Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [50]
On Tuesday, June 23, Harry woke up early and took his usual morning walk—his first in Washington without Secret Service agents in more than eight years. At his usual brisk pace, he covered two miles in thirty minutes, walking along Connecticut Avenue and K Street. He never came within three blocks of the White House. Along the way, he was greeted by passersby, cabbies, truck drivers, and motorists: “Hello, Harry,” “Hello, Mr. President,” “Glad to see you back.”
Back at the hotel, Truman spent the day welcoming a string of visitors to his suite. One of his callers was the Iranian ambassador to the United States, Allah-Yar Saleh, who presented the former president with a Persian rug. The timing of the meeting is curious, for at that very moment the CIA was plotting to overthrow Saleh’s boss, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and return the shah to the Peacock Throne. The motive, of course, was oil. In 1951, Mossadegh announced plans to nationalize the country’s oilfields. This infuriated the British, who controlled Iran’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum, or BP). The British asked the Truman administration to help them remove Mossadegh. Truman, who was up to his eyeballs in Korea at the time, wasn’t interested—but his successor was. On April 4, 1953, Eisenhower’s director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, signed off on an operation, code-named Ajax, to “bring about the fall of Mossadegh.” The agent in charge of the operation was Kermit Roosevelt—Theodore’s grandson. Iranians working for the agency and posing as communists harassed religious leaders to turn public opinion against Mossadegh. The CIA recruited an Iranian general to lead a coup. On August 19, 1953, demonstrators paid by the CIA attacked Mossadegh’s house. The resulting clashes killed three hundred people. Mossadegh fled, the general was installed as prime minister, and the shah returned to the throne. The British thanked the Americans by opening Iran to U.S. oil companies.
The CIA considered the coup a shining success and, in the ensuing years, it would inspire similar efforts to overthrow anti-American regimes in Guatemala and Cuba, with decidedly mixed results.
Mohammed Mossadegh was arrested and, after a show trial, sentenced to death. The shah commuted the sentence to three years’ imprisonment and house arrest for life. Allah-Yar Saleh, Mossadegh’s ambassador to the United States, returned to Iran and led the moderate opposition to the shah’s pro-Western government. The coup set the stage for the Islamic Revolution in 1979, not to mention generations of anti-American sentiment in Iran.
To Truman, the coup came to symbolize a larger problem: how the CIA, which he had organized in 1947, had been “diverted from its original assignment” of merely collecting intelligence. “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government,” he wrote in 1963. “This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”
The shah, for his part, would curry Truman’s favor for years, sending him Christmas cards every year and get-well cards when he got sick.
While Harry welcomed callers to his suite, Bess and Margaret attended a tea at the Women’s National Democratic Club. Bess wore a blue lace dress and a matching straw hat. She looked ten years younger, said one guest. She never looked happier, said another. Margaret,