Review of ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, AN AMERICAN COUP AND THE ROOTS OF MIDDLE EAST TERROR, by Stephen Kinzer. Wiley, New Jersey, 2003.

Part III. (See October 28 post for Part I., November 9 for Part II.)

All The Shah’s Men was obviously a labor of love for Kinzer. Early in the book he reveals his respect for the famously eccentric Mossadegh, and for the Iranian people: "In intellect and education he towered above almost all of them [his countrymen], a drawback for a politician in some countries but not in Iran, where those who do not live the life of the mind have always admired those who do." (Alert readers will naturally wonder what countries Kinzer had in mind.)

In 2002, Kinzer went to Iran "looking for traces of Mohammad Mossadegh." On August 19, 49 years to the day Mossadegh was overthrown, he is alone at the compound where the incorruptible Iranian democrat spent the last eleven years of his life, under house arrest. Leaning against a back wall of the compound, Kinzer finds "the tall double doors of a sturdy iron gate." It is the only artifact remaining of Mossadegh’s home in Tehran. "What history this gate has seen!" Kinzer writes. "The house before which this gate stood was wrecked and burned on the night of August 19, 1953, and later the debris was bulldozed to make way for an apartment building. All that remains is the gate. This gives it great historical importance, ... an almost spiritual aura. I placed my hand on it and held it there for a long time." [I was quite moved by Kinzer’s words myself. B.B.]

All The Shah’s Men is a very painful read, but it is of enormous value just because it presents in one compelling narrative a monumental event in U.S. foreign policy, and because it comes at a time when Americans are critically in need of understanding such events. I recommend it without reservation.

Nevertheless, All The Shah’s Men cannot be entirely satisfying to those of us who had already become familiar with much of the information Kinzer presents. For reasons we will probably never know — and to the detriment of his account — Kinzer withholds useful information.

As noted earlier, John Foster Dulles and his younger brother Allen joined the Eisenhower administration as Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively. In fact, Kinzer gives an inadequate account of their history. Kinzer correctly reports that the brothers were born into wealth. Later, before being tapped by Eisenhower for government work, he tells us that they were both lawyers for the "legendary firm of Sullivan & Cromwell." Kinzer notes that "the Dulles brothers developed a special interest in Iran," and that "Foster always mentioned Iran when he spoke about countries he believed might soon fall to communism." What Kinzer fails to reveal is that Sullivan & Cromwell represented two of the world’s largest companies, Exxon and Mobil (each controlled by the Rockefeller family), and that each company had large contracts for oil with Anglo-Iranian, the super-greedy, and blatantly exploitative British oil company nationalized by Mossadegh. No wonder the Dulles Brothers were so concerned about Mossadegh.

The cynical reader will say "So? Nothing new here. Everyone knows that self-interest is what drives businessmen. That’s just politics as usual." Just so. Nevertheless, it is certain that many of Kinzer’s readers will be well-meaning, uncynical Americans who might naively attribute the Dulles brothers’ anti-communism to a sincere desire that the Iranian people be truly free. Contrasted with Truman’s, Acheson’s, and even Eisenhower’s original view that patience, and even assistance to Mossadegh was the best way to prevent a communist take-over in Iran (which, as we will see, under Mossadegh was not in the cards in any case) the Dulles brothers’ choice of violent covert action against him comes across as pathological. There is no valid reason for leaving this information out of any account of the coup. (The lamest excuse would be that there wasn’t room for it.)

Kinzer compounds this narrative lacuna by failing to make proper journalistic use of his long-departed New York Times predecessor, Kennett Love. Love was the Iran correspondent for the Times at the time of the coup, and Kinzer’s highly selective, even mysterious, references to him make for an interesting story in itself.

Mossadegh’s tolerance of Tudeh, the Iranian communist party, played right into the hands of the rabidly anti-communist Dulles brothers. Kennett Love, on the other hand, was equally clear that Mossadegh was firmly anti-communist, and that he had severely suppressed Tudeh when the occasion called for it. But the reader will not learn about this from Kinzer.

To learn more, and more that is interesting, of Kennett Love’s experience in Iran, we must go to a different book, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny seventeen years before the "fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York": Endless Enemies -- The Making of an Unfriendly World. (Congdon & Weed, New York, 1984.)

