CHAPTER 37
August 16, 1953
West Berlin. It was a city deep behind the Iron Curtain, but spiritually far from the communist world. It was where East and West met, and where the leaders of both groups would meet for the first time since Potsdam. It had once been the heart of Germany, and if negotiations went well here it would be the heart of a new Germany once more.
MacArthur was glad that the people in charge of Presidential transport had finally disposed of the Independence. When Harry Truman had been in charge, this city had been a site of the greatest tensions to occur between the destruction of Nagasaki and the war in Korea. MacArthur had no intention of repeating his predecessor’s actions, his predecessor’s mistakes. He was here on a mission of peace, and he hoped the new Bataan III could represent that in a way that Independence never would.
In addition to himself, Malenkov, and the many translators and journalists, the great, circular, conference table would seat several other important officials from the four great powers: Churchill was once again a welcome sight, as was his deputy and foreign minister Anthony Eden. Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France replaced the ousted Mayer to lead the French delegation, and had promised to keep to the agreements made with his predecessor. On the Soviet side, Foreign Minister Molotov, and Party Chairman Kaganovich would not just support their boss in the negotiations, but MacArthur soon noticed they would do most of the talking for him as well. Malenkov would prove to be a man of few words, but also one who needed few. Clever and fearsome, Churchill would later remark “it wasn’t hard to see how he replaced Stalin.”
MacArthur’s view of his Soviet counterpart was more charitable, thinking the new leader much more agreeable than the old after a conversation on the first day in which he related a story from 1945:
“I hope that the new generation never has to see the disasters of war that we have been unfortunate enough to witness. My home in Manila was destroyed before my eyes, the acrid smoke left behind a reminder of the great tragedy around us, of a city not yet entirely free. We cannot have this happen again, no more German homes, no more American homes, no more Russian homes, turned to ashes because of the failure of diplomacy.
“Sixty years ago, our troops did not stand opposite each other across a battle-scarred nation, instead our nations considered each other amongst our closest friends.”
Then Malenkov, who had so far given no indication as to how much English he understood, replied, “Sixty years from now, I hope both our peoples will continue to say that.”
***
Malenkov’s primary goal at West Berlin was to keep the Allies at the table, and sincerely hoped for an agreement that would create a neutral, unified Germany. Although he hid it well, he knew that the Soviet Union was outmatched by the West in just about every military and economic factor of importance, and therefore decided that detente would be the best way to advance Soviet interests in the world. There weren’t many ways more likely to achieve detente than a neutral belt of nations crossing the entirety of Central Europe. Malenkov also knew that East Germany was as much an economic burden on the Soviet Union as it was a military advantage, and if that was the only price for convincing the West to abandon the far more valuable West Germany, the Soviet Union would be getting a bargain. In these circumstances, even a ‘bad’ deal would be better than no deal at all.
MacArthur would plainly need little convincing: whether he was driven by an almost obsessive antipathy towards the division of nations, his own stubbornness, or something else entirely, he was determined to find a way to unite Germany. He had used this conviction to pressure the British and especially French into following his lead (after all, would France really choose West Germany over the United States?), but Malenkov knew that would only get so far. They, unlike MacArthur, expressed serious concerns about the possibility of a Fourth Reich rising (a concern Malenkov himself shared) and would only accept a unified Germany if said state could not pose a threat to them in the future.
Malenkov therefore decided that the best proposal he could begin with would be one that was relatively generous towards the West. First, a peace treaty would need to be negotiated and signed by the four powers and the present German governments. Then, a free election would be held, using the same system as used in West Germany in 1949 and supervised by the four powers, to determine the makeup of the united German government. Germany would have freedoms of the press, assembly and speech guaranteed in its new constitution, would be free to trade with whatever powers it chose, and would be permitted to maintain a military open to all citizens except senior ex-Nazis. A similar system would be used for Austria as well, and the two nations would be prohibited from uniting with each other, or from making military agreements with any other nation without the consent of the four powers.
Churchill raised the first objection, saying that the free elections would have to come before any peace agreement, a point which both Mendès France and MacArthur agreed with and Malenkov was willing to concede. The second objection came from Mendès France, who sought more stringent arms limitations for the new German state and even suggested disarming the nation entirely.
