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CHAPTER 4

THE 1953 COUP

On 19 August 1953 the government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown as the result of Operation TP Ajax, a covert action program instigated by the British and engineered by the CIA (TP being the digraph that denoted Iranian operations and Ajax the operation code name). It was an act that had enormous political and psychological significance in modern Iranian history and was influential in the 1979 capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. One trenchant irony, given the emphasis Iranians placed on the coup during the 1978 revolution, is that it was not of much interest to Iranians at the time.

In fact, in 1953 and for years afterward the reversal of Mossadegh’s government was greeted with approbation by a majority of those Iranians who actually cared about or had a stake in their country’s government. (Iran was an undeveloped and provincial country at that time, and in the rural areas beyond Tehran relatively few Iranians were affected by, or even had any knowledge of, occurrences in the capital.) Former director of central intelligence (DCI) and, later, ambassador to Iran Richard M. Helms, a man who certainly knows Iran and Iranians, insists that it was only after the onset of the revolution in 1978 that any sizable number of Iranians began to complain about the 1953 coup. Until then, not only had the people for the most part accepted the shah as their leader, there was also a general consensus that—the history of the region being what it is—the method of his return to power wasn’t anything much to be upset about, either. Charlie Naas, the career Foreign Service officer and expert on Southwest Asia who served first as country director for Iranian affairs at the Department of State for four years and then as deputy chief of mission in Tehran in the final years of the shah’s regime, agrees with Helms. During all of the time he spent observing and participating in Iranian matters, no Iranian ever raised the issue of the 1953 coup with him.¹ In other words, Iranians as a population began to condemn the United States for its part in the coup only when it became politically expedient for them to do so.

The coup has been both condoned and condemned. Critics argue that it was wrong for the United States to overthrow a government of perceived legitimacy for seemingly narrow interests, and insist that the oppressive policies of the shah afterward, particularly with respect to human rights issues and the dictatorship he maintained, prove their point. They claim that the return of the shah ended any possibility that Iran might have evolved into a more democratic form of government with institutions respectful of the civil rights and liberties of its citizens. Indeed, on 17 March 2000 President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, came very close to apologizing for the coup when she acknowledged the role the United States played in it and declared that the coup was “clearly a setback for Iran’s political development.”² The critics also assert that Mossadegh was not a Communist and insist that there was little or no possibility that Communists would have gained control of the Iranian government under his rule. In sum, the coup was an unnecessary (if not illegal or immoral) act of governmental power that was fomented on insupportable grounds.

In rebuttal, there is first the obvious point that the future of Iran with Mossadegh in charge—or Iran without the coup, for that matter, whether Mossadegh or someone else was in power—was and is unknowable. Claims that Iran would have developed into a Western-style democracy or some other acceptable form of government, and that this other government would have been more respectful of human rights and liberties, are speculations, if not wishful thinking. Never in the millennia of its existence had Iran experienced any sustained period of democratic self-government, nor had it demonstrated an adherence to principles that today would be recognized as endorsing human rights and civil liberties. It exceeds mere optimism to postulate that Mossadegh’s Iran would have achieved these desirable conditions had the coup not cut short his regime.

Those who see the coup as a necessary act dictated by national and international security concerns deny neither the mistakes of the shah nor the cruelty of his government. Their position is essentially that the benefits to the free world of a pro-West regime in Iran far outweighed the more odious aspects of the shah’s rule.³ Those who support, or at least accept, the necessity of replacing the Mossadegh government point out that there was no assurance that Iran would or could have remained free from Soviet influence had the coup not occurred, and, conversely, that the consequences of the loss of Iran were too adverse to risk. One observer argues that even if the 1953 coup had not occurred, the “intervention would have happened in any case, touched off by some other specific action that Washington took as confirmation of its worst fears.”⁴ What is known, the coup supporters maintain, is that with the shah in power Iran was for a quarter-century a politically stable, pro-West ally in a critical region rent by turmoil and coveted by the Soviets.⁵

