Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (52 page)

T
AKING OVER

When the
Majlis (
the Iranian legislature
)
required the government to renegotiate the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. concession in 1947, Anglo-Iranian flatly refused. That prompted the Majlis to introduce the legislation revoking the concession.
That
got the company’s attention. In 1949 they responded with a “supplemental agreement” that set the minimum annual payment at £4 million ($16 million), and promised to train more Iranians for administrative positions within the company. But Iranians would still play no decision-making roles and would still be banned from auditing company books.

Realizing that the Majlis was unlikely to accept the agreement, the shah stalled for nearly a year before submitting it for approval in June 1950. As expected, they rejected it. Then on March 15, 1951, the Majlis cast their historic vote to revoke Anglo-Iranian’s concession and nationalize the oil industry. Six weeks later, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the leader of the nationalization drive in the Majlis, was elected prime minister, and on May 1, 1951, fearing his throne and maybe even his life were on the line, the shah reluctantly signed the bill into law. A new company, the National Iranian Oil Company, took control.

SWITCHING GEARS

At this point, Great Britain was ready to invade Iran outright, but backed off when U.S. president Harry Truman refused to support the action. He wouldn’t support a coup against Mossadegh, either, so when the British got themselves thrown out of Iran for plotting it, they were out of luck...for a while. But Truman’s term of office was coming to an end, and in November 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president. The British thought they might have better luck convincing Eisenhower to support a coup.

Historians believe that the current jury system is derived from the Viking code of law.

Eisenhower had run for president on an anti-Communist platform, so when the British sent a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agent named Christopher Montague Woodhouse to sell the Americans on having the CIA stage a coup, he abandoned the usual British argument—that Iran had stolen British property—and tried something different: the Communist threat.

THE IRON CURTAIN

Woodhouse had a lot to work with. In 1940 the Soviet Union had annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and after World War II, had set up Communist regimes in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, as well. The Soviet Union shared a border with Iran, and more ominously, they had recently recalled their ambassador to Iran and replaced him with the man who, as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, had helped organize the Communist coup there. “Only the naive could believe that the Russians were not organizing to gain political control of Iran through their agents in the [Iranian Communist] party,” Daniel Yergin writes in
The Prize
. “The chicken was only waiting to be plucked.”

Eisenhower approved the plot.

READY, SET, GO

Plans for the coup were well underway by the time Eisenhower gave his approval. A CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt—grandson of Theodore Roosevelt—was already in Iran contacting a network of Iranian operatives set up by British intelligence.

The plan to overthrow Mossadegh, code name Operation Ajax, was fairly straightforward: The CIA would get the shah to sign papers dismissing him from office—even though under the Iranian constitution, he didn’t have the power to dismiss prime ministers—and get him to appoint a retired pro-British general, Fazlollah Zahedi, in his place.

The trick was doing it without plunging the country into chaos in the process. Mossadegh was the most popular statesman in Iran—if he were dumped unceremoniously, the populace was likely to rise up in revolt. Before the CIA could overthrow Mossadegh they had to make him less popular.

Floccinaucinihilipilification
is the action of estimating something as worthless.

SHUTTING OFF THE SPIGOT

Much of the work of undermining Mossadegh was already being done by Great Britain, which launched an international boycott of Iranian oil in June 1951. And because it withdrew British oil workers from Iran, there wasn’t enough skilled labor left behind to operate the oil fields and run the refinery at Abadan. Iran tried to hire skilled oil industry workers from abroad, but Great Britain asked its allies to refuse exit visas to anyone with experience in oil. It added to the economic pressure by freezing Iranian assets in British banks.

Even though Anglo-Iranian paid Iran only a pittance for its oil, the Iranian economy was so underdeveloped that oil exports accounted for 70% of export income and half of all government revenues in 1950. Thanks to the boycott, by 1952 Iran’s oil exports dropped to almost nothing. Inflation soared, the economy contracted sharply, and the Iranian government ran out of money. It was reduced to paying teachers, police, and other civil servants with IOUs. One by one, the various groups that had supported Mossadegh—merchants, the middle class, religious leaders, and the military—began to fall away. By the time that the coup plotters were ready for action in the late summer of 1953, Mossadegh’s popularity was waning.

TURNING UP THE HEAT

The plotters added to the economic pressure by launching a psychological campaign that would split Mossadegh’s coalition even further. The CIA bribed Muslim clerics to attack him from the mosques, and planted anti-Mossadegh articles and editorial cartoons in Iranian newspapers. Mobs were paid to stage marches against him. Iranian agents posing as Communists made threats against religious leaders, and on at least one occasion, the CIA bombed a prominent cleric’s house to turn him against Mossadegh.

