America's Great Game (33 page)

Then everything went wrong. Alerted by at least one security leak, Mosaddeq ordered the arrest of the soldiers charged with arresting him. Zahedi concealed himself in a CIA officer’s basement, the shah fled to Baghdad and then to Rome, and Washington ordered the evacuation of AJAX operatives from Tehran. August 17 found Walter Bedell Smith, now undersecretary of state, telling the British ambassador in Washington that the Eisenhower administration was taking “a new look at policy towards Persia” and even considering technical assistance for the Mosaddeq government. “Whatever his faults, Musaddiq [
sic
] had no love for the Russians and timely aid might enable him to keep Communism in check,” Smith explained.
⁹

Kim Roosevelt, however, had other ideas. The evacuation orders were slow to reach him, reportedly because the MI6 communications team held them up deliberately, and he took advantage of the time this brought him to improvise—using the Rashidians’ contacts and US journalists to publicize
the firmans
and sending messengers to pro-shah army commanders stationed outside Tehran, urging them to march on
the capital. According to one account, he even threatened to have the BEDAMN agents Jalali and Kayvani killed if they did not carry on with their anti-Mosaddeq activities.
¹⁰

The tide turned on the morning of August 19, when a crowd gathered in Tehran’s bazaar and then began marching toward the center of the city, waving pictures of the shah and chanting his name. Royalist army units joined in the procession, which began attacking buildings associated with the Tudeh and, early in the afternoon, occupied Radio Tehran. Zahedi emerged from hiding and went on air declaring himself the rightful prime minister. Following a pitched battle in which at least two hundred Iranians died, pro-shah forces subdued the last army battalion loyal to Mosaddeq outside his residence, which was then ransacked by the mob while the erstwhile premier fled over the garden wall. Informed of these developments at his hotel in Rome, a dazed shah chokingly declared, “I knew that they loved me,” and hurriedly prepared to return to Tehran. Kim Roosevelt, meanwhile, was addressing a jubilant crowd of royalist army officers. “You owe me, the United States, the British,
nothing at all
, except, if you would like to give them, brief thanks,” he told them, a little gracelessly. The shah arrived home in triumph on August 22, at the same time that Mosaddeq was apprehended and sentenced to house arrest, and Zahedi granted $5 million by the CIA so that he could meet month-end payrolls (regular subsidies would follow later). At a secret midnight meeting the following day, the shah raised a glass in toast to Kim with the words, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!”
¹¹

Whether Kim deserved such fulsome thanks is open to question. Later, other Western participants in the planning of AJAX would claim their share of the credit. While quite generous toward Kim personally, Monty Woodhouse’s 1982 autobiography,
Something Ventured
, implicitly criticized the CIA for slighting the contribution of MI6 and taking “total responsibility for the disposal of Musaddiq
[sic]”
On the American side, Donald Wilber, in a rather peevish memoir published in 1986, was less kind to Kim, accusing him of monopolizing credit for the coup within the CIA, and asserting that “the plan was basically mine.” (Wilber also complained about the victory celebration Kim laid on for the AJAX team after returning from Iran: “a Dutch treat lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, which did not serve liquor.”) Never one to miss an opportunity for a joke, Miles Copeland teasingly joined
in the competition for credit in his memoir,
The Game Player
, reporting that the words spoken by the shah to Kim immediately after the coup were in fact, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, to you and, of course, to that undercover assistant of yours whom I shall not name.”
¹²

More recently (and more seriously), attention has focused on the part played in the 1953 coup by another set of actors: Iranians themselves. According to a 2010 book by a former Iranian diplomat, it was not Kim Roosevelt who was behind the crucial events of August 19—the gathering in the morning of the pro-shah crowd in the bazaar and the mobilization of the army units that joined in the demonstrations later in the day—but rather royalist officers in the Tehran garrison and Muslim clerics, in particular the Grand Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Qom, who had decided that the drift of events under Mosaddeq was dangerous to Islam. In this scenario, Kim’s actions in the days immediately after the abortive coup attempt of August 15 were geared less toward having a second stab on the nineteenth, as was claimed later, than putting in place stay-behind networks as part of the planned CIA evacuation of the country. These measures had little bearing on the events of 28 Mordad (August 19 in the Iranian calendar) but subsequently enabled Kim to claim responsibility for the day’s outcome.
¹³

