Part 1: Summary
Once again for this piece I wanted to discuss a fascinating book I just finished reading about a moment that is little known in the US, but is well known in Iran. However, thanks to subsequent Iranian history and the state of current Iranian politics this event has been painted with, let’s say, a creative, but not necessarily factual brush in Iran. I wish I could say altering history to fit the needs of contemporary political leaders is unique to Iran. However, I’m digressing. All the Shah’s Men recounts the 1953 CIA planned coup, backed by the US and UK, that overthrew the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh.
I’m going to try and give a very brief summary of the coup, the events that preceded it, and the historical consequences, so that people with no prior knowledge can have some context for the discussion. If you want to learn more about the first time the CIA tried out regime change in the Cold War, however, I absolutely recommend a couple books. The first is obviously All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer, which focuses exclusively on the coup and contains a lot of fascinating details. The second book is titled America and Iran: A History 1720 to the Present by John Ghazvinian. The 1953 coup is undoubtedly one of the pivotal moments in US Iranian relations, and features extensively in America and Iran, but this book is much wider in scope and gives more context to the events before and after the coup.
To make a very long story very short, the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh was born in the post WWII fight for Iran to nationalize its oil resources and industry. For decades the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which changed its name first to Anglo-Iranian and then eventually to British Petroleum (BP)), extracted vast amounts of oil while paying whatever Iranian government was in power a small pittance of the revenues, while refusing to allow Iranians to audit their accounts or let them into senior management positions. When Mossadegh became prime minister he championed oil nationalization to the absolute hilt, beginning a years long struggle between Iran, the oil company, and London, with Washington trying to act as a mediator (at least while Truman was in office).
Mossadegh stubbornly refused to compromise with the British, whom I believe, and as I shall discuss more below, never negotiated in good faith anyway. When Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil they did not have any oil tankers, and so the British began an effort to prevent Iranian oil from being sold and shipped, depriving Iran of key revenue to force them to the negotiating table. While Mossadegh refused to budge, the economic and social pressures put on Iran helped break many people away from Mossadegh, and created an atmosphere of tension that could be exploited if one were so inclined. In the course of the legal and political wrangling for Iran’s oil, Iran broke diplomatic relations with Britain, and expelled their embassy from Tehran. Which meant the network of spies and subversives the British had cultivated in Iran would go to waste, unless they handed that network to the CIA.
Two elections outside of Iran proved instrumental in allowing the coup to happen. One was Winston Churchill returning to power in London (a conservative old-school imperialist), he was absolutely in favor of getting rid of Mossadegh through force. The second was Dwight Eisenhower being elected to the presidency. Eisenhower was also more conservative than the president he was replacing, and although he wasn’t initially in favor of the coup he was convinced most especially by the Dulles brothers; John Foster and Allen. John Foster becoming Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen head of the CIA. So much groundwork had been laid for Mossadegh to be deposed that many people in the intelligence circles rejoiced when Eisenhower was elected, because they knew they could finally carry out the operation that they had been planning.
For the sake of brevity I won’t go into too much detail on the events of the actual coup itself. I will say that one of the American agents on the ground, and one of the men most responsible for the coup’s success, was a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt. There were two attempts to get rid of Mossadegh, the first one failed, but the second attempt a few days later succeeded. While much of the planning for Mossadegh’s overthrow had been carried out by British and American intelligence services, it would not have been possible without an extensive network of Iranians from all walks of life, from journalists and religious leaders, but most especially army and police units more loyal to the Shah than Mossadegh. Some of these Iranians had genuine ideological convictions that propelled them to support the coup, on the other hand many of them had simply been bribed into loyalty.
In the short term the removal of Mossadegh looked like a smashing success for US interests. In the long term, however, the 1953 coup looks like yet another foreign policy disaster in the long history of US foreign policy disasters. The continued US support for the Iranian Shah and his increasingly dictatorial rule in the years after 1953 helped harden anti-US opinion among many Iranians, and during the Islamic Revolution a justified fear in another US planned coup helped sow the seeds for the US embassy hostage crisis.
