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Over the decades that followed the overthrow of Mosaddeq in August 1953 a narrative attributing the fall exclusively to foreign conspiracy has taken hold and become institutionalized. In this narrative the internal factors are reduced to the simplest level of abstraction. They do not exist outside foreign conspiracy! This narrative is premised on an Anglo-American coup plot code-named TP-AJAX that was attempted in the late hours of 15 August but failed. The ensuing flight of the Shah generated dynamics which led to the fall of Mosaddeq four days later. The CIA chief operative in Tehran Kermit Roosevelt was quick to take credit claiming that these dynamics were inseminated by his ingenious and spontaneous planning. For abiding internal reasons both the CIA and the MI6 headquarters preferred to claim victory rather than admit failure. Evidence that emerged following the declassification of the State Department papers in 1989 and the leak of a secret CIA internal history in 2000 produced glaring evidence that the fall of Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953 had taken Washington, even its embassy in Tehran, by complete surprise and that post facto claims by Roosevelt were inconsistent both with Washington's explicit policy directives and Roosevelt's own situation reports filed with the CIA Washington during the interval between the two events. Roosevelt later published a phantasmagorical account of the event which, together with reminiscences of a few unnamed former operatives, was given credence by Professor Gasiorowski and associates, who curiously chose to ignore archival evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The overthrow of the government of Mosaddeq has received considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The scholarly explanations differ in emphasis, but not in the general contours, particularly regarding the significant role of the Anglo-American secret services. There have also long been attempts to portray the overthrow of Mosaddeq as an isolated event taking place on 19 August 1953 and representing a conflation of royalist and traditionalist sentiments among soldiers and civilians. More recently it has been contended that it was not the Anglo-American secret services but the clerical nexus—prompted by Ayatollah Borujerdi, the highest religious authority in the country—which played the crucial role. This paper argues against reducing the overthrow of Mosaddeq's government to the events of 19 August, and views it as a protracted process. It further argues that assertions regarding the crucial and active role of Borujerdi are, on the basis of available evidence, untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper surveys the history of American support for Iranian counter-narcotics policy between 1945 and 1989. In particular, it explores the general failings of Tehran's attempt to ban the domestic production and consumption of opium. The significance of this period is two-fold. First, this essay argues that American-backed efforts to combat the opium trade in Iran highlighted the detrimental effects narcotics had upon both state and society in Iran. Second, it suggests that the Iranian ban upon narcotics helped to stimulate a rise in Afghan opium production before the Soviet invasion of 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of “Fordist” connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that from the 1870s generated an Arab diaspora and Arabic emigration literature from Buenos Aires to Detroit, the Iranian encounter with the United States was much later and more limited. This changed rapidly, however, with the opening of the “Nairn Way” and the importing of American automobiles, developments that tied Iran to the Levant at the very moment American strategists were coining the unitary spatial concept of a “Middle East.” In Iran, this conjunctural moment coincided with the rise of Riza Shah and the nationalist search for a third-power strategy to negate a century of Russian and British influence. Expanding the recent literature on Middle Eastern globalization, this essay uses ‘Abdullah Bahrami's 1926 travelogue Az Tihran ta Niyu Yurk (From Tehran to New York) to reconstruct what Iran's new nation-builders hoped to learn from the United States during the formative decade of U.S.-Iran relations. From behind the better-known story of petropolitics, Bahrami's travelogue captures the turning point when the United States first rose on the globalizing horizons of Iran's modernizing nationalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]