علی صدارت : اگر کودتای «غیردموکراتیکِ» ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ اتفاق نمی‌افتاد، خشونت‌های امروز خاورمیانه را با تزویر «اسلام» شاهد نمی‌بودیم.
به عبارت دقیق‌تر، اگر کودتای «غیردموکراتیکِ» ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ و کودتای خرداد ۱۳۶۰ اتفاق نمی‌افتاند، یعنی در واقع اگر یک حداقل لازمی از ما مردم در آن روز به حمایت از مصدق و بنی‌صدر در نفی وابستگی، و نفی تجاوزها به حقوق و خشونت‌های مورد نیاز وابستگان، به اعتراض برمی‌خواستیم،… اگر با ادامه حکومت مصدق و بنی‌صدر، ایدئولوژی‌های دنیوی و دینی زورپرست و سلطه‌سالار می‌توانستند در آزادی کامل، نظرات خود را به مردم ارائه دهند، بهبهانی‌ها، و کاشانی‌ها، و خمینی‌ها، و کیانوری‌ها، و…، و کی‌جی‌بی‌ها، و سی‌آی‌ای‌ها، و ام‌آی۶ها، و… عرصه را برای جولان دادن در افکار عمومی آن‌قدر خالی نمی‌دیدند، در بیابان برهوت سیاسی ایران، لنگه‌کفش کهنه افکار سلطه‌سالارانه خود را به عنوان اسلحه، در جنگ روانی قدرتها علیه مردم، بدین شکل، بی‌محابا به‌کار ببرند! در آن صورت، در نتیجه حضور یک حداقل لازمی از ما مردم در میدان ساختن سرنوشت خویش، خشونت‌های امروز خاورمیانه مانند خمینیسم، و طالبان، و القاعده، و داعش و.. و سایر پدیده‌های با تزویر «اسلام» را شاهد نمی‌بودیم.
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اعتراف به مسئولیت کودتای ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ برابر با ۱۹ آگوست ۱۹۵۳ توسط مقامات عالی‌رتبه امریکایی و بریتانیایی، مطلب جدیدی نیست.
نقد علنی و رسانه‌ایِ آن عملیات، و موصوف کردن آن با صفت‌هایی چون اشتباه، و غیراخلاقی، و… آن هم چندین بار، توسط چندین مقام، آن هم چندین بار،تکرار شده است.
سی‌آی‌ای هم به حکمِ اجبارِ قوانینِ امریکا، اسناد کودتا را، منتشر کرده است، بدون آن‌که کمترین نقد و ابراز نظری ارائه دهد. اگر تحلیلی هم می‌دیدیم، در طرفداری از سیاست امریکا و عملیات براندازی و کودتا بوده است.
ولی اینکه سی‌آی‌ای نه تنها به مسئولیت خود در انجام کودتای ۲۸ مرداد و تجاوز به حقوق ایرانیان اعتراف کرده باشد، بلکه اعتراف کند که آن عملیاتِ غیرقانونی‌شان در کشور ما، «غیردموکراتیک» بوده، موضوع جدید و بسیار مهمی است. وصف «غیردموکراتیک» که اخیرا توسط پادکست رسمی سی‌آی‌ای منتشر شد، بی‌سابقه بود، و برای اولین بار در رسانه‌ها و به‌صورت عمومی و علنی منتشر گردید.
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در زمان مصدق، حکومت بریتانیا نتوانست هری ترومن (Harry S. Truman) سی‌وسومین رئیس جمهور امریکا از حزب دموکرات را به این کار وادار کند. ولی این تلاش آنها، یعنی حکومت نخست‌وزیر وینستون چرچیل، و انتونی ایدن (Anthony Eden) وزیر خارجه بریتانیا، در حکومت بعدی امریکا، یعنی دوایت ایزنهاور (Dwight David Eisenhower) جمهوری‌خواه و برادران دالس (الن دالس Allen Welsh Dulles رئیس سی‌آی‌ای، و جان دالس John Foster Dulles وزیر خارجه) به سادگی مورد موافقت و استقبال قرار گرفت.
این کودتا توسط دستگاههای اطلاعاتی–امنیتی امریکا (سی‌آی‌ای) و بریتانیا (ام‌آی۶) انجام شد. برخی افرادی که مسئولیت اجرای عملیات را به عهده داشتند عبارتند از:
کرمیت روزولت امریکایی (Kermit Roosevelt) که بالاترین مقام عملیاتی سی‌ای‌ای در عملیات تی‌پی‌آژاکس، و در زمان کودتا شخصا در مخفی‌گاه یک خانه امن در تهران حضور داشت،
نورمن دربی‌شایر بریتانیایی (Norman Darbyshire رئیس دفتر امور ایران در اداره جاسوسی «ام آی سیکس» (MI6) در قبرس)
مانتی وودهاوس بریتانیایی (Monty Woodhouse رئیس ایستگاه ام‌آی۶ در تهران)
اسم رمز عملیات:
در CIA امریکا: TPAJAX و یا AJAX
در MI6 بریتانیا: Operation Boot
رمزگذاری شده بود.
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برای اینکه آتش جنگ‌طلبی‌های اسرائیل، به سایر نقاط دنیا هم سرایت نکند، و دامن ایران و ایرانیان را نگیرد، من و شما و ما، و هر کدام از همه ما به سهم خود و به نوبه خود، وظیفه داریم که برای اشاعه فرهنگ مردمسالاری، از جمله تلاش برای غنای وژدان تاریخی، کوشا باشیم.
روشن‌گری در مورد وقایعِ واقعیِ تاریخ معاصر، به‌خصوص کودتای بریتانیایی–امریکایی ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲، و همچنین کودتای خرداد ۱۳۶۰ ، برای عبرت‌آموزی و درس‌گیری نسل فعلی، از اهمیت فوق‌العاده‌ای برخوردار است.
یکی از درس‌های مهم، این است که هر وقت به حق استقلال ما تجاوز شده، و وابستگان به اجنبی فعال شده‌اند، در روند استقرار و استمرار مردمسالاری، وقفه‌ای عظیم واقع شده است. کودتاهای مرداد ۱۳۳۲ و خرداد ۱۳۶۰ مثال‌های خوبی برای اثبات این مدعی هستند.
برای اینکه نسل جوان که شاهد کودتاهای ۱۳۶۰ و ۱۳۳۲ نبوده‌اند، بتواند این مهم را درک کند، نگریستن به اثر فعالیت‌های پهلوی و شرکا در این یک سال اخیر، کار را آسان می‌کند. اثر منفی رضا پهلوی و شرکا، در کوتاه شدن زمان رسیدن به سقوط فیزیکی رژیم، به‌خصوص در این یک سال اخیر، بر کسی پوشیده نیست و کاملا عیان است. از جوشش افتادن جنبشی که از شهریور ۱۴۰۱ شروع شد، در رسوایی‌های توئیت‌گیت، و وکالت‌گیت، و منشورگیت، و… فقط چند مثال از نقش موثر وابستگان به قدرتها، در پیشبرد شعار خامنه‌ای مبنی بر «حفظ نظام، اوجب واجبات است» هستند.
پشت به قدرتها و وابستگان به آنها، و روی به مردم و حقوق، تنها راه کوتاه کردن زمان رسیدن به سقوط فیزیکی رژیم ولایت مطلقه است.
هر کدام از ما به سهم خود و به نوبه خود، وظیفه داریم که برای اشاعه فرهنگ مردمسالاری، و از جمله غنای وژدان تاریخی، کوشا باشیم.
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در امریکا قانونی به نام آزادی اطلاعات (FOIA = Freedom of Information Act) دولت را مجبور می‌کند که اسناد طبقه‌بندی شده را منتشر کرده، و در اختیار صاحبان اصلی آنها، یعنی مردم و افکار عمومی قرار دهند. موسساتی هم برای انتشار هرچه بیشتر آنها تلاش می‌کنند، و حتی بسیاری از مواقع مجبور می‌شوند دولت امریکا را در دادگاهها به چالش بکشند. از آن جمله منابع ذیل را می‌توان نام برد که مراجع خوبی برای علاقمندان به‌خصوص اهل تحقیق هستند:
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This is the National Security Archive’s legacy site, last updated in August 2017.
All postings and publications prior to that date will be permanently available here.
To reach the Archive’s new site, click here.
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فرمان نصب زاهدی به نخست‌وزیری در تاریخ ۲۲ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ توسط پهلوی
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فاز اول کودتا: تظاهرات– مسیر حرکت لات‌های مزدور کودتاچی تهران ۶صبح روز ۲۸مرداد۱۳۳۲: طیب و طاهر حاج‌رضایی، حسین و نقی اسماعیل‌پور، محمود مسگر، بیوک صابر
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فاز دوم کودتا: الحاق قوای نظامی–انتظامی–امنیتی–اطلاعاتی کودتاچیِ خائن به مردم، به لات‌های مزدور تهران ۱۰صبح روز کودتای ۲۸مرداد۱۳۳۲
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فاز سوم کودتا: الحاق تانک‌ها به سایر کودتاچیان صبح روز کودتای ۲۸مرداد۱۳۳۲
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فاز چهارم کودتا: حمله کودتاچیان به خانه مصدق
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فضل‌الله زاهدی، (نفر سمت راست) به همراه چندی دیگر از کودتاچیان، در بعد از ظهر روز ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲، هنگام خروج از مخفی‌گاه خانه امن، بعد از اینکه وضعیت کودتا مشخص شده است.
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محمدرضا پهلوی و «نخست‌وزیر» فضل‌الله زاهدی، بعد از موفقیت کودتای امریکایی-انگلیسی، ۲۸مرداد۱۳۳۲
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تعدادی از کودتاچیان:
ردیف جلو، از چپ: اردشیر زاهدی، عباس فرزانگان، فضل‌الله زاهدی، ناصر باتمانقلیچ، هدایت‌الله گیلانشاه.
تصویر نعمت‌الله نصیری هم درست پشت سر فضل‌الله زاهدی دیده می‌شود.
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اذعان سازمان سیا برای اولین بار: کودتا علیه دولت مصدق غیردموکراتیک بود
تاریخ انتشار ۱۲/۱۰/۲۰۲۳ – ۱۹:۰۰•به روز شده در ۱۹:۰۵
موضع جدید آژانس اطلاعات مرکزی آمریکا، سیا در قسمتی تازه از پادکست رسمی این سازمان اعلام شده است.
آژانس اطلاعات مرکزی آمریکا، سیا، برای نخستین بار اعلام کرد که حمایتش از کودتا علیه دولت دکتر محمد مصدق، نخست‌وزیر ایران، در مرداد ۱۳۳۲ «دمکراتیک» نبوده است.
سازمان سیا این مطلب را در تازه‌ترین قسمت از پادکست رسمی خود آورده است که به عملیات فراری دادن شش دیپلمات آمریکایی از ایران پس از اشغال سفارت ایالات متحده در تهران در سال ۱۳۵۸ اختصاص دارد و جزئیات جدیدی را در مورد یکی از مشهورترین عملیات سیا در تاریخ فاش می‌کند.
سایر مقامات آمریکایی در گذشته اظهارات مشابهی را مطرح کرده بودند، اما اذعان سیا در پادکستی که به تاریخچه این آژانس اختصاص دارد از آنجا مهم است که بخش اعظمی از جزئیات رسمی وقایع مرداد ۱۳۳۲ در ایران همچنان پس از ۷۰ سال دارای طبقه‌بندی محرمانه بوده و فاش نشده است.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-langley-files /
سازمان سیا در بیانیه‌ای در پاسخ به خبرگزاری آسوشیتد پرس گفت: «کادر رهبری سیا متعهد است که تا حد امکان با مردم روراست باشد. پادکست آژانس بخشی از این تلاش است و ما می‌دانستیم که اگر بخواهیم این داستان فوق‌العاده را روایت کنیم، شفاف بودن در مورد زمینه تاریخی این رویدادها و نقش سیا در آنها مهم است.»
