Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Until 1951 the Iranian oilfields were controlled by a British corporation, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), and the country was effectively run as the corporation’s puppet – an oil-based equivalent of the United Fruit Company’s banana republics in Central America. The ancient might of the Persian empire had long since disappeared to leave a nation proud but poor, unable to benefit from the one asset that remained – its oil. Popular discontent translated into increasing assertions of independence and, after negotiations for higher oil royalties failed, the Iranian parliament – with the assent of the new young shah – voted to nationalise the AIOC. A month later Islamic fundamentalists assassinated the Iranian prime minister and parliament voted Mohammed Mosaddeq into office.

  The nationalisation of the AIOC was hugely popular in Iran, but the British government reacted in fury – a reaction of stunning hypocrisy given that Britain had only just nationalised a large part of its own economy, including its largest oil company, and AIOC’s largest shareholder was now the British government. Churchill, recently back in power, announced that he would not allow Mosaddeq’s government to export any oil produced in the formerly British-controlled facilities. The Royal Navy blockaded the Persian Gulf, and as Britain had long been the main market for Iran’s oil the Iranian economy was thrown into crisis.

  Despite the state of the economy Mosaddeq remained popular, and in 1952 was approved by parliament for a second term. However, the British boycott continued to bite and as the political and economic situation deteriorated further Mosaddeq resigned. His successor announced negotiations with Britain to end the oil dispute, but this sparked massive demonstrations throughout the country. The shah recalled Mosaddeq who, with the support of an uneasy coalition of socialists and militant Muslims, introduced a radical programme of social and agrarian reform.

  What happened next was shrouded in controversy until 16 April 2000, when the New York Times carried a front page story headed ‘What’s New on the Iran 1953 Coup’. Using US government reports obtained under the Freedom of Information regulations, the article described Operation Ajax – the first US-organised ‘regime change’ outside the western hemisphere since the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy six decades before. The chain of events leading up to armed soldiers surrounding the Iranian parliament building on 19 August 1953 is now a matter of record, as is the critical role played by the scion of one of America’s greatest dynasties, Kermit Roosevelt, who continued the imperial traditions of his grandfather Theodore.

  The impetus behind the coup came originally from Churchill, who refused all Mosaddeq’s increasingly desperate attempts at compromise and asked for American assistance in countering what he claimed was a potential communist threat. British intelligence was already bribing potential conspirators, but the plot was quickly taken over by the chief of the CIA’s near east and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt. He was given a $1m budget to be used ‘in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeq’. The CIA’s Tehran station launched a propaganda campaign, copying the successful Italian strategy, but it was clear that propaganda alone would be insufficient. In June American and British intelligence officials meeting in Beirut finalised a more robust strategy, and Roosevelt flew to Tehran to personally take charge.

  The initial objective of Operation Ajax was to persuade the shah to dismiss his prime minister, but the shah refused to be persuaded. The CIA then determined on a coup and started ‘black propaganda’. Iranian CIA operatives pretending to be Mosaddeq supporters threatened Muslim leaders, causing Islamic groups to turn against the government. Mosaddeq unwisely called a national referendum, which gave him emergency powers but turned many political factions, including the communists, against him. In August 1953 the shah finally bowed to American blandishments and dismissed Mosaddeq, but the prime minister refused to go and the shah himself fled abroad. Roosevelt now sped around Tehran exhorting army leaders to rally to the shah’s cause. Hundreds died as monarchists and pro-Mosaddeq nationalists clashed in the streets, and the CIA ensured that Mosaddeq loyalists were ‘taken out’. The CIA and British MI6 distributed bribes on a massive scale among the military. Finally army tanks bombarded Mosaddeq’s official residence and he surrendered. Many of his followers, including his foreign minister and numerous loyal army officers, were executed but Mosaddeq himself, after three years in prison, was sentenced to house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1967 at the age of eighty-four.

  ‘Regime change’ as an element of US foreign policy had arrived in the Middle East. And it had arrived in secret. Unlike earlier American interventions in, for example, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, the US government for long maintained that Mosaddeq had been ousted by a popular uprising – although everyone involved knew the truth and numerous participants had told their version of what happened. In 1979 Kermit Roosevelt himself published Counter Coup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, but only when the New York Times published the official government documents in 2000 did the full truth emerge.

  Secrecy has always been a feature of diplomacy, and America is not unique in that respect. Robert Kagan, in his authoritative study of American foreign policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writes that ‘Secrecy and deception were prominent features of American diplomacy from the start.’ The group handling foreign relations for the independence plotters, which eventually became the state department, was initially called the committee of secret correspondence. The treaty negotiated by the American revolutionaries with France in 1778 contained a number of secret clauses, including the one by which America agreed not to negotiate a separate peace with Britain – a clause that America then secretly broke. At the conclusion of the war American diplomats negotiated a treaty with Spain, again in secret, but this time the secrecy was not to avoid assisting foreign powers but to prevent debate at home on the possible terms. The secrecy surrounding the Iranian coup was similarly designed to prevent debate within the United States.