One highly important facet often overlooked and inevitably underestimated is the value of the Tacksman sites. It may never be known for certain just how vital to the interests of Western security, or indeed to the security of the world, the Tacksman intelligence was. The full extent of the role it played in enabling policymakers to counter the Soviet threat and bring about arms reduction agreements may likewise remain in the shadows. But it does not require much faith on the part of anyone familiar with intelligence and arms control policy to believe that the world was far safer for two decades because of the Tacksman sites. And these sites would not have existed without the shah in power.

It is not just that the sites collected critical intelligence against the Soviet strategic missile program. A collateral project, code-named Melody, at one Tacksman site provided crucial intelligence on at least two other security concerns: were the Soviets developing an antiballistic missile defense system in violation of a treaty then being negotiated between the United States and the USSR, and if so, was it founded on a modification of the SA-5 antiaircraft missile? There was doubt in some national security quarters that the Soviets actually could upgrade their SA-5 antiaircraft missile to antimissile capability, but it was essential to know for sure. The White House requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to inform the issue. The Melody equipment was slightly modified to acquire the SA-5 target-tracking radar signals and then used to monitor an SA-5 launch. The system captured signals emitted from the SA-5 that proved indisputably that its target-tracking radar was of the nature demanded by an ABM. When Henry Kissinger, the primary American negotiator, next met with the Soviets in Geneva he was able, he later recalled, to stare “his Soviet counterpart in the eye and read him the dates and time they had cheated on the treaty. The cheating immediately ceased and the Soviets began a mole-hunt for the spy” who was reporting to American intelligence. Melody continued to provide vital intelligence on Soviet missile-tracking radars that were being tested at a key Soviet test range almost one thousand miles distant.⁶

Ultimately, then, judging the appropriateness of the coup distills down to balancing the very tangible suffering of the Iranian people (which could very well have been worse under a ruler other than the shah) against the intangible role Iran under the shah played in ensuring that the Cold War remained that way. Regardless of the security advantages it provided for U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the 1953 coup had far-reaching consequences. Certainly it colored the Iranians’ view of U.S. actions and promises during the 1979–81 hostage crisis in Tehran.⁷

The United States made its first sales of military equipment to Iran in June 1947 in consonance with the implementation of the Truman Doctrine and the subsequent Military Defense Assistance Program. As part of that program the shah was asked to submit what was anticipated to be a modest shopping list. What came back to Washington must have confounded U.S. officials: the shah asked for no less than $175 million in advanced weaponry, including heavy tanks and jet aircraft, and supplies enough for 200,000 troops, even though the Iranian army mustered only 120,000 at the time. The supplies eventually provided were valued at just $10.7 million.⁸ As the Cold War intensified, however, America’s resolve to limit the shah to items that were in his nation’s best economic and security interests diminished. From 1946 to 1952 the shah received $42.3 million in economic assistance and $16.6 million in military aid.⁹

The 1950s witnessed the shah consolidating his power and authority and successfully linking his own policy preferences with those of NATO. The U.S. government began to view the shah in a more positive light, and the U.S. ambassador in Tehran decided that the shah was the only Iranian political personage strong enough to forestall a communist takeover. Secretary of State Dean Acheson lauded the shah as the best hope of providing firmness and leadership, even though the monarch was already demonstrating indecisiveness, depression, and a bent for conspiracy.¹⁰ The State Department increasingly backed his pleas for military assistance despite Defense Department objections that the Iranian army had limited technical capabilities and was rife with internal corruption.¹¹

