Later in June, a British-registered freighter named the Spring-fiord, with a British captain, was bombed and partially sunk by a CIA plane operating from General Somoza’s Nicaragua with the general’s personal approval for the mission. Suspected of carrying petrol for the Arbenz government, the vessel had a cargo no more lethal than coffee and cotton. No public protest was made by the British, who accepted a personal apology delivered to their Washington embassy by “roll-back” enthusiast Frank Wisner of the CIA, along with discreet payment from the Agency of $1.5 million to Lloyd’s of London.
Such was the situation on the high seas. At the United Nations, the British were in a yet more awkward position. Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was attempting to isolate Guatemala publicly. Neutral and Latin American states had made the apparently unexceptionable proposal that the Security Council send a team of observers to Central America. Lodge, Eisenhower, and Dulles opposed this idea vehemently, since they sought to keep the Guatemala issue confined to their “sphere of influence,” the Organization of American States. They were furious when they heard that Britain and France were thinking of backing the move. “The British,” said Eisenhower, bluntly speaking in Monrovian tones, “expect us to give them a free ride and side with them on Cyprus. And yet they won’t even support us on Guatemala! Let’s give them a lesson.”
The “lesson” took two forms. On June 24, it was decided that the United States would veto the proposal if the British supported it. This would have been the first use of the veto by America against an ally since the world body’s formation. And on June 25, at a meeting in the White House with Churchill and Eden, Eisenhower talked what he called “cold turkey.” There would, he told them, be no further American support for their positions on Cyprus or the Suez Canal Zone unless they ceased to contemplate this disloyalty. (The French, significantly and perhaps fatefully, were told the same thing in respect of Indochina.) Eisenhower’s instinct was shrewd. At the time, the Greek government was attempting to raise the matter of the colonial status of the Greek majority in Cyprus, and the British position in Egypt was the target of increasing criticism from the emerging Afro-Asian bloc at the UN. As a result, the British and French abstained on the motion and thereby, given the makeup of the Security Council, ensured its defeat.
This little incident, considerable in its ramifications, perfectly illustrates the point made by Theodore Roosevelt in his 1918 letter to Kipling, where he had said, in referring to an earlier period:
In those good old days the policies of the United States and Great Britain toward one another, and toward much of the outside world, were sufficiently alike to give a touch of humor to the virtuous honour expressed by each at the kind of conduct of the other which most closely resembled its own.
The period of decolonization and receivership, which saw the United States take over the former position of the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, was anticipated in all essentials by that rather teasing observation. At times, British and American policy could be concerted, even at some cost to pride, into the semblance of a united front. At other times, a lack of synchronization was evident, or a residual desire to maintain historic British freedom of action. At such times, there was liable to be grumbling about American “imperialism” from the British Establishment and sanctimony about British “colonialism” from the Washington side. The ill-tempered and grudging collusion over Guatemala perfectly captures the essence of a war of words and emotions in which both parties felt justified and both could correctly accuse the other of hypocrisy. Eisenhower may have invoked the Monroe Doctrine in protesting at one British proposal for Guatemala, but what he actually wanted was British intervention in Central America on his own terms. The British may have sniffed about Cyprus and Suez being their “internal affair,” but again they yearned, not for American abstention, but for American support.
As in the case of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence on Iranian and Saudi oil, both nations rightly suspected the other of self-interested designs. (United Fruit lobbyists in Congress had played on this memory artfully, pointing out that British oil assets were being menaced by nationalization in Iran, that American assets in Iran might be “next,” and that the habit of nationalization should not be allowed to spread to or from Guatemala. If they could see the connection, so could others.) Iran was to be the alternative scenario in the drama of “receivership.”
There is only one uncensored account of the Anglo-American overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, and it occurs in the memoirs of C. M. (“Monty”) Woodhouse, which were published in London in 1982. (Countercoup, the account given by his American opposite number, Kermit Roosevelt, was extensively cut and bowdlerized, with even Woodhouse’s name excluded and all allusions to British Petroleum removed. Among these excisions was the fact, later confirmed by Miles Copeland, that Kermit Roosevelt had brought James Burnham to Washington to advise on the political and psychological impetus of the coup.) Woodhouse escaped the usual treatment accorded to British intelligence officers turned memoirists because he is a former Conservative Member of Parliament, a family friend of the Churchills, and a man of unstained reputation during his time at “the Firm.” During the Second World War he had been a highly successful resistance coordinator in Greece and had watched the birth of the Cold War there with considerable interest.
There is something emblematic in the cooperation of this protege of Churchill’s with Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson. It was a classic instance of what was to be a recurring British self-image in counterrevolutionary enterprises that were undertaken with the new senior partner. In other words, the United States supplied the muscle and the British provided the nous. (this formulation is sometimes varied to read “their money and our brains.”) It also prefigured the general hand-over of British influence in the Middle East to American receivership, a process which was not always to be so smooth and cooperative.
