14

The Man in the Arena

IN FEBRUARY 1953, A FORTNIGHT OR SO AFTER EISENHOWER’S INAUGURATION, a British delegation led by MI6’s chief, Sir John Sinclair, traveled to Washington to meet the new director of the CIA in a bid to convince him to launch a coup against Mosaddeq. Allen Dulles, Foster’s younger brother, listened as Sinclair went into the details of Operation Boot, as MI6 had dubbed the plan to overthrow the Iranian prime minister.

Twinkly, charming, and tactile—he was nicknamed “the shark” by his long-suffering wife—Allen Dulles might have passed himself off as a college professor were it not for the three telephones, black, white and red, that stood ready on a sideboard behind his desk. He also knew the territory Sinclair was talking about. After serving in the Office of Strategic Services in the war, he had rejoined his old law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, where Foster was a partner. In 1949, on behalf of a consortium of engineering firms, he went to Tehran to meet the shah and negotiate a development deal that would have been worth $650 million had it not then been rejected by the Majlis during the furor over the Supplemental Agreement in December 1950. Unlike his older brother, Dulles was not a rich man, and the failure of a project that would have paid him a fortune hurt. He, too, was keen to see the back of Mosaddeq and would ultimately earmark $1 million for his removal.

Besides Allen Dulles’s personal vendetta, there was another reason why the new administration was suddenly willing to take action: Mosaddeq was now directly threatening its interests in a way he had not done before. Until that point Aramco had profited nicely from the Iranian crisis, dramatically increasing its output to fill the gap caused by the British-led boycott of Iranian oil. But then, a few days earlier, the Iranian prime minister had threatened to sell Iranian oil at a 50 percent discount—a move that would have calamitous implications for Aramco and the Saudis if he followed through with it.

Had Mosaddeq made the threat any earlier, it would have been easy to dismiss. Until the previous December, the combination of the British-orchestrated boycott and, more important, a lack of tankers meant that Iran could not have exported its oil anyway. But in the final days of Truman’s presidency, Acheson had abandoned the boycott, and falling maritime charter rates would soon make more tankers available. “It is rapidly becoming apparent,” wrote Foster Dulles around the time that the British delegation was in Washington, “that the future tanker situation… will be such in the very near future that Mosaddeq may be able to carry out his threat.” After Sinclair and his colleagues had returned to London, the CIA reported that the Iranian prime minister was on the point of announcing the failure of negotiations with the British and intended to ask the Majlis for permission to sell the country’s oil at whatever price he could get.¹

More turmoil in Iran days after Sinclair’s meeting with Allen Dulles also provided further grounds for intervention. In mid-February, the Bakhtiari—the tribe into which the shah had married—attacked an Iranian army column in the heart of the oilfields, killing forty-two Iranian soldiers. Mosaddeq blamed the British and the shah and threatened to resign, before changing his mind and arresting Zahedi, who had been all too obviously getting ready to succeed him.

Alarmed by the turn of events, the shah offered to leave the country for a holiday, a prospect that appalled Ayatollah Kashani—not because he liked the shah but because his absence would give Mosaddeq an opportunity to consolidate his position further. After Kashani had tried and failed to use members of the Majlis to convince the shah not to depart, he ordered Shaban the Brainless to organize a mob to close the bazaar and spread the rumor that the shah had resigned following pressure from Mosaddeq. Swelled by angry bazaaris, the mob then marched on and surrounded the shah’s palace to stop the shah from leaving. Mosaddeq, fearing for his life, fled his own home in his pyjamas.

