The Foreign Service Journal, May 2022

52 MAY 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL I published my conclusions in the August 1986 issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies , connecting the inci- dent both to international and Iranian domestic contexts. In the international context, Britain was attempting to dominate Iran in order to stabilize the borders of its Indian empire and its new mandate for Iraq, as well as to secure control of Iranian oilfields. The Anglo-Russian “Great Game in Asia” continued in Iran in the 1920s, although the terminology had become that of the “Cold War.” Britain failed to make Iran a “colony by treaty” with the abor- tive 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement, despite paying members of the Iranian government to ensure ratification. Subsequently, British officials in Iran encouraged Cossack General Reza Khan to seize power in Tehran in early 1921, to forestall a feared Soviet incursion after Britain withdrew its army from Iran in the spring. Anglo-American rivalry also continued in Iran, especially over oil. In 1914 Winston Churchill had bought a controlling inter- est in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) in order to end the Royal Navy’s dependence on American oil. A decade later Foreign Secretary George Curzon expressed Britain’s continu- ing intent to keep American “fingers” out of Britain’s “oil can,” opposing Iran’s efforts to grant an oil concession to an American- owned company. In the Iranian domestic context, Reza Khan sought to curb independent tribal forces and the domination of cities by local bazaar merchants and their clerical allies by establishing a military dictatorship over the entire country. He supported the American financial mission Iran had hired in 1922 in an effort to break dependence on British subsidies. In March 1924, Reza sought to end the Qajar monarchy and make himself president of a republic, as Mustafa Kemal had recently done in Turkey. Popular opposition to Reza’s proposed republican dictator- ship was mobilized by Shia clergy, both in the Majlis and in the streets. In the Majlis, Ayatollah Sayyid Hassan Modarres led the resistance, arguing: “The source of our politics is our religion.” During World War I, Modarres had been a member of the Ottoman-supported Nationalist government, opposing Russia and Britain, and in 1919 he had helped lead opposition to the Anglo-Persian Agreement. Other clerics in Tehran mobilized a crowd of demonstrators, who were attacked in the Majlis garden on March 22 by two regiments of Reza’s Cossacks. The Majlis refused to pass the bill. Reza was believed to be ready to flee the country; instead, he recovered by paying obeisance to the ulama, going to Qom and promising Ayatollahs Hairi, Naini and Isfahani that he would never make a republic. Whether explicit or tacit, he also seems to have given free rein to the clergy to organize anti-Baha’i violence. So Who Was Robert Imbrie? Why was Imbrie in Tehran? He was no diplomat. “Adventurer- spy” is a better description. Bored with the practice of law in Bal- timore, he had joined an expedition to the Congo in 1911. When war began in Europe in 1914, he volunteered for the French Army, serving as an ambulance driver at Verdun and Salonika. In 1918 he published an account of his adventures, Behind the Wheel of a War Ambulance . When the U.S. joined the war in 1917, Imbrie entered the Foreign Service and was sent as a special consular agent to Petro- grad, where he repeatedly clashed with Bolsheviks. Expelled from Soviet territory, he moved to Viborg, Finland, running agents into Soviet Russia until June 1920. Subsequently, he was sent to Istanbul to work with Pyotr Wrangel’s White army in the Crimea, but Wrangel was defeated before he arrived. In Istanbul he became friendly with young Allen Dulles, then deputy to American High Commissioner Admiral Mark Bristol. Dulles seems to have been instrumental in assigning Imbrie to Ankara, where he opened American relations with the Kemalists and facilitated Admiral Chester’s efforts to obtain an Ameri- can mining and oil concession in Anatolia. In October 1924, The National Geographic Magazine posthumously published Imbrie’s adventure tale, “Crossing Asia Minor, the Country of the New Turkish Republic.” Imbrie was recalled to Washington in July 1923 to answer U.S. Vice Consul Robert W. Imbrie and his wife, Katherine, in 1924. U.S.LIBRARYOFCONGRESS