| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam. By David Farber. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. x, 212 pp. Cloth, $22.95, ISBN 0-691-11916-3. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-691-12759-0.)

In 1918, the Iranian parliament offered an oil concession to the American Standard Oil Company in northern Iran. One motivation was to distance Russia, which had been occupying that area during World War I, but was in revolutionary turmoil in 1918. An American presence might also become a counterbalance to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (apoc), which monopolized Iran's oil industry. Britain also had militarily occupied southern Iran during the war. Shortly thereafter, the American consul general in Tehran, Robert Imbrie, was murdered by a street mob. Although many suspected that the apoc was behind the murder, this was never established. Washington sent a note of protest to Tehran, and the oil deal fell through. American oil interests penetrated Iran in 1954 after Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who had attempted to nationalize Iranian oil, was overthrown in a coup instigated by the Central Intelligence Agency. This time, the British had asked for American help to carry out the coup. From the start, the American legacy in Iran was a negative one as far as the Iranian patriots/nationalists were concerned, and, coupled with U.S. support for the Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi dictatorship (albeit under the circumstances of the Cold War), that legacy ended just as it began, with the Islamic revolution of 1979. David Farber takes up the last vestiges of that saga in this book.

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