The World

Nehrus, Maos and Suns, Mafiosi, Hashemites and Albanians

RADIANCE OF A THOUSAND SUNS: TRUMAN’S NON -SURPRISE AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY

The day before, 16 July 1945, as he watched the mushroom cloud of Operation Trinity, the exhilarated director of the secret Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.’ But the ‘splendor’ had a fearsome power: ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’

The Bomb had been in the making for forty years.^* In 1943, at Quebec, FDR and Churchill merged their countries’ nuclear research into the Manhattan Project based at Los Alamos in New Mexico. Now as Stalin arrived to visit Truman (finding him ‘neither educated nor clever’), neither man mentioned the test. ‘I didn’t know then,’ said Stalin, ‘at least not from the Americans.’ He had known since 1942, informed by Soviet spies. Until the explosion neither Stalin nor Truman could conceive of Trinity’s world-shattering significance. Learning from their spies about Trinity and knowing that their agents had secured uranium from Nazi laboratories near Berlin, Stalin and Beria twice discussed how to react if Truman informed him; they agreed to ‘pretend not to understand’.

On 24 July at Potsdam, Churchill attacked Stalin for his aggressive actions in Romania. ‘An iron fence,’ he said, trying out the phrase that would become the Iron Curtain, ‘has come down.’

‘Fairy tales,’ replied Stalin, getting to his feet. Truman hurried after him; Churchill, pre-warned, watched.

‘The USA,’ said Truman, ‘has tested a new bomb of extraordinary destructive power.’

Not a muscle moved in Stalin’s face. After the fanatical Japanese resistance on Okinawa and the expectation that attacking Japan itself could cost 268,000 American dead, Truman planned to use the new weapon against Japan.

‘A new bomb!’ said Stalin. ‘Of extraordinary power. Probably decisive on the Japanese! What a bit of luck!’ Back in Ludendorff’s house, Stalin briefed his henchmen that Britain and America ‘are hoping we aren’t able to develop the Bomb ourselves, but that’s not going happen’. Stalin had already put Beria in charge of the nuclear project, but now this was ‘Task No. 1’. The race to catch up was on.

On 6 August a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, after the mother of its pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets, took off from Tinian, Mariana Islands, and flew six hours to Hiroshima where at 8.15 a.m. it dropped the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima. Only three of Enola Gay’s crew knew they were dropping the device. ‘It was hard to believe what we saw,’ said Tibbets. ‘My God!’ gasped the crew. On the ground, 100,000 were killed instantly, 100,000 horribly burned, survivors experiencing a flash, a boom, then a firestorm that ravaged the city as black radioactive rain fell in a new vision of hell on earth.

Hirohito was shaken but did not immediately surrender; he procrastinated, seemingly more shocked two days later when Stalin invaded Manchuria. At dawn on 9 August, another American B-29 – Bockscar – dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki as Hirohito was meeting his generals to discuss negotiations, insisting that if divine kokutai was not preserved he would fight on. Within two days, the Bombs convinced him to accept unconditional surrender; the hawkish war minister, General Anami, reluctantly agreed. The emperor planned a speech to the people. The speech, recorded by radio technicians, contained the greatest understatement in history: ‘The war,’ said Hirohito, ‘has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.’ His ‘jewel-voice’ was faint, so he had to record it again. Before it could be broadcast, officers, encouraged by Anami, attacked the palace in a bid to seize the recording. They killed the commander of the Imperial Guards, but failed to find it and committed suicide. Next day, General Anami himself committed ritual disembowelment, leaving a note: ‘I – with my death – humbly apologize to the emperor for the great crime.’ And at noon the Japanese heard their tenno for the first time. ‘Our people believed too much in the imperial country,’ Hirohito wrote to his eleven-year-old son, Crown Prince Akihito, who was staying outside Tokyo for his safety. ‘Our military men knew how to advance not retreat. If we’d fought on, we’d have been unable to protect the three imperial regalia [mirror, sword, jewel] and more of our countrymen would have had to die. Repressing my emotions, I tried to save the seed of the nation.’

On 30 August, General MacArthur arrived in Tokyo, charged by Truman with preserving Japanese stability, while trying the militarists for war crimes. Tojo was executed, but MacArthur then decided to keep Hirohito, undoubtedly guilty too, by recasting him as a non-divine constitutional monarch.

The only one of the aggressors to remain in office became the figurehead of a thriving democracy, reigning until 1989 (his grandson, Naruhito, succeeded in 2019 as 126th tenno of the most ancient dynasty). In the west, the victors agreed to put the Nazis on trial at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, a partnership between democratic and Stalinist judges. Ribbentrop was sentenced to hang; Göring killed himself; and Speer charmed his way off the gallows. The chief murderers of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing camps were hanged – Himmler had committed suicide – but few lower ranks were punished. Krupp was tried and sentenced to twelve years. Antonescu was shot. Chastened by these horrors, a more rules-based world, created by a combination of a court of human rights and the authority of the United Nations, fostered supranational law, a measure of civilized conduct and a legal definition of genocide.^* Antisemitism became morally unacceptable; the Enlightenment was restored.

By the time the Bombs were dropped, Churchill was no longer prime minister, a victor’s defeat that surprised Stalin. ‘One party,’ he said, ‘is much better.’

‘A blessing in disguise,’ said Clementine Churchill.

‘At the moment,’ replied Churchill, ‘it seems very effectively disguised.’ The defeat was soothed partly by George VI’s offer of the dukedom of Dover, a title he refused. The Labour prime minister Clement Attlee (‘a modest man’, quipped Churchill, ‘with much to be modest about’) created a system that paid unemployed people and offered free healthcare, the prototype of an ambitious vision of the state as guarantor of comfort that western citizens came to regard as more important than its traditional roles of order and security. Previously only revolution could redistribute wealth and protect the poor: the British achievement was to do it peacefully. At home, Attlee offered what he called a ‘New Jerusalem’; abroad, his vision would spark war for the old Jerusalem – and sanguinary independence for India. In December 1945, Indians voted for a legislative assembly.

The problem was: there were two winners.

THE DEATH OF ONE INDIA: NEHRU, JINNAH AND THE VICEREINE

Nehru and Congress won the election. But so did Jinnah and the Muslim League who, campaigning on one issue – the creation of Pakistan – won every seat reserved for Muslims. Nehru formed the first Indian government, an interim one, in tense coalition with the League.

Freed from prison in 1944, Nehru aspired to inherit the entire British Raj, the first time in history India had ever been united. The British agreed, keen to hand over the Raj complete to a single leader, Nehru, which would embellish the Anglosphere as a British dominion.

Nehru was a romantic who had embraced a vision of gorgeous India that this lover of women always compared to a beautiful girl. ‘India was in my blood,’ he wrote, like a romantic novelist; ‘she is very lovable and none of her children can forget her … for she is part of them in her greatness and failings and they are mirrored in those deep eyes of hers …’ Overlooking much of Indian history (Gandhi disdained history as ‘an interruption of nature’, an instant in the cycles of life and reincarnation) as well as the differences between Hindus and Muslims, he believed in a single secular liberal democracy represented by Congress. ‘There is no cultural conflict in India,’ he insisted. There was just one India and Nehru dismissed the prospect of a Muslim challenge. ‘The idea is absurd,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘hardly worth considering.’ But the decline of British power and the new electoral politics promoted a new ethnic and religious nationalism: the electoral results undeniably revealed two visions of India.

Attlee proposed an Indian federation that might have prevented partition. Initially both sides accepted the idea, but then Nehru rejected it, believing Congress could receive the Raj complete. Jinnah in revenge called a Direct Action Day in Kolkata, where Muslims slaughtered Hindus, unrestrained by Bengal’s Muslim League government. Gandhi rushed to Kolkata to fast for peace.