This raw demonstration of Kashani’s power alarmed the CIA because the agency had long argued that, if the ayatollah seized power, the most likely beneficiary would ultimately be the communist Tudeh Party, which would quickly attract those repelled by Kashani’s style of politics. The day after the demonstration in Tehran the agency argued that, even if the ayatollah did not replace Mosaddeq, the rivalry between the two men was still likely to create a chaotic situation in which a communist takeover became “more and more of a possibility.”²

Three days later, on March 4, Allen Dulles talked through what had happened and its implications in a meeting of the National Security Council. “If Iran succumbed to the Communists,” he said, “there was little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.” When his brother Foster then said that he expected Mosaddeq to last just one or two years more, Eisenhower was alarmed. “If I had $500 billion to spend in secret,” the president exclaimed, “I would get $100 billion of it to Iran right now.” But had he had it at that moment, he would undoubtedly have used it to prop up Mosaddeq.³

Eisenhower’s attitude to Mosaddeq would change in the course of the next week. On March 8, the CIA produced a further report on the standoff between Mosaddeq and Kashani, who had meanwhile organized a boycott of parliament by his supporters to prevent it being quorate. Whoever won, the CIA suggested, the implications for the United States were serious. If Mosaddeq failed to recoup the prestige that he had lost and Kashani took over, Eisenhower’s administration would have an even more hostile government to cope with. On the other hand, the present deadlock was likely to make Mosaddeq increasingly authoritarian. If he succeeded Iran would take “one step further along its present revolutionary road” because the communist Tudeh Party was now openly supporting him, having calculated that its interests were best advanced by doing so. The report came as McCarthyite hysteria in Washington was approaching its zenith. Anyone reading it in the capital at that moment would have appreciated its implication: if the communists were backing Mosaddeq, then Eisenhower’s administration absolutely could not be seen to be doing so as well.⁴

If Mosaddeq’s reputation in the U.S. was tarnished by his association with Tudeh, it was the Iranian prime minister’s erratic threats about oil that ultimately doomed him. Late on March 10, Dulles received a telegram from his ambassador in Tehran reporting that Mosaddeq had told him that his negotiation with the British was over. The ambassador advised him not to deal with the Iranian prime minister any further. The next day, at the next National Security Council, Eisenhower observed that “he had very real doubts whether, even if we tried unilaterally, we could make a successful deal with Mosaddeq. He felt that it might not be worth the paper it was written on, and the example might have grave effects on United States oil concessions in other parts of the world.”⁵

Days later the State Department authorized the CIA to “consider operations which would contribute to the fall of the Mosaddeq government.” The CIA’s director of operations, Frank Wisner, then contacted MI6 in London. He wanted to discuss the detail of a plot.⁶

BY THE TIME that Wisner’s message reached MI6 headquarters in March 1953, two points concerning the plot were already clear: it had a leader and a figurehead. In February in Washington, MI6’s chief Sir John Sinclair had proposed Kim Roosevelt to lead the operation. Roosevelt, seemingly unaware that the British had long been in touch with the general, had suggested that they replace Mosaddeq with Zahedi.

Roosevelt, however, preferred a more fluid approach to the detailed operation Sinclair had set out, and in April he tasked Donald N. Wilber, an archaeologist who had been roped into the OSS in Iran and now acted as a consultant to the CIA, with drawing up a more flexible plan. The challenge, in Wilber’s words, was that “the Persian is not a joiner nor does he find it natural to work with others toward a mutually desired goal.” It was not until mid-May that he put his effort to MI6’s Norman Darbyshire in Cyprus, to where the members of the British secret service’s Iran station had decamped when they were kicked out of Iran. A fluent Farsi speaker, Darbyshire had joined MI6 from Special Operations Executive. Though not the easiest of men to get on with, he was very highly regarded by his peers, not least because he had spent eight of the last ten years in Iran. He was in contact with the Rashidian family by radio and occasionally met Asadollah in Geneva.⁷

Up to this point both sets of spies had been unwilling to disclose their assets to the other. Darbyshire now shared the identities of the Rashidians with Wilber, but Wilber kept back the names of the two men who ran a network disseminating anti-communist propaganda and were the CIA’s most important agents, Ali Jalali and Faruq Keyvani, though Darbyshire would later claim that he guessed who they were. Agreeing that what mattered in Iranian politics was now the shah, the Majlis, and the mob, he and Wilber came up with a “quasi-legal” takeover, which entailed a propaganda blitz, large-scale bribery of the Majlis, and a march on the parliament that would scare its deputies into passing a vote of no-confidence against Mosaddeq, paving the way for the appointment of Zahedi, who would by then be touting decrees showing that he enjoyed the shah’s support.⁸

