Empires Apart (65 page)

The policy discussions in Washington that culminated in the Truman Doctrine were uncannily mirrored in Moscow. Post-war Soviet archives record long discussions among Russian leaders on the need to intervene in western democracies to prevent the resurgence of fascism. Left and right arrived at the same place.

The ideological shorthands ‘left' and ‘right' had always disguised as much as they disclosed. The ‘right' stretched from autocratic fascism to libertarian anarchism and the ‘left' from autocratic communism to socialist anarchism. This swirling ideological complexity was quite alien to the American tradition, where since the earliest days in New England the world had divided into good and evil and in every debate God had taken sides. One of the most important ideological developments after the Second World War was to replace the multipolarity of European debate with the bipolarity of American. On one side was corporatist democracy conflating free elections and free markets; on the other was communism. Everything in between was a mistake; everyone who was not avowedly a wholehearted supporter of America or Russia was either a potential ally waiting to be shown the road to salvation or a crypto-communist with evil intent. It was this bipolarity that the CIA successfully hammered home in the Italian elections. Although the Christian Democrats were facing a broad left coalition, all their opponents were painted as the tools of Stalin and the harbingers of a return to dictatorship.

America's bipolar view of the world was to have a profound impact on its foreign policy. Time after time the assumption that anyone who was not a whole-hearted supporter of the American way of life must be a Soviet stooge led the United States to oppose ‘radical' leaders and thereby push them into Moscow's arms. Fidel Castro was one example,
but a more important one was to have a lasting influence on US policy in the Middle East. In 1956 Eisenhower had stunned Britain, France and Israel by siding with Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser during the Suez canal crisis, but when Nasser later proclaimed himself to be ‘nonaligned', courting Russia and America equally, the US became convinced that he must be a crypto-communist and shifted their support to his bitter enemy – Israel. (There were of course a host of other factors involved, but it is indicative that American leaders put ideological factors above their need to secure access to oil.)

Ideology was not enough, however. Money was the glue that would bind America's twentieth-century empire together: private funds used openly by corporations to buy market share overseas, thus enhancing economic power, and public funds used largely covertly to buy political power.

Covert operations and open democracy have always been uneasy bedfellows. The CIA's predecessor organisation had been abolished at the end of the war on the grounds that its activities were incompatible with the ideology of democracy, although at the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco in 1945 the US intercepted diplomatic traffic from forty-three of the forty-five delegations, Britain and perhaps Russia being the exceptions. The CIA was reformed under its new name in 1947 purely for intelligence gathering. That did not satisfy men like James Forrestal, who had just been made the nation's first secretary of defense; he started raising funds from his Wall Street friends to fund covert operations against the Red Menace. After the coup in Czechoslovakia such private enterprise became unnecessary, as the CIA's remit was extended to allow it to engage in covert and paramilitary activities anywhere in the world except within the United States. (Forrestal himself had a mental breakdown soon afterwards, and eventually committed suicide.)

In Italy the situation from Washington's point of view was clear cut. Stalin was funding the communists and the west needed to respond; a few million dollars to reinforce the ideology of democracy was no big deal. Nevertheless the CIA's actions represented something fundamentally new: covert empire building. American policy in Italy worked because it
was secret – both from the public in Italy, whose free elections were being manipulated, and, most importantly, from the American public.

In the next major test of this new approach secrecy from the American public became an over-riding priority, as the American government moved from influencing free elections to overturning them.

The title of Stephen Kinzer's book,
Overthrow:America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq
, highlights an essential feature of American imperial policy and one that particularly came to the fore in the decade after the Second World War.

In March 1951 there were changes in the leadership of two nations on opposite sides of the world. By a majority of seventy-nine to twelve the Iranian parliament chose Dr Mohammed Mosaddeq as prime minister; at the same time Jacobo Arbenz Guzman gained 60 per cent of the vote in the first fully free presidential election in the history of Guatemala.

Mosaddeq was sixty-eight and had been part of Iran's established political elite since before the First World War. He had served as a provincial governor general, finance minister and foreign minister. Arbenz was a wealthy landowner and career army officer who had previously been Guatemala's minister of defence. Despite their different backgrounds and the very different conditions in their two nations, the two men had much in common. Both had reformist agendas and were determined to improve the lot of the poorest members of their societies; neither had any global aspirations or posed any threat to anyone beyond their borders; and both were overthrown in bloody coups. Half a century later, when US government records of the period were declassified, one final similarity was definitively proved: in both cases the coups against them were organised by the CIA.

The anti-imperialist rhetorics of America and Russia had a particular impact in the Middle East, where the rising tide of nationalism smashed against the rocks not just of traditional colonialism but also of the new corporatism. The region was the domain of the major oil companies,
who had been among the first proponents of international corporatism. Iran became the first demonstration that the old European style of imperialism was giving way to something new: Britain handed over its imperial banner to the United States; Iranians were kept in their place despite the pious declarations at Yalta; and Russia sat watching, silent and inactive, on the sidelines.

Until 1951 the Iranian oilfields were controlled by a British corporation, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), and the country was effectively run as the corporation's puppet – an oil-based equivalent of the United Fruit Company's banana republics in Central America. The ancient might of the Persian empire had long since disappeared to leave a nation proud but poor, unable to benefit from the one asset that remained – its oil. Popular discontent translated into increasing assertions of independence and, after negotiations for higher oil royalties failed, the Iranian parliament – with the assent of the new young shah – voted to nationalise the AIOC. A month later Islamic fundamentalists assassinated the Iranian prime minister and parliament voted Mohammed Mosaddeq into office.