In March 1946, Nehru travelled to Singapore to review Indian troops. When the soldiers mobbed him, the forty-four-year-old Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the Allied supremo in East Asia, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, was knocked over in the excitement. Nehru and Mountbatten helped her up. The three got on so well that when Attlee sought a viceroy to oversee independence, Nehru probably suggested Mountbatten. Attlee appointed Viscount Mountbatten of Burma (as he had become) as the last viceroy – ‘the most powerful man on earth’ in his own words. He was debonair, capable and vain. Edwina was a sharp-tongued, free-spirited heiress, combining an exciting extramarital sex life (her lovers included women and men, a favourite being Hutch the Grenadian cabaret star) with intelligent public service. Mountbatten admired her as a force of nature.^*

The couple frequently invited Nehru and Indira to the Viceroy’s House in Delhi. Indira was Nehru’s indispensable companion in the vertiginous months ahead. Mountbatten became ‘real friends with Nehru’. Mountbatten’s daughters sometimes burst in to find Nehru on his head doing yoga. Gradually, an intimate friendship, all the more touching for its maturity, developed between the widowed Nehru and the married vicereine Edwina. ‘Suddenly I realized (and perhaps you did also),’ wrote Nehru later to Edwina, ‘that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force of which I was only dimly aware, drew us to one another. I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery.’ She agreed: ‘You left me a strange sense of peace and happiness. Perhaps I brought you the same?’ Mountbatten noticed, telling his daughter, ‘Please keep this to yourself but she and Jawaharlal are so sweet together. They really dote on each other … Mummy’s been incredibly sweet lately.’

Mountbatten leaned strongly towards Nehru, and both mocked Jinnah: ‘a psychopathic case’, said Mountbatten; ‘a paranoid’, said Nehru. ‘Hitlerian.’ Yet Jinnah’s landslide had exposed the myth of Nehru’s one nation.

Mountbatten could have explored a federation, which as the US demonstrated could be powerful and democratic. Gandhi proposed Jinnah as premier of a united India. It was just such a federal compromise that might have avoided bloodshed. But a federation would take time to forge. Instead Nehru accepted Jinnah’s demand for a partition in which Congress would receive the larger part of British India – its capital, army, bureaucracy – in return for Dominion status for both of the new countries. ‘We were tired men,’ he admitted later. ‘Partition offered a way out and we took it.’

Mountbatten embraced the plan for two states, India and Muslim Pakistan.^* Gandhi knew this would provoke violence. ‘The only alternatives,’ he told Mountbatten, ‘are a continuation of British rule to keep law and order or an Indian bloodbath. The bloodbath must be faced and accepted.’

On 3 June 1947, accompanied by Nehru and Jinnah, Mountbatten announced ‘the transfer of power to a fifth of the human race’ and partition, creating Pakistan in two unconnected parts. This pleased no one: Jinnah wanted the whole of Punjab and Bengal along with Kashmir, and requested a strip of India to link the two. The exact maps, to be drawn up by a British judge who had never been to India, would be announced just after independence, stoking up tension.

Then Mountbatten announced Britain would leave in ten weeks, a breakneck departure, unveiled with Mountbattenesque showmanship. It is a reality of all power that the moment departure is decided, the magnet of new power exerts its own visceral attraction and repulsion. The speed and uncertainty were likely to cause a bloody cataclysm, the only excuses being that British power was diminishing by the second; that he was unwilling to allow British troops to die keeping order; and that no ruler of India had ever voluntarily handed the subcontinent to another power before. Millions of people started to panic, anxious not just about what country they would live in but for their safety. ‘We’re living in the midst of crises,’ said Nehru. A further complication was that the princes still ruled 40 per cent of India: the Croesan nizam of Hyderabad, Sir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII, sixty-year-old descendant of the paladin of Aurangzeb, saw himself as a Muslim monarch and had married his son to the daughter of the last Ottoman caliph. Now he refused to join India and planned his own independence.

On 14 August 1947, in Karachi, Jinnah, aged seventy-one and already suffering from TB, announced Pakistani independence, becoming premier and governor-general and hailed as supreme leader. The next day, Nehru announced India’s ‘tryst with destiny … at the stroke of the midnight hour’, his Britannic rhetoric underlining how much he, the Harrovian Brahmin for all his socialism, was the successor and heir of the British Raj. India took possession of three-quarters of the Raj and the colonial administration, always overwhelmingly run by Indians, was transferred to the new state, just without the British. A vast crowd watched the raising of the Indian flag, which used the dharmachakra, symbol of Ashoka. Nehru had to rescue the viceregal daughter, Pamela, who almost got crushed by the crowds. ‘He was very nimble with his sandals,’ she recalled. ‘He said, “Come on.” I said, “I can’t, I’ve got high heels.” “Well, take them off,” he said’ – and the two of them were passed by hand over the crowd.

Away from this excitement, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs attacked each other, sparking migrations of terrified refugees. Two million were killed in a frenzy of slaughter, rape and arson. Trains of refugees arrived with every single passenger already slaughtered. Over ten million people moved homes in the largest single migration in history. As the killing started, Gandhi, his life’s work covered in blood, threatened to fast to death, while Nehru filled his residence with refugees, saying, ‘I know, mere bhai [my brother], it is my sorrow too.’ When Indira saw a Muslim about to be lynched, she dismounted from her train and shouted at the mob, overawing them into releasing him.

Nehru was determined to seize as much of India as possible. Kashmir, Muslim but ruled by a Hindu maharaja, was strategically vital, but to Nehru, descended from Kashmiri pandits, it was like ‘some supremely beautiful woman’. In October, Muslim Pathans and Pakistani troops invaded, prompting the maharaja to agree that Kashmir should accede to India, allowing him to request troops. Four days later, Nehru sent in his army.

When Gandhi arrived in Delhi, Nehru, as well as Indira and her elder son Rajiv, aged three, visited him nightly. On 30 January 1948, the day after Indira and Rajiv visited, Gandhi, walking as usual to prayers, was shot thrice in the chest by a Hindu nationalist, linked to the paramilitary RSS. Nehru rushed to Gandhi’s Birla House, falling to his knees beside the tiny body, sobbing. That night, to calm the growing crowds surrounding his house, Gandhi’s body was sat up and illuminated on the roof. ‘The light has gone out of our lives,’ said Nehru, ‘and there’s darkness everywhere.’

The love between Nehru and Edwina intensified in the last months. ‘We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed,’ wrote Nehru in May 1948, ‘and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.’ Whether it was sexual or not matters little. Sometimes it caused tensions with Nehru’s younger sister, Krishna: ‘Edwina could do no wrong …’ When Nehru told her off for wearing too much jewellery, she replied, ‘You don’t get angry with Edwina, in fact you keep admiring her jewellery …’ Edwina wept when the Mountbattens left India; Nehru wandered through her rooms in the Viceroy’s House to ‘lose myself in dreamland’.^*

In September 1948, as Indian forces, the cream of the Raj’s army, defeated Pakistan in Kashmir, Nehru invaded his other troublesome princely state, Hyderabad, where the nizam had declared independence. In Operation Polo, a five-day war, India defeated the Hyderabad forces, while Hindu mobs massacred 40,000 Muslims – the biggest bloodbath in modern Indian history. As Nehru dominated an India thriving in its first ten years, he was assisted by Indira, who, living at his residence Teen Murti House, raised her children for the dynastic life. ‘One mustn’t be afraid of getting hurt,’ she told Rajiv and Sanjay. ‘I want both of you to be courageous … there are millions of people in the world, but most just drift along, afraid of death and even more afraid of life.’ Jawaharlal, Indira and her sons – who would rule the greatest democracy for three generations – would not be like that.

As the British left independent India and Pakistan (while planning to keep their African possessions), the Dutch and French, bruised by defeats in the Second World War, were determined to reclaim their Asian empires, French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh declared independence in Hanoi, joining the French initially in a purge of Trotskyites and nationalists. But in 1946, when the French reoccupied the country, Ho and his brilliant general, Vo Nguyen Giap, a history teacher who now put his lessons into practice as an Asian Trotsky, fought a formidable French army in a brutal war. In Jakarta, East Indies, the ex-architect Sukarno declared himself president of a new state, Indonesia, framed by the Dutch colony, but based on his five principles, pancasila, fusing democracy with nationalism. In July 1947, as Nehru and Jinnah assumed power, the Dutch attacked Sukarno, then exploited a Communist insurrection to reconquer much of the archipelago. Sukarno, aided by his top officer Suharto, crushed the Communists himself but struggled against the Dutch. This European imperial war worried Truman, who threatened to cut aid to the Netherlands. The Dutch withdrew, recognizing the vast new country, which Sukarno, flirting with a large Communist presence, transformed into a Guided Democracy with himself as monarchical president for life.

