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It required stout nerves in this young ruler to defy the bluff and threat of his northern neighbor. Sometimes the Shah, envious of the way the great powers wooed the neutralist Nasser, complained that he was not getting enough Western help. In one dangerous foray into the perilous waters of neutralism, the Shah, despite Iran's membership in the Baghdad Pact, made a red-carpet tour of Moscow and later dangled in front of the Kremlin the hint that he might be willing to sign a nonaggression treaty. Last year he abruptly called the whole deal off. Ever since, the Russians have ranked him with West Germany's Konrad Adenauer as a specially loathsome "cold-war criminal." Powerful Persian-language stations in Stalinabad, Baku, Tashkent and Yerevan blast away at him daily. "Such puppets as Mohammed Reza Shah ought to be dumped in the garbage bin. The regime must be overthrown." proclaimed the self-styled "National Voice of Iran" from near Soviet Baku last week. At the in frequent wattle villages along Iran's bleak, mine-infested 1000-mile frontier with Russia, batteries of Soviet loudspeakers steadily blare out anti-Shah propaganda. The ceaseless attacks from Moscow-repeated in whispers in every Iranian bazaar—make it all the more imperative for the Shah's reforms to succeed. Heart of his program is a seven-year economic-development scheme called Operation Plan, backed both by U.S. aid and the revenues from Iran's oil—which is now produced and marketed by a four-nation (Britain, U.S., France, The Netherlands), consortium in partnership with the Iranian government. Virtually the only Iranian government agency bossed by bright young men. Operation Plan will have spent $1.2 billion by the time it is officially due to wind up in 1962. It has already done much to change the somber face of Iran.
Teheran streets, which only a few years ago were the preserve of donkeys and camels, today are clogged by 100,000 automobiles. On the northern outskirts of the city, showplace villas, some with kidney-shaped swimming pools and lush green lawns as trim as pile carpets, dot the cool foothills of 18,600-ft. Mount Demavend ("Bride of the Gods"). Cement mixers growl at the sites of a new 2O-story hotel and the nearly finished 15-story headquarters of the National Iranian Oil Co. Auditoriums, stadiums and university buildings add relieving notes to what was once peripheral wasteland. A jeep assembly plant spews out new models, soon to be shod by an Iranian Goodrich factory.