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As Minister of Court for 18 months (1944-45), Ala won so much respect from the Shah that the latter left the Minister-of-Court job unfilled for two years after Ala went to Washington. The dogged fight for Azerbaijan in the U.N. almost ruined Ala's health. Outwardly calm and unflaggingly polite, speaking a precise, British-accented English, Ala began to suffer from heart trouble, and after the fight for Azerbaijan was over, he went to Arizona to recuperate.
Picasso's Dove. No one suggested that Iran's Communists had anything to do with Razmara's death. Characteristically, however, the Communists sought to make propaganda hay out of the situation. In Teheran last week 60,000 people, headed by the underground Tudeh partisans, demonstrated not only for oil, but for Communist-style peace. "Down with war agitators!" they shouted. "Long live the free Korean people!" Ten thousand women & children followed a float on which appeared a reproduction of Pablo Picasso's peace dove, known to anti-Communists the world over as "The Dove that Goes Boom."
At Razmara's funeral, which was attended by U.S. Ambassador Henry F. Grady, Soviet Ambassador Ivan Sadchi-kov and other diplomats, old army friends of the dead Premier wept. In his jail cell, Assassin Tahmassebi chanted verses from the Koran, shouted: "Long live Islam, death to the oil company!" Fadayan Islam's newspaper threatened other Iranian leaders with death unless Tahmassebi was turned loose within three days.
*The word "assassin" comes from an old Arabic word, hashshashin, which means a killer hopped up on hashish. A Persian organization, the Assassins, carried on effective anti-Christian terrorist activity during the Crusades.