Mark Dankof's America

Giuliani, Ron Paul, and Operation Ajax:  Or Is It Operation Blowback? 

Book Review:  The CIA in Iran:  The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide

Edited by Christopher J. Petherick

American Free Press Books

ISBN:  0-9785733-2-3153 pages, $20 

by Mark Dankof for the American Free Press  

Rudy Giuliani’s now infamous exchange with Ron Paul in the Fox-sponsored Republican Presidential debate revealed the former’s inadvertent—or willful—ignorance of the obvious connection between American foreign policy and insidious “blowback,” both in the Middle East and elsewhere. 

My recent radio guest on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Dr. Jerome Corsi of both Human Events and WorldNetDaily, displayed a similar discomfort with acknowledging the connection between actions of the United States Government around the world, and predictable acts of retaliation and retribution on the part of past recipients of these American military and covert intelligence operations.  Dr. Corsi rightly pointed out that the latter phenomenon is not justified by the former.  But neither did Ron Paul indicate such, either in the Fox Presidential debates or in any other forum in which the Texas Congressman has participated over the course of many years. 

Giuliani and Corsi may well profit by perusing the Chalmers Johnson trilogy on the American Empire, the three volumes known respectively as The Sorrows of Empire, Blowback, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.  And as for the specifics of the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East, surely the fury of the insurgency against American occupation in Iraq must of necessity be inextricably linked to at least two (2) obvious phenomena:  the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five as a result of the economic sanctions against Saddam’s regime in the last 15 years, and the civilian casualties inflicted on that nation since the American military attack of March of 2003.  According to the British Lancet medical journal, those numbers have reached 650,000.  MIT and Johns Hopkins University researchers concur with this apocalyptic estimate.  So did Chalmers Johnson when I posited the question to him on Mark Dankof’s America.  What say Giuliani and Corsi about these latest manifestations of the foreign policy of the United States? 

And then there is Iran.  It is not an accident that Ron Paul pointed to the 1953 coup directed against the Mossadeq regime in Iran by the American CIA and the British MI6 in his televised exchange with Giuliani, as proof positive evidence of a clear connection between cause and effect in the link between American interventionism abroad and subsequent blowback of the most virulent strain.  The plot would be forever known as Operation Ajax. 

When it comes to providing the ironclad documentation of the specifics of Ajax and its implementation, there is no book available that surpasses the excellence of the American Free Press’s The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide.  Read in tandem with Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men:  An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2003, 258 pp.), the AFP’s offering underscores the tragedy that has enshrouded American-Iranian relations in the half century since the launching of Ajax by Kermit Roosevelt, the head of the CIA’s Near Eastern Division, at the behest of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles.   

The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide, is essentially the publishing of a once-secret planning document of the Central Intelligence Agency, penned by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, one of the principal organizers of Operation Ajax.  Originally published by Clandestine Service as Historical Paper Number 208 (October 1969) with the title Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran:  November 1952-August 1953, it provides the reader with irrefutable evidence of the dark methodologies implemented by the London-Washington alliance that led to the demise of a democratically elected government in Tehran.  The reverberations have echoed in the chambers of world history ever since. 

The motives of the members of the alliance are clear.  In the case of Britain, her imperial designs and activities in Iran must be seen against the backdrop of the D’Arcy oil concession, the creation of the Anglo-Persian [Iranian] Oil Company, and the infamous 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement which effectively reduced Iran to the status of a British protectorate.  The rise of nationalist Mossadeq in the context of the anti-colonialist movement of the developing world after World War II, had to be undermined by London to maintain British petroleum hegemony in Khuzestan Province.  In the case of the United States, the desire to check Soviet designs in Persia, already expressed in the confrontation between Truman and Stalin over Azerbaijan, resulted in the decision to cast Mossadeq overboard--by falsely portraying the latter, not as a nationalist, but a demagogue of port-Pink hue with dangerous leanings toward Soviet Communism and the expansion of the latter’s sphere of influence in the region. 

It is precisely in the area of the massive, covert propaganda campaign against Mossadeq that the character of the CIA-MI6 operation in Iran in 1953 may be fairly evaluated.  Wilber’s manuscrept, which contains many of the planning documents generated by American and British intelligence planners at the time, demonstrates the extent to which the ill-fated Iranian Prime Minister was the victim of a well financed and executed agitation-propaganda effort aimed at generating mass hysteria and suspicion among targeted Iranian constituencies, augmented by hired provocateurs assigned to provoke and exacerbate street incidents.  This, in turn, was supplemented by the selection of General Fazollah Zahedi to take control of the military and the government in conjunction with funding provided for this expressed purpose by both Washington and London. 