  Only with hindsight was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright able to admit nearly half a century later that ‘the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America’. At the time US policy-makers considered it a foreign policy triumph. The coup was not engineered solely, or even primarily, to help American corporate interests but to ensure that in the global struggle between the American and Russian empires Iran and its oil was in the American camp. It was the US equivalent of the coups that installed communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. And just as the US did not intervene in eastern Europe, Russia did not intervene in Iran. The official American line, put forward it would seem quite sincerely by Eisenhower and others, was that they acted to prevent Iran ‘going communist’. The reality is that even though Russia had troops on the Iranian border they were never mobilised, the Iranian communist party was never wholeheartedly committed to Mosaddeq’s cause and Mosaddeq himself never asked the Soviet Union for assistance. The Iran coup was an exercise in imperial policing by the new imperial superpower.

  The coup was also one of the most naked examples of pure power-politics, denuded almost entirely from the cloaking ideology of democracy. There was no suggestion that the shah was in some way more ‘democratic’ than Mosaddeq. Just before the coup the New York Times reported that Mosaddeq was undoubtedly ‘the most popular politician in the country’ and Time magazine had made him one of their men of the year. A democratic neutral had been replaced by an autocratic pro-American. The fact that the means by which the regime change occurred were undemocratic is precisely why they had to be kept secret from the American people.

  American military installations sprang up throughout the country. Electronic listening posts were set up on the Russian border; American spy planes used Iranian bases; espionage agents were smuggled across the frontier. Because the new regime had limited popular support the CIA had to help set up SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police. Twenty years later S
AVAK’s fearsome reputation would lead Amnesty International to claim that Iran had the world’s worst human rights record.

  The shah and the Iranian military realised that they owed their power to the United States, and Iran became a classic vassal state. The parallels with Stalin’s vassal states in eastern Europe were inescapable.

  The Iranian coup not only showed a new facet of American imperial strategy but demonstrated that global imperial power had passed definitively from Britain to America. Not only was Britain unable to protect its oil interests without US assistance, but once Mosaddeq had been removed American oil companies like Gulf Oil swiftly moved into the country, usurping what had once been a virtual British monopoly. In another sign of the times Kermit Roosevelt did not follow his grandfather Theodore and cousin Franklin into politics; when he left the CIA a few years later he joined Gulf Oil. The close relationship between American corporations and US covert operations that this exemplified was even more evident on the other side of the world, where events remarkably similar to those in Iran were unfolding with a cast of characters far more familiar to students of American history. America’s next target was the government of Guatemala.

  The coup in Iran could be presented as a legitimate move in the cold war between America and Russia. Soviet troops had not long before occupied parts of the country and still sat just over the border. Guatemala was nowhere near the Russian empire and had long been firmly entrenched in America’s camp. The robber baron Minor Cooper Keith had died nearly a quarter of a century before but his creation, the United Fruit Company, still exercised quasi-feudal control over the country. It was this control that was threatened when, in the same month that Mohammed Mosaddeq became prime minister of Iran, Guatemala held its first ever democratic presidential elections.

  Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, landowner, soldier and convinced capitalist, swept to power and announced plans for agrarian reform that were strikingly similar to those of the 1862 Homestead Act in the United States. Uncultivated land was to be compulsorily purchased and sold to smallholders. As the largest holder of such land was the United Fruit Company, this was bound to lead to conflict with the United States. Arbenz offered the company $3 an acre for its land, the value the company itself had declared when paying its property taxes, but United Fruit now declared the land to be worth $75 an acre. The scene was set for another imperial adventure, as United Fruit had far more powerful allies than the president of what one CIA document labelled a ‘Banana Republic’.

  CIA director Allen Dulles, his brother, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and the undersecretary of state Walter Bedell Smith were United Fruit shareholders. The Dulles’s former law firm had long represented United Fruit, and Allen Dulles had served on the corporation’s board of trustees. The company’s top public relations officer (who produced an anti-Arbenz film called Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas) was the husband of President Eisenhower’s private secretary. The corporation paid for American journalists to travel to Guatemala, where they were fed bloodcurdling stories of supposed communist infamy, and in February 1954 the CIA launched Operation Washtub, a scheme to ‘discover’ phoney Soviet arms caches in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.

  The campaign succeeded, and the CIA moved on to orchestrate a coup codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS. The agency set up a clandestine radio station to broadcast propaganda, jammed all Guatemalan stations and hired American pilots to bomb strategic points in Guatemala City. In this way the CIA’s invasion force of just 150 men was able to convince the Guatemalan public and President Arbenz that a major invasion was underway. Guatemala’s brief flirtation with democracy was snuffed out. Arbenz and his cabinet were allowed to flee the country, but hundreds of his supporters were rounded up and killed. Over the next forty years successive US-backed military regimes are said to have killed over 100,000 civilians as the repression that was necessary to maintain regime change continued. Arbenz himself spent the rest of his life in exile. In 1971 he was found dead in his bath in Mexico, prompting the same sort of rumours that had surrounded the death of a man whose fate he shared: Jan Masaryk in Prague.

