From Publishers WeeklyWith breezy storytelling and diligent research, Kinzer has reconstructed the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was wildly standard 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 it is 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, closely goes awry. A veteran New York Times alien correspondent and the author of books on Nicaragua (Blood of Brothers) and Turkey (Crescent and Star), Kinzer has combed memoirs, academic works, government documents and news stories to formulate this blow-by-blow account. He shows that until early in 1953, Great Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were the imperialist baddies of this tale. Intransigent in the face of Iran’s demands for a fairer portion of oil profits and better conditions for workers, British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison exacerbated tension with his attitude that the challenge from Iran was, in Kinzer’s words, “a simple matter of ignorant natives rebelling versus the forces of civilization.” Before the crisis peaked, a high-ranking employee of Anglo-Iranian wrote to a superior that the company’s confederacy with the “corrupt ruling classes” and “leech-like bureaucracies” were “disastrous, outdated and impractical.” This stands as a textbook lesson in how not to conduct alien policy.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
ReviewThat the past is prolog is peculiarly unfeigned in this astonishing account of the 1953 overthrow of nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, who became prime minister in 1951 and without delay nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This act angered the British, who sought assistance from the United States in overthrowing Mossedegh’s fledgling democracy. Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy’s grandson, led the successful coup in August 1953, which ended in the reestablishment of the Iranian monarchy in the person of Mohammad Reza Shah. Iranian anger at this alien intrusion smoldered until the 1979 revolution. Meanwhile, over the next decade, the United States with great success overthrew other governments, such as that of Guatemala. Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent who has likewise written regarding the 1954 Guatemala coup (Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala), tells his captivating tale with style and verve. This book leads one to wonder how a great deal of of our contemporary troubles in the Middle East may have resulted from this covert CIA adventure. Recommended for all collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa S tate Univ. Lib., Ames (Library Journal, June 15, 2003)
“…He does so with a keen journalistic eye, and with a novelist’s pen…In what is a very gripping read.” (The New York Times, July 23, 2003)
Tell humans today that the United Nations was once the center of the world—the place where engaged in a struggle nations got a shot at a reasonable hearing rather of a monkey trial before they were overthrown—and most would in all probability shake their heads in puzzlement.
Yet it was at the U.N., in October 1953, that one of the biggest dramas of the nascent television age unfolded: The eccentric, hawk-nosed Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh squared off with the aristocratic ambassador of the fading British Empire. At stake was Britain’s assert to own Iran’s oil in perpetuity.
The press played the showdown like a prize fight, “the tremulous, crotchety Premier versus Britain’s super-suave representative, Sir Gladwyn Jebb,” in Newsweek’s account. The Daily News groused, “Whether Mossy is a bogus or a authenti tear-jerker, he better put everything he’s got into his show if he goes on television here.” Time magazine had made him it is Man of the Year. Now came “the decisive act in the dramatic, tragic and now and then absurd drama that started out when Iran nationalized the Anglo-American Oil Co. five months ago.”
Five centuries ago would be more accurate, in the eyes of veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, who has written an completely engrossing, often riveting, almost Homeric tale, which, if life were fair, would be this summer’s beach book. For anybody with more than a passing interest in how the United States got into such a pickle in the Middle East, All the Shah’s Men is as good as Grisham.
And what a reputation Mossadegh makes: a fiery, French-educated nationalist with wild eyes, a high patrician forehead and droopy cheeks. His legendary hypochondriahe was prone to fainting and perpetually received even diplomatic visitors in bedseemed to flow from some deep wellspring of Shi’ite martyrdom, Kinzer suggests.
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 begun 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 each 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.