The combined planning was straightforward. Wilber noted, apparently surprised, that there was “no friction or marked difference of opinion during the discussions”; Darbyshire, clearly envious of the CIA’s superior resources, was under instruction to let Wilber set the pace. As Wilber later commented, “the British were very pleased at having obtained the active cooperation of the Agency and were determined to do nothing which might jeopardize US participation.”⁹

From Cyprus Wilber flew via Cairo to Beirut where he met Roosevelt, the CIA head of station in Tehran Roger Goiran, and George Carroll, an expert in paramilitary warfare, all of whom were to play key roles in the events that followed. Operation Ajax, as they had renamed MI6’s Operation Boot, seemingly in tribute to the powers of the abrasive cleaner, was finalized in a room in the Hotel St. Georges overlooking the Mediterranean, with the radio on full blast as a defense against eavesdroppers. Wilber and Roosevelt then went back to London where they ran their proposal past Darbyshire and several of his colleagues at the secret intelligence service’s headquarters beside St. James’s Park tube. Damp-stained and down-at-heel, the building was only notable to its American visitors for a sign bearing the red-lettered legend “Curb Your Guests”—the exact opposite of what MI6 was doing in this case. “The British, from burning desire more than judgment, were all for the operation,” Roosevelt recalled later.¹⁰

All that remained was to secure political sign-off for Ajax, which the MI6 officers warned might “take some time.” Their relationship with the Foreign Office was, as Roosevelt later realized, “neither close nor cordial,” and the plan might have encountered serious resistance had the prime minister not temporarily been in charge of British foreign policy while Eden recovered after major surgery on his bile duct. “Churchill enjoyed dramatic operations and had no high regard for timid diplomatists. It was he who gave the authority for Operation Boot to proceed,” an MI6 officer recalled.¹¹

Roosevelt went back to Washington where, on June 25, 1953, he met Foster Dulles, his brother Allen, and the U.S. ambassador to Tehran Loy Henderson, as well as other officials with a stake. There, approval came easily because McCarthy’s toxic influence meant that the opponents of the coup held their breath. “That’s that then,” said Foster Dulles, wrapping up the meeting. “Let’s get going.”¹²

To put pressure on Mosaddeq, the U.S. government leaked a private letter from Eisenhower, which told the Iranian prime minister that no more aid would be forthcoming. Henderson, who had left Tehran at the end of May, took an extended holiday. At the same time, Roosevelt flew back to Beirut under a pseudonym. Driving a car loaded with low-denomination banknotes out of the Mediterranean city, through Damascus and Baghdad, he crossed into Iran on July 19, 1953, and laid up in the CIA head of station’s country house in the hills outside Tehran. All he could now do was wait, while the CIA-funded propaganda began to do its work.

The propaganda hammered three themes. Mosaddeq favored Tudeh. Mosaddeq was an enemy of Islam. Mosaddeq was running down the army to allow Tudeh and Moscow to take over. In trying to associate the prime minister with Tudeh, the spies were following a time-honored method, which Roosevelt had summed up a decade earlier. “It is not easy to hate for his principles a man whose principles differ very little from your own,” he had written, in an article on English Civil War propaganda. “Let him be regarded, however, as a member of a party, and his individual beliefs are swallowed up by the larger body, which contains in fact a hundred shades of opinion, but which can, by judicious simplification, be represented by the most extreme.”¹³

WHEN THEY PLANNED Operation Ajax, Wilber and Darbyshire had made three important assumptions: that the shah would do as they wanted provided he was put under enough pressure; that Zahedi would take action if he knew the shah supported him, and that the army would rally to the shah rather than Mosaddeq when it was forced to choose between them. Everything, in other words, depended on a man who was known for being utterly unreliable.

