The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 his past Aug. 28 was the 50th anniver- sary of the ouster from power in Tehran of then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, due to street violence engineered, in part, by CIA operatives with the help of British counterparts. The young shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country in the midst of the turmoil, was restored to the throne. A quarter-century later, in 1979, fate would see the shah forced to flee his country again, this time never to return. Without his crown and essentially homeless, he would die in 1980 and eventually find burial in a far corner of an Egyptian mosque, courtesy of his faithful friend Anwar Sadat. The history of these years saw fate involving me as well with that history in Iran, both at its beginning and again at its end. At its immediate beginning, however, in August 1953, Tehran was for me still a distant place, and the political crisis surrounding Mossadegh’s nationalization of the British-oper- ated Iranian oil company of little interest. I had just com- pleted my first tour in the Service as a visa-issuing officer at the consulate general in Hamburg. Assigned next as a vice consul to Kobe, Japan, I had completed briefings in the State Department and was on home leave on the family farm in Minnesota. My mind, my preparations, including the dis- patch of my household effects, were on Kobe and all things Japanese (those effects, incidentally, only reached me 10 months later in Tehran). Then, three days before my sched- uled departure for Kobe in October 1953, a telephone call from the department informed me that I was not going there. Instead, I was to return to Washington for short briefings en route to the economic section of the embassy in Tehran. At that time Loy Henderson was presiding as ambas- sador in that city, deeply engaged in the considerable maneuvering of the U.S. and the U.K. in both the oil nationalization and its consequences — not least the coup involving the shah. Thinly staffed before these events, Embassy Tehran had grown sharply and would do so even more as American economic and military programs began a period of rapid expansion. “So many American offices,” I wrote, “that it seems to me to be confusion compound- ed.” As an available, as yet single and programmatically dispensable young officer, I became a part of that expan- sion — as did colleagues like Grant Mouser, Bob Malone, Chris Chapman, Bob Funseth, Roland Bushner, Pete MacDonald and others, also single and new to the Service. And today all of us remain proud of that service under Amb. Henderson. What follows in this writing are scattered impressions from my personal letters of the time that perhaps should have been warnings of things to come years later. First Impressions On Nov. 1, 1953, having been in Tehran all of a week, I wrote that I found everything, especially by contrast with Hamburg, nothing short of chaotic — a city where a few of the outward appearances of a modern city had been super- imposed on an ancient civilization not susceptible to quick change. The political situation was quiet but hardly settled. The T WICE F ATEFUL IN T EHRAN A N FSO REFLECTS ON TWO TOURS OF DUTY A QUARTER - CENTURY APART . N EITHER WAS EXPECTED OR SOUGHT , BUT BOTH PROVED MOMENTOUS . B Y B RUCE L AINGEN T Bruce Laingen was a Foreign Service officer from 1949 until 1987, serving twice in Iran (1953-1955 and 1979- 1981). He is currently the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.