| CIA
Coup in Iran – 50th Anniversary
Coup 53 of Iran is the CIA's (Central Intelligence
Agency) first successful overthrow of a foreign government.
| But a copy of the agency's secret history of the
coup has surfaced, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set
the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a generation
of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East's most powerful
countries. The document, which remains classified, discloses the pivotal
role British intelligence officials played in initiating and planning
the coup, and it shows that Washington and London shared an interest
in maintaining the West's control over Iranian oil. |
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Dr. Donald N. Wilber,
a CIA spy, with the cover of Persian architectural expert, who planned
the coup in Iran |
The secret history, written
by the CIA's chief coup planner, says the operation's success was
mostly a matter of chance. The document shows that the agency had
almost complete contempt for the man it was empowering, Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi. And it recounts, for the first time, the agency's
badly tried to seduce and force the shah into taking part in his
own coup.
The operation, code-named TP-AJAX, was the blueprint
for a succession of CIA plots to foment coups and destabilize governments
during the cold war - including the agency's successful coup in
Guatemala in 1954 and the disastrous Cuban intervention known as
the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In more than one instance, such operations
led to the same kind of long-term animosity toward the United States
that occurred in Iran.The history says agency officers orchestrating
the Iran coup worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers,
handpicked the prime minister's replacement, sent a stream of envoys
to bolster the shah's courage, directed a campaign of bombings by
Iranians posing as members of the Communist Party, and planted articles
and editorial cartoons in newspapers.
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But on the night set for Prime Minister Mohammad
Mosaddeq's overthrow, almost nothing went according to the meticulously
drawn plans, the secret history says. In fact, CIA officials were
poised to flee the country when several Iranian officers recruited
by the agency, acting on their own, took command of a pro-shah demonstration
in Tehran and seized the government.
Two days after the coup, the history discloses,
agency officials funneled $5 million to Iran to help the government
they had installed consolidate power.
Dr. Donald N. Wilber, an expert in Persian architecture,
who as one of the leading planners believed that covert operatives
had much to learn from history, wrote the secret history, along
with operational assessments in March 1954.
In less expansive memoirs published in 1986, Dr.
Wilber asserted that the Iran coup was different from later CIA
efforts. Its American planners, he said, had stirred up considerable
unrest in Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability
and supporting the shah. The move to oust the prime minister, he
wrote, thus gained substantial popular support.
Dr. Wilber's memoirs were heavily censored by the
agency, but he was allowed to refer to the existence of his secret
history. "If this history had been read by the planners of
the Bay of Pigs," he wrote, "there would have been no
such operation."
"From time to time," he continued, "I
gave talks on the operation to various groups within the agency,
and, in hindsight, one might wonder why no one from the Cuban desk
ever came or read the history."
The coup was a turning point in modern Iranian history
and remains a persistent irritant in Tehran-Washington relations.
It consolidated the power of the shah, who ruled with an iron hand
for 26 more years in close contact with the United States. He was
toppled by Iranian Revolution of 1979. Later that year, "Students
of Imam Line" went to the American Embassy, took diplomats
hostage and declared that they had unmasked a "nest of spies"
who had been manipulating Iran for decades.
The Islamic government of Ayatollah Khomeini supported
terrorist attacks against American interests largely because of
the long American history of supporting the shah's suppressive regime.
Even under more moderate rulers, many Iranians still resent the
United States' role in the coup and its support of the shah.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright,
in an address, acknowledged the coup's pivotal role in the troubled
relationship and came closer to apologizing than any American official
ever has before.
"The Eisenhower administration believed its
actions were justified for strategic reasons," she said. "But
the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development.
And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this
intervention by America in their internal affairs."
The history spells out the calculations to which
Dr. Albright referred in her speech. Britain, it says, initiated
the plot in 1952. The Truman administration rejected it, but President
Eisenhower approved it shortly after taking office in 1953, because
of fears about oil and Communism.
The document pulls few punches, acknowledging at
one point that the agency baldly lied to its British allies. Dr.
Wilber reserves his most withering asides for the agency's local
allies, referring to "the recognized incapacity of Iranians
to plan or act in a thoroughly logical manner."
