"What Really Happened in Iran: The CIA, the Ouster of Mosaddeq, and the Restoration of the Shah," By Ray Takeyh 2014
What Really Happened in Iran
The CIA, the Ouster of Mosaddeq, and the Restoration of the Shah
Back
in 2009, during his heavily promoted Cairo speech on American relations
with the Muslim world, U.S. President Barack Obama noted, in passing,
that “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in
the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Obama was
referring to the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad
Mosaddeq and consolidated the rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Obama would go on to remind his audience that Iran had also committed
its share of misdeeds against Americans. But he clearly intended his
allusion to Washington’s role in the coup as a concession -- a public
acknowledgment that the United States shared some of the blame for its
long-simmering conflict with the Islamic Republic.
Yet there was a supreme irony to Obama’s concession. The
history of the U.S. role in Iran’s 1953 coup may be “well known,” as the
president declared in his speech, but it is not well founded. On the
contrary, it rests heavily on two related myths: that machinations by
the CIA were the most important factor in Mosaddeq’s downfall and that
Iran’s brief democratic interlude was spoiled primarily by American and
British meddling. For decades, historians, journalists, and pundits have
promoted these myths, injecting them not just into the political
discourse but also into popular culture: most recently, Argo, a
Hollywood thriller that won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture,
suggested that Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution was a belated response to
an injustice perpetrated by the United States a quarter century earlier.
That version of events has also been promoted by Iran’s theocratic
leaders, who have exploited it to stoke anti-Americanism and to obscure
the fact that the clergy itself played a major role in toppling
Mosaddeq.
In reality, the CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was
ultimately insignificant. Regardless of anything the United States did
or did not do, Mosaddeq was bound to fall and the shah was bound to
retain his throne and expand his power. Yet the narrative of American
culpability has become so entrenched that it now shapes how many
Americans understand the history of U.S.-Iranian relations and
influences how American leaders think about Iran. In reaching out to the
Islamic Republic, the United States has cast itself as a sinner
expiating its previous transgressions. This has allowed the Iranian
theocracy, which has abused history in a thousand ways, to claim the
moral high ground, giving it an unearned advantage over Washington and
the West, even in situations that have nothing to do with 1953 and in
which Iran’s behavior is the sole cause of the conflict, such as the
negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program.
All of this makes developing a better and more accurate
understanding of the real U.S. role in Iran’s past critically important.
It’s far more than a matter of correcting the history books. Getting
things right would help the United States develop a less self-defeating
approach to the Islamic Republic today and would encourage Iranians --
especially the country’s clerical elite -- to claim ownership of their
past.
Day in court: Mohammad Mosaddeq on trial, November 1953. (Getty / Carl Mydans)
HONEST BROKERS
In the years following World War II, Iran was a devastated
country, recovering from famine and poverty brought on by the war. It
was also a wealthy country, whose ample oil reserves fueled the engines
of the British Empire. But Iran’s government didn’t control that oil:
the wheel was held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose majority
shareholder happened to be the British government. By the early 1950s,
as assertive nationalism swept the developing world, many Iranians were
beginning to see this colonial-era arrangement as an unjust, undignified
anachronism.
So strong was the desire to take back control of Iran’s
national resources that it united the country’s liberal reformers, its
intelligentsia, elements of its clerical establishment, and its
middle-class professionals into a coherent political movement. At the
center of that movement stood Mosaddeq, an upper-class lawyer who had
been involved in Iranian politics from a young age, serving in various
ministries and as a member of parliament. Toward the end of World War
II, Mosaddeq reemerged on the political scene as a champion of Iranian
anticolonialism and nationalism and managed to draw together many
disparate elements into his political party, the National Front.
Mosaddeq was not a revolutionary; he was respectful of the traditions of
his social class and supported the idea of constitutional monarchy. But
he also sought a more modern and more democratic Iran, and in addition
to the nationalization of Iran’s oil, his party’s agenda called for
improved public education, freedom of the press, judicial reforms, and a
more representative government.
In April 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to appoint
Mosaddeq prime minister. In a clever move, Mosaddeq insisted that he
would not assume the office unless the parliament also approved an act
he had proposed that would nationalize the Iranian oil industry.
Mosaddeq got his way in a unanimous vote, and the easily intimidated
shah capitulated to the parliament’s demands. Iran now entered a new and
more dangerous crisis.
