Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert
By the end of July the Tudeh party came out openly for Mossadeqh, the
Soviet Union sent a new and hopeful ambassador to Teheran, and the Shah,
his life in danger, was forced to take refuge. . . .
But we did not stop trying to retrieve the situation. I conferred daily with
officials of the State and Defense departments and the Central Intelligence
Agency and saw reports from our representatives on the spot who were
working actively with the Shah’s supporters. . . .
Throughout the crisis the United States government had done everything
it possibly could to back up the Shah. Indeed, reports from observers on the
spot in Teheran during the critical days sounded more like a dime novel than
historical fact.
Dwight Eisenhower, recalling the successful CIA coup in Iran, 19
August 19531
Good morning, Mr. Phelps. The man you’re looking at is King Selim III
of Qamadan, a good friend of the West. Unknown to the world, the king
has been imprisoned somewhere for over six months by his younger brother,
Prince Samandal. With the king in his power, Samandal now controls the
huge oil royalties which are Qamadan’s main source of revenue. . . . Your
mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to rescue King Selim and
restore him to his throne.
Opening scene from “The Brothers,” Mission: Impossible, 14 December
19692
In August 2003, I had the chance to speak with twenty-five Arab university
students who had spent their summer in the United States as part of a “Young
Ambassadors” program sponsored by the State Department in an attempt to
foster better relations between America and the Muslim world. After laying out
the historical context for the clash of cultures that culminated in the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001, I was stunned to hear several of my listeners insist
that the destruction of the World Trade Center had been part of an elaborate
CIA plot. Just as I was about to dismiss this as the worst sort of paranoid claptrap
popularized by the lunatic fringe, one of the Arabs asked me whether I had
ever heard of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian nationalist whom the agency
had overthrown almost exactly fifty years earlier. Only then did I truly appreciate
what a long shadow the CIA has cast across the Middle East.3
Indeed, few aspects of U.S. foreign policy since 1945 have been more controversial
than the activities of the CIA, which at one time or another has shaped
events in almost every Middle Eastern country. Throughout the Cold War,
the agency bribed government officials, tapped phones, and pilfered documents
from Tehran to Tripoli to secure the best possible information about the political
and military intentions of the Soviet Union and its friends and clients in
the Muslim world. Gathering intelligence, however, was only part of the CIA’s
mission. Confronted by what many Americans interpreted as Soviet-inspired
upheavals in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, the agency
has resorted to covert action from Cuba and Guatemala to Indonesia and Iran.
During the six decades after the Second World War, the CIA waged what
amounted to undeclared political warfare abroad, working to prevent Soviet
subversion and promote American interests while always making sure that the
ensuing rigged election or military coup d’etat was plausibly deniable and never
traceable directly to the United States. Over the years, however, many of
the CIA’s covert exploits would become open secrets, routinely rationalized
in Washington as Cold War necessities, bitterly resented in Muslim capitals
as naked imperialism, and frequently glamorized in the media as “mission
impossible.”
One of America’s earliest and most celebrated covert actions had come in
Iran during the summer of 1953, when CIA agents planned and executed a
military coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, an aging
nationalist infamous for his theatrical anti-Western tirades. In a series of stunning
moves beginning in late 1951, Mossadegh expropriated Britain’s quarterbillion-
dollar petroleum concession, flirted with the pro-Soviet Tudeh party,
and reduced the pro-American shah, Reza Mohammad Pahlavi, to a mere figurehead.
Unwilling to relinquish their control of Iranian oil without a fight, the
British prepared to send in troops during the autumn of 1951. The Truman
administration, however, favored a more subtle approach and persuaded
Whitehall to rely on economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure to counteract
Mossadegh’s nationalist policies.4 By November 1952, CIA officials and their
1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY, 1963),
163–64.
2. Patrick J. White, The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier (New York, 1991), 247–48.
3. For recent discussions of the legacy of the CIA’s clandestine activities in Iran during the
1950s, see Mostafa T. Zahrani, “The Coup That Changed the Middle East: Mossadeq v. the
CIA in Retrospect,” World Policy Journal (Summer 2002): 93–99, and “Revisiting Cold War
Coups and Finding Them Costly,” New York Times, 30 November 2003.
4. William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East: Arab Nationalism,
the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (New York, 1984), 632–689; Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The 1953
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Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004). © 2004 The Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
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