehran in 1944). Ordinary Iranians, heirs to a millennia-old civilization that had nurtured some of the greatest leaders, thinkers, and poets in human history, felt a deep sense of national humiliation and dreamed of a future free from foreign depredations on their soil.
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As in the Arab world, Americans were initially seen as potential allies in Iran’s struggle against Western imperialism. The United States’ origins lay in a war of national liberation from British colonial rule, and individual Americans, such as the Presbyterian missionary Howard Baskerville, had defended Iran’s own Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911 against Russian-backed royalist forces. The early twentieth century had also seen several American economic missions visit the country, a practice repeated during World War II. (It was one such mission that provided Kim Roosevelt with cover during his 1944 visit.) Members of the Roosevelt administration even talked about the Allied occupation as a model of the principles enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, including the self-determination and territorial integrity of small nations. Small wonder, then, that there was friction between British and American representatives in wartime Tehran, rather like that witnessed in Cairo after the arrival of the OSS.
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By 1945, however, irritation with the British was giving way to alarm about the Soviets. Like its neighbor Iraq, Iran was troubled by secessionist movements in its outlying provinces, and the Soviets appeared to be trying to harness these centrifugal forces for their own expansionist purposes. In the fall, nationalists in the northern province of Azerbaijan, still under Soviet occupation, established a new communist government backed by Moscow. Meanwhile, Kurds in the mountains between Azerbaijan and Iraq began taking similar steps toward establishing their own independent nation-state. Were these developments portents of a Soviet annexation of Iran?

In hindsight, it seems clear that Stalin’s postwar ambitions in Iran were in fact limited to protecting the Soviet Union’s vulnerable southern borders and, possibly, obtaining an oil concession in the north of the country like that enjoyed by the British in the Abadan oil field to the south. Indeed, Moscow was quite prepared to rein in Azeri and Kurdish nationalists if they threatened to get carried away in their revolutionary zeal. In late 1945, however, observers in Washington, a city grown noticeably less friendly toward the Soviet Union since the death of FDR earlier in the year, were less inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to the Russians. “The Soviet Union seems to be determined to break down the structure which Great Britain has maintained so that Russian power and influence can sweep . . . across Iran and through the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean,” observed Loy Henderson, now back in the State Department running its Near East and Africa division, in December. This analysis appeared to be confirmed in the first week of March 1946, when the date for the withdrawal of Allied forces from Iran passed without the Red Army leaving. Two weeks earlier, the State Department had received George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” with its foundational Cold War assessment of the sources of Soviet conduct. On March 5, Winston Churchill, in the course of his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, had referred specifically to Russian designs on Persia. Against this background, the nonevacuation of the Soviet troops seemed to fulfill the worst predictions of the State Department’s anticommunists. From having been a theater of the Great Game, Iran was fast becoming the battlefield for the first US-Soviet confrontation in the Cold War.
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“It was just after this dangerous week,” recalled Archie Roosevelt later, “that my bold British pilot landed me through close, thick cloud cover in the caldron of Tehran.” Archie had been able to observe the
breakaway movements in northwestern Iran during the final days of his previous posting in Iraq, and his assessment of the situation there was every bit as dire as the prognostications of the State Department’s Middle East hands. “The Russians appeared to be on the verge of realizing a centuries-old dream, the conquest of Iran,” he wrote later. “I believed that I could somehow be a part of an effort to block them.” Plunging into the fray, Archie immediately caught a ride north to observe Soviet troop movements for himself, flying in the same US military plane that had borne him to Tehran on his revelatory trip of the previous year. Piloted by air attaché Carl Garver, a flying ace of rugged character and appearance, the plane dipped to three hundred feet, and Archie “saw the white faces of Soviet soldiers looking up at us beside some twenty tanks.”
