by Jim Newton
Ike reined in his temper, reiterated the United States’ “common cause with the Korean people,” and reminded Rhee that UN forces had repelled the invasion and restored South Korea roughly to its prewar borders, though he conceded that he was “deeply disturbed” by Rhee’s threat. Talks resumed, and exchanges of prisoners began, an important step toward an armistice. Then, in July, Rhee secretly authorized the release of twenty-five thousand North Korean prisoners; South Korea described it as a mass escape, but it was abundantly clear—and eventually admitted—that Rhee had set the prisoners free in order to undermine the negotiations. Livid, Eisenhower now threatened to abandon Rhee to fight the Chinese alone. “Unless you are prepared immediately and unequivocally to accept the authority of the UN Command to conduct the present hostilities and bring them to a close, it will be necessary to effect another arrangement,” Eisenhower advised his Korean counterpart. John Eisenhower was blunter: “I guess Syngman Rhee pretty well scuttled the truce.”
If Rhee did not succeed, it was not for lack of trying. He never gave up his dream of uniting the country under his rule, and his periodic demands of American support were a recurring theme throughout the 1950s. In the meantime, Eisenhower’s anger had the desired effect. Rhee backed down, and negotiations went forward.
In addressing enemies, Eisenhower was no less firm. Administration officials quietly informed India’s government, then acting as an intermediary to China, that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons to bring the Korean War to an end. Although it is difficult to know how seriously Mao regarded that threat, Eisenhower believed it had rattled his adversary. Asked years later by Sherman Adams what had motivated China to negotiate a truce, Ike answered without hesitation. “Danger of an atomic war,” he said.
It did not end the war immediately. In late May 1953, the Chinese forces in Korea launched a final, withering assault. Howitzer and mortar fire rained down on South Korean positions, and along one stretch of the front Chinese soldiers fought in grueling hand-to-hand combat against Turkish adversaries. In early June, “the mightiest blow to fall upon our forces since the spring offensive in 1951” erupted with evening artillery attacks and built into a full-scale offensive along the Bukhan River.
While soldiers died on both sides, negotiators hammered out the final details of the armistice, their efforts hastened by the intensity of the fighting. Thousands lost their lives in the final weeks. At last, on July 27, General William K. Harrison signed the truce on behalf of the UN forces fighting in South Korea. In Washington, Eisenhower expressed his gratitude, mourning the fact that the conflict had caused such destruction, only to restore Korea to its former, divided self. “For this Nation the cost of repelling aggression has been high. In thousands of homes it has been incalculable. It has been paid in terms of tragedy,” Ike said to the American people late that night. “We have won,” Eisenhower stressed, “an armistice on a single battleground, not peace in the world.”
Thousands of miles away, in muddy foxholes strung along windswept ridges, soldiers set down their rifles and toasted over jugs of whiskey and rice wine. “It was almost joy enough,” Matthew Ridgway wrote, “just to be able to climb up out of a hole in the ground and look out over the countryside without getting shot at.”
The administration—just six months old—had succeeded in fulfilling Eisenhower’s “principal pledge.” Ike ended America’s most costly and protracted military engagement since World War II. With the Rosenbergs, he made it clear that if security required sacrifice, he would demand it. In Korea, he proved that peace was not merely an abstraction, nor was it defeat. Communism could be contained, and American men and women, dispatched to die in foreign lands, could come home alive.
6
Consequences
In 1953, having been president for less than a year, Dwight Eisenhower made two decisions that shaped America’s place in the world for decades to come. One ended up a source of irritation to Ike, even though it led to some of the most momentous changes under his leadership; the other was kept secret at the time, and though it delighted Eisenhower, it complicated history’s view of his legacy. In 1953, Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, less than four months after he authorized the covert action that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh from power in Iran.