Britain Fights Oil Nationalism
The coup had its roots in a British showdown with Iran, restive
under decades of near-colonial British domination.
The prize was Iran's oil fields. Britain occupied Iran in World
War II to protect a supply route to its ally, the Soviet Union,
and to prevent the oil from falling into the hands of the Nazis
- ousting the shah's father, whom it regarded as unmanageable. It
retained control over Iran's oil after the war through the Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company.
In 1951, Iran's Parliament voted to nationalize
the oil industry, and legislators backing the law elected its leading
advocate, Dr. Mosaddeq, as prime minister. Britain responded with
threats and sanctions.
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Mossadegh at the height of his popularity
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Dr. Mosaddeq, a European-educated
lawyer then in his early 70's, prone to tears and outbursts, refused
to back down. In meetings in November and December 1952, the secret
history says, British intelligence officials startled their American
counterparts with a plan for a joint operation to oust the nettlesome
prime minister.
The Americans, who "had not intended to discuss
this question at all," agreed to study it, the secret history
says. It had attractions. Anti-Communism had risen to a fever pitch
in Washington, and officials were worried that Iran might fall under
the sway of the Soviet Union, a historical presence there.
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In March 1953, an unexpected development pushed the plot forward:
the CIA's Tehran station reported that an Iranian general had approached
the American Embassy about supporting an army-led coup.
The newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration
was intrigued. The coalition that elected Dr. Mosaddeq was splintering,
and the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, had become active.
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Allen W. Dulles, the
director of central intelligence, approved $1 million on April 4
to be used "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeq,"
the history says.
"The aim was to bring to power a government
which would reach an equitable oil settlement, enabling Iran to
become economically sound and financially solvent, and which would
vigorously prosecute the dangerously strong Communist Party."
Within days agency officials identified a high-ranking
officer, Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, as the man to spearhead a coup.
Their plan called for the shah to play a leading role
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Allen W. Dulles, the director of CIA |
"A shah-General Zahedi combination,
supported by CIA local assets and financial backing, would have
a good chance of overthrowing Mosaddeq," officials wrote, "particularly
if this combination should be able to get the largest mobs in the
streets and if a sizable portion of the Tehran garrison refused
to carry out Mosaddeq's orders."
But according to the history, planners had doubts
about whether the shah could carry out such a bold operation.
His family had seized Iran's throne just 32 years earlier, when
his powerful father led a coup of his own. But the young shah, agency
officials wrote, was "by nature a creature of indecision, beset
by formless doubts and fears," often at odds with his family,
including Princess Ashraf, his "forceful and scheming twin
sister."
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Mohammad
Reza Shah and his father, Reza Shah who was the first king in the
Pahlavi dynasty. |
Also, the shah had what the CIA termed
a "pathological fear" of British intrigues, a potential
obstacle to a joint operation.
In May 1953 the agency sent Dr. Wilber to Cyprus
to meet Norman Darbyshire, chief of the Iran branch of British intelligence,
to make initial coup plans. Assuaging the fears of the shah was
high on their agenda; a document from the meeting said he was to
be persuaded that the United States and Britain "consider the
oil question secondary."
The conversation at the meeting turned to a touchy
subject, the identity of key agents inside Iran. The British said
they had recruited two brothers named Rashidian. The Americans,
the secret history discloses, did not trust the British and lied
about the identity of their best "assets" inside Iran.
CIA officials were divided over whether the plan
drawn up in Cyprus could work. The Tehran station warned headquarters
that the "the shah would not act decisively against Mosaddeq."
And it said General Zahedi, the man picked to lead the coup, "appeared
lacking in drive, energy and concrete plans."
Despite the doubts, the agency's Tehran station
began disseminating "gray propaganda," passing out anti-Mosaddeq
cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering articles in the
local press.
Trying to Persuade a Reluctant Shah
The plot was under way, even though the shah was a reluctant warrior
and Mr. Eisenhower had yet to give his final approval.
In early June, American and British intelligence
officials met again, this time in Beirut, and put the finishing
touches on the strategy. Soon afterward, the chief of the CIA's
Near East and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Theodore
Roosevelt, arrived in Tehran to direct it.
