The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

Dulles’s arrival in Rome was conveniently timed. By the following morning, the mobs running riot through the streets of Tehran were led and financed by the CIA—the final act in a covert drama aimed at overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restoring the shah’s autocratic rule. Mossadegh, a dedicated patriot and wily survivor of Iran’s treacherous politics, had antagonized the British government by nationalizing the powerful Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later renamed British Petroleum) soon after taking office in 1951. The British behemoth—the third-largest producer of crude oil in the world—ruled Iran with imperial arrogance for much of the twentieth century, crushing labor strikes in the hellish oil fields and propping up and replacing local regimes at will. Mossadegh’s defiant seizure of Iran’s oil treasure set off a global thunderclap.