US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup. By JON GAMBRELL
Once expunged from its official history, documents outlining
the U.S.-backed 1953 coup in Iran have been quietly published by the State
Department, offering a new glimpse at an operation that ultimately pushed the
country toward its Islamic Revolution and hostility with the West. The CIA’s role in the
coup, which toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh and cemented the control
of the shah, was already well-known by the time the State Department offered
its first compendium on the era in 1989. But any trace of American involvement
in the putsch had been wiped from the report, causing historians to call it a
fraud.
The papers released
this month show U.S. fears over the spread of communism, as well as the British
desire to regain access to Iran’s oil industry, which had been nationalized by
Mosaddegh. It also offers a cautionary tale about the limits of American power
as a new U.S. president long suspicious of Iran weighs the landmark nuclear
deal with Tehran reached under his predecessor. It exposes “more about
what we know about this milestone event in Middle East history and especially
U.S.-Iran history. This is still such an important, emotional benchmark for
Iranians,” said Malcolm Byrne, who has studied Iran at the non-governmental
National Security Archive at George Washington University. “Many people see it
as the day that Iranian politics turned away from any hope of democracy.”
The
1,007-page report , comprised of letters and diplomatic cables, shows
U.S. officials discussing a coup up to a year before it took place. While
America worried about Soviet influence in Iran, the British remained focused on
resolving a dispute over the nationalization of the country’s oil refinery at
Abadan, at the time one of the world’s largest. Many also feared further
instability following the 1951 assassination of Premier Ali Razmara. “Nationalization of
the oil industry possibly combined with further assassinations of top Iran
officials, including even the shah, could easily lead to a complete breakdown
of the Iran government and social order, from which a pro-Soviet regime might
well emerge leaving Iran as a satellite state,” one undated CIA analysis from
the report warned.
Out of that fear grew
TPAJAX, the CIA codename for the coup plot. Papers show the CIA at one point
“stockpiled enough arms and demolition material to support a 10,000-man
guerrilla organization for six months,” and paid out $5.3 million for bribes
and other costs, which would be equivalent to $48 million today. One CIA
document casually refers to the fact that “several leading members of these
(Iranian) security services are paid agents of this organization.” The CIA also described
hoping to use “powerfully influential clergy” within Shiite Iran to back the
coup, something that would be anathema by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It
offers no definitive proof of that, though several documents show American
officials in contact with Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, an anti-British leader
in the Iranian parliament who turned against Mosaddegh.
The agency faced
problems, however, chief among them Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself.
Diplomats and spies referred to him as a “weak reed” and “petulant.” “His inability to take
decisions coupled with his tendency to interfere in political life has on
occasions been (a) disruptive influence,” the U.S. Embassy in Tehran warned in
February 1953. Ultimately, his twin sister
Princess Ashraf and a U.S. general helped convince him. Mosaddegh was tipped
off about the coup, and it appeared doomed as the shah fled to Baghdad and
later Italy. But protests supporting the shah, fanned in part by the CIA, led
to Mosaddegh’s fall and the monarch’s return.
The report fills in
the large gaps of the initial 1989 historical document outlining the years
surrounding the 1953 coup in Iran. The release of that report led to the
resignation of the historian in charge of a State Department review board and
to Congress passing a law requiring a more reliable historical account be made. Byrne and others have
suggested the release of the latest documents may have been delayed by the
nuclear negotiations, as the Obama administration sought to ease tensions with
Tehran, and then accelerated under President Donald Trump, who has adopted a
much more confrontational stance toward Iran. Byrne said the new
administration needed just two months to agree to release the documents. “That
kind of speed is unheard of in the government unless there is some sort of
political foundation,” he said.
Die-hard opponents of
Iran’s current government might look to 1953 as a source of inspiration. But
the Americans involved in the coup acknowledged at the time they were playing
with fire. Wide-spread Iranian
anger over the heavy-handed Western intervention lingered for decades, and fed
into the 1979 revolution, when Iranians seized control of the U.S. Embassy and
held those inside captive for 444 days. To this day Iran’s clerical leaders
portray the U.S. as a hostile foreign power bent on subverting and overthrowing
its government. As President Dwight
Eisenhower wrote in his diary in 1953, if knowledge of the coup became public,
“We would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do
anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”
State Department
report: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran
