In January 1953, a few days before Eisenhower's inauguration, Walter Bedell Smith called Kim Roosevelt in at CIA headquarters and asked: "When is our goddamn operation going to get underway?"
Two months before, in early November 1952, Roosevelt, the CIA's Near East operations chief, had gone to Tehran to clean up a mess for his friends in British intelligence. Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, had caught the British trying to topple him. He had expelled everyone in their embassy, including the spies. Roosevelt had arrived to preserve and pay off a network of Iranian agents who had worked for the British but were happy to accept American largesse. On the way home, he stopped in London to report to his British colleagues.
He learned that Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted the CIA to help overthrow Iran. Iran's oil had propelled Churchill to power and glory forty years before. Now Sir Winston wanted it back.
On the eve of World War I, Churchill, as first lord of the British Admiralty, had converted the Royal Navy from coal-burning to oil-burning ships. He championed the British purchase of 51 percent of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had struck the first of Iran's oil five years before. The British took a lion's share. Not only did Iranian oil fuel Churchill's new armada, but the revenues paid for it. The oil became the lifeblood of the British exchequer. While Britannia ruled the waves, British, Russian, and Turkish troops trampled northern Iran, destroying much of the nation's agriculture and sparking a famine that killed perhaps two million people. Out of this chaos arose a Cossack commander, Reza Khan, who seized power with guile and force. In 1925, he was proclaimed the shah of Iran. A nationalist politician named Mohammad Mossadeq was one of the four members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, who opposed him.
The Majlis soon discovered that the British oil giant, now the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, systematically cheated their government of billions. Hatred of the British and fear of the Soviets ran so high in Iran in the 1930s that the Nazis made deep inroads there--so deep that Churchill and Stalin invaded Iran in August 1941. They exiled Reza Khan and installed his pliant, dewy-eyed twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
While Soviet and British armies occupied Iran, American forces used its airports and roads to transport roughly $18 billion worth of military aid to Stalin. The only American of consequence in Iran during World War II was General Norman Schwarzkopf, who organized Iran's Gendarmerie, the rural police (his son and namesake was the commander of the 1991 war on Iraq, Operation Desert Storm). Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held a war conference in Tehran in December 1943, but the allies left behind a starving nation where oil workers made fifty cents a day and the young shah held power through electoral fraud. After the war, Mossadeq called upon the Majlis to renegotiate the British oil concession. Anglo-Iranian Oil controlled the world's largest known reserves. Its offshore refinery at Abadan was the biggest on earth. While British oil executives and technicians played in private clubs and swimming pools, Iranian oil workers lived in shanties without running water, electricity, or sewers; the injustice bred support for the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, which claimed about 2,500 members at the time. The British took twice as much income from the oil as the Iranians. Now Iran demanded a fifty-fifty split. The British refused. They tried to sway opinion by paying off politicians, newspaper editors, and the state radio director, among others.
The British intelligence chief in Tehran, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, warned his compatriots that they were courting disaster. It came in April 1951, when the Majlis voted to nationalize Iran's oil production. A few days later, Mohammad Mossadeq became Iran's prime minister. By the end of June, British warships were off the coast of Iran. In July, the American ambassador, Henry Grady, reported that the British, in an act of "utter folly," were trying to overthrow Mossadeq. In September, the British solidified an international boycott of Iran's oil, an act of economic warfare intended to destroy Mossadeq. Then Churchill returned to power as prime minister. He was seventy-six; Mossadeq was sixty-nine. Both were stubborn old men who conducted affairs of state in their pajamas. British commanders drew up plans for seventy thousand troops to seize Iran's oil fields and the Abadan refinery. Mossadeq took his case to the United Nations and the White House, laying on the charm in public while warning Truman in private that a British attack could set off World War III. Truman told Churchill flatly that the United States would never back such an invasion. Churchill countered that the price for British military support in the Korean War was American political support for his position in Iran. They reached an impasse in the summer of 1952.
"CIA MAKES POLICY BY DEFAULT"
The British spy Monty Woodhouse flew to Washington to meet with Walter Bedell Smith and Frank Wisner. On November 26, 1952, they discussed how to "unseat Mossadeq." Their plot began in the twilight of a presidential transition--as Truman's power faded, the coup plans grew. As Wisner said when the plot was in full cry, there were times when "CIA makes policy by default." The stated foreign policy of the United States was to support Mossadeq. But the CIA was setting out to depose him without the imprimatur of the White House.