That was why the plan did not demand great heroics from the shah, simply envisaging that he would sign two decrees or firmans—one appointing Zahedi as chief of staff and the other calling on all ranks of the army to support the chief, which would enable the removal of Mosaddeq. But the shah was not overly keen on Zahedi, whom he regarded as an “adventurer lacking judgment and balance” and told the Americans that “it would be unwise for him openly to oppose Mosaddeq until the myth of his greatness has been exploded.” When he refused to sign the firmans, Operation Ajax began to unravel.¹⁴

To prod the shah into action, Darbyshire and Wilber were relying on his feisty twin sister. Nicknamed the Black Panther, Princess Ashraf was as forceful as her brother was feeble. Recalling an encounter with Stalin, she described her relief on finding that, far from being large and terrifying, the Soviet leader was “soft and fat, but above all he was small.” Her natural habitat was Paris: it was there that Darbyshire tried and failed to find her before finally tracking her down on the French Riviera on July 16. Aware that she liked gambling and expensive clothes, the British spy offered her a mink coat and a wad of cash if she would help him. “Her eyes lit up and her resistance crumbled,” he would recall later.¹⁵

When, however, Ashraf arrived in Tehran, her twin refused to see her. Although he relented four days later, the encounter was stormy, and the princess failed to persuade her brother to sign the firmans. She was at least able to give him a letter telling him to expect another visitor, General Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf had headed up a wartime U.S. military mission to Iran and was confident that he could persuade the shah to cooperate. When they met on August 1, 1953, the shah insisted that they conduct the meeting sitting on a table placed in the middle of the ballroom, as he believed his palace was bugged. Schwarzkopf, too, got nowhere.

There was nothing for it but for Roosevelt to go to see the shah himself. Having let him know via an agent inside the palace to expect an American authorized to speak for Eisenhower and Churchill, late on August 1, Roosevelt had himself driven into the palace, hidden under a blanket. He had last met the shah while working on his commission for Harper’s Magazine, six years earlier. “Good evening, Mr Roosevelt,” said the shah when he appeared. “I cannot say that I expected to see you but this is a pleasure.”¹⁶

Convinced that the Americans still supported Mosaddeq, the shah wanted proof that Eisenhower was behind him. Asadollah Rashidian, whom he was also seeing regularly, had already managed to arrange for the BBC Persian service to tweak its usual nightly greeting, “It is now midnight in London,” to include the word exactly so that the shah would know that Rashidian was speaking for the British government. By chance Eisenhower referred to his concerns about the deteriorating situation in Iran in a speech in Seattle on August 4, 1953, and Roosevelt claimed that these comments, too, amounted to a covert signal that the president was behind the operation. But the shah still wanted more time to make up his mind.

Mosaddeq inadvertently sped up this process. Wanting to outmaneuver Kashani’s boycott of the Majlis, but knowing that the shah would not agree to the dissolution of parliament, he encouraged deputies to resign. When that met resistance from those members of parliament who were in the CIA’s pay, he announced that he would put the dissolution of parliament to the country in a referendum. Confronted by separate ballot boxes for yes and no votes, opponents of the measure wisely stayed away. Mosaddeq won overwhelmingly, but the ruse backfired on him, playing into the CIA’s line that he was trying to turn the country over to Tudeh and the Soviets.

Unsure whether he could rely on a vote of the Majlis to endorse Zahedi, Roosevelt decided that the shah now needed to sign off a firman that explicitly sacked Mosaddeq, and another naming Zahedi as prime minister. This the shah refused to do. It was only when Rashidian met him and told him that Roosevelt would leave the country “in complete disgust” unless he quickly took action that the shah finally changed his mind.

Overwhelmed with relief, Roosevelt and his colleagues in the CIA station celebrated with a drinking binge; he did not get to bed until five o’clock the following morning. But the party was premature: before the firmans could be drawn up, the shah abruptly departed to the Caspian Sea resort of Ramsar. Once Rashidian had prepared the two documents on the evening of August 12, the commander of the imperial guard, Nematollah Nasiri, took them to the shah.