The shah was a problem from the start. The plan
called for him to stand fast as the CIA stirred up popular unrest
and then, as the country lurched toward chaos, to issue royal decrees
dismissing Dr. Mosaddeq and appointing General Zahedi prime minister.
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The agency sought to "produce such pressure on the shah
that it would be easier for him to sign the papers required of him
than it would be to refuse," the secret history states. Officials
turned to his sister for help.
On July 11, President Eisenhower finally signed
off on the plan. At about the same time, CIA and British intelligence
officers visited Princess Ashraf on the French Riviera and persuaded
her to return to Iran and tell her brother to follow the script.
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Shah confides in General Zahedi
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The return of the unpopular princess unleashed a storm of protest
from pro-Mosaddeq forces. The shah was furious that she had come
back without his approval and refused at first to see her. But a
palace staff member - another British agent, according to the secret
history - gained Ashraf access on July 29.
The history does not reveal what the siblings said
to each other. But the princess gave her brother the news that CIA
officials had enlisted Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in the coup campaign.
General Schwarzkopf, the father of the Persian Gulf war commander,
had befriended the shah a decade earlier while leading the United
States military mission to Iran, and he told the agency "he
was sure he could get the required cooperation."
The British, too, sought to sway the shah and assure
him their agents spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian,
approached him in late July and invited him to select a phrase that
would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC's Persian-language
program - as proof that Mr. Rashidian spoke for the British.
The exercise did not seem to have much effect. The
shah told Mr. Rashidian on July 30 and 31 that he had heard the
broadcast, but "requested time to assess the situation."
In early August, the CIA stepped up the pressure. Iranian operatives
pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with "savage
punishment if they opposed Mosaddeq," seeking to stir anti-Communist
sentiment in the religious community.
In addition, the secret history says, the house
of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing
as Communists. It does not say whether anyone was hurt in this attack.
The agency was also intensifying its propaganda
campaign. A leading newspaper owner was granted a personal loan
of about $45,000, "in the belief that this would make his organ
amenable to our purposes."
But the shah remained intransigent. In an Aug. 1
meeting with General Schwarzkopf, he refused to sign the CIA-written
decrees firing Mr. Mosaddeq and appointing General Zahedi. He said
he doubted that the army would support him in a showdown.
During the meeting, the document says, the shah
was so convinced that the palace was bugged that he "led the
general into the grand ballroom, pulled a small table to its exact
center" and got onto it to talk, insisting that the general
do the same.
"This meeting was to be followed by a series
of additional ones, some between Roosevelt and the shah and some
between Rashidian and the shah, in which relentless pressure was
exerted in frustrating attempts to overcome an entrenched attitude
of vacillation and indecision," the history states.
Dr. Mosaddeq had by now figured out that there was
a plot against him. He moved to consolidate power by calling for
a national referendum to dissolve Parliament. The results of the
Aug. 4 referendum were clearly rigged in his favor; foreign media
reported the same day that the prime minister had won 99.9 percent
of the vote. This only helped the plotters, providing "an issue
on which Mosaddeq could be relentlessly attacked" by the agency-backed
opposition press.
"On Aug. 3rd," the secret history says,
"Roosevelt had a long and inconclusive session with the shah,"
who "stated that he was not an adventurer, and hence, could
not take the chances of one.
"Roosevelt pointed out that there was no other
way by which the government could be changed and the test was now
between Mosaddeq and his force and the shah and the army, which
was still with him, but which would soon slip away."
Mr. Roosevelt told the shah "that failure to
act could lead only to a Communist Iran or to a second Korea."
Still haunted by doubts, the shah asked Mr. Roosevelt
if President Eisenhower could tell him what to do.
"By complete coincidence and great good fortune,"
the secret history says, "the president, while addressing the
governors' convention in Seattle on 4 August, deviated from his
script to state by implication that the United States would not
sit by idly and see Iran fall behind the Iron Curtain."
By Aug. 10, the shah had finally agreed to see General
Zahedi and a few army officers involved in the plot, but still refused
to sign the decrees. The CIA then sent Mr. Rashidian to say Mr.
Roosevelt "would leave in complete disgust unless the shah
took action within a few days."
The shah finally signed the decrees on Aug. 13.