The British, meanwhile, were also leaving Palestine, where in a multifaceted conflict, two Arab kings vied with a nascent Jewish state and Palestinian militias.

TWO KINGS: FAROUK, ABDULLAH AND THE CARVE -UP OF PALESTINE

The vicious ethnic war at the heart of Palestine was exacerbated by the ambitions of the two leading Arab dynasts, the cunning Hashemite king Abdullah of Jordan, and flashy King Farouk, scion of House Mehmed Ali, king of Egypt, to expand their kingdoms and bid for the leadership of the Arab world.

Most of the states of west Asia – Syria, Israel, Lebanon – were created out of the old Ottoman empire in the two years after the Second World War. In April 1946, the French granted independence to two newly crafted countries, Syria and Lebanon;^* Britain did the same to Transjordan, and in Egypt withdrew British troops to the Canal. Palestine was more complicated: in 1917 the British had promised a ‘Jewish homeland’, but there was no promise of a state and even the promise of a ‘homeland’ did not mean it would ever happen. The Kurds, Armenians, Alawites and Druze had also been promised states – which had never materialized. The Palestinian Arabs had long been the majority alongside a small Jewish community – both ancient. But there had been a Jewish majority in Jerusalem since the 1880s.

The Arabs resented the arrival of Jewish immigrants, who soon formed a thriving agricultural community. British backing for a Jewish homeland did not last twenty years: as the conflict intensified, Britain totally reversed and in 1937 promised independence to the Arabs, just as they launched an insurgency that was crushed by British arms. Now, as independence was granted to new Arab states, the 600,000 Jews, led by a diminutive pugnacious Polish-born pragmatist with a shock of white hair, David Ben-Gurion, launched a Jewish rebellion against the British to win their own state. The Jewish experience was unique, as were the circumstances in Palestine, but in other ways, as Stalin put it, Zionism was simply ‘Jewish national expression’. The suffering of the Holocaust persuaded many to support a Jewish state. But not Britain: Attlee banned Jewish immigration into Palestine and hoped to hand it over to an Arab state. Jewish militias attacked British troops: Israel, like Türkiye in 1922, was forged by an anti-imperial rebellion against British wishes. Attlee desperately passed the problem to the United Nations.

On 29 November 1947, in Resolution 181, the UN voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, a plan not unlike those in Ireland and India. President Truman backed it. ‘I am Cyrus,’ he joked, referring to the Persian king. Ben-Gurion, believing in ‘a state at any cost’, accepted the compromise; the Palestinians preferred to fight for the whole. Arab paramilitaries attacked the Jewish community, defended by its well-organized militia, Haganah.

Watching this was Farouk, the young ruler of the greatest Arab nation, Egypt. King at sixteen, six foot and matinee-idol handsome, he had been educated in Britain and was vastly rich, owning 75,000 acres; he was so sheltered he had never visited the Pyramids but quickly became the Beloved King, al-malik-al-mahbub. During the Second World War, he had been humiliated by the British proconsul who had imposed his will on Farouk by surrounding Abdeen Palace with tanks; now he was keen to assert Egyptian power.

Farouk, who was married, was addicted to showgirls, nightclubs, fast cars and casinos, his Egypt a cosmopolitan mix of Turks, Circassians, Copts, Jews, Greeks and Lebanese. He ‘was fascinated by the fact I was a Jewess’, recalled his mistress Irene Guinle. ‘The only person Farouk ever listened to was his father, Fuad … [who] told him that the best women in the world were Jewish women.’ But all Farouk’s girlfriends agreed that he was a lazy man-child who was so lonely that his best friend was the grifter son of the palace electrician, Antonio Pulli, known as the Stork for his ability to fall asleep standing up in nightclubs.

Still in his late twenties, Farouk was learning politics, embracing the new Arab nationalism while warily monitoring the rise of an Islamicist sheikh, Hassan al-Banna. The sheikh’s followers, the million-strong Muslim Brothers, believed that ‘Islam is the solution’ and were infuriated by Faroukian decadence and by Jewish immigration to Jerusalem. They started to assassinate Farouk’s ministers. Farouk tried to promote a Muslim monarchy, but when he made the hajj it was on his yacht Mahrousa. Now he hoped to neutralize the Brothers by fighting Jews and annexing south Palestine. After all, Mehmed Ali had ruled the lot.

In Cairo, in December 1947, Farouk hosted a new Arab League of the seven independent Arab countries, who decided on war. ‘It doesn’t matter how many [Jews] there are,’ said the League’s Egyptian secretary Azzam Pasha, ‘we’ll sweep them into the sea.’ Setting up the mufti of Jerusalem as Palestinian president, Farouk commanded 40,000 soldiers, but when he was warned that only half were equipped and of those only his Sudanese guard was ready for combat, he insisted that forty-five million Arabs could obliterate 600,000 Jews, who fielded just 35,000 fighters. But he had an Arab rival in the carve-up.

Abdullah, king of Transjordan, descended from Muhammad, mocked Farouk’s dynasty: ‘You don’t make a gentleman of a Balkan farmer’s son simply by making him a king.’ But he also possessed a crack unit of 10,000, the British-officered Arab Legion. Abdullah was determined to seize swathes of Palestine by war or guile, secretly negotiating a partition of Palestine with the Jews while publicly denouncing the Jewish state. Abdullah got himself elected supreme commander of Arab League forces and massed his legionaries; Farouk reviewed Egyptian troops on horseback and promoted his sisters to general.

On 15 May 1948, as the British evacuated, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel,^* just as Farouk and Abdullah were joined by the Syrians plus Iraqi and Saudi contingents. Stalin, who was already arresting and shooting Soviet Jews, accusing them of split loyalties, was the first to recognize Israel. The Egyptian plan was to race up the coast and take Tel Aviv. Instead, in a ferocious war, accompanied by atrocities on both sides, the new Israeli army, well led by disciplined officers, armed with shipments of Soviet weaponry, defeated all the Arab armies. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the war, but their Catastrophe – the Nakba – was the birth of Israel, aided by the expulsion by Arab states of 800,000 Sephardic Jews, communities that had thrived in Alexandria, Damascus, Marrakesh and Baghdad for millennia, who now arrived in Israel, shaping its culture.

As the war progressed, the total commitment of the Israelis and the influx of Sephardic immigrants allowed them to field 115,000 men by early 1949, the Arabs still only 60,000. While Abdullah successfully invaded the West Bank and seized the Old City of Jerusalem, Farouk’s troops were routed, let down by the Stork, who had procured faulty Italian weapons. Two Egyptians distinguished themselves: General Mohamed Naguib was wounded three times, but was disgusted by Farouk, whose excesses he knew well. When 4,000 Egyptians were trapped for four months in the Faluja Pocket, one of them, a tall handsome postman’s son, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, wounded in the siege, was so incensed by Faroukian incompetence that he wrote Philosophy of the Revolution, and planned a coup.

In February 1949, Farouk agreed to an armistice, withdrawing from the Negev desert. Israel was established as a liberal democracy with a Jewish majority and an Arab minority – the only democracy in the region then and now. The Palestinians, like the Jews before them, did not give up their dream of Return.

