{"id":242914,"date":"2023-08-28T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2023-08-28T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=242914"},"modified":"2023-08-25T05:23:47","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T04:23:47","slug":"from-iran-to-the-us-our-history-of-coups-has-come-home-to-roost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/08\/from-iran-to-the-us-our-history-of-coups-has-come-home-to-roost\/","title":{"rendered":"From Iran to the US: Our History of Coups Has Come Home to Roost"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Aug 2023 – <\/em>August 19th marked the 70th anniversary of the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the first democratically-elected prime minister of Iran. It was the first coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in the modern era orchestrated by the United States, launching decades of coups, assassinations and \u201cregime change.\u201d While Iran\u2019s grim anniversary generated scant attention in the U.S., one attempted coup was in the news, as defendants in the Fulton County, Georgia election interference case against former president Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators began surrendering for arrest. This is the second indictment served on Trump for his attempted coup against the United States following his 2020 election defeat. The Trump-summoned mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol almost stopped the peaceful transfer of power. The violence on January 6th, 2021, though, was just a shadow of the bloodshed that accompanied countless U.S.-sponsored interventions around the globe.<\/p>\n

Pres. Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s administration was directly involved in Mossadegh\u2019s overthrow. But it had help. The CIA<\/span> was just six years old in 1953. Britain\u2019s spy agency, MI6, by comparison, had been around for decades, had two world wars behind it and had fomented uprisings and intrigue the world over as Britain struggled to maintain its waning empire. By the 1950s, the British empire\u2019s lifeblood was petroleum, pumped from Iran\u2019s oil fields by the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1951, tired of being plundered, the Iranian parliament nationalized its oil industry. The movement was led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, who not long after was elected Prime Minister. He would remain in office for just over a year, as the US and the UK plotted to retake control of Iran\u2019s oil.<\/p>\n

The extent to which MI6 partnered with the CIA<\/span> in Mossadegh\u2019s ouster was revealed when a remarkable documentary, \u201cCoup 53,\u201d premiered in 2019. The film, directed by Taghi Amirani, an Iranian-born physicist turned filmmaker, uncovered the coup\u2019s long-concealed direction by an MI6 operative named Norman Darbyshire.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all grew up with the story of the CIA<\/span> coup run by Kermit Roosevelt,\u201d Amirani said on the Democracy Now! news hour.<\/a> He was describing Kermit Roosevelt, recruited by CIA<\/span> Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to be the CIA\u2019s point person on the Iran coup. He was the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Kermit Roosevelt gave numerous interviews, practically bragging that he brought $1 million into Iran for the coup, but only spent $60,000 of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cKermit \u2026was more of a bagman and an adventurist,\u201d Amirani said, going on to describe MI6\u2019s principal Iran operative: \u201cDarbyshire was in Iran from the age of 19 as a soldier. He spoke probably better Persian than me. He knew the Iranian street. He really understood the psyche of the Iranian mob, as he says in the interview in our film. He knows how to turn them, what buttons to press.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amirani\u2019s research for \u201cCoup 53\u201d uncovered troves of forgotten material. He found a transcript of an interview with Darbyshire. When the initial CIA<\/span>-led coup attempt failed, a mercenary mob hired by Darbyshire swept through Tehran, surrounded Mossadegh\u2019s house, and, with the help of rebellious army officers, attacked the residence and arrested Mossadegh.<\/p>\n

The U.S. and Britain installed a puppet, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the Shah of Iran. He ruled for a quarter century, guided by the CIA<\/span> in the creation of SAVAK<\/span>, a brutal state security apparatus that terrorized and killed Iranians who dared speak out. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution, ushering in strict theocratic rule that persists to this day.<\/p>\n

Amirani\u2019s research brought him to the non-profit National Security Archives in Washington, DC, which pries classified documents from the U.S. government for public access. One key CIA<\/span> document obtained by the Archive in 2013 reads, \u201cThe military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA<\/span> direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one chilling interstitial in \u201cCoup 53,\u201d document boxes that line the wall of the Archive\u2019s reading room scroll by, listing successive US-sponsored coups, attempted coups, and military interventions that followed the overthrow of Mossadegh:<\/p>\n

Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Lumumba (Congo, 1961), Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1961), Diem (Vietnam, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Salvador Allende (Chile, 1973), and others from the invasion of Grenada in 1983 to the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, the ongoing attempts to overthrow the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, confronting a homegrown attempted coup, with the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump and his co-defendants, will hasten a reckoning with our nation\u2019s violent history plotting coups abroad. On the 70th anniversary of the coup in Iran, such self-reflection is long overdue.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Story 23 Aug 2023:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s Always About Oil\u201d: CIA & MI6 Staged Coup in Iran 70 Years Ago, Destroying Democracy in Iran<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Aug 2023 – 19 Aug marked the 70th anniversary of the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the first democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, in a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat orchestrated by the US and UK, launching decades of coups, assassinations and \u201cregime change\u201d worldwide. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators are arrested for attempted coup against the US electoral system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1441,393,742,2177,249,639,70],"class_list":["post-242914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-big-oil","tag-coup","tag-iran","tag-mossadegh","tag-trump","tag-uk","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242915,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242914\/revisions\/242915"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}