Page 72 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 72 of 237

Zahedi came out of hiding and took over. The Shah returned from exile. Mossadegh went to jail and the leaders of
the Tudeh were executed.

In the aftermath, the British lost their monopoly on Iran's oil. In August, 1958, an international consortium of
Western oil companies signed a twenty-five-year pact with Iran for its oil. Under it, the former Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company got 40 percent, a group of American companies * got 40 percent, Royal Dutch Shell got 14 percent, and
the Compagnie Francaise des Petroles 6 percent. Iran got half of the multimillion-dollar income from the oil fields
under the deal, and Anglo-Iranian was assured a compensation payment of $70,000,000.

The United States, of course, has never officially admitted the CIA's role. The closest Dulles came to doing so
was in a CBS television show in 1962, after his retirement from the CIA. He was asked whether it was true that
"the CIA people spent literally millions of dollars hiring people to riot in the streets and do other things, to get rid
of Mossadegh. Is there anything you can say about that?"

"Well," Dulles replied, "I can say that the statement that we spent many dollars doing that is utterly false."

The former CIA chief also hinted at the CIA's Iran role in his book The Craft of Intelligence. " ... support from the
outside was given ... to the Shah's supporters," [11] he wrote, without directly saying it came from the CIA.

Although Iran remained pro-West after the 1953 coup, little was done to alleviate the terrible poverty in that
ancient land. Somehow, the oil wealth of Iran never trickled down to the people. A total of $1,300,000,000 in
United States aid poured in during twelve years since 1951, but much of it appeared to stick to the fingers of the
hopelessly corrupt officialdom. In 1957 a report of the House Committee on Government Operations said that
American aid to Iran was so badly handled that "it is now impossible -- with any accuracy -- to tell what became
of these funds."

A typical Iranian scandal involved a close friend of Princess Ashraf, Ehsan Davaloo, the "Caviar Queen," who
earned the sobriquet by paying officials to get a $450,000-a-year caviar monopoly.

With this stark contrast -- caviar and utter poverty side by side -- Iran remained a ripe breeding ground for
Communism. With the help of a President's swashbuckling grandson, the Invisible Government had brought about
a political coup d'etat. It had bought time. But the United States seemed unable to follow this up with badly
needed social and economic reforms.

***

1955: Mr. X Goes to Cairo

Two years after his operation in Iran, Kim Roosevelt turned up across the Red Sea in a mysterious episode in a
new setting.

On September 27, 1955, Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser announced to the world that he had concluded an
arms deal with the Soviet bloc. Washington had been unwilling to sell weapons to Egypt on Nasser's terms, and
the Arab leader turned to the East.

The news threw Washington into a turmoil, although the deal had been predicted beforehand by the CIA. It was
one case, however, where John Foster Dulles had not been inclined to take too seriously the reports coming from
his brother.