CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic because it revisits ‘Argo’ rescue

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Whereas revealing new particulars about one of the crucial famed CIA operations of all instances — the spiriting out of six American diplomats who escaped the 1979 U.S. Embassy seizure in Iran — the intelligence company for the primary time has acknowledged one thing else as effectively.

The CIA now formally describes the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as undemocratic.

Different American officers have made related remarks prior to now, however the CIA’s acknowledgment in a podcast concerning the company’s historical past comes as a lot of its official historical past of the coup stays labeled 70 years after the putsch. That complicates the general public’s understanding of an occasion that also resonates, as tensions stay excessive between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and because it cracks down on dissent.

The “CIA’s management is dedicated to being as open with the general public as doable,” the company mentioned in a press release responding to questions from The Related Press. “The company’s podcast is a part of that effort — and we knew that if we wished to inform this unbelievable story, it was vital to be clear concerning the historic context surrounding these occasions, and CIA’s position in it.”

In response to questions from the AP, Iran’s mission to the United Nations described the 1953 coup as marking “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s inside affairs” and dismissed the U.S. acknowledgments.

“The U.S. admission by no means translated into compensatory motion or a real dedication to chorus from future interference, nor did it change its subversive coverage in direction of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the mission mentioned in a press release.

The CIA’s podcast, called “The Langley Files” as its headquarters is predicated in Langley, Virginia, targeted two latest episodes on the story of the six American diplomats’ escape. Whereas hiding on the residence of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, a two-man CIA crew entered Tehran and helped them fly overseas whereas pretending to be members of a crew scouting for a made-up science fiction movie.

The caper, retold within the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie “Argo” directed by and starring Ben Affleck, provided a dramatized model of the operation, with Affleck taking part in the late CIA officer Antonio “Tony” Mendez. The podcast for the primary time recognized the second CIA officer who accompanied Mendez, naming him as company linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson. He beforehand solely had been recognized publicly by the pseudonym “Julio.”

“Working with the six — these are rookies,” Johnson recounts in an interview aired by the podcast. “They have been individuals who weren’t educated to deceive authorities. They weren’t educated to be clandestine, elusive.”

However within the podcast, one other temporary trade focuses on the 1953 coup.

In it, CIA spokesman and podcast host Walter Trosin cites the claims of company historians that almost all of the CIA’s clandestine actions in its historical past “bolstered” popularly elected governments.

“We must always acknowledge, although, that that is, due to this fact, a very vital exception to that rule,” Trosin says of the 1953 coup.

CIA historian Brent Geary, showing on the podcast, agrees.

“This is among the exceptions to that,” Geary says.

Seven many years later, the 1953 coup stays as hotly debated as ever by Iran, its theocratic authorities, historians and others.

Iran’s hard-line state tv spent hours discussing the coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on its anniversary in June. Of their telling, a straight line leads from the coup to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that in the end toppled the fatally sick shah. It nonetheless fuels the anti-Americanism that colours selections made by the theocracy, whether or not in arming Russia in its war on Ukraine or alleging with out proof that Washington fomented the latest nationwide mass protests concentrating on it.

From the U.S. facet, the CIA’s hand in the coup quickly was revealed as a success of Cold War espionage, although historians lately have debated simply how a lot affect the company’s actions had. It additionally led the CIA right into a sequence of additional coups in different international locations, together with Guatemala, the place American clandestine motion in 1954 put in a navy dictator and sparked a 40-year civil conflict that seemingly killed some 245,000 individuals.

That is led to an American political reappraisal of the 1953 CIA motion in Iran. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the U.S.’ “vital position” within the coup in 2000. President Barack Obama, talking in Cairo in 2009, described the CIA’s work as resulting in the “overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian authorities.”

However largely absent from the dialogue was the CIA itself. After years of conflicting variations of the coup each in public and labeled papers, a member of the CIA’s personal in-house crew of historians wrote a reappraisal of the operation in a 1998 paper titled “Zendebad, Shah!” in Farsi — or “Lengthy Stay the Shah!”

However regardless of a sequence of American historic paperwork being made public, including a major tranche of State Department papers in 2017, giant parts of that CIA reappraisal stay closely redacted regardless of makes an attempt to legally pry them free by the George Washington College-based Nationwide Safety Archive. That is even after pledges by former company administrators Robert Gates and James Woolsey Jr. within the Nineties to launch paperwork from that coup and others engineered by the company.

Additional complicating any historic reckoning is the CIA’s personal admission that many recordsdata associated to the 1953 coup seemingly had been destroyed within the Sixties.

“It’s incorrect to recommend that the coup operation itself has been totally declassified. Removed from it,” mentioned Malcolm Byrne of the Nationwide Safety Archive. “Essential components of the document are nonetheless being withheld, which solely contributes to public confusion and encourages myth-making concerning the U.S. position lengthy after the very fact.”