General Zahedi: After Mossadegh, A Tough Soldier

GENERAL Fazlollah Zahedi, who succeeds Mossadegh, is an ambitious nationalist and a tough soldier. He is no reformer, like Egypt's Naguib or Syria's Shishekly. Now 56, he has a hard, rocklike face, topped by straight, greying hair; he stands tall and straight despite severe arthritis.

He was a brigadier general at 25. Twice in his life he has been police chief of Teheran (pop. 1,000,000), a job which attests to his courage and his capacity for intrigue. During World War II, when the British and the Russians jointly occupied Iran and deposed the present Shah's father, Zahedi commanded the Isfahan military district in the South. The British got wind that Zahedi was masterminding the

Melliyun-I-Iran, a clandestine nationalist gang plotting with German secret agents to foment revolt against the Allied occupiers. On the side, Zahedi was making a tidy profit by commandeering the region's wheat stocks and holding on until starving Iranians forked over a top price.

The British sent Cloak & Dagger Agent Fitzroy Maclean (later chief of a mission to Tito, now a Conservative M.P.) to capture Zahedi. Maclean kidnaped him right under the nose of his own guard and shipped him off to Palestine for the rest of the war as a prisoner. In Zahedi's bedroom at the time of his arrest, Maclean itemized the following: a collection of German automatic weapons; some opium; a large supply of silk underwear; letters from German parachutist-agents operating in the hills; an illustrated register of the city's prostitutes.

Home again at war's end, Zahedi first held an important regional army command, then was Minister of the Interior when Mossadegh first took office. Mossadegh kept him on. The two cooperated to boot out the British oil company; but Mossadegh's toleration of the outlawed

Tudeh Reds enraged General Zahedi. On that issue they parted, and became sworn enemies.

Appointed a Senator by the Shah, Zahedi held automatic immunity from arrest. In October 1952, Mossadegh dissolved the whole Senate, apparently in order to nab Zahedi. Under arrest, the general was still a nuisance; he roamed his old haunts at the Interior Ministry and police headquarters, issuing orders and communiques. After a month of it, Mossadegh set him free.

Last April, when assassins murdered Mossadegh's police chief, the dragnet immediately went out for Zahedi, who took sanctuary in the Majlis for six weeks. When Mossadegh dissolved the Majlis, Zahedi fled secretly to the home of the commander of the Shah's Imperial Guards and continued to plot against Mossadegh.

One night last week, the two enemies met once again. As the general waited in his office in Teheran's Officers Club to accept Mossadegh's surrender, the Premier shambled in past lines of soldiers, his shoulders slumped, his eyes in tears. "Solh ba shoma [Peace be with you]," said the general. "You see the tables are turned."

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