by Tim Weiner
Would the weak-willed shah play his role? Ambassador Henderson did not believe he had the backbone to support a coup. But Roosevelt thought it would be hopeless to go ahead without him.
On June 15, Roosevelt went to London to show the plan to the boffins of British intelligence. They met in a headquarters conference room with a sign that read, “Curb Your Guests.” No objections were raised. The Americans, after all, were footing the bill. The British had conceived the coup, but their leaders could not play a commanding role in its execution. On June 23, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had major abdominal surgery in Boston. That same day, Winston Churchill suffered a severe stroke and almost died; the news was kept so quiet that the CIA heard nothing of it.
Over the next two weeks, the agency set up a two-pronged chain of command. One would run Zahedi’s military secretariat. The other would control the political warfare and propaganda campaign. Both reported directly to Frank Wisner. Kim Roosevelt set out to fly to Beirut, drive through Syria and Iraq into Iran, and link up with the Rashidian brothers. The CIA awaited a green light from the president of the United States.
It came on July 11. And from that moment on, almost everything went wrong.
“AFTER YOU, YOUR MAJESTY”
The secrecy of the mission was blown before day one. On July 7, the CIA had monitored a Tudeh Party radio broadcast. The clandestine radio warned Iranians that the American government, along with various “spies and traitors,” including General Zahedi, were working “to liquidate the Mossadeq government.” Mossadeq had his own military and political intelligence sources, independent of the Tudeh, and he knew what he was up against.
Then the CIA discovered that its coup had no troops. General Zahedi had not a single soldier under his control. The agency had no map of the military situation in Tehran, no roster of the Iranian army. Kim Roosevelt turned to Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, the father of U.S. special-operations forces. McClure was Eisenhower’s chief intelligence officer during World War II, ran the army’s Psychological Warfare Division during the Korean War, and specialized in overseeing joint operations with the CIA. He had worked side by side with Dulles and Wisner, and he trusted neither man.
General McClure had gone to Tehran to run the American military assistance advisory group, established in 1950 to provide up-and-coming Iranian officers with military support, training, and advice. As part of the CIA’s war of nerves, he cut off American contact with pro-Mossadeq commanders. Roosevelt relied entirely on McClure for a picture of the Iranian military and the political loyalties of its senior officers. President Eisenhower personally insisted that McClure receive a second star after the coup, noting his “very fine relationships with the Shah and other senior people in whom we are interested.” The CIA recruited a colonel who had served as the Iranian liaison to McClure’s military assistance group to help run the coup. He secretly enlisted about forty fellow officers.
Now all that was lacking was the shah.
A CIA colonel, Stephen J. Meade, flew to Paris to pick up the shah’s strong-willed and unpopular twin sister, Princess Ashraf. The CIA’s script called for her to return from exile and persuade the shah to back General Zahedi. But Princess Ashraf was nowhere to be found. The British intelligence agent Asadollah Rashidian tracked her down on the French Riviera. It took another ten days to coax her onto a commercial flight to Tehran. The inducements included a large sum of cash and a mink coat from the British intelligence service, along with a promise from Colonel Meade that the United States would bankroll the royal family should the coup fail. After a stormy face-to-face confrontation with her twin, she left Tehran on July 30, wrongly convinced that she had stiffened his spine. The CIA brought in General Norman Schwarzkopf to bolster the shah on August 1. The shah, fearing that his palace was bugged, led the general into the grand ballroom, pulled a small table to its center, and whispered that he would not go along with the coup. He had no confidence that the army would back him.
Kim Roosevelt spent the next week skulking in and out of the shah’s palace, pressuring him mercilessly, warning him that his failure to follow the CIA could lead to a communist Iran or “a second Korea”—in either case, a death sentence for the monarch and his family. Terrified, the shah fled to his royal resort on the Caspian Sea.
Roosevelt improvised furiously. He commissioned a royal decree dismissing Mossadeq and appointing General Zahedi as prime minister. He ordered the colonel who commanded the shah’s imperial guard to present a signed copy of this legally dubious document to Mossadeq at gunpoint and arrest him if he defied it. On August 12, the colonel chased after the shah on the Caspian and returned the next night with signed copies of the decrees. Now Roosevelt’s Iranian agents cascaded into the streets of Tehran. Newspapermen and printing presses spewed propaganda: Mossadeq was a communist, Mossadeq was a Jew. The CIA’s street thugs, posing as Tudeh Party members, attacked mullahs and defiled a mosque. Mossadeq counterattacked by shutting down the Majlis—under the law, only the Majlis could dismiss him, not the shah—rendering the senators and deputies whose votes had been purchased by the CIA useless.
Roosevelt forged ahead. He cabled headquarters on August 14 with an urgent request for $5 million more to prop up General Zahedi. The coup was set for that night—and Mossadeq knew it. He mobilized the Tehran garrison of the Iranian army and surrounded his home with tanks and troops. When the shah’s imperial guardsman went to arrest the prime minister, loyal officers seized him. Zahedi hid at a CIA safe house, watched over by one of Roosevelt’s officers, a rookie named Rocky Stone. The CIA’s hastily assembled cadre of Iranian colonels disintegrated.