Part 2: Discussion
There are a few things I wanted to discuss after reading All the Shah’s Men. To start with, I wanted to examine the mindset of British and American policy makers and intelligence agents. Why did they come to the conclusion that overthrowing a foreign government was the right decision? What did they judge correctly, what did they judge incorrectly? Before doing that I want to make a couple of small disclaimers. The first one will be a familiar refrain for anyone who has read my book and other blog posts, but I think it’s important and is worth repeating. For simplicity I will be talking about “the British” and “the Americans,” but there are always differences of opinion and dissenting voices, there is no national hivemind that agrees on everything. To make this into a digestible blog post I’m simplifying people and events, and if you want to know more that’s why I recommend you read the books I mentioned above. Second, while I will be focusing on the British and Americans I hope this doesn’t come across as a Euro or Atlantic-centric worldview. Iranians did and do have their own agencies and agendas, and the story of Iran nationalizing its oil industry is one where Iran tried to restore some of its national agency. The reason I’m focusing on the British and Americans is because they believed they had the right to interfere with a foreign country to advance their own interests because they were great powers (in the case of the British they thought they were still a great power in the early 50s).
First I wanted to quickly discuss the mindset of the policy makers in the UK leading up to the 1953 coup. I’m about to make some pretty damning conclusions, and while I’m American and lambasting the British is practically a national sport, I promise I will broaden the critique further in the conclusion below. With that being said, if you wanted to find an absolutely perfect example of the term “unforced error,” you could find no better candidate than how British intelligence agents, foreign office dignitaries, and most of all Anglo-Iranian executives behaved during the oil nationalization crisis.
In short, the British attitude toward Iranians and their perfectly legitimate demands for just compensation for the extraction of their own resources is unforgivably racist and myopically dismissive neocolonialist bullshit. It’s honestly shocking and more than a little depressing that people that are apparently intelligent, educated, and experienced can be so blinded by their own prejudices that it causes them to make such catastrophic blunders. It reminds me of nothing more than the British (again), getting their comeuppance for underestimating the Japanese before the Second World War in the Pacific, and for the same bigoted reasons. In the case of Iran, this isn’t just me looking back in the 21st century with hindsight as my guide. Plenty of people at the time knew the British were making a mistake and repeatedly pleaded with them to negotiate and make honest compromises. The British pretended to make concessions, but almost always if you read the fine print of these “concessions” the intention was always to keep as much power, money, and oil flowing into British hands and deny the Iranians as much as they could get away with. The British strategy of “negotiations” in the years leading up to the coup reminds me of one of my favorite influences as a writer, the pod-caster and author Mike Duncan. In his podcast series on the Mexican revolution, Duncan was discussing the famous revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Duncan described Zapata as fiercely stubborn and unwilling to negotiate with the revolving door of regimes that came and went during the Mexican Revolution. However, Duncan believes that often Zapata was right to be stubborn, because none of the people he was negotiating with were doing so in good faith. While obviously the situation in Iran in the 1950s was vastly different, often the same criticism is leveled at Mossadegh, that he was incredibly stubborn himself, but I feel the same way about Mossadegh as Duncan did about Zapata. Throughout the whole crisis the British never acted honestly, and as they offered token concessions with one hand, with the other they blockaded Iranian ports with the Royal Navy and planned potential military interventions. Should you compromise with someone who would sooner see you overthrown or dead? In the end, I believe that Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Truman, said it best when he parodied a famous Churchill quote to describe British blundering in this situation: “Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast.”
Next, I wanted to discuss why US policy makers came to the conclusion that overthrowing Mossadegh was their best, perhaps only option, to stabilize Iran. The short and simplified answer is the Cold War American hysteria that every country that wasn’t unshakably loyal to the US was a sneeze away from falling to Soviet domination. In hindsight it’s hard not to see American behavior during the Cold War both at home and abroad as an overreaction and a disgusting betrayal of the rights and values that supposedly made America the “good guys” in the Cold War, but I am viewing all of this with the benefit of knowing how it all turns out. Had I been alive at the time would I have been able to see past the fog of fear? Some of that fear was overblown propaganda, but some of it was justified. This was the beginning of the atomic age and everyone was aware of the new existential threat that could end life on earth, a threat that has not gone away. Furthermore, in the days following WWII the Soviet Union was aggressively expanding, and the person at the helm of the Soviet system until he died was Stalin, a man responsible for tens of millions of deaths and one of the worst men of the 20th century, no small feat considering what a rogue’s gallery of terrible men the 20th century was. So, while I am also sharply critical of the 1953 coup, and I think most would agree that it was a huge mistake in the long run, and at the time of this writing Iran and America are a long way from even an icy diplomatic relationship, I think it’s harder to imagine at least the people in the Eisenhower administration behaving differently.
