All the Shah’s Men (27 page)

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. No one will ever know how the Soviets might have acted or how successful they would have been. The coup certainly had disastrous aftereffects. What might have been the effects of not carrying it out must remain forever in the realm of speculation.

How did Iran reach the tragic crossroads of August 1953? The main responsibility lies with the obtuse neocolonialism that guided the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and with the British government’s willingness to accept it. If the company had shown even a modicum of good sense, it could have reached a compromise with the Iranian authorities. If it had cooperated with Prime Minister Razmara, who wanted the British to remain in Iran, Mossadegh might never even have come to power. But the men who ran the company, and the government officials who coddled them, were frozen in their imperial mindset and contemptuous of Iranians and their aspirations. Dean Acheson had it exactly right when he wrote: “Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast.”

Acheson also, however, laid blame on Mossadegh himself, whom he described as “inspired by a fanatical hatred of the British and a desire to expel them and all their works from the country regardless of the cost.” Certainly, Mossadegh was almost as resistant to compromise as were the British. At several points he might have declared victory and made a deal. In the summer of 1952, for example, he was an unassailable national hero. He had been returned to power by a spontaneous mass uprising and had won a great victory over the British at the World Court. President Truman was on his side. A more pragmatic leader might have seized on this moment, but Mossadegh was not a pragmatist. He was a visionary, a utopian, a millenarian. The single-mindedness with which he pursued his campaign against Anglo-Iranian made it impossible for him to compromise when he could and should have.

Another great failure in Mossadegh’s judgment was his inability or refusal to understand how the world looked to Western leaders. They were in a state of near-panic about the spread of communist power. Mossadegh believed that his conflict with Anglo-Iranian had nothing to do with the global confrontation between East and West. This was highly unrealistic. The men who made decisions in Washington and Moscow viewed everything that happened in the world as part of the war they were waging for control of the world’s destiny. It was foolish of Mossadegh to believe that he could separate Iran’s grievance, justified though it was, from this all-encompassing conflict.

Mossadegh was also naïve in his assessment of the communists who controlled Tudeh and were working assiduously to penetrate Iran’s government, army, and civil society. He detested autocracy and believed that all Iranians should be allowed to say and do what they wished. The fact that communists had taken advantage of democratic systems in Eastern Europe to seize power and destroy democracy seemed not to affect him. His refusal to crack down on communist movements in Iran put him on Washington’s death list. This may have been unjust, but it was the harsh reality of the age. By failing to recognize it, Mossadegh strengthened his enemies.

Never during his twenty-six months in power did Mossadegh attempt to forge the National Front into a cohesive political movement. It remained a loose coalition without central leadership or an organized political base. In the Majlis election of 1952 Mossadegh made no effort to assemble a slate of candidates committed to its program. This made it highly vulnerable to outsiders who sought to break it apart, and prevented it from developing a following that might have been mobilized to defend the government at crucial moments.

Despite his historic misjudgments, however, Mossadegh can hardly be considered to have been a failure as prime minister. His achievements were profound and even earth-shattering. He set his people off on what would be a long and difficult voyage toward democracy and self-sufficiency, forever altering not only their history but the way they viewed themselves and the world around them. He dealt a devastating blow to the imperial system and hastened its final collapse. He inspired people around the world who believe that nations can and must struggle for the right to govern themselves in freedom. He towers over Iranian history, Middle Eastern history, and the history of anticolonialism. No account of the twentieth century is complete without a chapter about him.

Mossadegh and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company brought disaster on themselves by refusing repeated efforts at compromise. Their final crack-up, however, would not have happened if British and American voters had not cooperated. They did so quite unwittingly. Iran was a visible but not overwhelming issue in the political campaign that brought the aging Winston Churchill back to power in London. It was hardly an issue at all in Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign, although fear of a worldwide communist advance certainly shaped the perceptions of many voters. The outcome of both elections was determined as much by a simple desire for change as by anything else. In faraway Iran these outcomes shaped the course of all future history. If Churchill and Eisenhower had not won, there would have been no Operation Ajax.

The election in the United States was especially significant because it brought John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles to power. They were driven men, intensely focused on the worldwide communist threat. Their decision to make Iran the first battleground of their crusade may or may not have been wise, but they deserve to be judged harshly for the way they made it. Even before taking their oaths of office, both brothers had convinced themselves beyond all doubt that Mossadegh must go. They never even considered the possibility that a coup might be a bad idea or that it might have negative consequences. History might view their action more favorably if it had been the result of serious, open-minded reflection and debate. Instead, it sprang from petulant impatience, from a burning desire to do something, anything, that would seem like a victory over communism. Ideology, not reason, drove the Dulles brothers. Iran was the place they chose to start showing the world that the United States was no longer part of what Vice President Richard Nixon called “Dean Acheson’s college of cowardly Communist containment.”

There was no substantial difference in the way Truman and Eisenhower assessed the communist threat. Both believed that Moscow was directing a relentless campaign of subversion aimed at world domination, that Iran was one of this campaign’s likeliest targets, and that the United States had no higher national priority than to resist and defeat it. They differed profoundly, however, in their views of how to shape America’s resistance. Truman accepted and even welcomed the rise of nationalism in the developing world. He believed that by placing itself alongside nationalist movements, the United States could show the world that it was the truest friend of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The idea of overthrowing foreign governments was abhorrent to him, in part because he recognized that the long-term consequences were entirely unpredictable and might well be catastrophic.