Radio Tehran went on the air at 5:45 a.m. on August 16 announcing that the coup had failed. CIA headquarters had no clue what to do next. Allen Dulles had left Washington a week earlier for an extended European vacation, blithely confident that all was well. He was out of touch. Frank Wisner was out of ideas. Roosevelt, on his own, decided to try to convince the world that it was Mossadeq who had staged the failed coup. He needed the shah to sell that story, but the monarch had fled the country. The American ambassador in Iraq, Burton Berry, learned a few hours later that the shah was in Baghdad, begging for help. Roosevelt fed the outlines of a script to Berry, who advised the shah to broadcast a statement saying he had fled in the face of a left-wing uprising. He did as instructed. Then he told his pilot to file a flight plan for the world capital of exiled monarchs: Rome.
On the night of August 16, one of Roosevelt’s officers handed $50,000 to the station’s Iranian agents and told them to produce a crowd posing as communist goons. The next morning, hundreds of paid agitators flooded the streets of Tehran, looting, burning, and smashing the symbols of government. Actual members of the Tudeh Party joined them, but they soon realized “that a covert action was being staged,” as the CIA station reported, and “tried to argue demonstrators into going home.” After a second sleepless night, Roosevelt welcomed Ambassador Loy Henderson, who flew in from Beirut on August 17. On the way to meet him at the airport, members of the American embassy passed a toppled bronze statue of the shah’s father, with only the boots left standing.
Henderson, Roosevelt, and General McClure held a four-hour war council inside the embassy compound. The result was a new plan to create anarchy. Thanks to McClure, Iranian military officers were dispatched to outlying garrisons to enlist soldiers to support the coup. The CIA’s Iranian agents were ordered to hire more street mobs. Religious emissaries were sent to persuade the supreme Shi’ite ayatollah in Iran to declare a holy war.
But back at headquarters, Wisner despaired. He read the assessment of the CIA’s best analysts that day: “The failure of the military coup in Tehran and the flight of the shah to Baghdad emphasize Prime Minister Mossadeq’s continued mastery of the situation and foreshadow more drastic action on his part to eliminate all opposition.” Late on the night of August 17, he sent a message to Tehran saying that, in the absence of strong recommendations to the contrary from Roosevelt
and Henderson, the coup against Mossadeq should cease. A few hours later, sometime after 2 a.m., Wisner placed a frantic telephone call to John Waller, who was running the Iran desk at CIA headquarters.
The shah had flown to Rome and checked into the Excelsior Hotel, Wisner reported. And then “a terrible, terrible coincidence occurred,” Wisner said. “Can you guess what it is?”
Waller could not imagine.
“Think of the worst thing you can think of,” Wisner said.
“He was hit by a cab and killed,” Waller replied. “No, no, no, no,” Wisner responded. “John, maybe you don’t know that Dulles had decided to extend his vacation by going to Rome. Now can you imagine what happened?”
Waller shot back: “Dulles hit him with his car and killed him?”
Wisner was not amused.
“They both showed up at the reception desk at the Excelsior at the very same moment,” Wisner said. “And Dulles had to say, ‘After you, Your Majesty.’”
“A PASSIONATE EMBRACE”
At dawn on August 19, the agency’s hired mobs assembled in Tehran, ready for a riot. Buses and trucks filled with tribesmen from the south, their leaders all paid by the CIA, arrived in the capital. Ambassador Henderson’s deputy chief of mission, William Rountree, described what happened next as “an almost spontaneous revolution.”
“It began with a public demonstration by a health club or exercise club—lifting barbells and chains and that sort of thing,” he recounted. These were weightlifters and circus strongmen recruited by the CIA for the day. “They began shouting anti-Mossadeq, pro-Shah slogans and proceeded to march through the streets. Many others joined them, and soon there was a substantial demonstration in favor of the Shah and against Mossadeq. Shouts of ‘Long live the Shah!’ spread throughout the city and the crowd went in the direction of the building housing the Mossadeq cabinet,” where they seized ranking members of the government, burned four newspaper offices, and sacked the political headquarters of a pro-Mossadeq party. Two of the men in the crowd were religious leaders. One was the Ayatollah Ahmed Kashani. Alongside him was his fifty-one-year-old devotee, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, the future leader of Iran.
Roosevelt told his Iranian agents to hit the telegraph office, the propaganda ministry, and police and army headquarters. By afternoon, after a skirmish that killed at least three people, the CIA’s agents were on the air at Radio Tehran. Roosevelt went to Zahedi’s hideout, in the safe house run by the CIA’s Rocky Stone, and told him to be ready to proclaim himself prime minister. Zahedi was so frightened that Stone had to button him into his military tunic. At least a hundred people died on the streets of Tehran that day.
