Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran.
The C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup, which served as a model for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries, has been well known for decades, and even today it is a source of animosity towards the United States on the part of many Iranians. The agent who led the coup was Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Until recently, though, the agency hasn’t publicly acknowledged the extent of its role, which was code named TPAJAX. That has now changed. In an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, the anonymous author states bluntly:
The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [a different English translation of the prime minister’s name from Farsi] 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.
So much for the the Eisenhower Administration’s vigorous denials that it was behind the coup. And so much for the alternative version of the events, assiduously promoted in some quarters, which claimed that the overthrowal of Mossadegh was a locally-inspired plot that the Americans and the British merely helped along. The internal C.I.A. historian continues:
It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission … that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPJAX was entered into as a last resort.
The newly released account come from one of a series of documents that the C.I.A. eventually turned over to Byrne after he filed Freedom of Information requests. It is different from another history of the Iranian coup that was written in 1954 by one of its planners at the C.I.A., Donald N. Wilber, and which the New York Times reporter James Risen obtained in 2000. Wilber’s account was almost contemporaneous, and it contained many vivid details of the coup attempt, which almost failed. The new account, portions of which had been declassified previously, takes a broader and more detached approach. In addition to confirming that a U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower, personally approved the toppling of a foreign government, it contains several other items of interest.
The United States saw the coup essentially as a Cold War maneuver. For the British, who were also eager to overthrow Mossadegh, the main beef with the Iranian Prime Minister was that, in May of 1951, he had nationalized the oil fields controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to BP. From the perspective of Washington, though, as the newly released documents confirm, Mossadegh’s biggest sin was his flirtation with the Soviet Union, which, like Britain, had colonial ties to Iran. As the animosity between Tehran and London escalated, the British moved to prevent Iran from selling any oil internationally, thus depriving the government of much-needed revenues. The C.I.A. and other U.S. agencies became concerned that Mossadegh would turn to the Soviets for economic and even military help. From the Agency’s history:
LOL, that's rich. Colonial ties, huh? Inherited from the Czars, I guess.
I don’t see how that account substantially differs from the article’s. And, given that it was in the midst of the Cold War, I have a hard time feeling bad about nipping a potential Soviet-aligned autocrat in the bud. The CIA did good work.