America's Great Game (32 page)

Within two short years, Nasser had consolidated the July Revolution, eliminated his main rivals, and emerged as the hero of Egyptian nationalism. The role of regional Arab leader was now beckoning. Not even James Burnham’s Machiavellians could have scripted a performance better than this.
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TWELVE

Authoring a Coup: Iran, 1953

AT PRECISELY THE SAME TIME
that Kim Roosevelt was working covertly to remove the British and shore up Gamal Nasser’s nationalist government in Egypt, he was also embroiled in another plot not far to the east. This one, however, would have a dramatically different effect on both the nation in question—Iran—and on the region as a whole. Whereas Kim’s Egyptian operation advanced the anticolonial, pronationalist goals of American Arabism (albeit by supporting a military government), this one set back the cause of Middle Eastern nationalism and helped revive the power of the old imperial regime. It would also leave a legacy of suspicion and resentment of the United States in the region that threatened to destroy Americans’ earlier reputation for disinterested benevolence.

The story of this plot—the August 1953 coup that removed Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and secured the throne of the young shah—has been told many times before, in countless books, articles, documentaries, and even recently a graphic novel. This is perhaps not surprising, given that, quite apart from its historical importance, the
coup had a dramatic, thrilling, almost literary quality that lends itself very well to storytelling. However, in all the accounts of the event, one topic has received less attention than it deserves: Kim Roosevelt’s personal motivation. Why did this young Arabist, the advocate of nationalism and anticolonialism in the Arab world, lead an operation that is now widely seen as having profoundly damaged these same causes in Iran?
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The answer to this question lies partly in grand strategic considerations relating to communism and oil that influenced US Middle East policies generally in the early Cold War period. But equally important for Kim Roosevelt personally were much more specific factors having to do with his cultural background and family history—and with the act of storytelling itself.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY KIM ROOSEVELT
found himself in 1953 in charge of a covert effort to topple one of the Middle East’s leading nationalists, it is necessary to go back several years in Iranian history, to long before Kim himself became involved in the operation.

The Cold War skirmishes of 1946 and 1947 witnessed by Archie Roosevelt—the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the suppression of separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan—had apparently left Iran firmly tethered within the Western camp. A major source of instability remained, however. Despite the example set by ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, where oil revenues were split fifty-fifty with the Saudi government, the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) was refusing to share the profits from its drilling operations with Iranians. As the country’s communist party, or Tudeh, began gaining support among the exploited workers in AIOC’s massive Abadan refinery, a broad coalition of reform-oriented groups, the National Front, emerged under the leadership of Mohammed Mosaddeq, a veteran champion of Iranian independence and constitutional rule. Bowing to public pressure, the young shah appointed Mosaddeq as his prime minister in April 1951; a few days later, the Iranian government seized control of the nation’s oil industry from the British.

