AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman on this 50th anniversary of the C.I.A.-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. We're talking to Stephen Kinzer. He is author of a new book, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. In a minute, we're going to go to old film about the coup where former C.I.A. agents talk about their role in it. But talk about the man in the C.I.A. who spearheaded this, Kermit Roosevelt.
STEPHEN KINZER: One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was because I've always been curious about exactly how you go about overthrowing a government. What do you do after you choose an agent and assign a lot of money? Exactly how do you go about doing it? Kermit Roosevelt really is a wonderful way to answer that question. What happened was this: Kermit Roosevelt, who as you said was Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, was the Near East director for the C.I.A. He slipped clandestinely into Iran just around the end of July 1953. He spent a total of less than three weeks in Iran--that's only how long it took him to overthrow the government of Mossadegh. And one thing that I did realize as I was piecing together this story is how easy it is for a rich, powerful country to throw a poor, weak country into chaos. So what did Roosevelt do?
The first thing he did was he wanted to set Tehran on fire. He wanted to make Iran fall into chaos. So he bribed a whole number of politicians, members of Parliament, religious leaders, newspaper editors and reporters, to begin a very intense campaign against Mossadegh. This campaign was full of denunciatory speeches and lies about Mossadegh, dated and passed, without bitter denunciations of Mossadegh from the pulpits and in the streets, on the houses of Parliament.
Then, Roosevelt also went out and bribed leaders of street gangs. You had a kind of "Mobs 'R' Us," mobs-for-hire, kind of situation existing in Iran that that time. Roosevelt got in touch with the leaders of these mobs. Finally, he also bribed a number of military officers who would be willing to bring their troops in on his side at the appropriate moment. So when that moment came, the fig leaf of the coup was, as you said, this document that the Shah had signed, rejecting the prime ministership of Mossadegh, essentially firing him from office. Now, this was a decree that was of very dubious legality since in democratic Iran only the Parliament could hire and fire prime ministers. Nonetheless, the idea was that this decree would be delivered to Mossedegh at his house at midnight one night and then, when he refused to obey it, as he probably would, he would be arrested. That was the plot. But what happened was that the officer that Kermit Roosevelt had chosen to go to Mossdegh's house at midnight, presented the decree firing Mossadegh and preparing to arrest him but other, loyal soldiers stepped out of the shadows and arrested him. The coup had been betrayed. The plot failed. The man who was supposed to arrest Mossadegh was himself arrested. And Kermit Roosevelt woke up the next day with a cable from his superiors in the C.I.A. telling him, My God, you failed, you better get out of there right away before they find you and kill you. But Kermit Roosevelt, on his own, decided that he would stay. He figured, I can still do this, I was sent here to overthrow this government, I'm going to make up my own plan.
AMY GOODMAN: Now he had had help before from Norman Schwarzkopf, is that right, Schwarzkopf's father?
STEPHEN KINZER: There's a fantastic cast of characters in this story and one of them is Norman Schwarzkopf, who had been the head of the investigation into the Lindhburg kidnapping while with the New Jersey state police, had spent many years in Iran during the 1940s, and was a very flamboyant figure with great influence on the Shah. He was one of the people that Kermit Roosevelt brought in to pressure the timid Shah into signing this fateful decree. Now, the decree finally failed to have its desired effect, as I said.
And then Roosevelt on his own devised this plan where, first of all, he sent rioters out into the streets to pretend that they were pro-Mossadegh. They were supposed to yell "I love Mossadegh and communism. I want a people's republic!" and then loot stores, shoot into mosques, break windows, and generally make themselves repugnant to good citizens. Then he hired another mob to attack his first mob, thereby creating the impression that Iran was falling into anarchy. And finally on the climactic day, August 19, 1953, he brought all his mobs together, mobilized all of his military units, stormed a number of government buildings and then, in the climactic gunbattle at Mossadegh's house, a hundred people were killed until finally the coup succeeded, Mossadegh had to flee and was later arrested, and the Shah, who had fled in panic at the first sign of trouble a few days earlier, returned in triumph to Tehran and began what became 25 years of increasingly brutal and repressive rule.
AMY GOODMAN:
That issue of the U.S. government funding both the people in the streets who pretended that they were for Mossadegh but communist, and against Mossadegh, pro-Shah, I would like our guest, professor Ervand Abrahamian, Middle East and Iran expert at Baruch College, to comment on. This was a time, the British had used the ruse of anti-communism supposedly to lure in the U.S. Do you think the U.S. was fully well aware of the issue of oil being at the core of this, and also them possibly getting a cut of those oil sales.
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http://dissidentvoice.org/Articles8/DN_Iran-Coup-1953.htm
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