Research Paper in Intelligence Studies

Mark J. Gasiorowski

The Causes of Iran’s 1953 Coup: A Critique of Darioush Bayandor’s Iran and the CIA

This article presents a detailed criticism of Darioush Bayandor’s book Iran and the CIA. Bayandor argues that certain Shi’a clerics, rather than the US Central Intelligence Agency, were the main actors responsible for overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953. Bayandor presents no major new evidence to support this claim. He gives too much weight to certain statements, draws unwarranted inferences from others, and discounts or disregards a wealth of evidence that conflicts with his account. He overemphasizes the role of civilian crowds in the overthrow of Mosaddeq and underemphasizes the role of Iranian military units organized by the CIA. And he fails to acknowledge the importance of US and especially British efforts to foment opposition to Mosaddeq before the coup.

Darioush Bayandor’s book Iran and the CIA1 presents a revisionist account of the coup d’état of 19 August 1953 that ousted Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosad- deq. Most existing accounts, including my own,2 blame the coup primarily on Britain and especially the United States, whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out a covert operation to overthrow Mosaddeq. Bayandor argues that the CIA’s role in Mosaddeq’s overthrow was quite limited and that the main perpetrators were Shi’a clerics, especially Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hossein Borujerdi, Ayatollah Moham- mad Behbehani, and Ayatollah Abolqasem Kashani. Bayandor presents no major new evidence to support his account. Rather, his argu-

ment is based on a selective reading of evidence that has been available to scholars for years. He gives too much weight to certain statements, draws unwarranted inferences from others, and discounts or disregards a wealth of evidence that conflicts with his account. And he interviewed only one participant in the coup (Ardeshir Zahedi), pre- venting him from examining this complex, inadequately documented event very deeply.

Mark J. Gasiorowski is Professor, Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA.

1Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (New York, 2010). All par- enthetical page and chapter references here refer to this book.

2See especially Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d’État Against Mosaddeq,” in Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, ed. Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (Syracuse, NY, 2004), 227–60.

Iranian Studies, volume 45, number 5, September 2012

ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/12/050669–10 ©2012 The International Society for Iranian Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2012.702555

Bayandor’s main argument is that Borujerdi, Behbehani, Kashani, and their allies organized crowds that marched into central Tehran on 19 August, triggering events that led to Mosaddeq’s downfall. These clerics therefore were the key perpetrators of the coup, in Bayandor’s view (see chapters 4–7 and especially pp. 172–75). They had become increasingly disillusioned with Mosaddeq’s secularist, republican ten- dencies, especially after Iran’s monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, threatened to leave Iran in a February 1953 dispute with Mosaddeq and after the Shah did actu- ally leave the country on 16 August, shortly after a CIA-organized coup attempt failed on the night of 15–16 August. These clerics then organized anti-Mosaddeq crowds on the morning of 19 August, triggering the appearance of anti-Mosaddeq army units that seized key locations, subdued pro-Mosaddeq units, and arrested Mosaddeq’s main allies. Mosaddeq surrendered the following day. I applaudBayandor’s industrious effort to analyze the coup and his insistence on exam-

ining the role of Iranian actors inMosaddeq’s downfall—a sensitive topic that has received too little attention. However, I believe there are three key flaws in his analysis. First, the historical evidence does not support Bayandor’s claim that Ayatollahs Beh-

behani, Kashani, and especially Borujerdi—or any other clerics, for that matter—were the key organizers of the 19 August crowds. Bayandor’s evidence for this claim is a state- ment Borujerdi apparently made sometime after the Shah’s 16 August departure that “the country needs a king,” as well as statements by Richard Cottam and Ardeshir Zahedi that Behbehani and Borujerdi were involved (pp. 153–54). It is not clear when Borujerdi made the statement Bayandor cites. Bayandor initially