Truman spent many hours thinking and talking about Iran, but Eisenhower was far less engaged. He allowed the Dulles brothers to shape his administration’s policy toward the restive Third World. They were anxious for quick and visible successes in their anticommunist crusade and saw covert action as a way to achieve them. Preemptive coups, actions against threats that had not yet materialized, seemed to them not only wise but imperative. They did not worry about the future consequences of such coups because they believed that if the United States did not sponsor them, its own future would be endangered.

The success of Operation Ajax had an immediate and far-reaching effect in Washington. Overnight, the CIA became a central part of the American foreign policy apparatus, and covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape the course of world events. Kermit Roosevelt could sense this view taking hold even before he had finished delivering his White House briefing on September 4, 1953.

“One of my audience seemed almost alarmingly enthusiastic,” he wrote afterward. “John Foster Dulles was leaning back in his chair. Despite his posture, he was anything but sleepy. His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat. Clearly he was not only enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts told me that he was planning as well.”

Dulles was indeed planning. The next year he and his brother organized the CIA’s second coup d’etat, which led to the fall of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and set off a sequence of events in that country that led to civil war and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths. Later the CIA set out to kill or depose foreign leaders from Cuba and Chile to the Congo and Vietnam. Each of these operations had profound effects that reverberate to this day. Some produced immense misery and suffering and turned whole regions of the world bitterly against the United States.

The final question to be answered is why Operation Ajax succeeded. The answer has a great deal to do with luck and happenstance. Had key participants made different decisions at any one of a half-dozen different points, the coup would have failed.

Kermit Roosevelt might have decided to give up and go home after the failed attempt of August 15. More plausibly, Mossadegh and his advisers might have dealt more sternly with the plotters. “Mossadegh should have reacted immediately and had them all shot,” Shapour Bakhtiar said in an interview years later. That would almost certainly have saved the day, but it was not Mossadegh’s nature.

The coup might also have failed if Mossadegh had been quicker to order his police to crack down on the hostile crowds that Roosevelt and his agents sent into the streets; if, when Mossadegh finally did order a crackdown, he had chosen a loyal officer rather than the outspokenly conservative General Daftary to carry it out; if Daftary had not intercepted and managed to turn back the loyalist column headed by General Kiani that was on its way to defend the government; if the loyal chief of staff, General Riahi, had managed to escape capture and mobilize more loyal units; if Mossadegh had called his supporters onto the streets instead of ordering them to stay home in the twenty-four hours before the final blow was struck; or if communists from the well-organized Tudeh party had decided to swing into action on Mossadegh’s behalf.

Undoubtedly, there would have been no coup in August 1953 if it had not been for the CIA. The CIA devised Operation Ajax, paid a large sum to carry it out—estimates of the final cost range from $100,000 to $20 million, depending on which expenses are counted—and assigned one of its most imaginative agents to direct it. Yet Kermit Roosevelt and his comrades could not have succeeded without help from Iranians. Two groups provided invaluable help. First were the Rashidian brothers and other covert agents who had spent years building the subversive network that Roosevelt found waiting for him when he arrived. Second were the military officers who provided decisive firepower on the climactic day.

Iran was falling toward chaos during Mossadegh’s last weeks. British and American agents had worked relentlessly to split the National Front and the rest of Iranian society, and their efforts proved how vulnerable an undeveloped society can be to a sustained campaign of bribery and destabilization. Yet Mossadegh himself helped bring Iran to the dead end it reached in mid-1953. It may be an exaggeration to assert, as some have done, that at some level he actually wished to be overthrown. Nonetheless, he had run out of options. Many Iranians sensed this and were ready for a new beginning.

Foreign intelligence agents set the stage for the coup and unleashed the forces that carried it out. At a certain point, however, the operation took on a momentum of its own. The great mob that surged through the streets of Tehran on August 18 was partly mercenary and partly a genuine expression of people’s loss of faith in Mossadegh. The CIA laid the groundwork for that day’s events but even in its own postmortem admitted: “To what extent the resulting activity stemmed from the specific efforts of all our agents will never be known.”

Iranians understood very soon after the coup that foreigners had played a central role in organizing it. In the United States, however, that realization was very slow in coming. Only when anti-American hatred exploded in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 did Americans even realize that their country was unloved there. Slowly, they were able to discover the reason why.

Just four months after Mossadegh’s overthrow, Richard Nixon traveled to Iran and pronounced himself much impressed with both Prime Minister Zahedi and Mohammad Reza Shah. President Eisenhower was more circumspect. He did not visit Iran until 1959 and stayed for just six hours. The Shah gave him a festive welcome and presented him with a silver peacock inlaid with sapphires and rubies. In private, however, the two leaders had a disagreement that foreshadowed trouble to come. Eisenhower warned the Shah that military strength alone could not make any country secure, and urged him to pay attention to his people’s “basic aspirations.” The Shah replied that security in the Middle East could be achieved “only by building Iran’s military strength.”

Eisenhower never admitted the American role in Operation Ajax. In his memoir, he recalled receiving a briefing about it but said it was written, rather than oral, and described Roosevelt as “an American in Iran, unidentified to me.” He was a bit more candid in his diary. There he wrote: “The things we did were ‘covert.’” He admitted, as he did not in his memoir, that Roosevelt had given him a personal briefing about the coup. “I listened to his detailed report,” he wrote, “and it seemed more like a dime novel than historical facts.”

Forty-seven years after the coup, the United States officially acknowledged its involvement. President Bill Clinton, who had embarked on what proved to be an unsuccessful effort to improve American relations with Iran, approved a carefully worded statement that could be read as an apology. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered it during a speech in Washington.