The United Kingdom, a declining empire struggling to
adjust to its diminished influence, saw the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company as
a crucial source of energy and profit, as well as a symbol of what
little imperial prestige the country had managed to cling to through the
end of World War II. So London responded to the nationalization with
fury. It warned European companies doing business in Iran to pull out or
face retribution, and the still potent British navy began interdicting
ships carrying Iranian oil on the grounds that they were transporting
stolen cargo. These moves -- coupled with the fact that the Western oil
giants, which were siding with London, owned nearly all the tankers then
in existence -- managed to effectively blockade Iran’s petroleum
exports. By 1952, Iran’s Abadan refinery, the largest in the world at
the time, was grinding to a halt.
From the outset of the nationalization crisis, U.S.
President Harry Truman had sought to settle the dispute. The close ties
between the United States and the United Kingdom did not lead Washington
to reflexively side with its ally. Truman had already demonstrated some
regard for Iran’s autonomy and national interests. In 1946, Soviet
Premier Joseph Stalin had sought to seize Iran’s northern provinces by
refusing to withdraw Soviet forces that were deployed there during the
war. Truman objected, insisting on maintaining Iran’s territorial
integrity even if it meant rupturing the already frayed U.S. alliance
with the Soviets; Stalin backed off. Similarly, when it came to the
fight to control Iran’s oil, the Americans played the role of an honest
broker. Truman dispatched a number of envoys to Tehran who urged the
British to acknowledge the legitimacy of the parliament’s
nationalization act while also pressing the Iranians to offer fair
compensation for expropriated British assets.
In the meantime, Washington continued providing economic
assistance to Iran, as it had ever since the war began -- assistance
that helped ease the pain of the British oil blockade. And the Americans
dissuaded the British from using military force to compel Iran to
relent, as well as rejecting British pleas for a joint covert operation
to topple Mosaddeq.
But Truman’s mediation fell short, owing more to
Mosaddeq’s intransigence than any American missteps. Mosaddeq, it
seemed, considered no economic price too high to protect Iran’s autonomy
and national pride. In due course, Mosaddeq and his allies rejected
every U.S. proposal that preserved any degree of British participation
in Iran’s oil sector. It turned out that defining Iran’s oil interests
in existential terms had handcuffed the prime minister: any compromise
was tantamount to forfeiting the country’s sovereignty.
Homecoming king: the shah returns to Iran, August 1953. (Getty / Carl Mydans)
TRUE COLORS
By 1952, the conflict had brought Iran’s economy to the
verge of collapse. Tehran had failed to find ways to get its oil around
the British embargo and, deprived of its key source of revenue, was
facing mounting budget deficits and having difficulty meeting its
payroll. Washington began to fear that through his standoff with the
British, Mosaddeq had allowed the economy to deteriorate so badly that
his continued rule would pave the way for Tudeh, Iran’s communist party,
to challenge him and take power.
And indeed, as the dispute dragged on, Mosaddeq was faced
with rising dissent at home. The cause of nationalization was still
popular, but the public was growing weary of the prime minister’s
intransigence and his refusal to accept various compromise arrangements.
The prime minister dealt with the chorus of criticism by expanding his
mandate through constitutionally dubious means, demanding special powers
from the parliament and seeking to take charge of the armed forces and
the Ministry of War, both of which had long been under the shah’s
control.
Even before the Western intelligence services devised
their plots, Mosaddeq’s conduct had already alienated his own coalition
partners. The intelligentsia and Iran’s professional syndicates began
chafing under the prime minister’s growing authoritarianism. Mosaddeq’s
base of support within the middle classes, alarmed at the economy’s
continued decline, began looking for an alternative and drifted toward
the royalist opposition, as did the officer corps, which had suffered
numerous purges.
Mosaddeq’s supporters among the clergy, who had endorsed
the nationalization campaign and had even encouraged the shah to oppose
the United Kingdom’s imperial designs, now began to reconsider. The
clergy had never been completely comfortable with Mosaddeq’s penchant
for modernization and had come to miss the deference they received from
the conservative and insecure shah. Watching Iran’s economy collapse and
fearing, like Washington, that the crisis could lead to a communist
takeover, religious leaders such as Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Kashani began
to subtly shift their allegiances. (Since the Islamic Revolution of
1979, Iran’s theocratic rulers have attempted to obscure the
inconvenient fact that, at a critical juncture, the mullahs sided with
the shah.)