implies that it occurred “in the immediate aftermath of” the Shah’s departure on 16 August, but then quotes a statement from a key source saying it occurred on the morning of 19 August (p. 153). However, Bayandor’s quotation of this statement is inaccurate and misleading; the source merely speaks of certain people “having been informed that a pro-Shah statement … by Borujerdi … might be forthcoming during the day” of 19 August (emphasis added).3 Even if Borujerdi made this statement on 19 August, it could not have been crucial to fomenting these crowds, which appeared early that morning. Moreover, the statement “the country needs a king” is hardly an incitement for street protests, even allowing for the nuanced language Iran’s clerics often use. Indeed, Bayandor admits that this statement “may just have been intended as a preliminary warning to Mosaddeq” (p. 153). Bayandor does not present any evi- dence showing how this statement catalyzed these crowds. Richard Cottam was a CIA officer working on Iran in Washington in August 1953

and later became a well-known academic specialist on Iran.4 What Bayandor cites is a passage Cottam wrote in 1964 stating that “Behbehani dollars” had been given to cle- rical leaders and mob organizers to hire the 19 August crowds.5 Cottam clearly implies in this passage not only that clerics were involved in hiring these crowds but also that

3Donald N. Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq of Iran (Central Intelligence Agency, 1954), 65– 66. This source is one of at least three official CIA histories of the coup.

4See Mark Gasiorowski, “Obituary of Richard Cottam,” Iranian Studies, 30 (1997): 415–17. 5Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh, 1964), 226.

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some unidentified source had paid them to do so—in dollars. In 1982 Cottam stated that the crowds had been “paid for by American dollars,” meaning dollars provided by American officials.6 In fact, New York Times reporter Kennett Love, who covered these events in Tehran, reported that so much American currency entered Tehran’s foreign exchange markets that the exchange rate for dollar checks fell from as much as 128 rials per dollar to less than 80 soon after the coup.7 Consequently, while Cottam affirmed that clerics were involved in organizing these crowds, he maintained that US officials had instigated them. Ardeshir Zahedi is the son of Fazlollah Zahedi, a retired general who had been plot-

ting against Mosaddeq since the fall of 1952 and was chosen by US officials as nominal leader of the CIA coup plot in early 1953. By all accounts he was deeply involved in the coup, working closely with his father and the CIA coup team. Thus he is hardly a disinterested observer. Ardeshir wrote in a 2006 memoir that clerics were involved in organizing the 19 August crowds, and he told Bayandor that Borujerdi was involved (p. 233, n. 30). Ardeshir also once told me that Borujerdi was involved, though he added that Behbehani, Kashani, the lay politicians Hossein Makki and Mozaffar Baqa’i, and the fascist Somka Party were involved as well.8 However, in two other pub- lished accounts, Ardeshir did not mention clerical involvement in these events, por- traying the 19 August crowds as a spontaneous popular uprising.9 He also vehemently denied that the CIA played any role in Mosaddeq’s downfall and claimed that his father never even met Kermit Roosevelt, who headed the CIA team in Iran.10 For these reasons I do not consider Ardeshir Zahedi a reliable source. Bayandor relies heavily on Zahedi’s account, raising doubts about many facets of his argument.11

Bayandor also downplays, dismisses, or ignores considerable evidence that the CIA team was directly involved in organizing these crowds. One such piece of evidence is Cottam’s statement, cited above, that US officials had financed the 19 August crowds. Two CIA officers independently told me that they together had delivered

6Brian Lapping, End of Empire (London, 1985), 221. In an August 1983 interview, Cottam told me that CIA officers had financed these crowds.

7Kennett Love, The American Role in the Pahlevi Restoration on 19 August 1953 (unpublished manu- script, Princeton University library, 1960), 40–41.

8Letter from Ardeshir Zahedi, 4 April 1984. 9See The New York Times, 26 May 2000, 6; and Ardeshir Zahedi, “Five Decisive Days, August 14–18,”

1953 (unpublished manuscript). The latter is an English translation of an article originally published in the Iranian magazine Ettela’at Mahanah in 1957, which Ardeshir gave me in 1984.

10The New York Times, 26 May 2000, 6; Letter from Ardeshir Zahedi, 4 April 1984. There is a wealth of evidence indicating that both Fazlollah and Ardeshir Zahedi worked closely with Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA team during this period, including Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, and Roosevelt’s memoir Countercoup (New York, 1979).

