The CIA has released documents which for the first time formally acknowledge its key role in the 1953 coup which ousted Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq.
The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup.
They come from the CIA’s internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s.
“The military coup… was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy,” says one excerpt.
The US role in the coup was openly referred to by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, and by President Barack Obama in a 2009 speech in Cairo.
But until now the intelligence agencies have issued “blanket denials” of their role, says the editor of the trove of documents, Malcolm Byrne.
This is believed to be the first time the CIA has itself admitted the part it played in concert with the British intelligence agency, MI6.
Mr Byrne says the documents are important not only for providing “new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency’s actions before and after the operation”, but because “political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup”.
The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institution based at George Washington University.
BBC has the full article
(Photo: Wikipedia)