Word that he would support an army-led coup spread rapidly among
the army officers backing General Zahedi.
First Few Days Look Disastrous
The coup began on the night of Aug. 15 and was immediately compromised
by a talkative Iranian Army officer whose remarks were relayed to
Mr. Mosaddeq.
The operation, the secret history says, "still
might have succeeded in spite of this advance warning had not most
of the participants proved to be inept or lacking in decision at
the critical juncture."
Dr. Mosaddeq's chief of staff, Gen. Taghi Riahi,
learned of the plot hours before it was to begin and sent his deputy
to the barracks of the Imperial Guard.
The deputy was arrested there, according to the
history, just as pro-shah soldiers were fanning out across the city
arresting other senior officials. Telephone lines between army and
government offices were cut, and the telephone exchange was occupied.
But phones inexplicably continued to function, which
gave Dr. Mosaddeq's forces a key advantage. General Riahi also eluded
the pro-shah units, rallying commanders to the prime minister's
side.
Pro-shah soldiers sent to arrest Dr. Mosaddeq at
his home were instead captured. The top military officer working
with General Zahedi fled when he saw tanks and loyal government
soldiers at army headquarters.
The next morning, the history states, the Tehran
radio announced that a coup against the government had failed, and
Dr. Mosaddeq scrambled to strengthen his hold on the army and key
installations. CIA officers inside the embassy were flying blind;
the history says they had "no way of knowing what was happening."
Mr. Roosevelt left the embassy and tracked down
General Zahedi, who was in hiding north of Tehran. Surprisingly,
the general was not ready to abandon the operation. The coup, the
two men agreed, could still work, provided they could persuade the
public that General Zahedi was the lawful prime minister.
To accomplish this, the history discloses, the coup
plotters had to get out the news that the shah had signed the two
decrees.
The CIA station in Tehran sent a message to The
Associated Press in New York, asserting that "unofficial reports
are current to the effect that leaders of the plot are armed with
two decrees of the shah, one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other appointing
General Zahedi to replace him."
The CIA and its agents also arranged for the decrees
to be mentioned in some Tehran papers, the history says.
The propaganda initiative quickly bogged down. Many
of the CIA's Iranian agents were under arrest or on the run. That
afternoon, agency operatives prepared a statement from General Zahedi
that they hoped to distribute publicly. But they could not find
a printing press that was not being watched by forces loyal to the
prime minister.
On Aug. 16, prospects of reviving the operation
were dealt a seemingly a fatal blow when it was learned that the
shah had bolted to Baghdad. CIA headquarters cabled Tehran urging
Mr. Roosevelt, the station chief, to leave immediately.
He did not agree, insisting that there was still
"a slight remaining chance of success," if the shah would
broadcast an address on the Baghdad radio and General Zahedi took
an aggressive stand.
The first sign that the tide might turn came with
reports that Iranian soldiers had broken up Tudeh, or Communist,
groups, beating them and making them chant their support for the
shah. "The station continued to feel that the project was not
quite dead," the secret history recounts.
Meanwhile, Dr. Mosaddeq had overreached, playing
into the CIA's hands by dissolving Parliament after the coup.
On the morning of Aug. 17 the shah finally announced
from Baghdad that he had signed the decrees - though he had by now
delayed so long that plotters feared it was too late. At this critical
point Dr. Mosaddeq let down his guard. Lulled by the shah's departure
and the arrests of some officers involved in the coup, the government
recalled most troops it had stationed around the city, believing
that the danger had passed.
That night the CIA arranged for General Zahedi and
other key Iranian agents and army officers to be smuggled into the
embassy compound "in the bottom of cars and in closed jeeps"
for a "council of war."
They agreed to start a counterattack on Aug. 19,
sending a leading cleric from Tehran to the holy city of Qom to
try to orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism. (The
religious forces they were trying to manipulate would years later
call the United States "the Great Satan.")
Using travel papers forged by the CIA, key army
officers went to outlying army garrisons to persuade commanders
to join the coup.
