In fact, however, four days before Ike’s letter, Kim Roosevelt carried a twenty-two-page paper outlining objectives for an operation in Iran to a meeting in the office of the secretary of state. The paper condensed the much more detailed British plan left by SIS chief Sinclair. John Foster Dulles asked a few questions. Some State Department officers—for instance, Ambassador Loy Henderson—opposed the plan but now said nothing or made pro forma comments. Some CIA officers also thought little of it, notably Teheran station chief Roger Goiran, but they were not present and their views were not presented by Allen Dulles or Kermit Roosevelt. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, who knew only about those parts concerning the Iranian military, Kim described as “appropriately enthusiastic.”

  Allen Dulles asked Roosevelt to be sure to cover two items in his briefing, the prospective cost of the project and its “flap potential,” or ability to cause controversy. Roosevelt estimated the price at no more than a couple hundred thousand dollars. On the flap potential, he proved ambiguous: if the spooks seriously miscalculated, the result could be disastrous in the Middle East, but on the other hand, the CIA division chief declared, if Project Ajax got the required support he did not see how it could fail.

  The project amounted to a scheme frantically put together in Cyprus and Beirut. A few months earlier the CIA station in Teheran had reported inquiries from a senior Iranian general as to whether the United States might support a coup d’état against Prime Minister Mossadegh. In mid-March DO chief Frank Wisner had sent SIS a message informing the British that the agency now stood ready. As an interim measure the Iranian general received mild encouragement while headquarters and CIA station personnel brainstormed how to proceed. Donald N. Wilber, a part-time contract officer and Princeton archaeologist, and Miles Copeland, a veteran of the CIA’s Egyptian adventure with Nasser, were the lead planners. Both were psychological warfare officers. Wilber had spent much of the preceding year in Iran running efforts against the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh.

  On April 4 Allen Dulles approved a $1 million fund that the Teheran station could use to weaken Mossadegh. In Washington the first move came from the Art Staff, a unit of the DO’s Paramilitary-Psychological Staff, which concocted a variety of anti-Mossadegh leaflets to be distributed in Iran. Planners traveled to Cyprus where, starting on May 13, they teamed up with SIS station chief Darbyshire to compile a paper describing the operation. They finished at the end of the month. The most delicate part came when the two intelligence agencies had to reveal exactly who their assets were in Iran. The British spooks were miffed that CIA’s resources and money were so much greater and agency personnel more numerous, but they sat back to allow the Americans to take the lead.

  Project Ajax envisioned a “quasi-legal overthrow” in which the CIA would manipulate public opinion into opposition and suborn members of the armed forces, the Majlis, religious figures, and businessmen. To induce the shah to dismiss Mossadegh, a series of emissaries would proceed to Teheran to persuade him to issue the appropriate decree, called a firman. At that point the agency would put crowds into the street to back up the shah’s action and further pressure any wavering members of the Majlis. The Tudeh would be neutralized. The CIA would work through Iranian agents developed by the SIS plus its own people.

  To support the plan the CIA had its analysts do an intelligence estimate, “Factors Involved in the Overthrow of Mossadegh,” completed on April 16, which concluded that the project could work.

  Wilber and Copeland carried the Ajax paper to Beirut. They met on June 10 with Kim Roosevelt, in from Washington, senior representative George Carroll, and CIA Teheran staff. The maitre d’ at the St. George Hotel grille, a friend of Carroll’s from his OSS days in Nice, gave them a quiet table and kept people away. Roosevelt took the paper on to London with only minor changes. On his last evening in Beirut he dined with the chief of the Lebanese security service, who tried hard to find out whether Kim would be going to Teheran, and had Pan American hold its London flight to have more time to ply Roosevelt with wine and questions.

  British government and senior SIS officials approved. Roosevelt then went to Washington, where the agency circulated the plan on June 19. When the key interagency meeting took place six days later, John Foster Dulles’s major concerns were not with the covert operation but whether the British government would agree on oil rights with the successor regime, and whether Washington would offer foreign aid in the aftermath. Ajax won approval. Kermit Roosevelt took charge of a CIA task force to carry out the project. This would be the real answer to Mossadegh’s pleas for foreign assistance.

