Despotism and Godless Terrorism

excerpted from the book

Overthrow

America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq

by Stephen Kinzer

Times Books, 2006, paper

p113
[John Foster] Dulles rose through the firm [Sullivan and Cromwell] more quickly than anyone ever had. By 1927, sixteen years after being hired, he was its sole managing partner and one of the highest-paid lawyers in the world.

Dulles's web of international contacts grew spectacularly during this period. In the spring of 1915, President Wilson named Dulles's uncle, Robert Lansing, to succeed William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Lansing arranged for the young lawyer to receive a string of diplomatic assignments. By the time he reached his mid-thirties, Dulles was on easy terms with some of the world's richest and most powerful men. From them he absorbed what one of his biographers, the historian Ronald Pruessen, called a "rather simplistic" view of the world.

Dulles may have been a world watcher, but his thoughts always demonstrated the angular vision that came with a perch in a Wall Street tower... The way he saw the world, in particular-the kinds of problems he identified and the kinds of concerns that led him to identify them-had been shaped by a lifetime of experiences .... Day-to-day work with [corporate] clients, spread out over forty years, strongly affected his perspective on international affairs and helped shape the frame of reference from which he operated long before he was secretary of state. It helped him develop a particular interest in the commercial and financial facets of international relations and a particular attentiveness to what he thought were the economic imperatives of American foreign policy . .. . Economic preoccupations were often a dominant and initiating force in his world view and thought.

The list of Dulles's clients at Sullivan & Cromwell is nothing less than a guide to the biggest multinational corporations of early-twentieth-century America. Some were companies that Cromwell had brought to the firm years before, like the Cuban Cane Sugar Corporation and International Railways of Central America. Others were American banking houses, among them Brown Brothers and J. and W. Seligman, which were then effectively governing Nicaragua, and foreign houses like Credit Lyonnais and Dresdner Bank. Dulles arranged loans to governments across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East; sued the Soviet Union on behalf of American insurance companies; organized a worldwide takeover campaign for the American Bank Note Company, which had printed the fateful Nicaraguan stamp showing a volcano in fictitious eruption; and negotiated utility concessions in Mexico and Panama for the American & Foreign Power Company. His clients built ports in Brazil, dug mines in Peru, and drilled for oil in Colombia. They ranged from International Nickel Company, one of the world's largest resource cartels, to the National Railroad Company of Haiti, which owned a single sixty-five-mile stretch of track north of Port-au-Prince.

Dulles was especially interested in Germany, which he visited regularly during the 1920s and 1930s. According to the most exhaustive book about Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm "thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime," and Dulles spent much of 1934 "publicly supporting Hitler," leaving his partners "shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression." When asked during this period how he dealt with German clients who were Jewish, he replied that he had simply decided "to keep away from them,"

p115
Dulles believed that the heritage of the United States, which he described as "in its essentials a religious heritage," placed Americans under a special obligation. He felt what he called "a deep sense of mission," a conviction that "those who found a good way of life had a duty to help others to find the same way." Like his father, he was a born preacher; like his grandfather, a missionary. When the 1950s dawned, he was looking for a way to channel his "Christian insight and Christian inspiration" into the fight against "the evil methods and designs of Soviet Communism."

The best way to do that, Dulles quite reasonably concluded, was to become secretary of state. He thought he had the job in 1948, when his old friend Thomas Dewey seemed poised to take the presidency from Harry Truman, but voters frustrated his ambition by giving Truman an upset victory. Determined to try again, he spent the next several years expanding his network of Republican contacts and publishing articles about Communism and the Soviet threat.

In the spring of 1952, Eisenhower declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. He had spent his adult life in the army, far from the refined circles in which Dulles moved. A mutual friend, General Lucius Clay, suggested that Dulles fly to Paris to meet Eisenhower, who was then serving as supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Dulles found this a fine idea, and arranged to give a speech in Paris as a way of disguising the true purpose of his trip. He and Eisenhower met for two long conversations. The general was much impressed. He relied on Dulles throughout his presidential campaign and soon after the election named him secretary of state.

