Studies of development often take as their point of departure Truman’s 1949 Point Four Program. In it he outlined that the way to tackle the threat of communism was through technical assistance–or through development, especially, “helping people to help themselves.” What is interesting is that shortly after he announced it, he gave an address before the Annual Convention of the American Newspapers Guild where he referenced a model that exemplified Point Four’s aims: this was the work of the Near East Foundation (NEF) in the Varamin Plains, just outside of Tehran. The NEF is the second oldest humanitarian agency in the US, having been founded in 1915 as the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. In 1945 the Iranian government invited them to undertake a rural development programme, which began the following year as a demonstration project in 35 villages in Varamin. Following the project, Truman declared, ‘the village people are at work in new carpentry shops, vegetable gardens and orchards’--a process that he said was ‘now spreading throughout Iran’ and could be ‘matched many times over’ under Point Four. As it turned out, the NEF’s work would go on to influence USAID, the Ford Foundation, UNESCO and the Iranian Ministry of Education as they started similar projects in the 1950s. This paper will offer an account of the NEF’s project in Varamin on the micro-level. It combines the foundation’s scarcely used records at the Rockefeller Archive Centre with several Persian-language sources such as memoirs, oral histories and newspapers, especially Enteqad Baraye Dehqanan-e Iran (Critique for the Villagers of Iran), detailing peasants grievances against landlords and gendarmes. It shows that Varamin was emblematic of how villages across the Global South became key battlegrounds in the early Cold War. Like other rural development schemes of the time, the project illustrates the politics of seemingly innocuous development practices, refashioning peasant subjectivities amidst growing fears of communism. Moreover, the paper argues, the NEF’s project was a testing ground for global development interventions that have come into prominence in recent decades–particularly neoliberal ideas around economic growth being based on human capital, investment in people, skills and education.