Land of Insecurity

In the spring of 1946, a little man named Hussein Ala, envoy from Iran, stood before the U.N. Security Council and unflinchingly insisted that the Russian army get out of his country. Sullenly, the Red army withdrew. The Communist puppet government of Azerbaijan in northern Iran collapsed. This was the first important postwar setback for Communist aggression--and the first great post-war symbol of the free world's strength. Thoughtful men, while they rejoiced, realized that the victory would be empty unless the U.S. moved rapidly to aid Iran, which was economically prostrate and politically shaky.

Five years later, the vast reservoir of nope and trust created in Iran is running dry. The danger from Russia today is greater than in 1946. The present Iran picture is one of all-round distrust between Americans, British and Iranians. Desperately and suicidally, the Iranians are back in an old game that they cannot win--trying to play the Russians off against the Western powers. Divided and discouraged, Iran lies defenseless--and the U.S. is doing nothing to protect it.

If the Communists grab Iran, they will get an asset far more valuable than Korea. Through Iran lie Russia's paths to the rest of the Middle East oil: the great fields of Iraq and Arabia, and the Bahrein-Sidon, Kirkuk-Haifa and Kirkuk-Tripoli pipelines (see map). With U.S. encouragement, Western Europe depends more & more on Middle East rather than Western Hemisphere oil. This shift is economically and strategically sensible, provided that the Western powers intend to defend the Middle East. Fact is, however, that they show no serious sign of such an intention. Turkey is the only country in the area whose defenses are in good shape and Turkey can be outflanked by a Soviet thrust through northern Iran and around to Turkey's southern frontier. The historic invasion road to India also lies through Iran. Yet no effort is being made or even planned for coordinating the defenses of the Middle East nations.

TIME Correspondent Enno Hobbing recently toured Iran, strategic key to the whole region. The following report on its sorry--but not hopeless--condition is based on Robbing's report.

"I Can Teach My Father." Revolutions usually take place while things are getting better, but not getting better fast enough. Iranians have seen something of Western ways and techniques. They are learning rapidly that their misery is unnecessary, their lot unjust. This means that Iran is not only poverty-stricken and disease-ridden; it is also in a ferment of insecurity that runs from the peasant in his windowless hovel to the young Shah in his palace. Everybody knows that the future will be very different, but nobody has any confidence that the immediate future will be better for him. Unless economic improvement is speeded up unless the people get a real political stake in their country, Communism will reap in Iran what Western influence and Western aid sowed.

Western influence--both as progress and as ferment--is most conspicuous in the capital, Teheran (pop. almost 1,000,000). Some sections have wide boulevards and modernistic buildings; in others, narrow streets run between mud-brick hovels. Cadillacs and ratty taxis run through swarms of wailing peddlers.

Here & there in the countryside are other physical signs of Western influence. The village of Mamazan, for instance shows the beginnings of what could be the Iran of tomorrow. Its peasants, though almost as poor as their fellows, look clean and confident. Their houses are spick & span. Farm animals are kept outside. A deep well pump with simple brick filters assures clean drinking water--a rarity. (Even in Teheran, the drinking water runs through filthy gutters.) In Mamazan, Hobbing saw peasants doing voluntary work on a new community project, a bathhouse. He asked them if they minded the extra labor. They pushed back their round caps and looked puzzled. Said one: Why should we? It's for a bath."

Mamazan has a tractor. Grain yields have doubled, cucumber yields multiplied by six. DDT saved the latest melon crop. A young American, Theodore Noe, is the organizer of Mamazan's progress. He represents the Near East Foundation, a private organization backed by voluntary contributions. The N.E.F. put up $20,000 to help Mamazan. Impressed by what the $20,000 bought, Iran's government put a whopping $400,000 into the N.E.F.'s work A ten-year-old who had gone to Noe's school said proudly: "I can teach my father how to transplant lettuce and how to keep the cabbage from freezing."

Near ancient Isfahan, a U.S. Government-sponsored Point Four project is trying to improve a farming district aptly described as "worse than anything in India." At Shiraz, wealthy Iranians are paying for the country's first city water mains. In many regions, especially along the Caspian shore, every building and cottage has the sign "DDT."

"Intrigue Becomes the Pattern." Yet all this is only a drop of progress in a bucket of despair. The fields and villages of Iran are owned by several hundred feudal families who take from two-fifths to four-fifths of what the peasants grow. Under those terms, the peasant is neither able nor eager to improve the land or h's farming methods.