11Zahedi, “Five Decisive Days,” 38ff., describes an elaborate plan his father allegedly developed in the days before 19 August to take over Kermanshah province and use it as a base to carry out sabotage oper- ations in Tehran and work against Mosaddeq. This plan is not discussed in any other source dealing with the coup, and none of the participants in the coup I interviewed ever mentioned it. Yet Bayandor strongly emphasizes this plan and uses it in his efforts to discredit the Roosevelt and Wilber accounts.

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$10,000 to an intermediary to give to Ayatollah Kashani to organize crowds on 19 August, though they did not know whether Kashani actually received this money. In his memoir, Kermit Roosevelt stated that two Iranians working under the direction of the CIA team organized some of these crowds. He later clarified to me that these were the CIA station’s two main intelligence operatives, Ali Jalali and Faruq Kayvani.12 The CIA history of the coup authored by Donald Wilber does not say who organized the crowds, but it states that Jalali and Kayvani led some of these crowds and encouraged them to ransack or burn opposition newspaper offices and secure the release from prison of key participants in the CIA coup plot.13 It also explains that the initial coup plan drawn up by US and British intelligence officers called for certain clerics to play a crucial role in the coup, implying that US or British operatives had close contact with these clerics and discussed carrying out a coup with them— actions that almost certainly encouraged these clerics.14 A British intelligence officer who was deeply involved in these events, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, stated that these crowds were organized by Jalali andKayvani and themain British intelligence operatives in Iran, the Rashidian brothers, who were working closely with the CIA team.15 A second CIA history of the coup says the Rashidians “almost certainly” were involved in organizing these crowds.16 Kennett Love states that a CIA officer “made an important contribution” in organizing these crowds.17

Bayandor questions why Cottam’s later accounts differ from his 1964 account (p. 177, n. 12), dismisses Roosevelt’s account as “disingenuous” (p. 120),18 downplays Wilber’s account of CIA involvement in the events of 19 August (pp. 128–31), and ignores the statements by Woodhouse, Love, and the second CIA history. However, this evidence, taken together, is far stronger than Bayandor’s evidence that clerics were

12Roosevelt, Countercoup, 180–81, 186; interview with Kermit Roosevelt, 5 June 1985. In his memoir, Roosevelt says these crowds were organized by the “Boscoe brothers”—his pseudonym for the Rashidian brothers. In my interview he said he had confused the two sets of operatives.

13Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 66–70. 14Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, appendices A and B; Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup

d’État,” 233–40. These clerics very likely were Behbehani, Kashani, and Borujerdi; see “The 1953 Coup d’État,” 333.

15C.M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured (London, 1982), 128–29. 16Scott A. Koch, “Zendebad, Shah!”: The Central Intelligence Agency and the Fall of Iranian Prime

Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, August 1953 (Washington, DC, June 1998), 63. 17Love, The American Role, 37–38. 18Bayandor’s dismissal of Roosevelt’s account is central to his argument. His main criticisms are that

Roosevelt’s account is inconsistent with Ardeshir Zahedi’s account of his father’s plan to take over Ker- manshah province, with statements made by US Ambassador Loy Henderson, and with Wilber’s history of the coup (pp. 118–23). As discussed above (see n. 11 and accompanying text), I consider Zahedi’s account unreliable. Henderson always publicly denied that the United States had tried to overthrow Mosaddeq and was not involved in the operational details, so Roosevelt’s account inevitably differs from his. While there are inconsistencies between the Roosevelt and Wilber accounts, they are relatively minor and hardly surprising, inasmuch as Roosevelt’s account was written 25 years after Wilber’s. Wilber was not in Tehran during the coup and did not debrief all members of the coup team, so his account omits some details. Consequently, while Roosevelt’s account undoubtedly is incorrect in minor ways, Bayandor’s wholesale dismissal of it seems unwarranted.

