Iran and the book that recounts the CIA's first coup d'état

PASCUAL SERRANO

One of journalism's shortcomings is that it allows itself to be dominated by the frenetic pace of current events and overlooks historical context. In the case of geopolitics, this means that citizens, no matter how much information they consume, cannot possibly fully decipher reality. The most obvious example these days is Iran. I think I'm not mistaken in saying that most citizens know little more about Iran's recent history than that years ago the Shah ruled and then there was a revolution after which the ayatollahs came to power.

However, there are some key events just before that that are crucial to understanding Iran and the role of the United States and the United Kingdom in its future.

I'm thinking about August 1953. Perhaps that was the moment in American history when it abandoned its sense of being a young former colony, committed to nations struggling to break free from their colonial powers, and began to behave like an imperialist state. That month, the first CIA-orchestrated coup d'état took place in Iran against a nationalist president with deep democratic and justice-oriented convictions.

The work “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup at the Roots of Terror in the Middle East” (Debate, 2005) offers a gripping account of those years in Iranian history, providing essential historical context for understanding the country and its culture. Its author, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, reveals the role of Shiite culture and Islam in the Iranian people, the various governments the country experienced, the attempts to establish a legislative branch, and the brutal clash with the British Empire over control of its oil reserves. It is in this struggle for Iran's dignity and sovereignty that the figure of Mossadegh emerges, the nationalist leader who, under his rule, would lead Iran toward the nationalization of its oil and inspire the admiration of its people.

A plot of espionage and intrigue that will reveal how the United States, little by little, is taking over from the British empire in taking control of governments and natural resources of impoverished countries.

But perhaps the most astonishing thing is discovering how those intrigues to destabilize and overthrow a government in the 1950s are identical to those of today. Showering tribal leaders and professional agitators with dollars to instigate mobilizations, demonstrations, and riots; bribing newspaper editors to spread lies to slander a government; bribing politicians to vote according to their interests; corrupting the military to secure the support of sectors of the army and police for the cause of subversion.

Methods that were first used in Iran, through what was called Operation Ayax, and which were repeated just a year later in Guatemala, continued in Chile, Congo, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya… and have not stopped to this day, where they are still being used, for example, against Russia, China (Hong Kong), Venezuela, and Cuba. And again in Iran.

It's always the same pattern: media manipulation, the creation of a network of agents serving the US administration and its agenda, bribes to compliant local politicians, destabilization through local criminal elements, and intervention by previously corrupted armed groups within the country. All of it heavily fueled by dollars—as many as needed. And if all else fails, direct military intervention, with the complicity of the European Union, of course.

Thanks to the United States, the Middle East in general, and Iran in particular, saw its progress toward democracy and development halted, plunging into decades of the ominous and bloody dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza, a criminal and cowardly despot acclaimed by the West during his reign. This dictatorship was finally overthrown by an Islamic revolution in 1979. It was then that the Americans witnessed the Iranian people's hatred of them, and public opinion began to learn about the coup that the CIA had orchestrated and executed more than 35 years earlier.

It was Bill Clinton, forty-seven years later, who officially acknowledged his country's involvement: “In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh,” he stated. “The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified on strategic grounds. However, the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is now easy to understand why many Iranians remain offended by that US intervention in their internal affairs.” But as the author rightly points out, “Operation Ajax taught the tyrants and would-be tyrants of the region that the world's most powerful governments would be willing to tolerate unchecked oppression as long as the oppressive regimes were friends of the West and Western oil companies.”

Shah Reza died in exile, but also with impunity. In 1980, his wife and faithful companion during the decades of his bloody rule, Empress Farah Diba, continued to grace the pages of Hola magazine in Spain, acclaimed for her elegance and wealth.

And as if that weren't enough, His son now appears as an alternative. to “democratize” Iran.

And perhaps to help with everything, here we have this headline from Hola magazine from January 17th: "An Yves Saint Laurent dress, the world's largest pink diamond and 300 kilos of hydrangea: we remember the wedding of the last Shah of Persia and Farah Diba”.

It is curious that the United States installed the Shah of Persia as emperor through a coup d'état 85 years ago and now wants to install his son claiming it is democracy.

Pascual Serrano is a journalist and writer. His last book is "Forbidden to doubt. The ten weeks in which Ukraine changed the world”