All the Shah′s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

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D]rawing conclusions about causes and effects is always dangerous.” But he has evidently ignored his own warning in writing his narrative. aIran |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79039880 |xRelations |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh00007590 |zUnited States. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n78095330-781

The communist takeover of China and the Korean War changed the way America viewed Iran. Foreign policy was now cast in terms of the Cold War. Still President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson remained anti-colonial. They refused to support Britain’s hardline stand and proposals for direct intervention in Iran. Acheson sent his assistant secretary George McGhee to Iran then followed up with the experienced Averill Harriman to try to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Despite the persistent effort of both men the British and Iranians remained intransigent. Iran took over the oilfields but had no capacity to run them. The British had never trained the Iranian workers who lived in abject poverty. Britain pulled out all its management and technicians and production stopped. 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. In the fabled history of the coup, from such incapacity the CIA developed a resilient network that easily toppled a popular leader a few months later. Kinzer, co-author of "Bitter Fruit," a classic study of the CIA-sponsored coup against Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, emphasizes the importance of British influence in Iran, and in particular, the role of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh nationalized the company only after the British ignored repeated American pleas to compromise and split profits 50-50 with the Iranians. 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 I 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.

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aUnited States |xRelations |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140497 |zIran. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79039880-781 An exciting narrative. [Kinzer] questions whether Americans are well served by interventions for regime change abroad, and he reminds us of the long history of Iranian resistance to great power interventions, as well as the unanticipated consequences of intervention." British goals in Iran were thwarted as well by U.S. opposition. President Harry Truman had no patience for the idea of empire, and his gut support for nationalist movements in the Third World made him cool to British overtures to help overthrow Mossadegh. In an attempt to calm tensions, Truman offered a number of compromises, which the British rejected. When Winston Churchill was re-elected prime minister in 1951, he had little doubt that covert action was called for. And when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, Churchill found a much more receptive ear. meticulously documented throughout essential reading ( Medicine Conflict and Survival, Vol. 21(4) October 2005)

The basic facts of Operation Ajax have been known for some time, in part from "Kim" Roosevelt′s own memoir, in part from other sources, most notably a windfall of long–classified CIA documents leaked to Kinzer′s New York Times colleague James Risen in 2000. astonishing account...Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent...tells his captivating tale with style and verve". ( Library Journal, June 15, 2003)After all this drama, the machinations of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt in Teheran to bring down Mossadegh and replace him with the young Reza Shah Pahlevi seems almost like an epilogue. For connoisseurs of covert action, however, there′s a hell of a story left, even if some of it will make even the hardest–bitten Cold Warrior wince. But this book seems to have its good guys and bad guys: the story goes that the magnificent "reforming" "democratic" leader of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown solely by the evil CIA in the 1950s and put in place the "evil" "autocratic" and "unpopular" Shah who was overthrown in 1979 by the masses of Iran yearning to be free. 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 the World Trade Center in New York. With breezy storytelling and diligent research, Kinzer has reconstructed the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was wildly popular at home for having nationalized his country's oil industry. The coup ushered in the long and brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah, widely seen as a U.S. puppet and himself overthrown by the Islamic revolution of 1979. At its best this work reads like a spy novel, with code names and informants, midnight meetings with the monarch and a last-minute plot twist when the CIA's plan, called Operation Ajax, nearly goes awry. A veteran New York Times