Dulles was then sixty-five years old. He had been shaped by three powerful influences: a uniquely privileged upbringing, a long career advising the world's richest corporations, and a profound religious faith. His deepest values, beliefs, and instincts were those of the international elite in which he had spent his life. One of his biographers wrote that he was "out of touch with the rough and tumble of humanity" because "his whole background was superior, sheltered, successful, safe."

At the State Department, as at Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles was famous for his solitary style of decision making. It was said that he carried the department in his hat, and that even his assistant secretaries did not know what he was planning. He shaped important policies without consulting anyone inside or outside the State Department. The diplomat and historian Townsend Hoopes called him "a compulsive oversimplifier" whose "mind was fundamentally shrewd and practical, but quite narrow in range, seeking always immediate and tangible results."

Dulles was an intellectual loner-a man who relied not merely in the last resort, but almost exclusively, in large matters and small, on his own counsel. His views on important matters were developed by an apparently elaborate, structured and wholly internalized process .... The resulting conclusion thus stood at the end of a long chain of logic and, when finally arrived at, was not easily reversed.

By nature Dulles was stiff and confrontational. He conveyed an absolute certainty about his course that many took for arrogance. One biographer wrote that he "scarcely knew the meaning of compromise, and insofar as he understood it, he despised it." He believed that a secretary of state should not be a conciliator but rather, in Eisenhower's words, "a sort of international prosecuting attorney."

In the take-no-prisoners style he had honed at Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles wished neither to meet, accommodate, or negotiate with the enemy. He resolutely opposed the idea of cultural exchanges between the United States and any country under Communist rule. For years he sought to prevent American newspapers from sending correspondents to China. He steadfastly counseled Eisenhower against holding summit meetings with Soviet leaders. "Indeed," one biographer has written, "evidence of America-Soviet agreement on any issue troubled him, for he judged it could only be a ruse designed to cause the free world to 'let down its guard."

Dulles, as a lawyer, had been trained in adversarial terms; interests, for him, could at times appear to be whatever was necessary to overwhelm the opponent. Moreover, he had been much impressed by Arnold Toynbee's suggestion that without some kind of external challenge, civilizations withered and died. It was not too difficult, then, for threats and interests to merge in Dulles's mind: to conclude that the United States might actually have an interest in being threatened, if through that process Americans could be goaded into doing what was necessary to preserve their way of life.

p117
Britain was at that moment facing a grave challenge, its ability to project military power, fuel its industries, and give its citizens a high standard of living depended largely on the oil it extracted from Iran. Since 1901 a single corporation, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, principally owned by the British government, had held a monopoly on the extraction, refining, and sale of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian's grossly unequal contract, negotiated with a corrupt monarch, required it to pay Iran just 16 percent of the money it earned from selling the country's oil. It probably paid even less than that, but the truth was never known, since no outsider was permitted to audit its books. Anglo-Iranian made more profit in 1950 alone than it had paid Iran in royalties over the previous half century.

In the years after World War II, the currents of nationalism and anticolonialism surged across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They carried an outspokenly idealistic Iranian, Mohammad Mossadegh, to power in the spring of 1951. Prime Minister Mossadegh embodied the cause that had become his country's obsession. He was determined to expel the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, nationalize the oil industry, and use the money it generated to develop Iran.

Mossadegh, a European-educated aristocrat who was sixty-nine years old when he came to power, believed passionately in two causes: nationalism and democracy. In Iran, nationalism meant taking control of the country's oil resources. Democracy meant concentrating political power in the elected parliament and prime minister, rather than in the monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah. With the former project, Mossadegh turned Britain into an enemy, and with the latter he alienated the shah.

In the spring of 1951, both houses of the Iranian parliament voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry.

