The 1953 CIA coup in
Iran was named “Operation Ajax” and was
engineered by a CIA agent named Kermit
Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore
Roosevelt. Capitalizing on the
oil-nationalization showdown between Iran and
Great Britain, which had thrown Iran into chaos
and crisis, Kermit Roosevelt skillfully used a
combination of bribery of Iranian military
officials and CIA-engendered street protests to
pull off the coup.
The first stage of the coup, however, was
unsuccessful, and the shah, who had partnered
with the CIA to oust Mossadegh from office, fled
Tehran in fear of his life. However, in the
second stage of the coup a few days later, the
CIA achieved its goal, enabling the shah to
return to Iran in triumph ... and with a
subsequent 25-year, U.S.-supported dictatorship,
which included one of the world’s most
terrifying and torturous secret police, the
Savak.
For years, the U.S. government, including the
CIA, kept what it had done in Iran secret from
the American people and the world, although the
Iranian people long suspected CIA involvement.
U.S. officials, not surprisingly, considered the
operation one of their greatest foreign-policy
successes ... until, that is, the enormous
convulsion that rocked Iranian society with the
violent ouster of the shah and the installation
of a virulently anti-American Islamic regime in
1979.
It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of
anger and hatred that the Iranian people had for
the U.S. government in 1979, not only because
their world-famous democratically elected prime
minister had been ousted by the CIA but also for
having had to live for the following 25 years
under a brutal and torturous dictatorship, a
U.S.-government-supported dictatorship that also
offended many Iranians with its policies of
Westernization. In fact, the reason that the
Iranian students took control of the U.S.
embassy after the violent ouster of the shah in
1979 was their genuine fear that the U.S.
government would repeat what it had done in
1953. |