 

In the chapter Upsetting the Balance: Iran and Afghanistan, Kwitny tells us that in 1960, Kennett Love wrote a forty-one page report on the coup. We learn that the report was not published, but was instead handed over to then Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, the same man who directed the coup from Washington seven years earlier. Ultimately, Love’s paper disappeared, with all of Dulles’s papers, into the bowels of the Princeton University archives. At the time Kwitny wrote, the Dulles papers were administered by a panel headed by a former CIA legal counsel. They were made available only to selected researchers, on condition that "any articles to be based even indirectly on material from the papers" be submitted to advance review (read: prior censorship). Kwitny says that the Wall Street Journal was refused access to the papers several times, just because it would not agree to advance review.

But, the truth will out, as the saying goes. Kwitny received a copy of Love’s paper from an independent source, and thus did not feel bound to submit Endless Enemies to prior censorship, In fact, Kwitny and Congdon & Weed were pretty gutsy.

Kwitny did not give the title of the Love document in his possession, but Kinzer’s bibliography refers to it follows:

Love, Kennett. The American Role in the Pahlavi Restoration on August 19, 1953 (unpublished), the Allen Dulles Papers, Princeton University, 1960.

 

As we will see below Kinzer is familiar with Love’s paper.

On May 28, 1953, Mossadegh asked President Eisenhower for help in breaking the British-led boycott of Iranian oil, which was strangling Iran. Instead of helping Mossadegh, Eisenhower waits until June 29 to suggest that he cave in to the British. In the following sections from Endless Enemies — indented, Love is in double quotes, with Kwitny’s clarifications in square brackets. Italics are Kwitny’s, for emphasis; they do not appear in Love’s original paper. My intervening text is full-left-justified.:

"Thus far, Dr. Mossadegh had taken no positive steps to suggest to the United States that it had better help Iran or the country might turn to the communists.... He had been anticommunist throughout his career. During his first year in office the outlawed Tudeh [Communist] party fought him with the bitterness the communists usually reserved for Social Democrats. ..."

"There was no real abatement of Dr. Mossadegh’s anticommunism until after [the denial of] his appeal for aid to President Eisenhower... 28 May 1953 ...."

"The letter was a blow to the Iranian premier. It was evidently intended as such....

"There are several theories as to why he [Mossadegh] did not resign ..."

After a nicely objective presentation of the self-serving theories of Mossadegh’s foreign and domestic enemies, Love suggests, au contraire:

"Dr. Mossadegh may also have felt responsible for carrying to completion his campaign to make the Shah a truly constitutional monarch, limited to reigning rather than ruling. He often stated this principle as well as his loyalty to the Shah."

Further on, Love reinforces the impression that Mossadegh was a nationalist first and foremost:

"The Mossadegh regime was as vigorous as any in suppressing overt communist activities and in combating the party in the streets until receipt of President Eisenhower’s letter [which came after Eisenhower and the Dulleses had ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow]."

Later, Love describes the behavior of Tudeh, the communist bogey-man that Washington evoked to justify the coup. Mr. Carroll is the CIA agent in charge of recruiting street thugs to create the chaos that would be blamed on the communists:

"It is conceivable," he says, "that the Tudeh could have turned the fortunes of the day against the Royalists. But for some reason they remained completely aloof from the conflict. ... As it turned out, Mr. Carroll’s bands had the streets largely to themselves. Resistance was concentrated at government buildings.... My own conjecture is that the Tudeh were restrained by the Soviet Embassy because the Kremlin, in the first post-Stalin year, was not willing to take on such consequences as might have resulted from the establishment of a communist controlled regime in Tehran."

 

So far, then, we have a report by the New York Times’s man in Iran that Mossadegh opposed communism as much as he opposed British hegemony, and that the communist party in Iran might well have been a paper tiger. While certain of Love’s conjectures may well have been the product of seven years’ hindsight, the events on the ground in 1953 Iran were known to him, and these conclusions might easily have been drawn then. At the least, it is certainly of interest to the modern reader of All The Shah’s Men to know that even in 1960, Love’s observations suggested that the fanatical American anticommunists were wrong; wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Mossadegh. It is of interest to know that these observations were, and still are, being kept under lock-and-key. Truman and Acheson were right, and Kinzer does us a disservice by not giving them stronger posthumous support for their views through Love’s comments.

It gets worse. Kinzer refers to the Love paper just twice in the notes, each time conjoined with a public reference to the same event. (Interestingly, in the notes Kinzer also refers to Love’s forty-one page paper for Dulles as an "article.") The first reference is about a CIA-recruited Iranian thug, Shaban the Brainless. Kinzer includes with it the reference to Love’s New York Times article of August 23, 1953, in which he mentioned Shaban. The second reference to Love’s "article" is about Love’s secret meeting with Ardeshir Zahedi, the son of General Fazlollah Zahedi, Mossadegh’s replacement-designate. Included with it is a reference to a book by Stephen Dorril, M16: Inside the World of Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York: Free Press, 2000). (Dorril does not appear anywhere in All The Shah’s Men, but he apparently revealed Love’s meeting with Zahedi in his book.) Let us now look at how Kinzer and Kwitny treat this event. (The two authors are either indented and/or in double quotes. My comments within quotes are in square brackets.)

Kennet Love appears in All The Shah’s Men three days before the coup succeeds. On Sunday, August 16^th Kermit Roosevelt was desperately trying to recover from an attempt that had failed the night before. He had in his possession two firmans, "decrees that the Shah had signed dismissing Prime Minister Mossadegh and naming Zahedi to replace him." The firmans were of questionable legality, but the army was used to respecting royal power, and "the firmans gave the plotters of Operation Ajax a way to wrap themselves in that tradition." (Much as American politicians wrap themselves in Old Glory when they want to deflect attention from their questionable behavior.) The plotters decided to distribute the firman naming Zahedi prime minister "throughout the city, especially in the tough southern neighborhoods where mobs were recruited [by CIA operatives]." As Kinzer tells it:

"To be sure that the firman reached as wide an audience as possible, Roosevelt sent a message to the two American news correspondents in Tehran.... Both eagerly accepted. ..."

Upon arriving at the safe house, Kennett Love and Don Scwhind of the Associated Press were surprised:

"‘Lo and behold, there was a huge copying machine,’ Kennett Love of the New York Times recalled later. ‘Now this was 1953, and a copying machine is about the size of two refrigerators. But at that time neither I nor most American journalists or most American people would have been able to tell you what the initials CIA stood for.’" (In fact, Love’s quote here is not from his Dulles "article" but from a History Channel video Anatomy of a Coup.)

Here Kinzer leaves us hanging. We do not learn from him if, or how, the two newsmen helped to ensure that "the firman reached as wide an audience as possible." Kwitny is more forthcoming (Love in double quotes):

"Ardeshir told us about the Shah’s issuance of the two firmans. He showed us the one appointing his father premier. Then he handed it to the occupant of the house who took it into the adjoining dining room where there stood a large photoduplicating machine... As Ardeshir talked, two operatives made sheafs of copies of the firman. Each of us took a handful back to town. I distributed mine at the Park Hotel, except for one copy, which I still have."

We can be sure that some copies of this firman found their way to the streets, where CIA hooligans could force passers-by to read them and shout their hearty approval. Too bad Kinzer doesn’t let us in on this little secret, too.

The reader may think that I am being too hard on Kinzer. Me too, at first. After my initial annoyance with him, my softer instincts kicked in and I surmised that he had probably agreed to the same requirement of prior censorship that Kwitny had successfully skirted, and was thus forced — reluctantly, I hoped — to omit unsavory details of Love’s "article." Then I reviewed some materials I had downloaded from the New York Times archives in anticipation of this review.

On April 16, 2000, the New York Times printed a by-line by Kinzer’s colleague, James Risen: C.I.A. Tried, With Little Success, to Use U.S. Press in Coup. There, Risen fearlessly shares with Times readers precisely the same information found in Endless Enemies. Risen is indented, Love in double quotes:

In a 1960 paper he wrote while studying at Princeton University, Mr. Love explained that he ''was responsible, in an impromptu sort of way, for speeding the final victory of the royalists.''

Seeing a half-dozen tanks parked in front of Tehran's radio station, he said, ''I told the tank commanders that a lot of people were getting killed trying to storm Dr. Mossadegh's house and that they would be of some use instead of sitting idle at the radio station.'' He added, ''They took their machines in a body to Kokh Avenue and put the three tanks at Dr. Mossadegh's house out of action.''

Risen checked with Love on this meaty item:

Mr. Love, who left The New York Times in 1962, said in an interview that he had urged the tanks into action ''because I wanted to stop the bloodshed.''

According to Kwitny, "Kennett Love later explained, rather lamely perhaps, that he acted as he did because of ‘misguided patriotism.’" In any case, if Risen can quote Love without fear, so Kinzer could have quoted him in far more depth than he did.

