A top-secret report submitted to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 by Lt. General James Doolittle advocated that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) become “more ruthless” than the Soviet KGB and argued that in order to survive, “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair-play’ must be reconsidered.” This report has been widely perceived as the key source of the abuses committed by the CIA in its conduct of “covert operations,” also referred to as “clandestine action” and “dirty tricks.” In fact, however, these prescriptions had already been filled and administered by the CIA in collusion with the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the coup that overthrew the elected nationalist and liberal government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953 and installed the dictatorship of General Fazlollah Zahedi.

The world will never know the full story of the coup because the CIA reported that it had inadvertently destroyed practically all of the relevant documents before they could be examined by anyone outside the agency. As a consequence, The Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq of Iran by Donald N. Wilber, the CIA's main architect of the coup and implementer of its deception and “grey” and “black” operations, and Scott A. Koch's “Zendebad, Shah!” are the main secondary official sources in place of those documents. The collection under review is by far the most thorough and objective study of the coup and is a must read for anyone interested in U.S.–Iran relations and American foreign policy. It is written by several scholars of integrity, with substantial previous relevant research and publication, and expertly edited by Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne.

In addition to the introduction and conclusion written respectively by Byrne and Gasiorowski, the collection consists of seven chapters. In the first, Homa Katouzian provides a brief history of oil nationalization, the Anglo–Iranian oil dispute, the coup, and Muhammad Reza Shah's regime. He makes some needed corrections, particularly in reference to the Qashqaʾis, to Wilber's work and places the coup in “the long cycle of chaos-arbitrary rule in Iranian history,” maintaining that “until very recent times [not specified] what most educated Iranians. . .understood by ‘dictatorship’ was arbitrary rule, and by ‘democracy’ traditional chaos” (p. 2). The lack of sophistication and fissiparous tendencies exhibited by members of voluntary political organizations in Iran, however, may be attributed more to such factors as the short intervals that elections provided access to political power and the difficulty of reconciling national and ideological values with the parochial imperatives of political parties. Some of the author's contributions would have benefited from a greater utilization of the relevant literature of comparative politics in such areas as the evolution of political parties, legitimacy, traditional autocracy, and modern dictatorship.

In the second chapter, Fakhreddin Azimi provides a comprehensive account of the configuration of domestic forces working for and against Mosaddeq in the critical months of 1952–53. In the third, Maziar Behrooz brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his focused and thorough analysis of the role of the Tudeh Party. He debunks the twin myths of the Tudeh takeover of Iran and Communist-supported Mosaddeq, which were used by the American and British decision makers and parroted by their media to justify the coup (pp. 103, 124–25).

In the fourth, Wm. Roger Louis discusses the significant British role, which after some early differences in approach evolved into dogged opposition to oil nationalization and its main architect Mosaddeq, often perceived (or deliberately discredited?) as “dangerously irrational” or a devious “Oriental” by British leaders and even some academics (pp. 137, 154). He provides a wealth of detailed information on the backgrounds and perceptions of a number of key decision makers, bureaucrats, spies, and cooperating scholars.

In the fifth, Mary Ann Heiss analyzes the British-sponsored boycott of Iran's oil and its effect on Mosaddeq's government. She notes that although the major U.S. oil companies were initially critical of the rigid posture of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, they immediately and in unison joined the boycott once Iran nationalized the company. Heiss also reports that in spite of protestations of being a neutral broker in the Anglo-Iranian dispute, the Truman administration actually sided with Britain early in the game. She concludes that although the boycott did not have the desired crippling effect on Iran's economy because of economic countermeasures, it did have the political effect desired by opponents by creating “the impression that Mosaddeq's government was near bankruptcy and by fueling U.S. fear” of growing support for the Tudeh Party and ultimate absorption of Iran into the Soviet bloc (p. 199).

In the sixth, Byrne investigates the U.S. domestic environment to isolate the factors that caused Eisenhower to change Truman's relatively more neutral and noninterventionist policy into one of covert and subversive intervention. He concludes that the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and associated geostrategic elements were the most significant. Eisenhower, whose presidential campaign had been based on opposition to Communism, became convinced that the Soviet Union posed a serious threat to U.S. global interests. In light of the fears generated by the perceived nature of Mosaddeq's government, Byrne's propositions are plausible. However, there are other explanations of U.S. Cold War behavior that may have explanatory value beyond the conventional one employed by Byrne.

In the seventh, Gasiorowski, the world's foremost living authority on the conduct of the coup, provides a detailed and fascinating account of its various stages based on published materials and interviews with former CIA operatives. He begins with its authorization by decision makers and the formulation of the operational scheme by Wilber and Norman Darbyshire in Nicosia; goes through its implementation and initial failure despite all American and British efforts to bribe, instigate, cajole, and organize internal opponents of Mosaddeq and fund “gray” operations in the media and “black” operations by agents provocateurs demonstrating as Tudeh Party members against the U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman; and ends with its eventual success and a final examination of its causes. Readers will find a wealth of information on the extensive networks of involved U.S. and British agents and diplomats, their principal Iranian operatives (Ali Jalali and Faruq Kayvani for the United States and the three Rashidian brothers for the British), their many subagents, and other collaborating individuals and groups.

In the conclusion, Gasiorowski notes that “the coup has had such a powerful impact on Iran's political consciousness that many Iranians today still believe that the United States is working covertly to undermine or overthrow their government” (p. 261). In light of what has transpired since this book was written, it seems that those Iranians have not been that far off the mark despite having been frequently labeled as conspiracy theorists. The present regime in Iran also seems to have learned the lessons of the coup, perhaps too well, and this no doubt has contributed to its viability despite wishful predictions of its demise in the West.