Product Description

This is the first full-length account of the CIA's coup d'etat in Iran in 1953—a covert operation whose consequences are still with us today. Written by a noted New York Times journalist, this book is based on documents about the coup (including some lengthy internal CIA reports) that have now been declassified. Stephen Kinzer's compelling narrative is at once a vital piece of history, a cautionary tale, and a real-life espionage thriller.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37854 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With breezy storytelling and diligent research, Kinzer has reconstructed the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was wildly popular at home for having nationalized his country's oil industry. The coup ushered in the long and brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah, widely seen as a U.S. puppet and himself overthrown by the Islamic revolution of 1979. At its best this work reads like a spy novel, with code names and informants, midnight meetings with the monarch and a last-minute plot twist when the CIA's plan, called Operation Ajax, nearly goes awry. A veteran New York Times foreign correspondent and the author of books on Nicaragua (Blood of Brothers) and Turkey (Crescent and Star), Kinzer has combed memoirs, academic works, government documents and news stories to produce this blow-by-blow account. He shows that until early in 1953, Great Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were the imperialist baddies of this tale. Intransigent in the face of Iran's demands for a fairer share of oil profits and better conditions for workers, British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison exacerbated tension with his attitude that the challenge from Iran was, in Kinzer's words, "a simple matter of ignorant natives rebelling against the forces of civilization." Before the crisis peaked, a high-ranking employee of Anglo-Iranian wrote to a superior that the company's alliance with the "corrupt ruling classes" and "leech-like bureaucracies" were "disastrous, outdated and impractical." This stands as a textbook lesson in how not to conduct foreign policy.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
”…meticulously documented throughout…essential reading…” (Medicine Conflict and Survival, Vol. 21(4) October 2005)

That the past is prolog is especially true in this astonishing account of the 1953 overthrow of nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, who became prime minister in 1951 and immediately nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This act angered the British, who sought assistance from the United States in overthrowing Mossedegh's fledgling democracy. Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy's grandson, led the successful coup in August 1953, which ended in the reestablishment of the Iranian monarchy in the person of Mohammad Reza Shah. Iranian anger at this foreign intrusion smoldered until the 1979 revolution. Meanwhile, over the next decade, the United States successfully overthrew other governments, such as that of Guatemala. Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent who has also written about the 1954 Guatemala coup (Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala), tells his captivating tale with style and verve. This book leads one to wonder how many of our contemporary problems in the Middle East may have resulted from this covert CIA adventure. Recommended for all collections. —Ed Goedeken, Iowa S tate Univ. Lib., Ames (Library Journal, June 15, 2003)

"...He does so with a keen journalistic eye, and with a novelist's pen...In what is a very gripping read." (The New York Times, July 23, 2003)

