All the Shah's Men

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Author(s)	Stephen Kinzer
Subject(s)	1953 Iranian coup d'état
Publisher	John Wiley & Sons
Publication date	July 18, 2003
Pages	272
ISBN	978-0471678786

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror is a book written by American journalist Stephen Kinzer. The book discusses the 1953 Iranian coup d'état backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran's prime minister, was overthrown by Islamists supported by American and British agents (chief among them Kermit Roosevelt) and royalists loyal to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Summary

Great Britain had returned the Shah in 1931. The Shah signed a deal selling Iranian oil pumping rights to the Anglo Persian Oil Company, which today is called British Petroleum (BP). When the Shah made the mistake of backing Hitler, he was summarily ejected by the British, but the agreement continued. When the first democratically elected parliament and prime minister in Iran took power in 1950 they planned to seize the oil assets in Iran that had been developed by the British, violating the still running oil contract with British Petroleum. The British Government followed to court in Belgium's International Court and lost the case against Iran's new government. Great Britain reacted by blockading the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, halting Iran's trade and economy.

The US was concerned that Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was seeking help from local superpower, the Soviet Union, in the case against Great Britain. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration agreed with the Churchill government to restore the pro-western Shah to power. In the summer of 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 arranged a coup in Tehran. The Iranian prime minister was successfully overthrown. Mossadegh spent the rest of his life on his country estate under house arrest, and Iran remained a staunch Cold War ally of the West. After more than 20 years of the Shah's rule, there was a bloody revolution in 1979 after which Iran became the Islamic Republic it is today.

Regarding US policy as it developed towards Iran in the early 1950s, the book portrays it as having been variously driven by the fear of annoying the British, or attempting to be an honest broker, or as being motivated by efforts to stop the spread of Communism. The fact (stated at the end of the book) that US companies were granted the majority of the oil concessions from the Shah's government after the coup, does not feature significantly in the earlier part of the narrative. However, that this was the chief reason for the coup is the tacit conclusion of the book.

The British critic David Pryce-Jones takes strong issue with this conclusion in his essay "A Very Elegant Coup" (link below). In his view, the attempted Communist takeover of Iran was the chief issue, and the portrayal of the CIA by Kinzer as 'arrogant, thuggish and immoral' was originally a notion put forward by leftists who sympathized with the attempt.

See also

• 1953 Iranian coup d'état

External links

• Review Essay of Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men, By: Masoud Kazemzadeh, Ph.D., MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XI, NO. 4, WINTER 2004
• How to Overthrow a Government—interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
• US-Iranian Relations, the 1953 CIA Coup in Iran and the Roots of Middle East Terror—Interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men
• All The Shah’s Men—interview with Steven Kinzer
• Review of All the Shah's Men by David S. Robarge
• A Very Elegant Coup—critique of All the Shah’s Men