MacArthur’s initial response to this was three words long: “It won’t work.” Mendès France demanded to know why not, saying that a disarmed nation could not go on the warpath as Hitler or the Kaiser had done. MacArthur did not even wait for the Frenchman’s remarks to be translated before he began explaining his rationale: the Germans were a proud people who would want their country to seem influential in the world - this was no small part of why reunification had to happen in the first place - and dictating the number of men in their armed forces would just build resentment towards the four powers. In the long run, they would probably ignore such limitations anyway, just like they had after Versailles. He then proposed that the German peace treaty include a point similar to the Japanese Article 9, whereby the German people would renounce war as a means of settling disputes, permitting the military only as a self-preservation force. It could be theoretically unlimited in size, but prohibited from developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. This policy had been so far successful in Japan, and all four leaders hoped it would work in Germany as well. If it didn’t, Allied and Soviet nuclear weapons would still be available to prevent the next Hitler. To secure French approval, MacArthur offered American funding for the French nuclear program.
The last matter of discussion would be that of the new German borders. In the East, the Oder-Neisse line agreed at Potsdam had only been intended to be temporary when they were drawn up. MacArthur was quick to say that this was a matter for the Soviets to decide: it was their border after all. Malenkov meanwhile maintained that he could not accept anything east of Oder-Neisse, and had been under the impression that that would be the permanent border ever since Potsdam. In the west, too, the borders for the new Germany would be the same as they currently stood for the divided state, and Germany would be required to renounce any and all claims to territory outside of those borders as part of the peace treaty.
The question was asked more than once: what if the Germans didn’t accept the deal that was presented to them? Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, was a known skeptic of the Stalin Note and could be expected to rebuff reunification efforts. MacArthur brushed the concerns aside: “The new election will settle the matter. If he wins and does not resign, he will be acknowledging his role as the leader of a united Germany. If he does not win, or he resigns and someone takes his place, whoever does will be doing the same, and we can make our agreements with them.”
Then, after two weeks of intense negotiation, Malenkov announced “I think we have a deal.” MacArthur preferred the term ‘victory’.
***
He would return home to the very opposite.
MacArthur’s White House had always been very much MacArthur’s White House, with him personally dominating events in the building at every turn, but beyond the bounds of the White House walls his administration was one of two conflicting methods of governance.
The first was a “hands off” role for the executive that had not been seen since the days of McKinley and Cleveland. MacArthur believed that Congress had been designed, and its members elected, to make the laws of the land. That wasn’t the President’s job. Compared to his predecessors, he very rarely vetoed bills or even signed executive orders, and he was content to give Congress a much larger degree of independence than it had had since the first decade of the century. When he did not feel strongly about a particular issue, which applied to the vast majority of domestic policy, he would let Congress sort matters out for itself.
The second, opposite, method came into play when he did have a strong opinion about a matter. Particularly with regards to foreign policy, he would insist on micromanaging subordinates when he did not simply handle the issue entirely himself. Those subordinates, who often went ignored regardless, had been chosen for their loyalty to the President.
When the President was absent however, as was the case in late August 1953, the system quickly fell into chaos. Vice President Lodge had needed little time to fall out of MacArthur’s favour, so Ned Almond was put in charge, and Almond, unlike MacArthur, had the loyalty of no-one. Professional politicians hated him for preventing them from forcing their views on MacArthur the way they had on Truman, the cabinet hated him because he seemed inept at handling government affairs, Whitney hated him because he competed for MacArthur’s favour, and without MacArthur around as a unifying figure, communication between the various factions quickly broke down.
But no two men in the MacArthur administration despised each other more fervently than Ned Almond and Charles Willoughby. They had first met, not in one of MacArthur’s headquarters, but in Kansas in 1929, and their feud had begun there. Each thought the other was arrogant, incompetent, and many other negative things. Both sought to be MacArthur’s favourite, producing even more bad blood between them. Willoughby thought Almond, who had joined MacArthur’s staff in 1946, had no place being there as a latecomer, while Almond resented Willoughby’s persistent efforts to imitate his Prussian heritage. One of Almond’s staff officers, when discussing Willoughby’s failure to warn MacArthur about the incoming Chinese forces in Korea, had suggested that Willoughby belonged in jail, and his boss would not have disagreed.
