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Kid Berwyn

(21,514 posts)
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 02:57 PM Jun 17

When 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 CIA’s acknowledgment in a podcast about the agency’s history comes as much of its official history of the coup remains classified 70 years after the putsch. That complicates the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and as it cracks down on dissent.

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.”

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.
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EYESORE 9001

(28,631 posts)
1. I've known about this for some time
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 03:03 PM
Jun 17

However, it wasn’t commonly known during the Iran hostage crisis, and I helpfully told this story.

Kid Berwyn

(21,514 posts)
3. Former Texas Lt. Gov. confessed to participating in October Surprise in the NYT
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 03:49 PM
Jun 17


A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO CONFIRMED REAGAN’S OCTOBER SURPRISE BEFORE THE NEW YORK TIMES

A lot of people beyond Ben Barnes have said that Reagan’s 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 Reagan’s campaign, and that when they returned home, Connally met in an airport lounge with William Casey, who’d been a top U.S. spy during World War II and was then Reagan’s 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 who’d 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 Bird’s 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 can’t find it.

At this point, even James Baker, first Reagan’s chief of staff and later his treasury secretary (and then Bush’s secretary of state), won’t say Casey wasn’t 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)
2. Schools are not what they used to be in the USA. I read about this in our "Weekly Reader" back in 1957
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 03:09 PM
Jun 17

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)
5. Crapademia
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 03:58 PM
Jun 17

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)
8. We read Weekly Reader too and they covered the Shah replacing Mossadegh but...
Wed Jun 18, 2025, 03:43 PM
Jun 18

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)
4. One of our greatest evils and stupidities
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 03:54 PM
Jun 17

What a different world we could have had. I grieve over this.

Kid Berwyn

(21,514 posts)
6. President Jimmy Carter tried...
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 04:05 PM
Jun 17

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-agency’s origin is that it was

the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mustachioed chief of France’s CIA. The SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage)…. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postcolonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s 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 Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would 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 bank’s 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, “Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations”99

It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggi’s 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 BCCI’s 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 BCCI’s 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)
7. Our navet, in believing in our goodness...
Tue Jun 17, 2025, 04:21 PM
Jun 17

Was grotesque and pathetic, and was used to control us. (Hey, I kinda believed) Now our rulers don’t even bother to pretend to be anything but evil.

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