The crisis finally came to a head in February 1953, when
the royal court, fed up with Mosaddeq’s attempts to undermine the
monarchy, suddenly announced that the shah intended to leave the country
for unspecified medical reasons, knowing that the public would
interpret the move as a signal of the shah’s displeasure with Mosaddeq.
The gambit worked, and news of the monarch’s planned departure caused a
serious confrontation between Mosaddeq and his growing list of
detractors. Kashani joined with disgruntled military officers and purged
politicians and publicly implored the shah to stay. Protests engulfed
Tehran and many provincial cities, and crowds even attempted to ransack
Mosaddeq’s residence. Sensing the public mood, the shah canceled his
trip.
This episode is particularly important, because it
demonstrated the depth of authentic Iranian opposition to Mosaddeq;
there is no evidence that the protests were engineered by the CIA. The
demonstrations also helped the anti-Mosaddeq coalition solidify. Indeed,
it would be this same coalition, with greater support from the armed
forces, that would spearhead Mosaddeq’s ouster six months later.
THE PLOT THICKENS
The events of February made an impression on a frustrated
Washington establishment. The CIA reported to U.S. President Dwight
Eisenhower, who had inherited the Iranian dilemma when he took office a
month earlier, that “the institution of the Crown may have more popular
backing than we expected.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles cabled
the U.S. embassy in Tehran that “there appears to be [a] substantial
and relatively courageous opposition group both within
and outside [the] Majlis [Iran’s parliament]. We gather Army Chiefs and
many civilians [are] still loyal to the Shah and would act if he gave
them positive leadership, or even if he merely acquiesced in [a] move to
install [a] new government.”
After the protests, the Majlis became the main seat of
anti-Mosaddeq agitation. Since Mosaddeq’s ascension to the premiership,
his seemingly arbitrary decision-making, his inability to end the oil
crisis, and the narrowing of his circle to a few trusted aides had
gradually alienated many parliamentarians. In response, the prime
minister decided to eliminate the threat by simply dissolving the
Majlis. Doing so required executing a ploy of dubious legality, however:
on July 14, all the National Front deputies loyal to Mosaddeq resigned
their posts at once, depriving the chamber of the necessary quorum to
function. Mosaddeq then called for a national referendum to decide the
fate of the paralyzed legislature. But this was hardly a good-faith,
democratic gesture; the plebiscite was marred by boycotts, voting
irregularities, and mob violence, and the results surprised no one:
Mosaddeq’s proposal to dissolve parliament was approved by 99 percent of
the voters. Mosaddeq won his rigged election, but the move cost him
what remained of his tattered legitimacy.
Meanwhile, Mosaddeq seemed determined to do everything he
could to confirm Washington’s worst fears about him. The prime minister
thought that he could use U.S. concerns about the potential for
increased Soviet influence in Iran to secure greater assistance from
Washington. During a meeting in January, Mosaddeq had warned Loy
Henderson, the U.S. ambassador, that unless the United States provided
him with sufficient financial aid, “there will be [a] revolution in Iran in 30 days.” Mosaddeq
also threatened to sell oil to Eastern bloc countries and to reach out
to Moscow for aid if Washington didn’t come through. These threats and
entreaties reached a climax in June, when Mosaddeq wrote Eisenhower
directly to plead for increased U.S. economic assistance, insisting that
if it were not given right away, “any steps that might be taken
tomorrow to compensate for the negligence of today might well be too
late.” Eisenhower took nearly a month to respond and then firmly told
Iran’s prime minister that the only path out of his predicament was to
settle the oil dispute with the United Kingdom.
By that point, however, Washington was already actively
considering a plan the British had developed to push Mosaddeq aside. The
British intelligence agency, MI6, had identified and reached out to a
network of anti-Mosaddeq figures who would be willing to take action
against the prime minster with covert American and British support.
Among them was General Fazlollah Zahedi, a well-connected officer who
had previously served in Mosaddeq’s cabinet but had left after becoming
disillusioned with the prime minister’s leadership and had immersed
himself in opposition politics. Given its history of interference in
Iran, the British government also boasted an array of intelligence
sources, including members of parliament and journalists, whom it had
subsidized and cultivated. London could also count on a number of
influential bazaar merchants who, in turn, had at their disposal thugs
willing to instigate violent street protests.