Tell people today that the United Nations was once the center of the world—the place where struggling nations got a shot at a fair hearing instead of a monkey trial before they were overthrown—and most would probably shake their heads in puzzlement.
Yet it was at the U.N., in October 1953, that one of the greatest dramas of the nascent television age unfolded: The eccentric, hawk-nosed Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh squared off with the aristocratic ambassador of the fading British Empire. At stake was Britain's claim to own Iran's oil in perpetuity.
The press played the showdown like a prize fight, "the tremulous, crotchety Premier versus Britain's super-suave representative, Sir Gladwyn Jebb," in Newsweek's account. The Daily News groused, "Whether Mossy is a phony or a genuine tear-jerker, he better put everything he's got into his show if he goes on television here." Time magazine had made him its Man of the Year. Now came "the decisive act in the dramatic, tragic and sometimes ridiculous drama that began when Iran nationalized the Anglo-American Oil Co. five months ago."
Five centuries ago would be more accurate, in the eyes of veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, who has written an entirely engrossing, often riveting, nearly Homeric tale, which, if life were fair, would be this summer's beach book. For anyone with more than a passing interest in how the United States got into such a pickle in the Middle East, All the Shah's Men is as good as Grisham.
And what a character Mossadegh makes: a fiery, French-educated nationalist with wild eyes, a high patrician forehead and droopy cheeks. His legendary hypochondria—he was prone to fainting and constantly received even diplomatic visitors in bed—seemed to flow from some deep wellspring of Shi'ite martyrdom, Kinzer suggests.
But the author's real accomplishment is his suspenseful account of Persia's centuries-old military, political, cultural and religious heritage, in which Mossadegh's face-off with London comes as the stirring climax to a drama that began with "Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, titans whose names still echo through history." By the 1930s, most Iranians had come to regard the abject misery they plunged into with every passing decade of exclusive British control of their one great natural asset as another passing calamity in a long history of the same. But with the global stirring of post-World War II nationalism, Anglo-American Oil pushed them to the breaking point.
In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million—the equivalent of $112 million—and gave Iran just £7 million," Kinzer writes. Meanwhile, the company ignored a 1933 agreement to pay laborers more than 50 cents a day, or to build "the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised." Inevitably, riots began breaking out at Abadan, the oil city where hundreds of thousands of Iranians lived amid baked mud and sewage in cardboard hovels in shadeless, searing heat. Their British overseers lived in another world entirely—tending to their green lawns and gardens, watching their well-scrubbed children frolic in the fountains, attending air-conditioned, "no-wogs-allowed" movie theaters, and sipping gin and tonics in their private clubs. The Abadan riots also propelled the fiery Mossadegh to his rendevous with destiny. But although the Iranian leader held his audience at the United Nations Security Council with a moving explication of his country's destitution at the hands of Anglo-Iranian interests, his triumph proved short-lived—and was soon to become a bittersweet memory.
In 1953, President Harry S Truman, whose gut-level sympathy for the impoverished Iranians led him to rebuff British pleas to conspire in Mossadegh's removal, was gone. The incoming Republicans were much more favorably disposed toward the British, especially after Whitehall repackaged its pitch in terms of a communist threat: Iran would fall to the Soviets, they now said, if Mossadegh stayed in office. Within weeks, the Eisenhower administration was plotting to get rid of him.
After all this drama, the machinations of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt in Teheran to bring down Mossadegh and replace him with the young Reza Shah Pahlevi seems almost like an epilogue. For connoisseurs of covert action, however, there's a hell of a story left, even if some of it will make even the hardest-bitten Cold Warrior wince.
The basic facts of Operation Ajax have been known for some time, in part from "Kim" Roosevelt's own memoir, in part from other sources, most notably a windfall of long-classified CIA documents leaked to Kinzer's New York Times colleague James Risen in 2000.
The author makes good use of the material, toggling his drama between Washington, where CIA desk officers furiously churned out material for bought-off Iranian newspapers and radio stations, to Teheran, where Roosevelt scurried among clandestine meetings with Reza Pahlevi—a man so timorous he flew to Baghdad when the plot seemed to unravel—as well as with various treasonous Iranian Army officers.
Ajax was a triumph in the eyes of many—especially, needless to say, in the CIA. That verdict, of course, discounts the whirlwind of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown by furious Shi'ite mobs whipped up by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who quickly spawned the terrorists of Hezbollah and other groups who plague us today.
"We got 25 years out of the Shah—that's not so bad," a CIA man once said to me, stirring a drink with his finger. As always, the Iranians had a different view. —Jeff Stein is co-author of "Saddam's Bombmaker" and editor of Congressional Quarterly's Homeland Security, a daily news Web site. (The Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2003)

