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Forewarned. The machinery of power had long ago passed to Mossadegh; almost all the Shah's allies and strongpoints had been enveloped and destroyed. At the end, only 700 of the Imperial Guard and one brigade were loyal to the palace. Shortly before midnight they donned helmets and took up arms against Mossadegh. They arrested three Cabinet members, including Foreign Minister Hussein Fatemi. With a few truckloads of troops, a colonel of the Imperial Guard set off for Mossadegh's house, with royal orders for the Premier's dismissal. Mossadegh's forces had been tipped off and were waiting. The Imperial Guards walked into a solid wall of tanks, trucks and jeeps around Mossadegh's house.
Troops "loyal to Mossadegh surrounded the Palace and Parliament building. By 5 a.m. it was all over, not a shot fired. In the face of Mossadegh's overwhelming control, the Shah's belated assertion of his constitutional prerogative was made to seem like an attempted coup, and Mossadegh, the usurper, to personify law & order. Belatedly, from a hideout in the mountains, a brave follower of the Shah's, General Fazlollah Zahedi, onetime Senator, proclaimed himself Premier. He had royal decrees from the Shah, he said, dismissing Mossadegh. As recently as a year ago, Teheran would have rung with the news; now it caused no stir.
In northern Iran, at Ramsar on the Caspian Sea, where he and his pretty Queen were vacationing, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi heard the news of the failure. With Queen Soraya,* he boarded his private twin-engine plane and flew to safety in Bagdad (where he landed unrecognized, asking the name ' of a good hotel). In Teheran, Mossadegh, confined to his iron cot and closely guarded, counted one more obstacle out of his way. Now, though his unhappy country has lost one more source of stability, there was little left to challenge him except the Communist-led mobs, who now sing his praises, but whose leaders await his downfall to grab power for themselves.
* His second wife. The first, Egyptian Princess Fawzia, was Farouk's sister; he divorced her in 1948 for failure to bear him a son.