(1)
Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of
Iran (1979)
"'I owe my throne to God, my people, my army and to you!"
By 'you' he (the Shah) meant me and the two countries - Great Britain
and the United States - I was representing. We were all heroes.
(2)
Sasan Fayazmanesh, Counterprunch
(18th August, 2003)
It is ironic
that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt,
published his book on the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and the return of
the shah in the same year that "his majesty's government"
was overthrown. An American friend gave a copy of the book to me
shortly after its publication in 1979. I skimmed through the book
and put it on my bookshelf. The CIA coup appeared irrelevant when
the old and decadent institution of monarchy in Iran seemed to be
finished once and for all.
More importantly,
however, I, along with many other Iranians of my generation, knew
the story full well and did not need Kermit to repeat it. We knew
that the shah owed his throne to the likes of Kermit. But we also
knew something that Kermit didn't know, or didn't say. We knew that
we owe to the Kermits of the world our tortured past: years of being
forced as students to stand in the hot sun of Tehran in lines, waving
his majesty's picture or flag as his entourage passed by in fast
moving, shiny, big black cars with darkened-glass windows; years
of being forced to rise and stay standing in every public event,
including movie theaters, while his majesty's national anthem was
being played; years of watching a dense megalomaniac try to imitate
"Cyrus the Great" by wearing ridiculous ceremonial robes
in extravagant celebration of his birthdays or crowning of his queens;
years of being hushed by our parents, fearful of being arrested,
if we uttered a critical word about his majesty's government or
his American advisors; years of worrying about secret police (SAVAK)
informants, who were smartly, but ruthlessly, trained by the best
of the US's CIA and Israeli's Mossad; years of witnessing our friends
and acquaintances being taken to jail, some never heard from again;
years of passing by buildings in which, we were told, people were
being tormented; years of hearing about people dying under torture
or quietly executed; years of being exiled in a foreign country,
which ironically was the belly of the beast, the metropolis, the
center which masterminded much of our misfortune in the first place;
years of spending our precious youth to free or save thousands of
political prisoners by marching in the streets of the metropolis,
wearing masks to hide our identities and looking bizarre to those
who knew nothing about our story; and, finally, years of trying
to prove to the American people that the 1953 CIA coup was not a
fig-leaf of our imagination or a conspiracy theory, that it indeed
happened and that they, whether they like it or not, have a certain
culpability in what their government does around the world.
(3)
Steven Kinzer, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy
Now (4th March, 2004)
The story
of how the C.I.A. overthrew the government of Iran in 1953 is really
an object lesson in how easy it is for a rich and powerful country
to throw a poor and weak country into chaos. The CIA sent one of
its most adept operatives, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President
Theodore Roosevelt, to Iran with the mission of organizing the overthrow
of the government. One reason I was so interested in writing this
book is that I have always asked myself, how do you go about overthrowing
a government? What do you do? Suppose that you are sent to a country
with that mission. What do you do on the first day? How do you start
and then what do you do? Well, now I know. Kermit Roosevelt set
about trying to create chaos in Iran. He was able to do that very
quickly by a series of means. The first thing he did was, he started
bribing members of parliament and leaders of small political parties
that were a part of Mossadegh 's political coalition. Pretty soon
the public started to see the Mossadegh ’s coalition splitting
apart and people denouncing him on the floor of parliament. The
next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing newspaper editors, owners
and columnists and reporters. Within a couple of weeks, he had 80%
of the newspapers in Tehran on his payroll and they were grinding
out every kind of lie attacking Mossadegh . The next thing Roosevelt
did was start bribing religious leaders. Soon, at Friday prayers,
the Mullahs were denouncing Mossadegh as an atheist enemy of Islam.
Roosevelt also bribed members of police units and low-ranking military
officers to be ready with their units on the crucial day. In what
I think was really his master stroke, he hired the leaders of a
bunch of street gangs in Tehran, and he used them to help create
the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in
Iran. He actually at one point hired a gang to run through the streets
of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows,
firing their guns into mosques, and yelling -- "We love Mossadegh
and communism." This would naturally turn any decent citizen
against him. He didn't stop there. He tired a second mob to attack
the first mob, to give people the impression that there was no police
presence and order had completely disintegrated. So, within just
a few weeks, this one agent operating with a large sum of cash and
a network of contacts and various elements of society, had taken
what was a fairly stable country and thrown it into complete upheaval.
