Don’t Blame Washington for the 1953 Iran Coup
Darioush Bayandor
In their Oct. 30 article in Foreign Policy, Roham Alvandi and Mark J. Gasiorowski took issue with my 2010 book Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited, seeking to link it to the current hostility between Iran and the United States. Their ultimate goal is to rehabilitate a discredited narrative to which the release of the secret CIA files in 2017 has dealt a devastating blow. The archival evidence presented below should enable readers to form an independent judgment about the circumstances of the fateful overthrow of the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953.
The first batch of declassified State Department documents, partially related to the Anglo-American coup plot against Mosaddeq, was released in the “Foreign Relations of the United States†series in 1989. CIA files were not included, and direct references to the plot, codenamed TPAJAX, had been redacted. Still, the released material contained valuable insights into the thinking of the Eisenhower administration and the U.S. policies both before and after the event.
U.S. involvement in the overthrow had long been suspected, but the first official admission came in the form of an apology by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in March 2000. Shortly after, the New York Times published a leaked secret CIA internal history of the event compiled by an insider CIA consultant, Donald Wilber.
Read more at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/21/dont-blame-washington-1953-iran-coup-mosaddeq/
If one watches "Argo" in the opening or from many other sources, the US (along with the UK) coup. I have seen counter-arguments like this before. No endorsement but I hope it is true.
See, if one researches it, previously released declassified info seemed to say we were involved in the coup. So, he offers up a counter-view. Alright.