On February 18, 1953, the newly installed chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service arrived in Washington. Sir John Sinclair, a soft-spoken Scotsman known to the public as "C" and to his friends as "Sinbad," met with Allen Dulles and proposed Kim Roosevelt as field commander for a coup. The British gave their plan the prosaic title of Operation Boot. Roosevelt had a grander name: Operation Ajax, after the mythical hero of the Trojan War (a strange choice, as legend has it that Ajax went mad, slew a flock of sheep thinking they were warriors, and killed himself in shame after he came to his senses).
Roosevelt ran the show with flair. He had been working for two years on political, propaganda, and paramilitary operations to fight off a feared Soviet invasion in Iran. CIA officers already had enough cash and guns stashed away to support ten thousand tribal warriors for six months. He had the authority to attack the Tudeh, the small, influential, outlawed Communist party of Iran. Now he shifted his target, aiming to undermine support for Mossadeq inside Iran's mainstream political and religious parties.
Roosevelt started stepping up a campaign of bribery and subversion. The agency's officers and their Iranian agents rented the allegiances of political hacks, holy men, and thugs. They bought the services of street gangs who broke up Tudeh rallies with their bare knuckles and mullahs who denounced Mossadeq from the mosques. The CIA did not have Britain's decades of experience in Iran, nor nearly as many recruited Iranian agents. But it had more money to hand out: at least $1 million a year, a great fortune in one of the world's poorer nations.
The CIA took its cues from the influence-buying network controlled by British intelligence. It was run by the Rashidian brothers, three sons of an Iranian Anglophile who controlled ships, banks, and real estate. The Rashidians had clout with members of the Iranian parliament. They held sway among the leading merchants of the bazaar, the unacknowledged legislators of Tehran. They bribed senators, senior military officers, editors and publishers, goon squads, and at least one member of Mossadeq's cabinet. They bought information with cookie tins filled with cash. Their circle even included the shah's chief manservant. It would prove a catalyst in the coup.
Allen Dulles walked into the March 4, 1953, National Security Council meeting with seven pages of briefing notes focused on the "consequences of Soviet take over" in Iran. The country faced "a maturing revolutionary set-up," and if it went communist, all the dominoes of the Middle East would fall. Sixty percent of the free world's oil would be in Moscow's hands. This disastrous loss would "seriously deplete our reserves for war," Dulles warned; oil and gasoline would have to be rationed in the United States. The president did not buy a word of it. He thought it might be better to offer Mossadeq a $100 million loan, in order to stabilize his government, rather than to overthrow it.
Monty Woodhouse tactfully suggested to his American counterparts at the CIA that they might take a different approach in presenting the problem to Eisenhower. They could not maintain that Mossadeq was a communist. But they could argue that the longer he remained in power, the greater the danger that the Soviets would invade Iran. Kim Roosevelt fine-tuned this pitch for the president's ear: If Mossadeq wobbled to the left, Iran would fall to the Soviets. But if he was pushed the right way, the CIA could make sure that the government fell into American control.
Mossadeq played straight into this trap. In a miscalculated bluff, he raised the specter of the Soviet threat with the American embassy in Tehran. He expected to be "rescued by the Americans," said John H. Stutesman, an American diplomat who knew Mossadeq well and served as the State Department officer in charge of Iranian affairs in 1953. "Mossadeq felt that if he kicked out the British, and threatened the Americans with Russian hegemony, that we'd rush in. He wasn't that far wrong."
On March 18, 1953, Frank Wisner informed Roosevelt and Woodhouse that they had an initial go-ahead from Allen Dulles. On April 4, CIA headquarters sent $1 million to the Tehran station. But Eisenhower still had his doubts, as did other key players in the plan to overthrow Iran.
The president made an eloquent speech a few days later called "The Chance for Peace," in which he declared that "any nation's right to form a government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable," and "any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible." These ideas struck home with the CIA's station chief in Tehran, Roger Goiran, who asked headquarters why the United States would want to ally itself with the traditions of British colonialism in the Middle East. It was a historic mistake, he argued, a long-term disaster for American interests. Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington and dismissed him as station chief. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, Loy Henderson, who had been in on the plans from the start, strongly opposed the British choice of a dissolute retired major general, Fazlollah Zahedi, as the front man for the coup. Mossadeq had told the ambassador that he knew Zahedi was a British-backed traitor.
Despite that, the British nominated and the CIA seconded Zahedi, the only man openly bidding for power who was thought to be pro-American. In late April, he went into hiding after the kidnapping and murder of Iran's national police chief--with good reason, for the suspected killers were his own supporters. He did not resurface for eleven weeks.
