All the Shah's Men

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror is a book written by American journalist Stephen Kinzer. The book discusses the 1953 Iranian coup d'état backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran's prime minister, was overthrown by Islamists supported by American and British agents (chief among them Kermit Roosevelt) and royalists loyal to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Summary
In 1933 Reza Shah signed a deal selling Iranian oil extraction rights to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later called British Petroleum (BP). Though Iran was officially neutral at the start of World War II, its monarch was friendly towards the Axis. Following the 1941 Allied Invasion of Iran, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Shah, who upheld the oil agreement with APOC, which by then had been renamed the "Anglo-Iranian Oil Company". When the first democratically elected parliament and prime minister in Iran took power in 1950 they planned to seize the oil assets in Iran that had been developed by the British, violating the still running oil contract with British Petroleum. The British Government followed to court in Belgium's International Court and lost the case against Iran's new government. Great Britain reacted by blockading the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, halting Iran's trade and economy.

The US was concerned that Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was seeking help from local superpower, the Soviet Union, in the case against Great Britain. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration agreed with the Churchill government to restore the pro-western Shah to power. In the summer of 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 arranged a coup in Tehran. The Iranian prime minister was successfully overthrown. Mossadegh spent the rest of his life on his country estate under house arrest, and Iran remained a staunch Cold War ally of the West. After more than 20 years of the Shah's rule, there was a bloody revolution in 1979 after which Iran became the Islamic Republic it is today.

Regarding US policy as it developed towards Iran in the early 1950s, the book portrays it as having been variously driven by the fear of annoying the British, or attempting to be an honest broker, or as being motivated by efforts to stop the spread of Communism. The fact (stated at the end of the book) that US companies were granted the majority of the oil concessions from the Shah's government after the coup, does not feature significantly in the earlier part of the narrative. However, that this was the chief reason for the coup is the tacit conclusion of the book.

The British critic David Pryce-Jones takes strong issue with this conclusion in his essay "A Very Elegant Coup" (link below). In his view, the attempted Communist takeover of Iran was the chief issue, and the portrayal of the CIA by Kinzer as 'arrogant, thuggish and immoral' was originally a notion put forward by leftists who sympathized with the attempt.