Arab soldiers found it hard to forgive their inept leaders. In Syria, the fragile democracy left by France was overthrown by General Husni al-Zaim – the first of many Arab military coups. Leaders across the region would shamelessly use reckless violence, ethnic rivalries and kinship favouritism instead of building democracy and civil societies, with fatal consequences. The other winner was Abdullah of Jordan, as he called his kingdom, which doubled in size. Now that he possessed the Holy City, he declared himself king of Jerusalem, the first actually to rule there since the short visit of Emperor Frederick II in 1229. Many could not forgive his successful game of thrones: in 1951, he was assassinated in the al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – in front of his grandson and later successor, Hussein, a seventeen-year-old Harrovian schoolboy who never forgot the sight. In Egypt, a cholera epidemic exposed Farouk’s ineptitude, while the Muslim Brothers planned his downfall, assassinating his premier. Instead Farouk had al-Banna assassinated and banned the Brothers. Bald, obese and absolute but with a thriving economy and almost rid of the British and the Brothers, Farouk had survived.

Stalin had ordered his Czech vassals to provide Israel with the armaments that won the war, while in China he was transferring huge caches of weaponry that would change the world.

MAO, JIANG QING AND RED SISTER SONG

The victory of Mao was not inevitable. As soon as Stalin withdrew Soviet troops from Manchuria in May 1946, essential for his relations with the USA, Chiang, now deploying 4.3 million troops, seized most of the province, driving back 1.27 million Communists. Mao panicked and prepared to return to guerrilla warfare but was saved by the Americans. Truman’s envoy General George Marshall, wartime chief of staff, was deceived by Mao, who played down his links to Stalin and played up his openness to American friendship. Marshall forced Chiang Kai-shek to stop the civil war and negotiate a ceasefire – a fatal mistake. Stalin had starved Mao of arms during the war, helping Chiang against the Japanese. Now Stalin pivoted towards Mao, transferring stashes of Japanese and Soviet arms, training the Japanese-allied Manchukuo army as Red soldiers and lending 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet northern sector of Korea.

At home, Stalin deported tens of thousands from his retaken regions, causing – though denying – a second Ukrainian famine in which almost another million died: he joked that he would have deported the entire Ukrainian nation but there were too many of them. He now saw the world divided into ‘two armed camps’ and envisaged, one day, war against the capitalist states led by America. Close to getting the Soviet Bomb – he tested his first in August 1949 – Stalin forced his own vassals onto eastern Europe, believing as he told the Yugoslavs that ‘Each side will impose their own system.’ For a Russian leader, Poland was the first and most important of those countries to secure. In Romania, Mihai of Romania, still only twenty-six, was forced to appoint a Communist-dominated government that arrested and tried liberal leaders and supporters, decrees he refused to sign. In November 1947, after attending the London wedding of his cousins, Princess Elizabeth of England and a naval officer Prince Philip of Greece, where he met his future wife, he returned home. There on 30 December he was summoned to the Elisabeta Palace. The Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Stalin’s henchman Andrei Vyshinsky, the shrieking prosecutor of the show trials, threatened, ‘If you don’t sign this [an instrument of abdication] immediately, we’re obliged to kill more than 1,000 students in prison.’ But Mihai refused to abdicate, hoping to call in loyal troops.

‘Your guards have been arrested,’ said Dej, ‘the telephones have been cut and artillery are pointed at this office.’ He drew a pistol. ‘I looked out of the window,’ Mihai recalled, ‘and saw the howitzers. I signed.’ Dej declared a ‘people’s republic’ that day. Bulgaria^* had fallen much earlier, but now similar coups, orchestrated by Stalin, were taking place in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; in the latter country the former foreign minister and son of the country’s founder, Jan Masaryk, either committed suicide or was defenestrated. Yugoslavia and Albania, the countries that had liberated themselves from the Germans, were more idiosyncratic: the regal Josip Tito, half Croat, half Slovene, who had survived the Terror in Moscow, reunited Yugoslavia, purging enemies. But Tito resisted Stalin’s bullying. Infuriated by such lese-majesty, Stalin ordered his killing. In a very rare example of anyone defying Stalin, Tito wrote him a letter: ‘Stop sending assassins to kill me … If you send another, I’ll send one to Moscow and I won’t have to send another.’^*

As he secured this unprecedented Russian empire, larger than the Romanovs’, Stalin calculated that the capitalist democracies lacked the will to fight for eastern Europe and he was right: the peace of the next forty years was based not just on the rules of international law but on the western recognition that half of Europe belonged to Moscow. On Europe’s western extremity, Spain was still ruled by Franco, who frantically trimmed his Fascistic dictatorship to win American favour as an anti-Communist crusader, calling himself ‘Caudillo of the War of Liberation against Communism’ and restoring the Bourbon monarchy with himself as regent. His less rebarbative Portuguese ultranationalist neighbour, Salazar, delivered stability at home and vigorously maintained the empire abroad, sending thousands of white settlers to his African colonies.

European democracy was limited to the centre and even there it wavered. Impoverished Italy looked likely to embrace Communism. In France, where a weak fourth republic proved unmanageable, Premier de Gaulle retired to his bleak Colombey house. Governments were short-lived. France, like Portugal, consoled itself with empire.

Both Stalin and Truman were uncertain whether Germany, divided between Soviet and western zones, should ever be reunited. As the Cold War intensified, Truman was sceptical; Stalin initially favoured reunification. But Berlin, deep in Stalin’s eastern zone, remained divided between the powers. In 1948, hoping to solve the German conundrum by driving the Americans out of Berlin, Stalin blockaded the western zones; Truman instead ordered an airlift to Berlin. Stalin now realized that America would resist Communist advances on all fronts and that a united neutral Germany was impossible, so he installed a Soviet vassal state in his eastern sector. The Americans fostered a West German democracy and needed German sophistication to use against the Communists. Hitler’s anti-Soviet intelligence chief Gehlen set up West Germany’s intelligence service, his missile expert Werner von Braun worked on US missiles; several of the Holocaust Wannsee planners were released.^* Krupp was restored to run his industrial empire. America prescribed a bold tonic for European sickness: a massive aid programme, the Marshall Plan. Stalin rejected it and launched new repressions. His blundering threats led the western democracies, recovering thanks to US aid and sharing a growing confidence in their open societies, to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance against the Communists, who would soon form their own. America, inspired by its missionary religious origins, embraced the conviction that openness, elections and markets would ultimately produce progress towards democracy and capitalism everywhere. Stalin’s USSR, fusing its Marxist quasi-religious mission with traditional anti-western Russian nationalism, was convinced it too would lead the world towards its version of progress.^*

Stalin’s success in the west encouraged him in the east, where Korea became the Asian Berlin. Soviet troops occupied the northern half, the Americans the south. Planning a Communist client state, Stalin struggled to find vassals. Finally Beria discovered a Korean-born Communist whose Christian parents had founded one of the first anti-Japanese groups, and who had fought during the 1930s in Mao’s armies before escaping into Russia. The thirty-three-year-old Kim Song-ju was unknown in Korea, but he cleverly adopted as nom de guerre the name of a famous, possibly mythological fighter: ‘Tiger’ Kim Il-sung. Kim embraced Stalinism mixed with Korean nationalism.

In March 1948, when Marshall’s truce collapsed, Chairman Mao seized Manchuria from Generalissimo Chiang, who in turn captured Mao’s headquarters at Yen’an. Mao rode away with his wife Jiang Qing and lieutenant Zhou Enlai. Basing himself near Beijing, he ordered his best general, Lin Biao, to advance southwards. The Japanese war had hollowed out Chiang’s China; victory destroyed him. Although he was uninterested in lucre, the Songs were a study in malversation: Madame Chiang lived like an empress, her brother, premier T. V. Song, made $300 million in currency speculations. Chiang sacked T.V. but promoted commanders so inept they may have been Communist moles. Chiang ranted against the Songs; Meiling flew to New York.

