The Riches of the World - 7
Mosaddeq, Iranian Oil and the Coup of 1953
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
There is a consistency and predictability to the response from the industrialized powers whenever their hegemony is challenged. Economic boycott, freezing of assets, trade embargoes, travel restrictions and massive propaganda are standard tools. When these fail, military force is an option, often as a group attacking a weak prey. In the aftermath, terms of capitulation are dictated which allow the victorious powers unlimited access to the natural resources of the vanquished land and control over its political and economic institutions. Alas! One would have hoped for a world in which the industrialized nations sat down across the table with non-industrialized nations and negotiated an equitable distribution of the benefits from the application of technology of the industrialized nations and the exploitation of natural and human resources of the host nations.
Faced with an acute economic crisis, Mosaddeq resigned and called for elections. According to some accounts, British intelligence was very active in influencing the elections, paying off influential businessmen, legislators, street gangs, newspaper editors and columnists to influence the elections. There were four principal players in the electoral melee: the nationalists who derived their support from the urban middle class; the mullahs who had their power base in the slums and the countryside; the communists who were supported by the workers, and the monarchists who were supported by the Shah. Into these complex equations was injected foreign intrigue and foreign money, creating a chaotic, unpredictable matrix.
The nationalists won the election and Mosaddeq became the democratically elected prime minister. To face the economic crisis, Mosaddeq asked for emergency powers from the majlis but the majlis refused. He also asked for the power to appoint the War Minister and the Army Chief of Staff as stipulated in the constitution but the Shah refused. Mosaddeq resigned and the Shah appointed a pragmatic, old time politician Ahmed Ghavam as the prime minister. Ghavam was disposed to negotiate with the British over oil but mass demonstrations forced his resignation and Mosaddeq was once again appointed the prime minister. This time, the majlis gave him emergency powers for six months.
Mosaddeq strengthened his political base by appointing a powerful cleric, Kashani as majlis speaker and forming an alliance with the Tudeh party. He limited the powers of the Shah to what the constitution had stipulated and strengthened the legislative powers of the majlis. He instituted land reforms, broke the feudal land structure, established village councils and gave the peasants a share in their crops. These reforms made him enormously popular at home but there was also resistance from the old guard. The resistance grew as the British boycott took its toll and British money did its work. Former allies turned against him. Kashani, who Mosaddeq had trusted as speaker of the parliament, denounced him.
Unable to dislodge him through their own efforts, the British turned to the United States for help in toppling Mosaddeq. But its approach to President Truman in November 1952 was rebuffed. However, when General Eisenhower became president in January 1953, Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, renewed his plea. The cold war was at its height and there was anti-communist hysteria in Washington. Churchill made the case that Mosaddeq was too close to the communist Tudeh party and would take Iran into the Soviet orbit. Iran was too strategic a prize to be ignored, for its oil, its location and its size. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles signed on to a joint British-American plan to topple Mosaddeq.
This was the first known large scale foreign intervention by the United States to topple a democratically elected popular government. Pious professions to the contrary, the Americans toppled a democracy and hoisted a despot on an ancient, proud nation which was struggling for the same ideals articulated by Thomas Jefferson.
In May 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency sent Dr. Wilber to the Middle East to meet with his British counterpart Darbyshire and together coordinate the operations to topple Mosaddeq. General Fazlulla Zahedi was chosen as the point man within the armed forces to stage a coup. Provocateurs were paid to stage street demonstrations and create chaos. Newspaper editors were bought off to run inciting articles. CIA operatives pretending to be communists threatened the ulema that if they opposed Mosaddeq they would be harmed. This alienated the mullahs. The agencies worked through princess Ashraf, the half sister of the Shah, to gain his concurrence for the plot. Roosevelt, the grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt was appointed as the overall coordinator for the mission.
On August 13 the Shah issued two decrees, one firing Mosaddeq as the prime minister, and another appointing General Zahedi to replace him. Both decrees were in violation of the constitution which stipulated that only the majlis had that privilege. However, the initial uprising was a failure. Army units loyal to Mosaddeq and the constitution blocked the renegade units headed by Zahedi. The Shah fled the country, first to Baghdad and then to Rome. General Zahedi went into hiding. Forces loyal to Mosaddeq took over key installations and renegade soldiers either fled or were arrested. Roosevelt himself was advised to abandon the plot and return home.
However, on August 19, a new attempt was made; this time led by Iranian CIA operatives. The Shah made the announcement from Baghdad that he had indeed removed Mosaddeq from office and installed Zahedi as the prime minister. Street hirelings were back in action. Some of the army officers switched sides. A mob incited by provocateurs took over the telegraph office. Telegrams were sent to district headquarters that a coup had toppled the government. Soon the police headquarters fell. Army tanks surrounded Mosaddeq’s offices and arrested him. The radio station was captured in the evening. Zahidi was brought out from hiding and made the announcement of a successful coup.
The Shah returned to Iran, this time as a puppet of foreigners. Dissidents were hunted down, punished or executed. The communist Tudeh party was crushed. Several army officers who were sympathetic to the Tudeh party were tortured. The clerics were sidelined and persecuted. One of these clerics, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was first imprisoned and then exiled to Iraq and then to France. Twenty-five years later it was the same Khomeini who triumphantly rode back into an Iranwhich had turned fiercely anti-American, had toppled the Shah, and had taken hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. The saga of American domination of Iran was over.
The American intervention of 1953 that toppled Mosaddeq was a historical blunder for the United States. There was initial jubilation in American official circles over the success of the coup. But the price was a destruction of the moral credibility of America in the eyes of the world. Many in the newly independent nations had looked to America as the champion of democracy, the land of Jefferson and Lincoln. The coup demonstrated that the United States would not shy away from toppling a democratically elected government when it suited her interests. It brought the United States down to the same level as Great Britain. The ease with which a successful coup was concluded encouraged similar ventures in Latin America and elsewhere, further eroding America’s moral credibility and stature.
The role of the American press during these events was a sad chapter in the annals of journalism. In their book, The US Press and Iran, Dorman and Farhang make the following observation: “The American news media more often than not followed the cues of foreign policy-makers rather than exercising independent judgment in reporting the social, economic and political life of Iran under the Shah…..Throughout the association of the United States with the shah, the press tended to serve Washington’s short sighted policy goals by portraying political opposition to the regime in such a way as to suggest that the shah’s critics were nothing more than benighted reactionaries”.
The overthrow of Mosaddeq derailed Iran’s experiment with democracy and its evolution towards a representative government. The fruits of fifty years of a national struggle for democracy and representative government, dating back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, were destroyed. Instead, the United States and Britain hoisted a despot on the peacock throne. The frustrations and anger felt at this intervention erupted with uncontrolled fury in the revolution of 1979, but this time it was not the Western trained nationalists who led the charge but right wing mullahs who wanted to purge Iranian society of all things Western.
(To be continued)