The CIA took a rather dim view of these British agents,
believing that they were “far overstated and oversold.” Nevertheless, by
May, the agency had embraced the basic outlines of a British plan to
engineer the overthrow of Mosaddeq. The U.S. embassy in Tehran was also
on board: in a cable to Washington, Henderson assured the Eisenhower
administration that “most Iranian politicians friendly to the West would
welcome secret American intervention which would assist them in
attaining their individual or group political ambitions.”
The joint U.S.-British plot for covert action was
code-named TPAJAX. Zahedi emerged as the linchpin of the plan, as the
Americans and the British saw him as Mosaddeq’s most formidable rival.
The plot called for the CIA and MI6 to launch a propaganda campaign
aimed at raising doubts about Mosaddeq, paying journalists to write
stories critical of the prime minister, charging that he was corrupt,
power hungry, and even of Jewish descent -- a crude attempt to exploit
anti-Semitic prejudices, which the Western intelligence agencies wrongly
believed were common in Iran at the time. Meanwhile, a network of
Iranian operatives working for the Americans and the British would
organize demonstrations and protests and encourage street gangs and
tribal leaders to provoke their followers into committing acts of
violence against state institutions. All this was supposed to further
inflame the already unstable situation in the country and thus pave the
way for the shah to dismiss Mosaddeq.
Indeed, the shah would be the plot’s central actor, since
he retained the loyalty of the armed forces and only he had the
authority to dismiss Mosaddeq. “If the Shah were to give the word,
probably more than 99% of the officers would comply with his orders with
a sense of relief and with the hope of attaining a state of stability,”
a U.S. military attaché reported from Tehran in the spring of 1953.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED
On July 11, Eisenhower approved the plan, and the CIA and
MI6 went to work. The Western intelligence agencies certainly found
fertile ground for their machinations, as the turmoil sweeping Iran had
already seriously compromised Mosaddeq’s standing. It appeared that all
that was left to do was for the shah to officially dismiss the prime
minister.
But enlisting the Iranian monarch proved more difficult
than the Americans and the British had initially anticipated. On the
surface, the shah seemed receptive to the plot, as he distrusted and
even disdained his prime minister. But he was also clearly reluctant to
do anything to further destabilize his country. The shah was a tentative
man by nature and required much reassurance before embarking on a risky
course. The CIA did manage to persuade his twin sister, Princess
Ashraf, to press its case with her brother, however. Also urging the
shah to act were General Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., a U.S. military
officer who had trained Iran’s police force and enjoyed a great deal of
influence in the country, and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a CIA official who
had helped devise the plot. Finally, on August 13, 1953, the shah signed
a royal decree dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing Zahedi as the new
prime minister.
Zahedi and his supporters wanted to make sure that
Mosaddeq received the decree in person and thus waited for more than two
days before sending the shah’s imperial guards to deliver the order to
the prime minister’s residence at a time when Zahedi was certain
Mosaddeq would be there. By that time, however, someone had tipped
Mosaddeq off. He refused to accept the order and instead had his
security detail arrest the men the shah had sent. Zahedi went into
hiding, and the shah fled the country, going first to Iraq and then to
Italy. The plot, it seemed, had failed. Mosaddeq took to the airwaves,
claiming that he had disarmed a coup, while neglecting to mention that
the shah had dismissed him from office. Indeed, it was Mosaddeq, not the
shah or his foreign backers, who failed to abide by Iran’s
constitution.
After the apparent failure of the coup, a mood of
resignation descended on Washington and London. According to an internal
review prepared by the CIA in 1954, after Mosaddeq’s refusal to follow
the shah’s order, the U.S. Department of State determined that the
operation had been “tried and failed,” and the official British position
was equally glum: “We must regret that we cannot consider going on
fighting.” General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s confidant and
wartime chief of staff, who was now serving as undersecretary of state,
had the unenviable task of informing the president. In a note to
Eisenhower, Smith wrote:
The move failed. . . . Actually, it was a
counter-coup, as the Shah acted within his constitutional power in
signing the [decree] replacing Mosaddeq. The old boy wouldn’t accept
this and arrested the messenger and everybody else involved that he
could get his hands on. We now have to take a whole new look at the
Iranian situation and probably have to snuggle up to Mosaddeq if we’re
going to save anything there.