  Compared to the protracted period of planning approval, Ajax’s execution took place quickly. It was the struggle for control of the armed forces and police, together amounting to some 250,000 Iranians, that triggered the actual Iranian coup. In the spring of 1953 Mossadegh assumed the position of defense minister in his own cabinet and moved to supplant the shah as commander-in-chief. He appointed his own people to head the police and as chief of staff of the army. Quite likely these actions steeled the shah, who had failed to act decisively throughout the AIOC crisis, in his determination to rid himself of Mossadegh. In this case the Majlis refused Mossadegh’s request for extended powers, leading the premier to dissolve parliament on July 19. A few days later major street demonstrations occurred in Teheran, said to be carried out by the Tudeh, against the Majlis.

  The first emissary of the CIA/SIS consortium was the shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf. Unpopular in Iran, she had gone to France, there to be contacted in mid-July by intelligence officers Darbyshire of SIS and Stephen Meade for CIA. The princess returned to Teheran without clearance from either the shah or the Mossadegh government, triggering a storm of controversy when she arrived on July 25. The shah refused to see her initially, but they met four days later. Ashraf told the Iranian chief of state that an emissary would come from London. That would be Asadollah Rashidian, one of several brothers of a wealthy Iranian shipping clan who were on the SIS payroll. To prove his bona fides, Rashidian asked the shah to select a phrase, those words to be broadcast over the BBC, a classic open code communication. The shah did so, and the British Broadcasting Corporation duly radioed the message. Rashidian, in turn, informed the shah that there would be an American emissary, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, known to the shah as trainer of his police a few years earlier. He had been recruited by DO Iran branch chief John Waller at the end of June. The general would give the shah the same assurances as had London’s emissary, then ask him to issue the firman on Mossadegh, another ordering the army to remain loyal, and a letter declaring confidence in Gen. Fazollah Zahedi, the CIA/SIS candidate for Mossadegh’s replacement. Schwarzkopf left for Teheran through Beirut on July 21, using the cover of a round-the-world tour. He met with the shah about ten days later. Reza Pahlavi still could not bring himself to do what had been asked. In fact the shah was so frightened of surveillance that he took the American general to a vast hall in the palace and pulled a table into the center of the room, whereupon both sat on top of it to talk.

  Kim Roosevelt preceded Schwarzkopf by a few days. He entered under a false identity, making the road trip from Baghdad, crossing the border on July 19 at a dusty frontier station manned by a barely literate guard. Roosevelt stayed with a senior CIA man whose home had a swimming pool Kim found a great joy. He lay in the sun between sallies for meetings with CIA operatives and the shah. At the office the agent, Joseph Goodwin, laid in an inexhaustible supply of vodka. This was spy work with panache. To intensify tensions, the United States began deliberately avoiding meetings between its representatives and Iranian government officials. Ambassador Loy Henderson stayed away, in Salzberg, Austria, awaiting developments. Gen. Robert McClure, America’s guru of military psychological warfare, who now headed the Teheran military mission, cooperated with Roosevelt quite pleasantly.

  Meanwhile division baron Roosevelt replaced Roger Goiran. The bushy-haired station chief had long service in Teheran and had recruited quite an agent network, plus he had a good sense of the place. But Goiran all along had warned that the shah would be hesitant to move against Mossadegh. Kim Roosevelt saw him as a fanatic, a professorial type with a high-pitched voice who passionately backed Mossadegh out of a sense of guilt. Why that should be so, instead of a straight-line analysis from the CIA’s most experienced man on the scene, is not evident. Roosevelt replaced him with Joe Goodwin. The Goiran recall was spun as an escalation of the confrontation with the Mossadegh government. Goiran left on August 2.

  Just hours earlier Roosevelt had met the shah. The palace sent a car to pick Kim up at his vacation spa, bringing him to the palace at midnight. In the dead of night, through the gates the CIA man crouched down in the vehicle, pulling a blanket over his head. Kim had thought carefully about what to wear—grey oxford slacks, dark turtleneck, and Iranian-style sandals. The meeting went well enough and became the first of a series between the CIA and the shah, with a British agent sometimes alternating. Roosevelt assured the shah of both Eisenhower and Winston Churchill’s personal support if he dismissed Mossadegh. They met again on August 3. The shah said he had never been an adventurer and would take no chances. He wanted more assurances from President Eisenhower. Ike made a last-minute insert into a speech he gave in Seattle and declared that the United States could not stand idly by while Iran fell to communism. Reassured, the shah still did nothing.