دو قسمت اخیر پادکست صوتی سازمان سیا که با نام «پرونده‌های لانگلی» (با اشاره به نام محل دفتر اصلی سازمان سیا در لانگلی در ایالت ویرجینیا) تولید می‌شود، به داستان فرار شش دیپلمات آمریکایی اختصاص دارد که پس از اشغال سفارت آمریکا در خانه سفیر کانادا در ایران مخفی شده بود.
برای نجات این افراد، یک تیم دو نفره سیا وارد تهران شدند و در حالی که وانمود می‌کردند اعضای یک گروه فیلمسازی هستند، به آنها کمک کردند تا از کشور خارج شوند. بعدها فیلمی دراماتیزه شده از این رویداد به نام «آرگو» و با کارگردانی بن افلک ساخته شد که جایزه اسکار سال ۲۰۱۲ را به خود اختصاص داد.
والتر تروسین، سخنگوی سیا و مجری پادکست، در این برنامه و در حاشیه پرداختن به اتفاقات پس از اشغال سفارت، به ادعاهای مورخان آژانس استناد می‌کند که اکثریت فعالیت‌های مخفی سیا در تاریخچه آن، دولت‌های منتخب مردم را «تقویت» کرده است.
وی با این حال با اشاره به کودتای ۱۳۳۲ می‌گوید: « اما باید اذعان کنیم که این یک استثنای واقعاً مهم از آن قاعده است.»
برنت گیری، مورخ سیا، که در پادکست حضور داشت نیز با تایید این موضوع گفت: «این یکی از استثناهای آن است».
نمایندگی ایران در سازمان ملل متحد، در واکنش به این موضع جدید سازمان سیا کودتای ۱۳۳۲ را «سرآغاز دخالت‌های مکرر آمریکا در امور داخلی ایران» توصیف کرد و با رد گفته‌‌های این سازمان در بیانیه‌ای گفت: «پذیرش ایالات متحده هرگز به اقدامی جبرانی یا تعهدی واقعی برای خودداری از مداخله در آینده تبدیل نشد و سیاست خرابکارانه این حکومت در قبال جمهوری اسلامی ایران را تغییر نداد.»
هفتاد سال پس از کودتای مرداد ۱۳۳۲ بحث درباره جزئیات این رویداد همچنان میان مورخان، سیاستمداران و دولت‌های ایران و آمریکا ادامه دارد.
مادلین آلبرایت، وزیر امور خارجه وقت ایالات متحده، در یک سخنرانی در سال ۲۰۰۰ به «نقش مهم» این کشور در سرنگونی دولت محمد مصدق اشاره کرده بود. باراک اوباما، رئیس جمهور آمریکا، نیز در سخنرانی خود در قاهره در سال ۲۰۰۹ اقدام سیا را «سرنگونی یک حکومت دموکراتیک منتخب ایران» توصیف کرد.
با این حال خود سازمان سیا در این اظهارنظرها و بحث‌ها غایب بوده است. اسناد زیادی از سوی این سازمان درباره برهه زمانی مورد مناقشه منتشر نشده است و این امر به نوبه خود به بحث‌ها و گاه افسانه‌پردازی‌ها در این خصوص دامن زده است.
اعلام سازمان سیا مبنی بر اینکه بسیاری از پرونده‌های مربوط به کودتای ۱۹۵۳ احتمالاً در دهه ۱۹۶۰ میلادی از بین رفته است، بحث‌های تاریخی را حتی پیچیده‌تر کرده است.
مالکوم برن، از مسئولان آرشیو امنیت ملی آمریکا، در این خصوص می‌گوید: «این اشتباه است که بگوییم عملیات کودتا به طور کامل از حالت طبقه‌بندی خارج شده است. بخش‌های مهمی از این پرونده هنوز پنهان مانده که این قضیه تنها سردرگمی عمومی را در پی دارد و داستان‌سرایی در مورد نقش ایالات متحده را باعث می‌شود.»
انتشار موضع تازه سیا در خصوص رویدادهای مرداد ۱۳۳۲ در حالی صورت می‌گیرد که تنش‌ها بین تهران و واشنگتن بر سر برنامه هسته‌ای جمهوری اسلامی و همینطور کمک ایران به گروههای شبه‌نظامی در سراسر خاورمیانه و سرکوب مخالفان بیش از پیش بالا گرفته است.
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CIA for the first time, finally publicly acknowledges:
۱- 1953 “coup”
۲- “CIA backed” in Iran
۳- was “undemocratic“
CIA Podcast:
September 14, 2023
Walter Trosin= CIA spokesman and podcast host
Brent Geary= CIA historian
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CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic as it revisits ‘Argo’ rescue
https://apnews.com/article/iran-1953-coup-cia-218323db3cc1aca6bde1e54827527e8d
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CIA admits 1953 Iranian coup it backed was undemocratic
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/13/cia-1953-iran-coup-undemocratic-argo
Fri 13 Oct 2023 10.32 EDT
The toppling of the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and ensuing rule of the shah directly led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution
The CIA has for the first time acknowledged that the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was undemocratic.
The admission came in a new podcast revealing details about one of the most famed CIA operations of all times – the effort to spirit six American diplomats out of Iran under the guise of a Hollywood movie production.
The CIA in 2013 admitted its role in the coup that brought down Iran’s then prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, but until now has not publicly acknowledged that the move was undemocratic.
‘Written out of the history books’: the British spy who planned Iranian coup
Much of the agency’s official history of the coup remains classified, complicating the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington.
The “CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible”, the agency said in a statement responding to questions from the Associated Press. “The agency’s podcast is part of that effort – and we knew that if we wanted to tell this incredible story, it was important to be transparent about the historical context surrounding these events, and CIA’s role in it.”
Iran’s mission to the United Nations described the 1953 coup as marking “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs” and dismissed the US acknowledgments.
“The US admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the mission said in a statement.
The CIA’s podcast, The Langley Files, focused two recent episodes on the story of the six American diplomats’ escape. While hiding at the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, a two-man CIA team entered Tehran and helped them fly out of the country while pretending to be members of a crew scouting for a made-up science-fiction film.
The operation was retold in the 2012 Academy Award-winning film Argo directed by and starring Ben Affleck, which offered a dramatized version of the operation, with Affleck playing the late CIA officer Antonio “Tony” Mendez. The podcast for the first time identified the second CIA officer who accompanied Mendez, naming him as agency linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson. He previously only had been known publicly by the pseudonym “Julio”.
In the podcast, CIA spokesperson Walter Trosin cites the claims of agency historians that the majority of the CIA’s clandestine activities in its history “bolstered” popularly elected governments.
“We should acknowledge, though, that this is, therefore, a really significant exception to that rule,” Trosin says of the 1953 coup.
CIA historian Brent Geary, appearing on the podcast, agrees.
“This is one of the exceptions to that,” Geary says.
Seven decades later, the 1953 coup remains as hotly debated as ever in Iran, where many see a straight line leading from the coup to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ultimately toppled the shah.
The coup also prompted the CIA into a series of further actions in other countries, including Guatemala, where US clandestine operations in 1954 installed a military dictator and sparked a 40-year civil war that likely killed approximately 245,000 people.
But large portions of the CIA reappraisal of the coup remain heavily redacted, despite attempts to legally pry them loose by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive.
Further complicating any historical reckoning is the CIA’s own admission that many files related to the 1953 coup likely had been destroyed in the 1960s.
“It’s wrong to suggest that the coup operation itself has been fully declassified. Far from it,” said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. “Important parts of the record are still being withheld, which only contributes to public confusion and encourages mythmaking about the US role long after the fact.”
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انتشار مجموعه اسناد کودتای ۲۸ مرداد توسط وزارت خارجه آمریکا
https://parsi.euronews.com/2017/06/16/documents-about-coup-against-mosadegh
تاریخ انتشار ۱۶/۰۶/۲۰۱۷ – ۰۹:۴۸
وزارت امور خارجه آمریکا روز ۱۵ ژوئن (۲۵ خردادماه) مجموعه کامل اسناد مربوط به روابط ایران و آمریکا در دهه ۱۹۵۰ و رویدادهای مربوط به کودتای ۲۸ مرداد علیه دولت دکتر محمد مصدق را منتشر کرد.
بسیاری از اسناد و اطلاعات مهم مربوط به این رویدادها قبلا و به تدریج توسط برخی سازمان های اطلاعاتی آمریکا و بریتانیا منتشر شده بود که مهمترین آنها اسنادی بود که در سال ۲۰۱۳ توسط سازمان اطلاعات مرکزی آمریکا (سیا) از طبقه بندی محرمانه خارج و در دسترس عموم قرار گرفت.
مجموعه اسناد جدید که در قالب یک کتاب منتشر شده با انتشار اسناد و جزئیاتی بیشر، به درک جامع تر روابط سه کشور ایران، آمریکا و بریتانیا در دهه ۱۹۵۰ بر اساس توالی منطقی رویدادها کمک می کند.
پیش از این برخی ماموران اطلاعاتی و یا دیپلماتهای هر دو کشور آمریکا و بریتانیا با انجام مصاحبه هایی بر گوشه های مبهمی از رویدادهای مربوط به کودتا روشنی بیشتری انداخته بودند و مادلین آلبرایت وزیر خارجه اسبق آمریکا نیز در سال ۲۰۰۰ بر نقش چشمگیر آمریکا در سازماندهی براندازی دولت دکتر مصدق تاکید کرد.
سرانجام در سال ۲۰۱۳ سازمان سیا پس از ۶۰ سال مجموعه اسنادی که تایید دخالت مستقیم آمریکا و بریتانیا در کودتا علیه مصدق، از طریق عملیاتی به نام آژاکس بود را از طبقه بندی محرمانه خارج کرد، اما چاپ و انتشار مجموعه اسناد کامل در چارچوب روابط ایران و آمریکا در دهه ۱۹۵۰ به دلیل حساسیت مذاکرات هسته ای تا سال جاری به تعویق افتاد.
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روایت هفتادسال پیش آسوشیتدپرس از روز کودتا علیه مصدق؛ متن کامل خبری که از تهران به جهان مخابره شد
نخست‌وزیر ایران توسط اوباش برکنار شد
تاریخ انتشار ۲۵/۰۸/۲۰۲۳ – ۱۴:۰۹
هفتاد سال پس از کودتای سازمان‌یافته سیا که موجب سرنگونی نخست وزیر ایران شد، هنوز میراث آن در بحبوحه تنش‌ها بین تهران و واشنگتن بحث‌برانگیز و پیچیده است.
کودتای ۲۸ مرداد سال ۱۳۳۲ خورشیدی (مصادف با ۱۹ اوت ۱۹۵۳ میلادی) پس از آن صورت گرفت که محمد مصدق، نخست‌وزیر وقت توانست صنعت نفت ایران را ملی کند. در آن زمان، پالایشگاه آبادان بزرگ‌ترین پالایشگاه جهان و اصلی‌ترین تامین‌کننده بریتانیا بود؛ به همین جهت بود که لندن برای دسترسی مجدد به این منابع، از کودتا علیه مصدق حمایت کرد.
اما برای آمریکایی‌هایی که حاضر شدند برای پیشبرد این عملیات، میلیون‌ها دلار صرف رشوه، اسلحه و تطمیع کنند، کودتا بهترین فرصت برای جلوگیری از گسترش اتحاد جماهیر شوروی در خاورمیانه قلمداد می‌شد.
در زمان کودتا، مردم ایران هیچ اطلاعی از نقش سیا در این عملیات نداشتند. این کرمیت روزولت جونیور، نوه تئودور روزولت، رئیس جمهوری پیشین ایالات متحده بود که نقشه سیا را از ایران رهبری کرد و بعدها کتابی در مورد آن منتشر کرد.
اما در سال‌های پس از آن، ایالات متحده از افشای جزئیات پرونده‌های دولتی در مورد آن اجتناب کرد؛ تا این که وزارت خارجه در سال ۲۰۱۷ بی سر و صدا جزئیاتی از کودتا را منتشر کرد، اگرچه برخی از جنبه‌های آن تا به امروز هم محرمانه باقی مانده است.