672 Gasiorowski

the key organizers. Indeed, Bayandor admits that his evidence is “circumstantial” and “may, as such, be seen as interpretative or deductive” (p. 172). We probably never will know very clearly which actors played what roles in orga-

nizing these crowds. However, the evidence now available suggests that both the CIA team and clerics such as Behbehani were involved and that the CIA team provided most or all of the money used to hire these crowds. Consequently, Bayandor’s argu- ment that the CIA’s role in the coup was minimal and Shi’a clerics were the key per- petrators is dubious. The second flaw in Bayandor’s analysis is that he overemphasizes the role of the

civilian crowds that appeared on 19 August and underemphasizes the role of military units in the overthrow of Mosaddeq. This is crucial to his argument that Shi’a clerics were responsible for Mosaddeq’s downfall because, while these clerics may have helped organize the civilian crowds, they had little or no ability to organize military units against Mosaddeq. Bayandor deemphasizes the role of these military units mainly by arguing that they were galvanized into action by the civilian crowds and by down- playing the importance of military actions on that fateful day. He also downplays evi- dence that these anti-Mosaddeq military units were linked to the CIA coup team. Bayandor credits the civilian crowds with galvanizing the military units into action

by claiming that military units began to act against Mosaddeq only in the early after- noon of 19 August, after seeing the civilian crowds that emerged that morning (p. 174). This claim is directly contradicted by Kennett Love, who reports that mili- tary and police units began to act against Mosaddeq on the evening of 18 August, attacking pro-Mosaddeq crowds “in a frenzy” and shouting pro-Shah and anti-Mosad- deq slogans. He also argues that these attacks emboldened the civilian crowds that appeared the next morning.19 In his history of the coup, Wilber reports that the civi- lian crowds assembled in the bazaar area of south Tehran by 9:00 am on 19 August; anti-Mosaddeq military units had seized control over all major intersections in Tehran by 10:15 am; and the armed forces’ commander reported to Mosaddeq at about 10:30 am that he no longer controlled the army.20 Bayandor ignores Love’s account and dis- misses Wilber’s account as a misunderstanding that is not backed up by other evidence (pp. 108 and 220, n. 48), but he presents no evidence that supports his own interpret- ation.21 While the appearance of civilian crowds on 19 August undoubtedly helped encourage military opposition to Mosaddeq, the available evidence indicates that mili- tary units had begun to act decisively against Mosaddeq before these crowds appeared and therefore were not galvanized into action by them. Anti-Mosaddeq military units undertook various actions on 19 August that were

crucial to Mosaddeq’s downfall. As mentioned above, they seized control over all

19The New York Times, 19 and 20 August 1953. 20Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 65–69. 21Bayandor cites a statement by Interior Minister Qolamhossein Sadiqi as evidence that military units

had not seized all major intersections by the early afternoon of 19 August (p. 220, n. 49). However, in this statement Sadiqi mentions being stopped by a police officer at one such intersection and by soldiers backed by tanks at another.

The Causes of Iran’s 1953 Coup 673

major intersections in Tehran by mid-morning, making it difficult for pro-Mosaddeq forces to act. In the early afternoon they seized the Tehran telegraph office, Press and Propaganda Ministry, and radio broadcasting facilities, giving Mosaddeq’s opponents control over Iran’s main communications media. They seized the police and army headquarters, facing heavy small-arms fire and suffering many casualties. The most severe fighting took place at Mosaddeq’s home, where pro- and anti-Mosaddeq units fought a two-hour tank battle in the late afternoon that left as many as 200 dead, according to Kennett Love.22 On 19 August and in the following days, army and police units maintained a heavy armed presence throughout Tehran and other cities, enforcing a curfew and arresting almost all of Mosaddeq’s key allies and hun- dreds of his supporters, using arrest lists previously drawn up by the CIA team. These arrests continued in the following months and Iran remained under martial law until late 1956, preventing pro-Mosaddeq forces from reemerging.23 Without these military actions, the civilian crowds that appeared on 19 August could have done little more than stage noisy demonstrations against Mosaddeq, especially since most of the officer corps remained loyal to Mosaddeq. Anti-Mosaddeq military units therefore played a decisive role in Mosaddeq’s downfall. Bayandor downplays evidence that these anti-Mosaddeq military units were linked

