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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen Iran Learned to Hate America
In the photo below, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is carried on the shoulders of supporters after announcing plans to nationalize Iran's oil fields. This really, really ticked off the Western powers -- the former owners of all that oil, including the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and their swell friends on Wall Street, who worried what might happen to Standard Oil of the great state of Rockefeller. So, MI-6 and their muscular cousins at CIA, overthrew him and his government in 1953 -- the last time Iran was a Democracy.
CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic as it revisits Argo rescue
by James Gambrell
Associated Press (AP), October 12, 2023
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) While revealing new details about one of the most famed CIA operations of all times the spiriting out of six American diplomats who escaped the 1979 U.S. Embassy seizure in Iran the intelligence agency for the first time has acknowledged something else as well.
The CIA now officially describes the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as undemocratic.
Other American officials have made similar remarks in the past, but the CIAs acknowledgment in a podcast about the agencys history comes as much of its official history of the coup remains classified 70 years after the putsch. That complicates the publics understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republics rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and as it cracks down on dissent.
The CIAs 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 agencys 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 CIAs role in it.
Continues...
https://apnews.com/article/iran-1953-coup-cia-218323db3cc1aca6bde1e54827527e8d
Didn't see this story when first published in 2023 -- and don't see the story mentioned much at all today.

EYESORE 9001
(28,631 posts)However, it wasnt commonly known during the Iran hostage crisis, and I helpfully told this story.
Kid Berwyn
(21,514 posts)
A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO CONFIRMED REAGANS OCTOBER SURPRISE BEFORE THE NEW YORK TIMES
A lot of people beyond Ben Barnes have said that Reagans 1980 election campaign conspired to keep American hostages in Iran.
by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, March 24 2023
ON SATURDAY, THE New York Times published a blockbuster story that said two prominent Texas Republicans flew across the Mideast in the summer of 1980 for secret meetings with regional leaders to urge them to tell Iran to keep the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the election that pitted GOP candidate Ronald Reagan against then-President Jimmy Carter.
The Times reported that Ben Barnes, a key figure in Texas politics, said he made the trip with former Texas Gov. John Connally, a major supporter of Reagans campaign, and that when they returned home, Connally met in an airport lounge with William Casey, whod been a top U.S. spy during World War II and was then Reagans campaign manager. Connally and Casey discussed the trip, according to Barnes, who The Times quoted as saying, History needs to know that this happened. After Reagan beat Carter in a landslide, Reagan appointed Casey head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Snip
This memo from Beach and the mysterious cable from the Madrid embassy were somehow never turned over to the House investigation. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat whod led the inquiry, wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016 asking for the cable. He did not receive it. For Kai Birds book The Outlier, which includes a chapter of additional evidence about an October Surprise, Bird submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the cable. The State Department likewise has not produced it for Bird even after he filed a lawsuit in 2019 informing him that they cant find it.
At this point, even James Baker, first Reagans chief of staff and later his treasury secretary (and then Bushs secretary of state), wont say Casey wasnt in Madrid. Asked about it by one-time Carter staffer Stuart Eizenstat, he responded: Would I be surprised if Casey did it? There is nothing about Casey that would surprise me. He is a piece of work.
Continues
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/october-surprise-ben-barnes/
This didn't make a bleep in American consciousness. Must be information overload. Again.
Jit423
(1,568 posts)Our sixth grade class used a publication called "The Weekly Reader" which was full of current events, civics and general interest stories.
Kid Berwyn
(21,514 posts)An organized effort to knock the caring, curiosity, creativity, civic responsibility and natural interest in learning, and other sensitivities developed by an education -- performed by dedicated lard asses who like to climb out of the pit and then pull the ladder they used up after their exit.
"Weekly Reader" was great and I couldn't wait to get mine. Our class would go over the news of the day, sanitized, but we all were focused on the same issues and developed a compassion for the people in other parts of the planet. Same with the WR Book Club. My parents encouraged me to read all I wanted.
My mom also supplemented my interests with "Highlights for Children" and its Goofus & Gallant feature. Wish one set of parents in the Bronx had done the same.
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hedda_foil
(16,791 posts)the fact that it was a US coup was never discussed, nor were the all-important oil interests. The Shah was always presented as a glamorous royal figure who was "friendly" to America -- not as the tyrannical autocrat he actually was. The handling of the Shah, in US news media in general, was equivalent to the treatment given top male movie stars.
Easterncedar
(4,758 posts)What a different world we could have had. I grieve over this.
Kid Berwyn
(21,514 posts)And Agents for Bush said, "Enough."
Jimmy Carter tried weaning the US off fossil fuels. So the Petrodollars got together with the former spooks to dump Carter and foist a half century of Trickle Down on the nation.
From...
The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld
By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, March 10, 2014
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 10, No. 5
EXCERPT...
The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCI
The usual account of this super-agencys origin is that it was
the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mustachioed chief of Frances CIA. The SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage) . Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postcolonial Africa, and by Americas post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turkis father, King Faisal, with a proposition . [By 1979] Somali president Siad Barre had been bribed out of Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for by Saudi Arabia) .95
Joseph Trento adds that The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations, With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine..96
Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who were then forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by perhaps the most controversial of them all: Theodore Shackley.
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Cluboperating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehranwould be ineffective. Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced.97
Kevin Phillips has suggested that Bush on leaving the CIA had dealings with the bank most closely allied with Safari Club operations: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In Phillips words,
After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book False Profits [p. 345], Bush traveled on the banks behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions.98
Joseph Trento adds that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, Adhams petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations99
It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggis before them, were marked by the ability to deal behind the scenes with both the Arab countries and also Israel.100
It is clear that for years the American deep state in Washington was both involved with and protected BCCI. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr acknowledged to a Senate Committee that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations.101
Later, a congressional inquiry showed that for more than ten years preceding the BCCI collapse in the summer of 1991, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the Customs Service, and the Department of Justice all failed to act on hundreds of tips about the illegalities of BCCIs international activities.102
Far less clear is the attitude taken by Wall Street banks towards the miscreant BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI charged however that the Bank of England had withheld information about BCCIs frauds from public knowledge for 15 months before closing the bank.103
CONTINUED...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843
Big Oil enslaving the planetary economy and USA welcoming the NAZIs after the war are pretty much the story.
I wrote about it 20 years ago on DU:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3648867
Easterncedar
(4,758 posts)Was grotesque and pathetic, and was used to control us. (Hey, I kinda believed) Now our rulers dont even bother to pretend to be anything but evil.
hedda_foil
(16,791 posts)