In April 1949, Mao took the capital Nanjing. After Chiang prayed tearfully at his mother’s tomb, he flew to Taiwan where, months later, Meiling joined him.^* Mao invited her sister, Madame Sun – Qingling – whom he addressed as ‘Dear Elder Sister’, to join him in Beijing: ‘Show us how to build a new China.’ Mao met her at the station, and appointed her vice-chairman; Premier Zhou Enlai gave her the palace where Puyi had been born (‘I’m getting the royal treatment,’ she boasted).^*

Mao decided to move the capital to Beijing, setting up his home – a comfortable villa, the Library of Chrysanthemum Fragrance, with a giant bed piled with books – in the heavily guarded Zhongnanhai compound of the Forbidden City that became his Kremlin. Zhongnanhai is still the metonym for the Chinese leadership. Mao was interested not in money but in comfort and security, using around fifty refurbished villas, ordering the army to choose girls from their theatrical groups to serve in his own troupe, available for sex with the chairman, which his defence minister Marshal Peng called ‘selecting imperial concubines’. His wife, Jiang Qing, did not interfere.

On 1 October 1949, Mao, accompanied by Madame Sun, announced the people’s republic from the top of Tiananmen Gate to 100,000 people. The triumph of Mao combined with Stalin’s explosion of the Bomb that August shocked America, destabilized President Truman and unleashed a witch-hunt against secret Communist infiltration (so-called Un-American Activities), led by an alcoholic senator, Joseph McCarthy, who, backed by the omnipresent Joe Kennedy, hired Kennedy’s younger son, Bobby, as a lawyer on his committee. As Mao turned to Stalin to industrialize China, he launched a ferocious terror ‘to suppress counter-revolutionaries’, specifically ordering ‘massive arrests, massive killings’, criticizing his underlings ‘for being much too lenient and not killing enough’ and complaining that ‘Many places don’t dare kill counter-revolutionaries on a big scale with publicity. The situation must be changed.’ Many were shot in front of parades, the brains spattering the crowd. Although Mao boasted that 700,000 were shot, the real number was around three million, and a further ten million were sent to Laogai – Reform by Labour – camps, where unknown millions died during his reign. He also attacked kinship traditions, banning polygyny, concubinage and foot-binding.^* No sooner was this campaign over than he devised a new purge known as the Three Antis (targeting bureaucratism, embezzlement, waste), telling his henchmen, ‘We must execute tens of thousands of embezzlers … Whoever disobeys is either a bureaucratist or an embezzler himself.’ Killing, said Mao, was ‘extremely necessary. Only when done properly can our power be secure.’

Always reading history, particularly about the First Emperor, with whom he identified, Mao’s real priority was to win great-power status for China, particularly possession of the Bomb. In December 1949, he travelled by train to Moscow for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Here the fifty-six-year-old Mao courted the grizzled Stalin, calling him ‘the Master’. When Stalin kept him waiting for weeks, he grumbled, ‘Am I here just to eat, shit and sleep?’ Stalin kept his influence in Manchuria; Mao got industrial aid and overlordship of Asian Communists.^* The meetings of these gifted, paranoic megalomaniacs were awkward, ending in a dinner at Stalin’s dacha where the Red Tsar tried to get the Red Emperor to dance to his gramophone. Mao refused; Stalin glowered; and the Bomb was out of the question – but Mao had a merciless plan to ensure that he got it.

In April 1950, Stalin received Kim Il-sung, who asked permission to attack American-backed South Korea.

TIGER KIM AND STALIN’S PROXY WAR

Kim was already expert at manipulating his titanic patrons: a year earlier he had asked Stalin to start the war; when Stalin refused, he went to Mao, who promised to back him. Then Kim probed Stalin, who again refused; Kim added that he would consult Mao. Stalin summoned him to Moscow and approved ‘a more active stance in the unification of Korea’ – war – provided he ‘rely on Mao who understands Asia beautifully’. But he warned him, ‘If you get kicked in the teeth, I shan’t lift a finger. You’d have to ask Mao for help.’ Stalin knew this might launch a world war – ‘Should we fear this? I should not’ – but more likely Kim would test America and ‘spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives’. Stalin was forging the Cold War template: the proxy war, locally lethal, safe from nuclear jeopardy.

On 25 June 1950, Kim’s 75,000 Koreans attacked the American-backed South Korea, quickly occupying most of the peninsula, but Truman, supported by the UN, poured in American troops, under the bombastic, Caesaresque MacArthur, who routed Kim’s army and took his capital, Pyongyang.

Kim begged for help from Stalin, who told Mao, ‘Move 5–6 divisions across the 38th Parallel … Call them volunteers.’ Mao refused to intervene; Stalin received Zhou and Lin at his Black Sea villa. Sitting up late in the hot Georgian night, Stalin teased Mao that the chairman did not have to fight, but promised air cover. Mao felt obliged to intervene.

‘With or without Soviet air cover, we go in!’ On 25 October, 450,000 Chinese attacked the bewildered Americans in human waves; the southern capital, Seoul, fell in January 1951.

A million American troops, under MacArthur, counter-attacked, pushing the Chinese back. MacArthur threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons; Truman sacked him. Crushed between Stalin–Mao and the Americans, Kim Il-sung was desperate for peace. Stalin and Zhou discussed whether to liquidate the panicking Korean, but Stalin agreed with Mao that the war must go on. ‘The war’s shown American weakness,’ said Stalin. ‘They want to subjugate the world and can’t subdue little Korea,’ adding chillingly, ‘The North Koreans have lost nothing except casualties.’ Mao had lost a little more: 400,000 men, and his son Anying, who, working as Marshal Peng’s Russian interpreter, died in an American air raid. When told, Mao was silent, then just said, ‘In a war, how can there be no deaths?’

In February 1953, the newly elected president Dwight Eisenhower, the general who had commanded D-Day, explicitly threatened China with nuclear weapons. Korea had shown Stalin that China needed the Bomb. On the 28th, Stalin sat up jovially drinking with his henchmen until the early hours.^* He was planning a new Terror against his grandees, linked to the arrest of mainly Jewish doctors in a murder plot he had himself invented. But that night he suffered a stroke; his comrades and his doctors were too terrified to treat him in case he was merely drunk: he was left on the floor soaked in his own urine. After the embalmed Stalin had joined Lenin in the Mausoleum, Beria dominated the state as first-vice-premier, security chieftain and nuclear supremo, freeing vast numbers of GULAG slave labourers and proposing a withdrawal from East Germany – ‘It’s not even a real state,’ he said, ‘but only kept in existence by Soviet troops’ – and political liberalization, much the same programme later proposed by Gorbachev.

The new leaders made peace in Korea. Kim Il-sung had lost the war and ruined the country, but he executed rivals and devised a particularly Korean concept of Communism and nationalism, juche – self-reliance and isolation – infused with a sacred cult which involved the quasi-divine birth of his son Jong-il (actually born in the USSR) on Korea’s holy mountain. Out of it he would spawn a hereditary dynasty which ruled North Korea into the third generation.

Beria, who had not received the top offices, nonetheless appeared to be the real power, yet his ghoulish vices and risky politics alarmed his coarse, lumpy and warty comrade Nikita Khrushchev, whom Beria fatally underrated. Khrushchev warned his comrades, ‘Beria’s sharpening his knives.’ Beria controlled the security organs who guarded the grandees, so Khrushchev recruited Marshal Zhukov, who on 26 June 1953 led a posse of loyal officers, including Leonid Brezhnev, deputy army commissar favoured by Stalin, into the Kremlin. At a Presidium session, Khrushchev orchestrated the denunciation of Beria; Zhukov’s posse burst in, pistols drawn, and arrested the Georgian. Beria was later tried for rape and treason and, his mouth stuffed with a towel, shot in the forehead.