Woodhouse’s entry into Iranian history took place at the moment when Mossadegh was threatening to nationalize the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), now better known as British Petroleum. A British minister, Richard Stokes, had visited Iran but returned with no concessions and spoke feelingly, if absurdly, about “grass growing in the streets of Abadan,” where the AIOC refineries were located. As Woodhouse put it:
The Americans were more likely to work with us if they saw the problem as one of containing Communism rather than restoring the position of the AIOC. Although some representatives of American oil companies seemed to be circling like vultures over Iran, American officials were inclined to be more cooperative. Averell Harriman, a roving Ambassador of great experience, had been associated with Stokes’s negotiating mission. Loy Henderson changed the atmosphere in the US Embassy towards sympathy with the British case. [Italics mine.]
This paragraph is almost a classic of “special relationship” prose. The clause in italics expresses the latent British suspicion and is a clear echo of Churchill’s misgivings as expressed to Roosevelt in 1944-45. Averell Harriman appears, the great wartime emollient in Anglo-American diplomacy and himself a relation by marriage of the lion of Fulton. Loy Henderson was the envoy who had eased the transition between British and American hegemony in Greece after the hasty promulgation of the Truman Doctrine. There was, then, even if for differing purposes, a wary communion of interests and a shared bank of expertise and experience.
Returning to London to brief the Foreign Office, Woodhouse found that a pessimistic view was being taken of his ability to mount a destabilization of Mossadegh. “But Eden,” as he put it, “left one loophole open. He remarked that an operation such as we contemplated would have no chance without American support.” This was exactly what Woodhouse had been hoping to hear, and the election of Eisenhower a few days later was to give him his cue. The new administration had a Dulles at State and a Dulles at the CIA. It was to both departments that Woodhouse t
ook his plan for what “was called, rather too obviously, Operation Boot.” He found that doors in Washington opened very readily. He also knew that the idea of British imperialism was not a great selling point, but that the spirit of Fulton was. Therefore:
Not wishing to be accused of trying to use the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasise the Communist threat to Iran rather than the need to recover control of the oil industry.
The Anglo-American candidate for the Iranian presidency was, it was agreed in Washington, to be General Fazlullah Zahedi. Woodhouse describes this selection as “ironic,” which from one point of view it most certainly was. During the Second World War, Zahedi had been a leading Nazi agent and had been arrested by the British and interned in Palestine. “Now we were all turning to him as the potential savior of Iran from the Soviet bloc.” The CIA’s director of operations, Frank Wisner, was a staunch proponent of the James Burnham view of the world and had already enlisted a substantial number of ex-Nazis for the purposes of “rolling back” the Iron Curtain. He was an early enthusiast for Operation Boot and for the Zahedi option.
While in America, Woodhouse took the opportunity to look around, and made various imperishable “special relationship” entries in his memoirs. He visited Major Gerry Wines, a wartime colleague and First World War veteran, in Dallas. “Southern hospitality proved even warmer than I had expected. Over a Thanksgiving dinner in a Texas mansion, I reminded Gerry Wines of a more Spartan Thanksgiving we had celebrated in Greece, when he had impressed on me that ‘you Limeys think Thanksgiving is the Fourth of July!’ ” Then came the moment without which no English gentleman’s visit to the United States is complete:
I did my Christmas shopping at Neiman-Marcus, where one of the salesgirls begged me to “just go right on talking— I just love that cute British accent.”
And on the way home, he had the moment without which no English gentleman’s return from America is complete:
An American sitting next to me in the plane, who had never been to London before, expressed anxiety about the fogs he had been told about, so I had done my best to reassure him that they were very rare. On the day after our arrival the worst smog of the century descended on London, and lasted two weeks. I happened to run into my American friend in Claridges while the smog was at its thickest, and offered him my apologies. He assured me that it was the greatest experience of his life, and he would not have missed it for anything.
Dickensian “heritage trails” did not have to be faked in those days.
A medical indisposition on the part of Sir Anthony Eden—one which was to be of great moment in Anglo-American relations a few years later—led Churchill to take over the Foreign Office for a few months and to silence all doubts about Operation Boot. One of the doubts concerned the personality and record of General Zahedi, described by Patrick Dean of British intelligence at a Washington planning meeting as “a bit of a shocker.” This classic of “special relationship” talk was merely decorative. On Woodhouse’s own account, the whole operation had by then become American-directed. He went off on a tour of the Far East, while on July 19, 1953, Kermit Roosevelt crossed the Iraqi border into Iran and began closing the net and making promises to the Shah. After a nerve-racking false start, which led to the Shah’s fleeing the country to Rome, a combination of CIA money, military preparedness, and carefully planned mob demonstrations managed to tip the scale. On August 23, 1953, General Zahedi was able to welcome a restored Pahlavi dynasty and to put relations with Britain and America back on their former footing. “In London,” noted Woodhouse, “the shares of the AIOC rose sharply on the Stock Exchange.”