But Kinzer, clever guy that he is, does indeed refer to Love’s direction of the tanks to Mossadegh’s house. In the text, the event is sandwiched between CIA chief Kermit Roosevelt listening to the takeover of Tehran Radio by his minions, and his departure to "fetch" General Zahedi for a triumphal entrance as the new premier. As Kinzer describes the action (my italics):

Military units led by anti-Mossadegh officers had already begun converging on the house. Inside, loyal soldiers built fortifications and prepared for battle. They were armed with rifles, machine guns, and Sherman tanks mounted with 75-millimeter cannons. Late in the afternoon the assault began. Defenders beat back wave after wave, leaving the sidewalks littered with bodies. Then after an hour of one-sided combat, the assailants gave a great cheer. Friendly army units had arrived with tanks of their own. A close quarters artillery duel soon broke out. Operation Ajax was approaching its climax.

Virtually every jot and tittle of Kinzer’s narrative has a reference note. He provides such a note for Roosevelt’s listening to the takeover of Tehran Radio, and for his "fetching" of General Zahedi. Why then, is there no reference note at all given for the arrival of "friendly army units ... with tanks of their own" — obviously the same tanks Kennett Love has publically admitted directing to Mossadegh’s house. How did Kinzer know that "the assailants gave a great cheer" upon their arrival? Kwitny doesn’t mention it. Did Kinzer learn of it in an interview with Kennett Love while researching for the book? Did he make it up to provide some extra color? Whatever the case, we must admit that Kinzer’s little gambit here is very, very slick.

(Patience, dear reader; the end of this review is in sight.)

In his penultimate chapter, wherein he discusses the joy felt by the Dulleses and other plotters at the success of the coup, Kinzer shows signs of the strain he has been under while presenting such an overwhelmingly dark picture of U.S.-British greed and duplicity. It is as if there is a program running in his head that tells him he has gone too far. There is a danger that readers of All The Shah’s Men might conclude that the coup was actually a mistake. Even worse, they might conclude that it was morally wrong. So, Kinzer "goes academic." He presents a masterfully "objective" and "unbiased" account of why the Dulles’s violent approach was chosen over Truman’s and Acheson’s recommendations of patience and assistance. He uses what I call the "he believed, she believed" variant of the "he said, she said" school of reporting. Here is how he does it:

"From the vantage point of history, it is easy to see the catastrophic effects of Operation Ajax. They will continue to plague the world for many years. But what would have been the effect of not launching the coup? President Truman insisted until his last day in office that the United States must not intervene in Iran. What if President Eisenhower had also held this view?"

We then read somewhat over a page of accurate presentations of what Eisenhower’s plotters [purportedly] believed, and suggestions by other analysts that they were mistaken. The scales are perfectly balanced. Thus, Kinzer is able to conclude:

"The crucial question of whether the American coup was necessary to prevent the Soviets from staging a coup of their own cannot be conclusively answered. No one will ever know how the Soviets might have acted or how successful they might have been. The coup certainly had disastrous aftereffects. What might have been the effects of not carrying it out must remain forever in the realm of speculation."

Of course it must. All conclusions following counterfactual historical premises are by definition speculative. It is also speculation that I will roll snake eyes with each of my next 100 throws of the dice. In fact, there is nothing in either Kinzer’s or in Love’s narratives that suggest the Soviets were planning a coup, or that they would have had the chutzpah to even make an attempt in the face of honest and massive U.S. support for Mossadegh.

In effect, Kinzer seriously proposes here that if Eisenhower had squashed the British oil embargo, had helped Mossadegh and his millions of passionately devoted supporters build Iran into a modern nation, had let it be known that America would defend true democracy in Iran (as opposed to corporate-friendly oligarchy or tyrannical monarchy), the Soviets would nonetheless have found the same fertile ground for subversion as if America had remained at arm’s length. This is preposterous on its face, and I think Kinzer knows it.

As I said above, I am deeply, and personally grateful to Kinzer for giving us this fine book. But, the coup against Mossadegh was a monstrous crime, even given the ambiguities of the day. In my view Kinzer should have said so. My best guess is that he has spent too long a stretch as a New York Times reporter.

Buy and read All The Shah’s Men, and Endless Enemies. (Get either the Viking or Congdon & Weed version of Endless Enemies — even without the references to Love, the Viking version is highly educational. It would be a nice tribute to one of America’s finest journalists. Tragically, and at great loss to our country, Jonathan Kwitny died of cancer in 1998. ) Draw your own conclusions.