In May, the plot gained momentum, though it still lacked the president's approval. It was now in its final draft. Zahedi, armed with $75,000 in CIA cash, would form a military secretariat and choose colonels to mount the coup. A group of religious fanatics called the Warriors of Islam--a "terrorist gang," says a CIA history of the coup--would threaten the lives of Mossadeq's political and personal supporters inside and outside the government. They would stage violent attacks on respected religious leaders that would look as if they were the work of the communists. The CIA drew up pamphlets and posters as part of a $150,000 propaganda campaign to control Iran's press and public, proclaiming that "Mossadeq favors the Tudeh Party and the USSR.... Mossadeq is an enemy of Islam.... Mossadeq is deliberately destroying the morale of the Army.... Mossadeq is deliberately leading the country into economic collapse.... Mossadeq has been corrupted by power." On D-Day, the coup plotters led by Zahedi's military secretariat would seize the army's general staff headquarters, Radio Tehran, Mossadeq's home, the central bank, police headquarters, and the telephone and telegraph offices. They would arrest Mossadeq and his cabinet. More money, $11,000 a week, immediately went to buy off enough members of the Majlis to ensure that a majority would proclaim Zahedi as the new prime minister. This last detail had the advantage of giving the coup an appearance of legality. Zahedi, in turn, would pledge fealty to the shah and restore his monarchy to power.
Would the weak-willed shah play his role? Ambassador Henderson did not believe he had the backbone to support a coup. But Roosevelt thought it would be hopeless to go ahead without him.
On June 15, Roosevelt went to London to show the plan to the boffins of British intelligence. They met in a headquarters conference room with a sign that read, "Curb Your Guests." No objections were raised. The Americans, after all, were footing the bill. The British had conceived the coup, but their leaders could not play a commanding role in its execution. On June 23, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had major abdominal surgery in Boston. That same day, Winston Churchill suffered a severe stroke and almost died; the news was kept so quiet that the CIA heard nothing of it.
Over the next two weeks, the agency set up a two-pronged chain of command. One would run Zahedi's military secretariat. The other would control the political warfare and propaganda campaign. Both reported directly to Frank Wisner. Kim Roosevelt set out to fly to Beirut, drive through Syria and Iraq into Iran, and link up with the Rashidian brothers. The CIA awaited a green light from the president of the United States.
It came on July 11. And from that moment on, almost everything went wrong.
"AFTER YOU, YOUR MAJESTY"
The secrecy of the mission was blown before day one. On July 7, the CIA had monitored a Tudeh Party radio broadcast. The clandestine radio warned Iranians that the American government, along with various "spies and traitors," including General Zahedi, were working "to liquidate the Mossadeq government." Mossadeq had his own military and political intelligence sources, independent of the Tudeh, and he knew what he was up against.
Then the CIA discovered that its coup had no troops. General Zahedi had not a single soldier under his control. The agency had no map of the military situation in Tehran, no roster of the Iranian army. Kim Roosevelt turned to Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, the father of U.S. special-operations forces. McClure was Eisenhower's chief intelligence officer during World War II, ran the army's Psychological Warfare Division during the Korean War, and specialized in overseeing joint operations with the CIA. He had worked side by side with Dulles and Wisner, and he trusted neither man.
General McClure had gone to Tehran to run the American military assistance advisory group, established in 1950 to provide up-and-coming Iranian officers with military support, training, and advice. As part of the CIA's war of nerves, he cut off American contact with pro-Mossadeq commanders. Roosevelt relied entirely on McClure for a picture of the Iranian military and the political loyalties of its senior officers. President Eisenhower personally insisted that McClure receive a second star after the coup, noting his "very fine relationships with the Shah and other senior people in whom we are interested." The CIA recruited a colonel who had served as the Iranian liaison to McClure's military assistance group to help run the coup. He secretly enlisted about forty fellow officers.
Now all that was lacking was the shah.
A CIA colonel, Stephen J. Meade, flew to Paris to pick up the shah's strong-willed and unpopular twin sister, Princess Ashraf. The CIA's script called for her to return from exile and persuade the shah to back General Zahedi. But Princess Ashraf was nowhere to be found. The British intelligence agent Asadollah Rashidian tracked her down on the French Riviera. It took another ten days to coax her onto a commercial flight to Tehran. The inducements included a large sum of cash and a mink coat from the British intelligence service, along with a promise from Colonel Meade that the United States would bankroll the royal family should the coup fail. After a stormy face-to-face confrontation with her twin, she left Tehran on July 30, wrongly convinced that she had stiffened his spine. The CIA brought in General Norman Schwarzkopf to bolster the shah on August 1. The shah, fearing that his palace was bugged, led the general into the grand ballroom, pulled a small table to its center, and whispered that he would not go along with the coup. He had no confidence that the army would back him.
