A recently discovered transcript of an interview with a British intelligence officer who played a leading role in the 1953 coup that brought forces back to the shah of Iran claims that Britain was the driving force behind the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
On the anniversary of the UK-US-led coup that removed the democratically elected leader of Iran, an interview with Norman Darbyshire – head of the MI6 spy agency’s Persia ‘station in Cyprus was published at the time .
In his account, Darbyshire said Britain had persuaded the US to take part in the coup.
Darbyshire’s remarks came from an interview with the makers of an episode of the 1985 British series from the end of 1985. His interview was not used directly in the program because he did not want to appear on camera.
The transcript, long forgotten, was recently discovered during the making of a new documentary called Coup 53, scheduled for release on Wednesday, the 67th anniversary of the coup.
Darbyshire died in 1993. The transcript of his interview was published Monday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in the United States.
“Even though it has been an open secret for decades, the UK government has not officially acknowledged its fundamental role in the coup. Finding the Darbyshire transcript is like finding the smoking gun. It is a historic discovery,” Taghi Amirani said. , the director of Coup 53, was quoted by the Guardian newspaper.
The coup – known as Operation Ajax – finally took place on 19 August 1953. Mossadegh was tried and placed under house arrest until his death 14 years later.
Mossadegh is sentenced in December 1953 to three years in solitary confinement by a military court in Tehran for acting against the shah [File: AP]
‘The classic plan’
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi appointed Mossadegh Prime Minister in 1951 after gaining the support of the Iranian parliament.
MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency then persuaded the shah to stage a coup against Mossadegh in 1953.
“The plan would have occupied important points in the town by which units we thought were loyal to the shah … seizing the radio station etc … The classic plan,” Darbyshire said.
Mossadegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and MI6 believed that Soviet-backed Communists would eventually take over the government, according to Darbyshire.
“I really believe it because Mossadegh was a pretty weak character,” the spy said. “[O]Now that you get high-ranking members of the Communist Party, it does not take long. “We did not share the American view that he acted as a bulwark against communism … We thought he would be shunned by the communists in the long run,” Darbyshire said.
‘Cold feet’
The US was initially uninterested, and Britain did not want to move without Washington.
“In the early months of [19]”We thought we had enough military units to store something, but London was starting to get cold feet,” he said in the interview.
“Unfortunately, the head of SIS [MI6] then, General [John] Sinclair knew about as much of the Middle East as a 10-year-old, “Darbyshire added.
When Dwight Eisenhower became President of the United States in January 1953, Washington came on board. The next task was to persuade the shah, then still young and unexperienced, to support the coup.
Darbyshire said he had persuaded the shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf, to fly from Paris to Tehran to talk to the angry monarch to support the coup. “We made it clear that we were going to pay expenses, and when I produced an awful lot of notes, their eyes widened,” he said.
Mohammed Mossadegh is helped by a car that was released in August 1956 after three years in prison on treason charges [File: AP]
Darbyshire said the removal of Mossadegh was inevitable.
“They would want to oust Mossadegh, regardless of whether he would have signed an agreement for the British,” he said. “Eventually, they would be forced to consider losing him to prevent a Russian takeover. I am convinced that was on the cards.”
“The coup cost £ 700,000. I know it because I spent it,” Darbyshire said.
‘Sequence of tragedies’
The removal of the democratically elected Mossadegh – who had pursued policies favorable to workers and the poor – and his replacement by the Western-backed absolute power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi set the context for the anti-American sentiment that followed. Iranian revolution in 1979 and the mutual distrust and resentment that pervade relations between Tehran and Washington.
The coup that “reversed” Mossadegh and his cabinet for the National Front was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government ‘, other documents obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive sei.
Pahlavi, a close ally of the United States, was overthrown in the 1979 revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran was declared, making its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hostile to the United States a cornerstone of Iran’s foreign policy. The most direct traumatic expression of that hostility was a hostage crisis that saw a group of Iranian students take control of the US Embassy in Tehran and 44 44 people were held captive for 444 days.
“Iranians really believe that if it were not for the CIA, the shah would never have been in power,” former CIA operative Robert Baer told Al Jazeera. “And they believe the CIA continues to operate as a malicious force in their country.
“The coup was the beginning of a series of tragedies that plagued the US and its allies in the Middle East today.“
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