Sixty years ago this week, on Aug. 19, 1953, the United States, in collaboration with Britain, successfully staged a coup in Iran to overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh that a newly declassified CIA document reveals was designed to preserve the control of Western companies over Iran\u2019s rich oil fields.<\/p>\n
The U.S. government at the time of the coup easily had manipulated Western media into denigrating Mossadegh as intemperate, unstable and an otherwise unreliable ally in the Cold War, but the real motivation for hijacking Iran\u2019s history was Mossadegh\u2019s move to nationalize Western-controlled oil assets in Iran. According to the document, part of an internal CIA report:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe target of this policy of desperation, Mohammad Mosadeq, [sic] was neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility as he was so often pictured in the foreign press; however, he had become so committed to the ideals of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds. In refusing to bargain\u2014except on his own uncompromising terms\u2014with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government.\u00a0 These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.\u201d<\/p>\n
There you have it, the smoking gun declaration of the true intent to preserve high profits and cheap oil that cuts through all of the official propaganda justifying not only this sorry attempt to prevent Iranian nationalists from gaining control over their prized resources but subsequent blood-for-oil adventures in Iraq and Kuwait. The assumption is that \u201cthe best and most altruistic of worlds\u201d is one that accommodates the demands of rapacious capitalism as represented by Western oil companies.<\/p>\n
Tragically, the coup that overthrew Mossadegh also crushed Iran\u2019s brief experiment in democracy and ushered in six decades of brutal dictatorship followed by religious oppression and regional instability. If Iran is a problem, as the United States persistently and loudly insists, it is a problem of our making. Mossadegh, who earned a doctorate in law from Neuchatel University in Switzerland, was not an enemy of the American people; he was an Iranian nationalist who as the CIA\u2019s own internal report concedes was preoccupied with the well-being of his people as opposed to the profitability of Western oil interests.<\/p>\n
The CIA report derides the Western media\u2019s acceptance at the time of the coup of the demonization of all actors on the world stage that fail to follow the approved script provided by the U.S. government. As the report notes, the \u201ccomplete secrecy about the operation,\u201d breached only by leaked information, made it \u201crelatively easy for journalists to reconstruct the coup in varied but generally inaccurate accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Without conceding responsibility for misleading the media, the report says \u201cThe point that the majority of these accounts miss is a key one: the military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [sic] 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. 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. TPAJAX (the operation\u2019s codename) was entered into as a last resort.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parts of the formerly top secret report, an internal CIA study from the 1970s titled \u201cThe Battle for Iran,\u201d which detailed the CIA-directed plot, have been revealed previously. But the section disclosed Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive is, as the archive\u2019s research director Malcolm Byrne writes in Foreign Policy magazine, the first time the CIA admits to \u201cusing propaganda to undermine Mossadegh politically, inducing the shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations.\u201d<\/p>\n