Mossadegh was, by all accounts, an odd character. Eisenhower regarded him with derision. He was born to privilege, educated in Europe as a doctor of law (the first Iranian ever to receive such a degree), but steeped in the politics of Iran. He wobbled in and out of favor of the nation’s rulers, alternately holding governorships and enduring banishments, winning elected offices and sweating out imprisonments. Theatrical, thin to the point of emaciation, Mossadegh had a “hawk-like face with the kind of tragic lines that are likely to win the sympathy of those with whom one talks, particularly when they are accompanied by an agreeable voice and friendly eyes,” recalled Loy Henderson, the American ambassador who managed to resist the charms he so fulsomely enumerated. Dean Acheson described Mossadegh as birdlike and impish; the Iranian leader would tuck his legs beneath him in a chair and play his character for maximum benefit. Once, “suddenly looking old and pathetic,” he had begged Truman to think kindly of his “poor country … just sand, a few camels, a few sheep.” Acheson interrupted: “And with your oil, rather like Texas!” Caught, Mossadegh erupted in laughter. “No one,” Acheson wrote, “was more amused than he.” Before crowds, Mossadegh was a mesmerizing orator who could reduce an audience to tears, but he was physically and emotionally fragile. He often greeted visitors in bed, and he suffered from a condition that caused his throat to seize up under stress. Sometimes he stirred his audiences to rapture, only to faint dead away.
In 1951, Mossadegh campaigned for prime minister on a platform of nationalizing British oil operations in Iran, a mission that placed him squarely on a path of collision with the world’s leading imperialist power. Mossadegh attracted zealous followers, and on March 15, 1951, the Iranian National Assembly, the Majlis, nationalized the company; five days later, the Iranian Senate unanimously approved the measure. In that fervid expression of nationalist identity, Mossadegh was elected prime minister and assumed the office on April 28. Britain’s skepticism of Iran’s new leader was thoroughly shared by its prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had returned to power in 1951 and who, like his Iranian counterpart, was no stranger to theatrics nor to greeting visitors in pajamas. Churchill viewed Mossadegh as a reckless demagogue intent on the theft of British property. In that, he was partly right, as Mossadegh deliberately provoked a diplomatic confrontation.
Animated by an abiding hatred for most things British, Mossadegh demanded new terms for the split between Iran and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company of the revenue it derived from Iranian oil. The company refused even to provide an accounting, no doubt because an honest one later revealed that Iran was receiving less than 10 percent of the oil’s value. Some of AIOC’s profits were spent on bribes to secure the complicity of Iranian leaders. At first, British leaders, as well as other oil companies, were frustrated by AIOC’s intransigence and encouraged the company to negotiate in good faith. AIOC’s chairman—a stubborn, Victorian-era colonialist—refused. On July 31, 1951, the British oil company shut down the world’s largest refinery, its facility in Abadan.
The company had backed Britain into a corner. British leaders tried to fight their way out. They moved to depose Mossadegh. That backfired when Mossadegh learned of the plot and publicly denounced it on September 6, threatening to expel all remaining British personnel from the refinery. The British dispatched naval forces off the Iranian coast. As the conflict intensified, an attempt at mediation by the American Averell Harriman fell apart. (Harriman’s efforts were complicated by an intestinal disorder so aggravated by the heat that he cooled off by flying a private jet around the country and running its air conditioner.) The British government and other oil companies reluctantly rallied to AIOC’s defense. AIOC launched a boycott of Ir
anian oil; American oil companies honored it, and the British fleet symbolically enforced it. Since British and American firms controlled three-quarters of the world’s tankers, the boycott was devastatingly effective. Within months, Iran had effectively lost all of its oil production revenue.
Truman was under no illusions about the danger posed by an unstable Iran. He recognized that a Soviet incursion into Iran could leave America’s most formidable enemy with an enlarged oil supply, strategic command over the Persian Gulf, and easy reach into the Middle East. Indeed, just after the North Korean invasion in 1950, Truman had turned to his aide George Elsey and pointed to Iran on a globe. “Here,” Truman said, “is where they will start trouble if we aren’t careful.”
