“You’re being very frank.”
“Ah, well, among friends. Now look at it from Stalin’s viewpoint for a moment, if you can. He partitioned Poland with Hitler. That we consider sinful. He partitioned Persia with us. That we consider quite all right. Appeals to his better nature may therefore confuse him a bit. You Americans have just got to take this thing firmly in hand.”
“Why should we get into this mess at all?” asked Pug.
“Captain, the Red Army now occupies northern Iran. We’re in the south. The Atlantic Charter commits us to get out after the war. You’ll want us to comply. But what about the Russians? Who gets them out? Czarist or communist, Russia acts exactly the same, I assure you.”
He gave Pug a long solemn stare. Pug stared back, not replying.
“Do you see the picture? We vacate. The Red Army stays. How long will it be before they control Iranian politics, and advance by invitation to the Persian Gulf and the Khyber Pass? Changing the world balance beyond recall, without firing a shot?”
After a gravelled silence, Pug asked, “What do we do about it?”
“Here endeth the first lesson,” said Seaton. He tilted his yellow straw hat over his eyes and fell asleep. Pug dozed, too.
When the train jolted them awake, they were in a huge railway yard crowded with locomotives, freight cars, flatcars, tank cars, cranes, and trucks, where a great noisy activity went on: loading, unloading, shunting about of train sections on sidings, with much shouting by unshaven American soldiers in fatigues, and a wild gabble from crowds of native workers. The sheds and carbarns were newly erected, and most of the rails looked freshly laid. Seaton took Pug on a jeep tour of the yard. Breezy and cool despite a strong afternoon sun, the yard filled hundreds of acres of sandy desert, between a little town of mud-brick houses and a range of steep brown dead crags.
“Yankee energy endlessly amazes me. You’ve conjured up all this in months. Does archeology bore you?” Seaton pointed at a flinty slope. “There are Sassanid rock tombs up there. The bas-reliefs are worth a look.”
They got out of the jeep and climbed in gusty wind. Seaton smoked as he went, picking his way upward like a goat. His stamina violated all physical rules; he was less out of breath than Pug when they reached the dark holes in the hillside, where the wind-eroded carvings, to Pug’s unpracticed eye, looked Assyrian: bulls, lions, stiff curly-bearded warriors. Here all was quiet. Far below, the railroad yard clanged and squealed, a small busy blotch on the ancient silent desert.
“We can’t stay in Iran once the war’s won,” Pug remarked, pitching his voice above the wind. “Our people don’t think that way. All that stuff down there will just rust and rot.”
“No, but there are things to do before you leave.”
A loud hollow groan sounded behind them in the tomb. Seaton said owlishly, “The wind across the mouth of the sepulchre. Odd effect, what? Rather like blowing over an open bottle.”
“I damned near jumped off this hill,” said Pug.
“The natives say it’s the souls of the ancients, sighing over Persia’s fate. Not inappropriate. Now look here. In 1941, after the invasion and partition, the three governments — Iran, the USSR, and my country — signed a treaty. Iran promised to expel the German agents and make no more trouble, and we and Russia agreed to get out after the war. Well, Stalin will just ignore that scrap of paper. But if you join in the treaty — that is, if Stalin promises Roosevelt he’ll get out — that’s something else. He may actually go. With grunts, shoves, and growls, but it’s the only chance.”
“Is it in the works?”
“Not at all.”
“Why not?”
Seaton threw up skinny brown hands.
Toward evening the train passed a string of smashed freight cars lying twisted and overturned by the roadbed. “This was a bad one,” said Seaton. “German agents planted the dynamite. Tribesmen looted the cars. They had good intelligence. The cargo was food. Worth its weight in gold, in this country. The big shots are hoarding all the grain, and most other edibles. The corruption here boggles the Western mind, but it’s how things are done in the Middle East. Byzantium and the Ottomans have left their mark.”