Once again, the shah disappointed the CIA He left
Baghdad for Rome the next day, apparently an exile. Newspapers supporting
Dr. Mosaddeq reported that the Pahlavi dynasty had come to an end,
and a statement from the Communist Party's central committee attributed
the coup attempt to "Anglo-American intrigue." Demonstrators
ripped down imperial statues -- as they would again 26 years later
during the Islamic revolution.
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Shah & Soraya in Rome |
The CIA station cabled headquarters for advice on whether to "continue
with TP-AJAX or withdraw."
"Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair,"
the history states, adding, "The message sent to Tehran on the
night of Aug. 18 said that 'the operation has been tried and failed,'
and that 'in the absence of strong recommendations to the contrary
operations against Mosaddeq should be discontinued'." |
CIA and Moscow Are Both Surprised
But just as the Americans were ready to quit, the mood on the streets
of Tehran shifted. On the morning of Aug. 19, several Tehran papers published
the shah's long-awaited decrees, and soon pro-shah crowds were building
in the streets.
"They needed only leadership," the secret history
says. And Iranian agents of the CIA provided it. Without specific orders,
a journalist who was one of the agency's most important Iranian agents
led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set fire to the offices
of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mosaddeq's foreign minister. Another Iranian
CIA agent led a crowd to sack the offices of pro-Tudeh papers.
"The news that something quite startling was happening
spread at great speed throughout the city," the history states.
The CIA tried to exploit the situation, sending urgent
messages that the Rashidian brothers and two key American agents should
"swing the security forces to the side of the demonstrators."
But things were now moving far too quickly for the agency
to manage. An Iranian Army colonel who had been involved in the plot several
days earlier suddenly appeared outside Parliament with a tank, while members
of the now-disbanded Imperial Guard seized trucks and drove through the
streets. "By 10:15 there were pro-shah truckloads of military personnel
at all the main squares," the secret history says.
By noon the crowds began to receive direct leadership
from a few officers involved in the plot and some who had switched sides.
Within an hour the central telegraph office fell, and telegrams were sent
to the provinces urging a pro-shah uprising. After a brief shootout, police
headquarters and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fell as well.
The Tehran radio remained the biggest prize. With the
government's fate uncertain, it was broadcasting a program on cotton prices.
But by early afternoon a mass of civilians, army officers and policemen
overwhelmed it. Pro-shah speakers went on the air, broadcasting the coup's
success and reading the royal decrees.
At the embassy, CIA officers were elated, and Mr. Roosevelt
got General Zahedi out of hiding. An army officer found a tank and drove
him to the radio station, where he spoke to the nation.
Dr. Mosaddeq and other government officials were rounded
up, while officers supporting General Zahedi placed "known supporters
of TP-AJAX" in command of all units of the Tehran garrison.
The Soviet Union was caught completely off-guard. Even
as the Mosaddeq government was falling, the Moscow radio was broadcasting
a story on "the failure of the American adventure in Iran."
But CIA headquarters was as surprised as Moscow. When
news of the coup's success arrived, it "seemed to be a bad joke,
in view of the depression that still hung on from the day before,"
the history says.
Throughout the day, Washington got most of its information from news agencies,
receiving only two cablegrams from the station. Mr. Roosevelt later explained
that if he had told headquarters what was going on, "London and Washington
would have thought they were crazy and told them to stop immediately,"
the history states.
Still, the CIA took full credit inside the government.
The following year it overthrew the government of Guatemala, and a myth
developed that the agency could topple governments anywhere in the world.
Iran proved that third world king making could be heady.
"It was a day that should never have ended," the CIA's secret
history said, describing Aug. 19, 1953. "For it carried with it such
a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful
whether any other can come up to it."
Mohammad Mosaddeq, an eccentric nationalist
Except for Reza Shah Pahlavi founder of modern Iran and Ayatollah Rouhollah
Khomeini, father of its revolution, no leader has left a deeper mark on
Iran's 20th century landscape than Mohammad Mosaddeq. And no 20th century
event has fuelled Iran's suspicion of the United States as his overthrow
has.
An eccentric European-educated lawyer whose father was
a bureaucrat and whose mother descended from Persian kings, Dr. Mosaddeq
served as a minister and governor before he opposed Reza Shah's accession
in the 1920's.