In those waning months of the Truman administration, American leaders balanced their condescension toward Mossadegh and their distaste for British imperialism against their fear of Soviet adventurism. They fretted a great deal but did very little. The U.S. government professed neutrality but quietly supported the boycott. The administration stood by its British allies—up to a point. Acheson tried to patch the situation together and received Truman’s permission to attempt a last-minute negotiated settlement of the oil dispute. The secretary of state sent his proposal to London. “Back came a reply about two weeks later, related and relevant to our proposal … only by being expressed on paper by means of a typewriter,” Acheson recorded in characteristically wry fashion. Failed talks led to more desperate proposals. Ambassador Henderson concluded that Mossadegh was deranged (“a sick leader,” in Henderson’s words) and that the oil crisis could only be solved by deposing him. But when British agents began to plot a coup and turned to the United States for help, Truman refused. In October 1952, Mossadegh learned of the British plans and responded by closing the British embassy and ejecting its officials, including the intelligence officials plotting the coup. Britain still wanted Mossadegh overthrown but needed American help more than ever. Truman continued to refuse.
The situation changed significantly when Eisenhower won the November election. Churchill had his old friend heading for the White House. Bedell Smith, the new undersecretary of state, was another valued Churchill acquaintance. Truman, who had resisted the English, was headed home to Independence, Missouri. Advocates of covert action recognized the opportunity and recalibrated their argument to appeal to the new president. No longer was the issue British oil or colonial rights; the central question for the new president was whether to stand by and allow a nation of undeniable strategic consequence to drift or plunge into the Soviet orbit. C. M. Woodhouse, delegated by the British government to sell the Eisenhower administration on overthrowing Mossadegh, realized what he had to do. “Not wishing to be accused of trying to use the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasize the Communist threat to Iran rather than the need to recover control of the oil industry.”
Those appeals had the desired effect. One week after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Henderson cabled to say that events in Iran were “rapidly … approaching deadlock.” The National Security Council took up the question of Iran’s future on March 4, and Ike warmed to the idea of a coup. “We, not the Russians, must make the next move,” the minutes show Nixon suggesting. Eisenhower agreed. “If I had $500 million of money to spend in secret, I would get $100 million of it to Iran right now.”
Smith, too, became an impatient supporter of an overthrow, and by the spring of 1953, John Foster and Allen Dulles had made up their minds “that it was not in American interests for the Mossadegh government to remain in power.” Left was the question of how to depose him. In humid conferences from Beirut to London to Washington, agents and officials of the American and British governments conspired to construct Mossadegh’s downfall. On June 3, Henderson arrived in Washington to brief his superiors, while in Beirut and Nicosia, CIA officials worked through the details. Churchill approved the coup on July 1. Eisenhower gave his verbal approval on July 11. In his memoirs, Eisenhower presented a highly sanitized version of the exercise that relegated U.S. agents to a bit part. His only mention of America’s role in the covert operation was an oblique acknowledgment that “the United States government had done everything it possibly could to back up the Shah.”
In fact, he did far more. In authorizing the covert action against Mossadegh, Eisenhower also approved the expenditure of $1 million to drum up support for General Fazlollah Zahedi, a ranking member of the Iranian military and the Americans’ chosen successor (British officials were uncomfortable with Zahedi, whom they had imprisoned during World War II for suspected Nazi ties, but they acceded to American wishes), and established a separate account specifically to bribe members of the Iranian Majlis. So armed with cash, American agents operating out of the embassy in Tehran launched an extraordinary three-week campaign in August 1953. After bribing, threatening, improvising, and nearly failing, they eventually achieved a historic triumph, at least on their terms.
Before rolling out their plans, the principals paused to check that they had appropriate authorization. John Foster Dulles asked his brother whether the plan was good to go. “It was cleared directly with the President,” Allen Dulles responded, “and is still active.”