  While the CIA was spreading pro-corporatist subversion around the globe the KGB was spreading pro-communist subversion. Soviet records that have become available, such as those known as the Mitrokhin archives, show that the KGB operated in much the same way as the CIA. It too launched ‘initiatives’, especially in the third world, quite independent of the formal diplomatic policy-makers, confident, like the CIA, that its political contacts at the highest levels would protect it. It too had a vision of a bipolar world, which was a mirror image of the CIA’s. Not only was the KGB convinced that American imperialism was constantly seeking Russia’s destruction, but it retained an ideological vision every bit as strong as its opponent’s. Readers of the Mitrokhin archives, knowing that communism was destined to collapse, may well find it bizarre that the bungling, brutality and bureaucracy of the KGB was not accompanied by unremitting cynicism but was leavened with an apparently genuine Marxist-Leninist world view: many of its leaders really believed that they were helping to act out the dramas Marx and Lenin had claimed to be historically inevitable, and that by encouraging anti-colonialist national liberation movements they would so weaken western capitalism that – as their ideology predicted – communism’s onward march to world domination would become unstoppable.

  The covert imperial adventures of both America and Russia after the Second World War were long shrouded in mystery. There still remains controversy about an aborted CIA project to depose the Iraqi president in 1959, a project now remembered mainly for the planned participation of a twenty-year-old CIA ‘asset’ named Saddam Hussein. With the end of the cold war Soviet archives began to be opened up, prompting America to do the same. In May 1997 the CIA released hundreds of documents relating to its 1954 coup in Guatemala, which demonstrated dramatically the moral equivalence of the two imperial powers. For example, the CIA documents included a list of fifty-eight people to be assassinated (although with the names of all fifty-eight carefully blanked out).

  The success of covert operations in Italy, Iran and Guatemala have led many on the left to see the CIA as the sinister architect of America’s global hegemony, just as their opponents have seen the KGB behind every American setback. Conspiracy theorists have found American spies under every rock. As secret archives are unlocked it has become obvious that the CIA has had amazingly long tentacles, which have encompassed enemies and allies alike. James Angleton, the CIA’s director of counterintelligence (who had previously represented the agency in Rome and been responsible for the manipulation of Italian elections after the Second World War), had a particular hatred for British prime minister Harold Wilson, and spent money to combat what he regarded as Wilson’s subservience to the Kremlin. Similarly the agency seems to have worked actively against Gough Whitlam’s government in Australia. But just because the United States tried to influence the course of events does not mean it succeeded. There is a danger of using the same faulty logic that pro-American observers used after the Second World War: the United States fought to bring down Hitler, Hitler was brought down, therefore the US brought down Hitler. The CIA wanted to push Wilson and Whitlam out; they were pushed out; therefore the CIA pushed them out. This is far too simplistic a reading of history. The CIA, like the KGB, has been just one of thousands of vectors carrying the influence of American and Russian rulers around the globe. It provides fertile soil to be tilled by thriller-writers, film makers and journalists, but the main tools of the new imperialism have been US financial institutions and corporations supported by old-fashioned military force.

  The role of military force in American foreign policy is sometimes regarded as a modern development. The classic text on post-war US foreign policy is Ambrose and Brinkley’s Rise to Globalism, first published in 1971 and regularly updated ever since. The book’s very first sentence describes the glaringly different conditions today from those that existed in 1939 when ‘no Amer
ican troops were stationed in any foreign country’. Today, the argument goes, the United States has interests beyond its borders that were entirely absent before the Second World War. In fact what this sentence illustrates is not a change in underlying policies but in perceptions, because of course there were American troops stationed in what most of the world would have described as foreign countries; there were significant military forces in the Philippines and Cuba, not to mention the island of Guam – where the commandant of the naval station also acted as the island’s governor. These were remnants of the old-style imperialism in which foreign territories from Florida to Hawaii had been annexed to become part of the United States. In 1939 the sailors at Subic Bay in the Philippines or Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were technically not in foreign countries; they were all part of the American empire (as indeed Guam remains, as does Guantanamo Bay – when it suits).

  The scale of American military intervention overseas dipped dramatically between the two world wars, but it then increased dramatically. One academic study quoted by Ferguson identified 168 separate instances of American armed intervention overseas between 1946 and 1965, one intervention every six weeks. The transition away from using force as a last resort started in the Middle East, with troops sent to Lebanon to protect the pro-American government in 1958 and additional air force units to Saudi Arabia a few years later to stop incursions from Yemen. Initially these were exceptions, with the United States relying on dollar diplomacy to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Whereas in 1939 there were a handful of military outposts in the colonies, by 1967 US troops were stationed in sixty-four countries – nineteen in Latin America, thirteen in Europe, eleven in Africa, eleven in the Middle East and surrounding area and ten in the far east. The collapse of the Russian Empire, far from reducing the desire for overseas bases, provided new opportunities for expansion. By 2006 there were 702 bases in 130 countries.