He talked far into the night about the ingenious pilfering and raiding devices of the Persians, which were a real drain on Lend-Lease. To them, he said, this river of goods suddenly rushing through their land, south to north, was just another aspect of imperialist madness. They were fishing in it for dear life, knowing it couldn’t last. Copper telephone wire, for instance, was stolen as fast as it was strung up. Hundreds of miles of it had vanished. The Persians loved copper trinkets, plates, and bowls, and the bazaars were now flooded with them. These people had been robbed for centuries, said Seaton, by conquerors and by their own grandees. Loot or be looted was the truth they knew.
“Should you succeed in getting Stalin out,” he said, yawning, “for God’s sake don’t try to install your free enterprise system here, with party elections and the rest. By free enterprise, Persians mean what they’re doing with your copper wire. A democracy in a backward or unstable country simply gets smashed by the best-organized power gang. Here it’ll be a communist gang that will open the gates of Asia to Stalin. So forget your antiroyalist principles, and strengthen the monarchy.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Pug, smiling at the cynical candor of the man.
Seaton smiled sleepily back. “One is told you have the ear of the great.”
The Tehran Conference was an off-again, on-again thing until the last minute. Suddenly it was on. A presidential party of seventy fell out of the sky on General Connolly: Secret Service men, generals, admirals, diplomats, ambassadors, White House stewards, and assorted staff people, swirling through the Amirabad base in unholy confusion. Connolly told his secretary that he was too busy to see anybody, but on hearing that Captain Henry had reappeared he jumped up and went out to the anteroom.
“Good God. Look at you.” Pug was unshaven, haggard, and covered with grime.
“The truck convoy got caught in a dust storm. Then in a mountain blizzard. I haven’t been out of my clothes since Friday. When did the President get here?”
“Yesterday. General Marshall’s in your room, Henry. We’ve moved you over to the officers’ quarters.”
“Okay. I got your message in Tabriz, but the Russians sort of garbled it.”
“Well, Hopkins asked where you were, that’s all. I thought you’d better get the hell back here. So the Russians did let you through to Tabriz?”
“It took some talking. Where’s Hopkins now?”
“Downtown in the Soviet embassy. He and the President are staying there.”
“In the Soviet embassy? Not here? Not in our legation?”
“Nope. There are reasons. We’ve got nearly everybody else.”
“Where’s the Soviet embassy?”
“My driver will take you there. And I think you should hurry.” Pug rubbed a hand over his grimy stubby face. Connolly gestured at a bathroom door. “Use my razor.”
Despite a few new boulevards which the deposed Shah had bulldozed through Tehran, most of the city was a maze of narrow crooked streets lined by blank mud-wattle walls. Seaton had told Pug that this Persian way of building a town was meant to slow and baffle an invading horde. It slowed the Army driver until he struck a boulevard and roared downtown. The walls around the Soviet embassy gave it a look of a high-security prison. At the entrance, and spaced all along the street and around the corners, frowning soldiers stood with fixed bayonets. One of these halted the car at the iron gates. Victor Henry rolled down the window and snapped in clear sharp Russian, “I am a naval aide to President Roosevelt.” The soldier fell back in a stiff salute, then leaped on the running board to guide the driver through the compound, a spacious walled park with villas set here and there amid autumnal old trees, splashing fountains, and wide lawns dotted with ponds.
Russian sentries and American Secret Service men blocked the veranda of the largest
villa. Pug talked his way into the foyer, where civilians and uniformed men, British, Russian, American, bustled about in a polyglot tumult. Pug spied Harry Hopkins slouching along in a gray suit by himself, hands in his pockets, looking sicker and skinnier than ever. Hopkins saw him, brightened, and shook hands. “Stalin just walked over to meet the Chief.” He gestured at a closed wooden door. “They’re in there. Quite a historic moment, hey? Come along, I haven’t unpacked yet. How’s the Persian Gulf Command doing?”
Behind the door, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin sat face to face. There was nobody else in the room but two interpreters.
Across the narrow street that separated the Russian and the British compounds, Winston Churchill sulked in a bedchamber of his legation residence, nursing a sore throat and a sorer spirit. Since arriving in separate planes from Cairo, he and Roosevelt had not spoken. He had sent an invitation to Roosevelt to stay at his legation. The President had declined. He had asked urgently for a meeting before any talks with Stalin. The President had refused. Now those two were meeting without him. Alas for the old intimacy of Argentia and Casablanca!