Certainly, it is striking that neither of the two major American sources about the Iran coup—Kim Roosevelt’s own memoir, the 1979
Countercoup
, and a 1954 internal CIA report on the operation by Donald Wilber leaked to the
New York Times
in 2000—explicitly claim that Kim played any part personally in the raising of the bazaar crowd or the royalist army units. The chaotic and bloody events on August 19 bore little resemblance to other Middle Eastern putsches in which the CIA had previously been implicated—the carefully planned and largely bloodless military takeovers in Syria and Egypt. And it is evident on its face that, whatever the role of Ayatollah Boroujerdi, players other than Kim Roosevelt and his CIA colleagues did contribute to Mosaddeq’s downfall, including the Iranian prime minister himself, who made a series of crucial errors of judgment on 28 Mordad.
¹⁴

Still, to correct the earlier exclusive focus on Western actors in the Iran coup by denying all credit (or blame, depending on one’s perspective) to Kim Roosevelt and his CIA team seems excessive. The constant agitation of the political atmosphere in Tehran by Kim’s agents Jalani
and Kayvani and their network of subagents surely helped to destabilize the Mosaddeq government, and it is difficult to imagine the events of August 19 taking place at all without the constitutional crisis that had been produced by the shah’s dismissal of Mosaddeq and subsequent flight, events in which Kim incontrovertibly had a hand. When all is said and done, the causes of the 1953 regime change in Iran were probably similar to those of the Syrian coup of 1949: that is, the ouster of Mosaddeq was produced by a combination of Iranian, American, and British actions, with the Westerners’ intervention helping produce a set of political conditions in Iran that slightly, perhaps crucially, advantaged some local elites over others.

While it may never be possible to establish definitively the precise balance of factors that caused Mosaddeq’s fall, the consequences of the 1953 coup were all too clear. With CIA backing (including the assignment of Steve Meade to Tehran to help train the Iranian secret police), the shah established an authoritarian regime that, by brutally repressing both the Tudeh and the National Front, staved off possible communist influences at the cost of generating profound currents of internal opposition. Lacking any democratic outlets, these eventually surged in the Revolution of 1979 with the exile of the shah and the establishment in Iran of an Islamic republic under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Already deeply sensitive to foreign meddling in their country, Iranians needed little encouragement to resent the suspected US role in the 1953 coup, and street demonstrators in 1979 chanted Mosaddeq’s name and burned effigies of the American president. For these protestors, “the thread of memory led clearly from the Great Game to the Great Satan,” as Yale scholar Abbas Amanat memorably put it. Iran now became a breeding ground for anti-Americanism in the wider Middle East and for Islamist acts of violence against US troops and civilians.
¹⁵

Ironically, the possibility of such “blowback” seems to have been anticipated by Kim Roosevelt himself in 1949, when he concluded his manifesto
Arabs, Oil, and History
with the warning that the “danger of Russia versus the United States is . . . the seen danger,” yet the “danger of Orient versus Occident seems as yet unseen; it could be ruinous; we may succumb to it from not seeing.” In light of this prophetic statement, the question has to be asked: Just what was Kim Roosevelt thinking when he carried out the Iran coup operation of August 19, 1953?
¹⁶

TO BE SURE, KIM ROOSEVELT
shared in the dominant American view that Iran was dangerously vulnerable to Soviet influence.
Arabs, Oil, and History
portrays the country’s political institutions as fragmented and weak, and his later account in
Countercoup
depicts Mosaddeq (inaccurately) as in “alliance . . . with the Soviet Union.” Yet neither of these works ever conveys the sense of intense, ideological anticommunism detectable in statements by other US Middle East hands from the early Cold War—Loy Henderson, for example, or, for that matter, Archie Roosevelt. Other factors, of a cultural and psychological rather than political nature, seem to have been more important in shaping Kim’s behavior toward Iran.
¹⁷

