All the Shah′s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

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aUnited States |xRelations |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140497 |zIran. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79039880-781 This well-researched non-fiction book at times reads like a novel. The author did a good job documenting the coup of 1953 and the events, public and clandestine, that preceded it. First, the British tried to dismiss Mossadegh but failed. The Iranian government expelled many of the British agents from the country. Then the British decided to pass the baton to the Americans. Churchill aimed to convince the White House to take action. President Truman was against intervention in Iranian internal affairs. During my entire life, I have regarded Iran and Iraq as part of the "troubled Middle East" with its occasional bursts of anger and violence directed at the United States. Even after 9/11, when the US launched military action in this region, I couldn't say that I could unravel the geopolitical complexities that characterize this corner of the world. I have now read a few nonfictions set in Iran in the 20th century, and none of them, including the latest, had been written in a purely objective tone. But at least, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror offered an explanation for the anti-Western sentiment.

But this book seems to have its good guys and bad guys: the story goes that the magnificent "reforming" "democratic" leader of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown solely by the evil CIA in the 1950s and put in place the "evil" "autocratic" and "unpopular" Shah who was overthrown in 1979 by the masses of Iran yearning to be free. The communist takeover of China and the Korean War changed the way America viewed Iran. Foreign policy was now cast in terms of the Cold War. Still President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson remained anti-colonial. They refused to support Britain’s hardline stand and proposals for direct intervention in Iran. Acheson sent his assistant secretary George McGhee to Iran then followed up with the experienced Averill Harriman to try to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Despite the persistent effort of both men the British and Iranians remained intransigent. Iran took over the oilfields but had no capacity to run them. The British had never trained the Iranian workers who lived in abject poverty. Britain pulled out all its management and technicians and production stopped. British goals in Iran were thwarted as well by U.S. opposition. President Harry Truman had no patience for the idea of empire, and his gut support for nationalist movements in the Third World made him cool to British overtures to help overthrow Mossadegh. In an attempt to calm tensions, Truman offered a number of compromises, which the British rejected. When Winston Churchill was re-elected prime minister in 1951, he had little doubt that covert action was called for. And when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, Churchill found a much more receptive ear. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

A Quasi-Victory for America

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It probably goes too far to lay all blame on the Dulles brothers or Winston Churchill or Kermit Washington. Avoiding shortsightedness is hard, because seeing the future is impossible. Not every bad thing after 1953 happened simply because of the coup. Nothing is inevitable, and there are always possibilities for people to act differently, no matter the past. Also, documentary evidence reveals that, far from acting as puppet masters, CIA operatives and U.S. embassy staffers in Tehran were surprised at the size and diversity of the 1953 crowds. The protesters who took to the streets were not merely thugs hired by the CIA; in fact, they represented a cross section of Iranian society. Mosaddeq’s defiance of the shah had outraged them and, in the words of one contemporaneous CIA assessment, had “galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.”

Notes

Finally all efforts to find a compromise failed and the Eisenhower administration gradually relented to British pressure for ousting Mosaddeq. To some extent it can be said that the Eisenhower administration did so in the interest of safeguarding its alliance with Britain; not because of a real threat of communist takeover but because the United States needed British support in the international scene and knew that a failure to support them in this case will undoubtedly alienate the British government and will weaken their unified stance against the Soviet Union and China. Roger Goiran, the CIA chief in Tehran, vehemently opposed the coup and given the fact that he was responsible for dealing with the communist threat, it only strengthens the argument that the danger of a communist takeover was mostly a fabrication. Kinzer’s tale doesn’t offer much more detail than this. And by ignoring crucial information like the involvement of key generals in rallying the troops and the importance of the clergy in organizing the protests, his account gets distorted and is attributed mostly to the work of CIA agents. I don’t know if we can say Mosaddeq's government would have fallen even without Ajax. But I think we can say that the CIA didn’t play that big a part. For that I recommend Darioush Bayandor’s account of the coup.

In writing All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer takes the reader through a historical outline of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the CIA aided British forces in overtaking Mohammed Mossadegh’s regime. Throughout his analysis, the themes of political ideology, economics and international diplomacy are recurrent. Kinzer offers different levels of analysis from a domestic Iranian point of view all the way to what was going on in Washington. The inherent struggle for military commitment from the US on behalf of Great Britain was ultimately rooted in the oil industry that Mossadegh was nationalizing. Ultimately, the US caved into international pressure from Great Britain and aided in Operation Ajax to overthrow the Iranian leader and re-install the Shah as its rightful leader. In his final analysis, Kinzer argued that while it is inconclusive whether the threat of communism was a realistic threat for intervention, the whole ordeal resulted in tensions and negative diplomatic relations amongst the US, Great Britain and Iran. All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror is a book written by American journalist Stephen Kinzer. For those who like their spy data raw, the CIA′s secret history is now freely available, thanks to a leek..." ( Economist, 15 August 2003)