The appendices in the Wilber report, repristinated in The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide, are the irrefutable proof of what happened.  A cursory look at two of its documents, entitled Initial Operation Plan for Ajax as Cabled from Nicosia To Headquarters 1 June 1953 and London Draft of the Ajax Operational Plan, cinch the deal.   

A sampling of the contents of these documents as they pertain to Mohammed Mossadeq is most revealing.  In the case of Initial Operation Plan for Ajax, the CIA decided upon two false charges against the Prime Minister as the basis for creating “popular dissatisfaction” with the Mossadeq government.  The first was the “anti-religious” tag, made to stick by associating the Prime Minister in the public mind with the Soviet Union.  The second was the phony allegation that Mossadeq was totally mismanaging the economy

. . . .  the CIA would give widest publicity to all fabricated documents [reviewer’s emphasis] proving secret agreement between Mossadeq and Tudeh [Communist Party of Iran].  . . .  Just prior to movement, CIA would give widest publicity to the evidence of illegally issued paper money.  CIA might have capability to print masses excellent imitation currency [reviewer’s emphasis, page 97].   

The London Draft is even more specific (pages 111 and 112): 

. . .  The material designed to discredit Mossadeq will hammer the following themes:  Mossadeq favors the Tudeh Party and the USSR (This will be supported by black documents.)  Mossadeq is an enemy of Islam since he associates with the Tudeh and advances their aims.  Mossadeq is deliberately destroying the morale of the Army and its ability to maintain order.  Mossadeq is deliberately fostering the growth of regional separatist movements through his removal of Army control over tribal areas.  One of the aims of the removal of control by the Army is to make it easier for the Soviets to take over the Northern Provinces.  Mossadeq is deliberately leading the country into economic collapse.  Mossadeq has been corrupted by power to such an extent that no trace is left of the fine man of earlier years, and he now has all the repressive instincts of a dictator.  Consistent with these themes will be the persistent slant that Mossadeq has been the unwitting victim of his unscrupulous, personally ambitious advisors [reviewer’s emphasis throughout]. 

And what were the results of the successful coup against Mossadeq and the restoration of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to his Peacock Throne?  Dilip Hiro, in The Iranian Labyrinth (preface, page xli) gives the short-term verdict: 

Following the 1953 coup, the Shah, advised by Washington, retained the nationalization law but reduced the National Iranian Oil Company to a paper organization.  It leased the rights to, and management of, Iranian petroleum for the next twenty-five years to a consortium of Western oil giants.  Over the next two decades, this Western consortium exported twenty-four billion barrels of crude at the paltry price of $1.80 a barrel.  No CIA-driven coup since then has proved so lucrative to Western economies. 

In the end, though, this bonanza ended so dramatically—with the Shah’s ignominious departure from Tehran ostensibly for “holiday” in January 1979—that it had a traumatic impact on Western economies, with the oil price spiraling to $31 a barrel. 

Furthermore, from being an integral part of the Iran-Israel-Saudi Arabia triad on which Washington’s anti-Soviet strategy in the Middle East rested, the emergent Islamic Republic of Iran not only expelled the American influence from its own territory but also attacked the pro-American Gulf monarchies and inspired Muslims throughout the region to challenge the hegemony of the U. S. 

We come full circle to the Fox Republican Presidential Sweepstakes Debate once more.  Does American foreign policy in Iran represent “blowback,” Mr. Giuliani?  Is there a connection between the coup of 1953 in that country and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s revolutionary victory in 1978-1979?  Does the Republican Party—and the American Empire—really support Mr. Bush’s apparently planned utilization of tactical nuclear weapons against Ahmadinejad’s Iran (Presidential National Security Directive 35 in support of CONPLAN 8022), as the United States employs preemptive military force as the surrogate--not of British Petroleum as in 1953--but as the janissary force of Zionist Israel in the Middle East? 

Buy, read, and contemplate The CIA in Iran:  The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide.  Give it to your family members and friends.  Demand answers to the questions it begs.  Your life—and those of your loved ones—may well hang in the balance.

Mark Dankof is a guest contributor to the American Free Press, and the past Constitution Party candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware (2000). A Lutheran pastor in San Antonio, he is the host of Mark Dankof's America heard live on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Monday through Friday, 7-10 am Central. In addition to writing for the paleo-conservative BATR News on the World Wide Web, his columns are posted at http://www.MarkDankof.com and the Al Bawaba/Middle East Gateway site in Amman, Jordan at http://blogs.albawaba.com/kramfoknad. 

In the 1970s, Pastor Dankof’s father served as a director of logistics for the Shah of Iran’s Imperial Iranian Air Force.  His 1976 diary from Tehran is located at his web site under the title, “A Summer of a Thousand Nights:  From Tehran to Susa."