Argo

How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

By Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio

It may seem odd today to think that Iran and the United States were once allies, but everything must be understood in terms of the Great Game waged between the Soviet Union and America.

In earlier times, the United States seemed content to observe Iran from the sidelines. Then known as Persia (it wouldn’t be named Iran until 1935), the country was like the knot in the center of a tug-of-war match between Russia and Great Britain a role that Iran managed with great skill, playing one nation off the other, Then World War II happened and the geopolitics of the region were upended. Suddenly Moscow and London were allies, and in their quest to protect oil and overland shipping routes into Russia, they decided to jointly occupy the country. Worried that the Iranian monarch, Reza Shah, was leaning toward an alliance with Nazi Germany, the two nations had him deposed and installed his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlaví, to the throne.

After the war, the United States invested heavily in Iran, both economically and militarily. Stalin had only reluctantly withdrawn his troops from northern Iran in 1946, and the thinking in Washington was that he would use the slightest pretext to invade again, Just as concerning was the potential for the Soviets to undermine the shah’s government through clandestine means. Iran’s communist Tudeh Party was growing in power and openly supported the aims of Moscow.

As a result, it was with trepidation that America watched in 1951 as the shah’s power was slowly stripped away by an Iranian lawyer named Mohammed Mosaddeq. Mosaddeq had risen to prominence on the back of a campaign to nationalize the British Owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a popular move among Iranians who had long felt exploited by the British. Caught up in a wave of nationalism, Mosaddeq became a hero and was eventually nominated prime minister.

As one would expect, in response to the Iranians’ attempt to nationalize the AIOC, the British soon instigated what amounted to a boycott of Iranian oil, which sent the local economy into a tailspin. In the ensuing turmoil, the coalition that had supported Mosaddeq began to splinter.

Nobody in Washington believed that Mosaddeq was a communist, but concern began to mount when he aligned himself with the Tudeh Party. The final straw for the Eisenhower administration came when intelligence uncovered that the Soviets were about to give Mosaddeq twenty million dollars in aid.

In light of these threats, the White House ordered CIA director Allen Dulles to work with the British to overthrow Mosaddeq.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to say that the Eisenhower administration overreacted. However, in the heat of the Cold War, America’s leaders saw a very different world than the one that exists today. In it, the Soviets were on the march everywhere, installing puppet regimes in Eastern Europe and supporting uprisings in Italy, France, and Greece. It’s also important to remember that the United States was involved in a bloody war at the time in Korea, which Eisenhower had inherited from Truman. Iran could just as easily become another front.

In the spring of 1953, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, chief of the Near East Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, was granted one million dollars and tasked with carrying out the operation to overthrow Mosaddeq, known as TPAJAX, or Operation AJAX.

The plan called for the use of propaganda and political action to undermine Mosaddeq’s support, but, as usual, things didn’t go according to plan.

Mosaddeq had been warned of the countercoup and had some of the plotters arrested even before the operation could get under way. However, with the help of massive public demonstrations, many of them organized by Roosevelt, Mosaddeq was forced to resign and the shah was swept to power.

In terms of its Cold War strategy of containment, Washington considered the operation to be a massive foreign policy success, and Kermit Roosevelt was heralded as a hero. Upon meeting him, the shah famously said, “I owe my throne to God, my people, the army—and you!”

In the wake of the operation the shah quickly worked out an agreement with the oil giant AIOC, and Iran became a stable, pro-Western ally, providing the United States with a steady flow of oil as well as a series of listening posts along the Soviet-Iran border that allowed it to eavesdrop on Russian intercontinental ballistic missile launches.

Regardless of these strategic advantages, however, there is no denying that the 1953 countercoup had major consequences for the long-term relations between the United States and Iran.

Many opponents of Operation AJAX blamed the United States for acting selfishly to protect its own interests, to the detriment of Iran and its people. Ironically, as the historical record shows, the countercoup would not have succeeded if it hadn’t been for the support of a sizable faction of Iranians who’d also had much to gain by securing the shah’s power. However, the popular myth in 1979 among Iranians, ever distrustful of foreign intervention, was that the CIA had single-handedly ousted a democratic leader while imposing a tyrant in his place. While not entirely accurate, it painted a picture that many Iranians were eager to believe.

After returning to power, the shah aligned himself with the West and immediately set about trying to legitimize his reign. He ushered in a series of Westernized reforms and spent lavishly to create a well-trained and modern military. Both efforts would put him at odds with his people, who would later claim he had destroyed their traditional way of life and at the same time squandered the nation’s wealth in an attempt to appease Washington.

Over time he grew more and more autocratic, tamping down any form of dissent with the help of his brutal secret police known by the acronym SAVAK.

