Well that only took six decades. The CIA has finally admitted its participation in a 1953 coup that ousted Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The U.S.- and British-orchestrated coup influenced years of anti-American sentiment. Now, almost 60 years to the day later, the CIA released a version of “The Battle for Iran” internal report to a Freedom of Information Act request. Under the section titled “Covert Action” it reads: “[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy,” to avoid leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression.” The American role has long been common knowledge, but the CIA had refused to confirm that aspect of the operation.
The agency finally owns up to its role in the 1953 operation.
Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event’s reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah’s ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year.
But it has taken almost six decades for the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge openly that it was behind the controversial overthrow. Published here today — and on the website of the National Security Archive, which obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act — is a brief excerpt from The Battle for Iran, an internal report prepared in the mid-1970s by an in-house CIA historian.
The document was first released in 1981, but with most of it excised, including all of Section III, entitled “Covert Action” — the part that describes the coup itself. Most of that section remains under wraps, but this new version does formally make public, for the first time that we know of, the fact of the agency’s participation: “[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy,” the history reads. The risk of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression,” it adds, “compelled the United States … in planning and executing TPAJAX.”
TPAJAX was the CIA’s codename for the overthrow plot, which relied on local collaborators at every stage. It consisted of several steps: using propaganda to undermine Mossadegh politically, inducing the Shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations. The initial attempt actually failed, but after a mad scramble the coup forces pulled themselves together and came through on their second try, on August 19.
Why the CIA finally chose to own up to its role is as unclear as some of the reasons it has held onto this information for so long. CIA and British operatives have written books and articles on the operation — notably Kermit Roosevelt, the agency’s chief overseer of the coup. Scholars have produced many more books, including several just in the past few years. Moreover, two American presidents (Clinton and Obama) have publicly acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup.
But U.S. government classifiers, especially in the intelligence community, often have a different view on these matters. They worry that disclosing “sources and methods” — even for operations decades in the past and involving age-old methods like propaganda — might help an adversary. They insist there is a world of difference between what becomes publicly known unofficially (through leaks, for example) and what the government formally acknowledges. (Somehow those presidential admissions of American involvement seem not to have counted.)
(THE FOREIGN POLICY GROUP)