Home » Iranian history: that CIA coup that deposed Mossaddegh

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Iranian history: that CIA coup that deposed Mossaddegh — 18 Comments

  1. “My gut feeling is always that history tends to be far more complex than its presentation by either side.”

    Yes! Understanding this truth should be a foundation stone of any serious study of the past. Unfortunately, it seldom is.

  2. I know people who were working/living in Tehran before the Shah was overthrown. They describe a vibrant, modern culture.

    Much is made of the Shah’s secret police. I am sure they existed and were no doubt brutal. I do not doubt that dissent was not tolerated by those who opposed the regime. However, according to everything I have read, and the personal testimony of those I cited, it seems that the Shah was attempting to move Iran toward a modern, stable state. Would it have ever resembled a western democracy or republic? Doubtful. But, as we have learned recently, there are worse situations than autocratic regimes that govern with some moderation.

    Considering the conventional wisdom from a different tack; I simply am not prepared to believe that Ike would have countenanced a coup to primarily benefit British oil interests. His actions over Suez and his refusal to support the French in Indo-China suggest that he had little tolerance for prolonging the excesses of our friends with Imperial histories. Having said that, I also believe that the actions of the Soviet Union following WWII created a climate that was conducive to miscalculation in various parts of he world.

  3. Lest we forget:

    Truman FORCED Stalin out of Iran — with the atomic bomb.

    Remember ?

    ( At the time, all of this was hidden from public view. )

    The Nazis intended to march down to the Persian Gulf.

    So too, Stalin.

    This entire affair folds back on up to Stalin.

    Lest we forget.

  4. From Amir Taheri’s The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution. After leaving office, Bill Clinton spoke at Davos:

    “It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadeq, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the shah back and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the ’50s; at least, that is my belief.”

    Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America coalition, Clinton appeared to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadeq was named prime minister by the shah twice, and dismissed by him twice. This did not mean that the United States “got rid of parliamentary democracy,” something that did not exist in the first place. Having dissolved the parliament and stopped the subsequent general election in midcourse because he realized that his opponents would win a crushing majority, Mossadeq was ruling by decree in violation of the constitution. Though a popular populist, he could hardly be described as a democrat.

    Clinton’s claim that the United States changed the course of Iranian history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an insult by an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation more than half a century ago. Moreover, in the Islamic Republic that Clinton was trying to court, Mossadeq, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullahs after seizing power in 1979 was to take the name of Mossadeq off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village where Mossadeq is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his tomb. History textbooks written by the mullahs present Mossadeq as “the son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed shah, and betrayed Islam.” Clinton’s apology to the mullahs for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadeq was like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy towards Alexander Kerensky.

  5. More from Taheri’s book:

    Buoyed by the American guarantee of support against a putative Soviet invasion, the shah signed two edicts, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other appointing Zahedi as prime minister. But when a colonel in the Royal Guard arrived at Mossadeq’s residence to deliver the edict, the prime minister claimed that the document was a forgery and thus unacceptable. The colonel was arrested, and Mossadeq ordered a propaganda campaign around the theme of “an attempted military coup by British agents.” Convinced that Mossadeq was determined to defy the constitution with support from the army, the shah decided to leave the country so as to prevent a direct clash.

    At the time, Mossadeq held the post of minister of defense as well as prime minister and had appointed officers related to him by blood ties or political ideas to all key posts within the armed forces. One of his relatives, General Muhammad-Taqi Rihai, a brilliant French-educated officer, served as chief of staff. A few months earlier, Mossadeq had given himself “full powers,” dissolved the parliament, declared a state of emergency (known as Point V under Iranian law), and arrested scores of his opponents, creating the impression that he wanted to impose personal rule or maybe even abolish the monarchy with support from the Communists. Later, he put a prize on Zahedi’s head and dissolved the senate, forcing the senator to go into hiding.

    As things heated up, the Tudeh (Iranian Communist party) threw its full support behind Mossadeq, the man it had vilified as an “American agent” two years earlier. But the bulk of Mossadeq’s original coalition had turned against him.3 His foreign minister, Hussein Fatemi, a firebrand and a magnetic orator, seized the opportunity to call for the abolition of the monarchy at a series of public meetings, thus widening the gap between Mossadeq and the traditional, monarchist elements of Iranian society.

  6. I would echo Oldflyer’s observations from the point of view that I knew many young people from the Shah’s era who were deliberately being educated in the West (US in particular) so that they could form the next generation of a more modernized Iran.

    Most of those went into hiding & then fled to other countries or, if my memory holds, sought asylum in the US when the Shah was driven out.

    Would they have grown up to think “like me” & lead in Iran like a Westerner? I doubt it…but they sure would have been a far cry from the mullahs. And that would have been something.

  7. Blert:

    The Nazi intended to do a lot of things, but mostly they killed civilians. Stalin, well he had plans too, but mostly killed whoever he wished in the tens of millions.

  8. I’m struck by the parallels between today’s leftists enabling and acting as apologists for Islam and the 1979 “unholy alliance” between Iran’s religious fundamentalists and the leftist/communists…

    Western Europeans, having failed to learn from history are making the same mistakes that Iran’s 1979 leftist/communists made and Canada under Trudeau is heading down the same path…

  9. I just finished reading Daniel Yergin’s book The Prize which, IYDN, is about the development of the oil business. It more-or-less echoes the non-leftist-meme version. One of the more interesting tidbits is that Kermit Roosevelt, Jr (TR’s grandson) was the CIA agent in change. Another one was that the Shah had to be convinced to start the coup and it was not a particularly easy job to convince him. And then, after it had (apparently) failed, they went to Eisenhower w/their tails between their legs (my words, not Yergin’s) and admitted that it had failed.

  10. Thanks for keeping the record straight.
    I have always doubted that anyone ever has all the information right about anything in history, and I am becoming more sure we do not, as I watch our current “fake news” crowding out reality, because what is happening now simply repeats what happened before.

  11. I worry about our understanding of history in the future. On one hand there will be massive amounts of digital information available but on the other hand we no longer will have first hand history as provided by diaries kept by important historical figures. The lifelong diaries of people like John Quincy Adams and Queen Victoria provide unbelievable context to events of their time and give historians first hand insight where as going forward what will be the equivalent?

  12. James Clavell’s novel “Whirlwind” is an interesting look at the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and a British company embroiled in it.

  13. Baklava:

    I presume you mean Neo should be in the NYTimes and WashPost.

    I don’t think fiction is her métier..

  14. I guess Wikipedia just sort of forgot about the Soviet armored divisions (as many as 40) poised on the border. I’d be shocked! shocked! if that was a deliberate omission.

  15. The lifelong diaries of people like John Quincy Adams and Queen Victoria provide unbelievable context to events of their time and give historians first hand insight where as going forward what will be the equivalent?

    Blogs, assuming they don’t get record wiped.

  16. Ymarsakar:

    It’s not necessary to purposely “record-wipe” a blog to have it disappear.

    Unless a blog is hosted on something like Blogger, which most big blogs don’t use anymore for a number of reasons, bloggers pay hosts to host the blog. If you don’t pay, it disappears. So when a person stops blogging—for example, if a person dies—the blog will disappear after the term for which the blogger has paid, unless some heir or friend decides to continue to pay for it to be online.

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