Kim Roosevelt spent the next week skulking in and out of the shah's palace, pressuring him mercilessly, warning him that his failure to follow the CIA could lead to a communist Iran or "a second Korea"--in either case, a death sentence for the monarch and his family. Terrified, the shah fled to his royal resort on the Caspian Sea.
Roosevelt improvised furiously. He commissioned a royal decree dismissing Mossadeq and appointing General Zahedi as prime minister. He ordered the colonel who commanded the shah's imperial guard to present a signed copy of this legally dubious document to Mossadeq at gunpoint and arrest him if he defied it. On August 12, the colonel chased after the shah on the Caspian and returned the next night with signed copies of the decrees. Now Roosevelt's Iranian agents cascaded into the streets of Tehran. Newspapermen and printing presses spewed propaganda: Mossadeq was a communist, Mossadeq was a Jew. The CIA's street thugs, posing as Tudeh Party members, attacked mullahs and defiled a mosque. Mossadeq counterattacked by shutting down the Majlis--under the law, only the Majlis could dismiss him, not the shah--rendering the senators and deputies whose votes had been purchased by the CIA useless.
Roosevelt forged ahead. He cabled headquarters on August 14 with an urgent request for $5 million more to prop up General Zahedi. The coup was set for that night--and Mossadeq knew it. He mobilized the Tehran garrison of the Iranian army and surrounded his home with tanks and troops. When the shah's imperial guardsman went to arrest the prime minister, loyal officers seized him. Zahedi hid at a CIA safe house, watched over by one of Roosevelt's officers, a rookie named Rocky Stone. The CIA's hastily assembled cadre of Iranian colonels disintegrated.
Radio Tehran went on the air at 5:45 a.m. on August 16 announcing that the coup had failed. CIA headquarters had no clue what to do next. Allen Dulles had left Washington a week earlier for an extended European vacation, blithely confident that all was well. He was out of touch. Frank Wisner was out of ideas. Roosevelt, on his own, decided to try to convince the world that it was Mossadeq who had staged the failed coup. He needed the shah to sell that story, but the monarch had fled the country. The American ambassador in Iraq, Burton Berry, learned a few hours later that the shah was in Baghdad, begging for help. Roosevelt fed the outlines of a script to Berry, who advised the shah to broadcast a statement saying he had fled in the face of a left-wing uprising. He did as instructed. Then he told his pilot to file a flight plan for the world capital of exiled monarchs: Rome.
On the night of August 16, one of Roosevelt's officers handed $50,000 to the station's Iranian agents and told them to produce a crowd posing as communist goons. The next morning, hundreds of paid agitators flooded the streets of Tehran, looting, burning, and smashing the symbols of government. Actual members of the Tudeh Party joined them, but they soon realized "that a covert action was being staged," as the CIA station reported, and "tried to argue demonstrators into going home." After a second sleepless night, Roosevelt welcomed Ambassador Loy Henderson, who flew in from Beirut on August 17. On the way to meet him at the airport, members of the American embassy passed a toppled bronze statue of the shah's father, with only the boots left standing.
Henderson, Roosevelt, and General McClure held a four-hour war council inside the embassy compound. The result was a new plan to create anarchy. Thanks to McClure, Iranian military officers were dispatched to outlying garrisons to enlist soldiers to support the coup. The CIA's Iranian agents were ordered to hire more street mobs. Religious emissaries were sent to persuade the supreme Shi'ite ayatollah in Iran to declare a holy war.
But back at headquarters, Wisner despaired. He read the assessment of the CIA's best analysts that day: "The failure of the military coup in Tehran and the flight of the shah to Baghdad emphasize Prime Minister Mossadeq's continued mastery of the situation and foreshadow more drastic action on his part to eliminate all opposition." Late on the night of August 17, he sent a message to Tehran saying that, in the absence of strong recommendations to the contrary from Roosevelt and Henderson, the coup against Mossadeq should cease. A few hours later, sometime after 2 a.m., Wisner placed a frantic telephone call to John Waller, who was running the Iran desk at CIA headquarters.
The shah had flown to Rome and checked into the Excelsior Hotel, Wisner reported. And then "a terrible, terrible coincidence occurred," Wisner said. "Can you guess what it is?"
Waller could not imagine.
"Think of the worst thing you can think of," Wisner said.
"He was hit by a cab and killed," Waller replied. "No, no, no, no," Wisner responded. "John, maybe you don't know that Dulles had decided to extend his vacation by going to Rome. Now can you imagine what happened?"
