General Discussion

Meet 'The Brothers' Who Shaped U.S. Policy, Inside And Out
Fresh Air | By NPR Staff
Published October 16, 2013 at 12:33 PM EDT

https://www.wunc.org/2013-10-16/meet-the-brothers-who-shaped-u-s-policy-inside-and-out

"In 1953, for the first and only time in history, two brothers were appointed to head the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles secretary of state, and Allen Dulles director of the CIA.

Journalist Stephen Kinzer says the Dulles brothers shaped America's standoff with the Soviet Union, led the U.S. into war in Vietnam, and helped topple governments they thought unfriendly to American interests in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo and Indonesia. In his new book, The Brothers, Kinzer says the Dulles' actions "helped set off some of the world's most profound long-term crises."

John Dulles died in 1959. President Kennedy replaced Allen Dulles after the covert operation he recommended to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba ended disastrously in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

Kinzer tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Dulles' shared background and ideology played out in their policy decisions: "They had this view of the world that was implanted in them from a very young age," Kinzer says. "That there's good and evil, and it's the obligation of the good people to go out into the world and destroy the evil ones."

The 1953 US-Led Coup in Iran
The Dulles Brothers back at it... again

https://skippedhistory.substack.com/p/the-1953-us-led-coup-in-iran


".... To understand Mossadegh’s ouster, let’s first chat about some other patricians—the British!— whose empire peaked 40 years earlier. In 1913, close to a quarter of the world’s population lived under the Union Jack, and one of the empire’s crown jewels was Iran, which Winston Churchill called “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” Why did Churchill describe Iran like The Rock describes GNC? Well, Churchill lived on an island whose chief source of fuel was oil. And Iran not only had oil but thanks to a series of deals that Britain imposed on Iran dating back to 1907 it, magically, also had oil that Britain controlled!

This was the imperial context in which a young Mohammad Mossadegh grew up. At turns theatrical, intimidating, and patriotic, he entered the Irani Parliament in 1924—Iran had a constitutional monarchy. There, he became Britain’s most vocal critic, declaring, “The Iranian is the best person to manage his home.” Mossadegh also became a vocal critic of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran’s monarch, or just the Shah for short, who was so detested in Iran for his coziness with the British that he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Of note, the Shah was also close with Allen, who when still working as a lawyer in 1949 secured the Shah’s support of a $5 billion construction deal with a client of Allen’s. Although the Shah assured Allen and OCI that the Iranian people “were eager to welcome American capital,” his statement proved almost as wrong as Wolf Blitzer on Celebrity Jeopardy, and Mossadegh’s political party killed the deal with Allen’s client. The following year, 1951, Mossadegh became Iran’s new Prime Minister and with unanimous consent from parliament nationalized the country’s oil industry.

.... But now there was a new empire in town. As planned, Allen’s pal the Shah consolidated his power and split Iran’s oil profits with an international consortium that included the British and a handful of companies in the US. The Shah also spent billions of dollars on US weaponry, and over the ensuing 25 years became a dictator who crushed dissent by any means necessary, including employing torture techniques honed by the CIA. The extreme repression of his regime led Iranians to further detest him, which led to his overthrow during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which led to the Iran Hostage Crisis, which led to the sour state of US-Iranian relations that has persisted ever since. And as one Iranian scholar mused in 2002, “It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup Iran would now be a mature democracy.”