By the end of July 1953, Iran had been destabilized to the point that the plotters were ready to launch their coup. The only thing left was to get the shah to sign the decrees firing Mossadegh and replacing him with General Zahedi. The CIA considered Mohammed Reza Pahlavi “a creature of indecision, beset by formless doubts and fears,” and when they went to him with the necessary papers, he stalled for more than two weeks before he finally agreed to sign, and then only on the condition that he be allowed to leave Tehran as soon as he did.

Sears stores originally refused to stock Barbie dolls. Why? They were “too sexy.”

The CIA agreed, but when they brought the papers, the shah had already fled to his hunting lodge on the Caspian Sea. So an Iranian colonel was dispatched to the lodge with the decrees and finally, on August 13, the shah signed the papers. The CIA scheduled the coup to begin on the evening of August 15.

TURNING THE TABLES

As simple as the plan was—deliver the decree to Mossadegh, arrest him, and have pro-shah troops and demonstrators in the streets before Mossadegh’s supporters could organize—a lot went wrong. Mossadegh’s people learned of the plot a few hours before it was scheduled to begin, and loyal army officers rallied to his side. When pro-shah soldiers arrived at his house to arrest him, they were taken into custody. Mossadegh then ordered his troops to take up defensive positions around the city.

When General Zahedi learned that the coup was failing, he went into hiding. So did the shah, who was still at his hunting lodge when Tehran radio announced the following morning that the coup had been put down. He and his wife fled the country, flying first to Baghdad and then to Rome.

Thinking that with the shah in exile, the coup was over and the danger had passed, Mossadegh relaxed his guard and recalled his troops that were stationed around the city.

But he may have been a little hasty.

For the final part of the story turn to
page 464
.

WHAT A GAS

What word was spelled out in the first neon sign?
Neon
. The small, bright red sign was created by Dr. Perley Nutting, a government scientist, and exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, 15 years before neon signs became widely used commercially.

Heads up! Rats have been known to survive falls from five stories high.

Bad news got you down? Take a break from humanity
.

H
AIR CLUB FOR HEIFERS

Three Ohio livestock exhibitors were disqualified from the state fair for gluing hairpieces onto their prize-winning Holstein cows (to make their backs appear straighter). One judge got suspicious of the cows’ appearance and ran his hand across their backs as they were leaving the show ring. When the hair came off in gluey clumps, officials disqualified Scott Long, Kreg Krebs, and Ken Krebs, and withheld the $335 prize. Using artificial enhancers is “unethical, and unfair to competitors who play by the rules,” says Melanie Witt, an official with the Ohio Department of Agriculture.

ELECTRIC COILS

On May 19, 2004, the entire nation of Honduras was plunged into darkness when a generator at the country’s biggest hydroelectric plant failed. What caused a whole country to go dark? A boa constrictor slithered into a sensitive area of the power plant. The unlucky snake was electrocuted, and the resulting short circuit caused the emergency systems to shut down the entire plant, which shut down the country’s electricity for about 15 minutes.

BIRDIE DOG

Mike Wardrop, a bar manager at the Didsbury Golf Club in Manchester, England, liked to take his German Shepherd, Libby, for walks on the golf course, where Libby liked to pick up stray golf balls and bring them to Wardrop. When one day Libby lost her appetite and began coughing up blood, Wardrop never suspected that Libby might have swallowed some of the golf balls. But when Wardrop took Libby to the vet, “they didn’t even have to do an X-ray; they could hear the balls rattling around,” he says. “They were betting how many would be in there. I think the highest bet was 11, so they were shocked when 28 came out.” $1,100 worth of veterinary and surgery bills later, Libby is back to normal and Wardrop is trying to break her golf ball habit. “I bought her two footballs,” he says. “She can’t swallow them.”

Who’s your daddy? Puppies from the same litter can have different fathers.

Some deep thoughts from the movies
.

“Life is not a movie. Everyone lies, good guys lose, and love does not conquer all.”

—Kevin Spacey,
Swimming with Sharks
(1994)

“There’s a kind of freedom in being completely screwed—because you know things can’t get any worse.”

—Matthew Broderick,
The Freshman
(1990)

“Destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.”

—Meg Ryan,
Sleepless in Seattle
(1993)

“Man is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building and stupid enough to jump off it.”

—Rock Hudson,
Come September
(1961)

“They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that’s true. What they don’t tell you is that when it starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.”

—Albert Finney,
Big Fish
(2003)

“You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? That idea of home is gone. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

—Zach Braff,
Garden State
(2004)

“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

—Robert De Niro,
Wag the Dog
(1997)

“Vice. Virtue. It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then you’re bound to live life fully.”

—Ruth Gordon,
Harold and Maude
(1971)

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

—Kevin Spacey,
The Usual Suspects
(1995)

“Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.”

—Russell Crowe,
Gladiator
(2000)

James Dean made his first television appearance in a 1950 Pepsi commercial.

The idea of buying on credit is as old as recorded history (the Sumerians did it 4,000 years ago), but the plastic in your wallet is a relatively new invention. Here are a few highlights from the history of the modern credit card
.