The peasants know what is needed.

When Correspondent Hobbing asked a group of them what they wanted, the answers came fast. "Water, tools, seed, schools, doctors." And they know, as their fathers did not, how their ragged plight looks to the rest of the world. When Hobbing asked a group of peasants if they had ever been to a movie, they laughed. Said one: "Why should we? Aren't we show enough ourselves?"

Most landlords feel no more interest in Iran's future than the peasants. The rich bank their profits outside Iran instead of planting them back on the land in improvements. To say that Iran's landlords are greedy is to miss the point. They too are insecure--without confidence in Britain and the U.S., or in their own government, or in the restless Iranian people, or in each other.

The Majlis, Iran's Parliament, represents cliques of landlords and courtiers, competing for patronage and graft. To satisfy their appetite for jobs, Iran has a swollen civil service of 250,000, about three times as many as it needs. The Majlis members are too afraid of the people to risk reforms, too afraid of the national administration to give it the power it needs. The Majlis cannot even bring itself to vote an annual budget; it passes each month a bill appropriating a twelfth of the budget. Obviously, even efficient civil servants have no scope to plan and operate on that basis. A government commission recently issued a report dividing prominent officials into three classes: 1) honest and efficient, 2) honest but unnecessary, and 3) corrupt or unworthy.

The executive branch is riddled with bribe-takers and other grafters. Again, the reason is insecurity. Said a foreign diplomat who knows Iran: "Political fortunes are so fluctuating that officials hedge their bets. Life in or out of office is so uncertain that money seems the only sure thing; hence bribery flourishes. Where nothing and nobody appear trustworthy, intrigue becomes the pattern of action, and orderly government becomes impossible."

The Royal Family. Atop this heap of corruption sits the royal family. Every member of it is well and painfully aware of the fact that the dynasty was founded only 25 years ago. Iranian peasants are attached to the idea of monarchy, but even they know that the founder of the present line, Reza Shah Pahlevi, was a sergeant in the Iranian army, a "strong man" raised to power by British influence after World War I, broken and exiled by the British in World War II.

His son, the present Shah, is intelligent and devoted to the welfare of his country, around which he pilots his own B17. This week he announced that he would split up the royal estates, estimated at 1,000 villages of 25,000 people, and sell small farms to the peasants who work the land. But the Shah of Shahs is as insecure and distrustful as all other elements in Persian life. In 1946 he had at his side Iran's best elder statesman, Ahmad Qavam-es-Sultaneh, the Premier who resisted the Russian threat and regained Azerbaijan. The Shah, however, could not stand Qavam's growing popularity and prestige. He dismissed him, and today wily old (75) Qavam sits in his Teheran villa, plotting against his master.

After Qavam, the Shah had a succession of weak and venal governments, many of whose members were appointed through the influence of his sister, pretty Princess Ashraf. She likes to reward her favorites with jobs, especially in the Finance Ministry. Her love for money meets few obstacles, but her love of power recently received a setback when the Shah asked his other sister, Princess Chams, to pick a bride for him. Princess Chams is retiring and sweet, the exact opposite of Princess Ashraf. The latter was enraged when Chams chose Soraya Esfandiari, daughter of a chief of the powerful Bakhtiari tribe, to be the Shah's second wife. (He divorced his first, the beautiful Fawzia, a sister of Egypt's unbeautiful King Farouk, partly because she did not produce a son.) The Shah and Soraya (whose mother was German) were to be married last Dec. 27; the wedding was postponed because the bride got typhoid. Present plans call for a Feb. 12 wedding.

The Shah's brother, Prince Abdor Reza, is a graduate of Harvard (1947). He takes his public duties seriously and is a good influence on the Shah. They quarreled a few years ago, then made it up. Princess Ashraf was incensed when she heard that the Shah and Abdor Reza had taken to having lunch and playing billiards together again. No good word is spoken in Teheran of two other brothers.

Mother of this brood is Tajomolouk Pahlevi, icy-eyed widow of "the strong man." Her main contribution is to further undermine the Shah's self-confidence by reminding him that he is not the man his father was. This encourages him to make forays into Iranian politics, beyond the limits of the constitutional monarchy.

