Posted on 08/17/2020 2:22:57 AM PDT by Winniesboy
A first-hand account of Britain’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and restored the shah to power has been published for the first time.
The account by the MI6 officer who ran the operation describes how it took British intelligence years to persuade the US to take part in the coup. Meanwhile, MI6 recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament with banknotes transported in biscuit tins.
Together the MI6 and CIA even recruited Shah Reza Pahlavi’s sister in an effort to persuade the reluctant monarch to back the coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh.... According to Darbyshire, the main reason MI6 wanted to get rid of Mossadegh was that Britain’s spies believed his government, although it contained only one member of the communist Tudeh party, would ultimately be overwhelmed by Soviet influence.
“I really do believe it because Mossadegh was a fairly weak character,” the British intelligence officer said. “Once you get highly trained members of the communist party in, it doesn’t take long. We didn’t share the American view that he was acting as a bulwark against communism … we thought he would be pushed by the communists in the long run.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
A lot of this external business and coup affair in 1953 Iran...revolves around the oil business, and the nationalization of oil assets in the country.
The idea was that the Shah would arrive....be a friend of the UK/US, and allow the oil ‘game’ to continue. Twenty-six years later, folks would discover the Shah didn’t have the leadership skills required, and the coup would eventually deliver some Islamic regime.
And this is news now, why? Cause “The Guardian” want to conflate the current Iranian regime with the elected one that we ousted in 1953. They also hope to de-legitimize our actions against the mullahs in the current circumstances.
I wonder how closely this parallels the current coup attempt in the United States. I’d guess they are no longer transporting the bribes in biscuit tins, but I suspect those who want to overthrow our elected president are bribing our elected representatives, among other things. Human nature does not change.
The best account I ever read claimed that CIA involvement in the coup was exaggerated by......... the CIA.
Mosodeque was dismantling their legislature and setting himself to be.....as usual, dictator for life.
No, because, as you will see from the article:
"The transcript was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the course of research for a new documentary, Coup 53, due to be released on Wednesday, the 67th anniversary of the coup."..."The typewritten transcript was published on Monday morning by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in the US."
....The Guardian is simply reporting these two current events, not instigating them. It's the director of the documentary and George Washington University who have revived the story.
And the end result was well worth the cost according to some. Carter didn’t help any by refueling it, But almost 70 years later this event still drives Iran’s animosity. We didn’t belong there...
In the game of nations, a coup and the installation of the Shah was the best outcome for the West -- and for Iran. Under the Shah, Iran avoided the grim fate of a Communist satellite and the Shah laid down the rudiments of a modern nation.
One day, after the mullahs are ousted, Iran will recover her freedom and will prosper. Indeed, the discrediting of Islam among the populace is such that a free Iran seems likely to embrace religious pluralism and friendship with the West and will look more to Persian kings for inspiration than Muhammed.
It was bad enough that it was done, it was worse that Lermit Roosevelt bragged about it.
I may not have liked Bill Clinton or Barak Obama, but if a foreign entity had overthrown them and stuck even a benevolent dictator on us, I’d be burning embassies and planting IEDs, too.
Same here, natural expected cause and effect. We made our own bed with that one. But this is considered impossible, we never make mistakes and no fault was our own. So here we are, still. Everything we deal with from the middle east was seeded and has grown from that very event.
Yeah, because Ayatollah Khomeini didn’t really began start denouncing westernization as far back as the 1940s, and Islamists never cause trouble unless a secular, left leaning aspiring despot running the country gets overthrown.
Just as we denounce Islam and consider this as our business to do so, it was their business to do that if they wanted to. By 1953 Iran had actually already become very much westernized. This trend was reversed after the coup. The Westernization had nothing to do with this action. It was about the oil.
Westernization has EVERYTHING to do with the Islamic revolution. In fact the mullahs had turned on Mossadegh.
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