As 1951 turned into 1952, Truman became increasingly worried about the support Mossadegh (a wealthy and popular, if eccentric, career civil servant and uncompromising nationalist) was receiving from the Tudeh party. The president was further nettled by the failure of the Iranians and the British to resolve their differences over the British-dominated Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and oil profits. Both sides refused to compromise, which deepened the crisis and eventually led to an international boycott of Iranian oil organized by the British. Truman decreed a harder line toward the Mossadegh government in the spring of 1952, initiating in very small steps policies that would later be attributed to Eisenhower but which clearly originated before he was elected president. Included in Truman’s actions was planning for a political action program to prevent a pro-communist government from assuming control in Iran.¹²

While Britain eagerly sought U.S. support for overt military action against the Iranians, preferably as a co-partner, Truman walked a fine line between deterring intervention in Iran and maintaining a positive relationship with America’s closest ally. The last thing Truman wanted was any use of force. Military action might push the Soviet Union either to invade and occupy Iran itself or to invoke a 1921 treaty with Iran that permitted intervention in case of foreign invasion, and thus create a casus belli between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although no one doubted that Iran was of vital strategic interest to America, the U.S. military had pressed hard to prevent a policy that might require American military intervention in that country, or anywhere else in the Middle East, for any reason. With U.S. military forces still weakened by the rapid reduction in manpower that followed World War II, and with most of the remaining fighting forces committed to combat in Korea and to the defense of Asia, the Pentagon had no confidence that the United States could fight and win the global war with the USSR that would certainly follow military intervention in Iran in support of British interests.

The vision of an increasingly unstable Iran was nevertheless unsettling to the Truman administration, which feared that the Soviets would exploit the internal unrest and either gain covert control of the Iranian government or, in a worst-case scenario, actually invade and occupy Iran—an understandable worry when the tenor of the times is considered.¹³ Thus, in the summer of 1952, with these concerns in mind and in fear that British policies would fail, the Truman White House began drafting options for some type of U.S. intervention in Iran.¹⁴ U.S. military forces were being steadily built up in response to the Korean War and as a by-product of the seminal Cold War document NSC-68 to a point that would enable the United States to match Soviet military power anywhere in the world—and would perforce establish a potential capability to intervene in the Persian Gulf region in addition to meeting other global commitments.¹⁵ The Truman administration was thus poised to pursue a more active stance in resolving the standoff between the British and the Iranians.

Mohammed Mossadegh’s rule as prime minister was a brief one. He acceded to the post on 29 April 1951 (a political act essentially forced on the shah) and was ousted less than two years later by dint of a political action operation that was equal parts “romantic intrigue, timing, and luck,” to co-opt Evan Thomas’s description.¹⁶ Of course, the repercussions of a British oil boycott on the Iranian economy and continuing violence in the streets of Tehran should not be discounted when evaluating the factors that ultimately brought success to the coup plotters. John Stempel argues that the British boycott (which the Eisenhower administration adhered to) was more instrumental in bringing down Mossadegh than the CIA, claiming that the CIA official behind the coup only “encouraged forces who were already restive and prepared to participate.”¹⁷ The CIA’s official history of the coup details the progression of the coup, and missteps therein, to the point at which CIA officials in Washington and Tehran all thought the operation was a failure. When the coup actually succeeded, thanks mostly to initiatives taken by Iranian army officers and Iranian agents of the CIA, U.S. government officials were as surprised as anyone.¹⁸ The CIA officer who supervised the operation later averred that the coup succeeded because the intended results were desired by a majority of the Iranian people and not because of any CIA derring-do.¹⁹

The last straw for the Americans was a visit to Washington by an intransigent Mossadegh in the fall of 1952. Immediately on returning to Iran from Washington, Mossadegh broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain and ordered the official British presence to be out of Iran by 1 November. With this rupture the British opted to pursue a scheme that had been gestating in the London headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) for some time: the overthrow of Mossadegh. But lacking an official presence in Iran with which to mount a covert program, and with limited financial resources, the British turned to their American cousins for assistance. The original SIS plan, Operation Boot, was a complicated scheme involving tribal uprisings in the provinces coordinated with political moves in Tehran. At the most senior level, the politically appointed CIA officials were generally favorable to the overall goal of the British, if not necessarily the means.