To Ambassador Harriman, who went across the street to calm him, Churchill grumbled that he was glad to “obey orders,” that all he wanted was to give a dinner party two nights later on his sixty-ninth birthday, get thoroughly drunk, and leave the next morning.
Why was Franklin Roosevelt staying in the Russian compound?
Historians casually note that on arrival he had declined invitations from both Stalin and Churchill, so as to offend neither. At midnight Molotov had urgently summoned the British and American ambassadors to warn them of an assassination plot afoot in Tehran. Stalin and Churchill were scheduled to come to the American legation in the morning for the first conference session. It was over a mile from the British and Russian compounds, which adjoined each other. Molotov urged that Roosevelt move to one of these, hinting that otherwise business could not safely proceed.
So when Roosevelt woke in the morning, a choice was thrust on him: either move in with Churchill, his old trusted ally, offering comfortable English-speaking hospitality and reliable privacy; or with Stalin, the ferocious Bolshevik, Hitler’s former partner in crime, offering a goldfish bowl of alien attendants and perhaps of concealed microphones. An American Secret Service man had already checked the Russian villa Roosevelt was being offered; but could such a cursory inspection detect the sophisticated Soviet bugging?
Roosevelt chose the Russians. Churchill writes in his history that the choice pleased him because the Russians had more room. Chagrin is not something a great man often acknowledges.
Was there an assassination plot?
Nobody really knows. A book by an aged Nazi ex-agent asserts that he was part of one. Of making such books there is no end. At the least, Tehran’s streets were risky; German agents were there; public men do get killed riding through streets; the First World War had started that way. The weary disabled Roosevelt no doubt was better off staying downtown.
Yet — why with the Russians, when the British were across the street?
Franklin Roosevelt had come all the way to Stalin’s back fence. So he had bowed to the brute fact that Russia was doing the main suffering and bleeding against Hitler. To take this last step, to accept Stalin’s hospitality, to show openness and trust to a tyrant who knew only secrecy and distrust, was perhaps the subtle gamble of an old lion, the ultimate signal of goodwill across the political gulf between east and west.
Did it signal to Stalin that Franklin Roosevelt was a naïve and gullible optimist, a soft touch, a man to push around?
Stalin seldom disclosed his inner thoughts. But once, during the war, he told the communist author Djilas, “Churchill merely tries to pick your pocket. Roosevelt steals the big things.”
The grim ultra-realist was not unaware, it would seem from this, that Russians were dying by the millions and Americans by the thousands, in a war that would give world preeminence to the United States.
We have a record of the first words they exchanged.
ROOSEVELT:I have been trying for a long time to arrange this.
STALIN:I’m sorry, it is all my fault. I have been preoccupied with military matters.
Or, translated into plain terms, Roosevelt was saying, as for the first time he shook hands with the second most powerful man on earth, “Well, why have you been so difficult and mistrustful for so long? Here I am, you see, under your very roof.”
And Stalin, whom even Lenin called rude, was drawing instant first blood in his retort: “We’ve been doing most of the fighting and dying, that’s why.”
So these two men in their sixties met at Stalin’s back fence in Persia and chatted: the huge crippled American in a blue-gray sack suit, the very short potbellied Georgian wearing an army uniform with a broad red stripe down the full trousers; the one a peaceful social reformer three times elected, guiltless of any trace of political violence, the other a revolutionary despot with the blood of unthinkable millions of his own countrymen on his hands. A strange encounter.
Tocqueville had predicted that America and Russia would between them rule the earth, the one as a free land, the other as a tyranny. Here was his vision made flesh. What drew these opposites together was only the mutual need to crush a mortal menace to the entire human race, Adolf Hitler’s Frost-Cuckoo Land, coming from the east, and coming from the west.
A Secret Service man looked into Hopkins’s room. “Mr. Stalin just left, sir. The President’s asking for you.”
Hopkins was changing his shirt. Hurriedly he tucked the shirttail inside baggy trousers, and pulled over his head a red sweater with a hole in one elbow. “Come along, Pug. The President was inquiring about you this morning.”
