Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (27 page)

Golf ball:
Must weigh no more than 1.62 ounces, with a diameter no less than 1.68 inches. (A standard tee is 2-1/8 inches long.)

King mattress:
Must be no smaller than 80 inches long and 76 inches wide.

Jumbo egg:
One dozen jumbo eggs should weigh no less than 30 ounces.

What fore? Americans spend over $630 million a year on golf balls.

Few Americans know much about a secret coup orchestrated by the CIA in Iran in 1953. Yet it is one of the most important moments in the history of U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Here’s the story
.

L
IVE FROM BAGHDAD

In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and began working toward the day when U.S. administrators would turn over control of the country to a new elected government in Iraq.

The war in Iraq was easily the most thoroughly documented “regime change” ever. CNN covered developments live, 24 hours a day. So did Fox News, MSNBC, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Al-Jazeera, and every other news network worldwide. If you didn’t have a TV or newspaper, you could follow events on the Internet. Breaking news was never more than a click away.

Compare that to another U.S. attempt at regime change: the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, right next door to Iraq. It doesn’t sound familiar? That’s not surprising—CIA coups are
supposed
to be secret, and for nearly 50 years this one was as secret as the Iraq war was public.

Rumors have been circulating about it since the 1950s, especially in Iran. But it wasn’t until April 2000—when the agency’s own in-house history of the coup became public—that Americans got the first detailed account of U.S. involvement in the affair. And that only happened because someone leaked the history to the
New York Times
. Had that document not been leaked, much of what we now know about the coup would still be secret today.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Pop quiz: What do Iraq and Iran have in common? Answer: They both have lots of oil. For decades Great Britain had controlled Iran’s oil industry, but by the early 1950s, the Iranians were ready for a change. On March 15, 1951, the Majlis (an elected assembly similar to the U.S. House of Representatives) voted to nationalize their country’s oil industry and take it back from Great Britain.

The moon is 2,140 miles in diameter. That’s less than the width of the continental U.S.

The British government owned a 51% stake in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum), a private company that had begun developing the Iranian oil fields in 1908. Iran was home to one-fourth of the world’s proven petroleum reserves, and the British-built refinery at Abadan was the largest on Earth, supplying Europe with 90% of its oil. England had no known oil reserves of its own, nor did any of its colonies. If the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was allowed to pass, Great Britain would be stripped of its most valuable foreign asset and the only source of oil it directly controlled.

And they weren’t about to just let it happen.

By May 1952, the British had drawn up plans for invading Iran with 70,000 troops and seizing the oil fields and the Abadan refinery. But they were reluctant to do it without at least the tacit approval of their ally, the United States. President Truman was adamantly opposed and urged the British to resolve the dispute by negotiating with Iran.

BACKUP PLAN

Without U.S. support, the British scrapped their invasion plans. Rather than negotiate, however, they started planning a coup against Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. Truman refused to support the coup, too. When Mossadegh caught wind of it in October 1952, he broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and expelled all British diplomats from the country.

The coup had been thwarted, and Great Britain was even worse off than before. President Truman had no sympathy—he blamed the British government for refusing to negotiate. “We tried to get the block-headed British to have their oil company make a fair deal with Iran,” Truman wrote in disgust to his former ambassador to Iran, Henry Grady. “No, no, they could not do that.”

NASIR AL-DIN

President Truman
did
have sympathy for the Iranians as they struggled to gain control of their own natural resources. He was no fan of European colonialism, and British relations with Iran smacked of exactly that. They and the Russians had dominated and exploited Iran since the 1840s, when the country was ruled by an incompetent, despotic shah, Nasir al-Din.

Coincidence? Reported UFO sightings are greatest when Mars is closest to Earth.

The court of Nasir al-Din was something to behold: He had a harem of more than 1,000 wives and concubines, and through them had fathered hundreds of princes and princesses. Each one was a drain on the national treasury, so to support them Nasir al-Din set taxes exorbitantly high, raided the fortunes of Iran’s wealthiest citizens, and sold government offices to the highest bidder.

After a while even these measures didn’t generate enough cash, so Nasir al-Din began selling “concessions”—exclusive rights to build railroads and streetcar lines, irrigate farmland, buy and sell tobacco, mine for minerals, print the national currency, and anything else he could think of—to foreign businesses, for a pittance.

Nasir al-Din’s successors continued the practice, and in 1901, his son Muzaffar al-Din sold what would turn out to be the biggest concession of all: the right to explore the southern part of the country for petroleum and natural gas. He sold Iran’s most valuable natural resource to a British businessman named William Knox D’Arcy for £20,000, plus 16% of profits realized from the sale of any oil that was discovered.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

The D’Arcy concession, which was later purchased by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later changed to “Anglo-Iranian”), didn’t attract much opposition at the time because oil had not been discovered yet in that area. What made Iranians
really
angry was when the shah tried to raise the price of sugar in 1905.

After decades of being sold out by their leaders and exploited by foreigners, Iranians decided they’d finally had enough when the price of sugar went up. Riots broke out in Tehran, and when a nationwide revolt seemed imminent, Muzaffar al-Din cancelled the sugar price increase and even agreed to a written constitution that would limit his power, as well as to an elected assembly (the
Majlis
) that would share power with him.

DEMOCRACY AT LAST?

The wholesale looting of Iran appeared to be over...but it wasn’t. For one thing, Muzaffar al-Din died a week after he signed the new constitution, and his son and successor, Muhammad Ali, was openly hostile to democratic reforms. For another, the British and the Russians profited handsomely when Iran was for sale, so they had a lot to lose if the monarchy gave way to a constitutional democracy. In 1907 the two powers signed an agreement dividing the country into Russian and British spheres of influence. Then, together with Muhammad Ali, they began to fight back.

