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

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In writing All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer takes the reader through a historical outline of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the CIA aided British forces in overtaking Mohammed Mossadegh’s regime. Throughout his analysis, the themes of political ideology, economics and international diplomacy are recurrent. Kinzer offers different levels of analysis from a domestic Iranian point of view all the way to what was going on in Washington. The inherent struggle for military commitment from the US on behalf of Great Britain was ultimately rooted in the oil industry that Mossadegh was nationalizing. Ultimately, the US caved into international pressure from Great Britain and aided in Operation Ajax to overthrow the Iranian leader and re-install the Shah as its rightful leader. In his final analysis, Kinzer argued that while it is inconclusive whether the threat of communism was a realistic threat for intervention, the whole ordeal resulted in tensions and negative diplomatic relations amongst the US, Great Britain and Iran. They stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American diplomats hostage for more than fourteen months." Also - since Herodotus’ times, history gets much more interesting if you insert a bit of bias and subjective narrative.... without that, it easily becomes a very dry collection of facts and sources.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Although over ninety, Dad is unusually active. He is a docent at the Dundee Historical Society and, thanks to the influence of his Danish wife, Lene, takes courses as a non-degree-seeking student at the Roosevelt University campus out in dreary Schaumburg, Illinois. He tends towards history and political science, having said at one time that he enjoys ganging up with the liberal teachers against his mostly right-wing, fellow suburban students. (Dad always was a pinkish Democrat.) This book was recommended by him after he'd taken some course which used it. He had asked it I'd read it and, having read Kinzer's other book about the overthrow of the Guatemalan government by the C.I.A. and having enjoyed that one, his recommendation was enough for me to obtain the thing. I wasn't disappointed. 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. Part of what makes All The Shah's Men: An American Coup & the Roots of Middle East Terror so fascinating is Stephen Kinzer's ability to put all of the details into historical context and still formulate his story in a way that causes it to read like a spy novel at times. I initially read this book on the American involvement in Iran when I was awaiting an Iranian visa to visit a country that was officially listed as part of the "Axis of Evil".

A Quasi-Victory for America

After the coup, an international consortium was organized to run the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had named the National Iranian Oil Company by Mossadegh. Anglo-Iranian held 40% of the shares. The consortium agreed to share profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis, but still refused "to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors." (196). The hostage-takers were enraged against Americans and their support for the deposed Shah who had been allowed into the United States. The US regarded this crime not only as barbaric but also inexplicable. But was it so inexplicable? Many Iranians feared that Americans would help the Shah return to power as they once did in 1953. What stood behind the fears of many Iranians that the US could help the Shah return to Tehran and to power? foreign 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 produce 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 share 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 against the forces of civilization." Before the crisis peaked, a high-ranking employee of Anglo-Iranian wrote to a superior that the company's alliance 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 foreign policy. (July)

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. When the first democratically elected parliament and prime minister in Iran took power in 1950 they planned to seize the oil assets in Iran that had been developed by the British, violating the still running oil contract with British Petroleum. In 1950 communists advanced across Korea. The prior year the USSR tested a nuclear weapon and Mao won the civil war in China. Countries across eastern Europe had governments imposed by Moscow. Truman thought the developing world would adopt Marxism if the west didn't accept nationalism. Iran was at risk due to British refusal to compromise on oil leases. Churchill was PM again in 1951 and Eisenhower president in 1953. Britain needed oil to pay US war debts. Same goes for Che Guevara, Simon Bolivar and everyone else whom popular history loves to celebrate as demi-gods. They are all human beings. Erm ... actually, worse: they were all men, and extremely self-absorbed and dominating ones).

Kinzer cares about Iran and his trip to Tehran for visiting the house that Mosaddeq stayed and lived his final years (which he chronicles in the epilogue of this book), shows that he is passionate about Iran and its fate. His passion is palpable in the account that he offers.

The truth might be in the middle: the CIA did that, but probably not on the scale that is often reported, and thanks to the help of many other powerful local groups. 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.

Despite the appalling living conditions of workers at the company's huge oil refinery in Iran, as British directors lived nearby in luxury, Jebb sputtered on patronizingly about how the company's profiteering in Iran "must arouse the greatest admiration from the social point of view and should be taken as a model of the form of development which would bring benefits to the economically less-developed areas of the world." In addition, Iranian military officers had their own reasons for plotting against Mosaddeq, and they required neither instigation nor instruction from Roosevelt. Under the shah, and during the rule of his father before him, the military and the monarchy were indivisible. The army was an essential pillar of the shah’s rule. That is why Mosaddeq -- who wanted to weaken the shah -- continuously purged the army’s officer ranks, cut the military’s budget, and hollowed out its institutions.