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mohammad mosaddegh
Trump Brought the Coups Home
The violence on January 6, 2021, was just a shadow of the bloodshed that accompanied countless U.S.-sponsored interventions around the globe.
Aug 26, 2023
August 19 marked the 70th anniversary of the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the first democratically-elected prime minister of Iran. It was the first coup d’état in the modern era orchestrated by the United States, launching decades of coups, assassinations and “regime change.”
While Iran’s 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 coconspirators 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 6, 2021, though, was just a shadow of the bloodshed that accompanied countless U.S.-sponsored interventions around the globe.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration was directly involved in Mossadegh’s overthrow. But it had help. The CIA was just six years old in 1953. Britain’s 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’s lifeblood was petroleum, pumped from Iran’s 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 U.S. and the U.K. plotted to retake control of Iran’s oil.
Hopefully, confronting a homegrown attempted coup, with the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump and his codefendants, will hasten a reckoning with our nation’s violent history plotting coups abroad.
The extent to which MI6 partnered with the CIA in Mossadegh’s ouster was revealed when a remarkable documentary, Coup 53, premiered in 2019. The film, directed by Taghi Amirani, an Iranian-born physicist turned filmmaker, uncovered the coup’s long-concealed direction by an MI6 operative named Norman Darbyshire.
“We all grew up with the story of the CIA coup run by Kermit Roosevelt,” Amirani said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He was describing Kermit Roosevelt, recruited by CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to be the CIA’s 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.
“Kermit… was more of a bagman and an adventurist,” Amirani said, going on to describe MI6’s principal Iran operative: “Darbyshire 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.”
Amirani’s research for Coup 53 uncovered troves of forgotten material. He found a transcript of an interview with Darbyshire. When the initial CIA-led coup attempt failed, a mercenary mob hired by Darbyshire swept through Tehran, surrounded Mossadegh’s house, and, with the help of rebellious army officers, attacked the residence and arrested Mossadegh.
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 in the creation of SAVAK, 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.
Amirani’s research brought him to the nonprofit National Security Archives in Washington, D.C., which pries classified documents from the U.S. government for public access. One key CIA document obtained by the archive in 2013 reads, “The military coup that overthrew Mossadeq 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.”
In one chilling interstitial in Coup 53, document boxes that line the wall of the archive’s reading room scroll by, listing successive U.S.-sponsored coups, attempted coups, and military interventions that followed the overthrow of Mossadegh:
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.
Hopefully, confronting a homegrown attempted coup, with the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump and his codefendants, will hasten a reckoning with our nation’s violent history plotting coups abroad. On the 70th anniversary of the coup in Iran, such self-reflection is long overdue.
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It’s the 70th Anniversary of the US’ ‘Original Sin’ In Iran
Since the CIA-backed coup in 1953, both nations have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others.
Aug 19, 2023
The history of U.S.-Iranian relations dates to the time when the once mighty Persian Empire, thanks to the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain, was anything but mighty.
The “Yengi Donya” or new world, as the Persians called the United States, was an emerging global power with no colonial aspirations in Persia. Iranians admired America for its ideals of liberalism, democracy, and individual freedom. For Iranians, the U.S. was the land of Howard Baskerville, the martyr of their 1906 Constitutional Revolution, and Morgan Shuster, the young financier who tried against all odds to help Iran stand on its feet against British and Russian colonialism. That history is long forgotten, however.
The romantic relationship that once existed between the two countries came to an abrupt end when Washington played a critical role in toppling the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 19, 1953.
Unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
In the runup to the coup, Washington cut off its financial assistance to Iran, which, due to a British-sponsored boycott of Iranian oil, was facing a severe financial crisis. Indeed, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in response to Mosaddegh’s pleas for an emergency loan, had asserted that “it would not be fair to the American taxpayers… to extend any considerable amount of economic aid to Iran.” After the coup, Eisenhower approved an emergency loan in the amount of $45 million to help the new Iranian government.
But unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
This episode marked the transformation of the U.S. image from a benevolent power sympathetic to Iranian aspirations to one similar to that of the British and Russians. To many Americans, however, the significance of the coup remains unknown.
