Millions of people are always plotting one thing or another in any given country, and assigning credit for plotting is like assigning credit for any other form of fantasy role-play.
The CIA may have been plotting more enthusiastically than most of the other fantasizers who happened to be concentrating their nasty little thoughts on Iran after WWII, but the CIA has always been better at plotting than reality, in spite of the realism of a few intelligent staffers who are typically overruled by celebrity chiefs like Kermit Roosevelt, the American "secret agent" who usually gets most of the blame or credit for overthrowing the government of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953.
As a "secret agent," Kermit Roosevelt was a heck of a tennis player, and one good indication of his subtlety at the craft of espionage was his habit of shouting "Oh, Roosevelt!" every time he missed a shot at a tennis club in Tehran, where his cover identity was "James Lockridge." How did the brilliant Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore and celebrity adventurer extraordinaire, explain these outbursts?
Don't ask.
The usual discussion of Mossadeq's downfall paints a scary picture of the democratically elected Mossadeq chased out of office by a renegade army run by CIA puppet-masters, after he nationalized all the property of British Petroleum in Iran, but the supposedly ultra-democratic Mossadeq had previously abolished the secret ballot and won the preceding national plebiscite with more than 99% of the vote.
Nothing remotely resembling democracy ever gave 99% of the vote to anybody.
Mossadeq had assumed "emergency powers" that allowed him to legislate by decree, and as undemocratic as such an arrangement may be, for the man in the street in Tehran the economic strangle-hold that the British enforced on Iran after nationalization of British Petroleum's "property" was probably more repulsive than any merely political factor. Iran's yearly oil production had fallen from 240 million barrels to 10, partly because the British had subjugated the Iranian workforce to a condition of such abject ignorance that none of them could run the machines after BP pulled out its experts, and partly because the Royal Navy was blockading the Persian Gulf and British banks were blocking the sale of the trickle of Iranian oil that managed to seep out.
Mossadeq hadn't bothered to train any Iranians to run BP's oil fields before he nationalized them, and he didn't bother to develop any alternative export lanes out of Iran in case the Royal Navy responded unsympathetically to his expropriation, so when oil production sank to nothing in 1952, and the Royal Navy more or less shut down the Persian Gulf, millions of ordinary Iranians lost everything in the subsequent collapse of the economy.
Where millions of people are pauperized by a "democratic" government, an insurgency often follows, and only a really methodical tyrant like Saddam Hussein or the Shah of Iran can pauperize his subjects with impunity. In this case the street-manager of the insurgency was a former national wrestling champion known as "Shaban the Brainless."
Shaban (uppermost in photo) wrestling on the street in Tehran in 1953.
Shaban "Beemokh" Jafari, a.k.a. "Shaban the Brainless," was a much more important figure in the overthrow of Mossadeq than Kermit Roosevelt and all the other little spies running around the back streets of Tehran. Unfortunately, the best source about Shaban, Homa Sarshar's biography, has never been translated, as far as I know. It's very sympathetic to the brawler Shaban, and so am I.
Shaban Jafari organized the Iranian sans culottes, desperate and often formerly prosperous citizens impoverished by the unintended consequences of nationalizing petroleum in Iran, and they broke heads on the street even more effectively than Mossadeq's thugs, who were adept enough at this sport themselves. By the time the rather timorous Iranian Army crept out of its barracks and rode tanks into Tehran, Shaban the Brainless had already disposed of most of the opposition.
So the CIA was represented in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq by a tennis-ninny who couldn't remember his cover-identity for five minutes at a time, while the mob-organizer and street brawler Shaban the Brainless gave the starving masses an arm, if not a voice, and they flushed the impulsive and undemocratic Mohammed Mossadeq down the toilet of history.
Shaban prospered after the coup when the Shah made him commissioner of the Iranian Federation of Traditional Sports, and even when he went into exile after the Islamic revolution in 1979, Shaban spent a long and apparently not completely unhappy retirement in Los Angeles, where he was able to find some consolation in the exploits of his favorite sports franchise, the head-banging Oakland Raiders.
Shaban in Oakland circa 2002
[Re-posted from MyLeftWing, August 21, 2008]