  Working with a core of just a few CIA officers, Roosevelt activated SIS agent networks and those already serving the CIA. He used SIS communications through Cyprus for cables to Washington. Mossadegh’s own schemes ran into trouble. His candidate for police chief bragged that he had a list of all British spies on the force. By the next morning the man had been gunned down. In desperation Mossadegh, a populist nationalist and in no sense a Communist, on August 8 opened trade talks with the Soviet Union. This news led President Eisenhower to issue the final go-ahead for Project Ajax.

  The shah finally signed the firmans that fired Mossadegh, and appointed Zahedi as premier, but here there is some confusion as to the record. Kim Roosevelt recounts that the shah left with Queen Soraya for Ramsar, a resort town on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, without approving the decrees. The chief of the palace guard, Col. Nematollah Nasiri, went after him and finally induced the shah to sign. This is also the version in the CIA history. By some accounts Queen Soraya played a crucial last-minute role in stiffening the shah’s resolve.

  There is another account, however, by Prince Manucher Farmanfarmaian, an intimate of the Iranian ruler whose sister was Soraya’s lady-in-waiting and who the shah customarily invited for hard-played volleyball games (which the prince detested). One such weekend at Ramsar, for example, the prince referred to as his Dien Bien Phu. In any case, on the afternoon of Sunday, August 9, Farmanfarmaian remembers, the shah and his intimates were enjoying tea and shade after volleyball, the emperor reading the newspaper, when the butler announced a visitor and the shah said to show him in. Dressed in a dark suit, the man offered the shah a document, and the Iranian emperor asked if anyone had a pen. Prince Farmanfarmaian offered his. Reza Pahlavi signed the papers, handed back the pen, pronounced it a good one, and told the prince his pen would now be worth a lot of money, hoping it would bring them good luck as well. The document had been the decree appointing General Zahedi as prime minister, the stranger a CIA emissary. The prince then recalls the dinner conversation that day, clearly timing these events after the shah’s departure for Ramsar.

  The prince’s story may be the weavings of a courtier or perhaps only part of a larger tapestry. In any case, the advance schedules prepared by Ajax planners supposed that August 14 would be the critical day. Allen Dulles and his wife Clover materialized in Rome. Dulles spent the night in the communications vault of the CIA’s Rome station, hosted by station chief Gerry Miller. They were limited to talking Italian operations, however, because nothing happened in Iran.

  Almost the only development of consequence in Teheran on the day of the long-anticipated coup was not an event but a demand—by the local plotters working with the CIA—that they would need $5 million immediately after acting. Kim Roosevelt and Joe Goodwin, already nervous about delays, were also told that nothing could be done until the night of the 15th. “The pool was no solace,” Roosevelt records, “cigarettes and vodka-limes tasted awful.”

  Late in the afternoon of action-day, someone ratted out the plot. Mossadegh’s chief of staff, Gen. Taghi Riahi, learned of the impending firmans. He alerted the First Armored Brigade to move that night and threw a cordon of troops around Mossadegh’s house. By then Colonel Nasiri’s Imperial Guard had sent squads to arrest prominent Mossadegh supporters, but they missed Riahi who had already gone to headquarters. Nasiri was arrested himself when he attempted to serve the first decree. In the morning Mossadegh went on the radio to announce that there had been an attempted coup but the government retained control.

  The fat was in the fire. General Zahedi, having fled to a hideout outside Teheran, had put himself out of play. The general’s son, Ardeshir Zahedi, later a top aide to the shah, stood beside the general throughout these days and denies Zahedi engaged in any foreign intrigues. Ardeshir took out an ad in the New York Times in May 2000 when the CIA history of Ajax was finally opened and the newspaper published a feature article based on it. Not only does the son deny Fazollah Zahedi’s CIA connection, he insists no agency operation put his father into power, that in fact if there was such an operation, it failed. The CIA history shows that on August 16 a senior CIA officer spent much of the day in search of Ardeshir Zahedi to contact the general, who hid at the estate of a friend. Kim Roosevelt collected the general from his hideaway and brought him to the home of a CIA officer in Teheran. Later the CIA station compiled a public statement purportedly from Zahedi based on the direct advice of Ardeshir. The CIA’s agents fabricated an interview with Zahedi as well. Donald Wilber’s CIA account notes that Ardeshir Zahedi stayed with agency officers from August 16 on and his father from the next morning.

