*
THE HISTORIAN TONY JUDT once told me that when he was invited to speak at American high schools about world history, the question he often asked students first was “Who was Mossadegh?” None of the students had ever heard of him. For these Americans, the name Mossadegh meant nothing, while for the entire Middle East, Judt said, it meant everything—everything about America’s role in the Middle East, and in the world.
In the 1950s, Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which at the time was the British government’s largest single investment abroad. Mossadegh was able to unite his country’s monarchic, Communist, and Islamic communities under the banner of independence and a nationalist vision. Mossadegh wanted to modernize Iran’s legal and political systems without also Westernizing Iran. Most of the world cheered on Mossadegh’s challenge to the West, especially young nations with still-fresh memories of colonial excesses, such as India, Turkey, and Egypt. The West, unsurprisingly, had a different response. The editors of Time magazine named Mossadegh Man of the Year in 1951, out of anger; the article characterized Mossadegh as a child who threw temper tantrums. Still, Mossadegh believed that the United States would intervene on his behalf against the British.
The United States worried they might lose the country to the Soviets. British diplomats didn’t believe that Iran’s communist party posed a threat, but happily manipulated the Americans’ fears, and convinced the Americans to join forces and wreak a special kind of havoc on Tehran. American intelligence officers used, according to the journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, “alarmist propaganda” to “instill panic that the country was sliding towards a communist takeover.” In August 1953, they bought off newspapers, employed thugs to pose as Communists, attacked mullahs and mosques, and spread rumors that Mossadegh was a Jew. In response to this phony violence, the real Communists soon rampaged through the city. A New York Times correspondent was nearly lynched.
In the chaos, Mossadegh was overthrown and Iran’s political development was forever disrupted. In a sense, all the tensions that define the relations between the United States and Iran today are rooted in the fall of Mossadegh. An older Iranian once asked an American journalist, “Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?… To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again.”
The coup preceded another historic event that would inspire young Muslims everywhere to rise up in defense of their country: the Algerian war for independence. In the academic Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet, his book about the political evolution of a young religious Iranian man before the Iranian revolution, a group of Iranian students learn about the plight of Algerian fighters battling against the French during the Algerian war of the 1950s and ’60s: hundreds had been burned alive in the Algerian desert. One student says, “The Iranians, as usual, confine themselves to weeping. If Mossadegh were still prime minister and we had freedom to act, Iran would do more than Egypt … We had a Rostam, a genuine lion.” It was the Iranians, these young Iranians said, who “let the English and Americans take Mossadegh away. The shame is ours as much as anybody else’s.”
After Mossadegh, the Shah returned to power. The American ambassador recommended to the Shah to create an “undemocratic independent Iran.” The Shah soon became one of the United States’ closest allies. Iran was as much a modernizing ideal for the Americans as Turkey and Afghanistan had been. Modernization projects sprung up throughout the countryside, destroying local communities and draining the country of millions of dollars. As part of his “White Revolution,” a massive modernization program “framed by Western ideas, experts, and aid,” as the academic David Ekbladh writes, the Shah supported a development project in the Khuzestan region that would use five rivers for hydroelectric power and irrigation, with the goal of transforming indigenous agricultural practices. The regime predicted the area would become a “Garden of Eden,” and for the Americans, according to Ekbladh, “one of the great symbols of postwar liberal development.” Instead, the project was beset by technical problems, displaced thousands of people from their homes, and ultimately failed. Economic productivity in the region actually fell.
Between 1970 and 1979, the number of Americans in Iran jumped from eight thousand to fifty thousand. The scholar James A. Bill writes that “as time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high proportion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillusioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran.” Conservative and rural Iranians who came to Tehran for work found themselves alienated and bewildered by the Western clothes, values, and behavior celebrated in their capital city, its magazines and miniskirts. “We found ourselves wondering,” one Iranian said, “is there any room for our own culture?”
At the same time, Iran became one of the United States’ largest customers for weapons. The former CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt—a spy who played a large part in the overthrow of Mossadegh—now worked for the weapons dealer Northrop. Henry Kissinger promised Iran any non-nuclear weapon it wanted; the Shah once spent $10 billion on weapons in just one year. Many Iranians knew that SAVAK, the brutal secret police service, which employed as many as sixty thousand agents, as well as millions of informants, and was known for spectacular acts of torture and violence, had been trained by the CIA and Mossad. “Whoever fell into the grip of that organization,” wrote the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapu?ciński, “disappeared without a trace, sometimes forever.”