to the CIA coup team by stating that opposition to Mosaddeq already existed in the officer corps before the CIA coup plan was developed (in May 1953) and that the CIA team had no direct communication with the anti-Mosaddeq units that acted on 19 August (p. 117). These points are partly true. However, before the CIA team arrived in Tehran in mid-July, anti-Mosaddeq sentiment in the officer corps was not at all organized and was kept in check by Mosaddeq’s efforts to purge officers he did not trust—as the CIA team quickly realized. In the weeks before the coup, the CIA team worked tirelessly to organize a network of anti-Mosaddeq officers, which consisted of retired Generals Zahedi and Guilanshah, active-duty Generals Bat- mangelich and Nakhi, at least twelve field-grade officers—including colonels in the Tehran police and gendarmerie and the Shah’s elite Imperial Guard—and forty line commanders.24 Zahedi had also gained support from the chief of police.25 The CIA team did not maintain direct communication with all of these officers on 19 August and the preceding days, but it was in regular contact with Zahedi, Batmange- lich, and Colonel Abbas Farzanegan, who were the key leaders of the military network.26 Although it is not possible to identify exactly which officers and military units did what on 19 August, it is clear that members of the military network and the police chief and his forces were deeply involved. Late in the afternoon, “known supporters of” the CIA coup plan were placed in command of “all units of the

22The New York Times, 20 August 1953. 23Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 75, D6–D7; Mark J. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and

the Shah (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 85–92. 24Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 67 and Appendix D. 25Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–54 (FRUS), vol. X (Washington, DC, 1989), 783. 26This is clear from the Wilber and Roosevelt accounts and was emphasized in interviews I conducted

in the mid-1980s with several of the CIA participants.

674 Gasiorowski

Tehran garrison” and began to carry out the arrests previously planned by the CIA team.27

The third and most serious flaw in Bayandor’s analysis is that he does not acknowl- edge the importance of US and British actions that helped foment opposition to Mosaddeq before the coup and during its early phases. These actions undermined Mosaddeq’s government by encouraging Iranian elites to act against him, fanning dis- content among common Iranians, and leading Mosaddeq and his allies to make tac- tical mistakes. US and British officials have always maintained that their main contributions to the coup were indirect efforts of this sort aimed at catalyzing and organizing domestic opposition to Mosaddeq, rather than direct efforts to orchestrate and lead this opposition. Bayandor focuses on the latter and largely ignores the former. British efforts to catalyze and organize opposition to Mosaddeq began within days

of his appointment as prime minister and his nationalization of the British-controlled oil industry in April and May 1951. British officials maintained a rigid stance in the subsequent oil negotiations, implemented unilateral trade and financial sanctions against Iran, and organized a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil exports, crippling Iran’s economy. They deployed military forces to the Persian Gulf and made plans to invade Iran in the summer of 1951, though US officials persuaded them to desist. They backed three coup plots against Mosaddeq and worked tirelessly to under- mine support for him among Iranian elites, including the Shah and prominent Shi’a clerics. The last of these plots was a fall 1952 effort to install Zahedi as prime minister, which helped make him Mosaddeq’s leading opponent.28 Bayandor mentions most of these events but does not acknowledge that they helped undermine elite and popular support for Mosaddeq. Under the Truman administration, the United States supported Mosaddeq and

gave him economic aid and other assistance. However, US officials were deeply con- cerned about Soviet influence in Iran at this time. The CIA therefore began carrying out extensive propaganda activities and other covert operations aimed at creating alarm among the Iranian public, the Shi’a clergy, and other elites about the activities of Iran’s communist Tudeh Party.29 These activities helped create fear among Iranians that the Tudeh might seize power and therefore inadvertently undermined public con- fidence in Mosaddeq. Moreover, despite official US support for Mosaddeq, the CIA carried out several covert operations aimed at encouraging Kashani, Baqa’i, and perhaps other elites and the Toilers Party and Pan-Iranist Party to break with Mosaddeq.30 Again, Bayandor mentions some of these events but does not acknowl- edge their impact on Mosaddeq. It was not until the Anglo-Iranian oil negotiations collapsed in March 1953

that top US officials approved deliberate efforts to undermine Mosaddeq. In early April they redirected the CIA’s anti-communist covert operations toward the task

27Wilber, Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq, 67–75; FRUS, vol. X 784–85. 28See Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, chs. 4–5. 29Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup., ch. 6 and 235–36. 30Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 243–44.