  Mossadegh’s National Front, plus the Tudeh, now began something of a psywar competition with the CIA, the object being to convince Iranians that their side had the upper hand. The government put out press bulletins and held news conferences to insist that the plot had been broken up. Mossadegh had some success—at least one senior officer working with the CIA went to a foreign embassy to plead for asylum, believing Ajax had crashed. For its part the agency circulated cartoons and leaflets drawn up at headquarters, organized press coverage undermining Mossadegh’s claims, and called in chits from anyone who owed the Americans—for example, one newspaper publisher who had been advanced the sum of $45,000. In one case CIA officers took two international journalists, including the New York Times’s Kennett Love, to an interview with General Zahedi. Joe Goodwin used the CIA station’s radio to relay a message to the Associated Press in New York which asserted that “unofficial reports” acknowledged the anti-Mossadegh forces were armed with official decrees from the shah firing the prime minister and appointing General Zahedi in his place. Roosevelt and CIA officers ran around organizing street demonstrations of their own against Mossadegh.

  Street protests by nationalists and by the Tudeh persisted. Up to six thousand pro-shah rioters recruited by the CIA then took to the streets as well. Eisenhower perceived Mossadegh’s failure to suppress Tudeh demonstrations as coddling of Communists, as Mossadegh moving into the Soviet orbit. Ambassador Henderson arrived from Beirut on the 17th. He complained to Mossadegh, who answered by calling out the police. The next days brought lows and highs: CIA headquarters cabled regrets on the failure and advised Kim Roosevelt to leave Iran for his own safety. Instead Kim and George Carroll held a council of war, improvising a fresh plan. London rejected continuing appeals from SIS/Nicosia to permit its officers to proceed to Teheran. The shah secretly left the country for Rome the next morning. There he stayed at the same hotel as Allen Dulles, with obvious potential for direct contact.

  Full-scale rioting broke out in Teheran on August 18 and 19. Several hundred people died in the violence. A friendly newspaper published the text of the shah’s firman appointing Zahedi. Late on the 18th a CIA headquarters dispatch actually called off Ajax, and the SIS dispatched a similar instruction. But the tide had already begun to turn. Roosevelt got the Rashidian brothers and other agents to mobilize mobs in the streets while Iranians and CIA officers contacted army units throughout Iran to rally them to Zahedi. On the second day pro-shah tank units, informed by reporter Kennett Love of weak guard forces at the premier’s house, attacked Mossadegh’s residence. That morning Chief of Staff Riahi reluctantly informed Mossadegh he no longer controlled the army, and in fact pro-shah troops began to appear all over Teheran. Throughout the afternoon the CIA-backed forces consolidated their hold on the city. The shah returned from Italy and paraded in triumph through the streets of Teheran.

  So ended Project Ajax, the first apparent U.S. covert victory. Kim Roosevelt received personal thanks from both Churchill and Eisenhower as well as the medal already noted. Aside from its direct cost, estimated at $10 million to $20 million—far more than the $100,000 or $200,000 originally estimated—Ajax had unfolded in a fashion following a scenario if not a precise plan.

  The big winners were the shah and his henchmen, who gained absolute power, which they held for twenty-six years until swept away by a religious conservatism even more potent than the populism of Mossadegh. The United States, by participating in the coup, broke with its own tradition—and its declaratory policy—of unconditional support for democracy around the globe. Through support of the shah, the United States also committed itself irrevocably to his regime in a way that blinded Washington later when it should have recognized rising opposition. As for the cost to American taxpayers, Eisenhower approved $45 million in new funds soon after the Zahedi cabinet took office. The flow neared a billion dollars before the end of Ike’s administration. The losers were the Iranian people; Mohammad Mossadegh, who was eventually captured and placed on trial; and, ironically, AIOC. Although Iranian oil production resumed in August 1954, the “former oil company’s” claims were never fully resolved.