The White House, the leadership of the CIA, and the U.S.
embassy in Tehran all shared the view that the plot had failed and that
it was time to move on. It seems that some operatives in the CIA station
in Tehran thought there was still a chance that Zahedi could succeed,
if he asserted himself. The station might even have maintained some
contact with Zahedi; it’s not clear whether it did or not. What is clear
is that by that point, the attempt to salvage the coup became very much
an Iranian initiative.
A TRAGIC FIGURE
In the aftermath of the failed coup, chaos reigned in
Tehran and political fortunes shifted quickly. The Tudeh Party felt that
its time had finally come, and its members poured into the streets,
waving red flags and destroying symbols of the monarchy. The more
radical members of the National Front, such as Foreign Minister Hossein
Fatemi, also joined the fray with their own denunciations of the shah.
An editorial in Bakhtar-e Emruz, a newspaper Fatemi controlled,
castigated the royal court as “a brothel, a filthy, corrupt place”;
another editorial in the same newspaper warned the shah that the nation
“is thirsty for revenge and wants to see you on the gallows.” Such talk
alarmed military officers and clerics and also outraged many ordinary
Iranians who still respected the monarchy. Mosaddeq himself did not call
for disbanding the monarchy. Despite his attempts to expand his powers
at the shah’s expense, Mosaddeq remained loyal to his vision of a
constitutional monarchy.
The shah issued a statement from exile declaring that he
had not abdicated the throne and stressing the unconstitutionality of
Mosaddeq’s claim to power. Meanwhile, Zahedi and his coconspirators
continued their resistance. Zahedi reached out to armed military units
in the capital and in the provinces that remained loyal to the shah and
told their commanders to prepare for mobilization. Zahedi also sought to
widely broadcast the shah’s decree dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing
Zahedi himself as prime minister, and the CIA station in Tehran appears
to have helped distribute the message through both domestic and foreign
media.
The efforts to publicize the shah’s decree and Mosaddeq’s
studied silence are instructive. Many accounts of the coup, including
Roosevelt’s, cast the shah as an unpopular and illegitimate ruler who
maintained the throne only with the connivance of foreigners. But if
that were the case, then Zahedi and his allies would not have worked so
hard to try to publicize the shah’s preferences. The fact that they did
suggests that the shah still enjoyed a great deal of public and
institutional support, at least in the immediate aftermath of Mosaddeq’s
countercoup; indeed, the news of the shah’s departure provoked
uprisings throughout the country.
These demonstrations did not fundamentally alter the views
of U.S. representatives in Iran. As Henderson later recalled, he
initially did not take the turmoil very seriously and cabled the State
Department that “it would probably have little significance.” Momentum
soon built within Iran, however. The clergy stepped into the fray, with
mullahs inveighing against Mosaddeq and the National Front. Kashani and
other major religious figures urged their supporters to take to the
streets. Unlike some of the demonstrations that had taken place earlier
in the summer, these protests were not the work of the CIA’s and MI6’s
clients. A surprised official at the U.S. embassy reported that the
crowds “appeared to be led and directed by civilians rather
than military. Participants not of hoodlum type, customarily
predominant in recent demonstrations in Tehran. They seemed to come from
all classes of people including workers, clerks, shopkeepers, students,
et cetera.” A CIA assessment noted that “the flight of [the] Shah
brought home to the populace in a dramatic way how far Mosaddeq had
gone, and galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.”
Mosaddeq was determined to halt the revolutionary surge
and commanded the military to restore order. Instead, many soldiers
joined in the demonstrations, as chants of “Long live the shah!” echoed
in the capital. On August 19, the army chief of staff, General Taqi
Riahi, who had stayed loyal to Mosaddeq until then, telephoned the prime
minister to confess that he had lost control of many of his troops and
of the capital city. Royalist military units took over Tehran’s main
radio station and several important government ministries. Seeing his
options narrowing, Mosaddeq went into hiding in a neighbor’s house. But
the prime minister was too much of a creature of the establishment to
remain on the run for long, and he soon turned himself in. A few months
later, Mosaddeq was convicted of treason, for which the mandatory
punishment was execution. However, given his age, his long-standing
service to the country, and his role in nationalizing Iran’s oil
industry, the sentence was commuted to three years in prison. In
practice, he would go on to serve a life sentence, spending the
remaining 14 years of his life confined to his native village.