On Aug. 15, 1953, a. group of anxious C.I.A. officers huddled in a safe house in Tehran, sloshing down vodka, singing Broadway songs and waiting to hear whether they'd made history. Their favorite tune, "Luck Be a Lady Tonight," became the unofficial anthem of Operation Ajax - the American plot to oust Iran's nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and place the country firmly in the authoritarian hands of Mohammed Reza Shah.
In fact, luck was not much of a lady that night; as Stephen Kinzer's lively popular history of the 1953 coup recounts, Mossadegh's chief of staff got word of the conspiracy and rushed troops to defend the prime minister, thereby panicking the feckless young shah into fleeing to Baghdad and plunging the carousing Central Intelligence agents into gloom. The coup succeeded four tense days later, only after a C.I.A.-incited mob (led by a giant thug known memorably as Shaban the Brainless) swept Mossadegh aside. Luck was even less kind to the Ajax plotters in the longer haul; in 1979, the despotic shah fell to Islamist revolutionaries bristling with anti-American resentment.
Even the president who approved the coup, Dwight Eisenhower, later described it as seeming "more like a dime novel than an historical fact." Sure enough, "All the Shah's Men" reads more like a swashbuckling yarn than a scholarly opus. Still, Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent now based in Chicago, offers a helpful reminder of an oft-neglected piece of Middle Eastern history, drawn in part from a recently revealed secret C.I.A. history.
The book's hero is the enigmatic Mossadegh himself. In his day, British newspapers likened Mossadegh to Robespierre and Frankenstein's monster, while The New York Times compared him to Jefferson and Paine. Kinzer full-throatedly takes the latter view, seeing Mossadegh's achievements as "profound and even earth-shattering." But he acknowledges that the great Iranian nationalist was also an oddball: a prima donna, prone to hypochondria, ulcers and fits, who met the urbane American diplomat Averell Harriman while lying in bed in pink pajamas and a camel-hair cloak.
Mossadegh's Iran faced formidable foes: British oil executives, the C.I.A. and the brothers Dulles, all of whom come off wretchedly here. The least sympathetic of all are Iran's erstwhile British rulers, who continued to gouge Iran via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. When the Truman administration prodded it to share the wealth with Iran, its chairman sniffed, "One penny more and the company goes broke." In 1951, to London's fury, Mossadegh led a successful campaign to nationalize the oil company, drove the British to close their vital oil refinery at Abadan and became prime minister. The British began drafting inv...

The New York Times, July 23, 2003
"...He does so with a keen journalistic eye, and with a novelist's pen...In what is a very gripping read."

Customer Reviews

A must read to understand the middle east
This is a good history book everyone needs to read. Especially anyone running for political office.

Sometimes the truth has a liberal bias
To write a good history book like this one an author needs to do well in three separate areas. He needs to research the topic at hand, write a readable account and finally analyze the events. Kinzer performs exceptionally well in all three areas. First, the book is meticulously researched. He discusses appropriate history without going into unnecessary or boring details to give the reader an appropriate context and background leading up to the 1953 coup. He also uses a diverse set of resources which leaves no holes in the story.

Second, Kinzer's writing is engaging and at times suspenseful. In fact at the end of many chapters, I was unable to put the book aside and take a break from reading due to the suspense Kinzer created. The story is very easy to follow and the reader needs practically no background to follow the events. This is particularly impressive given the relative short length of the book. My only criticism is that I wished he had summarized the cast of characters in an appendix or in the beginning as many similar books do.

Finally, his analysis, while many have called too liberal, is even handed. He makes a leap by implying that 9/11 events may have not happened if it weren't for the 1953 CIA led coup. Of course we will never know for sure. He supports his claims convincingly that the coup led to the eventual 1979 hostage crisis and the anti-American feelings in the Middle East. Liberal bias? The facts speak for themselves. The CIA using American tax payer money to overthrow a popular and democratically elected government. We, in the USA, would not appreciate if foreigners overthrew our government so why have a double standard? Perhaps Mossadegh is being glorified too much and ultimately he would have led Iran towards the wrong path, but the point remains that we will never know thanks to the coup. Kinzer does entertain the possibilities that Mossadegh would have been terrible for Iran and the West so I reject the idea that he has a strong liberal bias.

If you, like me, find the "Death to USA" chants and hostage taking barbaric and puzzling, this book will offer you fresh insights and help you understand the roots of these actions. You will become a lot smarter and more knowledgeable about the Middle East after reading it. I highly recommend this book.