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"We English have had hundreds of years of experience on how to treat the natives," one [British diplomat] scoffed "Socialism is all right back home, but out here you have to be the master."

p118
Mossadegh's rise to power and parliament's vote to nationalize the oil industry thrilled Iranians but outraged British leaders...

"Persian oil is of vital importance to our economy," [British] Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison declared. "We regard it as essential to do everything possible to prevent the Persians from getting away with a breach of their contractual obligations."

p118
Britain had dominated Iran for generations, and during that time had suborned a variety of military officers, journalists, religious leaders, and others who could help overthrow a government if the need arose. Officials in London ordered their agents in Tehran to set a plot in motion. Before the British could strike their blow, however, Mossadegh discovered what they were planning. He did the only thing he could have done to protect himself and his government. On October 16, 1952, he ordered the British embassy shut and all its employees sent out of the country. Among them were the intelligence agents who were / organizing the coup.

p118
Modern Iran has produced few figures of Mossadegh's stature. On his mother's side he was descended from Persian royalty. His father came from a distinguished clan and was Iran's finance minister for more than twenty years. He studied in France and Switzerland, and became the first Iranian to win a doctorate in law from a European university. By the time he was elected prime minister, he had a lifetime of political experience behind him.

... In January 1952, Time named him [Mossadegh] man of the year, choosing him over Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. It called him an "obstinate opportunist" but also "the Iranian George Washington" and "the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries."

Barely two weeks after Mossadegh shut the British embassy in Tehran, Americans went to the polls and elected Eisenhower as president. Soon after tat, Eisenhower announced that Dulles would be his secretary of State. Suddenly the gloom that had enveloped the British government began to lift.

At that moment the chief of CIA operations in the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, happened to be passing through London on his way home from a visit to Iran. He met with several of his British counterparts, and they presented him with an extraordinary proposal. They wanted the CIA to carry out the coup in Iran that they themselves could no longer execute.

p121
[The British] sent one of their top intelligence agents, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, to Washington to present their case to Dulles. Woodhouse and other British officials realized that their argument - Mossadegh must be overthrown because he was nationalizing a British oil company - would not stir the Americans to action. They had to find another one. It took no deep thought to decide what it should be. Woodhouse told the Americans that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward / Communism.

... Woodhouse gave Dulles the idea that he could portray Mossadegh's overthrow as a "rollback" of Communism. The State Department, however, did not have the capacity to overthrow governments. For that, Dulles would have to enlist the CIA. It was still a new agency, created in 1947 to replace the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Truman had used the CIA to gather intelligence and also to carry out covert operations, such as supporting anti-Communist political parties in Europe. Never, though, had he or Secretary of State Acheson ordered the CIA-or any other agency-to overthrow a foreign government.

Dulles had no such reservations. Two factors made him especially eager to use the CIA in this way. The first was the lack of alternatives. Long gone were the days when an American president could send troops to invade and seize a faraway land. A new world power, the Soviet Union, counterbalanced the United States and severely restricted its freedom to overthrow governments. An American invasion could set off a confrontation between superpowers that might spiral into nuclear holocaust. In the CIA, Dulles thought he might have the tool he needed, a way to shift the balance of world power without resorting to military force.

Calling on the CIA had another great attraction for Dulles. He knew he would work in perfect harmony with its director, because the director was his younger brother, Allen. This was the first and only time in American history that siblings ran the overt and covert arms of foreign policy. They worked seamlessly together, combining the diplomatic resources of the State Department with the CIA's growing skill at clandestine operations.

Before the coup could be set in motion, the Dulles brothers needed President Eisenhower's approval. It was not an easy sell. At a meeting of the National Security Council on March 4, 1953, Eisenhower wondered aloud why it wasn't possible "to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us." Secretary of State Dulles conceded that Mossadegh was no Communist but insisted that "if he were to be assassinated or removed from power, a political vacuum might occur in Iran and the communists might easily take over." If that happened, he warned, "not only would the free world be deprived of the enormous assets represented by Iranian oil production and reserves, but... in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some sixty percent of the world's oil reserves, would fall into Communist hands."