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of weakening Mosaddeq, allocating $1 million specifically for this purpose. In addition, US officials approached Fazlollah Zahedi about organizing a coup and gave him $135,000 to do so. As mentioned above, they also approached clerical leaders through intermediaries with a plan to create disturbances to undermine Mosaddeq.31 These activities undoubtedly helped catalyze opposition to Mosaddeq, especially among Zahedi and his allies and the clergy. In July and early August 1953, the CIA sharply increased its covert operations to

destabilize Mosaddeq’s government, undertaking an “all-out” propaganda campaign in Iranian newspapers and other media and hiring thugs to attack mosques and Tudeh demonstrations and create other disturbances. Some of this activity was designed specifically to turn the clergy against Mosaddeq. As discussed above, the CIA coup team began organizing a network of Iranian military officers to work against Mosaddeq in this period. It also began bribing members of parliament to turn against Mosaddeq, using $11,000 per week that had been allocated for this purpose —a large amount of money, since parliament had only 79 members at the time. Mosaddeq evidently learned of this and denounced members of parliament as agents of foreigners. He then staged a fraudulent referendum on 4 August that pro- duced an overwhelming vote in favor of dissolving parliament. This was a major tac- tical mistake that further undermined support for Mosaddeq, as Bayandor admits (p. 89). The CIA team sent a series of emissaries to see the Shah in late July and early August to persuade him to dismiss Mosaddeq and appoint Zahedi prime minis- ter, which was his legal prerogative. The Shah wavered for weeks, recognizing that Mosaddeq was still popular, but he finally acquiesced and signed royal decrees to this effect on 13 August. US officials also undertook several diplomatic initiatives aimed at undermining Mosaddeq.32

Bayandor downplays or dismisses these various US actions, refusing to acknowledge their contribution to Mosaddeq’s downfall. He briefly mentions the CIA’s anti- Mosaddeq covert operations but dismisses them, stating—without citing any evi- dence—that the principal agents who implemented them, Jalali and Kayvani, “must have aggrandized the extent and impact of these measures” (p. 85). He does not acknowledge that the contact US officials and their intermediaries had with Zahedi and clerical leaders in the spring of 1953 may have encouraged them to act against Mosaddeq. He also never explains why an uprising led by clerics would install Zahedi as prime minister—he was hardly the sort of person clerics would favor. Bayan- dor insists that the CIA team’s efforts to bribe members of parliament “yielded strictly nothing,” though he admits that Mosaddeq’s fear of a censure vote in parliament was not unfounded and that Mosaddeq staged the referendum to dissolve parliament in response to this bribery campaign (pp. 87–88 and 211, nn. 76 and 77). He describes the CIA team’s elaborate efforts to turn the Shah against Mosaddeq (pp. 89–94), and he argues that the Shah’s departure from Iran on 16 August played a decisive role in

31Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 232–40. 32Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 240–48.

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catalyzing the forces that carried out the coup. However, he does not acknowledge that the CIA team’s pressure may have helped lead the Shah to do this. Immediately after its first coup attempt failed on 15–16 August, the CIA team

began to improvise33 a series of measures aimed at catalyzing a second, successful coup, ignoring messages from Washington telling them to stop and evacuate. They hid Fazlollah Zahedi and other key plotters in the US embassy compound and other secure locations, saving them from arrest. They took a series of steps to publicize the Shah’s decrees dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing Zahedi and to rally support in the armed forces for Zahedi and the Shah. Disseminating the Shah’s decrees was crucial to Mosaddeq’s downfall because they showed that the Shah now opposed Mosaddeq and he was defying the Shah’s authority. The CIA team gave their principal agents, Jalali and Kayvani, $50,000 on 16 August to organize anti-Mosaddeq activities, including mobs of agents provocateurs that pretended to be Tudeh crowds and created chaos in Tehran on the following days, tearing down statues of the Shah, attacking mosques, vandalizing shops, and clashing with Mosaddeq supporters. On 18 August, Ambassador Henderson warned Mosaddeq that he would call for all Amer- icans to leave Iran if the security forces could not restore order. In Henderson’s pres- ence, Mosaddeq then directed the security forces to break up the crowds in Tehran’s streets, producing the military and police attacks of that evening described above. The CIA team then worked through several channels to organize, finance, and direct anti- Mosaddeq activities on 19 August, as discussed above.34