Indeed, in the middle of the 1979-80 U.S. embassy hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter called Mossadegh’s ouster “ancient history” and “something that happened 30 years ago.” But, for many Iranians, the episode’s trauma remains a living memory. Iranian students who stormed the embassy in November 1979, including Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, believed that Washington was “plotting” another coup in Iran by giving refuge to the ailing, exiled Shah. But, with the embassy seizure and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran, too, had committed its “original sin.”
These two episodes have left a deep wound in the relationship between the two countries. As the veteran American diplomat John Limbert observes, “The hostage crisis still casts its long shadow over how America and Americans view Iran. The event lurks behind some American analysts’… descriptions [of Iran] as rogue state, axis of evil…” Indeed, other than sporadic and tactical cooperation on issues of mutual interest, Iran and America have failed to overcome the ghosts of their history.
Obama’s presidency offered an exceptional opportunity to overcome the past decades of squandered opportunities. Except for the breakthrough on the nuclear issue, however, he was faced with Ayatollah Khamenei’s “clenched fist.” Trump’s renunciation of Washington’s commitments under the JCPOA only exacerbated Khamenei’s deeply held suspicions of the U.S.
It Is Time to Move On
Recently, Iran’s former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, who had advised Khamenei to accept secret talks with the U.S. over the nuclear issue, urged the leadership to hold more comprehensive talks with Washington on the broadest possible range of issues.
“Because of our tensions with the west, especially with the U.S., they pressure us at every opportunity… It is time to sit and talk with the U.S…. maybe we call it political negotiations,” he observed. Salehi, who also served as chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, warned that so long as Iran was at loggerheads with the U.S. it cannot sustain healthy relations with any country, even including its most powerful partners, China and Russia.
Iran’s nuclear program has long been a source of tension between the two countries. The dispute actually dates back to the Shah’s time when Tehran and Washington fought over Iran’s rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. categorically rejected the existing nuclear program in Iran and pressured other countries not to cooperate with Tehran to reconstitute it.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Realizing that Iran would never agree to halt all uranium enrichment, President Barack Obama accepted a limited but strongly verified program, which led to the signing of JCPOA (which included the four other members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) in 2015. However, Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA unshackled Tehran’s nuclear program from the limits established by the 2015 accord.
While President Joe Biden promised to return to the agreement during his presidential campaign in 2020, the two sides have failed to come to a formal understanding in the two-and-a-half years that followed his inauguration. The Biden administration has thus been pursuing its own “maximum pressure” campaign although its rhetoric has been considerably more diplomatic than the Trump administration’s.
Dismantling Iran’s nuclear program might be an ideal outcome for the U.S., but it is very unlikely that any ruling regime would accept it. Thus, the only viable solution for the U.S. is an agreement that verifiably keeps Iran’s nuclear program checked. For now, the prisoner swap and Iran’s dilution of its 60% enriched-uranium stockpile is a positive step toward deescalation.
Another source of tension between Iran and the U.S. is Iran’s regional ambitions, especially its activities in the Persian Gulf. Washington sees Iran’s harassment of foreign-flagged oil tankers as a threat to international maritime security and the free flow of oil. For the Islamic Republic, as it was for the Shah, the security of the Persian Gulf is indispensable to Iran’s security. When Washington, in violation of international law, confiscated Iranian oil shipments, Iranians responded by seizing and harassing foreign-flagged tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Most recently, the U.S. has escalated by dispatching 3,000 troops to the region with the aim of deterring Iran.
However, the U.S. already has a substantial military presence in the region that is fully capable of deterring Iran. Dispatching more troops will only increase Iran’s insecurities in its immediate periphery. Accidents and miscalculation could drag both sides into an unwanted direct conflict at a time when Washington is more focused on the Ukrainian war and tensions with China over Taiwan and the larger Indo-Pacific region.
Because of its size, population, and strategic location, Iran is one of the pillars of security and stability in the region and cannot be excluded from regional calculations or be expected to capitulate to U.S. ultimatums. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2018 list of 12 demands on Iran totally failed to address any of Iran’s legitimate concerns. This is why the “maximum pressure” policy pursued by Trump, who insisted rhetorically that he would talk to the Iranians without preconditions, failed miserably.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Iran and the U.S. both have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others. But, in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, “between American and Iranian basic national interests there need be no permanent conflict.” It is time for Iran and the U.S. to talk based on recognition of the other party’s core interests and mutual respect.
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