I also believe the American Cold War paranoia and a binary obsession with the “free world” and “communism” also put blinders on even some of the most well informed and well connected Americans. Our obsession with halting communism blinded the US to the importance of developing world nationalism, and how mass movements might develop outside the narrow Cold War binary, say for example, religious movements.
In All the Shah’s Men, Kinzer quoted several other authors, to show some of the different interpretations of the 1953 coup, and how the historiography of the event has changed over time. I’d also like to quote the author James F. Good. In this passage Good begins by talking about Mossadegh, but ends by perfectly summarizing why the United States decided that toppling Iran’s current government was preferable to negotiating with it.
“Mossadegh was no saint, as even his advisors recognized. He could be stubborn and narrow minded. Yet he was the most popular leader in modern times, at least prior to the [Islamic] revolution…If Mossadegh was a prisoner of the past—opposed to dictatorial rule, supportive of the constitutional government, hating foreign influence—the Americans were no less prisoners of the Cold War mindset that would not tolerate neutralism in the struggle against godless Communism.”
Finally, before concluding I wanted to quickly mention one more quote from All the Shah’s Men. For context, this book was released in the early 2000s, and the edition I read had a new foreword that was written in 2008. I’m sure if Kinzer released this book last week he would write the passage I’m about to quote differently. Before and during the coup the CIA had a vast network of Iranians on their payroll either directly or indirectly fomenting a propaganda campaign against Mossadegh. It turned out to be extremely effective, and Kinzer had this to say about it: “…their efforts proved how vulnerable an undeveloped society can be to a sustained campaign of bribery and destabilization.” The only word I would change in this quote would be undeveloped. If the past few decades of American politics have demonstrated anything, it’s that any society is vulnerable to a campaign of bribery and destabilization, especially if that society has a relatively free and unrestricted press. I would even argue that it’s a relatively cheap and easy way for one power to unsettle another. Why go to war with another country when you can just exploit and exacerbate the fault lines that exist in every society?
Part 3: Conclusion
For me, the coup the CIA carried out in 1953 (the agency would attempt many more in the Cold War), represents in spirit an attitude that is as old as human statecraft. More powerful states, fiefdoms, kingdoms, nations, whatever word you want to use tend to develop a chauvinistic attitude that they are allowed to interfere with weaker polities as it suits their interests consequence free. While I naturally talked about the UK and US and their attitudes leading up to Mossadegh’s ousting, I don’t think that imperial overconfidence is unique to these two countries at all. Iran itself has a history thousands of years old that has many times seen it as the center of great world empires subjugating other peoples, and as a colonial vassal being subjugated.
This overconfidence might allow a state and its people the confidence and justification for imperial conquest, but the reason I call it overconfidence is because it’s a double-edged sword. If a powerful state starts believing that they have the right to trample weaker peoples when it suits them, and especially if the powerful state starts to see itself as superior and everyone else inferior, that attitude can often backfire in morbidly hilarious ways.
Something I’m starting to believe more about the CIA, and the psychology of people who planned and executed their attempted and successful regime changes, is that it was remarkably short sighted. If the United States wanted to promote democracy, and avoid the specter of communist takeover, is overthrowing democratic leaders and institutions a good idea? It doesn’t exactly sell the Western Democratic model when your pitch is “sure you can be democratic, as long as you do exactly what we want you to do at all times, and the second you don’t we’ll overthrow you and put a pliant dictator in your place.” I know none of this discussion can be separated from Cold War fear, and how justified it was or not, but I can’t help but feeling that this pattern that began in 1953 in Iran was a mistake we are still feeling the consequences of. Mossadegh himself had some very wise words that great powers would do well to heed in the future, if they want to avoid making similar blunders: “Abiding by law and respecting the rights of the weak not only would not diminish, but would greatly enhance the position and prestige of the strong.”
Links for All the Shah’s Men:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/all-the-shahs-men-stephen-kinzer/1101126123?ean=9780470185490
Links for America and Iran:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/america-and-iran-john-ghazvinian/1136585406?ean=9780307472380