The British raised the idea again in February 1953, by which time the Eisenhower administration had concluded that removing Mossadegh offered the best solution for ensuring that Iran did not turn to the Soviets or otherwise become a communist regime. The White House told the CIA that it should proceed jointly with the SIS to achieve this objective. Although the senior officials at State and CIA (political appointees all) looked favorably on the idea, most officers two or three echelons below the top—in other words, the career civil servants whose day-to-day responsibilities centered on Iranian affairs, including the chief of station in Tehran—held little brief for this intrusion into Iranian politics. Agency and State analysts did not believe that Mossadegh was a Communist or a stooge of the Communists. Nor did they place much credence in the argument that the Tudeh party was poised to take control of Iran.²⁰ (It wouldn’t be the last time that CIA officers who were country or regional experts were directed by political appointees to undertake a covert action that they deemed unwise or foolish.) The American ambassador in Tehran, Loy Henderson (a long-time Soviet expert), was convinced that Mossadegh was simply naive about communism, even as he grew increasingly more reliant on the Tudeh party.²¹

Late in 1952, outgoing secretary of state Dean Acheson briefed the new Eisenhower administration on Iran, highlighting three salient points: negotiations with Mossadegh had failed, with blame falling equally on the Iranians and the British; U.S. policy now included options for unilateral intervention (presumably to replace the Mossadegh regime); and the problems festering in Iran would probably confront Eisenhower sooner rather than later.²² Sure enough, in early January 1953, even before Ike’s inauguration, Mossadegh sent a three-page letter to the president-elect asking for assistance for his country. Eisenhower had been hearing derogatory reports about Mossadegh not only from Truman’s people but also from British prime minister Winston Churchill, and so was not an uninformed bystander in the matter. His reply to Mossadegh was noncommittal, expressing hope that “our future relations will be completely free from suspicion.”²³ In late January and February 1953 the new U.S. administration watched as the turmoil in Iran increased. A failed attempt in the Majlis (Iran’s legislature) to replace Mossadegh through constitutional processes was followed by Mossadegh’s move against the leaders of a half-baked plot hatched by retired military officers to establish a separate “Free South in Iran.” Finally there came rioting in the streets.²⁴ The cowed Majlis extended Mossadegh’s near dictatorial powers, and soon thereafter, on 28 February, the shah announced that he would abdicate the throne. Rioting broke out anew almost immediately, and the shah retracted his abdication within hours.

The British SIS met with Eisenhower’s people and the CIA in February, just two weeks after Ike’s inauguration. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, chief of the Near East Division of the CIA’s Clandestine Service (known at the time as the Directorate of Plans), was named program manager for the coup operation. Operation Boot then became TPAjax. Preparations began in earnest in March, with DCI Allen Dulles authorizing a $1 million budget for the coup (this figure was subsequently augmented by $11,000 for the purpose of bribing members of the Majlis).²⁵

Any initial misgivings on the part of the United States eroded through the spring of 1953 as the political and security situation in Iran worsened and Mossadegh became increasingly dependent on the Tudeh party (although he was also popular with many of the middle class, including bazaaris [the merchant class], junior military officers, and clerics).²⁶ Street demonstrations for and against Mossadegh, which had become common in the opening months of 1953, escalated in violence, with some of the disturbances instigated by the Tudeh party. The Majlis was as chaotic as the country in general and eventually was dissolved by Mossadegh. The Eisenhower team deemed the burgeoning instability in Iran unacceptable, and Ike commented at one point to Republican senator Robert Taft of Ohio that Iran “must in no circumstances fall to communism.”²⁷

Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, expressed fears that civil unrest or worse combined with covert Tudeh influence might present the Soviets with the opportunity to gain control of Iran.²⁸ Thus, as State officials had earlier predicted, the 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