در زمان کودتا، انتشار اخبار از تهران با چالش‌های متعددی مواجه بود. حتی یکی از روزنامه‌ها که گزارش لحظه‌به‌لحظه این رویداد تاریخی را پوشش می‌داد اولین خبر خود از کودتا را تا ساعت‌ها مخابره نکرد. روزنامه The Evening Star چاپ واشنگتن که بوسیله ماشین‌های تحریر آن زمان تازه‌ترین پیام را مخابره می‌کرد، در تاریخ ۱۹ اوت ۱۹۵۳ نوشت: «ظاهرا گزارش آسوشیتدپرس به خاطر سانسور به تاخیر افتاده و پس از سرنگونی دولت مخابره شد.»
آنچه در ادامه می‌خوانید ترجمه یکی از روایت‌های آسوشیتدپرس از روزهای کودتا است که البته در متون اصلی انگلیسی، برخی اسامی از جمله «تهران»، «محمد» در نام محمد مصدق و نام فامیلی «پهلوی»، با اشتباهات املایی همراه بوده است.
نخست‌وزیر ایران توسط اوباش برکنار شد
تهران، ایران، ۱۹ اوت (آسوشیتدپرس) – قیام نیروهای طرفدار سلطنت در ارتش و پلیس، امروز در تهران با [به راه افتادن] معرکه‌های برنامه‌ریزی‌شده در مرکز شهر، شعله‌ور شد. اولین تلاش مصرانه پلیس و نیروهای وفادار به محمدرضا شاه پهلوی برای تسخیر مقر مرکزی پلیس در مواجهه با رگبار گلوله، با شکست مواجه شد.
(اخبار رادیویی تهران که امکان شنیدن آنها از لندن بود حکایت از آن داشت که طرفداران شاه، مصدق را سرنگون کرده و او را فراری دادند و اوباش، وزیر امور خارجه او حسین فاطمی را «تکه تکه کردند». این برنامه از شاه ایران که در آن زمان در رُم بسر می‌برد خواست تا به کشور بازگردد.)
صدها گلوله در میدان سپه، بالای سر اوباش تظاهرکننده شلیک شد.
قبل از این که این تظاهرات به شکل حمله مسلحانه پلیس و سربازان وفادار شاه به مواضع کلیدی مانند وزارت خارجه متبلور شود؛ اوباش طرفدار شاه دست‌کم هشت ساختمان را در مرکز شهر سوزاندند.
این پخش رادیویی مختصر که از لندن شنیده می‌شد، جزئیاتی از ناآرامی گزارش شده در تهران ارائه نکرد و تلگراف‌ها قطع شده یا خیلی با تأخیر می‌رسیدند، بنابراین نمی‌توان [این اخبار را] فورا تایید کرد.
گزارش‌هایی که صبح امروز از تهران مخابره شد، از خشونت اوباش و تیراندازی پلیس در پایتخت خبر می‌داد. اما این گزارش‌ها حاکی از آن بود که این نابسامانی‌ها ناشی از تلاش‌های پلیس برای جلوگیری از ادامه تظاهرات جنون‌آمیز حامیان ملی‌گرای مصدق و کمونیست‌ها علیه شاه بوده است.
وقتی که نیروهای [طرفدار] مصدق تلاش‌ها برای برکناری نخست‌وزیر پیشین [مصدق] و انتصاب گزینه شاه یعنی ژنرال زاهدی غربگرای را سرکوب کردند؛ محمدرضا شاه پهلوی، فرمانروای خوش‌تیپ ۳۳ ساله ایران، یکشنبه گذشته به همراه ملکه زیبایش، ثریا از کشور گریخت. شاه و ملکه دیروز وارد رم شدند.
گزارش واصله امروز از تهران حاکی از آن است که زاهدی به عنوان نخست وزیر جدید منصوب شده است.
مصدق سالخورده، شاهین‌دماغ و احساسی؛ با تکیه بر مطالبات ملی‌گرایانه خود برای تصاحب صنعت نفت عظیم ۳۰ میلیون تنی در سال توسط دولت [ایران]، در آوریل ۱۹۵۱ به قدرت رسیده بود. بریتانیا در حدود نیم قرن کنترل شریان حیاتی ایران را در دست داشت.
امتناع او از مصالحه در پیشبرد برنامه ملی کردن «شرکت نفت ایران و انگلیس» به ارزش یک میلیارد و ۵۰۰ میلیون دلاری، جریان نفت به غرب را قطع کرد و باعث گسست تلخ روابط دیپلماتیک بین ایران و بریتانیا شد.
شاه و ملکه‌اش در هتل رم در حال خوردن ناهار بودند که گزارش این سرنگونی را شنیدند. شاه با هیجان گفت که مشتاق بازگشت به کشورش است.
مردی که متن دعوت به بازگشت شاه را از طریق رادیو تهران قرائت می‌کرد گفت: «هم اکنون مردم توانستند پایتخت را تصرف کنند. ما مشتاقانه منتظر بازگشت شما هستیم.»
رادیو تبریز در آذربایجان – استان مجاور اتحاد جماهیر شوروی – هم خبر داد که [این رادیو] در دست طرفداران شاه است. همچنین گزارش داد که تمام پادگان‌های ارتش در آذربایجان در کنار شاه هستند.
با این حال رادیو اصفهان، در ۲۰۰ مایلی جنوب تهران، در کنار مصدق ایستاده بود.
رادیو تهران از مردم درخواست کرد آرامش خود را حفظ کنند. سرگردی روی آنتن آمد و گفت: «گوش کنید، من یک افسر پیاده نظام هستم که توسط مصدق خائن خانه‌نشین شده‌ام. ما به جهانیان ثابت کردیم که ارتش ایران حافظ این کشور و تحت فرمان شاه است.»
صدای یک زن از مردم ایران می‌خواست تا نشان دهند که بیگانگان نمی‌توانند کشور را تسخیر کنند. وی گفت: «ایرانی ها عاشق شاه هستند. مصدق کشور را به [آغوش] دولت داس و چکش می‌فرستد.»
مصدق بیش از دو سال است که کنترل ایران را با چنگ و دندان حفظ کرده بود. او بارها مخالفان رژیم خود را از رقبای پارلمانی گرفته تا رهبران مذهبی و یا کاخ [سلطنتی] سرکوب کرده است. او فقط یک بار از مقام نخست وزیری انصراف داد. آن هم زمانی بود که احمد قوام حکومت را به دست گرفت، اما قوام تنها سه روز دوام آورد و حامیان شورشی مصدق او را از قدرت کنار زدند.
تازه‌ترین تلاش انقلابی ممکن است خیلی دوام نیاورد، چرا که مصدق ملی‌گرا هنوز هم در بازارها و در محله‌های فقیرنشین شهرهای شلوغ ایران از حمایت عظیمی برخوردار است.
عامل اصلی دیگری که به نظر حل نشده باقی مانده است این است که حزب کمونیست توده تا کی دست نگه می‌دارد؟
سرخ‌ها از نظر اکثر دیپلماتهای غربی، بهترین و منسجم‌ترین سازمان سیاسی در کشور هستند. این حزب ماه‌هاست که با مصدق در صف‌آرایی علیه کاخ قرار گرفته است. ممکن است آنها اکنون وارد عمل شوند – به خصوص اگر به نظر رسد که رژیم جدید ممکن است بخواهد این حزب را که به طور رسمی غیرقانونی است، از بین ببرد.
وزارت خارجه بریتانیا گزارش‌های رادیویی را سریعا به نخست‌وزیر چرچیل در خانه ییلاقی او در کنت ارسال کرد، اما اعلام کرد که هیچ تاییدی درباره کودتا در اختیار ندارد.
ظاهراً بر سر این که چه کسی باید اعلامیه را بخواند هیاهویی بود. یکی با صدای بلند گفت: «بگذار من بخوانم.» دیگری می‌گفت: «نه – من می خواهم آن را بخوانم.» سپس صدایی جاری شد و منطقا گفت: «مهم نیست چه کسی آن را می‌خواند، [مهم این است] که خوانده شود.»
اخبار سلطنت‌طلبان حاکی از پیروزی کامل و فرار مصدق است. [هر چند در این گزارش‌ها] اشاره ای به تکه تکه شدن فاطمی نشده است. اما احتمالاً به این معنا است که وزیر امور خارجه به دست یک گروه طرفدار سلطنت افتاده باشد. همچنین هیچ توضیحی در مورد اینکه مصدق به کجا و چگونه فرار کرد، در دست نیست.
مقامات بریتانیایی هنوز منتظر هستند ببینند که آیا گروههای طرفدار مصدق به خیابان‌ها می‌آیند یا خیر. آنها معتقدند که این موضوع ممکن است با درگیری در میادین پایتخت حل شود.
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سندرز در مناظره با کلینتون: سقوط مصدق تبعات غیرمنتظره ای داشت
تاریخ انتشار ۱۲/۰۲/۲۰۱۶ – ۰۸:۱۳
ششمین مناظره هیلاری کلینتون و برنی سندرز، نامزدهای انتخابات مقدماتی حزب دموکرات برای ریاست جمهوری آمریکا روز پنجشنبه در شهر میلواکی ایالت ویسکانسین برگزار شد.
آقای سندرز با انتقاد از سیاست آمریکا برای تغییر حکومتها، به کودتای ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ و سقوط دولت محمد مصدق اشاره کرد و گفت که این دخالت تبعات غیر منتظره ای برای جهان داشت. وی همچنین با اشاره به قدرت گرفتن گروههای افراطی در عراق و لیبی در پی سرنگونی صدام و قذافی تاکید کرد که تنها سقوط حکومت های مستبد مساله اصلی نیست بلکه باید به فردای تغییر حکومت نیز فکر کرد.
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افشای نقش‌آفرینی بریتانیا در کودتای ۲۸ مرداد علیه دولت مصدق
تاریخ انتشار ۱۸/۰۸/۲۰۲۰ – ۱۵:۳۰
یک افسر اطلاعاتی بریتانیا که در سال ۱۹۹۳ درگذشت هزینه کوتای ۲۸ مرداد را «۷۰۰ هزار پوند» عنوان کرده بود.
متن مصاحبه یکی از افسران اطلاعاتی بریتانیا که به تازگی منتشر شده است از نقش برجسته این کشور در کوتای ۲۸ مرداد علیه دولت محمد مصدق، نخست وزیر پیشین ایران حکایت دارد.
مصاحبه نورمان دربی‌شایر (Norman Darbyshire)، رئیس دفتر امور ایران در اداره جاسوسی «ام آی سیکس» (MI6) در قبرس در سالگرد کودتای سال ۱۳۳۲ منتشر شده است. او در روایت خود از حوادث آن سال گفته است که بریتانیا موفق شد تا آمریکا را به شرکت در کودتای ۲۸ مرداد در ایران متقاعد کند.
نورمان دربی‌شایر این مصاحبه را در سال ۱۹۸۵ میلادی با سازندگان مجموعه سریال مستند «پایان امپراطوری» انجام داد اما از مصاحبه او به طور مستقیم استفاده نشد زیرا این افسر اطلاعاتی بریتانیا تمایلی به حضور مقابل دوربین نداشت.
از مصاحبه نورمان دربی‌شایر در تهیه مستند «کودتای ۵۳» که قرار است روز چهارشنبه پخش شود استفاده شده است.
نورمان دربی‌شایر در سال ۱۹۹۳ از دنیا رفت. متن مصاحبه او را روز دوشنبه آرشیو امنیت ملی در دانشگاه جورج واشنگتن آمریکا منتشر کرد.
دولت بریتانیا به طور رسمی به نقش آفرینی خود در کودتای ۲۸ مرداد اذعان نکرده است هرچند گمانه‌زنی‌های زیادی طی دهه های گذشته در این باره صورت گرفته بود.
نورمان دربی‌شایر در این مصاحبه به نقش اشرف پهلوی، خواهر دوقلوی محمدرضا شاه در متقاعد کردن پهلوی دوم به انجام کودتا اشاره کرده است. او همچنین هزینه کوتای ۲۸ مرداد را «۷۰۰ هزار پوند» عنوان کرده است.
