The Lessons of Classified Information: From Mossadegh to Snowden

For connoisseurs of irony, there was much to savor in the timing of Monday’s announcement from the White House that, while it had been notified in advance of what was likely to happen, it had nothing to do with the British government’s decision to detain David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, at Heathrow airport, hold him for nine hours, and strip him of his laptop, cell phone, and various other possessions. Absolutely nothing to do with us, was the White House line: strictly a matter for our British friends. “This is a decision they made on their own,” said the aptly named spokesman Josh Earnest.

Across town, meanwhile, the C.I.A.—through the conduit of Malcolm Byrne, the director of research at the National Security Archive—was confirming its role in what was most definitely a joint U.S.-British intelligence operation: the August, 1953, coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s populist prime minister, and reinstated the Shah, a convenient puppet for Washington and London who was to remain in power for another twenty-six years, before fleeing in January of 1979. Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran.

The C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup, which served as a model for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries, has been well known for decades, and even today it is a source of animosity towards the United States on the part of many Iranians. The agent who led the coup was Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Until recently, though, the agency hasn’t publicly acknowledged the extent of its role, which was code named TPAJAX. That has now changed. In an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, the anonymous author states bluntly:

The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [a different English translation of the prime minister’s name from Farsi] and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.

So much for the the Eisenhower Administration’s vigorous denials that it was behind the coup. And so much for the alternative version of the events, assiduously promoted in some quarters, which claimed that the overthrowal of Mossadegh was a locally-inspired plot that the Americans and the British merely helped along. The internal C.I.A. historian continues:

It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission … that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPJAX was entered into as a last resort.

The newly released account come from one of a series of documents that the C.I.A. eventually turned over to Byrne after he filed Freedom of Information requests. It is different from another history of the Iranian coup that was written in 1954 by one of its planners at the C.I.A., Donald N. Wilber, and which the New York Times reporter James Risen obtained in 2000. Wilber’s account was almost contemporaneous, and it contained many vivid details of the coup attempt, which almost failed. The new account, portions of which had been declassified previously, takes a broader and more detached approach. In addition to confirming that a U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower, personally approved the toppling of a foreign government, it contains several other items of interest.

The United States saw the coup essentially as a Cold War maneuver. For the British, who were also eager to overthrow Mossadegh, the main beef with the Iranian Prime Minister was that, in May of 1951, he had nationalized the oil fields controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to BP. From the perspective of Washington, though, as the newly released documents confirm, Mossadegh’s biggest sin was his flirtation with the Soviet Union, which, like Britain, had colonial ties to Iran. As the animosity between Tehran and London escalated, the British moved to prevent Iran from selling any oil internationally, thus depriving the government of much-needed revenues. The C.I.A. and other U.S. agencies became concerned that Mossadegh would turn to the Soviets for economic and even military help. From the Agency’s history:

Had the British sent in the paratroops and warships, as they were to do a few years later against the Egyptians at Suez, it was almost certain that the Soviet Union would have occupied the northern portion of Iran.… It was also quite probable that the Soviet army would have moved south to drive British forces out on behalf of their Iranian “allies.” Then not only would Iran’s oil have been irretrievably lost to the West, but the defense chain around the Soviet Union which was part of U.S. foreign policy would have been breached. The Soviets would have had the opportunity to achieve the ancient Russian dream of a port on the Persian Gulf and to drive a wedge between Turkey and India. Under such circumstances, the danger of a third world war seemed very real. When it became apparent that many elements in Iran did not approve of Mosadeq’s continuing gamble or the direction in which he was pushing their country, the execution of a U.S.-assisted coup d’etat seemed a more desirable risk than letting matters run their unpredictable course.

Evidently, the C.I.A. was a bit bemused by Mossadegh, who hailed from a well-to-do Iranian family, and who refused all entreaties to engage him in a deal with the British. “At any time in 1951 or 1952, he could have had the same compromise through which his successors gained a nationalized oil industry efficiently run by foreign experts to give Iran the revenues that financed the Shah’s White Revolution,” the internal history says. “He chose to gamble on total victory over Britain, the United States, and the international oil industry—and he lost.”

In recent decades, some academic historians, such as the late Amos Perlmutter, of American University, have argued that the C.I.A.’s role in Mossadegh’s downfall had been exaggerated, and that, having lost the support of numerous political factions in Tehran, he would have been pushed from power without the agency’s intervention. In a different document that Byrne obtained, which is heavily redacted, another agency historian, Scott A. Koch, disputes this revisionist argument, writing:

Perlmutter is correct in saying that Iranian political divisions made the fall of Mossadeq (this is yet another spelling) possible, but merely because something is possible does ensure that it will happen. Without Kermit Roosevelt’s leadership, guidance, and ability to put some backbone into the key players when they wanted to quit, no one would have moved against Mossadeq.

At this stage, much of this material might appear to be primarily of historical interest. But that doesn’t mean that it lacks importance. In Iran, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries, history, particularly colonial history, is a living presence that helps shape many people’s attitudes to the West. For example, many Americans can’t understand why so many Egyptians think that the United States is secretly orchestrating what is happening in Cairo. But throughout the Middle East, events like the Iranian coup and the Suez crisis still figure much larger in the public imagination than they do in this country.

As for us, there are least two lessons to draw. First, we should pay more attention to history. In watching the events convulsing the Middle East, and thinking about how to react to them, it is essential to be aware of how we got to this juncture. Second, the official version of history is often very different from what really happened. During the Cold War, as now, the reality of what the U.S. government was doing was often hidden in classified documents. In the case of the coup against Mossadegh, it’s taken sixty years for the full truth to emerge. Doubtless, it will take almost as long for us to learn everything about the spying agencies’ electronic prosecution of the “War on Terror.” But thanks to Edward Snowden and journalists like Glenn Greenwald, we’ve at least had an advance briefing.

Above: A crowd of demonstrators in Tehran, in 1953. Photograph: AP.