Democracy dawned in Iran when the Shah's wives gave up smoking. He had 1,600 of them, and tobacco was one of their favoured indulgences as they reclined on lush divans in the harem awaiting the call to higher things.
Tobacco was also a major Iranian industry at that time and a main source of income for poor farmers. When the Shah sold off the business to foreigners to finance his lavish lifestyle, the Shiite leaders called for a nationwide boycott.
That was in 1891 and it was the Iranians' version of the Boston Tea Party or the storming of the Bastille. The Tobacco Revolt was the beginning of the end of absolutism. Tragically for Iranians, the evolution of democracy which followed was brutally cut off, almost at its birth, in 1953.
Fifty years ago this year, Iran's fragile democracy was crushed in a plot by an imperial power lusting for oil. Outraged at "being pushed around by Persian pip-squeaks", the plotters organised a coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, but were at first repelled and expelled by the man they called a "wily Oriental", who "looks like a cab horse" and "diffuses a slight reek of opium". Having failed in their mission, the conspirators turned to more cunning diplomacy. They approached their closest ally and manipulated them into finding common cause in the overthrow of the elected government of Iran. Regime change was the cause then, as it is today in the same region.
But there was a difference. The imperialists then were not the Americans but the British. When they first approached their American allies for help in restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - nationalised by Mossadegh in 1952 - they were left in no doubt that imperialism was repugnant to the US and that they viewed the actions of the British in Iran as an intolerable interference in a sovereign state. Kinzer writes that "President Truman insisted until his last day in office that the United States must not intervene in Iran". His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was famously anti-imperialist. Kinzer quotes him asking why it wasn't possible "to get some of the people in these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us". Like Truman, he considered Mossadegh to be "the only hope for the West in Iran".
Why then was it the Americans who wielded the dagger and overthrew a foreign government for the first time in US history? Why did Eisenhower give tacit approval to a CIA agent to take over the dirty work of the British Foreign Office, and to replace a man whom he and the American media regarded as a liberator comparable to Thomas Jefferson with the disgraced Shah? British cunning played its part in this fabulous tale of machiavellian intrigue which Stephen Kinzer relates with uncommon skill and clarity.
But other conditions were necessary to account for the volte-face on the part of the White House. The year gives the clue. In 1953, the Korean War, the Soviet atomic and space advances, and the personalities of two powerful Americans transformed US fears of communism into a frenzy. Joseph McCarthy - strangely not mentioned in Kinzer's account - led the witch-hunt which prepared public opinion and media to escalate the threat. And John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, needed no prompting when the call came for covert action against godless communism.
The call came when a British agent, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, arrived in Washington to brief his CIA counterparts on a revised version of the British case for getting rid of Mossadegh. Woodhouse realised there was no point any longer in appealing to Britain's imperial claim to recover control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He had a cleverer strategy. He pitched his case on the existence of a small political party in northern Iran which was backed by Soviet support and which, he claimed, was interested in regime change. The zealot Dulles needed little convincing: "So this is how we get rid of that madman Mossadegh".
The execution of the coup itself, as Kinzer tells it, is a gripping story of sabotage, riots, suitcases full of dollars, bungling and cruelty. It was masterminded and led personally by the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, a swashbuckling CIA agent who appears to have been in it for the kicks, was twice summoned by Washington to abort it and only succeeded in the end by fomenting riots between paid Iranians who had little idea of the cause and purpose of their actions.
Had Truman still been in office; had Eisenhower, who shared his repugnance for communism, also shared his convictions about self-determination; had Foster Dulles been spirited away instead of Mossadegh, then the United States might have been spared the unhappy history which followed this first exercise in regime change, and the Iranian people delivered from Mossadegh's successors. Truman and Eisenhower displayed that "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" which Jefferson enjoined on future US policy-makers. Dulles had no such scruples. After his first sniff in Iran he took to coup-plotting like an addict and instilled the habit in the CIA with tragic consequences for Guatemala, Cuba, Chile and Vietnam.
Kinzer's book is an astonishing achievement, a thriller backed by meticulous research, a political analysis in artful prose, fair, humane, and absorbing.
• Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin History