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'Interview with Stephen Kinzer
By Rick Shenkman
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.
Mr. Kinzer is the author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). He is a correspondent with the New York Times.

Let's start with history. In 1953 the Eisenhower administration backed a coup against the elected leader of Iran, a man named Mossadegh, who had sought to nationalize the country's oil industry. The British wanted to overthrow him to save their control over Iran's oil. But why did the United States become involved? In your book you seem to argue that Ike was conned into helping the British out.
The idea that Mossadegh should be overthrown originated with the British. They were apoplectic at the prospect of losing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which Mossadegh's government had nationalized with the unanimous approval of the Iranian parliament. Their efforts to carry out a coup, however, were disrupted when Mossadegh learned of their plan and responded by shutting the British embassy and expelling all British diplomats from Iran. Among these diplomats were the secret agents who had been assigned to carry out the coup. That left the British with no way to depose Mossadegh. Prime Minister Churchill tried to persuade President Truman to carry out the coup as a favor to the British, but Truman refused. Only after Eisenhower came into office did the United States change its mind.
The British agent who came to Washington to present the coup plan to Eisenhower's team, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, wrote afterward that he knew the Americans would not respond to an appeal based on Britain's desire to regain its oil company. He decided instead to argue that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward communism. This argument was patently false, but Woodhouse sensed it would move John Foster Dulles and the rest of the Eisenhower administration into action. He was right.
In your book you assert that a red line can be drawn from the CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh to the revolution to overthrow the Shah in 1979 to the events of September 11. How are these events connected?
The CIA deposed Mossadegh and allowed Mohammed Reza Shah to reclaim his throne. The Shah's repressive rule lasted 25 years, finally provoking the revolution of 1978-9. That revolution brought to power a group of fundamentalist clerics who capitalized on Iran's anger at the United States for having destroyed Iranian democracy. Their regime inspired Muslin radicals around the world, including in next-door Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave sanctuary to terrorists who carried out attacks including the ones on September 11.
If the United States had not overthrown Mossadegh, do you think the history of terrorism would have turned out differently? Would we have had a 9-11 without the coup?
The coup in Iran was hardly the only factor that led many Muslims to begin considering the United States an enemy. It did, however, represent a broader American policy of intervening in the Middle East in ways that crushed prospects for democratic development there. If Iranian democracy had been allowed to flourish, it might well have become an example to other countries in the region and led to a flowering of democracy there. Instead it produced just the opposite.'

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