A ringside seat for Britain’s Iran debacle

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - Britain abroad

I see that the former Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen has emerged from relative obscurity to reflect in The Guardian on the 70th anniversary of the British and American inspired coup that toppled the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Lord Owen  urges the Brits to come clean on their role in this disaster and claims to have been prescient regarding the fall of the Shah. This is interesting because he is silent about his role bolstering the Shah who was on his last legs during his tenure in the foreign office (1977-79).

Curiously I had a ring side seat to some of these events. I was a young member of the Labour Party’s International Department, grandly put in charge of Middle East affairs, among other things.

It was an extraordinarily interesting job, not least because many people and organisations in my sphere of responsibility laboured under the misapprehension that because Labour was in power, the headquarters of the Labour Party had great influence on the government of the day. They were mistaken. However because the lofty Foreign Office refused to engage with opposition forces in counties where opposition was a dangerous business, some of them attempted to get their voices heard via Labour HQ’s dingy offices located in Transport House, very close to the centre of power but only geographically.

The kleptomaniac Shah of Iran was as ruthless as he was stupid. Inconveniently, because of their dubious democratic credentials, the overwhelming bulk of the Iranian opposition came from Islamist forces, mostly in thrall to the Ayatollah Khomeini, then installed in Paris.

Demonstrations against the Shah were mounting and it was evident, even back then, that power was sliding away from the monarchy.

This, however, was not the view taken among the Foreign Office specialists who have a long tradition of siding with tyrants as long as they were viewed as being good for British trade and investment and because, well, because they are dedicated followers of the status quo however dubious it may be.

Because I must have appeared to occupy a post that was important I was contacted and subsequently spent a great deal of time with the highly personable and shrewd Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a close aide to the Ayatollah in Paris and subsequently foreign minister in the revolutionary government. Later he fell out with the increasingly extremist regime and was executed.

However back then in the late 1970s if there was anyone who the Britain’s foreign service should have been talking to it was Mr Ghotbzadeh. The Foreign Office mandarins however declined to even allow him past their front door.

It therefore seemed important to find a way of circumventing the officials and putting the government in touch with the people who stood a very good chance of taking over from the Shah. An opportunity arose when a defecting Major from the Imperial Guard was smuggled over to Paris and had much to say about what was going on inside the Shah’s palace. Finally and with no small amount effort, we managed to secure a meeting with Mr (as he was then) Owen.

The Major gave a vivid description of the disintegration of the regime, including the telling revelation that when the Shah made his rare visits outside the palace to meet members of the public, the people he actually met were confined to members of the guard dressed in civilian clothing.

Mr Owen sat through this session with something of a smirk on his face. When the Major and Mr Ghotbzadeh were bundled out of the room he told us that he was in constant touch with Her Majesty’s ambassador in Tehran, Sir Anthony Parsons, who furnished him with adamant assurances that the Shah’s position was solid, warning him not to listen to any nonsense from the Ayatollah’s aides.

Shortly after this meeting the Ayatollah, with Mr Ghotbzadeh at his side, was on a plane back to Tehran and the rest is history.  Sir Anthony was promoted.

For what it’s worth I was hideously embarrassed. The Ayatollah’s people gave up further attempts to establish a dialogue with Britain. Who knows what might have happened had they done so, at least at the earlier stages of the new regime when it was not the case that the hardliners were in control.

What I learned from this encounter and was emphasised time and again while working as a journalist in Asia, was the truly dreadful advice coming out of the Foreign Office, given in the name of protecting British interests overseas.

Some of this bad advice derived from Foreign Office mandarin hubris derived from the conceit that they knew everything worth knowing about in their areas of specialist knowledge. On top of this was an institutional belief in the idea of the longevity of regimes, regardless of their repulsiveness.

Few better illustrations of this can be found in the FCO attitude towards the dictatorship in China.  The memoirs of Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong, (The Hong Kong Diaries, Allen Lane) spell out in exhaustive detail the extent to which Foreign Office undermined his attempts at democratic reform, grounded in a belief that it is always right to make nice with dictators rather than challenge them.

Britain, during the Cameron premiership, blundered into a ‘golden age’ of relations with China which yielded many benefits for the Chinese Communist Party, not least emboldening Beijing to establish secret police stations in the UK. It was of very little benefit to Britain. Thuggish regimes see supine governments for what they are and act accordingly.

The Foreign Office prides itself on its pragmaticism and is happy to have ventriloquist dummies (also known as ministers) such as David Owen mouth words about realism. The dirty secret is that this kind of realism is in fact form of blindness.

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