It was a classic cloak-and dagger operation, but Kermit Roosevelt, CIA operative in Iran, neither wore a cloak nor carried a dagger when he brought down the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Tehran 50 years ago, in October 1953.

Operation Ajax, as the plot was known, was no mere CIA-engineered coup in a backwater Central American country. It was an event that reshaped the entire Middle East — indeed the world — enabling the Shah to return from exile to the Peacock Throne and impose a tyranny on his people that sparked the 1979 revolution, a revolution that to this day continues to inspire activists throughout the Muslim world.

Stephen Kinzer, a veteran New York Times correspondent, drawing on both academic research and on new material from long secret CIA documents leaked to his paper in 2000, has just published “All the Shah’s Men,” an engrossing account of Operation Ajax, complete with saboteurs, secret agents and bought-off newspapers, bribes, staged riots and suitcases full of cash, and of midnight meetings between a terrified Shah — who fled his country at the first sign of trouble — and a determined Roosevelt.

But beyond being a suspenseful narrative of CIA skullduggery, Kinzer’s book is a tragic tale of the head-on encounter between a Cold-War obsessed US and Iran’s political, cultural and religious heritage, of which Mossadegh was the product, and about which Washington was clueless.

By the 1930s, the proud people of Iran were already smarting under the humiliation imposed on them by British control of their oil, their one great national asset. Consider this: In 1947, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (AIOC) reported an after-tax profit of $60 million, of which the Iranians received the chump change of $12 million. Workers in Abadan, the oil city where tens of thousands of Iranian workers lived in hovels, in the searing heat, often without running water or electricity, rioted against their British employers, who had reneged on an earlier agreement to pay them more than the basic wage of 50 cents a day.

Mossadegh, an Iranian patriot, was widely seen by his people as the answer to foreigners’ blatant exploitation of their national resources. As Kinzer writes: “In his time, Mohammed Mossadegh was a titanic figure. He shook an empire and changed the world. People everywhere knew his name.”

But Britain’s policy toward the Iranian leader was implacable. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Truman administration: “From now on, Britain would be interested only in deposing him.” The American president was not responsive. When the incoming Republicans took power in the White House, the British pitched their call for a coup in Tehran as necessary to avert an imminent “communist takeover of the country.” It was then that President Eisenhower alerted the boys at Langley to get moving.

Operation Ajax, in and by itself, was a success. But, in a dialectical sense, it was a great failure for Washington, since it set the stage for the overthrow of the Shah, and the advent of Khomeini, in 1979. All of which, Kinzer reminds us, is a “stark warning to the United States and to any country that ever seeks to impose its will on a foreign land.”

Americans, in their innocence and their lack of interest in foreign affairs, knew little, and cared less, about their government’s adventurism in the Middle East. Writes Kinzer: “The violent anti-Americanism that emerged from Iran after 1979 shocked most people in the United States. Americans had no idea of what might have set off such bitter hatred in a country where they had always imagined themselves more or less well liked. That was because almost no one in the United States knew what the Central Intelligence Agency did there in 1953.”

Or, in the overlapping of historical events in that region, of what it wrought.

In this riveting, brilliant reconstruction of that fateful coup 50 years ago, whose consequences continue to reverberate to this day, Kinzer concludes: “It is not far-fetched 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.”

Food for thought here.

- Arab News Opinion 4 September 2003