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An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
John Wiley & Sons
August 2004
272 pages
ISBN: 0471678783
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Political
Half a century ago, the United States overthrew a Middle
Eastern government for the first time. The victim was
Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime
minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at
first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the
dangers of foreign intervention. In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen
Kinzer gives the first full account of this fateful
operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour
reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes
with an assessment of the coup’s "haunting and terrible legacy." Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the
history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored
Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to
impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic
Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn,
inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world,
including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its
protection. "It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts in this book, "to
draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s
repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the
fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." Drawing on research in the United States and Iran, and using
material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the
background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It
is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret
agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots,
suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the
Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and
out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of
a car. Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore
Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA
agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup
attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded
three days later. The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young
Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble;
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War
commander and the radio voice of "Gang Busters," who flew to
Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in
motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged
the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the
seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight
Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism.
Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great
Britain became the coup’s main sponsors. Brimming with insights into Middle Eastern history and
American foreign policy, this book is an eye-opening look at
an event whose unintended consequences–Islamic revolution
and violent anti-Americanism–have shaped the modern world.
As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the
Middle East, it is essential reading.
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