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In my opinion, this review of The Queen and the Coup is exceedingly generous, as beside the basic errors (example, MRP became shah age 21, not 20), excruciating pronunciation of Persian names and sensationalist tone, the premise of the documentary is fundamentally false. (Thread) https://twitter.com/TheIndyTV/status/1272273299557552128
2/15 Professors Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac claim
that Loy Henderson convinced the Shah to remain in Iran in February 1953 by telling him he had Queen Elizabeth’s support. Aldrich says: “Without Henderson’s intervention the coup [in August 1953] would not have happened.”
that Loy Henderson convinced the Shah to remain in Iran in February 1953 by telling him he had Queen Elizabeth’s support. Aldrich says: “Without Henderson’s intervention the coup [in August 1953] would not have happened.”
3/15 Any historian who has studied this event will tell you that though Henderson did urge the Shah to remain in Iran, he failed to convince him. How do we know this? Because Henderson himself says so in his record of his conversation with the Shah. He writes, “Shah expressed
4/15 appreciation [of message], but insisted he must go.” This same document is cited in the documentary itself. Rather than engage in meaningless speculation as to how the Shah must have felt at hearing about the Queen’s support, why did Aldrich and Cormac not present the full
5/15 evidence? The answer to me is simple – if Henderson failed to convince the Shah, the story of the Queen’s involvement in the coup would be of no consequence and there would be no show. This is how to do scholarship badly: presenting only evidence that suits your conclusions
6/15 rather than attempting to shed light on what really happened. So, if it wasn’t Henderson’s intervention, what did convince the Shah to stay? Speaker of the Majles Ayatollah Kashani and Ayatollah Behbahani, one of the leading clerics in Tehran, sent letters to the Shah urging
7/15 him to stay and helped to mobilize huge crowds to protest in his support at the palace, while Mosaddeq was there, and shortly after at Mossadeq’s house. This second mob was led by the notorious thug Shaban Jafari, nicknamed “the brainless,” and included local heavies,
8/15 royalists, senior retired officers and gangs of peasants, who had been ferried into the city in army trucks to cause trouble. Mosaddeq managed to escape from his house still wearing his pajamas and took refuge in the Majles. At the same time, chief of staff General Mahmud
9/15 Baharmast visited the Shah to tell him that should he leave the country, the entire general staff were prepared to resign. I accept that the professors are not Iran specialists, however, these domestic forces are alluded to in the very same report on which the entire
10/15 documentary is based. Hearing of Kashani’s activities in the morning of 28 Feb, Henderson writes, the Shah “had become excited and insisted on leaving at once before lunch because he was afraid that if he did not (rpt not) get away so much pressure would be brought upon him
11/15 that he would have difficulty leaving without incident.” The pressure brought to bear on the Shah and the huge public support, although clearly manufactured by royalist and anti-Mosaddeq forces, were key factors in the Shah’s eventual decision to abandon his trip.
12/15 As Ali Rahnema has argued in his Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran, “What the British had asked Henderson to do – and what he had failed to achieve – was successfully accomplished by the Behbahani–Kashani axis.” There is a lot of excellent scholarship on the 1953 coup
13/15 and Iranian politics at the time (see, for example, Fakhreddin Azimi’s Iran the Crisis of Democracy, Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne’s edited volume Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, and Ali Rahnema’s Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran), which Aldrich and Cormac
14/15 do not have appear to have consulted. Britain’s role in the coup that ousted Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq certainly requires greater scrutiny, and there is, indeed, work to be done.
15/15 This documentary, however, has contributed little to nothing to the subject, aside from an amusing footnote about a boat being mistaken for Queen Elizabeth II.
See the document for yourself here: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/d166 #pahlavistudies
See the document for yourself here: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/d166 #pahlavistudies
