The CIA, in recently declassified documents, has formally acknowledged that the spy agency helped to plan and execute the coup in Iran in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister who was in the process of nationalizing the country’s British-controlled oil industry.
The acknowledgment is contained in documents obtained by the National Security Archive through a Freedom of Information Act. The archive, which is based at George Washington University’s Gelman Library in Washington, posted the documents on its website; http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/, along with related material.
The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s, the archive notes.
The CIA had released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release, the archive says.
Archive Deputy Director Malcolm Byrne says he got the CIA’s revised version in 2011 but has held it in hopes even more information might be divulged. In the end, he chose to release the material now to mark the 60th anniversary of the coup on Aug. 19,1953.
The archive, on its website, says posting the material surrounding the Iranian coup “is more than academic.”
“Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country’s historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran’s sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur,” the archive says.
The coup plot, which relied heavily on local collaborators, used propaganda to undermine Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq politically, arm-twisted the shah to get his cooperation, bribed members of parliament, organized the security forces that carried it out and stirred up public demonstrators to serve as a backdrop for the operation.
The initial coup attempt failed, and the shah fled the country, but the organizers succeeded in a second attempt two days later.
Materials posted on the website include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup and the son of President Theodore Roosevelt.
The CIA history of the operation called the coup a “last resort” to avoid the possibility that Iranian oil could fall under the control of the Soviet Union.
“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” the CIA history says.
It says Mosaddeq was “neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility” but a political leader “who had become so committed to the ideal of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds.”
© 2013 USA TODAY. All rights reserved.
