OPERATION AJAX – When history repeats, do we notice?

There have been many threads in the last 24 hours discussing US gearing up for covert operations in Iran. Now, my first reaction is that it’s not too covert if we are reading about the intent on the Net. My second reaction is to the reaction of so many who find these “covert operations” as shocking.

I offer the following short lesson in US-British-Iranian history to bring up to speed all those people who are “shocked”:

Operation AJAX / TPAJAX

(Translation: the 1953 CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service coup d’etat against Iran’s democratically elected government, and specifically Muhammad Mossadeq, via covert operations.)


Following is a good essay outlining the events:

An Anti-Democracy Foreign Policy: Iran
by Jacob G. Hornberger, January 31, 2005


When Iranians took U.S. officials hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, Americans were mystified and angry, not being able to comprehend how Iranians could be so hateful toward U.S. officials, especially since the U.S. government had been so supportive of the shah of Iran for some 25 years. What the American people failed to realize is that the deep anger and hatred that the Iranian people had in 1979 against the U.S. government was rooted in a horrible, anti-democratic act that the U.S. government committed in 1953. That was the year the CIA secretly and surreptitiously ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, a man named Mohammad Mossadegh, from power, followed by the U.S. government’s ardent support of the shah of Iran’s dictatorship for the next 25 years.


Today, very few Americans have ever heard of Mohammad Mossadegh, but that wasn’t the case in 1953. At that time, Mossadegh was one of the most famous figures in the world. Here’s the way veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer decribes him in his book All the Shah’s Men:

In his time, Mohammad Mossadegh was a titanic figure. He shook an empire and changed the world. People everywhere knew his name. World leaders sought to influence him and later to depose him. No one was surprised when Time magazine chose him over Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill as its Man of the Year for 1951.

(Kinzer’s book, published in 2003, is an excellent account of the CIA coup; much of this article is based on his book.)


There were two major problems with Mossadegh, however, as far as both the British and American governments were concerned. First, as an ardent nationalist he was a driving force behind an Iranian attempt to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company that had held a monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil since the early part of the 20th century.


[link to www.fff.org]

Last Edited by Account Deleted by User on 10/21/2014 04:32 PM