By now the military preparations had come together, after a very unpromising start. Since Zahedi had taken sanctuary in the Majlis in May, it was not until he left the parliament for a safe house on July 21 that the CIA head of station Roger Goiran was able to meet him. The encounter left Goiran unimpressed. Zahedi “appeared lacking in drive, energy and concrete plans,” while his best contact in the military, a colonel named Hassan Akhavi, was “full of desire to do something, but had no idea how to go about it.”¹⁷

Having realized that Zahedi could not count on the support of any of the five brigades garrisoned in Tehran, Goiran summoned George Carroll, the paramilitary expert who had been at the meeting at the St. Georges Hotel, to try to salvage the operation. On August 5, Carroll made a breakthrough when he met a contact of Akhavi’s, Colonel Zand Karimi. Karimi had contacts throughout the units stationed in the capital; within four days, Akhavi had a list of forty officers, which he was able to show the shah. Once Nasiri returned from Ramsar with the signed firmans on August 13, the coup was set for the night of the August 15—a Saturday and the first day of the working week.

The delay was necessary because Karimi needed Friday, August 14, 1953, to tip off these forty officers about what was going to happen. It seems that one of them alerted Mosaddeq, who knew that a coup was imminent by the end of that afternoon. As a consequence, when Nasiri tried to arrest Mosaddeq at his home at one o’clock on the morning of the sixteenth, he was arrested. Zahedi was reportedly so nervous that he could not button his own uniform. A CIA officer, “Rocky” Stone, did it up for him, while Mrs. Stone held Zahedi’s wife’s hand. Once it became obvious that forces loyal to Mosaddeq had preempted the coup, the plotters’ fragile morale disintegrated completely. Zahedi went into hiding while the shah fled by plane to Baghdad and ultimately Rome. “Let the plane go,” Mosaddeq said, when he was asked if it should be intercepted and shot down. In Rome the shah checked into the Excelsior Hotel. Beside him at the counter was Allen Dulles, who had arranged the shah’s accommodation. “After you, your Majesty,” he said.¹⁸

The shah and his wife, Soraya, in Rome, August 1953.

From Roosevelt and his colleagues’ perspective, by the small hours of August 16, there were already disconcerting signs that the plot had not gone according to plan. For one thing, the city’s telephones were still working. But it was not until one of their agents inside the Iranian army arrived at the embassy seeking sanctuary that it became clear that the coup had failed. Rocky Stone remembered the reaction: “The safe house exploded with expletives and pointed fingers assigning the blame. Before the place became violent, Roosevelt raised his hand, calmed the group and quietly announced that he accepted the blame for the failure—to the appreciative applause of all.”¹⁹

ROOSEVELT MUST HAVE realized that his CIA career was on the line, but he was not the quitting type. Four decades earlier, his grandfather, Theodore, whom he venerated, had made a famous speech at the Sorbonne. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” the former president had said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”²⁰

Soon after eight o’clock that Sunday morning, Roosevelt drove north out of the city to meet Zahedi, who was in hiding with his son Ardeshir. Like him, Zahedi had not entirely given up; both believed that their task was now to convince Tehran that it was Mosaddeq who had staged the coup, after getting wind of the firmans that dismissed him, and appointed the general. Roosevelt agreed, and his colleagues in the CIA station went about spreading the rumor, starting with a message to the Associated Press and then arranging for Ardeshir to meet the New York Times correspondent, Kennett Love, so that he could show him the original firman. Independently and shrewdly, the CIA agents Jalali and Keyvani had reached the same conclusion and published a broadsheet that morning alleging that the purpose of the coup had been to force out the shah.