He was imprisoned and then put under house arrest at his
estate in the walled village of Ahmadabad west of Tehran. Eventually he
bought the village, growing crops, founding an elementary school and beginning
a public health project.
When Britain and Russia forced Reza Shah from power in
favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1941, Dr. Mosaddeq became
a member of Parliament. He was hailed as a hero for his fiery speeches
on the evils of British control of Iran's oil industry. In 1951, when
Parliament voted to nationalize the industry, the young shah, recognizing
the nationalists' popularity, appointed Dr. Mosaddeq prime minister.
In that job he became a prisoner of his own nationalism,
unable to reach an oil compromise. Even as the British negotiated with
Iran, they won the support of the major oil companies in imposing an effective
global boycott on Iranian oil.
Still, in the developing world Dr. Mosaddeq became an
icon of anti-imperialism. He was revered despite his odd mannerisms, which
included conducting business in bed in grey woollen pyjamas, weeping publicly
and complaining perpetually of poor health.
He amassed power. When the shah refused his demand for
control of the armed forces in 1952, Dr. Mosaddeq resigned, only to be
reinstated in the face of popular riots.
He then displayed a streak of authoritarianism, bypassing
Parliament by conducting a national referendum to win approval for its
dissolution. Meanwhile, the United States became alarmed at the strength
of Iran's Communist Party, which supported Dr. Mosaddeq.
In August 1953, a dismissal attempt by the shah sent Dr.
Mosaddeq's followers into the streets. The shah fled, amid fears in the
new Eisenhower administration that Iran might move too close to Moscow.
Yet Dr. Mosaddeq did not promote the interests of the
Communists, though he drew on their support. Paradoxically, the party
turned from him in the end because it viewed him as insufficiently committed
and too close to the United States. By the time the royalist coup overthrew
him after a few chaotic days, he had alienated many landowners, clerics
and merchants.
After a trial, he served three years in prison and ended
up under house arrest at his estate. In March 1967, in his mid-80's and
weakened by radium treatments for throat cancer, he died.
When the revolution brought the clerics to power in 1979,
anti-shah nationalists tried to revive Dr. Mosaddeq's memory. A Tehran
thoroughfare called Pahlavi Avenue was renamed Mosaddeq Avenue.
But Ayatollah Khomeini saw him as a promoter not of Islam
but of Persian nationalism, and envied his popularity. So Mosaddeq Avenue
became Vali Asr, after the revered Hidden Imam, whose reappearance someday,
Shiite Muslims believe, will establish the perfect Islamic political community.
Still, even Ayatollah Khomeini was careful not to go too far. Ignoring
Dr. Mosaddeq, rather than excoriating him, became the rule.
Two decades later, the Mosaddeq cult has been revitalized
by resurgent nationalism and frustration with the strictures of Islam.
Dr. Mosaddeq inspires the young, who long for heroes and have not necessarily
found them, either in clerics or kings.
In campaigns for local elections in February 1999 and
parliamentary elections a year later, reformist advertising made use of
Dr. Mosaddeq's sad, elongated face. And every year since his death, his
supporters have rallied at his estate.
His legacy still stirs considerable debate. In August,
Parliament approved a bill to abolish a holiday marking the nationalization
of the oil industry in 1951. The decision set off protests in the press
"Alas! Parliament ignored the most apparent symbol of the struggle
of the Iranian people throughout history against colonialism," the
reformist daily Khordad said. In November, legislators were forced to
reinstate the holiday.
CIA tried, With Little Success, to Use U.S. Press in Coup
Central Intelligence Agency officials plotting the 1953 coup in Iran hoped
to plant articles in American newspapers saying Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's
return resulted from a home-grown revolt against a Communist-leaning government,
internal agency documents show.
Those hopes were largely disappointed. The CIA's history
of the coup shows that its operatives had only limited success in manipulating
American reporters and that none of the Americans covering the coup worked
for the agency.
An analysis of the press coverage shows that American
journalists filed straightforward, factual dispatches that prominently
mentioned the role of Iran's Communists in street violence leading up
to the coup. Western correspondents in Iran and Washington never reported
that some of the unrest had been stage-managed by CIA agents posing as
Communists. And they gave little emphasis to accurate contemporaneous
reports in Iranian newspapers and on the Moscow radio asserting that Western
powers were secretly arranging the shah's return to power.
