(See Cover)
The room on the second floor of Teheran's Majlis (Parliament) building was as bare as a hermit's cell. It was furnished with a sagging cot, a few dingy chairs, a foot locker, and a small table on which rested a half-used box of Kleenex, a bottle of ink, and a key ring with three keys. The only spot of color in the drab room was supplied by a bright blue enamel chamberpot under the cot.
In this austere room last week lived an austere old man consumed by illness and by strange fires of faith. His body was so frail that it seemed as if a gust of wind could blow it over; his face was sallow and flabby, his eyes were watery, his hands trembled. Yet in this fragile frame is a will tougher than the rock of the Elburz Mountains and more inflammable than the oil of Abadan. A month ago, scarcely anyone in the West had ever heard of Mohammed Mossadeq; by last week, what he said and did could powerfully affect the free world's security.
Even so, little was known about him in the U.S. beyond the facts that 1) his government had just nationalized the British-owned Iranian oilfields; 2) he faints when highly excited during a speech, and has to be carried out feet first.
There was a chance that this unknown and implausible figure would slide feet first into chaos, taking his country and perhaps a large part of the world with him. Iran is a vital source of oil, the lifeblood of industrial civilization (see box, next page). It is also a natural road of conquest for Soviet Russia. If Mossadeq fails to keep the country's vast oilfields operating, what will happen, at the very least, is that Western Europe will be deprived of the oil it needs to keep its industries going.
At worst, if disorders flare up in Iran as a result of nationalization, the Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War III. The Russians would not necessarily have to use the Red army to move into Iran; the northern border province of Azerbaijan (which the Russians tried to annex in 1946) might be used by Moscow to set up a "native Iranian" Communist regime.
While U.S. forces are trying to hold Western Europe and Asia, Communism might turn the flank from Iran. An American engineer, an old Iran hand, put it this way: "The 38th parallel runs right through Iran. We wouldn't even have to learn a new name."
The Face of the Land. Outwardly, last week, Iran was calm. In Teheran, on a sunny afternoon, the Shah and his young bride drove to the races in their new sea-blue Rolls-Royce. Across the city, the spring cycle of parties was in full swing.
The Shah's small (130,000) but loyal army was in its barracks, ready for trouble. For the present, at least, there was none. Beyond the capital, Iran's brown and barren face was peaceful. The skeletons of Persepolis, Susa, Pasargadae, the great dead imperial cities, were bleaching in the sun. Eastward the silent desert reached toward Asia. In the southwest, Iran's black treasure still gushed into the Abadan refinery from beneath the baked flats east of the Tigris. The people, moving herds across the plains and raising cotton in the steaming Caspian littoral, lived in poverty, as they had for centuries; as far as they thought about large issues at all, they were ready to follow Mohammed Mossadeq wherever he would lead them.