At least two hundred more were killed after the CIA directed the shah’s Imperial Guard to attack Mossadeq’s heavily defended home. The prime minister escaped but surrendered the next day. He spent the next three years incarcerated and a decade more under house arrest before he died. Roosevelt handed Zahedi $1 million in cash, and the new prime minister set out to crush all opposition and jail thousands of political prisoners.
“The CIA did remarkably well in creating a situation in which, in the proper circumstances and atmosphere, a change could be effected,” remembered Ambassador Rountree, later the assistant secretary of state for the Near East. “Quite clearly the matter did not work out as they had anticipated, or at least hoped, but it did work out in the end.”
In his hour of glory, Kim Roosevelt flew to London. On August 26, at two in the afternoon, he was received at 10 Downing Street by the prime minister. Winston Churchill was “in bad shape,” Roosevelt reported, his speech slurred, his vision occluded, his memory fleeting: “The initials CIA meant nothing to him, but he had a vague idea that Roosevelt must be connected in some way with his old friend Bedell Smith.”
Roosevelt was hailed as a hero at the White House. Faith in the magic of covert action soared. “Romantic gossip about the ‘coup’ in Iran spread around Washington like wildfire,” remembered the CIA’s Ray Cline, one of the agency’s star analysts. “Allen Dulles basked in the glory of the exploit.” But not everyone at headquarters saw the fall of Mossadeq as a triumph. “The trouble with this seemingly brilliant success” was “the extravagant impression of CIA’s power that it created,” Cline wrote. “It did not prove that CIA could topple governments and place rulers in power; it was a unique case of supplying just the right amount of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time.” By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime.
The shah returned to the throne and rigged the next parliamentary elections, using the CIA’s street gangs as enforcers. He imposed three years of martial law and tightened his control over the country. He called upon the agency and the American military mission in Iran to help him secure his power by creating a new intelligence service, which became known as SAVAK. The CIA wanted SAVAK to serve as its eyes and ears against the Soviets. The shah wanted a secret police to protect his power. SAVAK, trained and equipped by the CIA, enforced his rule for more than twenty years.
The shah became the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the Islamic world. For years to come, it would be the station chief, not the American ambassador, who spoke to the shah for the United States. The CIA wove itself into Iran’s political culture, locked in “a passionate embrace with the Shah,” said Andrew Killgore, a State Department political officer under the American ambassador from 1972 to 1976—Richard Helms.
The coup “was regarded as CIA’s greatest single triumph,” Killgore said. “It was trumpeted as a great American national victory. We had changed the whole course of a country here.” A generation of Iranians grew up knowing that the CIA had installed the shah. In time, the chaos that the agency had created in the streets of Tehran would return to haunt the United States.
The illusion that the CIA could overthrow a nation by sleight of hand was alluring. It led the agency into a battle in Central America that went on for the next forty years.
10. “BOMB REPEAT
BOMB”
Colonel Al Haney parked his new Cadillac at the edge of a decrepit air base in Opa-Locka, Florida, a few days after Christmas in 1953, stepped out onto the tarmac, and surveyed his new domain: three two-story barracks buildings on the fringes of the Everglades. Colonel Haney had buried the human wreckage he had created as the station chief in South Korea under a top secret shroud. Then he conned his way into a new command. A handsome rogue, thirty-nine years old, newly divorced, wearing a crisp army uniform on a muscular six-foot-two frame, he was Allen Dulles’s newly appointed special deputy for Operation Success, the CIA’s plot to overthrow the government of Guatemala.
Plots for a coup against the president, Jacobo Arbenz, had been kicking around the agency for almost three years. They were revived the instant that Kim Roosevelt returned triumphant from Iran. An elated Allen Dulles asked him to lead the operation in Central America. Roosevelt respectfully declined. He determined after studying the matter that the agency was going in blind. It had no spies in Guatemala and no sense of the will of the army or the people. Was the military loyal to Arbenz? Could that loyalty be broken? The CIA had no idea.
Haney had orders to devise a path to power for a cashiered Guatemalan colonel selected by CIA headquarters, Carlos Castillo Armas. But his strategy was no more than an elaborate sketch. It said only that the CIA would train and equip a rebel force and point it toward the presidential palace in Guatemala City. Wisner sent the draft over to the State Department for a bolstering from General Walter Bedell Smith, who put a new team of American ambassadors in place for the operation.
“THE BIG STICK”
Pistol-packing Jack Peurifoy had made his name ridding the State Department of leftists and liberals in 1950. On his first tour abroad, as ambassador to Greece from 1951 to 1953, he worked closely with the CIA to establish covert American channels of power in Athen
s. Upon arriving at his new post, Peurifoy cabled Washington: “I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick.” He met with President Arbenz and reported: “I am definitely convinced that if the President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along.”
Bedell Smith picked Whiting Willauer, a founder of Civil Air Transport, the Asian airline that Frank Wisner bought in 1949, as ambassador to Honduras. Willauer summoned pilots from CAT headquarters in Taiwan, with instructions to lie low and await orders in Miami and Havana. Ambassador Thomas Whelan went to Nicaragua to work with the dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was helping the CIA build a training base for Castillo Armas’s men.