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

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This is the story of the oil-nationalization episode in Iran and the rise and fall of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the leader who embodied his people’s hopes for taking control of their destiny. This book however, is mainly concerned with depicting how the United States and the British governments tried to influence the event through gunboat diplomacy.

For example: how did it happen that the history of a country plundered mercilessly by British and Russian colonialists became the history of a country whose future has been “ruined by the US”? Still, in executing the coup, the United States in general, and the CIA in particular, made the same mistake it repeated throughout the Cold War: the failure to believe in its own product. More people are reading the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Our independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too. All the Shah's Men is an entertaining and educating read. It sheds light on one of the most important U.S. actions in the Middle East of the 20th century. It is also a book with relevance to today. It is said that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. This book should be read thoughtfully by anyone concerned about where the current U.S. administration's policies might lead.

T]he United States gave its go-ahead for Operation Ajax, or Operation Boot as the British continued to call it. The governments in London and Washington were finally united in their enthusiasm. One [Britain] looked forward to recovering its oil concession. The other [The United States] saw a chance to deliver a devastating blow against communism." (164). In a riveting narrative that reads like a thriller, All the Shah’s Men brings to life the 1953 CIA coup in Iran a regime change that ousted the country’s elected prime minister, ushered in a quarter–century of brutal rule under the Shah, and stimulated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and anti–Americanism in the Middle East. Selected as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and the Economist, it’s essential reading if you want to put the American conquest of Iraq in context. The British had in fact discovered the oil in Iran, and had in fact built the refineries and assembled the fleet of tankers to transport it around the world. But the unwillingness of British leaders, including Churchill, to accept even a 50-50 split of the billions derived from Iranian oil was a costly miscalculation. 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. With his fast-paced narrative and deep ferreting out of the facts, Kinzer reassembles the CIA's 1953 coup of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran in favor of the bloodthirsty dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah, who is believed to have been a puppet for the US government.

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. Personally, I think heroes exist only in popular narratives, which are typically a fictionalization of reality. They stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American diplomats hostage for more than fourteen months."

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Stephen Kinzer, a NYT journalist and specialist in US plots to overthrow foreign governments published this book in 2003. He begins with a whirlwind tour of Iranian history from Cyrus the Great in 550 BC to Alexander the Great in 334 BC and Parthians to Sasanians. Zoroastrianism taught leaders gained legitimacy by just rule. Following the Arab conquest of 633 AD Islam was divided into Sunni and Shia branches. Shia believed that the Sunni caliphate had been corrupted. The relationship between Iran and the United States has been so bad, for so long, that it seems like it’s always been that way. After a century of involvement in Iran, Britain did not remain idle in the face of this loss. So when Mossadegh's administration expelled the British diplomats, they turned to their American allies for assistance. Author Stephen Kinzer firmly pointed his finger at specific employees of the British and American governments. President Harry Truman opposed any military intervention on behalf of British economic interests. But in 1952, Truman was replaced by Dwight Eisenhower, who heeded the anti-Communist strategies of his Secretary of State John Dulles [the one for whom the Washington DC Airport is named] and brother Allen Dulles [who became the head of the CIA]. With the approval of POTUS Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a coup d'état (codenamed "Operation Ajax") had been successfully orchestrated against Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953. But the author′s real accomplishment is his suspenseful account of Persia′s centuries–old military, political, cultural and religious heritage, in which Mossadegh′s face–off with London comes as the stirring climax to a drama that began with "Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, titans whose names still echo through history." By the 1930s, most Iranians had come to regard the abject misery they plunged into with every passing decade of exclusive British control of their one great natural asset as another passing calamity in a long history of the same. But with the global stirring of post–World War II nationalism, Anglo–American Oil pushed them to the breaking point. 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.