'Sic semper politics petroleum'
'Sic semper politics petroleum' Thomas Powers dismisses the 1953 . coup in Iran with a single brief reference, calling it "a classic of quiet political subversion, accomplished by Kermit...
...He was just fighting the mind-boggling greed of the British oil interests...
...His careful account of the conflict between the British Iranian Oil Company and the Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh makes the matter clear: Mossadegh wasn't a Communist, he wasn't even pro-Soviet...
...citation), and the more recent horrors-is it possible that these stemmed directly from the mild requests of 1949...
...When the White House wants action, covert or otherwise, it wants action the day before yesterday...
...I don’t want to end up with operations as inappropriate to our needs as this damned house...
...The man who had just opened the CIA’s first station there sipped his drink and tried to cool off...
...Sic semper politics petroleum' Thomas Powers dismisses the 1953 . coup in Iran with a single brief reference, calling it "a classic of quiet political subversion, accomplished by Kermit Roosevelt with a handful of aides and a suitcase of money...
...Neither he nor anyone else in the agency then knew the language...
...Fortunately they had porches...
...The first rule for the use of covert action is: A truly vital American interest must be at stake...
...He was trying to learn Laotian...
...The Iranian commission set up in 1949 to review the British concession suggested that the oil company should make its books available, hire more Iranians, and sell oil to Iranians at the cost of production rather than at the price charged on the world market...
...They never do...
...What about the cause...
...Was this the case in 1953...
...In the small print of an act rejecting Soviet demands for an oil concession, the legislators included a provision requiring a review of the Anglo-Iranian concession of 1933...
...Within two years he had been swept away, replaced by more activist types who were trying to respond to Washington’s demands to do sotnething...
...Joseph Burkholder Smith Joseph Burkholder Smith spent 25 years in the CIA before retiring in 1975...
...Anyone seeking the answer to that question should read Present al the Creation, Dean Acheson's memoirs...
...The seeds of the controversy were sown in an action taken by the Iranian parliament in 1947...
...In the end," Acheson writes, "a new concession agreement was worked out by a consortium of oil companies, American and European, in which Anglo-Iranian had less than half an interest-a far less favorable result than it could have obtained in \950...
...All the houses were des beat the heat by the massive use of airitioning, for which there was insufnt power in the capital of the hant kingdom of Laos at the time...
...British intransigence led to Iranian belligerence, then to nationalization, long and bitter negotiations between the Iranians and the British, then to U.S...
...He was a keen student of China, fluent in several Chinese dialects-a serious, thoughtful, very bright man...
...The aid ’ ’ had built a compound for sonnel...
...The craftsmanship was excellent...
...They didn’t give him the time...
...We really don’t know anything about this country,” he said to me...
...aid mission in Vientiane in the mer of 1955...
...The White House doesn't want to hear that the CIA isn't reaqy or may not have precisely the right people to work with.I remember sitting on the veranda of a wooden house newly constructed by the U.S...
...diplomatic efforts, then to fights between Mossadegh and the Shah, between Mossadegh and the military, then to the plotting of a coup and finally tQ the CIA solution...
...The air-conditioners were silent, the houses uninhabitable...
...1 just hope they’ll give me time to learn...
...Is it possible that the long chain of eventsthe international jockeying, the propaganda, the CIA coup, the reign of the Shah and his close alliance with seven U.S...
...presidents ("a twentieth century ruler who has found in power a constructive instrument to advance social and economic reform in an ancient land"-the words of Harvard's 1968 honorary LL.D...
Vol. 12 • March 1980 • No. 1