Queen Latifah once worked at Burger King.

In 1908 they attempted to disperse the Majlis by force. The plan backfired, and Muhammad Ali was forced to abdicate in favor of his 12-year-old son, Sultan Ahmad. Then in 1911, the Majlis did the unthinkable—they hired an American banker named W. Morgan Shuster to be Iran’s treasurer-general. Shuster immediately went to work straightening out the country’s finances and reforming its corrupt tax system, a job that included exposing many of the secret deals that the British and Russians had used to exploit the country. That of course, was intolerable. In late 1911, Russia invaded Iran, overthrew the Majlis, and forced Shuster to resign.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

The Iranian democratic experiment was over for now, but foreign manipulation of the Iranian government was only beginning:

•
When World War I broke out in 1914, Iran declared neutrality but leaned in favor of the Germans (who were fighting the British and Russians). That prompted the latter two to send troops into Iran, and by the end of the war they occupied nearly the entire country—the Russians in the north and the British in the south.

•
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russians withdrew from northern Iran, leaving the country wide open to the British. In 1919 they drafted a document called the Anglo-Persian Treaty and forced it on the shah. In effect, the “treaty” gave the British outright control of the Iranian army and treasury, as well as the country’s transportation and communication systems. Then, to quell any dissent, the British declared martial law. With the stroke of a pen, Iran was reduced to little more than a British protectorate and the gas pump of the Royal Navy.

•
By 1921 the country was on the verge of splitting apart, so the British encouraged a strong-willed army officer named Reza Khan to seize control of the government. In February 1921, Reza led 3,000 troops into Tehran and forced the shah to appoint him commander of the armed forces. In 1923 he became prime minister and in 1925 overthrew the shah. The following year he crowned himself shah and changed his name to Reza Pahlavi.

The United Kingdom is made up of 3 nations (England Scotland, Wales) and 1 province (Northern Ireland).

•
Reza Pahlavi lasted until 1941, when the British and Russians overthrew him for leaning in favor of the Germans during World War II. They installed his 21-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in his place.

CRUDE PLANS

Getting rid of Reza Pahlavi solved one problem, but it created another—Mohammed Reza was nothing like his iron-fisted father. Weak, fearful, and indecisive, he wasn’t strong enough to impose his will on the country when nationalist sentiment came roaring back after the war.

The Majlis, which had been powerless during the reign of Reza Pahlavi, began to reassert itself. In 1947 it passed a law requiring the government to renegotiate the petroleum concession with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. And it really needed renegotiating.

After 40 years, Anglo-Iranian still had no Iranians on its board of directors. It had no Iranians in management positions and hadn’t trained a single Iranian technician to help run the refinery at Abadan. British employees lived in spacious homes in a tidy company town with social clubs and a swimming pool; Iranian employees lived in rat-infested shanty towns with no indoor plumbing or electricity. Iran was supposed to receive 16% of the profits generated from the sale of crude oil, but Iranians weren’t allowed to audit the company’s books. And Iran was only entitled to a share of profits from the sale of
crude
oil—Anglo-Iranian kept the profits from refining and marketing the oil around the world.

Although Iran had a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves, the concession with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was so biased in favor of the British that Iran was making more money from exporting carpets than from exporting oil.

For more of the CIA’s First Coup, turn to
page 303
.

Nudity can be shocking...and so can prudery. But these characters demonstrate that whether you’re dressed or naked, you can still be dumb (and funny)
.

N
UDE...
On Christmas Day 2003, Minneapolis firefighters with sledgehammers knocked down the chimney of Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore and rescued a naked 34-year-old man who was trapped inside. The man claimed he had stripped naked in order to fit down the 12-by-12-inch chimney, and that he was looking for some keys he had accidently dropped down the shaft. Police didn’t buy it—and planned to charge him with attempted burglary. “He doesn’t appear to be a hard-core criminal,” said Lieutenant Mike Sauro, “just stupid.”

PRUDE...
Acting on a neighbor’s complaint, in May 2004, police in Barnsley, England, ordered a local man named Tony Watson to do something about the naked lawn gnomes in his front yard or face arrest for “causing public offense.” Watson, an ex-army sergeant, complied by painting bathing suits on the gnomes. “We have to take complaints from members of the public seriously,” a police spokesperson told reporters.

NUDE...
In April 2004, a woman parking her car in Göttingen, Germany, was confronted by a man who complained that she did a bad job parking her car. According to police, the man was completely naked and ran after her “to communicate his displeasure about the noise and time she had taken to park.” The woman swore at the man, then ran into her house and called authorities.

PRUDE...
In 1998 the Navy charged a career officer with indecent exposure and conduct unbecoming an officer following an incident at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. The incident: Lieutenant Patrick Callaghan, 28, had mooned a friend while jogging on the base. “There are people who are real offended when you take your pants down in a public street,” Callaghan’s commanding officer, Captain Terrence Riley, explained. At first, Callaghan faced dismissal from the Navy for the prank, but officials let him off with only a letter of reprimand in the end.

Popular items at McDonald’s in India: Maharaja Mac and the McAloo Tikki.

NUDE...
In January 2004, a businessman named Bill Martin bought a run-down nudist colony outside of Tampa, Florida, for $1.6 million and made plans to open a new business on the site. What kind of business? A
Christian
nudist colony. “The Bible very clearly states that when Adam and Eve were with God, they were naked,” says executive director David Blood. “When people are right with God, they do not have to fear nudity.”