Khrushchev, a pugnacious semi-literate miner and devout Marxist-Leninist, impulsive and irrepressible, was Stalin’s protégé, who had killed many when he ran Ukraine and Moscow. Yet he brought to an end government by killing, though the secret police – renamed KGB – remained omnipresent and vigilant. After war and terror, there was such a shortage of men that women were encouraged to work, and abortion, illegal since 1935, was legalized. The porcine Khrushchev now confronted the polished Eisenhower in a bipolar tournament of power, fought out in proxy duels across the world. After Communist victories in China then in Indo-China, Eisenhower feared ‘what you call the “falling domino” principle. You knock over the first one and … the last one … will go over very quickly.’ America and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, now enjoyed truly global reach, each seeking local clients and using war, espionage, credit and culture to defeat their ideological rivals. Both showered spending and technology on their military industries. Both the KGB and America’s new intelligence agency, the CIA, became huge, potent and often murderous global bureaucracies, though the KGB was also responsible for oppressing its own citizens and those of its vassals.^*

At home, the US thrived, its economy – now a third of global output – stimulated by mass consumerism, military production and technical ingenuity, boundlessly innovative and confident in its righteous mission to promote capitalist democracy. In the richest country that had ever existed,^* the appetite of its well-off consumers for flashily advertised fashions, cars and fridges stimulated efficient production; its films and music reverberated across the world as compulsive as the pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley. A handsome boy with an invincible sex appeal and a creamy baritone who, channelling the African-American gospel and blues he heard in his dirt-poor upbringing in Mississippi and later in Memphis, promoted a new sound – rock ’n’ roll – selling 500 million records to make him ‘The King’. Radio and television had diminished community – promenades and theatres were no longer essential – but the home theatre of television tied families together and helped build nations through the sharing of beloved drama series and trusted anchormen, and yet televised scenes of political strife and warfare could also divide them. Some leaders were better on television than they were at ruling.^* TV became a powerful political tool for all states, democratic or autocratic. It was television that helped expose the bullying bombast of US Senator McCarthy, who had orchestrated witch hunts against supposed Communists in arts and governments.

It was not just goods that travelled: cheaper flights allowed millions to go on holiday to foreign lands, and many Americans now flew down to their own American Babylon: Cuba.

MEYER LANSKY’S HOTEL NACIONAL; FIDEL CASTRO’S FAILED REVOLUTION

In 1952, Meyer Lansky, the Russian-born gangster who had started in the backstreets of Little Italy, met a former Cuban dictator, Colonel Fulgencio Batista, at his suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, Manhattan, to plan a new seizure of power and division of casinos in Havana. An illegitimate ex-labourer, Batista, part-Taíno, African, Chinese and Spanish, the only mixed-race president Cuba has ever had, had early befriended Lansky, who, starting in 1933, helped turn Havana into the pleasure dome of the western world.

Lansky and Bugsy Siegel had survived the arrest and trial of their boss Lucky Luciano, sentenced to fifty years for pandering,^* but the Mafiosi had negotiated his release through a deal, Operation Underworld, in which he and his longshoremen would prevent Nazi infiltration of New York Harbor. On his release, Luciano set up headquarters in Havana, where, in 1946, he and Lansky held a Mafia conference of kingpins at the Hotel Nacional, where they were entertained by a young singer, blue-eyed son of a New Jersey bar-owner, fixer (and occasional abortionist) and a boxer, called Frank Sinatra, whose feral sex appeal, transcendent baritone and extended phrasing would make the idol of the first teenager ‘fanatics’ of the consumer age, the bobby-soxers. The first problem on their agenda was their oldest friend: Bugsy Seigel.

As Havana boomed, Lansky and Siegel pursued their vision of an American pleasure city, investing in a hotel–casino, the Flamingo, at the village of Las Vegas in the Utah desert, attracted by legal gambling and off-track betting. Siegel was basing himself in Los Angeles, where the rich gangster became friends with the movie stars and producers of the Hollywood industry that was purveying the glamour of American capitalism to the world. After several murder cases, Bugsy was keen to go legitimate, reassuring his builder at the Flamingo, ‘Don’t worry, we only kill each other.’ But Siegel spent too much money buying jewellery for his girlfriend. After blowing $6 million on the Flamingo, he attracted his friends Clark Gable and Judy Garland to the launch, but Lansky and Luciano now suspected him of ‘skimming’ profits – a capital offence in their milieu. Lansky signed off: on 20 June 1947, as Siegel held court in his Beverly Hills mansion, a sniper shot him through the eye.

Batista, allowing Lansky to open hotels and casinos and American industry to control Cuba’s sugar, asked the diminutive gangster to bribe the island’s president to resign and then seized power again as dictator. As the Mafia ruled Havana and the American fruit companies dominated Cuban agriculture, the CIA backed Batista. Wiser Americans worried that his corruption would encourage revolution.^* Batista and his secret police the Bureau for Repression of Communist Activities soon demonstrated how easily he would crush any Communists.

On 26 July 1953, Batista foiled a pathetic Communist attempt to seize the barracks in Santiago. Many of the 165 rebels were shot, their amateurish leader, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro, imprisoned and unlikely to be heard of again. Cuba was safe, but now the CIA worried about two friendly kings in danger.

FAT FUCKER AND THE BOY SCOUT: NASSER AND THE SHAH SEIZE POWER

In 1952, Kim Roosevelt, a thirty-five-year-old American spy, arrived in Cairo to see King Farouk, whom he had befriended during the war, keen to bolster the monarchy. Kermit, grandson of President Teddy, who had joined CIA forerunner the OSS during the war and believed America should back Arab nationalists to counter Soviet subversion, personified the tweedy jauntiness of the early CIA. That tone was also echoed in the name of his Egyptian mission: Project FF (Fat Fucker). King Farouk was the Fat Fucker. Roosevelt had a second mission related to another young king, the shah of Iran. In Egypt, control of the Canal was essential for oil supplies; in Iran, the oilfields were in peril, and the two were connected: Farouk’s sister Fawzia was married to the shah. Roosevelt, chief of the Near East and Africa Division, was ordered to save both.

Roosevelt started with Fat Fucker, but Farouk refused to reduce his extravagance or dismiss the Stork and other favourites, leading the American to probe a coterie of young officers who loathed the inept monarchy. These Free Officers were led by Colonel Nasser and his ally Anwar Sadat, son of a fellahin, a poor Nilotic farmer, who had been imprisoned in the war for pro-German conspiracy. Giving up on FF, Roosevelt encouraged Nasser, who he believed was pro-American.

Farouk, who hated the British, declared that the Canal belonged to Egypt, elevated himself to a new title, king of Egypt and Sudan, and faked a descent from Muhammad: ‘If there was any Arabic blood in Farouk’s veins, it was so diluted that it couldn’t possibly have been traced back to Muhammad,’ fulminated General Naguib. ‘A sacrilege.’ Farouk divorced his queen, the popular part-Turkish aristocrat Farida, to marry a teenager, Narriman, chosen in part because she was Arab and middle-class; but the combination of cold-heartedness and extravagance made the obese sybarite unpopular. When Peter Ustinov played Nero in the new film Quo Vadis, the resemblance to the king was so strong that the film was banned in Egypt. Farouk was losing control: on 26 January 1952, rioters burned down cinemas, hotels and nightclubs.

Now Farouk promoted his brother-in-law, Ismail ‘Pretty Boy’ Chirine, a playboy who had married Fawzia after her divorce from the shah, to defence minister. It was the last straw for Nasser who, chain-smoking and listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, accelerated his coup, recruiting Naguib as figurehead. When some officers betrayed the plot to Farouk he mocked them as ‘a bunch of pimps’. On the night of 23 July 1952, Nasser seized Cairo’s army headquarters. Farouk was at an Alexandrian casino, but he appealed to the US ambassador for help against Communist mutineers. Nasser and Sadat debated whether to execute him, but, deciding to let him live, they dispatched two columns to arrest him.

Brandishing a machine gun, Farouk drove Narriman, his son and Pulli the Stork to the fortified Ras el-Tin Palace, defended by Sudanese guards. When the rebels attacked the palace, he shot four with a hunting rifle; but neither the Americans nor the British backed him and he signed the abdication, in favour of his son Fuad. Dressing up in his white admiral’s uniform, Farouk with his family boarded the Mahrousa, which had taken his grandfather Ismail into exile in 1879. Naguib, embarrassed and moved, kissed his hand. ‘It isn’t easy to govern Egypt, you know,’ said Farouk, ending 146 years of his family’s rule.

