One of the beautiful things about the CIA-led 1953 coup in Iran (what Charles Krauthammer recently referred to as a ‘rent-a-mob in a coup 56 years ago’) is that we have a declassified document that details every step that was taken and contemplated to carry it out. It was written by Dr. Donald N. Wilber in March 1954 and it was titled: OVERTHROW OF PREMIER MOSSADEQ OF IRAN. Dr. Wilber was a Princeton man (class of 1929). He was a collector of Persian rugs and an expert on Islamic architecture who wrote many books. He was also the main architect (along with Kermit Roosevelt) of the coup in Iran that we have so many reasons to regret. You really should take the time to read the whole document, but a synopsis is available from California State University at Fresno Economics Professor Sasan Fayazmanesh:
On April 16, 2000, The New York Times broke what its writer, James Risen, called the US’s “stony silence” by devoting a number of pages to publishing parts of a still classified document on the “secret history” of the 1953 coup. The history was written by one Donald N. Wilbur, an expert in Persian architecture and one of the “leading planners” of the operation “TP-Ajax.” The report chronicled gruesome details of the events in 1953: how, by spending a meager sum of $1 million, the CIA “stirred up considerable unrest in Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability and supporting the shah”; how it brought “the largest mobs” into the street; how it “began disseminating ‘gray propaganda’ passing out anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering articles in local press”; how the CIA’s “Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with ‘savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh'”; how the “house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists”; how the CIA tried to “orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism”; how on August 19 “a journalist who was one of the agency’s most important Iranian agents led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set fire to the offices of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mossadegh’s foreign minister”; how American agents swung “security forces to the side of the demonstrators”; how the shah’s disbanded “Imperial Guard seized trucks and drove through the street”; how by “10:15 there were pro-shah truckloads of military personnel at all main squares”; how the “pro-shah speakers went on the air, broadcasting the coups’ success and reading royal decrees”; how at the US embassy, “CIA officers were elated, and Mr. Roosevelt got General Zahedi out of hiding” and found him a tank that “drove him to the radio station, where he spoke to the nation”; and, finally, how “Dr. Mossadegh and other government officials were rounded up, while officers supporting General Zahedi placed ‘unknown supports of TP-Ajax’ in command of all units of Tehran garrison.” “It was a day that should have never ended,” Risen quotes Wilbur as saying, for “it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.”
Now, Mohammed Mosaddeq was no saint. His flaws have been largely forgotten in favor of remembering the injustices that were done to him.
Shortly after the return of the Shah, on 22 August 1953, from his flight to Rome, Mosaddeq was tried by a military tribunal for high treason. Zahedi and the Shah were inclined, however, to spare the man’s life (the death penalty would have applied according to the laws of the day). Mosaddeq received a sentence of 3 years in solitary confinement at a military jail and was exiled to his village not far from Tehran, where he remained under house arrest on his estate until his death, on 5 March 1967.
The Shah of 1953 bore no resemblance to the tyrant he would become in the 1960’s and 70’s. In the summer of 1953, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was only 33 years-old. He was terrified that the British were conspiring against him. He tried once to dismiss Mosaddeq, only to lose his nerve and reinstate him. Prior to the coup he had fled to Rome when things seemed to be closing in on him. The CIA didn’t see him as a tyrant, but as an immature boy-king. That was true when they decided to put him back on his throne, but it didn’t last. The CIA must take a huge amount of responsibility for the Shah’s future behavior, however, because they literally built the instruments of his tyranny.
After removing the left-leaning government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, (which had planned to nationalize Iran’s oil industry), from power on 19 August 1953, in a coup, supported and funded by the British and U.S. governments, the Shah decided he wanted an effective internal security service and set up the large organization known by the acronym SAVAK in 1957 to strengthen his regime by placing political opponents under surveillance and repress dissident movements. According to Encyclopaedia Iranica:
A U.S. Army colonel working for the CIA was sent to Persia in September 1953 to work with General Teymur Bakhtiar, who was appointed military governor of Tehran in December 1953 and immedi ately began to assemble the nucleus of a new intelligence organization. The U.S. Army colonel worked closely with Bakhtīār and his subordinates, commanding the new intelligence organization and training its members in basic intelligence techniques, such as surveillance and interrogation methods, the use of intelligence networks, and organizational security. This organi zation was the first modern, effective intelligence service to operate in Persia. Its main achievement occurred in September 1954, when it discovered and destroyed a large communist Tudeh Party network that had been established in the Persian armed forces.
In March 1955, the Army colonel was “replaced with a more permanent team of five career CIA officers, including specialists in covert operations, in telligence analysis, and counterintelligence, including Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf ” who “trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel.” In 1956 this agency was reorganized and given the name Sazeman-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar (SAVAK). In 1960/61 the CIA trainers left and were replaced by a team of instructors from the Israeli Mossad. These in turn were replaced by SAVAK’s own instructors in 1965.
An interesting sidenote is that Hebert Norman Schwarzkopf’s son would go on to lead the U.S. Coalition Forces in Operation Desert Storm, setting off another tragic set of unintended consequences.
SAVAK became one of the most feared and loathed intelligence organizations in the world. Some of the following will, unfortunately, be familiar to you.
A turning point in SAVAK’s reputation for ruthless brutality was an attack on a gendarmerie post in the Caspian village of Siahkal by a small band of armed Marxists in February 1971. According to Iranian political historian Ervand Abrahamian, after this attack SAVAK interrogators were sent abroad for “scientific training to prevent unwanted deaths from ‘brute force.’ Brute force was supplemented with the bastinado; sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo—an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked. Despite the new ‘scientific’ methods, the torture of choice remained the traditional bastinado” used to beat soles of the feet. The “primary goal” of those using the bastinados “was to locate arms caches, safe houses and accomplices …”
I know that America does not like to admit responsibility for such things. We like to think of ourselves as people who not only oppose that kind of brutality but built organizations and ratified treaties to eliminate them. Unfortunately, our record is rather mixed in these areas, and this was true even before Bush and Cheney chose to emulate SAVAK is many respects.
This history, however, is much better known in Iran (and throughout the Middle East) than it is here. Many of these things still go on in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which are all countries that are aligned with the U.S. in ways reminiscent of our special relationship with the Shah’s Iran.
It would be wrong, however, to see our historic relationship with Iran in an entirely negative light. Even today, after thirty years of clerical rule, Iran still derives benefits from the Shah’s heavy emphasis on modernism and westernification. Iran’s population is very well educated and skilled in the sciences. They have modern roads and hospitals. They are self-sufficient in the energy sector. Without their oppressive government, they would resemble Turkey or Dubai more than any other Middle Eastern nation.
Iran has always been a deeply religious country with a conservative streak. The Shah didn’t respect that enough in his haste to emulate the West. Yet, Iran advanced a long way towards the West’s way of doing things before the Iranian Revolution intervened. And the people of Iran now have pent-up cravings in the opposite direction. Their people (particularly the youth in the cities) crave normalcy. They want to be a part of the modern world, not a pariah state ruled by oppressive religiously imposed mores. The current regime is as brutal as the Shah’s in every particular. I think the American people and the Iranian people can be very friendly toward each other if only our respective elites could get over their fears of each other.