To begin with, there was Roosevelt Anglophilia. Although again not quite as pronounced as in Archie’s case, there was a palpable sense of cultural identification between the upper-class British spies who conceived of Operation BOOT and the patrician American who eventually carried it out. “Kim Roosevelt was quickly seen as an important ally in our plans,” wrote the MI6 Tehran station chief Monty Woodhouse, an Oxford-educated classicist and future baron. “Like his grandfather, and also his father, he had a natural inclination for bold and imaginative action, and also a friendly sympathy with the British.” Family connections doubtless played their part: when Kim passed through London, he tended to stay at the Chester Square residence of the Herberts, the aristocratic British family into which his aunt, Belle’s sister Elizabeth, had married. Another of Belle’s trans-Atlantic connections was the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Mary Alice Gascoyne-Cecil (“Moucher” to Belle and other intimates), whose brother Robert (“Bobbety”), Fifth Marquess of Salisbury, was a Conservative Party grandee and, at the time of the Iran coup, acting foreign secretary. There were, admittedly, some strains in the intelligence dimension of the “Special Relationship”: perhaps mindful of the recent exposure of Soviet moles—Kim Philby’s accomplices Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—Kim Roosevelt was reluctant to divulge the identity of the CIA’s principal BEDAMN agents to his MI6 counterparts, while the latter could not hide “a faint note of envy . . . that the Agency was better equipped in the way of funds, personnel, and facilities than was SIS.” Overall, though, the CIA’s collaboration with MI6—“our cousins,” as Kim tellingly referred to the British in
Countercoup
—was conspicuously harmonious, so much so that it was immediately seen as a precedent for future joint operations. “The lesson
here is clear,” concluded Donald Wilber’s CIA report on AJAX, which drew heavily on briefings with Kim Roosevelt. “As in the larger world picture, U.S.-U.K. interests and activities must be coordinated.”
¹⁸

If culture helped make Kim receptive to the plans of the British, it set him against Iranians. Despite his affinity for the Arab world, Kim, much like Archie in this regard, viewed Persia through an Orientalist prism inherited from the British. His description of Mosaddeq in
Countercoup
went through the checklist of supposed Oriental character flaws: deviousness, inconsistency, and emotionalism. The “wily” prime minister “was like an ill-tempered, erratic old peasant, . . . judging all problems from his emotional standpoint,” wrote Kim, ignoring Mosaddeq’s aristocratic background and European education. “His great strength lay in his ability to mesmerize crowds,” the description continued. “His wild exaggerations . . . led his listeners into almost insane hysteria.” Hence Kim, who not much earlier had hailed Arab nationalism as a spontaneous, potent force in its own right, now dismissed its Iranian equivalent as irrational and susceptible to manipulation—exactly the British view of the same phenomenon.
¹⁹

The main exception to this Orientalist representation of Iranians in
Countercoup
was Kim’s portrayal of the shah. Whereas in the run-up to the coup many Western observers perceived the vacillating young king as a “mesmerized rabbit,” to quote Monty Woodhouse, Kim in contrast portrayed him as a rather heroic figure, on one occasion bravely foiling an assassination attempt, on another piloting a crippled plane to safety, and fleeing Iran in August 1953 not out of cowardice but rather in a premeditated move to stimulate popular anti-Mosaddeq feeling. Yet it seems that this image of the shah was constructed after the fact. At the time of the coup, Kim was no less impatient with the king than other Westerners, at one point threatening to quit Iran “in complete disgust unless the Shah took action within a few days.” Moreover, Kim’s claim in
Countercoup
that the shah had left “a lasting impression” on him when they first met during his 1947 Middle Eastern tour is belied by the fact that the king is barely mentioned in the 1949
Arabs, Oil, and History
. Interestingly, this process of reinventing the shah as a more decisive, virile, Western-like leader seems to have begun immediately after the August 19 coup, when Loy Henderson described him to Washington as showing newfound “vigour, decision, and clear thinking,” and Kim called him “a new man.”
²⁰

The argument here is not that Kim Roosevelt staged the 1953 coup because he disliked Iranians. Rather, it is that, as for other Anglo-American observers at this time, Orientalist attitudes clouded his judgment of Persian politics and encouraged his tendency to view Iran as a place for personal adventure, a playing field for spy games. This last impulse, which for Kim was strongly associated with his identity as a Roosevelt man, is evident throughout the narrative of events offered in
Countercoup
. As Kim set off from Beirut for Iran in July 1953, for example, he remembered what his father, Kermit, “wrote of his arrival in East Africa with
his
father, T.R., in 1909 on
The African Game Trails
trip. ‘It was a great adventure, and all the world was young!’” The implicit comparison of TP-AJAX to one of his father’s or grandfather’s hunting expeditions was reinforced by “the traditional French hunter’s sendoff” that Kim received from a Lebanese friend. The connection to earlier Roosevelt foreign adventures was not lost on contemporaries. Writing Washington shortly after the coup, the chief of the US military mission to Iran, Robert A. McClure, observed, “Frank W[isner]’s boys did a grand job, and wielded a big stick.”
²¹