The nationalisation of the AIOC was hugely popular in Iran, but the British government reacted in fury – a reaction of stunning hypocrisy given that Britain had only just nationalised a large part of its own economy, including its largest oil company, and AIOC's largest shareholder was now the British government. Churchill, recently back in power, announced that he would not allow Mosaddeq's government to export any oil produced in the formerly British-controlled facilities. The Royal Navy blockaded the Persian Gulf, and as Britain had long been the main market for Iran's oil the Iranian economy was thrown into crisis.

Despite the state of the economy Mosaddeq remained popular, and in 1952 was approved by parliament for a second term. However, the British boycott continued to bite and as the political and economic situation deteriorated further Mosaddeq resigned. His successor announced negotiations with Britain to end the oil dispute, but this sparked massive demonstrations throughout the country. The shah recalled Mosaddeq
who, with the support of an uneasy coalition of socialists and militant Muslims, introduced a radical programme of social and agrarian reform.

What happened next was shrouded in controversy until 16 April 2000, when the
New York Times
carried a front page story headed ‘What's New on the Iran 1953 Coup'. Using US government reports obtained under the Freedom of Information regulations, the article described Operation Ajax – the first US-organised ‘regime change' outside the western hemisphere since the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy six decades before. The chain of events leading up to armed soldiers surrounding the Iranian parliament building on 19 August 1953 is now a matter of record, as is the critical role played by the scion of one of America's greatest dynasties, Kermit Roosevelt, who continued the imperial traditions of his grandfather Theodore.

The impetus behind the coup came originally from Churchill, who refused all Mosaddeq's increasingly desperate attempts at compromise and asked for American assistance in countering what he claimed was a potential communist threat. British intelligence was already bribing potential conspirators, but the plot was quickly taken over by the chief of the CIA's near east and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt. He was given a $1m budget to be used ‘in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeq'. The CIA's Tehran station launched a propaganda campaign, copying the successful Italian strategy, but it was clear that propaganda alone would be insufficient. In June American and British intelligence officials meeting in Beirut finalised a more robust strategy, and Roosevelt flew to Tehran to personally take charge.

The initial objective of Operation Ajax was to persuade the shah to dismiss his prime minister, but the shah refused to be persuaded. The CIA then determined on a coup and started ‘black propaganda'. Iranian CIA operatives pretending to be Mosaddeq supporters threatened Muslim leaders, causing Islamic groups to turn against the government. Mosaddeq unwisely called a national referendum, which gave him emergency powers but turned many political factions, including the communists, against him. In August 1953 the shah finally bowed to
American blandishments and dismissed Mosaddeq, but the prime minister refused to go and the shah himself fled abroad. Roosevelt now sped around Tehran exhorting army leaders to rally to the shah's cause. Hundreds died as monarchists and pro-Mosaddeq nationalists clashed in the streets, and the CIA ensured that Mosaddeq loyalists were ‘taken out'. The CIA and British MI6 distributed bribes on a massive scale among the military. Finally army tanks bombarded Mosaddeq's official residence and he surrendered. Many of his followers, including his foreign minister and numerous loyal army officers, were executed but Mosaddeq himself, after three years in prison, was sentenced to house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1967 at the age of eighty-four.

‘Regime change' as an element of US foreign policy had arrived in the Middle East. And it had arrived in secret. Unlike earlier American interventions in, for example, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, the US government for long maintained that Mosaddeq had been ousted by a popular uprising – although everyone involved knew the truth and numerous participants had told their version of what happened. In 1979 Kermit Roosevelt himself published
Counter Coup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran
, but only when the
New York Times
published the official government documents in 2000 did the full truth emerge.

Secrecy has always been a feature of diplomacy, and America is not unique in that respect. Robert Kagan, in his authoritative study of American foreign policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writes that ‘Secrecy and deception were prominent features of American diplomacy from the start.' The group handling foreign relations for the independence plotters, which eventually became the state department, was initially called the committee of secret correspondence. The treaty negotiated by the American revolutionaries with France in 1778 contained a number of secret clauses, including the one by which America agreed not to negotiate a separate peace with Britain – a clause that America then secretly broke. At the conclusion of the war American diplomats negotiated a treaty with Spain, again in secret, but this time the secrecy was not to avoid assisting foreign powers but to prevent debate at home
on the possible terms. The secrecy surrounding the Iranian coup was similarly designed to prevent debate within the United States.

Only with hindsight was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright able to admit nearly half a century later that ‘the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America'. At the time US policy-makers considered it a foreign policy triumph. The coup was not engineered solely, or even primarily, to help American corporate interests but to ensure that in the global struggle between the American and Russian empires Iran and its oil was in the American camp. It was the US equivalent of the coups that installed communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. And just as the US did not intervene in eastern Europe, Russia did not intervene in Iran. The official American line, put forward it would seem quite sincerely by Eisenhower and others, was that they acted to prevent Iran ‘going communist'. The reality is that even though Russia had troops on the Iranian border they were never mobilised, the Iranian communist party was never wholeheartedly committed to Mosaddeq's cause and Mosaddeq himself never asked the Soviet Union for assistance. The Iran coup was an exercise in imperial policing by the new imperial superpower.

The coup was also one of the most naked examples of pure power-politics, denuded almost entirely from the cloaking ideology of democracy. There was no suggestion that the shah was in some way more ‘democratic' than Mosaddeq. Just before the coup the
New York Times
reported that Mosaddeq was undoubtedly ‘the most popular politician in the country' and
Time
magazine had made him one of their men of the year. A democratic neutral had been replaced by an autocratic pro-American. The fact that the means by which the regime change occurred were undemocratic is precisely why they had to be kept secret from the American people.