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This week, to Iran, where in 1953, the US conducted one of its most consequential coups abroad:
You can also watch on Instagram here. And ICYMI here’s our episode from last week on the birth of campaign finance reform and the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905. And, disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Crocs, although that is through no choice of my own.
This week’s story comes from All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer. All the Shah’s Men is a page-turner and I recommend it to anyone looking for more background on US relations with Iran and the Middle East!
Next time on Skipped History…
We circle back to Indonesia. In 1965, US officials overthrew Sukarno, finishing the work that the Dulles Brothers started in 1958. It is a very tasty episode… literally 😉
Did the Dulles Bros control Dwight Eisenhower’s destructive foreign policy, or did Ike have more of a say than people gave him credit for? Paying subscribers will learn a juicy answer to that question, as well as gain a sneak peek of our upcoming visit to Indonesia. Sign up below if you’re interested to learn more + support the Skipped History mission!
Otherwise, see you in two weeks with our return to Jakarta!
Cheers,
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the 1953 US-led coup in Iran. I read about it in All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer.
In earlier episodes of Skipped History, we examined nefarious activity abroad orchestrated by Allen and John Foster Dulles, Director of the CIA and Secretary of State in the 1950s. While awkward Foster was off chewing candle wax into balls at dinner parties—not a joke, and he was the country’s top diplomat—Allen was busy cultivating an image as a charming, pipe-smoking spymaster. Of course, there wasn’t that much mystery to him or to his employees, who other than this cheeky owl unsuccessfully trying to hide his ears, tended to be “white Anglo-Saxon patricians from old families with old money.” And in 1953, a member of one of the most prominent old families helped Allen topple Irani Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the CIA’s first, definitely not last, and maybe most consequential coup abroad.
To understand Mossadegh’s ouster, let’s first chat about some other patricians—the British!— whose empire peaked 40 years earlier. In 1913, close to a quarter of the world’s population lived under the Union Jack, and one of the empire’s crown jewels was Iran, which Winston Churchill called “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” Why did Churchill describe Iran like The Rock describes GNC? Well, Churchill lived on an island whose chief source of fuel was oil. And Iran not only had oil but thanks to a series of deals that Britain imposed on Iran dating back to 1907 it, magically, also had oil that Britain controlled!
This was the imperial context in which a young Mohammad Mossadegh grew up. At turns theatrical, intimidating, and patriotic, he entered the Irani Parliament in 1924—Iran had a constitutional monarchy. There, he became Britain’s most vocal critic, declaring, “The Iranian is the best person to manage his home.” Mossadegh also became a vocal critic of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran’s monarch, or just the Shah for short, who was so detested in Iran for his coziness with the British that he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Of note, the Shah was also close with Allen, who when still working as a lawyer in 1949 secured the Shah’s support of a $5 billion construction deal with a client of Allen’s. Although the Shah assured Allen and OCI that the Iranian people “were eager to welcome American capital,” his statement proved almost as wrong as Wolf Blitzer on Celebrity Jeopardy, and Mossadegh’s political party killed the deal with Allen’s client. The following year, 1951, Mossadegh became Iran’s new Prime Minister and with unanimous consent from parliament nationalized the country’s oil industry.
Predictably, Allen and Foster were not so pleased with Iran’s new self-determinative direction, and entering office in 1953, the Dulles Brothers were eager to depose Mossadegh. President Dwight Eisenhower took some more convincing, but after drinks with Foster and wondering aloud why it was so hard “to get some people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us”—uh, that’s obvious: we invented crocs, which are useless in 45-degree weather unless they’re close-toed!—in the end, Ike came around to the idea of a coup because it would help the British and establish US influence in Iran.
That left one question: who would run the operation? In the summer of 1953, Allen tapped none other than Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit. Kermit had all the relevant qualifications: he was a Roosevelt, a WASP, and had written a few articles on the Middle East. If that doesn’t impress you, here’s footage of him conducting interviews for the articles. Sorry, that was low-hanging fruit. Here’s actual footage of Kermit writing the articles. Anyway, in July 1953, Kermit crossed into Iran from Iraq with orders from Allen to “effect the fall of the Mossadeq government and to replace it with a pro-Western government under the Shah’s leadership.”
Kermit and a small team of agents got to work. They created pamphlets and fliers saying Mossadegh was a communist and an enemy of Islam. They paid journalists to write that Mossadegh was Jewish, bribed local religious leaders to denounce Mossadegh in their sermons, and hired local street gangs to pretend to be Mossadegh loyalists and attack a mosque. When the uninformed local CIA station chief, Roger Goiran, got wind of what was going on, he warned that the US was making a historic mistake. Allen ignored him, recalled him, and soon after, on August 19th, a climactic battle took place outside of Mossadegh’s house between his supporters and the CIA’s paid gangs. By dawn, 300 people had died, and Mossadegh was in the custody of US-supported forces. His only crime, he stated, was that he had “removed from this land the network of colonization and the... influence of the greatest empire on earth.”
But now there was a new empire in town. As planned, Allen’s pal the Shah consolidated his power and split Iran’s oil profits with an international consortium that included the British and a handful of companies in the US. The Shah also spent billions of dollars on US weaponry, and over the ensuing 25 years became a dictator who crushed dissent by any means necessary, including employing torture techniques honed by the CIA. The extreme repression of his regime led Iranians to further detest him, which led to his overthrow during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which led to the Iran Hostage Crisis, which led to the sour state of US-Iranian relations that has persisted ever since. And as one Iranian scholar mused in 2002, “It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup Iran would now be a mature democracy.”
But democracy was never the US’ goal, and Foster reportedly reacted to news of the coup’s success by “leaning back in his chair... and purring like a giant cat.” Why did Foster sound like the Rock reading a catalog from GNC? Well, maybe he found another yummy candle to chew on, maybe he realized the US government now had a blueprint for toppling democratically elected leaders who threatened US business interests, or maybe he realized that close-toed crocs are not only good in cool temperatures but non-slip in the kitchen, too!
Whatever his rationale, Allen, Foster, and Ike’s actions in the 1950s continue to shape a litany of countries, none more so than Indonesia. Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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