Dulles had two lifelong obsessions: fighting Communism and protecting the rights of multinational corporations.

p124
{Dulles] deepest instinct, rather than any cool assessment of facts, told him that overthrowing Mossadegh was a good idea. Never did he consult with anyone who believed differently.

The American press played an important supporting role in Operation Ajax, as the Iran coup was code-named. A few newspapers and magazines published favorable articles about Mossadegh, but they were the exceptions. The New York Times regularly referred to him as a dictator. Other papers compared him to Hitler and Stalin. Newsweek reported that, with his help, Communists were "taking over" Iran. Time called his election "one of the worst calamities to the anti-communist world since the Red conquest of China."

To direct its coup against Mossadegh, the CIA had to send a senior agent on what would necessarily be a dangerous clandestine mission to Tehran. Allen Dulles had just the man in Kermit Roosevelt, the thirty-seven-year-old Harvard graduate who was the agency's top Middle East expert. By a quirk of history, he was the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, who half a century earlier had helped bring the United States into the "regime change" era.

p124
{Kermit] Roosevelt slipped into Iran at a remote border crossing on July 19, 1953, and immediately set about his subversive work. It took him just a few days to set Iran aflame. Using a network of Iranian agents and spending lavish amounts of money, he created an entirely artificial wave of anti-Mossadegh protest. Members of parliament withdrew their support from Mossadegh and denounced him with wild charges. Religious leaders gave sermons calling him an atheist, a Jew, and an infidel. Newspapers were filled with articles and cartoons depicting him as everything from a homosexual to an agent of British imperialism. He realized that some unseen hand was directing this campaign, but because he had such an ingrained and perhaps exaggerated faith in democracy, he did [thing to repress it.

p125
[Kermit] Roosevelt quickly came up with an alternative plan. He would arrange for Mohammad Reza Shah to sign royal decrees, or firmans, dismissing Mossadegh from office and appointing General Zahedi as the new prime minister. This course could also be described as "quasi-legal," since under Iranian law, only parliament had the right to elect and dismiss prime ministers. Roosevelt realized that Mossadegh, who among other things was the country's best-educated legal scholar, would reject the firman and refuse to step down. He had a plan for that, too. A squad of royalist soldiers would deliver the firman, and when Mossadegh rejected it the soldiers would arrest him.

... [Kermit] Roosevelt summoned General Norman Schwarzkopf, a dashing figure who had spent years in Iran running an elite military unit-and whose son would lead the Desert Storm invasion of Iraq four decades later-to close the deal.

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Mossadegh's supporters tried to organize demonstrations on h] behalf, but once again his democratic instincts led him to react naively. He disdained the politics of the street, and ordered leaders of political parties loyal to him not to join the fighting. Then he sent police units to restore order, not realizing that many of their commanders were secretly on Roosevelt's payroll. Several joined the rioters they were supposed to suppress.

... Roosevelt chose Wednesday, August 19, as the climactic day. On that morning, thousands of demonstrators rampaged through the streets, demanding Mossadegh's resignation. They seized Radio Tehran and set fire to the offices of a progovernment newspaper. At midday, military and police units whose commanders Roosevelt had bribed joined the fray, storming the foreign ministry, the central police station, and the headquarters of the army's general staff.

... the shah returned home and reclaimed the Peacock Throne he had so hastily abandoned. Mossadegh surrendered and was placed under arrest. General Zahedi became Iran's new prime minister.

Before leaving Tehran, Roosevelt paid a farewell call on the shah. This time they met inside the palace, not furtively in a car outside. A servant brought vodka, and the shah offered a toast.

"I owe my throne to God, my people, my army-and to you," he said.

Roosevelt and the shah spoke for a few minutes, but there was little to say. Then General Zahedi, the new prime minister, arrived to join them. These three men were among the few who had any idea of the real story behind that week's tumultuous events. All knew they had changed the course of Iranian history.

Overthrow

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