All the Shah's Men

Kinzer reconstructs the U.S. CIA's 1953 overthrow of the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was wildly popular for having nationalized his country's oil industry. The coup ushered in the long and brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah, widely seen as a U.S. puppet. A veteran New York Times foreign correspondent, he shows that until early in 1953, Great Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were imperialist baddies. Intransigent in the face of Iran's demands for a fairer share of profits from their oil and better conditions for workers, British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison exacerbated tension with his overt racisism. Before the crisis peaked, a high-ranking employee of Anglo-Iranian wrote to a superior that the company's alliance with the "corrupt ruling classes" and "leech-like bureaucracies" were "disastrous, outdated and impractical." This tragic epesode stands as a textbook lesson in how not to conduct foreign policy. The book highlights much that the U.S. military/industrial elites would prefer was forgetten.