Initially, the United States tried to take a neutral position in the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute, blocking a British plan to retake the Abadan refinery with military force and sending emissaries to Tehran and London to broker a negotiated settlement. Truman administration officials were irritated by the colonial mind-set of their British counterparts and,
at this stage, saw the hugely popular Mosaddeq, a professed anticommunist, as a barrier against possible Soviet expansion into Iran. They were justified in doing so. The prime minister was no less opposed to Soviet than to British colonialism; like many nationalist leaders in Iran before him, his primary objective was putting an end to the Anglo-Russian Great Game on Iranian soil. In any case, just as in the 1946–1947 crisis, it was far from clear that the Soviets desired the communization of Iran. Recent research in Iranian and Russian archives has suggested that neither Moscow nor the Tudeh saw the country as ready for communist takeover.
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Gradually a number of factors undermined American neutrality. Although it is not altogether clear whether US petroleum interests coveted the Iranian oil fields for themselves, they definitely did not like the example set by Mosaddeq’s seizure of AIOC assets and applied subtle pressure against him in Washington. The prime minister was a flamboyant figure, given to conducting government business from his bed and to theatrical fits of weeping and fainting. While this behavior delighted his Iranian supporters, it unnerved US officials, who tended to blame it on “Oriental” emotionalism and irrationality (in its 1951 “Man of the Year” article,
Time
magazine, adopting a prose style clearly intended to evoke an
Arabian Nights
tale, described Mosaddeq as a “dizzy old wizard”). The British, who made much of their greater experience in Persian affairs, did little to discourage this Orientalizing tendency. Finally, with the oil dispute dragging on and pressure on the Iranian economy mounting, the National Front coalition began to fragment. Emboldened opposition elements mounted street demonstrations in Tehran, causing Mosaddeq to resort to authoritarian measures. Observers in Washington were alarmed by what they perceived as a weakening of Iran’s capability to resist Soviet influence. It did not help that, with Senator Joseph McCarthy riding high, the domestic political atmosphere in the United States was virulently anticommunist; moreover, as of September 1951, the US ambassador in Tehran reporting on developments there was none other than the archetypal foreign service Cold Warrior Loy Henderson.
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Although US officials continued to work for a negotiated settlement of the oil dispute, behind-the-scenes support for drastic action against Mosaddeq was growing. Following the events of 1946–1947, the CIA had carried on anti-Soviet covert operations in Iran, including BEDAMN, a psychological warfare program run by the archaeologist and former OSS officer Donald Wilber, now a half-time Agency consultant. After
1951, BEDAMN’s principal agents, Ali Jalali and Faruq Kayvani (CIA code names Nerren and Cilley), increasingly focused their attentions on Mosaddeq himself, trying to turn leading Muslim clerics and other members of the National Front coalition against the prime minister. CIA intelligence estimates, meanwhile, emphasized Mosaddeq’s “incompetence and dictatorial tendencies,” as well as his vulnerability to communist adventurism. It was partly in response to such reporting that in November 1952 the Truman administration adopted NSC 136/1, directing US officials to expand “special political operations” to thwart a possible communist coup.
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As yet, no one in Washington was proposing an operation to get rid of Mosaddeq—that idea originated with the British. Somewhat improbably, it was two professors of Persian, Ann “Nancy” Lambton of London University and Oxford’s Robin Zaehner, who first proposed, in 1951, the anti-Mosaddeq plot that culminated in the 1953 coup. The idea received the enthusiastic blessing of new prime minister Winston Churchill—a firm believer in both clandestine warfare and Britain’s right to Iranian oil—and was turned over to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) for development in Tehran. MI6 station chief Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse mobilized British agents such as the three Rashidian brothers—merchants with excellent connections to opposition politicians, clerics, and journalists—in a campaign of anti-Mosaddeq intriguing. The prime minister responded in October 1952 by expelling all British personnel from the country. Undeterred, MI6 reassembled its Iranian team on its base in Cyprus under the command of Woodhouse’s assistant, Norman Darbyshire. Before quitting Tehran, Woodhouse himself handed over the Rashidians and other British assets to Roger Goiran, head of the CIA station there. Woodhouse had believed from the first that US support was necessary if the British were to remove Mosaddeq, and in November 1952 he departed for Washington bearing a detailed plan for a joint Anglo-American operation code-named BOOT. While State Department representatives reacted coolly, CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner both expressed guarded interest. As he confessed later, Woodhouse deliberately tailored his presentation to emphasize “the antiCommunist element in our plans” and avoided any hint that Americans “were being used to rescue Britain’s oil interests.” This tactic was effective, he believed. “At that date the CIA was a fairly new establishment, and willing to accept professional advice and even influence from the British.”
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It was at this juncture that Kim Roosevelt appeared on the scene. Passing through London on his way back from one of his periodic trips to Tehran, Kim was collared by a group of British officials who presented him with BOOT. Intrigued, he pursued the idea with Allen Dulles, now slated to serve as CIA director in the incoming Eisenhower administration. As he explained later, he and Dulles “were in quiet disagreement with the outgoing administration’s positions and had in fact already begun studying possible action in support of the Shah, and testing of agents with such action in mind.”
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In February 1953, an MI6 team arrived in Washington and proposed Kim as the operation’s “field commander.” Miles Copeland was dispatched to Iran to assess the likelihood of a successor to Mosaddeq “sticking”; he returned in April with a positive estimate. Kim, meanwhile, was in Tehran meeting with the Rashidian brothers and a retired army major general, Fazlollah Zahedi, the man identified as the best bet to replace Mosaddeq. In May, Donald Wilber and Norman Darbyshire convened in Cyprus to thrash out details of the coup plan, now called TP-AJAX. “TP” was the CIA country prefix for Iran, while “AJAX” seems, rather prosaically, to have been a reference to the popular household cleanser, the implication being that the operation would scour Iran of communist influence.
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Following final planning meetings in Beirut, London, and Washington, Churchill granted official British approval for AJAX on July 1; Eisenhower signed off on the plan on July 11. On July 19, with both the CIA BEDAMN and MI6 Rashidian networks fomenting disturbances on the streets of Tehran, Kim slipped over the border from Iraq. He went into hiding in the hills just outside the capital, at the Tajrish home of Joseph Goodwin, one of the journalists who had preceded the shah’s army into Azerbaijan seven years earlier and had since gone to work for the CIA. In the run-up to the coup, Goodwin acted as a replacement for station chief Roger Goiran, who on August 2 abruptly returned to Washington from Tehran. Various explanations for Goiran’s departure have been offered, but the most likely seems his reluctance to participate in what he called an act of “Anglo-French colonialism.” Such misgivings were not uncommon among mid-level CIA officers and the Persian experts who consulted with the Agency.
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With a team at CIA headquarters in Washington handling the propaganda and military aspects of the coup, and the British base in Cyprus providing three-way communication, Kim now set to work turning
Operation AJAX into reality. The crux of the plan was to provoke a constitutional crisis in which Iranians were forced to choose between Mosaddeq and the shah. Kim and his fellow conspirators were confident that, in a confrontation between the prime minister and the king, the most powerful elements of Iranian society—the merchants of the bazaar, Muslim religious leaders (with their ability to summon urban crowds), and army officers—would rally to the latter. The problem was that the young shah, while no friend of his turbulent prime minister, was reluctant to sign the royal decrees, or
firmans
, dismissing him and appointing Zahedi in his stead—hardly surprising, given the personal risk involved. Kim responded by applying pressure on him through various third parties, first the shah’s famously strong-willed sister, Princess Ashraf (the supposedly irresistible Steve Meade was enlisted in the effort to win her over), then, when that ploy failed, General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, the highly regarded former head of a wartime US gendarmerie mission to Iran (and father of the Desert Storm commander). With the
firmans
still not forthcoming, finally Kim himself went to see the shah, hiding under a blanket as he was driven through the palace gates. The shah eventually signed the orders on August 13, after retreating to a royal resort on the Caspian Sea. With arrangements in place for the arrest of Mosaddeq and his supporters in the army, August 15 was set as the day for the coup.