از کودتای ۲۸ مرداد به عنوان یکی از تاثیرگذارترین حوادث ایران معاصر یاد می‌شود. برخی بر این باور هستند که این کودتا زمینه‌ساز انقلابی بود که ربع قرن بعد در ایران روی داد و منجر به قدرت رسیدن روح‌الله خمینی شد. از سوی دیگر کودتای ۲۸ مرداد پس از ۶۷ سال همچنان بر روابط ایران و آمریکا سایه انداخته است.
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مادلین آلبرایت، نخستین وزیر خارجه زن تاریخ آمریکا درگذشت
https://parsi.euronews.com/2022/03/23/madeleine-albright-former-us-secretary-of-state-passed-away
تاریخ انتشار ۲۳/۰۳/۲۰۲۲ – ۱۹:۴۳•به روز شده در ۲۰:۴۰
از جمله اقدامات وی در قبال ایران می‌توان به کاهش تحریم‌ها واشنگتن علیه تهران نام برد. وی همچنین نخستین مقام رسمی آمریکا است که مسئولیت کشورش را در کودتای ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ و سرنگونی دولت محمد مصدق پذیرفت.
لرد دیوید اوئن، که پست وزارت خارجه بریتانیا را در سال‌های ۱۹۷۷ تا ۱۹۷۹ بر عهده داشت، به نشریه گاردین گفت: «من در پاییز ۱۹۷۸ در تلویزیون به شیوه‌ای بسیار علنی هشدار دادم که حکومت آخوندها از نظر حقوق بشر و سعادت شخصی افراد بسیار بدتر از حکومت شاه خواهد بود. متأسفانه ثابت شد که چنین هشداری درست بود.»
حکومت محمدرضا شاه پهلوی در ایران که به عنوان متحد غرب شناخته می‌شد در دوران مسئولیت آقای اوئن در بریتانیا سقوط کرد و اسلام‌گرایان در تهران به قدرت رسیدند. دیوید اوئن در آن هنگام مقام وزیر خارجه را در دولت جیمز کالاهان، نخست وزیر بریتانیا، بر عهده داشت.
وزیر خارجه اسبق بریتانیا اضافه کرد: «من برای شاه روشن کردم که شکل حکومت او باید راه را برای اصلاحات دموکراتیک باز کند، اما ای کاش از بیماری جدی او اطلاع داشتم و می‌توانستم خیلی زودتر در سال ۱۹۷۸ او را تحت فشار قرار دهم تا برای معالجه در سوئیس بماند و به این نحو حکومت دموکراتیک‌تری در ایران بر سر کار می‌آمد.»
محمدرضا پهلوی در سال‌های پایانی حکومت خود از نوع نادری از سرطان رنج می برد، با این حال این موضوع تا زمان سقوط او از همگان پنهان نگه داشته شد.
دیوید اوئن پیشتر در کتاب خود با عنوان «در بیماری و در قدرت؛ بیماری سران دولتها در طول ۱۰۰ سال گذشته» گفته بود که وزارت خارجه بریتانیا نیز در آن زمان از بیماری شاه خبر نداشته است.
آقای اوئن در مصاحبه تازه خود همچنین گفته است که بریتانیا باید نقش رهبری خود در سرنگونی دولت محمد مصدق در سال ۱۳۳۲ را بپذیرد. امروزه شماری از مورخان، انقلاب ۱۳۵۷ در ایران را پیامد حوادث سیاسی سال ۱۳۳۲ می‌دانند.
آقای اوئن با اشاره به این مطلب گفت: «دلایل خوبی برای اذعان به نقش بریتانیا با آمریکا در سال ۱۹۵۳ در سرنگون کردن تحولات دموکراتیک ایران وجود دارد. اکنون با اعتراف به این مسئله که اشتباه کردیم و به گام‌هایی که ایران برای حرکت به سمت توسعه برمی‌داشت آسیب زدیم، می توانیم اصلاحات را کمی محتمل‌تر کنیم.»
وزیر خارجه سابق بریتانیا درباره اعتراضات سراسری سال ۱۴۰۱ در ایران گفت: «امروز استدلال‌های قدرتمند زنان برای تغییر در ایران شنیده می‌شود و مورد احترام قرار می‌گیرد، زیرا آنها به روح سیاسی موجود که سابقه طولانی در ایران دارد وفادار هستند. اگر دولت بریتانیا امروز اشتباهات گذشته خود در سال ۱۹۵۳ را بپذیرد، همانطور که من به اشتباهات سال‌های ۱۹۷۷ تا ۱۹۷۹ خود اعتراف کرده‌ام، به آرمان زنان در ایران کمک می‌کند و احتمال موفقیت آنها را بیشتر می‌سازد.»
ایالات متحده ۱۰ سال پیش رسماً به نقش خود در سرنگونی حکومت دکتر محمد مصدق اذعان کرد و حجم وسیعی از اسناد اطلاعاتی را از حالت طبقه‌بندی خارج کرد که نشان می‌داد برکناری نخست وزیر وقت در مرداد ماه ۷۰ سال پیش، یک تلاش مشترک اطلاعاتی بین سازمان سیا و سازمان ام آی ۶ بوده است. با این حال بریتانیا تا کنون از تایید رسمی چنین نقشی خودداری کرده و موضع رسمی دولت این کشور همچنان امتناع از اظهار نظر در این خصوص است.
ریچارد نورتون تیلور، نویسنده کتاب «وضعیت محرمانه» درباره نهادهای اطلاعاتی و رسانه‌های بریتانیا، در این باره می‌گوید: «این غم‌انگیز، پوچ و در واقع غیرسازنده است که دولت بریتانیا همچنان در پشت شعار قدیمی خود یعنی نه تایید و نه رد پنهان می‌شود و از اعتراف به نقش اصلی‌ام آی ۶ در سرنگونی مصدق امتناع می‌ورزد. در حالی که سال‌هاست موارد زیادی از جمله اسناد رسمی سیا در مورد آن افشا شده است.»
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The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/
Published – November 29, 2000
Edited by Malcolm Byrne
For more information contact:
Malcolm Byrne 202/994-7000 or [email protected]
More information on Iran:
The Iran Declassification Project
Washington, D.C., November 29, 2000 – The CIA history of operation TPAJAX excerpted below was first disclosed by James Risen of The New York Times in its editions of April 16 and June 18, 2000, and posted in this form on its website at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html
This extremely important document is one of the last major pieces of the puzzle explaining American and British roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq. Written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, one of the operation’s chief planners, the 200-page document is essentially an after-action report, apparently based in part on agency cable traffic and Wilber’s interviews with agents who had been on the ground in Iran as the operation lurched to its conclusion.
Long-sought by historians, the Wilber history is all the more valuable because it is one of the relatively few documents that still exists after an unknown quantity of materials was destroyed by CIA operatives – reportedly “routinely” – in the 1960s, according to former CIA Director James Woolsey. However, according to an investigation by the National Archives and Records Administration, released in March 2000, “no schedules in effect during the period 1959-1963 provided for the disposal of records related to covert actions and, therefore, the destruction of records related to Iran was unauthorized.” (p. 22) The CIA now says that about 1,000 pages of documentation remain locked in agency vaults.
During the 1990s, three successive CIA heads pledged to review and release historically valuable materials on this and 10 other widely-known covert operations from the period of the Cold War, but in 1998, citing resource restrictions, current Director George Tenet reneged on these promises, a decision which prompted the National Security Archive to file a lawsuit in 1999 for this history of the 1953 operation and one other that is known to exist. So far, the CIA has effectively refused to declassify either document, releasing just one sentence out of 339 pages at issue. That sentence reads: “Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair.” In a sworn statement by William McNair, the information review officer for the CIA’s directorate of operations, McNair claimed that release of any other part of this document other than the one line that had previously appeared in Wilber’s memoirs, would “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security of the United States.” Clearly, the “former official” who gave this document to The New York Times disagreed with McNair, and we suspect you will too, once you read this for yourself. The case is currently pending before a federal judge. (See related item on this site: “Archive Wins Freedom of Information Ruling Versus CIA”)
In disclosing this history, the Times initially reproduced only a summary and four appendixes to the original document. It prefaced each excerpt with a statement explaining that it was withholding the main text of the document on the grounds that “there might be serious risk that some of those named as foreign agents would face retribution in Iran.” Eventually, the Times produced the main document after excising the names and descriptions of virtually every Iranian mentioned.
In posting the main body of the history on June 18, 2000, the Times’ technical staff tried to digitally black out the unfamiliar Iranian names, but enterprising Web users soon discovered that in some cases the hidden text could be “revealed” without much technical savvy. The Times quickly pulled those portions of the document and reposted them using a more fool-proof redaction method. The Archive is reproducing the latter versions of the document, even though most of the individuals known to be named in the history are either already dead or have long since left Iran.
The posting of this document is itself an important event. Although newspapers regularly print stories based on leaked documents, they far more rarely publish the documents themselves, typically for lack of space. The World Wide Web now offers a tremendous opportunity for the public to get direct access to at least some of the sources underlying these important stories — much like footnotes — rather than relying on second-hand accounts alone. The Times performed a valuable public service in making available virtually the entire Wilber history. Its precedent should be a model for future reporting that unveils the documentary record.
Although the Times’ publication was not without controversy, mainly over the unwitting revelation of Iranian names, fundamental responsibility for their exposure rests with those officials at the CIA who, despite compelling public interest and the filing of a lawsuit, insisted that virtually the entire document had to remain sealed. As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists put it:
If the CIA had exercised a more discerning classification policy and had declassified the bulk of the report, then there would have been no “leak” to the New York Times, and no subsequent disclosure of agent names. Instead, through overclassification, [Director of Central Intelligence George] Tenet failed in this case to fulfill his statutory obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.
As a brief substantive introduction, the Archive is reproducing a preliminary analysis of the document by Prof. Mark Gasiorowski (Louisiana State University), the most prominent scholar of the coup, and a member of the Advisory Panel of the Archive’s Project on Iran-U.S. Relations. It takes the form of a response to a request for his “take” on the document from the listserv Gulf2000, directed by Dr. Gary Sick of Columbia University. From June 7-8, 2000, the Archive co-sponsored an international conference in Tehran on Iran and the great powers during the early 1950s, specifically focusing on the Mossadeq coup.
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“What’s New on the Iran 1953 Coup in the New York Times Article (April 16, 2000, front page) and the Documents Posted on the Web”
By Professor Mark Gasiorowski
19 April 2000
There is not much in the NYT article itself that is not covered in my article on the coup (“The 1953 Coup d’Etat in Iran” published in 1987 in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and available in the Gulf2000 archives) or other sources on the coup. The most interesting new tidbit here is that the CIA’s agents harassed religious leaders and bombed one’s home in order to turn them against Mossadeq. The article does not say, but this was probably done by Iranians working in the BEDAMN network, which is described in my article. There are also some new details on how that US persuaded the shah to agree to the coup, including a statement that Assadollah Rashidian was involved in this effort and that General Schwartzkopf, Sr. played a larger role in this than was previously known. There are also a few details reported in the article that I knew about but chose not to reveal, including that Donald Wilber and Norman Derbyshire developed the original coup plan and that the plan was known as TPAJAX, rather than simply AJAX. (The TP prefix indicated that the operation was to be carried out in Iran.) The NYT article does not say anything about a couple of matters that remain controversial about the coup, including whether Ayatollah Kashani played a role in organizing the crowds and whether the CIA team organized “fake” Tudeh Party crowds as part of the effort. There may be something on these issues in the 200-page history itself.