It should have been little surprise then, that when the two men were expected to work together, the result was a disaster. Its name was Ajax.
MacArthur’s support for the plan to overthrow the Iranian government had been lukewarm at best, only agreeing to it at Glasgow so Churchill would not stand in his way at West Berlin. As he did with everything he didn’t want to be bothered with, he quickly shuffled the task onto his subordinate, and as Willoughby was the CIA Director, it was now his problem. Then when MacArthur left for Europe, Almond was told to watch over him. Almond made a half-hearted attempt to do so, which resulted in a spectacular quarrel, and then refused to have anything more to do with the intelligence chief.
Willoughby meanwhile proceeded to utterly mismanage the plan. He began by overruling CIA officials such as Kermit Roosevelt Jr, who had helped create the Ajax plan in the first place: MacArthur had entrusted him with this responsibility, so he would be the one who oversaw the plan’s execution. Then he let his paranoia get the better of him. While many in the American government saw Iran’s recent nationalistic moves, such as seizing the Abadan oilfields, as part of a communist plot sponsored by the Soviet Union, Willoughby also came to believe that this plan was somehow part of a British conspiracy as well, aimed at somehow subverting American influence in Iran and the Middle East in general. To avoid this, he decided the coup would be carried out with a minimum of British influence, and he ignored MI6 reports that had been sent to him and was reluctant to send his own.
The coup, as planned, would have seen the Iranian Shah dismiss Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and appoint the pro-Western General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place, with CIA dollars being used to bribe key Iranian officials into going along with the plan. When Mossadegh, who by this time had ruled largely by decree for a year, dissolved parliament, the indecisive Shah decided to support the plan, and the order was given to plotters in Iran to begin.
Unfortunately for the CIA, word had gotten out in Iran, and Mossadegh knew what was coming. Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, the commander of the Imperial Guard, was sent to Mossadegh with a message informing him that the Shah had dismissed him in favour of Zahedi. Mossadegh instead had Nassiri arrested, an action that sparked crowds of thousands to take to the streets in protest. The Shah panicked, and fled the country for Rome, never to return.
CIA agents in Iran had to scramble to save the failing coup before the situation spiralled out of control. A plan was proposed to bribe some Iranian officials into launching a false-flag “communist revolution”, which would be blamed on Mossadegh and his ruling Tudeh Party, and give the Army an excuse to crack down on the Prime Minister and give Zahedi control of the government. The only issue was that Willoughby had failed to send anywhere near the amount of funds that such an effort would need. As the crowd in Tehran took control of the situation into their own hands, the CIA agents had no choice to flee.
Theirs had been only one of three plans to replace Mossadegh that week.
The second came from the common citizens, who had tired of Mossadegh’s dictatorial rule and inability to end the economic crisis that the British blockade had caused. As many had done in past societies, these citizens formed a mob, which fought through those Mossadegh supporters who took to the streets, and when they found the Prime Minister, they beat him to death with a variety of improvised weapons. General Zahedi, who had waited in an Army barracks until this point, then declared himself the new Prime Minister, citing the Shah’s order.
That set the stage for the third plan. Word of the CIA coup had not just spread to Mossadegh, but to members of his party as well, including a faction of hardline communists who now sought to take control for themselves. Knowing that Mossadegh was unpalatable to the public, and expecting Zahedi to attempt to seize control as soon as Mossadegh was toppled, they decided to declare the events as an “illegal military coup”. The proper successor to Mossadegh had to come from his party - the Tudeh - and the party had chosen Reza Radmanesh as his replacement. Radmanesh called on forces loyal to “Iran’s democracy” to take up arms against the “traitors”. Although he had convinced the Soviet government to provide him with financial aid, which he used to buy weapons, he was wary of turning the entire Army against him and sparking a civil war which he would be doomed to lose. To that effect, he ordered that pro-Tudeh forces not attack Army barracks, and only those soldiers who came out to fight on Zahedi’s behalf were to be branded as traitors.
For four days, Tehran would be engulfed in either a very large riot or a very small civil war, before General Zahedi himself would be captured and shot by Tudeh forces. Radmanesh described the events as the “thwarting of an insurrection”.
American newspapers had a rather different view. MacArthur had returned to news that Iran had “fallen to communism”.
- BNC
