August 25, 2023
70 years after the CIA-assisted overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh,
Trump's coup attempt is making its way through the courts.
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’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 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.
Pres. 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 US and the UK plotted to
retake control of Iran’s oil.
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 non-profit National
Security Archives in Washington, DC, 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
US-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 co-defendants, 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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