and unimpeded use” of the intelligence facilities in Iran, the memo giving clear recognition of the need to sustain a stable government in that country. With that objective in mind, the inspector general “urged” the department to “undertake a long-range study of U.S.-Iran relations and ensure a high level of monitoring” of this relationship.21 The Tacksman sites thus constituted a crucial element in the U.S.-Iran equation.
Map 1. Former Soviet Socialist republics to the northeast of Iran
It took World War II to create what appeared to be a permanent alliance between Iran and the United States.22 Although the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact apparently raised no concerns in the American legation in Tehran when it became public knowledge, the April 1941 Nazi invasion of Greece did. Two factors were at play: there was an established German commercial and political presence in Iran reaching back several decades under Reza Shah, and the Nazi-Soviet pact left open the possibility of Soviet demands to operate from Iranian airfields, a situation the impotent Iranian army would be powerless to prevent. The geopolitical matrix was further complicated when neighboring Iraq expelled the British in favor of ties with Germany.23 Because of the war in Europe, British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force units in the Middle East and Persian Gulf were thus forced to rely on Iran even more than previously for fueling stations and replenishment facilities. Then, on 21 June 1941, three German army groups invaded the USSR, one of which (Army Group South under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt) headed for the Trans-Caucasus region in southwestern Russia, toward the Caspian and Iran. The British and the Soviets—suddenly allies—immediately insisted that Iran expel all German nationals, of whom there were some three thousand, among them intelligence agents who had been establishing underground networks in the country.24 The Iranian monarch, Reza Shah, refused.
With vital trans-European lines of transport and communication to the USSR severed, there remained only two avenues of supply by which vital U.S. Lend-Lease and other materials could reach the Soviets: the treacherous Murmansk run for ship convoys, and the Trans-Iranian Railroad from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet border in northwestern Iran.25 The solution was the occupation of Iran in the north by Soviet troops and by British forces in the Gulf region to facilitate the movement of Lend-Lease goods.26 Reza Shah, whose army was exquisitely undistinguished in its efforts to deter the arrival of foreign troops, was forced into exile on the island of Mauritius (later to die in South Africa), and his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the Peacock Throne in a figurehead status. During this period Iranians came to view both Soviet and British troops as uninvited transgressors who were looting their country while bringing to Iran’s frontier a war in which they had no perceptible stake.
The thirty thousand U.S. troops committed to support the occupation were stationed in southwestern Iran, where they provided logistical support and transport for the Lend-Lease materials arriving at Persian Gulf ports.27 The tripartite occupation deepened Iranians’ suspicions and hostility toward foreigners, feelings entirely merited in the north, where the Soviets used their position to subvert the provinces under their control by supporting the Iranian communist Tudeh party against the central Iranian government. Conversely, the British never received credit for the humanitarian assistance they gave to the Iranian people throughout this period.28
The U.S. government’s stake in Iran, as well as its diplomatic and military presence, concomitantly increased as a consequence of its support for Britain and the Soviet Union. The war’s end found the United States calling on its allies to end their occupation of Iran by 2 March 1946, as agreed to in the 1942 Tripartite Treaty of Albania signed by all three governments.29 With the onset of the Cold War, however, the Soviet Union had no intention of honoring that agreement. And in the wake of British retrenchment in the Middle East in early 1947, the United States found itself replacing the British lion as the tacit protector of Iran.
The Iranian coup of 1953 was a direct consequence of the perceived Soviet threat to Iran in 1953 and its impact on U.S. national security interests. It was this potential menace that ultimately convinced Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to consider replacing the Iranian government with a regime more in line with the goals of Western governments. While some observers blessed with hindsight claim that this danger was overstated, senior U.S. government officials of both political parties had no doubt at the time that the Soviets and communism posed very real threats to U.S. national security interests and to world freedom.
And, indeed, events in the postwar years were alarming. In 1946 and 1947 the Soviets solidified their control over Eastern Europe and local Communist parties attempted to gain control of governments in Italy, France, Turkey, and Greece. In Czechoslovakia, the elected president, Edvard Beneš, allowed Communists to participate in his government. They proceeded to undermine him, gain control of the government, and corrupt it into a Soviet satellite. In 1947, after two years of obstruction and deceit, Stalin initiated serious attempts to force the British, French, and American occupiers out of West Berlin, culminating in the blockade of 1948. In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, built from plans stolen by spies operating in the United States and Great Britain; these acts of treason helped inspire the anticommunist mania that came to be known as McCarthyism. The Soviet A-bomb also moved President Truman to consider including the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in the U.S. national security policy; he signed the approval on 31 January 1948.1 It is also not without significance that in 1946 the Soviet intelligence service (called the MGB at the time) had intelligence officers in London, Rome, Paris, Washington, and New York while there was not a single Western intelligence officer, from any service, in Moscow.2 That these hostile intelligence officers were obtaining American secrets and recruiting important American officials as well as “regular” citizens became evident with the trials of State Department officer Alger Hiss and those involved in the theft of America’s deepest secret, the atomic bomb.
Truman and Eisenhower were further alarmed by a series of Soviet policies between 1945 and 1953 that could or would have threatened Iran. Undeniable evidence of the Soviet mischief that abounded in Europe, on the western approaches to Iran (e.g., Greece and Turkey), and inside and adjacent to Iranian frontiers generated serious worries about the future independence of Iran. Both presidents viewed U.S. security interests, in Jeffery Kimball’s words, “in holistic terms: security comprised an interrelated global system of military balances, geographic positions, political stability, ideological unity, national prestige, and economic resources.”3 And both leaders were determined to prevent further communist expansion. Meanwhile, on mainland Asia the victory of Mao Zedong turned the world’s most populous nation into a communist dictatorship. In June 1950 communist North Korea, with the (albeit reluctant) assent of Stalin, invaded South Korea, followed six months later by massive Chinese intervention in the conflict. U.S. leaders feared that the USSR would exert its growing influence in other weak spots in the world as well.4 In the spring of 1953 the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb and commenced a build-up of military forces.
These actions alone were sufficient to stimulate aggressive counterpolicies on the part of the United States and its allies. Neither President Truman nor President Eisenhower could ignore a potential communist challenge in a nation of such crucial strategic importance to the West as Iran. And Ike remembered well the beating the Democratic party had taken following the communist
