SA-5 target-tracking radar signals and then used to monitor an SA-5 launch. The system captured signals emitted from the SA-5 that proved indisputably that its target-tracking radar was of the nature demanded by an ABM. When Henry Kissinger, the primary American negotiator, next met with the Soviets in Geneva he was able, he later recalled, to stare “his Soviet counterpart in the eye and read him the dates and time they had cheated on the treaty. The cheating immediately ceased and the Soviets began a mole-hunt for the spy” who was reporting to American intelligence. Melody continued to provide vital intelligence on Soviet missile-tracking radars that were being tested at a key Soviet test range almost one thousand miles distant.6
Ultimately, then, judging the appropriateness of the coup distills down to balancing the very tangible suffering of the Iranian people (which could very well have been worse under a ruler other than the shah) against the intangible role Iran under the shah played in ensuring that the Cold War remained that way. Regardless of the security advantages it provided for U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the 1953 coup had far-reaching consequences. Certainly it colored the Iranians’ view of U.S. actions and promises during the 1979–81 hostage crisis in Tehran.7
The United States made its first sales of military equipment to Iran in June 1947 in consonance with the implementation of the Truman Doctrine and the subsequent Military Defense Assistance Program. As part of that program the shah was asked to submit what was anticipated to be a modest shopping list. What came back to Washington must have confounded U.S. officials: the shah asked for no less than $175 million in advanced weaponry, including heavy tanks and jet aircraft, and supplies enough for 200,000 troops, even though the Iranian army mustered only 120,000 at the time. The supplies eventually provided were valued at just $10.7 million.8 As the Cold War intensified, however, America’s resolve to limit the shah to items that were in his nation’s best economic and security interests diminished. From 1946 to 1952 the shah received $42.3 million in economic assistance and $16.6 million in military aid.9
The 1950s witnessed the shah consolidating his power and authority and successfully linking his own policy preferences with those of NATO. The U.S. government began to view the shah in a more positive light, and the U.S. ambassador in Tehran decided that the shah was the only Iranian political personage strong enough to forestall a communist takeover. Secretary of State Dean Acheson lauded the shah as the best hope of providing firmness and leadership, even though the monarch was already demonstrating indecisiveness, depression, and a bent for conspiracy.10 The State Department increasingly backed his pleas for military assistance despite Defense Department objections that the Iranian army had limited technical capabilities and was rife with internal corruption.11
As 1951 turned into 1952, Truman became increasingly worried about the support Mossadegh (a wealthy and popular, if eccentric, career civil servant and uncompromising nationalist) was receiving from the Tudeh party. The president was further nettled by the failure of the Iranians and the British to resolve their differences over the British-dominated Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and oil profits. Both sides refused to compromise, which deepened the crisis and eventually led to an international boycott of Iranian oil organized by the British. Truman decreed a harder line toward the Mossadegh government in the spring of 1952, initiating in very small steps policies that would later be attributed to Eisenhower but which clearly originated before he was elected president. Included in Truman’s actions was planning for a political action program to prevent a pro-communist government from assuming control in Iran.12
While Britain eagerly sought U.S. support for overt military action against the Iranians, preferably as a co-partner, Truman walked a fine line between deterring intervention in Iran and maintaining a positive relationship with America’s closest ally. The last thing Truman wanted was any use of force. Military action might push the Soviet Union either to invade and occupy Iran itself or to invoke a 1921 treaty with Iran that permitted intervention in case of foreign invasion, and thus create a casus belli between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although no one doubted that Iran was of vital strategic interest to America, the U.S. military had pressed hard to prevent a policy that might require American military intervention in that country, or anywhere else in the Middle East, for any reason. With U.S. military forces still weakened by the rapid reduction in manpower that followed World War II, and with most of the remaining fighting forces committed to combat in Korea and to the defense of Asia, the Pentagon had no confidence that the United States could fight and win the global war with the USSR that would certainly follow military intervention in Iran in support of British interests.
The vision of an increasingly unstable Iran was nevertheless unsettling to the Truman administration, which feared that the Soviets would exploit the internal unrest and either gain covert control of the Iranian government or, in a worst-case scenario, actually invade and occupy Iran—an understandable worry when the tenor of the times is considered.13 Thus, in the summer of 1952, with these concerns in mind and in fear that British policies would fail, the Truman White House began drafting options for some type of U.S. intervention in Iran.14 U.S. military forces were being steadily built up in response to the Korean War and as a by-product of the seminal Cold War document NSC-68 to a point that would enable the United States to match Soviet military power anywhere in the world—and would perforce establish a potential capability to intervene in the Persian Gulf region in addition to meeting other global commitments.15 The Truman administration was thus poised to pursue a more active stance in resolving the standoff between the British and the Iranians.
Mohammed Mossadegh’s rule as prime minister was a brief one. He acceded to the post on 29 April 1951 (a political act essentially forced on the shah) and was ousted less than two years later by dint of a political action operation that was equal parts “romantic intrigue, timing, and luck,” to co-opt Evan Thomas’s description.16 Of course, the repercussions of a British oil boycott on the Iranian economy and continuing violence in the streets of Tehran should not be discounted when evaluating the factors that ultimately brought success to the coup plotters. John Stempel argues that the British boycott (which the Eisenhower administration adhered to) was more instrumental in bringing down Mossadegh than the CIA, claiming that the CIA official behind the coup only “encouraged forces who were already restive and prepared to participate.”17 The CIA’s official history of the coup details the progression of the coup, and missteps therein, to the point at which CIA officials in Washington and Tehran all thought the operation was a failure. When the coup actually succeeded, thanks mostly to initiatives taken by Iranian army officers and Iranian agents of the CIA, U.S. government officials were as surprised as anyone.18 The CIA officer who supervised the operation later averred that the coup succeeded because the intended results were desired by a majority of the Iranian people and not because of any CIA derring-do.19
The last straw for the Americans was a visit to Washington by an intransigent Mossadegh in the fall of 1952. Immediately on returning to Iran from Washington, Mossadegh broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain and ordered the official British presence to be out of Iran by 1 November. With this rupture the British opted to pursue a scheme that had been gestating in the London headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) for some time: the overthrow of Mossadegh. But lacking an official presence in Iran with which to mount a covert program, and with limited financial resources, the British turned to their American cousins for assistance. The original SIS plan, Operation Boot, was a complicated scheme involving tribal uprisings in the provinces coordinated with political moves in Tehran. At the most senior level, the politically appointed CIA officials were generally favorable to the overall goal of the British, if not necessarily the means.
The British raised the idea again in February 1953, by which time the Eisenhower administration had concluded that removing Mossadegh offered the best solution for ensuring that Iran did not turn to the Soviets or otherwise become a communist regime. The White House told the CIA that it should proceed jointly with the SIS to achieve this objective. Although the senior officials at State and CIA (political appointees all) looked favorably on the idea, most officers two or three echelons below the top—in
