The Fall Guy, the London Economist review of my book

The Fall Guy
How a prime minister was brought down
May 13th 2010

Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited. By Darioush Bayandor. Palgrave Macmillan; 272 pages; $33 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DARIOUSH BAYANDOR’S account of the toppling of Muhammad Mossadeq, Iran’s charismatic prime minister of the early 1950s, is ruffling expatriate Iranians. A Persian translation will doubtless follow, adding to the clamour. Iranians recall with anguish this episode in their history, when a democratically elected nationalist took on Britain and America and lost. Many link their subsequent political travails, including the 1979 Islamic revolution, to this early defeat.

Mossadeq nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, denting British prestige and prompting fears, especially in America, that his unstable premiership would pave the way for a communist takeover. The putsch that unseated him in August 1953 was carried out in the name of Shah Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, but the whole seedy plot, it later emerged, had been hatched by the CIA. In 2000, Madeleine Albright, then the American secretary of state, turned the affair into an instrument of mortification, publicly rueing her compatriots’ role in the overthrow of Iran’s “popular” prime minister.

To judge by his book, Mr Bayandor would rather she hadn’t. The author, a former diplomat in the pre-Khomeini government who went on to work for the United Nations before retiring to Switzerland, does not go as far as the shah and his entourage, who presented Mossadeq’s overthrow as a patriotic uprising in no need of a foreign impetus. But he casts doubt on one account of events that was penned by the main CIA plotter, Kermit Roosevelt, a buccaneering grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Far from snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, as Roosevelt claimed to have done, Mr Bayandor says he and his local assets were largely observers as a constellation of indigenous forces brought Mossadeq down.

Much hinges on the four days that followed the failed coup of August 15th, which, Mr Bayandor admits, was masterminded by Roosevelt. With American plans in disarray, the shah scuttled off to Rome and Mossadeq came under pressure to declare a republic. According to the received wisdom, Roosevelt and his co-conspirators organised a group of army officers to launch a second, successful coup on August 19th, and American dollars were used to bribe crowds to pour onto the streets, giving them cover to act.

Mr Bayandor contests these assumptions. The armed forces, he asserts, acted without American prompting. The CIA “bribe” was a non-event. Mr Bayandor’s scepticism is a useful antidote to Roosevelt’s self-aggrandising, which some later writers have mimicked uncritically, among them Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter, who in 2003 penned an entertaining account of Mossadeq’s downfall. But the claim over bribes has been contradicted by Marc Gasiorowski, the leading historian of the American side of the coup, who interviewed some of the bribe-givers. All in all, Mr Bayandor’s account may be over-reliant on one of the last surviving coup-makers, Ardeshir Zahedi, son of the general who seized the premiership after Mossadeq’s arrest, who resists depictions of his father as an American stooge.

It is helpful to be reminded that history often needs re-examining. Mr Bayandor might have cast his revisionist net even wider. Some accounts have been too glib in portraying Mossadeq as a democratic paragon when his instinct was to concentrate power in his hands, glossing over his failure to negotiate a solution to the nationalisation crisis when there was still an opportunity to do so.

Mr Bayandor is less wise to dismiss another axiom out of hand: that the 1953 coup, by removing the last effective stay on the shah’s power, led indirectly to Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution. Only after Mossadeq’s ejection was the shah able to become a high-octane dictator, though the ousted prime minister had the last laugh with a courtroom performance that undermined the shah’s pretensions to justice and benevolence. In destroying Mossadeq (who died in internal exile in 1967), the shah robbed liberal Iranians of their natural figurehead. They have been looking for a replacement ever since.