Everything about this villa was oversize. Hopkins’s bedroom was huge. So was the crowded foyer. The room in which Roosevelt sat might have accommodated a masquerade ball. Tall windows admitted a flood of golden sunshine through the sere leaves of high trees. The furniture was heavy, banal, randomly scattered, and none too clean. In an armchair in the sun Roosevelt smoked a cigarette with the holder in his teeth, exactly as in the caricatures.
“Why, hello there, Pug. Grand to see you.” His arm swept out for a hearty handclasp. The President looked drawn, lean, much older, but a massive man still, radiating strength and — at the moment — triumphant good humor. The color of the big-jawed face was high. “Harry, it went beautifully. He’s an impressive fellow. But bless me, the translation does eat up the time! Terribly tedious. We’re meeting at four for the plenary session. Does Winnie know that?”
“Averell went over to tell him.” Hopkins glanced at his wristwatch. “That’s in twenty minutes, Mr. President.”
“I know. Well, Pug!” He gestured at a sofa on which seven men might have sat. “We get gorgeous statistics about all the Lend-Lease aid going to Russia through this Persian corridor. Did you see any sign of it out there? Or is it all just talk, as I strongly suspect?”
The facetiousness went with a broad smile. Roosevelt clearly was still winding down from the excitement of meeting Stalin.
“It’s all out there, Mr. President. It’s an unbelievable, a magnificent effort. I’ll have a report for you later today on one sheet of paper. I’m just back from the road.”
“One sheet, eh?” The President laughed, glancing at Hopkins. “Grand. The top sheet is all I ever read, anyway.”
“He toured Iran from the gulf to the north,” said Hopkins. “By rail and by truck.”
“What can I tell Uncle Joe, Pug, if Lend-Lease comes up?” Roosevelt said a shade more seriously. In an aside he remarked to Hopkins, “I don’t think it will today, Harry. That wasn’t his mood.”
“He’s changeable,” Hopkins said.
Pug Henry swiftly described the pile-ups he had seen at the northern depots, especially at the truck terminal. The Russians had refused to permit the truck convoys to drive any distance into their zone of Iran, he said, allotting only one unloading termi
nal far from the Russian frontier. That was the big bottleneck. If the trucks could go straight on to Caspian ports and Caucasus border points, the Russians would get more matériel, much faster. Roosevelt listened with sharp attention.
“That’s interesting. Put it on your one sheet of paper.”
“Don’t worry,” said Pug without thinking, making Roosevelt laugh again.
“Pug’s been boning up on Iran, Mr. President,” Hopkins said. “He’s on to Pat Hurley’s idea, that we should become a party to the treaty guaranteeing withdrawal of foreign armies after the war.”
“Yes, Pat keeps harping on that.” On Roosevelt’s expressive face impatience fleetingly came and went. “Didn’t the Russians reject the notion at the Moscow Conference?”
“They stalled.” Hopkins, sitting beside Pug, held out a bony hand in an argumentative gesture. “I agree, sir, that we can hardly initiate it. That would be pushing ourselves into the old imperialist game. Still —”
“Exactly. And I won’t have that.”
“But what about the Iranians, Mr. President? Suppose they ask for a guarantee that we’ll get out? Then a new declaration would be in order, which would include us.”
“We can’t ask the Iranians to ask us,” Roosevelt replied with casual candor, as though he were in the Oval Office, and not in a Soviet building where all his words were almost certainly being overheard. “That won’t fool anybody. We’ve got three days here. Let’s stick to essentials.”
He dismissed Victor Henry with a smile and a handshake. Pug was making his way out through the noisy crowded foyer when he heard a very British voice: “I say, there’s Captain Henry.” It sounded like Seaton. He glanced about, and first noticed Admiral King, standing straight as a telephone pole, looking around with visible lack of love at the swarming uniformed Russians. Beside him a tanned man in a beribboned RAF blue uniform was smiling and beckoning. Pug had not seen Burne-Wilke in several years, and remembered him as taller and more formidable-looking. Beside King the air vice marshal appeared quite short, and he had a mild harassed look. “Hello, there,” he said as Pug approached. “You’re not on your delegation’s roster, are you? Pamela said she’d looked, and you weren’t.”