All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2008) by by Stephen Kinzer

In August 1953, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a clumsy coup d’état orchestrated by the infant Central Intelligence Agency. Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer expertly tells this outrageous story of subterfuge in “All the Shah’s Men.” For Kinzer the episode is a cautionary tale of western meddling in Middle Eastern political affairs. I’m certain that there is more than one way to interpret the remarkable events of 1953.

Mossadegh is the tragic hero of Kinzer’s crisp narrative. He was, in the author’s estimation, “a visionary, a utopian, a millenarian.” Two central beliefs shaped his political consciousness, according to the author: the rule of law and independence from foreign interference. He opposed any attempt to concentrate political power and abhorred the concessions given to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. To Winston Churchill he was “an elderly lunatic bent on wrecking his country and handing it over to the Communists.” I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.

In the early 1950s Mossadegh moved to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which became something of a sacred cause for his followers. “The Shiite religious tradition blended perfectly with the nationalist passion sweeping through Iran,” Kinzer writes. The British run Anglo-Iranian Oil Company steadfastly refused to make any meaningful concessions to the sweetheart deal the company had struck in the 1920s. Mossadegh was prepared to have his country fall on its sword rather than cave to British economic blackmail. As the British did everything in their power to cripple the Iranian economy, Mossadegh called for “deprivation, self-sacrifice, and loyalty.”

Kinzer places responsibility for the 1953 coup squarely on the shoulders of the British, even though it was the Americans that would eventually carry out the deed. “The main responsibility [for the coup] lies with the obtuse neocolonialism that guided the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and with the British government’s willingness to accept it.” Interestingly, Mossadegh saw things much the same way. “My only crime,” he said, “is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth.”

The Americans weren’t overly interested in the economic consequences of oil nationalization. Rather, they viewed the crisis through the prism of the Cold War. There was genuine angst in Washington that the Soviet-backed Tudeh party would orchestrate a coup to overthrow Mossadegh if they didn’t do so first. Of course, that is a great imponderable, as Kinzer concedes: “The crucial question of whether the American coup was necessary to prevent the Soviets from staging a coup of their own cannot be conclusively answered.” The key point, however, is that the Dulles brothers believed it was true and that decisive action was necessary.

What really amazed me was how effective the upstart CIA was in fomenting dissent and orchestrating Mossadegh’s fall. The agency was just a few years old and had no real experience at covert regime change. Yet for as little as $100,000 placed in just the right hands clandestine operatives, led by Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit – “The chief hero or villain of the piece” depending on your perspective, according to the author – a popular nationalist regime was replaced with a more pliable, and eventually far more repressive one. Indeed, one might perceive Operation Ajax, the code-name given to the operation, as one of the greatest in the CIA’s history.

Kinzer certainly doesn’t see it that way. On the contrary, it was very nearly the worst of all outcomes. “Only a Soviet takeover followed by war between the super-powers would have been worse,” he writes. Why? In his view, “It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.” The blowback from the ouster of Mossadegh may have been slow in coming, but it’s been with us now for over thirty years. The operation sent all the wrong signals, according to Kinzer. “Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants [in the Middle East] that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies.”

Mossadegh’s legacy in his homeland remains sticky. On the one hand, he is a revered nationalist hero. Shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 the main boulevard in downtown Tehran was renamed in his honor. On the other hand, there is much about Mossadegh that the mullahs governing Iran today are unsettled by. “Mossadegh’s secularism was as abhorrent to the new regime as his democratic vision had been to the old one.”