I consider the role of the mainstream press in reporting U.S. foreign policy over the years to be a scandal in itself. How better to close this review than with an observation by Oswald Spengler:

"And as for the modern press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally ‘free’
— the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is."
The Decline Of The West, by Oswald Spengler. Abridged edition, Oxford, 1991. p. 388.

ELECTRONIC VOTING

I recently learned a bit about the extent that electronic voting has intruded into the democratic process, and of the danger to our democracy it poses.    See the report Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, by computer scientists at the Information Security Institute of Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Computer Science at Rice University. The report is online at avirubin.com/vote.pdf .   It requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't already have it on your computer, it is available for free download from Adobe Systems.

The following websites have a wealth of information on electronic voting:

www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/
www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/7720685p-8660180c.html
why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html#excerpts
www.legitgov.org

CAPITALISM

I have been suggesting for a while now that another threat to our democracy, and to the establishment of democracy around the world, are the free-market worshippers that now control the Bush administration's economic and foreign policies. It turns out that I am in good company. One of America's richest men, George Soros, has written an essay titled The Capitalist Threat, which he introduces as follows:

"In The Philosophy of History, Hegel discerned a
disturbing historical pattern -- the crack and fall
of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of
their own first principles. Although I have made
a fortune in the financial markets, I now
fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire
capitalism and the spread of market values into
all areas of life is endangering our open
and democratic society. The main enemy of the
open society, I believe, is no longer the
communist but the capitalist threat."

The entire essay can be read at www.theatlantic.com/issues/97feb/capital/capital.htm

ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, AN AMERICAN COUP AND THE ROOTS OF MIDDLE EAST TERROR, by Stephen Kinzer. Wiley, New Jersey, 2003.

(With more thanks to Bonnie)

Part II. (See October 28 post for Part I.)

In this important book, Kinzer provides information that should give even the most fervent anti-communist reason to doubt that the U.S. action in Iran was either intelligent or necessary. (Kinzer also provides a useful, and arguably sympathetic, discussion of Shiism, the version of Islam predominant in Iran. When the Arabs conquered Persia, they forced Islam on the population, but this Islam was modified by the precepts of Persia’s original, much older religion, Zoroastrianism. Kinzer notes the Zoroastrian emphasis on social justice and just rule, which is a major element of Shiism.)

First, we learn that after failing to intimidate Mossadegh into returning the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company under effectively the same rules that led to its nationalization in the first place, Britian's newly re-elected, super-imperialist Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried mightily to persuade the Truman administration to join Britain in a covert action to remove him from power. Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, rejected Churchill’s underhanded request out of hand. Truman and Acheson held British imperialism in contempt, and while recognizing that Mossadegh was a frustratingly difficult national leader to deal with, they also approved of his progressive reforms and his democratic aspirations for Iran. Contrary to the British, they also took seriously the fact that Mossadegh had been democratically elected and enjoyed the genuine support of the vast majority of Iranian citizens. In essence, they wanted to see Mossadegh succeed.

Second, we learn that the British did not once invoke a "communist threat" to the entire Middle East and beyond if Anglo-Iranian was not returned to them. In fact, the British and the Russian monarchy had in 1907 formally partitioned Iran between them, with the Russians taking the north sector. During WWII, the U.S., the British, and the Soviet Union worked together in Iran for crucially important strategic purposes. In 1944, the pro-Soviet wing of Iran’s first true political party, Tudeh, gained control of the party, and in 1946 even succeeded in winning a majority in Iran’s parliament. Tudeh implemented significant progressive reforms: limitations on child labor, a 48-hour workweek, guaranteed maternity leaves, and a minimum wage. Tudeh’s growing political strength led Stalin to attempt a takeover of Northern Iran in early 1946. He envisioned a "People’s Republic of Azerbaijan" run by Tudeh. Azerbaijanis resisted, and the Iranian Prime Minister at the time, Ahmad Qavam, persuaded Stalin to withdraw his troops as required by the agreement reached before the end of the war. "Jubilant Azerbaijanis celebrated by summarily executing all the Tudeh leaders they could find," writes Kinzer.

Tudeh also suffered in Iran proper. In 1949, a attempt was made to assassinate Mohammad Reza Shah. In spite of the evidence that the would-be assassin was a religious fanatic, the Shah blamed Tudeh, and took repressive measures against it. Thenceforth, Tudeh was only one of several players on the Iranian political field.