Mosaddeq was a principled politician with deep reverence
for Iran’s institutions and constitutional order. He had spent his
entire public life defending the rule of law and the separation of
powers. But the pressures of governing during a crisis accentuated
troubling aspects of his character. His need for popular acclaim blinded
him to compromises that could have resolved the oil conflict with the
United Kingdom and thus protected Iran’s economy. Worse, by 1953,
Mosaddeq -- the constitutional parliamentarian and champion of
democratic reform -- had turned into a populist demagogue: rigging
referendums, intimidating his rivals, disbanding parliament, and
demanding special powers.
Popular lore gets two things right: Mosaddeq was indeed a
tragic figure, and a victim. But his tragedy was that he couldn’t find a
way out of a predicament that he himself was largely responsible for
creating. And more than anyone else, he was a victim of himself.
THE MYTH OF U.S. FINGERPRINTS
Since 1953, and especially since the 1979 Islamic
Revolution that toppled the shah, the truth about the coup has been
obscured by self-serving narratives concocted by Americans and Iranians
alike. The Islamic Republic has done much to propagate the notion that
the coup and the conspiracy against Mosaddeq demonstrated an implacable
American hostility to Iran. The theocratic revolutionaries have been
assisted in this distortion by American accounts that grossly exaggerate
the significance of the U.S. role in pushing Mosaddeq from power. Chief
among these is the version that appears in Roosevelt’s
self-aggrandizing 1979 book, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran.
In his Orientalist rendition, Roosevelt landed in Tehran with a few
bags of cash and easily manipulated the benighted Iranians into carrying
out Washington’s schemes.
Contrary to Roosevelt’s account, the documentary record
reveals that the Eisenhower administration was hardly in control and was
in fact surprised by the way events played out. On the eve of the
shah’s triumph, Henderson reported in a cable to Washington that the
real cause of the coup’s success was that “most armed forces and great
numbers [of] Iranian civilians [are] inherently loyal to [the] Shah whom
they have been taught to believe is [a] symbol of national unity as
well as of [the] stability of the country.” As Iran underwent its
titanic internal struggle, even the CIA seemed to be aware that its own
machinations had proved relatively unimportant. On August 21, Charles
Cabell, the agency’s acting director, reported to Eisenhower that “an
unexpectedly strong upsurge of popular and military reaction to Prime
Minister Mosaddeq’s Government has resulted, according to late
dispatches from Tehran, in the virtual occupation of that city by forces
proclaiming their loyalty to the Shah and his appointed Prime Minister
Zahedi.”
In addition to overstating the American and British hand
in orchestrating Mosaddeq’s downfall and the shah’s restoration, the
conventional narrative of the coup neglects the fact that the shah was
still popular in the early 1950s. He had not yet become the megalomaniac
of the 1970s, but was still a young, hesitant monarch deferential to
Iran’s elder statesmen and grand ayatollahs and respectful of the limits
of his powers.
But the mythological version of the events of 1953 has
persisted, partly because since the Islamic Revolution, making the
United States out to be the villain has served the interests of Iran’s
leaders. Another reason for the myth’s survival is that in the aftermath
of the debacle in Vietnam and in the wake of congressional
investigations during the mid-1970s that revealed the CIA’s involvement
in covert attempts to foment coups overseas, many Americans began to
question the integrity of their institutions and the motives of their
government; it hardly seemed far-fetched to assume that the CIA had been
the main force behind the coup in Iran.
Whatever the reason for the persistence of the mythology
about 1953, it is long past time for the Americans and the Iranians to
move beyond it. As Washington and Tehran struggle to end their
protracted enmity, it would help greatly if the United States no longer
felt the need to keep implicitly apologizing for its role in Mosaddeq’s
ouster. As for the Islamic Republic, at a moment when it is dealing with
internal divisions and uncertainties about its future, it would
likewise help for it to abandon its outdated notions of victimhood and
domination by foreigners and acknowledge that it was Iranians themselves
who were the principal protagonists in one of the most important
turning points in their country’s history.