Mosaddeq now made another error that played into Roosevelt’s and Zahedi’s hands. At noon he issued a statement announcing the dissolution of the Majlis; that afternoon his foreign minister published an article savagely attacking the shah in the newspaper that he owned. That evening the foreign minister announced that the shah had fled to Baghdad and demanded his abdication, at a public meeting outside the Majlis, which was broadcast on the radio. The combined effect of Mosaddeq’s announcement and his minister’s article and statement was to reinforce the impression Zahedi wanted to give—that Mosaddeq had tried to overthrow the shah after being dismissed by him. To give it further momentum, the CIA had hundreds of copies of the firmans made and distributed, both to the newspapers and in the streets.

Despite this, the two most senior diplomats in the U.S. embassy in Tehran had “given up hope.” Their mood infected that of the undersecretary of state, Walter Bedell Smith, in Washington, who warned a British diplomat the next day that the “latest developments” made a “new look at policy towards Persia” necessary. “He thought it would be necessary to cultivate good relations with Mosaddeq. Perhaps American technicians might be sent. Whatever his faults Mosaddeq had no love for the Russians and timely aid might enable him to keep Communism in check,” the British man reported, alarmed, to London.²¹

The Foreign Office viewed this as “an ignominious climb-down” that would encourage only Mosaddeq “to blackmail the United States further.” So too did MI6. When Bedell Smith then sent a message to Roosevelt telling him to halt the operation, Darbyshire, in Cyprus, and in charge of all communications between Washington, London, and Tehran, did not immediately pass it on. “While… the apparent faith shown by the SIS station in Nicosia was altogether admirable,” the CIA consultant Don Wilber noted afterward, “it should be remembered that they had nothing to lose.”²²

Unaware of Bedell Smith’s order thanks to Darbyshire, Roosevelt carried on. His priority was to dramatize how the Tudeh would exploit the vacuum left by the departure of the shah. To do so, he had asked Jalali and Keyvani to muster a mob of agents provocateurs for a large demonstration in the city center. When they refused, he offered them fifty thousand dollars; when they still refused, he threatened to kill them. Jalali and Keyvani had a change of heart. By lunchtime on August 17, their rent-a-mob, swelled by genuine Tudeh supporters, had pulled down two statues of Reza Shah. Thanks to their efforts, senior clerics had, by that point, also started to receive letters, written in red ink and purporting to come from the Tudeh, warning them they would soon be hanging from the lampposts. When, that evening, Roosevelt held a long council of war with Zahedi and his son and the Rashidians, they agreed that they would take action two days later. The Rashidians would mobilize their followers from the city bazaar. August 19, 1953, would be the day of reckoning.

Meanwhile, the disturbances inspired by Jalali and Keyvani continued. On August 18, their thugs attacked and looted shops on two main streets, all the time acting as if they supported the Tudeh. They “scared the hell out of me,” Roosevelt would admit later. That evening Henderson, who had just returned after ten weeks’ absence, saw Mosaddeq and, on Roosevelt’s advice, warned him that he would be obliged to advise the Americans to leave Iran if the security forces could not protect them. Mosaddeq, his honor challenged, called his chief of police and told him to put down the disturbances. He also ordered his own followers not to protest.²³

What that meant was that on the morning of August 19, when many newspapers ran photostat copies of the firman appointing Zahedi, Mosaddeq’s supporters were not on the streets. His opponents, on the other hand, were out in force. Paid with money from Kashani, which came from the CIA via the Rashidians, they were market porters and day laborers, members of the city’s athletic clubs, and ruffians who made a living from extortion; they were always in trouble and reliant on the Rashidians to bail them out. Two groups, armed with identical wooden staves, moved in parallel northward up the slope Tehran is built on, out of the slums in the south of the city into the smarter, higher neighborhoods where they would be encouraged to attack the offices of the main, Tudeh-supporting newspapers. The athletes gave the demonstration a carnival-like flavor. An eyewitness reported that the crowds included “tumblers turning handsprings, weightlifters twirling iron bars and wrestlers flexing their biceps.” By a quarter past ten that morning, they controlled the city’s main squares and had been joined by soldiers from the local garrisons and Bakhtiari tribesmen bussed in from the south. Tanks sent in to break up the demonstration turned out to be crewed by men loyal to the shah. They were surrounded and surrendered without putting up any resistance.