A Bang-Up Job. Some of these efforts have good results. Last year the Shah picked as Premier his close friend, Ali Razmara, who had done a bang-up job as army chief of staff. The Majlis resents Razmara, as it resents any kind of effective government. "I have to spend 75% of my time fighting off intrigues," the new Premier said. In spite of the Majlis and the Princess Ashraf, Premier Razmara began getting things done.

Then the Shah, suspicious of Razmara's growing popularity, turned against him. He forced Razmara to take two cabinet members he did not want. Razmara's old army division was merged with the Imperial Guard, and many of Razmara's army friends were shifted out of key posts. Caught between the resentful Majlis and the suspicious Shah, Razmara is still hanging on, still serving his country well. (Princess Ashraf wants his job to go to an old friend of hers, Ali Soheily, now Iranian minister to London.)

When Razmara was chief of staff, he worked closely and well with a U.S. military mission. Today, Iran has a gendarmery of 20,000 and a conscript army of 130,000 scattered across the land to maintain internal security. Its stubby, wiry infantrymen wear U.S. uniforms or British battle dress, carry old U.S. bolt-action rifles. The government has bought $26 million worth of surplus U.S. military stocks, mainly M-24 tanks, light artillery and trucks. The two air brigades fly ancient British Audax and Hawker Hurricane fighters, plus a few P-47s. A tiny navy patrols along the Caspian and the Persian Gulf. The U.S., in Iran, has made no effort comparable to its military-aid program in Turkey. Granted that Iran has no such military tradition as Turkey's, a well-equipped Iranian army could make an invasion costly to the Russians.

An able U.S. military man stationed in Teheran estimates that mountainous Iran poses such terrain, communications and logistics problems that Soviet Russia would need 100,000 to 200,000 men to reach and exploit the Iranian oilfields. The stronger the Iranian army, the more soldiers Russia would have to draw from elsewhere, and the higher price it would pay. Improving the basically footslogging Iranian army would require relatively small financial assistance. A greater military gamble in Iran would seem justified.

The Reluctant Neutral. The military gamble, however, would be justified only if tied up with effective economic and political policies by the Western powers. The present lack of coordination between British and U.S. policy in Iran is a scandal worse than any produced by the Iranians themselves. The Americans have the right goal: a more prosperous Iran with a strong central government. At heart, the British do not accept this goal. For decades they divided Iran with the Russians. In recent years, chief British interest in Iran has centered on the great oilfields and refinery at Abadan. The British, who are presently deadlocked with the Iranian government in negotiations over oil royalties, are accustomed to feeling that the poorer Iran is and the weaker its government, the easier it will be to deal with. The U.S. has not succeeded in pressuring the British and Iranians into agreement.

For lack of British payments and because of the inefficiency of the Iranian government, Iran's great seven-year plan for development with the aid of eleven top U.S. engineering and management firms was abandoned (TIME, Jan. 22). There is little or no coordination between U.S. Government and business in Teheran, and even agencies of the U.S. Government distrust and rival one another in Teheran. The present ambassador, Henry F. Grady, gets little backing from the State Department. Iranians pinned their hopes on a $100 million loan from the Export-Import Bank. Last October a loan for only $25 million was approved--and it is still tied up in Washington red tape.

Iran no longer believes in the U.S. The evidence of recent weeks is plain. A $20 million Soviet-Iran trade treaty was signed on Nov. 3. Radio Teheran stopped broadcasting the Voice of America. The official Iranian news agency for the first time is distributing handouts from Tass, the Soviet news agency. Ten leaders of the Tudeh (Communist) Party were allowed to "escape" from jail, and the party, though illegal, is growing. Asked whether his country was neutral, Razmara, who wants to be a friend of the U.S., replied: "We cannot take the one part or the other part." Last week, when the first shipment (15 Sherman tanks, 18 howitzers) of an estimated $10 million U.S. military-aid program arrived in Iran, it was met with distinct coolness by officials and people who are afraid such aid will provoke the Russians.

A Turned Back. So Iran is slipping away--needlessly. A little money (compared to what the U.S. is spending elsewhere) and a lot of leadership might hold it, and with it the rest of the Middle East. It has thousands of well-educated, patriotic men (including Razmara and the Shah) who want their country to have progress and independence. They cannot swing it alone. They need the U.S., and the U.S. gives them only promises, vacillation and contradiction. The U.S., in its turn, needs Iran--but the State Department, in a calamitous failure of foreign policy, has turned its back.

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