The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

American and British officials who dealt with Mossadegh took to calling him “Mossy.” Anthony Eden remarked that “Old Mossy,” with his pajamas and iron bedstead, was the “first real bit of meat to come the way of the cartoonists since the war.” Even some of those most exasperated by Mossadegh would ever after also remember how charmed they had been by him. The Americans tended, at first, to see Mossadegh as a rational, nationalistic leader, and one with whom business might be done. He could be a bulwark against the Soviet Union and an agent of reform; the alternative to Mossadegh was communism. And, throughout, Cold War considerations and fears shaped American policies and perceptions more than British. In any event, there were, as far as Washington was concerned, good enough grounds to be opposed to old-fashioned British imperialism. No less an authority than President Harry Truman said that Sir William Fraser of Anglo-Iranian looked like a “typical nineteenth-century colonial exploiter.” The Americans understood, better than the British, that Mossadegh’s great problem centered on his rivals within Iran; he was always constrained by the need to keep at bay those who were more nationalistic, more extreme, more fundamentalist, and more antiforeigner than he. In the meantime, he would improvise and play off the great powers and never quite compromise. Eventually, the Americans lost patience with him. When it was all over, Dean Acheson delivered a pungent judgment. Mossadegh, ...