Thrilling Read, Highly Important History.
"All The Shah's Men" by Stephen Kinzer is one of those rare works that exposes and explores a little-known moment in world history that is of high importance for our own times. The book chronicles how the U.S. and Britain pulled off a coup in Iran in the 1950s, overthrowing an elected government and setting the stage for what would become the Islamic Revolution of 1979. There has never been a more timely moment to pick up this book which explains the past, but it has priceless insights into the present. Kinzer has even included a new preface in this latest edition where he discusses the current spike in tensions and rhetoric from the U.S. towards Iran and the grave danger of a possible military confrontation and what it could mean.

In rich, fascinating detail and thrilling pace, Kinzer takes the reader through Iran's most fascinating moments in history ranging from its glory days as the Persian Empire to its time as a colony under British rule. Kinzer brilliantly looks at Iranian culture, how the Shiite religion plays a role in the Iranian character and has shaped the nation's attitudes and social structure. There are interesting moments dealing with the discovery of oil in the country and how this especially turned the area into a target for colonial interests. After this educative introduction to the country, Kinzer then focuses on the political upheavel Iran faced during the 1930s and 1940s when a parliamentry system was installed to sit next to the reigning monarchy. This came about during a time of intense nationalism which finally climaxed in the election of Mohammed Mossadegh, a fierce nationalist who's main goal was to nationalize Iran's oil which at the time was completely controlled by the British. Iranian oil was helping keep the British Empire afloat and giving the British citizenry a cozey lifestyle while Iranians lived in horrendous poverty, especially the oil workers at the Abadan refinery who lived in tin shacks while their colonial masters enjoyed golf courses, cinemas and luxurious clubs.

Kinzer's exploration of Mossadegh is deep and fascinating, reading you realize that Mossadegh deserves a place among the great nationalist leaders who have been known for their clashes with imperialism like Mandela, Lumumba, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. He comes across as a highly intelligent, charismatic character who felt a deep pain for his nation's suffering and was willing to face hell in order to liberate his people. The moment where Mossadegh speaks before the UN is especially memorable.

"All The Shah's Men's" main storyline focuses on how the battle for oil independence by Iran led to a joint British/U.S. operation to overthrow Mossadegh and re-install the Shah who was willing to serve all his master's demands as long as his throne and authority were kept secure. These are some of the books most enraging, thrilling moments as key historical characters such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and CIA director Allen Dulles make appearances, divising massive propaganda, sabotage and destabilization plots to bring down a nationalist government threatening imperial hegemony.

Kinzer's book looks at the past, but is highly important for the present because once again we face a situation where a dominant power in the world might intervene violently in Iran, but as anyone who reads "All The Shah's Men" learns, this is not a wise course of action. The intervention carried out in 1953 lead to years of brutal repression which in turn led to the Islamic Revolution and the regime we are dealing with today. Kinzer brilliantly explores Iranian culture and the history of a people who have been punished endlessly for trying to control their own natural resources, this makes the story quite universal considering the struggle of Mossadegh in the book is the same struggle we see today in nations like Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and Asia. "All The Shah's Men" is the answer to these radical, right-wing, religious books we have been bombarded with promoting war with Iran based on simplistic reasons when in fact, the history is much more complex.

Kinzer writes "All The Shah's Men" with a great eye for detail and provides in-depth analysis, documents, rare news reports and speeches to take us back in time. Like his other brilliant work on imperialism, "Overthrow," Kinzer also captures the human aspect and provides great personal, psychological details of the characters and how they were shaped by and related to the historical event in question. The book also serves as a nice crash course for anyone who wants to become familiar with Iran and its history, Kinzer does some excellent historical research that proves to be very valuable in understanding how this controversial nation has been shaped and formed.

"All The Shah's Men" is a brilliant chronicle and great resource, it is one of the best books available on Iran and the best record yet on what can be seen as the most crucial Western intervention in the Middle East in the last century before the Iraq War. A timely work and a timely warning.