The Free Officers appointed Naguib as president, but as his conservatism became apparent, the dashing, tall and exuberant Nasser, who had already become premier, replaced him as president, winning massive popularity with his land reforms and powerful oratory, first in Egypt but ultimately as the voice of secular pan-Arab nationalism. There was always another route in the Arab world: religion. Religious and secular power were always in contact, sometimes clashing, sometimes combining, but like all ideologies always contagious and fluid.

Nasser consulted a leader of the Muslim Brothers, Sayyid Qutb, a pale, heavy-lidded bachelor who had been disgusted by American decadence during his studies in Colorado and preached jihad against the materialistic west. The modern history of the Arab world can be written through these two men. Once Qutb realized Nasser was opposed to his views, he ordered his assassination. In October 1954, while Nasser was speaking live on the radio in Alexandria, a Brother shot at him and missed. Nasser, a born thespian, played it to the hilt. ‘Let them kill me,’ he cried, ‘so long as I’ve instilled pride, honour, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser.’ Nasser, advised by the CIA but also employing ex-Nazis, now used his General Intelligence Service, the Mukhabarat – the essential tool of all Arab rulers – to purge the jihadists. He hanged Qutb, but his works were read across the House of Islam by all sects – including the Shiite lecturer in philosophy and sharia in Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini.

As Farouk settled into luxurious Italian exile with a new starlet, Kim Roosevelt arrived to advise his ex-brother-in-law, Shah Mohammad Reza, who at thirty-four was in danger of being exiled or murdered. He had suffered bitterly from the humiliations of his father’s downfall and Anglo-Soviet occupation, but he had the acumen to govern. ‘There’s no more lonely unhappy life,’ said the shah, ‘than that of the man who decides to rule instead of reign.’ He gained stature first in 1946 when Tabriz was recovered from the Soviets, and then in 1949 when, visiting Teheran University, he was shot in cheek and shoulder by an assassin who was himself shot on the spot. A wave of sympathy permitted the shah to pass new powers to appoint governments, a first step in his mission to modernize Iran and make it a great power.

The shah had to deal with a rising Communist Party; the Tudeh, a mercurial ayatollah Kashani, who backed a terrorist movement called Fadayan-e Islam or Devotees of Islam; a conservative army; and, in the parliament (Majlis), the return of a veteran politician, Mohammad Mosaddegh and his National Front, who spearheaded the call to nationalize British oil. In the face of anti-British fury, the shah appointed a forceful general, Ali Razmara, to negotiate with the British, but he was assassinated by Fadayan-e Islam. The shah sought another premier, but the Majlis voted to nationalize British oil and then for Mosaddegh, now backed by the religious leader Ayatollah Kashani, to succeed Razmara. On 28 April 1951, the shah duly appointed Mosaddegh, who three days later nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mosaddegh, now sixty-nine, was an unlikely revolutionary. Educated in Paris, he was a semi-royal, super-wealthy landowner – his mother was a Qajar princess, his wife granddaughter of a shah – but he was also a valetudinarian who, pyjama-clad, governed from bed. Detesting the British – ‘You have no idea how crafty they are, how evil,’ he told an American envoy – this neurotic funambulist tried to balance the Communists on one side, shah, army and ayatollahs on the other. The only way to do so was to assume autocratic powers himself.

In July 1952, Mosaddegh challenged the shah’s control of the army; the shah dismissed him but, faced with riots organized by both the Communists and the ayatollahs, recalled him. Mosaddegh, now taking command of the military, backed by the ayatollahs and the Communists, assumed emergency powers. He tried to appease the Communists but only succeeded in disappointing them while convincing everyone else that he was either becoming a despot or turning Communist. In January 1953, Ayatollah Kashani turned against him. The Communists attempted to seize power. An army conspiracy plotted with the shah. Abroad, Winston Churchill, seventy-eight, prime minister for the second time, agreed with Eisenhower that Mosaddegh was in danger of being overwhelmed by the Communists.

The shah felt beleaguered – ‘The bastard was out for blood,’ he later recalled of Mosaddegh – consoled only by Soraya, his half-German, half-Iranian second wife, the love of his life. The queen dispensed with his Swiss mentor Perron, whom she called a ‘woman-hating homosexual who spread poison’. Shah Mohammad was shy and yet sexually voracious, his eyes revealing: ‘Dark brown, almost black, shining, at times hard, at times sad or gentle, they exuded charm and reflected his soul.’ Soraya calmed him with sex, the only thing, along with flying planes, that soothed him. He slept with a pistol under his pillow.

Mosaddegh, talking in riddles in his barricaded mansion, had alienated all sides. ‘Our authority throughout the Middle East,’ said Churchill, ‘has been violently shaken.’ Eisenhower agreed; his advisers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, founding director of the CIA, believed that Mosaddegh was an ineffective dictator who would be forced into the arms of the Soviets. ‘Is there,’ asked Eisenhower, ‘any feasible course of action to save the situation?’

In July 1953, Roosevelt drove into Teheran with a million dollars in cash to arrange a coup against Mosaddegh: Operation Ajax. An ambitious if venal general, Fazlollah Zahedi, Mosaddegh’s former interior minister and cousin, also married to a Qajar shah’s granddaughter, was already planning his own coup and was happy to receive western help. The shah distrusted everyone, particularly the Anglo-Americans.

On 1 August, Roosevelt was smuggled on the floor of a limousine into the Golestan Palace to see the shah. Coups do not usually have soundtracks but Roosevelt chose Sinatra’s ‘Luck be a Lady’ as his theme song. He and his British SIS colleagues Woodhouse and Darbyshire massively exaggerated their own importance and competence amid this welter of conspiracies. Their portrait of all Iranians, starting with the shah and Zahedi, as childish, corrupt panickers and themselves as ice-cool, swashbuckling manipulators was delusional braggadocio and racist orientalism of the worst sort. Roosevelt revealingly codenamed the shah Boyscout, Mosaddegh Old Bugger and himself Rainmaker.

On 16 August, outside Teheran, the shah signed decrees that dismissed Mosaddegh and appointed Zahedi, but Mossadegh mobilized a mob with the aid of Communists and tried to arrest Zahedi. A mob funded by Roosevelt was vanquished, but Zahedi went underground. The coup had failed; the shah, now in danger of assassination, flew Soraya to Baghdad then to Rome.

* In 1898, a Polish physicist, Marie Skłodowska, born in Romanov Warsaw, and recently married to a French colleague, Pierre Curie, developed the theory of what she called ‘radioactivity’, revealing the enormous energy within her newly discovered elements polonium and radium, which would have immense implications for both war and medicine. In 1905 a German-Jewish physicist, the twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein, son of a failed technical entrepreneur from Württemberg, had written a paper demonstrating the physical reality of atoms and molecules, which had been known about since the early nineteenth century. He showed through his theory of relativity that energy and matter are equivalent and provided a precise equation to show how much energy is contained in a particular amount of matter. After 1933, when Einstein had escaped Germany and moved to the US, physicists had discovered that certain isotypes of uranium had the potential to sustain a chain reaction that split atoms. The energy this released could be calculated from Einstein’s formula of decades earlier. In 1939, realizing that this energy could be prodigious, Einstein had advised FDR to develop its potential. Hitler decided not to concentrate on the development of a nuclear bomb, perhaps his biggest mistake, while persecution of Jewish scientists meant that many of its creators were German refugees.

* A World Health Organization was founded that through a massive vaccination programme – 150 years after Jenner – managed to eradicate smallpox globally. As Steven Johnson writes, ‘Global eradication was as dependent on the invention of an institution like the WHO as it was on the invention of the vaccine itself.’ The Covid pandemic only underlined this.

* Mountbatten was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, descended from an illegitimate son of a Hessian prince, the marquess of Milford Haven, who had made his career in Britain, rising to command the Royal Navy. Edwina was granddaughter of a German-Jewish magnate, Sir Ernest Cassel, banker of Edward VII.

