In the Shadow of the Ayatollah. William Daugherty

Eisenhower administration was open to the idea of a coup. In fact, top Eisenhower advisers Foster Dulles and his brother Allen had already discussed the idea of a covert reversal of the Mossadegh regime.²⁹ It was, the two agreed, an opportunity to “turn back the communist tide before it reached the beach . . . please an ally . . . and keep the oil flowing.”³⁰ Eisenhower expressed confidence that the shah would be an effective leader when he resumed full control of the government.³¹ On receiving a second letter from Mossadegh pleading for financial assistance, Eisenhower remarked to his advisers that he would not “pour more money” into a country causing its own distress by refusing to negotiate with the British.³² Intelligence that Mossadegh was soon to receive $20 million from the USSR consolidated, in Ike’s mind, the need for a new government in Iran.³³

      In late July, just three weeks before the coup was to occur, the Tudeh party came out openly in support of Mossadegh.³⁴ The Majlis held new elections in early August, with Mossadegh blatantly rigging the results. In a politically riven country, Mossadegh managed to garner an astonishing 99.4 percent of the popular vote (some two million “voted” for Mossadegh and only a few hundred “voted” against him).³⁵ Eisenhower was appalled, comparing the electoral manipulation with communist tactics already witnessed in Eastern Europe (and possibly in Ike’s mind adding a communist taint to Mossadegh). (This act also undermines later criticism that Mossadegh’s government was democratic and legitimately elected.) And if all that wasn’t sufficient to convince the Eisenhower administration that Mossadegh had to go, on 8 August Soviet foreign minister Georgy Malenkov announced in Moscow that the Soviet Union had initiated negotiations with Iran to resolve border problems and financial claims.³⁶ Thus, throughout that spring and summer Eisenhower was certain that Iran was on a steady course toward a “communist-supported dictatorship.”³⁷

      What transpired next was the first successful reversal of a foreign government by the United States in the Cold War. It was an act that would return to confront and confound a future administration in a manner no one could have foreseen.³⁸ Motivated by a strong determination to contain the spread of Soviet influence, and sincere in their belief that Iran was about to fall under the control of forces inimical to the interests of the free world, the most senior policymakers in the United States ordered the ouster of the government of a sovereign nation. Almost certainly no one in the U.S. government believed that the people of Iran would suffer more under a pro-American government than they probably would have under a Soviet-controlled one.³⁹

      While it became fashionable in the post-1970 years to assert that the United States prevented Iran from becoming a stable democracy by overthrowing Mossadegh’s government, there is little evidence to support this position. It is perhaps true that Iran had been making some small progress toward this end in the half century preceding the coup. It is also true that, under the shah’s rule, Iran paid a steep price for twenty-five years of political stability. Authoritarian conditions became increasingly harsh until they finally reached the point at which Iranian citizens were willing to risk death in the street rather than live under them any longer. In the end, the Iranians inherited a dismal legacy: yet another foreign intervention in their nation, yet another lost opportunity to determine their own future for better or worse, and yet more of their oil wealth siphoned off by others, leaving most of them destitute while a privileged elite lived in unimaginable opulence.

      Observers of the coup differ on the nature of its long-term outcome, but all agree that it was one of the most important events of the Cold War and perhaps of the twentieth century. Eisenhower believed the results justified the means; he had no second thoughts about the coup and later said that he would use such tactics again to “fight the communists where prudent and possible, with every weapon possible.”⁴⁰ Kim Roosevelt believed that if the coup had failed, Iran would have fallen to the Soviet Union with disastrous results for the Middle East.⁴¹

      Mark Gasiorowski labels the 1953 coup a “critical event in postwar world history” and a “decisive turning point in Iranian history.”⁴² He asserts that if the coup had not occurred, the revolution of 1978 might not have followed.⁴³ James Bill calls the coup a “momentous event” in the relationship between the United States and Iran, a “running wound which bled for twenty-five years.”⁴⁴ That said, Bill further maintains that while the coup affected Iranians’ perception of the U.S. government, it did not make the 1978–79 revolution inevitable, as the United States had ample chances during that quarter-century to “rethink and revise” its Iranian policies.⁴⁵

      Former diplomat and now scholar John Stempel says simply that the coup has “assumed a political importance well beyond [its] intrinsic significance.”⁴⁶ Intelligence scholar and former NSC staffer Gregory Treverton would agree. He thinks that TPAjax receives too much blame for what happened twenty-five years afterward. Nor does Treverton (unlike Bill and others who sympathize with the Iranians) belittle the fact that Iran under the shah was a “pro-West bastion in a turbulent region” for that period, which was “no mean feat.”⁴⁷

      For fifty-two Americans in 1979, these debates were moot. Although apparently a majority (perhaps a large majority) of Iranians were unconcerned about the coup when it happened, twenty-five years later it began to grate harshly on many Iranians—including untold numbers who weren’t even alive in 1953—as anti-American sentiment rose at the onset of the 1978 revolution. Many feared a repeat of the 1953 coup, no matter how inane it may have sounded to Americans. Thus, after lying dormant in the minds of the Iranian population for two and a half decades, the 1953 coup helped precipitate a world crisis and one of the most shaming periods in the history of American foreign policy.⁴⁸