In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax earnings of £40 millionthe equivalent of $112 millionand gave Iran just £7 million,” Kinzer writes. Meanwhile, the company ignored a 1933 agreement to recompense workers more than 50 cents a day, or to build “the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone scheme it promised.” Inevitably, riots started out breaking out at Abadan, the oil city where hundreds of thousands of Iranians lived amidst baked mud and sewage in cardboard hovels in shadeless, searing heat. Their British overseers lived in another world entirelytending to their green lawns and gardens, looking at their well-scrubbed children frolic in the fountains, attending air-conditioned, “no-wogs-allowed” movie theaters, and sipping gin and tonics in their private clubs. The Abadan riots also propelled the fiery Mossadegh to his rendevous with destiny. But altho the Iranian leader held his audience at the United Nations Security Council with a moving explication of his country’s destitution at the hands of Anglo-Iranian interests, his triumph proved short-livedand was soon to become a bittersweet memory.
In 1953, President Harry S Truman, whose gut-level sympathy for the impoverished Iranians led him to rebuff British pleas to conspire in Mossadegh’s removal, was gone. The incoming Republicans were much more favorably disposed toward the British, peculiarly after Whitehall repackaged it is pitch in terms of a communist threat: Iran would fall to the Soviets, they now said, if Mossadegh stayed in office. Within weeks, the Eisenhower administration was plotting to get rid of him.
After all this drama, the machinations of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt in Teheran to fetch 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 numerous of it will make even the hardest-bitten Cold Warrior wince.
The basic facts of Operation Ajax have been known for a lot of time, in portion from “Kim” Roosevelt’s own memoir, in portion from other sources, most notably a windfall of long-classified CIA documents leaked to Kinzer’s New York Times colleague James Risen in 2000.
The author makes good use of the material, toggling his drama amidst Washington, where CIA desk officers furiously churned out material for bought-off Iranian newsprints and radio stations, to Teheran, where Roosevelt scurried amongst clandestine meetings with Reza Pahlevia man so timorous he flew to Baghdad when the plot seemed to unravelas well as with respective treasonous Iranian Army officers.
Ajax was a triumph in the eyes of manyespecially, needless to say, in the CIA. That verdict, of course, discounts the whirlwind of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown by furious Shi’ite mobs whipped up by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who speedily spawned the terrorists of Hezbollah and other groups who plague us today.
“We got 25 years out of the Shahthat’s not so bad,” a CIA man once said to me, stirring a drink with his finger. As always, the Iranians had a dissimilar view. Jeff Stein is co-author of “Saddam’s Bombmaker” and editor of Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security, a each and everyday news Web site. (The Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2003)
On Aug. 15, 1953, a. group of anxious C.I.A. officers huddled in a safe house in Tehran, sloshing down vodka, singing Broadway songs and waiting to listen whether they’d made history. Their favored tune, “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” became the unofficial anthem of Operation Ajax – the American plot to oust Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and place the country with resolute determination in the authoritarian hands of Mohammed Reza Shah.
In fact, luck was not much of a lady that night; as Stephen Kinzer’s lively general history of the 1953 coup recounts, Mossadegh’s chief of staff got word of the conspiracy and rushed troops to defend the prime minister, thereby panicking the feckless young shah into fleeing to Baghdad and plunging the carousing Central Intelligence agents into gloom. The coup succeeded four tense days later, only after a C.I.A.-incited mob (led by a giant thug known memorably as Shaban the Brainless) swept Mossadegh aside. Luck was even less kind to the Ajax plotters in the longer haul; in 1979, the despotic shah fell to Islamist revolutionaries bristling with anti-American resentment.
Even the president who approved the coup, Dwight Eisenhower, later described it as seeming “more like a dime novel than an historical fact.” Sure enough, “All the Shah’s Men” reads more like a swashbuckling yarn than a scholarly opus. Still, Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent now based in Chicago, offers a helpful reminder of an oft-neglected piece of Middle Eastern history, drawn in part from a lately revealed mystery C.I.A. history.