Much more important than the NYT article are the two documents appended to the summary document giving operational plans for the coup. These contain a wealth of interesting information. They indicate that the British played a larger—though still subordinate—role in the coup than was previously known, providing part of the financing for it and using their intelligence network (led by the Rashidian brothers) to influence members of the parliament and do other things. The CIA described the coup plan as “quasi-legal,” referring to the fact that the shah legally dismissed Mossadeq but presumably acknowledging that he did not do so on his own initiative. These documents make clear that the CIA was prepared to go forward with the coup even if the shah opposed it. There is a suggestion that the CIA use counterfeit Iranian currency to somehow show that Mossadeq was ruining the economy, though I’m not sure this was ever done. The documents indicate that Fazlollah Zahedi and his military colleagues were given large sums of money (at least $50,000) before the coup, perhaps to buy their support. Most interestingly, they indicate that various clerical leaders and organizations—whose names are blanked out—were to play a major role in the coup. Finally, the author(s) of the London plan—presumably Wilber and Derbyshire—say some rather nasty things about the Iranians, including that there is a “recognized incapacity of Iranians to plan or act in a thoroughly logical manner.”
Perhaps the most general conclusion that can be drawn from these documents is that the CIA extensively stage-managed the entire coup, not only carrying it out but also preparing the groundwork for it by subordinating various important Iranian political actors and using propaganda and other instruments to influence public opinion against Mossadeq. This is a point that was made in my article and other published accounts, but it is strongly confirmed in these documents. In my view, this thoroughly refutes the argument that is commonly made in Iranian monarchist exile circles that the coup was a legitimate “popular uprising” on behalf of the shah.
In reply to Nikki Keddie’s (UCLA) questions about whether the NYT article got the story right, I would say it is impossible to tell until the 200-page document comes out. Nikki’s additional comment that these documents may not be entirely factual but may instead reveal certain biases held by their authors is an important one. Wilber was not in Iran while the coup was occurring, and his account of it can only have been based on his debriefing of Kermit Roosevelt and other participants. Some facts were inevitably lost or misinterpreted in this process, especially since this was a rapidly changing series of events. This being said, I doubt that there will be any major errors in the 200-page history. While Wilber had his biases, he certainly was a competent historian. I can think of no reason he might have wanted to distort this account.
Here are a few other notes. It is my understanding that these documents were given to the NYT well before Secretary Albright’s recent speech, implying that they were not an attempt to upstage or add to the speech by the unnamed “former official” who provided them to the NYT. I think there is still some reason to hope that the 200-page document will be released with excisions by the NYT. I certainly hope they do so.
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CIA Clandestine Service History, “Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran,
November 1952-August 1953,” March 1954, by Dr. Donald Wilber.
These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive.
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CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role-1953-iranian-coup
Mon 19 Aug 2013 14.26 EDT
Declassified documents describe in detail how US – with British help – engineered coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq.
The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.
On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling, the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents.
“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.
The documents, published on the archive’s website under freedom of information laws, describe in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6.
Britain, and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, latterly known as BP. But the UK needed US support. The Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.
British documents show how senior officials in the 1970s tried to stop Washington from releasing documents that would be “very embarrassing” to the UK.
Official papers in the UK remain secret, even though accounts of Britain’s role in the coup are widespread. In 2009 the former foreign secretary Jack Straw publicly referred to many British “interferences” in 20th-century Iranian affairs. On Monday the Foreign Office said it could neither confirm nor deny Britain’s involvement in the coup.
The previously classified US documents include telegrams from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. Others, including a draft in-house CIA history by Scott Kock titled Zendebad, Shah! (Viva, Shah!), say that according to Monty Woodhouse, MI6’s station chief in Tehran at the time, Britain needed US support for a coup. Eden agreed. “Woodhouse took his words as tantamount to permission to pursue the idea” with the US, Kock wrote.
Mosaddeq’s overthrow, still given as a reason for the Iranian mistrust of British and American politicians, consolidated the Shah’s rule for the next 26 years until the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the west’s oil interests in the country.
The archived CIA documents include a draft internal history of the coup titled “Campaign to install a pro-western government in Iran”, which defines the objective of the campaign as “through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq government; and to replace it with a pro-western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its prime minister”.
One document describes Mosaddeq as one of the “most mercurial, maddening, adroit and provocative leaders with whom they [the US and Britain] had ever dealt”. The document says Mosaddeq “found the British evil, not incomprehensible” and “he and millions of Iranians believed that for centuries Britain had manipulated their country for British ends”. Another document refers to conducting a “war of nerves” against Mossadeq.
The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, said in a recent interview that the coup was designed “to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalised”.
Unlike other nationalist leaders, including Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mosaddeq epitomised a unique “anti-colonial” figure who was also committed to democratic values and human rights, Abrahamian argued.
Some analysts argue that Mosaddeq failed to compromise with the west and the coup took place against the backdrop of communism fears in Iran. “My study of the documents proves to me that there was never really a fair compromise offered to Mosaddeq, what they wanted Mosaddeq to do is to give up oil nationalisation and if he’d given that of course then the national movement would have been meaningless,” he told the Iranian online publication, Tableau magazine.
“My argument is that there was never really a realistic threat of communism … discourse and the way justifying any act was to talk about communist danger, so it was something used for the public, especially the American and the British public.”
Despite the latest releases, a significant number of documents about the coup remain secret. Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the national security archive, has called on the US intelligence authorities to release the remaining records and documents.
“There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran,” he said. “Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides.”
In recent years Iranian politicians have sought to compare the dispute over the country’s nuclear activities to that of the oil nationalisation under Mosaddeq: supporters of the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often invoke the coup.
US officials have previously expressed regret about the coup but have fallen short of issuing an official apology. The British government has never acknowledged its role.
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CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/#_ftn1
Documents Provide New Details on Mosaddeq Overthrow and Its Aftermath
National Security Archive Calls for Release of Remaining Classified Record
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 435
Posted – August 19, 2013
Edited by Malcolm Byrne
For more information contact:
Malcolm Byrne 202/994-7043 or [email protected]
Washington, D.C., August 19, 2013 – Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States’ role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq’s ouster has long been public knowledge, but today’s posting includes what is believed to be the CIA’s first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup.
The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency’s actions before and after the operation.
The 1953 coup remains a topic of global interest because so much about it is still under intense debate. Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran, and how did it succeed — are in dispute.[1]
The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country’s historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran’s sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur.
Also, the public release of these materials is noteworthy because CIA documents about 1953 are rare. First of all, agency officials have stated that most of the records on the coup were either lost or destroyed in the early 1960s, allegedly because the record-holders’ “safes were too full.”[2]
Regarding public access to any remaining files (reportedly about one cubic foot of material), the intelligence community’s standard procedure for decades has been to assert a blanket denial. This is in spite of commitments made two decades ago by three separate CIA directors. Robert M. Gates, R. James Woolsey, and John M. Deutch each vowed to open up agency historical files on a number of Cold War-era covert operations, including Iran, as a sign of the CIA’s purported new policy of openness after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.[3]
A clear sign that their pledge would not be honored in practice came after the National Security Archive filed a lawsuit in 1999 for a well-known internal CIA narrative about the coup. One of the operation’s planners, Donald N. Wilber, prepared the account less than a year later. The CIA agreed to release just a single sentence out of the 200-page report.
Despite the appearance of countless published accounts about the operation over the years – including Kermit Roosevelt’s own detailed memoir, and the subsequent leak to The New York Times of the 200-page CIA narrative history[4] — intelligence agencies typically refused to budge. They have insisted on making a distinction between publicly available information on U.S. activities from non-government sources and official acknowledgement of those activities, even several decades after the fact.
While the National Security Archive applauds the CIA’s decision to make these materials available, today’s posting shows clearly that these materials could have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage to the national security. (See sidebar, “Why is the Coup Still a Secret?”)
Archive Deputy Director Malcolm Byrne called for the U.S. intelligence community to make fully available the remaining records on the coup period. “There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran. Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides.”
To supplement the recent CIA release, the National Security Archive is including two other, previously available internal accounts of the coup. One is the narrative referred to above: a 1954 Clandestine Services History prepared by Donald N. Wilber, one of the operation’s chief architects, which The New York Times obtained by a leak and first posted on its site in April 2000.
The other item is a heavily excised 1998 piece — “Zendebad, Shah!” — by an in-house CIA historian. (The Archive has asked the CIA to re-review the document’s excessive deletions for future release.)
The posting also features an earlier declassification of The Battle for Iran for purposes of comparison with the latest release. The earlier version includes portions that were withheld in the later release. As often happens, government classification officials had quite different — sometimes seemingly arbitrary — views about what could and could not be safely made public.
Read together, the three histories offer fascinating variations in perspective — from an agency operative to two in-house historians (the last being the most dispassionate). Unfortunately, they still leave wide gaps in the history, including on some fundamental questions which may never be satisfactorily answered — such as how to apportion responsibility for planning and carrying out the coup among all the Iranian and outside actors involved.
But all 21 of the CIA items posted today (in addition to 14 previously unpublished British documents — see Sidebar), reinforce the conclusion that the United States, and the CIA in particular, devoted extensive resources and high-level policy attention toward bringing about Mosaddeq’s overthrow, and smoothing over the aftermath
DOCUMENTS
CIA Records
CIA Internal Histories
Document 1 (Cover Sheet, Summary, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, Appendix A, Appendix B, Appendix C, Appendix D, Appendix E): CIA, Clandestine Services History, Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran: November 1952 – August 1953, Dr. Donald N. Wilber, March 1954
Source: The New York Times
Donald Wilber was a principal planner of the initial joint U.S.-U.K. coup attempt of August 1953. This 200-page account is one of the most valuable remaining records describing the event because Wilber wrote it within months of the overthrow and provided a great deal of detail. Like any historical document, it must be read with care, taking into account the author’s personal perspective, purpose in writing it, and audience. The CIA routinely prepared histories of important operations for use by future operatives. They were not intended to be made public.
Document 2: CIA, Summary, “Campaign to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran,” draft of internal history of the coup, undated
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This heavily excised summary was almost certainly prepared in connection with Donald Wilber’s Clandestine Services History (Document 1). By all indications written not long after the coup (1953-54), it includes several of the phrases Wilber used — “quasi-legal,” and “war of nerves,” for example. The text clearly gives the impression that the author attributes the coup’s eventual success to a combination of external and internal developments. Beginning by listing a number of specific steps taken by the U.S. under the heading “CIA ACTION,” the document notes at the end (in a handwritten edit): “These actions resulted in literal revolt of the population, [1+ lines excised]. The military and security forces joined the populace, Radio Tehran was taken over, and Mossadeq was forced to flee on 17 [sic] Aug 53.”
Document 3A & Document 3B: CIA, History, The Battle for Iran, author’s name excised, undated (c. mid-1970s) – (Two versions – declassified in 1981 and 2011)
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This posting provides two separate releases of the same document, declassified 30 years apart (1981 and 2011). Each version contains portions excised in the other. Though no date is given, judging from citations in the footnotes The Battle for Iran was written in or after 1974. It is marked “Administrative – Working Paper” and contains a number of handwritten edits. The author was a member of the CIA’s History Staff who acknowledges “the enthusiastic cooperation” of the agency’s Directorate of Operations. The author provides confirmation that most of the relevant files were destroyed in 1962; therefore the account relies on the relatively few remaining records as well as on public sources. The vast majority of the covert action portion (Section III) remains classified, although the most recent declassification of the document leaves in some brief, but important, passages. An unexpected feature of the document (Appendix C) is the inclusion of a series of lengthy excerpts of published accounts of the overthrow designed, apparently, to underscore how poorly the public understood the episode at the time.
Document 4: CIA, History, “Zendebad, Shah!”: The Central Intelligence Agency and the Fall of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, August 1953, Scott A. Koch, June 1998
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
The most recent known internal history of the coup, “Zendebad, Shah!” was written by an in-house agency historian in 1998. It is heavily excised (but currently undergoing re-review by the CIA), with virtually all paragraphs marked Confidential or higher omitted from the public version. Still, it is a useful account written by someone without a stake in the events and drawing on an array of U.S. government and published sources not available to the earlier CIA authors.
CIA Records Immediately Before and After the Coup
Document 5: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], July 14, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Kermit Roosevelt conveys information about rapidly unfolding events in Tehran, including Mosaddeq’s idea for a referendum on his remaining in office, the prospect of his closing the Majles, and most importantly the impact President Eisenhower’s recent letter has had in turning society against the prime minister. The U.S. government publicized Eisenhower’s undiplomatic letter turning down Mosaddeq’s request for financial aid. The move was one of the ways Washington hoped to weaken his political standing.