Shouting “Long Live the Shah,” “Death to the Tudeh,” and later “Death to Mosaddeq,” the gathering crowd freed Nasiri and other officers arrested on the night of the abortive coup from the cells in police headquarters, and then seized control of the telegraph office and attacked the army’s headquarters and the ministry of foreign affairs. Radio Tehran fell into the protestors’ hands at about two that afternoon. Two hundred people were reported to have been killed in a fierce battle for Mosaddeq’s home. Mosaddeq himself escaped but gave himself up a day later. By then his possessions had been sold on the street to passersby.²⁴

When it became clear that the royalists were in control of the radio station, Roosevelt went to find Zahedi, who made a broadcast to announce that he was now prime minister and that his forces were in control of the city. The previous day Roosevelt had received an order from headquarters telling him to end the operation. He now belatedly acknowledged the message, adding that he was pleased to report that Zahedi had been safely installed and that the shah would be flying home shortly. He ended, “Love and kisses from all the team.” Roosevelt stayed in the city long enough to meet the shah, who arrived back on August 22. “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army,” the shah said, “and to you!” and toasted him with vodka.²⁵

After being spirited out of the country by the American naval attaché, Roosevelt reached London on August 25. The head of MI6, Sinclair, was delighted to see him, particularly when Roosevelt explained why so little information had got back to London. “If they had simply reported what they were doing, London and Washington would have thought they were crazy and told them to stop immediately,” he said. “If they had reported the reasons why they felt justified in taking such action they would have had no time to take action; accordingly they followed the third course which was to act, and report practically nothing.” Sinclair asked him to repeat this to everyone he was about to meet.²⁶

In the next twenty-four hours, Sinclair took Roosevelt on a whirlwind tour of Whitehall, from which he clearly hoped that MI6 would profit. Roosevelt’s final interview was with the prime minister, who had been poleaxed by a stroke several weeks earlier and was recuperating. The American spy would milk the symbolism of this encounter, describing how he had recounted the story of the coup to a bedridden, dozy Churchill, who seemed barely aware of what the CIA was. “Had I been but a few years longer, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture,” the prime minister apparently told him. It was a metaphor for the role reversal that was well underway.

MOSADDEQ MIGHT HAVE hung on had he not threatened to flood the market with cheap oil, for the coup would not have happened without American support. But it would never have succeeded had Mosaddeq been as popular as he had been a year earlier, before the oil sanctions began to bite, and had the British not played a part as well, by mobilizing the Rashidians to support the operation and then preventing the State Department from stopping it when it appeared to have failed. As a consequence, Mosaddeq was put on trial later that year and, having been convicted, spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.

For Britain, the price of American involvement in the removal of Mosaddeq was the loss of her monopoly. Following protracted negotiations in 1954, Anglo-Iranian was joined by five American companies in a new consortium, which left the British company with a 40 percent stake. To avoid upsetting the arrangement in Saudi Arabia, the consortium split the profits with the Iranians fifty-fifty. Eden’s desire that “Persia must not obtain better terms than other Middle Eastern countries… nor must she be seen to benefit by her wrongful action” could just about be said to have been satisfied. But the victory was pyrrhic, and the Anglo-American conspiracy that had achieved it was the exception, rather than the rule.²⁷

Demonstrators in Tehran after the coup. “They scared the hell out of me,” Kim Roosevelt admitted later.

Some time after Roosevelt returned to Washington, he also briefed the president, emphasizing his own role in rescuing the operation. “It seemed more like a dime novel than an historical fact,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary, impressed by Roosevelt’s courage. “The things we did were ‘covert.’ If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.” But news of the CIA’s involvement soon leaked out, and as Ike predicted, it has poisoned U.S.-Iran relations ever since.²⁸