Conclusion

Although over ninety, Dad is unusually active. He is a docent at the Dundee Historical Society and, thanks to the influence of his Danish wife, Lene, takes courses as a non-degree-seeking student at the Roosevelt University campus out in dreary Schaumburg, Illinois. He tends towards history and political science, having said at one time that he enjoys ganging up with the liberal teachers against his mostly right-wing, fellow suburban students. (Dad always was a pinkish Democrat.) This book was recommended by him after he'd taken some course which used it. He had asked it I'd read it and, having read Kinzer's other book about the overthrow of the Guatemalan government by the C.I.A. and having enjoyed that one, his recommendation was enough for me to obtain the thing. I wasn't disappointed. However, the events are relevant in terms of a booming United States economy in the post WWII era. As the oil reserves and industry of the middle-east was both lucrative and profitable, it was a rational move in terms of economics. Great Britain clearly held personal interest in the whole affair because they had been effectively monopolizing the oil industry through their oil company, eventually renamed British Petroleum (BP). This was why the Iranians labeled the British as acting in an imperialist nature towards them. Nonetheless, the US gained economically from the whole ordeal. After gaining 40% ownership of the company among five different United States corporations, domestic economic goals were accomplished, albeit they may have been utterly unintended. This accurately reflects the US legacy of capitalism and free markets. Just as the open door policy in China opened up trade across the Pacific, this was yet another way for the US to develop its international economy as well. Therefore, the content of the book related to and supported the class material we studied relating to US superiority, both economically and diplomatically. Finally, US initiatives surrounding military intervention to stop the potential spread of communism abroad also coincided with our class material. But the author′s real accomplishment is his suspenseful account of Persia′s centuries–old military, political, cultural and religious heritage, in which Mossadegh′s face–off with London comes as the stirring climax to a drama that began with "Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, titans whose names still echo through history." By the 1930s, most Iranians had come to regard the abject misery they plunged into with every passing decade of exclusive British control of their one great natural asset as another passing calamity in a long history of the same. But with the global stirring of post–World War II nationalism, Anglo–American Oil pushed them to the breaking point.

After the coup, an international consortium was organized to run the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had named the National Iranian Oil Company by Mossadegh. Anglo-Iranian held 40% of the shares. The consortium agreed to share profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis, but still refused "to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors." (196). Stephen Kinzer, a NYT journalist and specialist in US plots to overthrow foreign governments published this book in 2003. He begins with a whirlwind tour of Iranian history from Cyrus the Great in 550 BC to Alexander the Great in 334 BC and Parthians to Sasanians. Zoroastrianism taught leaders gained legitimacy by just rule. Following the Arab conquest of 633 AD Islam was divided into Sunni and Shia branches. Shia believed that the Sunni caliphate had been corrupted. In August 1953 the CIA with the help of some influential figures in Iran orchestrated a coup against Mossadegh. They encouraged and organized the mass protests against Mossadegh that resulted in chaos in the capital city of Tehran. Kinzer cares about Iran and his trip to Tehran for visiting the house that Mosaddeq stayed and lived his final years (which he chronicles in the epilogue of this book), shows that he is passionate about Iran and its fate. His passion is palpable in the account that he offers. While being very curious about the erstwhile Persia, most of the available media-supplied images of Iran were couched in extreme anti-American rhetoric, nary a hint about why the people of that land might be so antagonistic. Kinzer fills in the gaps & does so in an almost politically neutral manner. As the saying has it, "the devil is in the details" and the way the story of the CIA-led overthrow of an elected Iranian government unfolds, seems almost comic at times, with anti-Mossadegh protestors being somewhat randomly hired by the CIA, at times reminding one of an early scene from the recent film Argo. What happened hardly represnts a distinguished moment in American diplomatic history.Kinzer’s brisk, vivid account is filled with beguiling details. . . . A helpful reminder of an oft–neglected piece of Middle Eastern history." After a century of involvement in Iran, Britain did not remain idle in the face of this loss. So when Mossadegh's administration expelled the British diplomats, they turned to their American allies for assistance. Author Stephen Kinzer firmly pointed his finger at specific employees of the British and American governments. President Harry Truman opposed any military intervention on behalf of British economic interests. But in 1952, Truman was replaced by Dwight Eisenhower, who heeded the anti-Communist strategies of his Secretary of State John Dulles [the one for whom the Washington DC Airport is named] and brother Allen Dulles [who became the head of the CIA]. With the approval of POTUS Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a coup d'état (codenamed "Operation Ajax") had been successfully orchestrated against Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953. Kashani was not the leader of Fada'iyan, a fundamentalist malcontent named Navvab Safavi was the man at the helm. Navvab saw himself big enough to condemn “apostates” to death and authorized assassinations in the hope of purging the land of corruption. The clerical establishment didn’t endorse him and even banned him and his fanatics from Qom.) That the past is prolog is especially true in this astonishing account of the 1953 overthrow of nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, who became prime minister in 1951 and immediately nationalized the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company. This act angered the British, who sought assistance from the United States in overthrowing Mossedegh′s fledgling democracy. Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy′s grandson, led the successful coup in August 1953, which ended in the reestablishment of the Iranian monarchy in the person of Mohammad Reza Shah. Iranian anger at this foreign intrusion smoldered until the 1979 revolution. Meanwhile, over the next decade, the United States successfully overthrew other governments, such as that of Guatemala. Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent who has also written about the 1954 Guatemala coup ( Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala), tells his captivating tale with style and verve. This book leads one to wonder how many of our contemporary problems in the Middle East may have resulted from this covert CIA adventure. Recommended for all collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa S tate Univ. Lib., Ames ( Library Journal, June 15, 2003)