Document 6: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], July 15, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Responding to the resignation of Mosaddeq supporters from the Majles, Kermit Roosevelt fires off a plan to ensure that other Majles members keep the parliament functioning, the eventual goal being to engineer a no-confidence in Mosaddeq. The memo provides an interesting clue on the subject of whether CIA operatives ever bought votes in the Majles, about which other CIA sources are vague. Roosevelt urges that as many deputies as possible be “persuaded” to take bast in the parliament. “Recognize will be necessary expend money this purpose and determine precisely who does what.” At the conclusion of the document he appears to tie this scheme into the previously elaborated — but clearly evolving — coup plan.
Document 7: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], July 16, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Roosevelt reports on developing plans involving Fazlollah Zahedi, the man who has been chosen to replace Mosaddeq. CIA sources, including the Wilber history, indicate that the military aspects of the plan were to be largely Zahedi’s responsibility. This memo supports that (even though many details are excised), but also provides some insight into the differences in expectations between the Americans and Zahedi. With some skepticism (“Zahedi claims …”), Roosevelt spells out a series of events Zahedi envisions that presumably would bring him to the premiership, albeit in a very round-about way. His thinking is clearly prompted by his declared unwillingness to commit “‘political suicide’ by extra-legal move.”
Document 8: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], July 17, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
The CIA’s Tehran station reports on the recent resignations of independent and opposition Majles members. The idea, an opposition deputy tells the station, was to avert Mosaddeq’s planned public referendum. The memo gives a bit of insight into the fluidity and uncertainty of developments with each faction undoubtedly elaborating their own strategies and tactics to a certain degree.
Document 9: CIA, note to Mr. [John] Waller, July 22, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This brief note conveys much about both U.S. planning and hopes for Mosaddeq’s overthrow. It is a request from Kermit Roosevelt to John Waller and Donald Wilber to make sure that a formal U.S. statement is ready in advance of “a ‘successful’ coup.” (See Document 10)
Document 10: CIA, note forwarding proposed text of State Department release for after the coup, August 5, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This draft text from the State Department appears to be a result of Roosevelt’s request (Document 9) to have an official statement available for use after completion of the operation. The draft predates Mosaddeq’s ouster by two weeks, but its language — crediting “the Iranian people, under the leadership of their Shah,” for the coup — tracks precisely with the neutral wording used by both the State Department and Foreign Office in their official paperwork after the fact.
Document 11: CIA, Memo, “Proposed Commendation for Communications Personnel who have serviced the TPAJAX Operation,” Frank G. Wisner to The Acting Director of Central Intelligence, August 20, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Wisner recommends a special commendation for the work performed by the communications specialists who kept CIA headquarters in contact with operatives in Iran throughout the coup period. “I am sure that you are aware of the exceptionally heavy volume of traffic which this operation has necessitated,” Wisner writes — an unintentionally poignant remark given how little of that documentation has survived.
Document 12: CIA, Memo, “Commendation,” Frank G. Wisner to CNEA Division, August 26, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Wisner also requests a commendation for John Waller, the coup overseer at CIA headquarters, “for his work in TPAJAX.” Waller’s conduct “in no small measure, contributed to the successful result.”
Document 13: CIA, “Letter of Commendation [Excised],” author and recipient names excised, August 26, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Evidently after reflection, Frank Wisner concludes that there are troubling “security implications” involved in providing a letter of commendation for a covert operation.
Document 14: CIA, Memo, “Anti-Tudeh Activities of Zahedi Government,” author’s name excised, September 10, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
A priority of the Zahedi government after the coup was to go after the Tudeh Party, which had been a mainstay of support for Mosaddeq, even if the relationship was mostly one of mutual convenience. This is one of several memos reporting details on numbers of arrests, names of suspected Central Committee members, and planned fate of arrestees. The report claims with high specificity on Soviet assistance being provided to the Tudeh, including printing party newspapers at the embassy. Signs are reportedly mixed as to whether the party and pro-Mosaddeq elements will try to combine forces again.
Document 15: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], September 21, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Roosevelt reports on an intense period of political maneuvering at high levels in the Zahedi government. Intrigues, patronage (including a report that the government has been giving financial support to Ayatollah Behbehani, and that the latter’s son is angling for a Cabinet post), and corruption are all dealt with in this memo.
Document 16: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], September 24, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
A restless Zahedi is reported to be active on a number of fronts including trying to get a military tribunal to execute Mosaddeq and urging the Shah to fire several senior military officers including Chief of Staff Batmangelich. The Shah reportedly has not responded to Zahedi’s previous five messages.
Document 17: CIA, Memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], October 2, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
According to this account, the Shah remained deeply worried about Mosaddeq’s influence, even while incarcerated. Roosevelt reports the Shah is prepared to execute Mosaddeq (after a guilty verdict that is a foregone conclusion) if his followers and the Tudeh take any threatening action.
Document 18: CIA, Memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], October 9, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Iranian politics did not calm down entirely after the coup, as this memo indicates, reporting on “violent disagreements” between Zahedi and his own supporter, Hoseyn Makki, whom Zahedi threatened to shoot if he accosted any senators trying to attend a Senate session. Roosevelt also notes two recent payments from Zahedi to Ayatollah Behbehani. The source for these provocative reports is unknown, but presumably is named in the excised portion at the top of the memo.
Document 19: CIA, memo from Kermit Roosevelt to [Excised], October 20, 1953
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
Roosevelt notes a meeting between the new prime minister, Zahedi, and Ayatollah Kashani, a politically active cleric and once one of Mosaddeq’s chief supporters. Kashani reportedly carps about some of his former National Front allies. Roosevelt concludes Zahedi wants “split” the front “by wooing Kashani away.”
Document 20: CIA, Propaganda Commentary, “Our National Character,” undated
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This appears to be an example of CIA propaganda aimed at undermining Mosaddeq’s public standing, presumably prepared during Summer 1953. Like other examples in this posting, the CIA provided no description when it released the document. It certainly fits the pattern of what Donald Wilber and others after him have described about the nature of the CIA’s efforts to plant damaging innuendo in local Iranian media. In this case, the authors extol the virtues of the Iranian character, particularly as admired by the outside world, then decry the descent into “hateful,” “rough” and “rude” behavior Iranians have begun to exhibit “ever since the alliance between the dictator Mossadeq and the Tudeh Party.”
Document 21: CIA, Propaganda Commentary, “Mossadeq’s Spy Service,” undated
Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release
This propaganda piece accuses the prime minister of pretending to be “the savior of Iran” and alleges that he has instead built up a vast spying apparatus which he has trained on virtually every sector of society, from the army to newspapers to political and religious leaders. Stirring up images of his purported alliance with “murderous Qashqai Khans” and the Bolsheviks, the authors charge: “Is this the way you save Iran, Mossadeq? We know what you want to save. You want to save Mossadeq’s dictatorship in Iran!”
British Records
Document 22 : FCO, Summary Record, “British-American Planning Talks, Washington,” October 10-11, 1978
Source: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) FCO 8/3216, File No. P 333/2, Folder, “Iran: Release of Confidential Records,” 1 Jan – 31 Dec 1978 (hereafter: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216)
In October 1978, a delegation of British FCO officials traveled to Washington for two days of discussions and comparing of notes on the world situation with their State Department counterparts. The director of the Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anthony Lake (later to serve as President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor), led the American side. Other participants were experts from various geographical and functional bureaus, including Henry Precht, the head of the Iran Desk.
Beginning in paragraph 22, Precht gives a dour summary of events in Iran: “the worst foreign policy disaster to hit the West for many years.” In a fascinating back-and-forth about the Shah, Precht warns it is “difficult to see how the Shah could survive.” The British politely disagree, voicing confidence that the monarchy will survive. Even his State Department colleagues “showed surprise at the depth of Mr. Precht’s gloom.”
In the course of his presentation (paragraph 23), Precht notes almost in passing that the State Department is reviewing its records from 1952-1954 for eventual release. A British representative immediately comments that “if that were the case, he hoped HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] would be consulted.”
Document 23: FCO, Minute, B.L. Crowe to R.S. Gorham, “Anglo-American Planning Talks: Iran,” October 12, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
This memo recounts Precht’s dramatic presentation on Iran two days earlier (see previous document). “His was essentially a policy of despair,” the author writes. When the British follow up with the Americans about Precht’s outlook of gloom, they find that State Department and National Security Council (NSC) staff were just as bewildered by his remarks. One NSC staff member calls them “bullshit.” Policy Planning Director Lake laments the various “indiscreet and sensitive things” the Americans said at the meeting, and asks the British to “be very careful” how they handle them.
“On a completely different subject,” the minute continues, “Precht let out … that he was having to go through the records of the 1952/53 Mossadeq period with a view to their release under the Freedom of Information Act [sic]. He said that if released, there would be some very embarrassing things about the British in them.” (Much of this passage is underlined for emphasis.) The note goes on: “I made a strong pitch that we should be consulted,” but the author adds, “I imagine that it is American documents about the British rather than documents on which HMG have any lien which are involved.” (This is a point that may still be at issue today since the question of discussing American documents with foreign governments is very different from negotiating over the use of foreign government records.)
Document 24: FCO, Letter, R.J. Carrick to B.L. Crowe, October 13, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
An FCO official reports that Precht recently approached another British diplomat to say that “he hoped we had not been too shocked” by his recent presentation. He says Precht acknowledged being “over-pessimistic” and that in any event he had not been offering anyone’s view but his own.[5] According to the British, NSC staff members put more stock in the assessments of the U.K. ambassador to Tehran, Sir Anthony Parsons, than in Precht’s. The writer adds that U.S. Ambassador to Iran William Sullivan also shares Parsons’ judgment, and concludes, without indicating a source, that even “Henry Precht has now accepted Sullivan’s view!”
Document 25: FCO, Letter, R.S. Gorham to Mr. Cullimore, “Iran: The Ghotbi Pamphlet and the Mussadeq Period,” October 17, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
This cover note (to Document 24) refers to Precht’s revelation about the impending American publication of documents on the Mosaddeq period. The author suggests giving some consideration to the implications of this for “our own record of the time.”
Document 26: FCO, Letter, B.L. Crowe to Sir A. Duff, “Anglo-American Planning Talks,” October 19, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
FCO official Brian Crowe summarizes the October 10-11 joint U.S.-U.K. talks. The document is included here mainly for the sake of comprehensiveness, since it is part of the FCO folder on the FRUS matter. The writer repeats the remark from State’s Anthony Lake that “some of the comments” from the U.S. side on Iran (among other topics) were “highly sensitive” and should not be disclosed – even to other American officials.
Document 27: FCO, Letter, J.O. Kerr to B.L. Crowe, “Talks with the US Planners: Iran,” October 24, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
This brief note shows that word is moving up the line in the FCO about the forthcoming FRUS volume on Iran. The writer conveys a request to have the U.K. embassy in Washington check the risks involved in the potential release of U.S. documents, and “when the State Department propose to raise them formally with us.”
Document 28: FCO, letter, G.G.H. Walden to B.L. Crowe, “Anglo-American Planning Talks: Iran,” November 10, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
Still more interest in the possible State Department release is reflected in this short note, now a month after the joint U.S.-U.K. talks. Here and elsewhere, the British notes erroneously report that the release will come under the Freedom of Information Act (or the Public Information Act, as given here); they are actually slated for inclusion in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.
Document 29: FCO, R.S. Gorham cover note to Streams, “Iran: Release of Confidential Records,” attaching draft letter to Washington, November 14, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
This note and draft are included primarily because they are part of the FCO file on this topic. However, the draft letter does contain some different wording from the final version (Document 31).
