Assaulted in 1924 “by a mob which practically cut him and beat him to death”.
Long before the Iranian hostage crisis or the suicide bombings that would follow, Iranian Islamists and their Communist allies teamed up to murder a top American diplomat.
When Vice Consul Robert Whitney Imbrie set out to take some pictures of a ‘sacred well’ in Tehran for National Geographic Magazine, he did not take any special protection with him.
The Muslim riots in the Iranian capital might have worried ordinary diplomats, but this was 1924 and the American delegates of the era were a hardier breed than today’s paper pushers. Major Imbrie was a big game hunter who had been the longest serving ambulance driver in WWI, and had fled Russia disguised as a Scandinavian journalist ahead of the Communist takeover and the death sentence and $100,000 reward for his capture that the regime had put on his head.
Assigned to Turkey, he married an American volunteer who had been working with Christian victims of the Armenian genocide, while trying to stay ahead of the Communists who were offering tens of thousands in gold at a time when their own people were starving. “The Soviets will get me if there is any way of doing it,” he had remarked to a friend.
Taking a few photos of a mystical well must have seemed like a relaxing excursion.
But Iran was torn between Soviets, who had already carved off parts of it, and the Mullahs, who would eventually take it over. Holding them both back was Reza Shah, the father of the shah overthrown by the Islamic Revolution who had hoped to turn Iran into a republic. The Communists and the Mullahs both had an interest in preventing that. Like the Ayatollah Khomeini, the ayatollahs of the twenties believed American diplomats had to be driven out.
“At every teahouse a Mullah harangued the crowd. Mobs, fired by oratory,” Imbrie warned the State Department “swarmed through the streets, unhindered by the police” in riots “engineered by the mullahs”.
The well that National Geographic had asked Imbrie to photograph, according to the New York Times, had become “a shrine and was visited by crowds of Moslems.” Newspaper accounts reported that the “fanatics protested against his taking the picture on the grounds that there were Mohammedan women present” who could not be photographed even in their hijabs and chadors. Imbrie did not actually take the picture, but the mob began to chase after him anyway, screaming that Imbrie had poisoned the well and “killed Musselmen women and children.”
“A mob of excited Moslems followed the carriage and overtook it,” a newspaper account described. Imbrie and his companion were “dragged from the vehicle and attacked with sticks, stones and knives” by the mob. “Major Imbrie, who was unarmed, did his best to defend himself until he became unconscious from a blow on the skull, evidently delivered with a sabre. While he was lying on the ground a stone broke his jaw”. Finally he was brought into a military barracks.
But the Muslim mob was “joined by shopkeepers and bystanders until it numbered about five thousand.” The soldiers turned Imbrie over to the police, some of whom however joined in the attacks on the Americans. “For twenty minutes Major Imbrie fought alone”. Finally the soldiers rescued him again and the two Americans were taken by car to the American Hospital.
But the mobs gathered again outside the hospital.
“A Mohammedan named Seyed Hossein, a direct descendant of their great prophet, aged 24, got up on a box in front of the hospital and addressed the already demented mob, urging them to break into the hospital and kill those Americans.” The report to the Secretary of State stated that he wanted to have “have the blood of this infidel dog to avenge the death of Hossein and his grandfather.” This is believed to be a reference to Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed and the founder of Shiite Islam, whose death during the first Islamic civil war is marked by Shiites to this day with orgies of violent self-mutilation during their festival of Ashura.
The attack in Imbrie came at the beginning of the Islamic month of Muharram during which Shiites wear black and bewail their Imam Hussein leading up to the Ashura mutilations.
Little is known about this particular Hossein, but his name is similar to that of the Ayatollah Sayyid Hassan Modarres, a fierce opponent of the future shah who was obsessed with imposing Islamic law on Iran, and who was a major influence on Ayatollah Khomeini. American diplomats had met with him and dismissed him as a backward “senile old man”.
The Muslim mob broke into the hospital’s operating room. “One young Mohammedan boy about seventeen years old tore the flagstones from the floor of the operating room and beat in the face of Major Imbrie.” One of the hospital attendants later showed an American delegation one of “the tiles of the floor which had been torn up and shattered on the body of Imbrie, as well as a chair which was smashed in assaulting him”.
The State Department telegram stated that Imbrie was assaulted “by a mob which practically cut him and beat him to death” and in other accounts suffered “more than 180 wounds” on his body in a brutal assault carried out “with a viciousness and savagery” and Muslims “a day or two later insulted his widow in the street, tearing her veil from her face and spitting upon her.” --->READ MORE HERE
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