* Pakistan means Land of Purity in Urdu, but it is also an acronym for Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir and Indus-Sind, combined with the -stan suffix from Baluchistan, coined in 1933 by a law lecturer of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Rahmat Ali, and his three colleagues at the time of Round Table negotiations between Britain and Indians, none of whom embraced it. It was only after 1940 that Jinnah co-opted the idea. Rahmat got little credit and when he arrived in 1948 in the new state he had conceived, he was expelled, dying penniless soon afterwards at Cambridge.

* Later, accompanied by his daughter Indira and her daughter Pamela, Nehru and Edwina holidayed at Orissa; Nehru also visited Broadlands, Mountbatten’s house, eight times. Edwina Mountbatten died in 1960. In 1981, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who had met his cousin Tsar Nicholas II as a child before the First World War and served as Britain’s chief of the defence staff under both Conservative and Labour governments up to 1965, was assassinated by IRA terrorists while fishing near his Irish castle in Sligo.

* Neither country had ever existed before and both are failed states. Lebanon, a fragile concoction of Christian Maronite, better-off Sunnis, poor Shiites and martial Druze, was designed by the French to protect their Christian favourites, storing up resentment of the Shiites. Syria was a conglomerate of Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds and Druze. Lebanon, ruled by venal magnates and sectarian warlords, has been cursed with civil wars, Palestinian intervention, Israeli invasion, state capture by a Shiite resistance movement and, in the 2020s, collapse. And in 2012, Syria dissolved into civil war.

* The new country was going to be called either Judaea or Israel and they chose Israel.

* Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria, Foxy’s grandson, was deposed by plebiscite in 1944. Bulgaria, run by Stalin’s trusted henchman Dmitrov, became a people’s republic.

* Tito helped an obscure Communist schoolteacher, Enver Hoxha, to seize power in his minuscule neighbour, Albania. Hoxha was handsome, tall, garrulous and strangely literary, writing diaries and memoirs – sixty-five volumes in all. Ruling through a tiny intermarried cabal that lived in an ugly heavily guarded street in mid-Tirana called Blloku (the Block), Comrade Enver systematically murdered all rivals: ‘Irfan Ohri must be tracked down and killed,’ read a typical note. ‘I believe he’s staying at a house near the Rex Cinema.’ Even as he took power in November 1944, he ordered, ‘Set up prisons and concentration camps; don’t show mercy to anyone,’ adding, ‘Stop, arrest and execute influential individuals.’ Hoxha worshipped Stalin, whom he met for long conversations.

* Some of the most evil escaped down the ‘Ratline’ to South America where a new Argentine dictator, Colonel Juan Perón, an admirer of Hitler, gave refuge to Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Ante Pavelić. Pavelić died two years after an attempted assassination; Eichmann was kidnapped by Mossad and hanged in Jerusalem. Mengele drowned.

* ‘Not since Athens and Sparta, not since Rome and Carthage,’ Deputy Secretary of State Dean Acheson told US senators, ‘have we had such a polarization of power.’

* Chiang established an independent republic ruled by the Song and Chiang families. Chiang had lost 550 million people and now ruled six million, subdued by waves of terror and ruled by mainlanders for the next half-century. Reigning there as dictator for the rest of his life, he was succeeded like an emperor by his Russian-educated son, Ching-kuo, who introduced democracy. Taiwan’s liberal democracy, home to a sophisticated semiconductor industry, was protected by the USA into the 2020s. But it remains the last Chinese entity outside Beijing’s control.

* Puyi on the other hand was not getting the royal treatment. In 1945, Japan’s puppet emperor had abdicated and then been captured by the Soviets, who repatriated him. He was forced to perform menial jobs, though Mao encouraged him to write his memoirs. In 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai received him: ‘You weren’t responsible for becoming emperor at the age of three or the 1917 attempted restoration coup. But you were fully to blame … when you agreed to become Manchukuo Chief Executive.’ Puyi agreed, wishing he could say sorry to all the eunuchs he had thrashed. In 1967, the last emperor died aged sixty-one.

* Cixi had banned foot-binding in 1902, as had the new republic in 1912, and the practice was already declining. This time it was final.

* Stalin and Mao together received Ho Chi Minh in Moscow. Mao started to train and arm 70,000 Viet Minh fighters. Mao invited other Indo-Chinese Communists for training in Beijing: one was a Cambodian teacher, trained in Paris, called Saloth Sar, who later changed his name to Pol Pot.

* To celebrate the tricentenary of Hetman Khmelnytsky’s treaty of allegiance to the Romanov Tsar Alexei in April 1654, Stalin decided to grant Crimea to Ukraine. The new leaders made the transfer the next year. This meant that when in 1991, the Soviet Union broke up, Crimea remained part of Ukraine.

* A world game of espionage was played out as each side tried to burrow agents, single, double and triple, deep into the institutions of the other. This bleak, amoral world was exquisitely rendered and turned into literature in the masterpieces of human frailty and betrayal, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by an ex-intelligence officer who became one of the great post-war novelists: John le Carré. Both sides used clandestine and kinetic methods to overthrow their rival’s proxies all over the world. Yet in both camps the control of local actors by Moscow and Washington were as exaggerated as the rare successes of the KGB and CIA. Later a myth grew up that the CIA had successfully launched multiple coups. This anti-imperialist narrative underplayed the agency of local potentates. One rare case of a CIA plot that succeeded was greenlit in June 1954 by Eisenhower in Guatemala, where US auxiliaries overthrew the socialist president.

* Housing was needed and property prices were rising in the expanding cities. In New York, Fred Trump, son of Drumpf the Bavarian gold-rush brothel-keeper, built thousands of houses and apartment, seeking government loans to offer cheap housing, often keeping much of the money. Telling his agents ‘not to rent to blacks’ and, if they were already tenants, to ‘get rid of the blacks’, he was found guilty of bias against the black tenants. He was the personification of hard-nosed American capitalism, bullying his three sons. Fred Trump left a billion-dollar fortune, a huckster flamboyance and a personal philosophy to his second son Donald, who embraced the old man’s philosophy: ‘In life there are killers and there are losers … We’re killers … you’re a king, you’re a killer.’

* A paradox of populist televised politics is that the best performer may not be good at anything else: ‘The qualities rewarded in the rise to eminence,’ wrote Henry Kissinger, ‘are less and less the qualities required once eminence is reached.’

* After Luciano’s arrest, his own organization was taken over by underboss Vito Genovese; the Five Families that dominated New York crime continued as before, as did the Mafia’s governing body, the Commission, founded by Luciano. Lansky’s partner was a cunning younger Mafioso in New York, Carlo Gambino, consigliere of the most terrifying Mafia chieftain of his day, Albert Anastasia, who ran a hit squad out of the City Democratic Club which the newspapers called Murder Inc, with Anastasia as lord high executioner. But when Anastasia tried to create his own casinos in Havana, Lansky and Gambino ordered him hit: on 25 October 1957, Anastasia was at the Park Sheraton Hotel, Manhattan, reclining in his barber’s chair, covered in warm towels, when he was shot, creating one of the famous images of a Mafia hit. Gambino took over the Family that later produced John Gotti.

* Batista was typical of the leaders backed by the US who became even more essential in the struggle against Communism. ‘He may be a bastard,’ FDR supposedly said about the US ally Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, ‘but he’s our bastard.’ Somoza and his son ruled until 1979. On the island of Hispaniola, the US backed Rafael ‘El Jefe’ Trujillo, Dominican tyrant since 1930, who in 1937 had ordered the slaughter of thousands of black Haitians in a massacre known as El Corte. In Haiti, it tolerated the election of a popular doctor who made his name treating yaws, a common disease, then as a progressive health minister, François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. In a country long dominated by the mulatto elite, Duvalier was black, promising to protect ‘the great unacknowledged’. Distrusting the army, he created his own Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, a militia of murderous machete-wielding secret policemen nicknamed Tontons Macoutes after the bogeymen who in voodoo mythology would catch victims in a sack. Led by a henchman known as the Vampire due to his trade in blood plasma, the Macoutes burned, shot and dismembered Papa Doc’s enemies, whose remains were often displayed in trees as a warning; Washington had nonetheless initially trained them. In 1964 Duvalier declared himself president for life.