This history hardly speaks of a Soviet Union that presented a dire threat to Iranian sovereignty, or even to British commercial interests. The British knew this, and President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson, both savvy and far more scrupulous, knew it. In fact, Kinzer makes it clear that Truman and Acheson believed that the most effective way to forestall a communist Iran was to bring more democracy, more education, more freedom, and higher living standards to the Iranian people. They thought Mossadegh was the man for the job. Thus the British had no choice but to keep their mouths shut regarding a non-existent "communist threat." (More on Kinzer’s treatment of the "communist threat" in Part III of this review.)

Truman chose not to run for re-election, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, running as a Republican on a strong anti-communist platform, won the Presidency in 1952. Even before the inauguration, the British, knowing of the rabid anti-communist sentiments of Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles, purposefully played the "communist threat" card. Dulles and his younger brother Alan, who had been appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, easily manipulated Eisenhower into approving a coup against Mossadegh. (Poor Ike: going into his Presidency, he held the same view of Mossadegh as did Truman and Acheson. "I’d like to give the guy ten million bucks," he told British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden before the Dulles brothers worked their magic on him. Our current President, George W. Bush, is clearly as manipulable as Eisenhower was, but in Bush a humanity comparable to Eisenhower’s is much less in evidence.)

Following are a few pertinent tidbits from All The Shah’s Men. Kinzer in double quotes, others in single quotes or italics. My clarifications are in brackets.

In 1951 Iranian Prime Minister and British lackey Ali Razmara tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the line against nationalization of Anglo-Iranian.

"[British] Ambassador [Francis] Shepherd went so far as to send him [Razmara] a letter advising him to take ‘a strong line’ against ingrates who did not appreciate ‘the immense contributions of the British people in recent times.’" p. 78.

In August 1952 Truman finally caved in to Churchill’s pressure and asked Mossadegh to return Anglo Iranian to the British and submit to the opinion of the World Court, into which the British had dragged the nationalization controversy. Truman offered a bribe, in the form of a $10 million aid package and the end of the British embargo of Iranian oil, which was literally strangling Iran. Mossadegh rejected the offer in a scornful address to the Iranian parliament.

"He concluded with a telling moral observation: ‘Abiding by law and respecting the rights of the weak should not only not diminish, but would greatly enhance the position and prestige of the strong.’" p. 146.

After the initial coup attempt appeared to fail, the CIA agent in charge, Kermit Roosevelt, regrouped and decided on his own to make another attempt. Just as his second effort appeared on the brink of success, Roosevelt received a cable from Washington, ordering him to "flee immediately. "

"‘Never mind, chum,’ he told the confused radio man. ‘.... the tide has turned! Things are going our way! Right will triumph! All for the best, in the best of all possible worlds!’" p.181.

After the coup succeeded:

"For Roosevelt and his co-conspirators, this was, as the CIA post-mortem put it, ‘a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation that it is doubtful that any other can come up to it.’" p. 188.

Those who opposed the coup were right after all:

"[Subsequent events] eerily vindicate those who opposed the use of force against Mossadegh. President Truman predicted that mishandling the Iran crisis would produce ‘a disaster to the free world.’" p. 215.

Finally, Kinzer’s own statement:

"It is not farfetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." p. 203.

 

In 1984, I heard former CIA agent John Stockwell speak at a meeting of activists opposing President Reagan’s war against the people of Nicaragua. Stockwell had been the CIA station chief in charge of the not-so-covert action against Angola, conceived by President Nixon and his Secretary of State – or National Security Advisor, I don’t recall which – Henry Kissinger. Stockwell later wrote a book about the Angola operation, In Search Of Enemies.

In his talk, Stockwell said that CIA recruits were taught how to get a handle on the enemy-designate’s core persona and values by imagining him or her as a 5-year-old child. Kinzer’s description of Kermit Roosevelt and the Cold War CIA agents makes clear that this method is also useful in understanding many of America’s so-called defenders of freedom.

"CIA agents in those days shared a profound idealism, a conviction that they were doing the vital dirty work of freedom. Many combined the best qualities of the thinker and the adventurer. None epitomized that combination more fully than did Kermit Roosevelt."

As Roosevelt surreptitiously entered Iran:

"he could barely contain his excitement: ‘I remembered what my father wrote of his arrival in Africa with his father, [Theodore Roosevelt] ... It was a great adventure and all the world was young! I felt as he must have felt then. My nerves tingled, my spirits soared as we moved up the mountain road....’"

Children at play: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. To those who opt for violence as the first response to serious international issues, the advice of peace activist Alice Walker will forever be unintelligible:

                   "Look carefully at the present you are constructing. 
                     It should look like the future you dream of."

Coming up: Part III.