All The Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. By Stephen Kinzer. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. Pp.258. $24.95, paper.

Any analysis of America’s position in the Middle East would be incomplete without a thorough understanding of the U.S. role in overthrowing Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected and revered Prime Minister who nationalized Iran’s oil. In All The Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer revisits Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that ousted Mossadegh and returned the Shah to power. Though not forgotten in Iran, the 1953 coup has sadly faded from memory in the United States. It is, therefore, refreshing and timely for Kinzer to provide a highly readable account of America’s first intervention in Middle Eastern affairs, a coup d'état that may be at the root of the terrorist threats America faces today. This book implicitly argues that the Eisenhower administration’s Cold War mentality caused an error in judgment with tremendously negative long-term ramifications for U.S. policy.

Kinzer begins his exciting narrative with the CIA’s initial failure to depose Dr. Mossadegh. Concerned with Mossadegh’s willingness to tolerate communists, the CIA dispatched Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson) to Iran to destabilize the government and to replace the Prime Minister with a leader more acceptable to the Americans and British. Roosevelt’s original plan was to arrest Mossadegh using quasi-legal royal decrees and to appoint royalist General Zahedi in his place. When the plans were secretly leaked, the Shah escaped, and all hopes of ousting Mossadegh seemed lost. In a matter of days, however, Roosevelt tried again, and this time, he was successful.

Before recounting how Roosevelt’s second coup succeeded in overthrowing the democratic government in Tehran, Kinzer provides readers with a quick overview of the history of ancient Persia and modern Iran. In addition, he discusses the role of Islam in Iranian history and pays particular attention to the Shiite Muslim tradition. He focuses primarily on two themes: the historical Iranian desire for just leadership culminating in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in the early 1900s and the tragic Iranian outlook rooted in the Shiite belief in martyrdom. Kinzer argues that this tradition gave rise to Dr. Mossadegh, a fierce believer in democracy and Iran’s national sovereignty. Predictably these beliefs placed Mossadegh in direct odds with the highly profitable British oil business that operated in Iran according to the inequitable terms agreed to by Iranian monarchs. The concessions leading to the formation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) effectively permitted the British to siphon all oil profits out of Iran, to treat Iranian workers as second-class citizens, and to refuse Iranians the opportunity to audit AIOC’s books.

Dr. Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil in 1951 to wide acclaim. He was immensely popular at home and tremendously respected abroad, so much so that he was chosen Time’s “Man of The Year.” Kinzer argues that until Eisenhower’s election to the White House in 1952, American and British approaches to the nationalization of Iranian oil remained widely divergent. He quotes numerous American foreign policy figures expressing disdain for British colonialism and sympathy for the Iranian cause. In fact, Kinzer cites President Truman’s correspondence with Churchill in which he urged the British leader to respect Iranian nationalism. Failure to accommodate Iran’s nationalist aspirations, Truman warned, would allow the Soviets to control this strategically situated country.

Eisenhower’s election reversed this foreign policy approach, bringing the United States much closer to Britain. The rigidly polarized worldview of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, both high-ranking figures in the Eisenhower administration, allowed the British to enlist American support for the coup. The British, according to Kinzer, merely reformulated their predominantly colonial grievance with Iran using the prevalent Cold War discourse. The Dulles brothers accepted the British argument that Mossadegh was too soft on communists and that the Tudeh (the pro-Soviet Communist party) may soon control Iran. Thus, the CIA backed Operation Ajax and allowed Kermit Roosevelt to ally himself with figures as diverse as the Shah, General Zahedi, Ayatollah Kashani, and local gang-leader Shaban Jafari in order to overthrow Mossadegh. Kinzer superbly describes the chaotic atmosphere in Tehran in August 1953 when Mossadegh was finally driven from power.

Kinzer’s well-written, quick-paced, and gripping work should be of tremendous interest to those concerned with American foreign policy in the Middle East. The story of Operation Ajax may be worth telling and retelling for those who wonder why the people of the region in general, and Iranians in particular, remain distrustful of the United States. In this book, Kinzer wishes to argue for the existence of a causal connection between the overthrow of Mossadegh and the contemporary terrorist acts directed at the United States. While the strength of this causal chain is perhaps debatable, observant students of history would be hard-pressed to dispute Kinzer’s central assertion.

Despite general strength, All The Shah’s Men suffers from two shortcomings. First, Kinzer attempts to explain too much about the Iranian perspective, and about Mossadegh’s refusal to compromise, through the lens of Shiite Islam. Despite Islam’s importance in Iranian politics, using Shiite theology to explain the nationalization of the oil industry is far too reductionist. It is disappointing that the book discusses Shiite traditions at length, but fails to consider the influences of various decolonization movements around the globe on the Iranian struggle.

More importantly, Kinzer does not illustrate precisely why he believes Operation Ajax has given rise to today’s terrorist activities. Though he points out that the 1953 coup has made Iranians distrustful of the United States, Kinzer fails to consider the issue in sufficient depth. The author’s central thesis may have been strengthened if he considered the Shah’s post-1953 crackdown on secular and democratic opposition groups and how this approach translated into the radicalization and Islamization of dissent. Had Iran’s secular democracy been allowed to develop, mature, and solidify under Mossadegh, it is likely that the Islamic fundamentalism now threatening the entire region would not be a serious issue.

Stephen Kinzer begins his book with a quote from Harry Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” Those wishing to learn about terrorism and America’s image in the Middle East would be well advised to take Truman’s words seriously and to familiarize themselves with the history of the American-backed coup d'état in Iran.

—Kaveh Shahrooz

Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 17, Spring 2004