As tended to happen during the Great Game, however, successive American administrations decided to take the good with the bad and outwardly supported the shah, even while privately encouraging him to cut the systemic corruption of his regime and curb the abuses of SAVAK.

The shah seemed neither willing nor capable to do either.

With most avenues for political dissent gone, the masses had turned to the mullahs for support, and the clergy used their new found power to denounce the shah as a tool of the West. The most outspoken of these critics was a cleric by the name of Ruhollah Khomeini. Born in 1902, Khomeini had made a name for himself among the religious community of Iran by authoring numerous tracts against Iran’s secular leadership, including the shah’s father, Reza. Then in 1961, he would take on the shah directly, decrying the shah’s pro-Western policies—specifically those enfranchising women and non-Muslims—as being antithetical to the true spirit of Islam. However, unknown even to his own followers, who believed he would support a moderate Islamic democracy once the shah had abdicated, Khomeini’s real aim was to create a government that was strictly beholden to Islamic law, and was ruled unquestionably by him.

Too powerful to arrest or kill, Khomeini was exiled by the shah to Turkey in 1964 and then eventually to Najaf, in southern Iraq, From there the cleric would prove to be a resourceful political operator. For the next fourteen years he would continue to give sermons lambasting the evils of the shah and America, which were smuggled back into Iran and sold in the bazaars as cassette tapes.

By the fall of 1978, the country was on the brink of collapse. A succession of riots and strikes had led to violent clashes between the shah’s security forces and Khomeini’s supporters. After a series of last-ditch measures–including a military government — had failed to stem the tide, the shah was finally forced to leave Iran on January 16, 1979. In his wake he left a country teetering on the edge, and it would take only ten days for the remnants of his government and the army to fall apart.

While there had been many signs that the shah’s regime was on the verge of crumbling, the suddenness with which it happened caught the White House, as well as the intelligence community completely off guard. Even as late as August of 1978, a National Intelligence Estimate famously reported that Iran was not in a “revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” As to how we at the CIA and the White House could have been so wildly off the mark, there is no easy answer. The shah had maintained an iron grip on his country for nearly twenty-five years, and the common wisdom was that despite the unrest he would weather the storm.After the fact, it was revealed that many in Washington had assumed the shah would use any force necessary to save his regime, and they were baffled when he failed to do so. Even the U. S. ambassador to Iran at the time, Bill Sullivan, believed the shah’s government would survive; by the time he changed his tune, on November 9, 1978, there was little that could be done. Throughout the struggles of 1978, there was no clear strategy for meeting with the opposition groups, partly because of the fear that it might undermine the shah’s regime. In the end, though, perhaps the biggest reason for the intelligence failure was that the U. S. government had invested too much importance in the person of the shah and not enough in the people of Iran. So when the cracks in the regime began to appear, the policy makers in Washington refused to acknowledge them because they simply had no other alternative than to support the shah.

Ironically, the shah was said to be somewhat nervous about the election of Jimmy Carter. The shah’s main concern, it seems, had been Carter’s stated goal of making human rights a central tenet of his presidency. Sensitive to public opinion, the shah was apparently concerned that Carter might think he was a tyrant. He needn’t have worried. As late as New Year’s Eve 1978, just one week before a series of violent clashes would touch off the revolution, President Carter visited Tehran and reassured the shah of America’s firm commitment by calling Iran an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” While Carter may have had good reasons to support the shah, or he had no alternative given the strategic alliance created under the necessities of the Cold War, this perceived hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by the masses in Iran. The American president was now considered to be a close friend of the shah, and it wasn’t long before crowds of angry demonstrators began denouncing Carter’s name alongside that of the shah’s.

Despite the Iranians’ rhetoric, there seemed to be some common ground between the two countries. The Shah, for one, had purchased vast amounts of American military equipment during the Nixon and Ford administrations, some of which still had to be delivered. In addition, Iran had several billion dollars deposited in U. S, banks, money the revolutionary government would desperately need to stay afloat, During the fall of 1979, Khomeini had yet to solidify his power, and the country was being loosely run by the relatively “moderate” government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. In June of 1979, the Iranians accepted the appointment of Bruce Laingen as the U. S. embassy’s charge d’affaires, and it appeared the two countries were on track to normalize relations, Fleeing Iran, the shah spent several months as an international “fugitive,” until President Carter was persuaded to admit the deposed ruler for humanitarian reasons, when it was discovered he was suffering from lymphoma and needed emergency medical treatment, Yet even as he admitted the shah, Carter knew he was taking a risk, Khomeini had been calling for the shah to return to face “crimes, and Carter was worried about reprisals, In a breakfast meeting at the White House with his staff, he reiterated his concerns, asking them, “What course of action will you recommend to me if the Americans in Iran are seized or killed?” No one had an answer.