All the Shah's Men

Stephen Kinzer traces the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, arguing that this covert operation destabilized the Middle East and continues to shape global politics. Drawing on declassified documents, diplomatic cables, and scholarly research, Kinzer reconstructs both the coup and the centuries of Iranian history that produced the nationalist movement Mossadegh embodied.

Kinzer opens on the night of August 15, 1953, when Colonel Nematollah Nasiri, commander of the Imperial Guard, led an armed convoy through Tehran to arrest Mossadegh. Nasiri carried a firman, a royal decree signed by Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran's monarch, dismissing Mossadegh from office. The decree is of dubious legality, since under Iran's constitution only parliament can remove a prime minister. President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered the operation, organized by the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Loyalist commanders intercepted and arrested Nasiri. Mossadegh announced victory on the radio, and the Shah fled to Baghdad and then to Rome.

Kinzer traces the roots of Iranian political identity. Iran is one of the world's oldest nations, heir to the Achaemenian dynasty founded by Cyrus in the sixth century B.C. The Zoroastrian faith introduced farr, a divine blessing that rulers must earn through moral behavior. When Arab conquerors imposed Islam in the seventh century A.D., Iranians fashioned Shiism, a branch of Islam centered on devotion to martyred leaders. Shiite tradition instilled a conviction that unjust rulers lose their right to rule, an idea that shaped Mossadegh's political consciousness.

Under the corrupt Qajar dynasty (late eighteenth century to 1925), Britain and Russia exploited Iran, dividing the country into spheres of influence in 1907. The Tobacco Revolt of 1891 and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911, which produced Iran's first parliament, or Majlis, established democratic aspirations that persisted through the twentieth century. In 1921, Reza Khan seized power in a British-backed coup and crowned himself Reza Shah. He modernized Iran but ruled as a dictator, and his ties to Nazi Germany led Britain and the Soviet Union to invade in 1941, forcing his abdication; his son Mohammad Reza succeeded him.

At the heart of the conflict lies oil. In 1901, the Qajar Shah sold British financier William Knox D'Arcy the exclusive right to prospect for oil across Iranian territory. D'Arcy's geologist George Reynolds struck oil in 1908 at Masjid-i-Suleiman. The British government bought a majority stake in the resulting Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which built the world's largest refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf. Conditions were starkly colonial: British executives enjoyed private clubs and lawns, while Iranian laborers lived in slums without running water or sanitation.

Mohammad Mossadegh, born in 1882, was shaped by faith in the rule of law and opposition to foreign domination. He earned a doctorate of law from Switzerland's University of Neuchâtel in 1914, the first Iranian to earn such a degree from a European university. After Reza Shah's forced abdication, Mossadegh returned to politics and became the driving force behind a 1947 law forbidding further concessions to foreign companies.

Kinzer shows how British intransigence pushed Iran toward nationalization. AIOC's chairman, Sir William Fraser, refused to share profits equally, even as American officials pointed to the fifty-fifty deal that the Arabian-American Oil Company had struck with Saudi Arabia. After the British-installed Prime Minister Razmara was assassinated in March 1951, the Majlis voted unanimously to nationalize Anglo-Iranian. Mossadegh was named prime minister, and the Majlis passed the nationalization act that same afternoon.

Britain responded aggressively. Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison sent warships to the Persian Gulf and imposed sanctions, but President Harry Truman's opposition prevented military action. Mossadegh argued Iran's case at the United Nations; Secretary of State Dean Acheson tried to broker a compromise, but Mossadegh rejected any arrangement letting the British retain operational control. Churchill's return to power in October 1951 intensified economic warfare: sabotage, tanker interceptions, and a global boycott of Iranian oil. When Mossadegh expelled all British diplomats in October 1952, American participation in any future coup became essential.

Eisenhower's election that November transformed the situation. MI6's Monty Woodhouse framed the case for a coup around the communist threat, an appeal that resonated with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles. The Dulles brothers gradually persuaded the initially reluctant Eisenhower. By March 1953, Allen Dulles had authorized $1 million for the operation. CIA and MI6 operatives drafted the plan, code-named Operation Ajax: propaganda, staged provocations, bribery, and a climactic day of paid demonstrations and military seizure.

The CIA chose Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and chief of the agency's Near East and Asia Division, to direct the operation. Roosevelt entered Iran covertly in July 1953, commanding agents who had spent months bribing politicians, officers, clergymen, and gang leaders. His greatest challenge was persuading the Shah to sign firmans dismissing Mossadegh and naming General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. After secret midnight meetings at the palace, the Shah signed and fled to a Caspian coast hunting lodge.

When the first attempt failed on August 15, Roosevelt ignored cables ordering him to flee and improvised. He distributed copies of the firman and sent CIA-controlled mobs into the streets to create an impression of chaos. Ambassador Loy Henderson visited Mossadegh with a fabricated complaint, and the shaken prime minister banned all public demonstrations, effectively disarming his own supporters.

On Wednesday, August 19, thousands gathered at mosques and public squares. Members of traditional athletic societies marched through the bazaar shouting "Long Live the Shah!" while agents distributed cash. Police joined the marchers. Mossadegh's supporters, obeying his ban, stayed home. Tudeh, the pro-Soviet communist party, spent the day deliberating, paralyzed without orders from a Kremlin in turmoil after Stalin's death. CIA-bribed military units joined the crowds, and by late morning the insurgents controlled Tehran. CIA agents seized Radio Tehran and announced Mossadegh's fall; Zahedi rode a tank to the station to address the nation. About three hundred people died. Mossadegh escaped over a garden wall. In Rome, the Shah learned of his triumph: "I knew it!" he cried. "They love me!"

Mossadegh surrendered the next evening. A military tribunal convicted him of treason and sentenced him to three years in prison followed by house arrest at his estate in Ahmad Abad, where he died on March 5, 1967, with no public funeral permitted. An international consortium replaced AIOC, with British Petroleum and five American companies each holding 40 percent.

Kinzer argues that the coup's consequences were catastrophic. The Shah became increasingly dictatorial, and because he eliminated every moderate political movement, there was no one to negotiate with when anger exploded in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior Shiite cleric. The seizure of the American embassy was directly motivated by fear of another CIA-backed coup. The hostage crisis poisoned U.S.-Iran relations, led the United States to back Iraq in its war against Iran, and strengthened militant factions. The revolutionary regime financed Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist militant group, and Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militant group, and inspired the Taliban, an Afghan Islamist movement. Kinzer assigns primary blame to British intransigence, quoting Acheson: "Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast." The coup also emboldened the CIA to pursue regime change in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, the Congo, and Vietnam.

In an epilogue, Kinzer describes visiting Ahmad Abad on the forty-ninth anniversary of the coup in 2002. Ordinary Iranians still speak of Mossadegh with reverence, associating his name with freedom. Inside the compound, his burial site has become an informal shrine. Mossadegh's great-grandson Ali tells Kinzer he will never enter politics because the risk of tarnishing the family name is too great, a reluctance testifying to the enduring weight of Mossadegh's legacy.