Reviewing the situation with the advantage of perspective, Woodhouse observed that it had been conservative ayatollahs who had been of most help in organizing pro-Shah demonstrations. He also recorded the fact that, Stock Exchange notwithstanding, “the AIOC . . . never regained its exclusive position in Iran, but it recovered some of its losses through participation in an international consortium.” The nature of that consortium can be guessed at from Woodhouse’s minuting of “an immediate grant of 45 million dollars to the new Iranian government” from Washington and also from the fact that Iran applied to join the Baghdad Pact, a British-dominated group of treaty nations, which after the Suez fiasco became the American-dominated Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). In the new oil concession, the renamed “British Petroleum” held 40 percent and Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California, Gulf Oil, Texas Oil, and Socony-Mobil each held 8 percent. This improved the American stake in Iranian oil from nil to 40 percent. As a coda, Woodhouse added: “What we did not foresee was that the Shah would gather new strength and use it so capriciously and tyrannically, nor that the US government and the Foreign Office would fail so abjectly to keep him on a reasonable course.” On this uncharacteristic “special relationship” note, the story of Operation Boot draws to a close, except for two ironic footnotes.
Woodhouse, who was a pronounced philhellene from his wartime days, worried that the British were asking for trouble in their refusal to grant freedom to Cyprus. In 1954, he made an approach to Allen Dulles, proposing that CIA influence be brought to bear on Churchill to reconsider the matter. “A few weeks later the reply came back that the President was unwilling to intervene. He thought he had urged quite enough new initiatives on Churchill already, though I could not think what they were.” If Woodhouse had known what his friends Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner had been up to in parallel in Guatemala, and of the complicity of Churchill and Eden and of the price of that complicity, he might have been able to solve the mystery of their sudden coolness about the rights of small nations and the need for British decolonization.
Finally, describing a chill that was to set in among the Anglo-American elites, Woodhouse recalls in his memoir:
We still cooperated in a few unspectacular activities: for instance, we jointly founded and funded the periodical Encounter as a vehicle for intellectual propaganda. But the CIA became increasingly preoccupied with power and prestige, and increasingly confident that it no longer needed British expertise so much.
Whether Woodhouse knew it or not, one of the founders of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was James Burnham, who was recommended to Encounter and its editor, Stephen Spender, by Irving Kristol as “a first-rate essayist on cultural matters.” Under this rubric, the author of the “receivership” idea was to gain in Anglo-American stature.
Although Woodhouse never worked it out, the Iran and Guatemala operations of 1953 and 1954 (the root of so much later grief in two hemispheres) in many ways form a “pair,” at least in the sense suggested to Kipling by Theodore Roosevelt.
This is more than may be said for the other two grand episodes in, respectively, American and British postwar alliance politics. Vietnam and Suez were not just questions of imposing discipline on small and impudent nations like Iran and Guatemala. They represented great power judgments about the possibility of halting or bridling in the one case Vietnamese and in the second case Arab nationalism. In both the formative and the active periods of these two crises, London and Washington behaved much more like imperial rivals than allies, and failed to keep up the habit of collusion which, however reluctant and unequal, had served them well enough in more limited theaters.
As the French position in Vietnam deteriorated toward its humiliation at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Sir Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and Sir Winston Churchill as Prime Minister were attempting to save French face as well as American. Eden wrote, deludedly, that there was a middle path of partition. (The British, of course, always say that in these situations. Even General Gracey, the military author of the Vietnam impasse, had found a natural billet after Saigon as one of the commanders of the army of newly created Pakistan.) Pleadingly, Eden wrote: “There was some indication of a greater willingness in Vietnam to face partition . . . we felt that the distress at amputation might prove more apparent than real.”
A
bsurd though this opinion seems today, at the time it struck John Foster Dulles as a milksop half measure. He wanted a more vigorous operation to save the French position in Vietnam, and he wanted a “united front” of anti-Communist Asian nations to underwrite it. This front was to include Taiwan, which he trusted, but not “neutralist” India, which he did not. Sir Anthony rather belatedly put the case for Indian susceptibilities about exclusion, perhaps feeling more sympathetic than he might have done owing to the fact that Britain had just been excluded by the United States from membership in the ANZUS pact linking America, Australia, and New Zealand. Snubbed over the question of the old “white dominions” and the “New Commonwealth,” he had little enough inducement to follow Dulles into Vietnam behind the tattered French tricolor. (If Dulles had hoped to rally Eden to this banner, he contradicted himself in a private conversation with him in London in April 1954, where, in Burnham-like fashion, “Mr. Dulles concluded with pessimistic comments about France. He wondered whether France was not, by a process of historical evolution, inevitably ceasing to be a great power.”) Later in the London meeting, Dulles reached for the Churchill-Burnham analogy in its crudest form. Eden recorded:
I was not convinced by the assertion which Mr. Dulles then made, that the situation in Indo-China was analogous to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and to Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland.
Eden was a proven liar, and one should never use any citation from his memoirs and papers without a more authoritative confirmation. In this case, confirmation exists in the form of a letter from Eisenhower to Churchill, dispatched only one week earlier. Churchill may or may not have relished its condescending tone: