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The third day was the people's day. The shabbily dressed poor poured out of their south Teheran slums, chanting, "Long live the Shah." Others, armed with knives and clubs, joined them. Shopkeepers pulled down the shutters in front of their stores and swelled the march. Ordered to stop the parades, the soldiers turned, instead, on their officers. Eight truckloads of troops and five tanks, dispatched to the city to help Mossadegh, turned over their equipment to the first pro-Shah mob they met.
Flanked now by soldiers, the mob began a nine-hour-long assault on one Mossadegh stronghold after another. When they finished, they had captured the police station and Radio Teheran: they had sacked eight government buildings and two pro-Mossadegh newspaper plants; they had smashed the headquarters of the Tudeh and the pro-Mossadegh Pan-Iranian party.
This was no military coup, but a spontaneous popular uprising; individual soldiers joined, but not a single army unit came in. Not until 4 p.m., when an air force general appeared before General Zahedi's hideout with a tank, did Zahedi emerge and take command of a field already won. The General-Premier and his officers were as surprised by the victory as the people themselves. The army had planned to counterattack Mossadegh on Friday; the people beat them to it by two days.
Last Stand. Mossadegh's last stand came at 109 Kakh Street. U.S.-built Sherman tanks, ranged at each end of the tree-lined avenue, dueled for four hours, 75-mm. shells clanging off their World War II armor. The defending Mossadegh forces ran out of ammunition first, and it was all over. The losing commander was turned over to the royalist mob, which pulled him apart. A tank smashed the green grill gate, and thousands of attackers swarmed into the yard. Mossadegh had got away.
The mob tore apart the famous iron cot on which Mossadegh had reigned so long with weepy-eyed, irrational stubbornness. The rioters ripped the house to pieces, hauled the furniture into the streets and auctioned it off (a new electric refrigerator went for $36). Soon, nothing remained of 109 Kakh Street but memories of a regime which had stood Iran and the Western world on its ear for more than two years. But, even in his last hours of power, Mohammed Mossadegh cost the nation dear: 300 died that day. Dressed in silk pajamas, Mossadegh surrendered 24 hours later to General Zahedi, was temporarily imprisoned in the luxurious Teheran Officers' Club and then carted off to a common jail cell.
Tennis Partner. The man in whose name the street mobs prevailed had fled his native land three days before. Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the Shahinshah, arrived in Rome with a two-day beard on his chin, accompanied by his disheveled, 21-year-old Queen, who was on the verge of tears. That night, unable to sleep, the Shah paced the living room of their three-room suite at Rome's showy Hotel Excelsior. With his personal pilot, Major Mohammed Khatami, he talked over future plans for a pleasant exile. "He asked me to stay with him," the major said later. "I told him I was afraid I would become a burden to him." "Who," asked the Shah plaintively, "is going to play tennis with me if you leave me?"