The role of the United States during those August days is captured in two distinctly different accounts—a long-classified CIA history prepared in 1954 but not made public for almost fifty years, and a self-aggrandizing memoir by one of the participants, Kermit Roosevelt. Neither is entirely trustworthy, but both present the whirlwind nature of the coup. In Roosevelt’s version, the Shah is depicted as cautious but capable—his leadership essential to the legitimacy of the American intervention. Roosevelt maintains throughout that he and his compatriots merely acted at the Shah’s behest as the Shah fended off an attack on his throne. The CIA version portrays the Shah as dithering and weak. His more strong-willed twin sister is flown in to stiffen his spine, her cooperation bought in part by the gift of a mink coat. The Shah flees when the coup falters. He fears spies and microphones and insists on holding one meeting in the center of a large banquet room atop a table.
Documents from the period strongly support the CIA’s characterization of the Shah. As the events gathered momentum that year, he was erratic and flighty, unwilling to challenge Mossadegh, afraid not to. In February, he complained he needed a vacation. On his return, he had meetings in his garden and complained of his humiliating treatment at the hands of his own army. His desired solution: a vacation out of his country.
The CIA had steadier nerves. Its operatives grindingly increased the pressure on Mossadegh and occasionally got lucky. The Shah, unsure of whether to cast his lot with the Americans and the British, stalled but was reassured that Eisenhower was supporting him. In an address to a Governors’ Convention in Seattle on August 4, Eisenhower vowed not to let Iran fall behind the Iron Curtain. Roosevelt told the Shah that comment was meant as a signal. It was not, but it sufficed. Over the next few days, U.S. operatives planted highly critical stories about Mossadegh in the “controllable press” and, posing as members of the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, unnerved religious leaders with ominous phone calls and threats to bomb homes. The Shah eventually capitulated and signed a pair of orders dismissing Mossadegh and replacing him with Zahedi. Trouble arose when the colonel assigned the job of serving Mossadegh with the papers—known as a firman—was arrested after presenting them to the prime minister’s servant (Mossadegh was sleeping and had left word not to be awakened). Mossadegh then rallied forces loyal to him, and the Shah fled first for Baghdad and then for Italy, where he ran into the vacationing Allen Dulles in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. Ever the gracious spy, Dulles stepped aside: “After you, Your Majesty.”
In Washington, officials were crestfallen. “The move failed,” Smith wrote to Eisenhower, “because of three days of delay and vacillation by the Iranian generals concerned.” The United States, Smith bleakly added, might now be forced to “snuggle up” to Mossadegh in ord
er to salvage any strategic advantage from the failed effort.
Convinced that the danger had passed, Mossadegh relaxed his guard. Roosevelt and his cohorts were still frantically at work in the embassy compound, searching for Zahedi and other troops willing to stand with the now-absent Shah against the increasingly confident Mossadegh. CIA operatives distributed copies of the firman—collaborative newspapers published the document—along with a faked interview of Zahedi. The CIA paid demonstrators and capitalized on public revulsion at looting by Tudeh Party members. At dawn on August 19, the Shah’s bands took their place in the streets and converged on Radio Tehran. Three people died defending the station. It fell at 2:12 p.m. Once inside, the Shah’s supporters read aloud the firman. Sensing the government’s imminent collapse, Roosevelt made it to Zahedi’s hideout and persuaded the general that there was no time to wait. Zahedi donned his uniform, boarded a tank, and headed for the radio station. He spoke at 3:25 p.m. At 7:00 p.m., Mossadegh’s home was ransacked and his belongings tossed in the street, sold off to anyone happening by. All that was left was mopping up, and that was done quickly. Even the CIA’s official history, in its dry recitation of those events, conveys the agency’s exuberance: “It was a day that … carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it. Our trump card had prevailed and the Shah was victorious.”
Eisenhower spent August 19 in New York. He lunched at the Waldorf Astoria with Nixon; the New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger; the president of Doubleday, Douglas Black; New York’s governor, Tom Dewey; Secretary of Labor Martin Durkin; and his old friend Lucius Clay. Ike registered to vote that afternoon, then departed for Denver on the presidential plane. By the time he arrived, Iran had a new government, loyal and beholden to the United States. Ike cabled the Shah congratulations: “I offer you my sincere felicitations on the occasion of your happy return to your country.”