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In the event, the evacuation crisis ended as quickly as it had arisen, with the Soviet leadership agreeing to withdraw a few weeks later. However, Iran was not out of danger yet. Azerbaijan remained under the rule of the communist-controlled government in the city of Tabriz, and Kurdish nationalists had established a similar entity in Mahabad. Meanwhile, in Tehran itself, the Iranian Communist Party, or Tudeh, was working to undermine the government of Reza Shah’s successor, his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, “a weak, washed-out-looking young man” (in Archie’s description) who seemed ill-equipped to withstand the terrible pressures on his country. It did not help that the new shah’s prime minister was the (again, according to Archie) “devious” Ahmad Qavam al-Saltaneh, an old nationalist who was ready to appease the Soviets if it suited his personal interests, or that Qavam was in turn being advised by his even more slippery éminence grise, the “sinister” Mozaffar Firuz, whose main aim in life seemed to be to deliver Iran up to the Kremlin.
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Or such, anyway, was Archie Roosevelt’s assessment of the situation. Historians writing today with access to records available only since the end of the Cold War tend to favor a more nuanced interpretation, with Iranian communists pursuing a somewhat different agenda from Moscow’s, and Prime Minister Qavam attempting to steer a middle course between left and right, Tudeh and shah, designed to preserve Iran’s independence and integrity. Little of this complexity, though, was evident at the time to Archie Roosevelt, who saw only an existential threat to Iran and, therefore, the West itself. His thoughts about US policy toward the Middle East were changing accordingly. A few years earlier, he had envisioned an American approach that was fundamentally different from the imperial European past. Now the threat of communist
expansionism was such that Americans had no option but to throw in their lot with, if not France, then at least with Britain, whether that meant backing the British position in the region or having (as Archie put it) “to some extent [to] replace the power of a fading British Empire.” Either scenario meant Archie compromising his earlier vision of a new kind of Western policy based on Americans’ unique history of noncolonial engagement with the Arab and Muslim worlds.
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Archie’s behavior changed as well. Whereas in Africa he had spent as much time as possible with local inhabitants, among them many future Arab nationalist leaders, during his tour of Iran he seemed instead to prefer the company of his American colleagues, who emerge from the pages of his autobiography as a small band of ideological brothers-in-arms. And while the tone of charming self-deprecation present throughout his memoirs is still detectable in these passages, a new note of masculine bravado, even swagger, has appeared. In one passage, for example, Archie describes a trip to Tabriz in the company of the US consul Robert Rossow, “one of a handful of men whose efforts halted Soviet expansion.” With Carl Garver at the controls, the plane swooped down and buzzed some Azeri troops standing by their trenches. Detained briefly at the airport by a hostile group of officials, the Americans obtained their release when Rossow implied that Archie was a son of FDR. The party then proceeded to a Tabriz restaurant in the company of some British comrades and swigged champagne while an orchestra regaled them with wartime Western ditties. After this adventure, Archie was elected a member of Rossow’s Azerbaijan Club. As he explained in his memoirs, admission was based on a points system. “There were points for days spent in Azerbaijan, hours under arrest, being targets of gunfire. Twenty points were required for membership, which could be attained at one stroke if you were killed trying out for it.”
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It was as if Archie were now joining in the Great Game, both philosophically and emotionally. Some of the reasons for his doing so are obvious—his Anglophilia, his anticommunism, his Rooseveltian urge to be the first into this new world war—but another factor was also at work. Archie simply never developed the same love for Iranians as he had for Arabs. Indeed, in his memoirs, they suffer badly from the comparison. Whereas Arabs had a “democratic tradition,” exemplified by the “majlis, the tribal deliberative body,” Iranians had always been “dominated by an all-powerful khan” or “autocratic shah,” and so had never known “anything like democracy.” Worse than that, Iran
was, Archie believed, the source of all things “slavish” and “oriental” in the Middle East: eunuchs, women’s veils, self-abasement before the ruler—“all the despotic splendor of the East.” The lesson for the present day was unpleasant but unavoidable. While the Arab world had potential for democratization, it was only “idealists who hoped for true democratic government in Iran.”
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