Document 30: U.S. Embassy London, Letter, Ronald I. Spiers to Sir Thomas Brimelow, March 24, 1975
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
Three years before Precht’s revelation to his British counterparts, the U.K. sought general guidance from the State Department about how the U.S. would handle “classified information received from Her Majesty’s Government.” The month before, robust amendments to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act had gone into effect. This letter from the number two official in London at the time, Ronald Spiers, offers a detailed response. Britain’s awareness of the new amendments and anxiousness about their implications (including the fairly abstruse question of how secret documents would be handled in court cases) show how sensitive an issue the British considered protection of their information to be. The U.S. Chargé is equally anxious to provide the necessary reassurances. (More than a decade later, Spiers would sharply oppose efforts by the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee to gain access to restricted documentation for the FRUS series.[6])
Document 31: FCO, Letter, R.S. Gorham to R.J.S. Muir, “Iran: Release of Confidential Records,” November 16, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
The British embassy in Washington is alerted to the possibility of documents being released on the 1952-54 period. The FCO clearly expects that, as apparently has been the case in the past, “there should be no difficulty for the Americans in first removing … copies of any telegrams etc from us and US documents which record our views, even in the case of papers which are not strictly speaking ‘official information furnished by a foreign government.'” (This raises important questions about how far U.S. officials typically go to accommodate allied sensibilities, including to the point of censoring U.S. documents.) “What is not clear,” the letter continues, “is whether they could withhold American documents which referred to joint Anglo/US views about, say, the removal of Musaddiq in 1953.”
Document 32: British Embassy in Washington, Letter, R.J.S. Muir to R.S. Gorham, “Iran” Release of Confidential Records,” December 14, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
This follow-up to Gorham’s earlier request (Document 31) is another reflection of U.K. skittishness about the pending document release. The embassy officer reports that he has spoken to Henry Precht “several times” about it, and that the British Desk at the State Department is also looking into the matter on London’s behalf. The objective is to persuade the Department to agree to withhold not only British documents but American ones, too.
Document 33: British Embassy in Washington, Letter, R.J.S. Muir to R.S. Gorham, “Iran: Release of Confidential Records,” December 22, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
The embassy updates the FCO on the status of the Iran records. Precht informs the embassy that he is prepared to “sit on the papers” to help postpone their publication. Precht’s priority is the potential impact on current U.S. and U.K. policy toward Iran. Conversely, a historian at the State Department makes it clear that his office feels no obligation even to consult with the British about any non-U.K. documents being considered. The historian goes on to say “that he had in the past resisted requests from other governments for joint consultation and would resist very strongly any such request from us.” But the same historian admits that the embassy might “be successful” if it approached the policy side of the Department directly.
The embassy letter ends with a “footnote” noting that State Department historians “have read the 1952-54 papers and find them a ‘marvelous compilation.'”
Interestingly, a handwritten comment on the letter from another FCO official gives a different view about the likely consequences of the upcoming document publication: “As the revolution [in Iran] is upon us, the problem is no longer Anglo-American: the first revelations will be from the Iranian side.” In other words, the revolution will bring its own damaging results, and the revolutionaries will not need any further ammunition from the West.
Document 34: FCO, Cover Note, Cohen (?) to Lucas, circa December 22, 1978
Source: TNA: PRO FCO 8/3216
In a handwritten remark at the bottom of this cover note, an unidentified FCO official voices much less anxiety than some of his colleagues about the possible repercussions of the disclosure of documents on Iran. Referring to a passage in paragraph 3 of the attached letter (see previous document), the writer asks: “why should we be concerned about ‘any other documents’?” The writer agrees with the cover note author’s suggestion to “let this matter rest for a while,” then continues: “I think we ought positively to seek the agreement of others interested to Y.” (“Y” identifies the relevant passage on the cover note.)
Document 35: FCO, Meeting Record, “Iran: Policy Review,” December 20, 1978
Source : British National Archives, FCO 8/3351, File No. NB P 011/1 (Part A), Title “Internal Political Situation in Iran”
British Foreign Secretary David Owen chairs this FCO meeting on the unfolding crisis in Iran. It offers a window into London’s assessment of the revolution and British concerns for the future (including giving “highest priority to getting paid for our major outstanding debts”). The document also shows that not everyone at the FCO believed significant harm would necessarily come to British interests from the FRUS revelations. Although he is speaking about events in 1978, I.T.M. Lucas’ comment could apply just as forcefully to the impact of disclosing London’s actions in 1953: “[I]t was commonly known in [the Iranian] Government who the British were talking to, and there was nothing we could do to disabuse public opinion of its notions about the British role in Iran.” (p. 2)
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Have the British Been Meddling with the FRUS Retrospective Volume on 1953?
Foreign Office Worried over Very Embarrassing Revelations, Documents Show
The United Kingdom sought to expunge “very embarrassing” information about its role in the 1953 coup in Iran from the official U.S. history of the period, British documents confirm. The Foreign Office feared that a planned State Department publication would undermine U.K. standing in Iran, according to declassified records posted on the National Security Archive’s Web site today.
The British censorship attempt happened in 1978, but London’s concerns may play a role even today in holding up the State Department’s long-awaited history – even though U.S. law required its publication years ago.
The declassified documents, from the Foreign Office (Foreign and Commonwealth Office since 1968), shed light on a protracted controversy over crucial gaps in the State Department’s authoritative Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. The blank spots on Iran involve the CIA- and MI6-backed plot to overthrow the country’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq. Six decades after his ouster, some signs point to the CIA as the culprit for refusing to allow basic details about the event to be incorporated into the FRUS compilation.[1]
Recently, the CIA has declassified a number of records relating to the 1953 coup, including a version of an internal history that specifically states the agency planned and helped implement the coup. (The National Security Archive obtained the documents through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.) This suggests that ongoing CIA inflexibility over the FRUS volume is not so much a function of the agency’s worries about its own role being exposed as a function of its desire to protect lingering British sensitivities about 1953 – especially regarding the activities of U.K. intelligence services. There is also evidence that State Department officials have been just as anxious to shield British interests over the years.
Regardless of the reasons for this continued secrecy, an unfortunate consequence of withholding these materials is to guarantee that American (and world) public understanding of this pivotal episode will remain distorted. Another effect is to keep the issue alive in the political arena, where it is regularly exploited by circles in Iran opposed to constructive ties with the United States.
Background on FRUS and the Mosaddeq Period
By statute, the FRUS series is required to present “a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record” of American foreign policy.[2] That law came about partly as a consequence of the failure of the original volume covering the Mosaddeq period (published in 1989) to mention the U.S. role in his overthrow. The reaction of the scholarly community and interested public was outrage. Prominent historian Bruce Kuniholm, a former member of State’s Policy Planning Staff, called the volume “a fraud.”[3]
The full story of the scandal has been detailed elsewhere,[4] but most observers blamed the omission on the intelligence community (IC) for refusing to open its relevant files. In fact, the IC was not alone. Senior Department officials joined in opposing requests for access to particular classified records by the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC), the group of independent scholars charged with advising the Department’s own Office of the Historian.[5] The head of the HAC, Warren Cohen, resigned in protest in 1990 citing his inability to ensure the integrity of the FRUS series. Congress became involved and, in a display of bipartisanship that would be stunning today (Democratic Senator Daniel P. Moynihan getting Republican Jesse Helms to collaborate), lawmakers passed a bill to prevent similar historical distortions. As Cohen and others pointed out, while Moscow was disgorging its scandalous Cold War secrets, Washington was taking a distinctly Soviet approach to its own history.[6]
By 1998, State’s historians and the HAC had decided to produce a “retrospective” volume on the Iran coup that would help to correct the record. They planned other volumes to cover additional previously airbrushed covert activities (in Guatemala, the Congo, etc.). It was a promising step, yet 15 years later, while a couple of publications have materialized, several others have not – including the Iran volume.[7]
Institutional Delays
A review of the available minutes of HAC meetings makes it apparent that over the past decade multiple policy, bureaucratic, and logistical hurdles have interfered with progress. Some of these are routine, even inevitable – from the complications of multi-agency coordination to frequent personnel changes. Others are more specific to the realm of intelligence, notably a deep-seated uneasiness in parts of the CIA over the notion of unveiling putative secrets.
In the Fall of 2001, an ominous development for the HO gave a sense of where much of the power lay in its relationship with the CIA. According to notes of a public HAC meeting in October 2001, the CIA, on instructions from the Director of Central Intelligence, decided unilaterally “that there could be no new business” regarding FRUS until the two sides signed an MOU. Agency officials said the document would address legitimate IC concerns; HAC members worried it would mainly boost CIA control over the series. The agency specifically held up action on four volumes to make its point, while HAC historians countered that the volumes were being “held hostage” and the HO was being forced to work “under the threat of ‘blackmail’.”[8]
The CIA held firm and an agreement emerged in May 2002 that, at least from available information, appears to bend over backwards to give the IC extraordinary safeguards without offering much reassurance about key HO interests. For instance, the MOU states that the CIA must “meet HO’s statutory requirement” – hardly something that seems necessary to spell out. At the same time, it allows the CIA to review materials not once, but again even after a manuscript has passed through formal declassification, and once more after it is otherwise in final form and ready for printing. In the context of the disputed Iran volume, HAC members worried about the “random” nature of these provisions which gave the agency “a second bite at the apple.”[9] The implication is that the CIA will feel little obligation to help meet the HO’s legal requirement if it believes its own “equities” are at stake. (This of course may still affect the Iran volume, currently scheduled for 2014 publication.)
Is It the British?
As mentioned, the CIA has begun to release documentation in recent years making explicit its connection to the Mosaddeq overthrow. Even earlier, by 2002, the State Department and CIA jointly began compiling an Iran retrospective volume. These are not signs of a fundamental institutional unwillingness to publish American materials on the coup (although parts of the CIA continued to resist the notion). The HO even tried at least twice previously to organize a joint project with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Iran, but the idea evidently went nowhere.[10]
In 2004, two years later, the State Department’s designated historian finished compiling the volume. According to that historian, he included a number of records obtained from research at the then-Public Record Office in London. Among his findings was “material that documents the British role.” He added that he had also located State Department records “that illustrate the British role.”[11] By no later than June 2006, the Iran volume had entered the declassification queue. At the June 2006 HAC session, CIA representatives said “they believed the committee would be satisfied with the [declassification] reviews.”
Up to that point, the agency’s signals seemed generally positive about the prospects of making public previously closed materials. But in the six years since, no Iran volume has emerged. Even State’s committee of historians apparently has never gotten a satisfactory explanation as to why.[12]
When the IC withholds records, “sources and methods” are often the excuse. The CIA is loath to release anything it believes would reveal how the agency conducts its activities. (For many years, the CIA kept secret the fact that it used balloons to drop leaflets over Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and would not confirm or deny whether it compiled biographical sketches of Communist leaders.) On the other hand, clandestine operations have been named in more than 20 other FRUS publications.[13] One of these was the retrospective volume on PBSUCCESS, the controversial overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Furthermore, the agency has released troubling materials such as assassination manuals that demonstrate how to murder political opponents using anything from “edge weapons” to “bare hands.” In 2007, in response to a 15-year-old National Security Archive FOIA request, the CIA finally released its file of “family jewels” detailing an assortment of infamous activities. from planning to poison foreign leaders to conducting illegal surveillance on American journalists.
If the agency felt it could part with such high-profile sources and methods information, along with deeply embarrassing revelations about itself, why not in the Iran case? Perhaps the British are just saying no, and their American counterparts are quietly going along.
State Department Early Warning – 1978
The FCO documents in this posting (Documents 22-35) strongly support this conclusion. Theytell a fascinating story of transatlantic cooperation and diplomatic concern at a turbulent time. It was a State Department official who first alerted the FCO to plans by the Department’s historians to publish an official account of the 1953 coup period. The Department’s Iran expert warned that the records could have “possibly damaging consequences” not only for London but for the Shah of Iran, who was fighting for survival as he had 25 years earlier (Document 22). Two days later, FCO officials began to pass the message up the line that “very embarrassing things about the British” were likely to be in the upcoming FRUS compilation (Document 23). FCO officials reported that officers on both the Iran and Britain desks at State were prepared to help keep those materials out of the public domain, at least for the time being (Document 33). Almost 35 years later, those records are still inaccessible.