It was just eight years after the end of World War II,
which left American journalists with a sense of national interest framed
by six years of confrontation between the Allies and the Axis. The front
pages of Western newspapers were dominated by articles about the new global
confrontation with the Soviet Union, about Moscow's prowess in developing
nuclear weapons and about Congressional allegations of "Red"
influence in Washington.
In one instance, the history indicates, the CIA was apparently
able to use contacts at The Associated Press to put on the news wire a
statement from Tehran about royal decrees that the CIA itself had written.
But mostly, the agency relied on less direct means to exploit the media.
The Iran desk of the State Department, the document says,
was able to place a CIA study in Newsweek, "using the normal channel
of desk officer to journalist." The article was one of several planted
press reports that, when reprinted in Tehran, fed the "war of nerves"
against Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq.
The history says the Iran operation exposed the agency's
shortcomings in manipulating the American press. The CIA "lacked
contacts capable of placing material so that the American publisher was
unwitting as to its source."
The history discloses that a CIA officer, working under
cover as the embassy's press officer, drove two American reporters to
a house outside Tehran where they were shown the shah's decrees dismissing
the prime minister.
Kennett Love, the New York Times reporter in Tehran during
the coup, wrote about the royal decrees in the newspaper the next day,
without mentioning how he had seen them. In an interview, he said he had
agreed to the embassy official's ground rules that he should not report
the American role in arranging the trip.
Mr. Love said he did not know at the time that the official
worked for the CIA
After the coup succeeded, Mr. Love did in one article briefly refer to
Iranian press reports of American involvement, and The New York Times
also published an article from Moscow reporting Soviet charges that the
United States was behind the coup. But neither The Times nor other American
news organizations appear to have examined such charges seriously.
In a 1960 paper he wrote while studying at Princeton University,
Mr. Love explained that he "was responsible, in an impromptu sort
of way, for speeding the final victory of the royalists."
Seeing a half-dozen tanks parked in front of Tehran's
radio station, he said, "I told the tank commanders that a lot of
people were getting killed trying to storm Dr. Mosaddeq's house and that
they would be of some use instead of sitting idle at the radio station."
He added, "They took their machines in a body to Kakh Avenue and
put the three tanks at Dr. Mosaddeq's house out of action."
Mr. Love, who left The New York Times in 1962, said in
an interview that he had urged the tanks into action "because I wanted
to stop the bloodshed."
Months afterward, Mr. Love says, he was told by Robert
C. Doty, then Cairo bureau chief and his boss, of evidence of American
involvement in the coup.
But Mr. Doty, who died in 1974, did not write about the
matter, and by the summer of 1954, Mr. Love decided to tell the New York
office what he knew. In a July 26, 1954, letter to Emanuel R. Freedman,
then the foreign editor, Mr. Love wrote, "The only instance since
I joined The Times in which I have allowed policy to influence a strict
news approach was in failing to report the role our own agents played
in the overthrow of Mosaddeq."
Mr. Love said he had hoped that the foreign editor would
order him to pursue the subject. But he never received any response, he
said.
"I wanted to let Freedman know that I knew there
had been U.S. involvement in the coup, but that I hadn't written about
it," he said. "I expected him to say, 'Jump on that story.'
But there was no response." Mr. Freedman died in 1971.
'Gentleman Spy'
Donald Wilber, who planned the coup in Iran and wrote its secret history,
was old-school CIA, a Princetonian and a Middle East architecture expert
who fit neatly into the mold of the "gentleman spy."
Years of wandering through Middle Eastern architectural
sites gave him the perfect cover for a clandestine life. By 1953, he was
an obvious choice as the operation's strategist.
The coup was the high point of his life as a spy. Although
he would excel in academia, at the agency being part-time was a handicap.
"I never requested promotion, and was given only one, after the conclusion
of AJAX," Dr. Wilber wrote of the Iran operation.
On his last day, "I was ushered down to the lobby
by a young secretary, turned over my badge to her and left." He added,
"This treatment rankled for some time. I did deserve the paperweight."
Donald Wilber died in 1997 at 89. NEXT
History in pictures
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