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DARIOUSH BAYANDOR’S account of the toppling of Muhammad Mossadeq, Iran’s charismatic prime minister of the early 1950s, is ruffling expatriate Iranians. A Persian translation will doubtless follow, adding to the clamour. Iranians recall with anguish this episode in their history, when a democratically elected nationalist took on Britain and America and lost. Many link their subsequent political travails, including the 1979 Islamic revolution, to this early defeat.

Mossadeq nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, denting British prestige and prompting fears, especially in America, that his unstable premiership would pave the way for a communist takeover. The putsch that unseated him in August 1953 was carried out in the name of Shah Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, but the whole seedy plot, it later emerged, had been hatched by the CIA. In 2000, Madeleine Albright, then the American secretary of state, turned the affair into an instrument of mortification, publicly rueing her compatriots’ role in the overthrow of Iran’s “popular” prime minister.

To judge by his book, Mr Bayandor would rather she hadn’t. The author, a former diplomat in the pre-Khomeini government who went on to work for the United Nations before retiring to Switzerland, does not go as far as the shah and his entourage, who presented Mossadeq’s overthrow as a patriotic uprising in no need of a foreign impetus. But he casts doubt on one account of events that was penned by the... >>>