'All the Shah's Men': Regime Change, Circa 1953
By WARREN BASS
ON Aug. 15, 1953, a group of anxious C.I.A. officers huddled in a safe house in Tehran, sloshing down vodka, singing Broadway songs and waiting to hear whether they'd made history. Their favorite tune, ''Luck Be a Lady Tonight,'' became the unofficial anthem of Operation Ajax -- the American plot to oust Iran's nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and place the country firmly in the authoritarian hands of Mohammed Reza Shah.
In fact, luck was not much of a lady that night; as Stephen Kinzer's lively popular history of the 1953 coup recounts, Mossadegh's chief of staff got word of the conspiracy and rushed troops to defend the prime minister, thereby panicking the feckless young shah into fleeing to Baghdad and plunging the carousing Central Intelligence agents into gloom. The coup succeeded four tense days later, only after a C.I.A.-incited mob (led by a giant thug known memorably as Shaban the Brainless) swept Mossadegh aside. Luck was even less kind to the Ajax plotters in the longer haul; in 1979, the despotic shah fell to Islamist revolutionaries bristling with anti-American resentment.
Even the president who approved the coup, Dwight Eisenhower, later described it as seeming ''more like a dime novel than an historical fact.'' Sure enough, ''All the Shah's Men'' reads more like a swashbuckling yarn than a scholarly opus. Still, Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent now based in Chicago, offers a helpful reminder of an oft-neglected piece of Middle Eastern history, drawn in part from a recently revealed secret C.I.A. history.
The book's hero is the enigmatic Mossadegh himself. In his day, British newspapers likened Mossadegh to Robespierre and Frankenstein's monster, while The New York Times compared him to Jefferson and Paine. Kinzer full-throatedly takes the latter view, seeing Mossadegh's achievements as ''profound and even earth-shattering.'' But he acknowledges that the great Iranian nationalist was also an oddball: a prima donna, prone to hypochondria, ulcers and fits, who met the urbane American diplomat Averell Harriman while lying in bed in pink pajamas and a camel-hair cloak.
Mossadegh's Iran faced formidable foes: British oil executives, the C.I.A. and the brothers Dulles, all of whom come off wretchedly here. The least sympathetic of all are Iran's erstwhile British rulers, who continued to gouge Iran via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. When the Truman administration prodded it to share the wealth with Iran, its chairman sniffed, ''One penny more and the company goes broke.'' In 1951, to London's fury, Mossadegh led a successful campaign to nationalize the oil company, drove the British to close their vital oil refinery at Abadan and became prime minister. The British began drafting invasion plans, but Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned them that gunboat diplomacy would hurt the West in its struggle with Moscow.
Truman and Acheson's successors, alas, were less restrained. Third-world nationalists like Mossadegh made Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as one scholar has put it, ''see red'' -- as Communist wolves in neutralist sheep's clothing. Eager to roll back Communism rather than contain it, enthralled with covert action and egged on by Winston Churchill, they soon concluded that Mossadegh had to go.
Conveniently enough, the secretary of state could ask his brother to do the dirty work. Allen Dulles was then running the newly founded C.I.A., which had grown out of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. The C.I.A.'s man in Tehran was Kermit Roosevelt, an affable young O.S.S. veteran who had inherited his grandfather Theodore's taste for adventure. After masterminding the 1953 coup, Roosevelt began his victory speech by crowing, ''Friends, Persians, countrymen, lend me your ears!''
Kinzer's brisk, vivid account is filled with beguiling details like these, but he stumbles a bit when it comes to Operation Ajax's wider significance. Kinzer shrewdly points out that 1953 helps explain (if not excuse) the Islamist revolutionaries' baffling decision to take American hostages in 1979; the hostage-takers feared that the C.I.A. might save the shah yet again and, in part, seized prisoners as insurance. One mullah -- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now Iran's supreme leader -- warned at the time, ''We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the C.I.A. can snuff out.'' Kinzer also notes that the 1953 conspiracy plunged the C.I.A. into the regime-change business, leading to coups in Guatemala, Chile and South Vietnam, as well as to the Bay of Pigs.
The book's subtitle, unfortunately, suggests a less persuasive argument. ''It is not far-fetched,'' Kinzer writes, ''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.'' Kinzer is right to warn against the unintended consequences of American intervention, but his suggestion here involves far too many causal leaps. After all, the shah needn't have turned out to be such a tyrannical disaster, and 1953 needn't have led to 1979. Moreover, while Iran's Shiite radicals surely helped inspire many Sunni Arab Islamists, the Iranian revolution hardly created the fanaticism of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, who nursed hatreds of their own. Indeed, revolutionary Iran and Taliban Afghanistan were rivals, not allies, and they even almost went to war in 1998.
Moreover, blaming the C.I.A. and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for the Iranian revolution lets later American administrations (and the shah himself) off the hook. Most cold war presidents relied too heavily on the shah for Persian Gulf stability while doing too little to press him to reform. John F. Kennedy, who did push Iran to liberalize, proved an honorable exception. In April 1962, he told a somewhat baffled shah to learn from the example of Franklin Roosevelt, who ''was still regarded almost as a god in places like West Virginia'' for siding with the common citizen.
The shah didn't get it. Nor did Eisenhower, who, in a March 1953 National Security Council meeting, wondered why we can't ''get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.'' It's still a splendid question.
Warren Bass is the author of ''Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance.'' |