The book’s hero is the enigmatic Mossadegh himself. In his day, British newsprints likened Mossadegh to Robespierre and Frankenstein’s monster, while The New York Times equated him to Jefferson and Paine. Kinzer full-throatedly takes the latter view, seeing Mossadegh’s accomplishments as “profound and even earth-shattering.” But he acknowledges that the great Iranian nationalist was likewise an oddball: a prima donna, prone to hypochondria, ulcers and fits, who met the urbane American diplomat Averell Harriman while lying in bed in pink pajamas and a camel-hair cloak.
Mossadegh’s Iran faced formidable foes: British oil executives, the C.I.A. and the brothers Dulles, all of whom come off wretchedly here. The least sympathetic of all are Iran’s erstwhile British rulers, who continued to gouge Iran thru the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. When the Truman administration prodded it to portion the wealth with Iran, it is chairman sniffed, “One penny more and the company goes broke.” In 1951, to London’s fury, Mossadegh led a successful effort to nationalize the oil company, drove the British to close their critical oil refinery at Abadan and became prime minister. The British started out drafting invasion plans, but Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson cautioned them that gunboat diplomacy would hurt the West in it is struggle with Moscow.
Truman and Acheson’s successors, alas, were less restrained. Third-world natio…
“astonishing account…Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent…tells his captivating tale with style and verve”. (Library Journal, June 15, 2003)
“…He does so with a keen journalistic eye, and with a novelist’s pen…In what is a very gripping read.” (The New York Times, July 23, 2003)
“…Kinze who has written an totally engrossing, many times riveting, closely Homeric tale, which, if life were fair, would be this summer’s beach book.” (The Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2003)
“…lively general history…brisk, bright account…. Kinzer…offers a helpful reminder of an oft-neglected piece of Middle Eastern history”. (The New York Time Book Review, August 10, 2003)
“…For those who like their spy data raw, the CIA’s mystery history is now freely available, thanks to a leek…” (Economist, 15 August 2003)
“a thrilling tale that pits two characters worthy of a movie versus each other.” (Economist, August 16, 2003)
“entertaining and now and again shocking…serves as a utile reminder that troublesome regimes do not come out of nowhere.” (Business Week, Aug. 18-25, 2003)
“…Kinzer’s book offers a cautionary tale for our current leaders…not all such changes go according to plan…” (The Scotsman, 16 August 2003)
“…a new book in regards to the coup All the Shah’s men…recalls a good deal of unwelcome parallels(with the Gulf War)…”(The Guardian, 20 August 2003)
“…a topical subject with an explanation…” (Greenock Telegraph, 29 October 2003)
“…provides an capable and ofttimes bright summary of our knowledge…” (BBC History Magazine, December 2003)
“…an astonishing achievement, a adventure story backed by meticulous research, a political analysis in artful prose…” (Irish Times, 25 December 2003)
“this skilled correspondent and analyst writes this so efficaciously is one of the a lot of reasons why this incisive critique is so applicable today.” (Ray Locker of the Associated Press)
From the Inside FlapHalf a century ago, the United States overthrew a Middle Eastern government for the primary time. The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson when it comes to the dangers of alien intervention.
In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer gives the firstborn full account of this fateful operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes with an assessment of the coup’s “haunting and terrible legacy.”
Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, permitting him to impose a tyranny that in the end sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists allround the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived underneath it is protection.
“It is not far-fetched,” Kinzer asserts in this book, “to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.”
Drawing on exploration in the United States and Iran, and using material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and mystery agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings amongst the Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car. Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated primarily by their wits. After his original coup try failed, he coordinated a second try that succeeded three days later.
The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the basi sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of “Gang Busters,” who flew to Tehran on a mystery mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup’s main sponsors.
Brimming with perceptivities into Middle Eastern history and American alien policy, this book is an eye-opening look at an event whose unintended consequences–Islamic revolution and violent anti-Americanism–have shaped the modern world. As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the Middle East, it is necessary reading.
British intransigence, American obtuseness
Essential reading for understanding US relations with Iran