(4)
Geoff Simons, The
Link (January, 2005)
After the
overthrow of Mossadegh, Reza Shah returned to Tehran and began the
last phase of the Pahlavi dynasty. For the next 25 years he remained
a steadfast ally of the United States. Electronic surveillance posts
were established near the Soviet border; American aircraft were
permitted to fly from Iran to carry out surveillance over the Soviet
Union; spies were infiltrated across the Soviet-Iranian border;
and many American military installations were established throughout
Iran. In February 1955, Iran became a member of the U.S.-devised
Baghdad Pact to create, in Dulles’s words, “a solid band
of resistance against the Soviet Union.”
The way
was now open for the denationalization of Iran’s oil industry.
The British oil monopoly was superseded by a consortium in which
Anglo-Iranian received 40 percent of revenues, five US corporations
(Gulf Oil, Standard of New Jersey, Standard of California, Texas,
and Socony-Mobil) received 40 percent, and 20 percent went to Royal
Dutch Shell and a French company.
In 1958,
Kermit Roosevelt left the CIA to work for Gulf Oil; in 1960 he was
appointed vice president. Later he formed the consulting firm, Downs
and Roosevelt, which in the late 1960s was receiving $116,000 a
year from the Iranian government. At the same time, the aerospace
Northrop Corporation was paying Roosevelt $75,000 a year to aid
its sales to Iran and other states in the region. John Foster Dulles
and his brother Allan, director of the CIA, were also board members
of Standard Oil. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported
in the San Francisco Chronicle (December 26, 1979) that the Rockefeller
family, who controlled Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan Bank, “helped
arrange the CIA coup that brought down Mossadegh.” The shah
showed his gratitude by making heavy deposits in Chase Manhattan
and facilitating housing developments in Iran built by a Rockefeller
company.
(5)
Obituary of Kermit
Roosevelt in The Times (16th
June, 2000)
I owe my throne to God, my people, my army - and to you," sobbed
a grateful Shah of Iran to Kermit Roosevelt in August 1953, after
the CIA-backed coup which overthrew the country's independently-minded
Prime Minister, Muhammad Mossadeq, and restored the Shah to the
Peacock Throne.
The background
to the crisis was Iran's substantial oil reserves, which in the
early 1950s - like the Suez Canal in Egypt not so long afterwards
- were becoming a focus for nationalist sentiment. As soon as Mossadeq
became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951, with the support of the Tudeh
(Communist) Party, the debate over them moved from aspiration to
direct action.
In 1952
Mossadeq nationalised Iran's (mainly British-owned) oil resources,
an action which put him beyond the pale with the Americans, who
swiftly came to regard him as being the thin end of one of the Cold
War's many wedges. From that moment they saw him as opening the
door to the Soviet domination of Iran - although in fact he had
been as much opposed to giving the Soviet Union an oil concession
in the north of the country as he was to the dominance in the south
of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the forerunner of BP).
But with
the Americans obsessed with the Soviet danger to their interests
worldwide, and in the uncertain climate that prevailed within the
Soviet Union in the aftermath of Stalin's death, this obvious fact
could not save Mossadeq. And the British Government of Winston Churchill,
enraged at the nationalisation of its huge oil assets, was even
more anxious to have him removed.
When British
Intelligence approached the CIA about the possibility of toppling
him, it found a ready ear, and a plan - Operation Ajax - was formulated
with remarkably little discussion of the ethics of removing the
legitimate government of a foreign country. It was the precursor
of several such infamous actions by the CIA.
Roosevelt,
grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and the head of the CIA's
Middle East division, was the man for the job. A man of languid
coolness, he was dispatched to Iran where, on August 3, 1953, he
confronted the Shah and bluntly told him that there would have to
be an insurrectionary solution to the Mossadeq problem, with the
support of the army absolutely vital to success.
But the
frightened monarch havered, and it was for Roosevelt to "help"
key members of the armed forces to realise where their loyalties
lay and physically to assist them to carry out their "duties".
In particular he arranged for the influential army commander, General
Fazlolah Zahedi, to make an address to the country over the radio,
which was to prove important to the Shah's cause.
In spite
of all these precautions, the success of the coup was in its early
days far from a foregone conclusion. There was widespread rioting
from crowds who remained loyal to Mossadeq, and for several days
it was difficult to tell whether Roosevelt's tactics were succeeding
or not. The Shah himself so doubted the outcome that on August 16
he fled the country and took refuge in Baghdad.
But CIA
money was lavished on officials and police. Mossadeq supporters
were quietly done away with. Roosevelt gradually persuaded the wavering
commanders of army units to show themselves on the streets at the
head of their units and to face down the pro-Mossadeq mobs. Mossadeq
and ministers and officers loyal to him were arrested, and on August
19, just three days after his flight, the Shah was able to return
in triumph to his capital, where he later expressed his heartfelt
gratitude to his saviour.
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