The British government’s apparent unwillingness to acknowledge what the world already knows is difficult for most outsiders to understand. It becomes positively baffling when senior public figures who are fully aware of the history have already acknowledged London’s role. In 2009, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw publicly remarked on Britain’s part in toppling Mosaddeq, which he categorized as one of many outside “interferences” in Iranian affairs in the last century.[14] Yet, present indications are that the U.K. government is not prepared to release either its own files or evidently to approve the opening of American records that might help bring some degree of closure to this protracted historic – and historiographical – episode.
(Jump to the British documents)
NOTES
[1] A recent article drawing attention to the controversy is Stephen R. Weissman, “Why is U.S. Withholding Old Documents on Covert Ops in Congo, Iran?” The Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 2011. ( http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0325/Why-is-US-withholding-old-documents-on-covert-ops-in-Congo-Iran )
[2] Section 198, Public Law 102-138.
[3] Bruce Kuniholm, “Foreign Relations, Public Relations, Accountability, and Understanding,” American Historical Association, Perspectives, May-June 1990.
[4] In addition to the Kuniholm and Weissman items cited above, see also Stephen R. Weissman, “Censoring American Diplomatic History,” American Historical Association, Perspectives on History, September 2011.
[5] Joshua Botts, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “‘A Burden for the Department’?: To The 1991 FRUS Statute,” February 6, 2012, http://history.state.gov/frus150/research/to-the-1991-frus-statute.
[6] Editorial, “History Bleached at State,” The New York Times, May 16, 1990.
[7] Retrospective compilations on Guatemala (2003) and the intelligence community (2007) during the 1950s have appeared; collections on the Congo and Chile are among those that have not.
[8] HAC minutes, October 15-16, 2001, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/october-2001.
[9] HAC minutes, July 22-23, 2002, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/july-2002; and December 14-15, 2009, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/december-2009.
[10] HAC minutes, July 22-23, 2002, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/july-2002.
[11]HAC minutes, March 6-7, 2006, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/march-2006.
[12] See HAC minutes for July 12-13, 2004, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/july-2004; September 20-21, 2004, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/september-2004; September 8-9, 2008, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/september-2008; for example.
[13] Comments of then-FRUS series editor Edward Keefer at the February 26-27, 2007, HAC meeting, http://history.state.gov/about/hac/february-2007.
[14] Quoted in Souren Melikian, “Show Ignores Essential Questions about Iranian King’s Role,” The International Herald Tribune, February 21, 2009.
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Do Allied Demands for Secrecy Undercut the U.S. Public Interest?
The delays in publication of the Iran FRUS volume raise broader questions about U.S. government justifications for withholding records after so much time has elapsed. When it comes to foreign government information (known as FGI) U.S. agencies deny access for sometimes decades after the events they cover – six decades in the Iran case, and counting. Consulting with allies before declassifying documents is a long-standing practice, though what exactly that entails is not well understood. The intelligence community regularly invokes FGI and “foreign relations” as reasons to deny requests through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In response to a 1999 National Security Archive FOIA lawsuit, the CIA used both rationales in declining to release all but a single sentence from the 200-page internal history of the 1953 coup written by Donald Wilber.[1]
Although agencies often cite legal grounds for keeping information on relations with other governments classified, there is good reason to challenge the appropriateness of relying exclusively on those determinations. The following questions raise additional considerations. They make particular reference to the Iran 1953 case:
- Does disclosure of information about other governments always critically impair intelligence relationships?The CIA routinely argues that divulging FGI will weaken cooperation with other intelligence agencies or make it harder to recruit agents. But a spy organization as sophisticated as MI6 understands that secrets are perpetually vulnerable to disclosure through official inquiries, leaks to the media, or nowadays WikiLeaks, especially given the free-for-all of the American political scene. Although the agency’s argument sounds plausible, it is extremely unlikely that allied intelligence entities could afford to cut back meaningfully or over the long haul on cooperation and information-sharing with the United States. (See March 2013 Senate testimony by then-CENTCOM Commander James Mattis extolling the increased appetite of regional allies to share intelligence with the U.S.[2]) Furthermore, the force of the argument diminishes when the information being withheld is six decades old, and has been repeatedly confirmed in public through knowledgeable sources.
- Even if CIA concerns are legitimate, should these factors always be paramount?The U.S. military does not have final authority in matters of war and peace; the Constitution grants that power to civilian leaders. In the same way, the intelligence community does not, and should not, have the last word on whether withholding or releasing certain information serves a higher national interest. This notion is already embodied in our legal system and in the creation of entities such as the Interagency Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) at the National Archives and Records Administration. But the system continues to exhibit an ingrained tendency to accept uncritically whatever the intelligence community asserts (to grant “great deference,” as courts put it), when there may be countervailing factors worth considering, such as the effects on broader U.S. policy or standing (see below).
- What happens when the desire to honor foreign government sensitivities risks undermining other U.S. policies or priorities?Protecting allied interests is in principle a reasonable policy. But there are sometimes undesirable consequences that should be considered. The most obvious result of the current standoff over the FRUS series is that it has prevented the State Department’s Office of the Historian from fulfilling its legal obligation. This also damages the credibility of the U.S. government, and the CIA itself, on matters of accountability and transparency, both at home and abroad. Finally, there is the intangible cost of keeping the public in the dark about key aspects of the past and about the performance of its government. (When former CIA Director James Woolsey found out in 1997 that agency officials had destroyed most of the files on the coup in the early 1960s, he called it “a terrible breach of faith with the American people and their ability to understand their own history.”[3])
- Can protecting sensitivities about clandestine activities be justified in perpetuity?Is it reasonable to argue that a 60-year-old covert action remains as sensitive as it was at the time of execution, especially when it is as widely acknowledged as the Iran coup? Other than specific imperatives such as protecting agent identities (something no-one is arguing against here), logic suggests that the justification for withholding basic facts about significant historical events degrades over time. Furthermore, as alluded to above, when an agency insists unreasonably on keeping information concealed it undermines the legitimacy of the entire secrecy system.
- What exactly is the “foreign government information” being withheld?Do the CIA’s criteria for protecting other governments cover only documents originated by that government, or something more? Do they broadly include information about that government? Do they also cover U.S. documents, as the British records imply? What is the mechanism for ensuring that these criteria are both appropriate and properly applied?
- What are the British afraid of?Other than the general principle of wanting to keep their own intelligence operations under wraps, MI6 and the FCO presumably are worried that reconfirming old truths will give anti-Westerners in today’s Islamic Republic fresh ammunition to use against British interests. This is a questionable assumption. Iranian bookstores have carried Persian translations of the unexpurgated 200-page Donald Wilber history for over a decade, along with pirated versions of every other published Western document or account. It is unlikely in the extreme that there are new facts in the materials still locked in American or British vaults that would even mildly surprise readers in the Islamic Republic. There is also no evidence that Iranian officials are impressed by the distinction between leaked and officially declassified history.Furthermore, Iranian reactions, particularly in 2000 to President Bill Clinton’s and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s public acknowledgements of the U.S. role in the 1953 coup, were generally positive.[4] Why should the response be different for Britain? Hard-liners who want to torpedo relations with London will never lack for pretexts – artificial or real. Withholding pseudo-secrets about the 1950s will hardly discourage them.
- Has the CIA or any other U.S. agency ever challenged the British position?Presumably the National Clandestine Service (NCS), the agency’s operational side and by most accounts the main obstacle to releasing the documents, would simply accept MI6 requests without quarrel. It is a priority for them to cooperate with allied agencies. But if the British are blocking the way, have other U.S. government components with different institutional priorities questioned the validity or impact of the British demands? Assuming there is a process to allow for this, has it been used? In either case, will the interested public ever hear what happened?It is worth recalling an infamous U.S. Supreme Court case-that-never-was. In 1999, the Court agreed to hear a case involving the classification of information on “foreign relations” grounds. The British government had asked the State Department to keep in confidence a letter relating to the extradition of two British subjects. Their attorney requested the letter under the FOIA but was turned down, the underlying rationale being to prevent “foreign relations harm.” The subsequent lawsuit went all the way to the highest court before it was discovered that a British official had already turned over a similar letter to the attorney. The court took the extremely unusual course of canceling oral arguments. If nothing else, the case highlighted how subjective – and costly – a proposition withholding foreign government information can be.[5]
- What are the implications of failing to resolve the Iran dilemma for the State Department’s statutory obligations to the public?Publication of the FRUS retrospective volume on Iran is said to be imminent (by the first half of 2014). If its appearance continues to be delayed (the manuscript was completed in 2003 and first entered the declassification queue nine years ago), or if it fails to account appropriately for the British role, how will that affect the standing of this invaluable series? What will be the impact on subsequent attempts by State’s Office of the Historian to present reliable accounts of other sensitive foreign operations?
- If this standoff cannot be resolved at the agency level, at what point should the Congress or the President step in?How would Congress respond to the relegation of the FRUS statute to virtual irrelevance? What role has the so-called High-Level Panel, including representatives from State, CIA and the National Security Council staff, played so far? For the Obama administration, the episode to date is a blemish on its aspirations for open government and rational classification practices, but one that is well within White House powers to remove.
NOTES
[1] See HAC minutes, February 25-26, 2008, ( http://history.state.gov/about/hac/february-2008); see also “Declaration of William H. McNair…,” August 13, 1999, in National Security Archive v. Central Intelligence Agency, Civil No. 99-1160. ( https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ciacase/EXA.pdf).
[2] Quoted in Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, March 10, 2013.
[3] Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Destroyed Files on 1953 Iran Coup,” The New York Times, May 29, 1997.
[4] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s negative public response emphasized other issues, notably Albright’s comment that Iran was ruled by a handful of unelected individuals.
[5] See U.S. Justice Department, Office of Information Policy, FOIA Update, Vol. XX, No. 1, (undated), http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XX_1/page1.htm.
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آدرس مطلب در سایت (سایت علی صدارت : رسانه‌های ملیِ همگانی به مثابه شاخه چهارم دولت) را در ذیل آورده‌ایم. در این آدرس، شما می‌توانید به بعضی دیگر رسانه‌ها که هم این مطلب و نیز برخی دیگر از مطالب سایت در آنها منتشر می‌شوند، دسترسی داشته باشید. از این راه شما می‌توانید به عنوان یک «کنش‌گر حقوق بشر» فعال بشوید با عضو شدن، و دنبال کردن، و مشترک شدن، و رای‌دادن، و ابراز نظر، و پسندیدن، و پیاده کردن، و به دوستان خود ایمیل کردن، و…، و ابتکار برای سایر روش‌های هم‌رسانی، برای احقاق حقِ اطلاع‌یافتن و اطلاع‌دادن، نقش‌آفرین گردید.
https://alisedarat.com/2023/10/14/12367/
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Massacres committed by Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_committed_by_Israel
Pages in category “Massacres committed by Israel”
The following 17 pages are in this category, out of 17 total. This list may not reflect recent changes.
0–9
1984 Sohmor massacre
B
Bahr El-Baqar primary school bombing
Beit Rima massacre
G
Ghaziyeh airstrikes
H
Hula massacre
I
Ibrahim al-Maqadma Mosque missile strike
K
Kafr Qasim massacre
Khan Yunis massacre
M
Maarakeh bombing
Mansouri attack
N
Nabatieh Fawka attack
Q
2006 Qana airstrike
Qana massacre
Qibya massacre
R
Rafah massacre
Ras Sedr massacre
Z
Zrarieh raid
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Pages in category “1948 massacres of Palestinians”
The following 12 pages are in this category, out of 12 total. This list may not reflect recent changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_committed_by_Israel
A
Al-Kabri incident
Arab al-Mawasi massacre
B
Balad al-Shaykh massacre
D
Al-Dawayima massacre
Deir Yassin massacre
E
Eilabun massacre
Ein al-Zeitun massacre
K
Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war
M
Massacre in Lydda
S
Sa’sa’ Massacre
Safsaf massacre
T
Tantura massacre
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بازتاب: کودتای «غیردموکراتیکِ» هفتاد سال قبل، و خشونت‌های امروز خاورمیانه