Waller shot back: "Dulles hit him with his car and killed him?"
Wisner was not amused.
"They both showed up at the reception desk at the Excelsior at the very same moment," Wisner said. "And Dulles had to say, 'After you, Your Majesty.'"
"A PASSIONATE EMBRACE"
At dawn on August 19, the agency's hired mobs assembled in Tehran, ready for a riot. Buses and trucks filled with tribesmen from the south, their leaders all paid by the CIA, arrived in the capital. Ambassador Henderson's deputy chief of mission, William Rountree, described what happened next as "an almost spontaneous revolution."
"It began with a public demonstration by a health club or exercise club--lifting barbells and chains and that sort of thing," he recounted. These were weightlifters and circus strongmen recruited by the CIA for the day. "They began shouting anti-Mossadeq, pro-Shah slogans and proceeded to march through the streets. Many others joined them, and soon there was a substantial demonstration in favor of the Shah and against Mossadeq. Shouts of 'Long live the Shah!' spread throughout the city and the crowd went in the direction of the building housing the Mossadeq cabinet," where they seized ranking members of the government, burned four newspaper offices, and sacked the political headquarters of a pro-Mossadeq party. Two of the men in the crowd were religious leaders. One was the Ayatollah Ahmed Kashani. Alongside him was his fifty-one-year-old devotee, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, the future leader of Iran.
Roosevelt told his Iranian agents to hit the telegraph office, the propaganda ministry, and police and army headquarters. By afternoon, after a skirmish that killed at least three people, the CIA's agents were on the air at Radio Tehran. Roosevelt went to Zahedi's hideout, in the safe house run by the CIA's Rocky Stone, and told him to be ready to proclaim himself prime minister. Zahedi was so frightened that Stone had to button him into his military tunic. At least a hundred people died on the streets of Tehran that day.
At least two hundred more were killed after the CIA directed the shah's Imperial Guard to attack Mossadeq's heavily defended home. The prime minister escaped but surrendered the next day. He spent the next three years incarcerated and a decade more under house arrest before he died. Roosevelt handed Zahedi $1 million in cash, and the new prime minister set out to crush all opposition and jail thousands of political prisoners.
"The CIA did remarkably well in creating a situation in which, in the proper circumstances and atmosphere, a change could be effected," remembered Ambassador Rountree, later the assistant secretary of state for the Near East. "Quite clearly the matter did not work out as they had anticipated, or at least hoped, but it did work out in the end."
In his hour of glory, Kim Roosevelt flew to London. On August 26, at two in the afternoon, he was received at 10 Downing Street by the prime minister. Winston Churchill was "in bad shape," Roosevelt reported, his speech slurred, his vision occluded, his memory fleeting: "The initials CIA meant nothing to him, but he had a vague idea that Roosevelt must be connected in some way with his old friend Bedell Smith."
Roosevelt was hailed as a hero at the White House. Faith in the magic of covert action soared. "Romantic gossip about the 'coup' in Iran spread around Washington like wildfire," remembered the CIA's Ray Cline, one of the agency's star analysts. "Allen Dulles basked in the glory of the exploit." But not everyone at headquarters saw the fall of Mossadeq as a triumph. "The trouble with this seemingly brilliant success" was "the extravagant impression of CIA's power that it created," Cline wrote. "It did not prove that CIA could topple governments and place rulers in power; it was a unique case of supplying just the right amount of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time." By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime.
The shah returned to the throne and rigged the next parliamentary elections, using the CIA's street gangs as enforcers. He imposed three years of martial law and tightened his control over the country. He called upon the agency and the American military mission in Iran to help him secure his power by creating a new intelligence service, which became known as SAVAK. The CIA wanted SAVAK to serve as its eyes and ears against the Soviets. The shah wanted a secret police to protect his power. SAVAK, trained and equipped by the CIA, enforced his rule for more than twenty years.
The shah became the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the Islamic world. For years to come, it would be the station chief, not the American ambassador, who spoke to the shah for the United States. The CIA wove itself into Iran's political culture, locked in "a passionate embrace with the Shah," said Andrew Killgore, a State Department political officer under the American ambassador from 1972 to 1976--Richard Helms.
The coup "was regarded as CIA's greatest single triumph," Killgore said. "It was trumpeted as a great American national victory. We had changed the whole course of a country here." A generation of Iranians grew up knowing that the CIA had installed the shah. In time, the chaos that the agency had created in the streets of Tehran would return to haunt the United States.
The illusion that the CIA could overthrow a nation by sleight of hand was alluring. It led the agency into a battle in Central America that went on for the next forty years.