Once again Bayandor downplays or dismisses these actions, refusing to acknowledge their contribution toMosaddeq’s downfall. He expresses doubt that Zahedi was hidden by the CIA team (pp. 111 and 222, n. 59), despite considerable evidence of this. He downplays the importance of the Shah’s decrees in rallying opposition to Mosaddeq, emphasizing instead a statement made by Zahedi (p. 104). He also downplays the CIA team’s role in copying and disseminating the Shah’s decrees and Zahedi’s state- ment, citing Ardeshir Zahedi’s dubious account and ignoring substantial evidence of the CIA team’s role (pp. 104, 125), including a statement by Kennett Love, who wit- nessed and participated in these activities.35 Bayandor dismisses the anti-Mosaddeq activities of Jalali and Kayvani during 16–18 August on the grounds that the Shi’a clergy already fully opposed Mosaddeq by this time, but later in the same paragraph and elsewhere he cites the Shah’s flight from Iran during this same period (on 16 August) as a key catalyst of clerical action (p. 124). He claims that Jalali and Kayvani did not organize mobs pretending to be Tudeh crowds and did not receive CIA

33Bayandor argues that the CIA had not pre-planned the events of 19 August and therefore cannot be credited with orchestrating them (p. 168). However, when I interviewed the CIA station chief in 1984 and Kermit Roosevelt in 1985, they both told me they had regarded the coup plan merely as a starting point and expected to improvise as events unfolded.

34Gasiorowski and Byrne,Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 250–55; Loy Henderson Inter- view, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 1972.

35Love,The American Role, 31–32; Gasiorowski and Byrne,MohammadMosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 251. Love states that he met Ardeshir Zahedi at a CIA officer’s home, where the decrees were being copied. Zahedi does not mention this in Five Decisive Days.

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money during 16–18 August, dismissing or ignoring substantial evidence that they did,36 while citing the account of Tudeh leader Noureddin Kianouri—hardly a disin- terested observer (pp. 128–30, 136–38). Finally, he acknowledges that Henderson’s meeting with Mosaddeq may have contributed to the security forces’ crackdown on the evening of 18 August but downplays the importance of this meeting by arguing that it had not been coordinated with the CIA team’s actions, despite a statement by Roosevelt that it had (pp. 133–36). Of course, it is impossible to say conclusively how important these British and US

actions were in catalyzing and organizing the various Iranians who worked to over- throw Mosaddeq on 19 August. But the breadth of these actions and the wealth of evidence describing them contrast sharply with Bayandor’s much narrower account, which relies on a few dubious or misinterpreted statements about the actions of certain clerics and extraordinary efforts to discredit any account that highlights the role of foreign actors.37

My own reading of the historical evidence available today is that domestic actors— probably including Ayatollah Behbehani and perhaps other clerics—certainly were involved in Mosaddeq’s overthrow, but that foreign actors—especially the CIA and its coup team in Tehran—played a more important role.38 Bayandor’s book has not changed my view on this issue. Unless compelling new evidence emerges about who organized the anti-Mosaddeq crowds and military units that appeared on 19 August and what motivated them, this is likely to remain the most credible expla- nation of the causes of Mosaddeq’s downfall.

36Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 251 and 337, n. 58. 37A major theme of Bayandor’s book is that Roosevelt deliberately overstated the CIA team’s role in

the coup, providing an account that “borders on prevarication,” though Bayandor presents no credible evidence of this (pp. 7–8, 155). He also seems to imply that Roosevelt provided false information to Wilber and to British officials, which found its way into Wilber’s history of the coup and an important British document (pp. 8, 144). This enables Bayandor to discount the two major insider accounts of the CIA’s role in the coup.

38I examine the relative importance of domestic and foreign actors in detail in Mark J. Gasiorowski, “Conclusion: Why Did Mosaddeq Fall?,” in Gasiorowski and Byrne,MohammadMosaddeq and the 1953 Coup, 261–77.

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