Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T07:54:42.119Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Causes of Iran's 1953 Coup: A Critique of Darioush Bayandor's Iran and the CIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mark J. Gasiorowski
Mark J. Gasiorowski*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents a detailed criticism of Darioush Bayandor's book Iran and the CIA. Bayandor argues that certain Shi'a clerics, rather than the US Central Intelligence Agency, were the main actors responsible for overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953. Bayandor presents no major new evidence to support this claim. He gives too much weight to certain statements, draws unwarranted inferences from others, and discounts or disregards a wealth of evidence that conflicts with his account. He overemphasizes the role of civilian crowds in the overthrow of Mosaddeq and underemphasizes the role of Iranian military units organized by the CIA. And he fails to acknowledge the importance of US and especially British efforts to foment opposition to Mosaddeq before the coup.

Type
Special Section: 28 Mordad
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2012 , pp. 669 - 678
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bayandor, Darioush, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical page and chapter references here refer to this book.

2 See especially Gasiorowski, Mark J., “The 1953 Coup d'État Against Mosaddeq,” in Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, ed. Gasiorowski, Mark J. and Byrne, Malcolm (Syracuse, NY, 2004), 227–60Google Scholar.

3 Wilber, Donald N., Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq of Iran (Central Intelligence Agency, 1954), 65–66Google Scholar. This source is one of at least three official CIA histories of the coup.

4 See Gasiorowski, Mark, “Obituary of Richard Cottam,” Iranian Studies, 30 (1997): 415–17Google Scholar.

5 Cottam, Richard, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh, 1964), 226Google Scholar.

6 Lapping, Brian, End of Empire (London, 1985), 221Google Scholar. In an August 1983 interview, Cottam told me that CIA officers had financed these crowds.

7 Love, Kennett, The American Role in the Pahlevi Restoration on 19 August 1953 (unpublished manuscript, Princeton University library, 1960), 40–41Google Scholar.

8 Letter from Ardeshir Zahedi, 4 April 1984.

9 See The New York Times, 26 May 2000, 6; and Ardeshir Zahedi, “Five Decisive Days, August 14–18,” 1953 (unpublished manuscript). The latter is an English translation of an article originally published in the Iranian magazine Ettela'at Mahanah in 1957, which Ardeshir gave me in 1984.

10 The New York Times, 26 May 2000, 6; Letter from Ardeshir Zahedi, 4 April 1984. There is a wealth of evidence indicating that both Fazlollah and Ardeshir Zahedi worked closely with Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA team during this period, including Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, and Roosevelt's memoir Countercoup (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

11 Zahedi, “Five Decisive Days,” 38ff., describes an elaborate plan his father allegedly developed in the days before 19 August to take over Kermanshah province and use it as a base to carry out sabotage operations in Tehran and work against Mosaddeq. This plan is not discussed in any other source dealing with the coup, and none of the participants in the coup I interviewed ever mentioned it. Yet Bayandor strongly emphasizes this plan and uses it in his efforts to discredit the Roosevelt and Wilber accounts.

12 Roosevelt, Countercoup, 180–81, 186; interview with Kermit Roosevelt, 5 June 1985. In his memoir, Roosevelt says these crowds were organized by the “Boscoe brothers”—his pseudonym for the Rashidian brothers. In my interview he said he had confused the two sets of operatives.

13 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 66–70.

14 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, appendices A and B; Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d'État,” 233–40. These clerics very likely were Behbehani, Kashani, and Borujerdi; see “The 1953 Coup d'État,” 333.

15 Woodhouse, C.M., Something Ventured (London, 1982), 128–29Google Scholar.

16 Koch, Scott A., “Zendebad, Shah!”: The Central Intelligence Agency and the Fall of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, August 1953 (Washington, DC, June 1998), 63Google Scholar.

17 Love, The American Role, 37–38.

18 Bayandor's dismissal of Roosevelt's account is central to his argument. His main criticisms are that Roosevelt's account is inconsistent with Ardeshir Zahedi's account of his father's plan to take over Kermanshah province, with statements made by US Ambassador Loy Henderson, and with Wilber's history of the coup (pp. 118–23). As discussed above (see n. 11 and accompanying text), I consider Zahedi's account unreliable. Henderson always publicly denied that the United States had tried to overthrow Mosaddeq and was not involved in the operational details, so Roosevelt's account inevitably differs from his. While there are inconsistencies between the Roosevelt and Wilber accounts, they are relatively minor and hardly surprising, inasmuch as Roosevelt's account was written 25 years after Wilber's. Wilber was not in Tehran during the coup and did not debrief all members of the coup team, so his account omits some details. Consequently, while Roosevelt's account undoubtedly is incorrect in minor ways, Bayandor's wholesale dismissal of it seems unwarranted.

19 The New York Times, 19 and 20 August 1953.

20 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 65–69.

21 Bayandor cites a statement by Interior Minister Qolamhossein Sadiqi as evidence that military units had not seized all major intersections by the early afternoon of 19 August (p. 220, n. 49). However, in this statement Sadiqi mentions being stopped by a police officer at one such intersection and by soldiers backed by tanks at another.

22 The New York Times, 20 August 1953.

23 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 75, D6–D7; Gasiorowski, Mark J., U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 85–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 67 and Appendix D.

25 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–54 (FRUS), vol. X (Washington, DC, 1989), 783.

26 This is clear from the Wilber and Roosevelt accounts and was emphasized in interviews I conducted in the mid-1980s with several of the CIA participants.

27 Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 67–75; FRUS, vol. X 784–85.

28 See Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, chs. 4–5.

29 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup., ch. 6 and 235–36.

30 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 243–44.

31 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 232–40.

32 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 240–48.

33 Bayandor argues that the CIA had not pre-planned the events of 19 August and therefore cannot be credited with orchestrating them (p. 168). However, when I interviewed the CIA station chief in 1984 and Kermit Roosevelt in 1985, they both told me they had regarded the coup plan merely as a starting point and expected to improvise as events unfolded.

34 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 250–55; Loy Henderson Interview, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 1972.

35 Love, The American Role, 31–32; Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 251. Love states that he met Ardeshir Zahedi at a CIA officer's home, where the decrees were being copied. Zahedi does not mention this in Five Decisive Days.

36 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 251 and 337, n. 58.

37 A major theme of Bayandor's book is that Roosevelt deliberately overstated the CIA team's role in the coup, providing an account that “borders on prevarication,” though Bayandor presents no credible evidence of this (pp. 7–8, 155). He also seems to imply that Roosevelt provided false information to Wilber and to British officials, which found its way into Wilber's history of the coup and an important British document (pp. 8, 144). This enables Bayandor to discount the two major insider accounts of the CIA's role in the coup.

38 I examine the relative importance of domestic and foreign actors in detail in Mark J. Gasiorowski, “Conclusion: Why Did Mosaddeq Fall?,” in Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 261–77.