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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Over the decades that followed the overthrow of Mosaddeq in August 1953 a narrative attributing the fall exclusively to foreign conspiracy has taken hold and become institutionalized. In this narrative the internal factors are reduced to the simplest level of abstraction. They do not exist outside foreign conspiracy! This narrative is premised on an Anglo-American coup plot code-named TP-AJAX that was attempted in the late hours of 15 August but failed. The ensuing flight of the Shah generated dynamics which led to the fall of Mosaddeq four days later. The CIA chief operative in Tehran Kermit Roosevelt was quick to take credit claiming that these dynamics were inseminated by his ingenious and spontaneous planning. For abiding internal reasons both the CIA and the MI6 headquarters preferred to claim victory rather than admit failure. Evidence that emerged following the declassification of the State Department papers in 1989 and the leak of a secret CIA internal history in 2000 produced glaring evidence that the fall of Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953 had taken Washington, even its embassy in Tehran, by complete surprise and that post facto claims by Roosevelt were inconsistent both with Washington's explicit policy directives and Roosevelt's own situation reports filed with the CIA Washington during the interval between the two events. Roosevelt later published a phantasmagorical account of the event which, together with reminiscences of a few unnamed former operatives, was given credence by Professor Gasiorowski and associates, who curiously chose to ignore archival evidence.
1 Bayandor, Darioush, Iran and CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Gasiorowski, Mark, “The 1953 Coup d'État in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19, no. 3 (1987); 261–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gasiorowski, Mark and Byrne, Malcolm, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY, 2003)Google Scholar.
3 Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d'État in Iran,” 261, n. 3.
4 Ambassador Henderson retired from the US Foreign Service in 1957 and died in 1986 at the age of 93.
5 Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. X, Iran, 1952–1954 (US Government Printing Office, 1989).
6 The first conference was hosted by the Institute of Political and International Studies, attached to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, in June 2000; the second took place in June 2002, at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
7 This point jotted down in Eisenhower's Diary, 8 October 1953, was initially picked up by his biographer Ambrose, Stephen, Eisenhower: the President, vol. 2 (New York, 1984), 129Google Scholar n. 73. A photocopy of the original passage of the diary was obtained for my book from Eisenhower Library.
8 Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d'État in Iran,” 361, n. 2.
9 Published in extenso in, among others, Agheli, Baqer, Roozshamri, vol. 2 (Tehran, 1387/ 2008), 419–30Google Scholar.
10 Khāterāt-e Noureddīn Kiānouri (Tehran, 1371/1992), 269–71.
11 “Panj Rooz-e Bohrāni,” Etelā'āt Mahaned, 114 (Shahrivar 1336), reproduced in Khāterāt-e Ardeshir Zahedi [Ardeshir Zahedi memoirs], vol. 1 (Bethesda, MD, 2006), 201–14. For the Overthrow confirmations see, pp. 45, 48, 49, 52, 57.
12 Kāterāt I:187.
13 Overthrow, 57, 45.
14 Bayandor, Iran and the CIA, 105–10.
15 Bayandor, Iran and the CIA, 113–15.
16 The Kenneth Love dispatches published by the New York Times can be accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-archive-articles.html.
17 Gasiorowski, Mark J., “The Causes of Iran's 1953 Coup: A Critique of Darioush Bayandor's Iran and the CIA,” Iranian Studies, 45 (2012): 675CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 “The Fall Guy,” Economist, 13 May 2010.
19 Gasiorowski, “The Causes of Iran's 1953 Coup”: 670.
20 Overthrow, 62.
21 Overthrow, 91.
22 Roosevelt's cable to Washington on 17 August 1953, Overthrow, 56.
23 Roosevelt's cable to Washington on 18 August 1953, Overthrow, 61.
24 See his articles in le Monde Diplomatique, October 2000; Iranian, 7 July 2000.
25 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, 330 no. 35. Koch, Scott A., “Zendeh Bād Shah” (Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C., 1998)Google Scholar.
26 Bayandor, Iran and the CIA, 78–81; and chapter 7.
27 Overthrow, 65–66; Boroujerdi statement translates as ‘The Country Needs Shah.’
28 FRUS 1952–54, vol. X, 748.
29 Overthrow, 64.
30 FRUS, 1952–54, vol. X, 752–55.
31 US Embassy Cable 398, dated 19 August, 1953, to Washington, cited in Bayandor, Iran and the CIA, 110, n.55. FRUS 1952-54, vol. X, 751–52.
32 Truman Library, Oral History Project, Interview with Loy Henderson, 14 June 1973.
33 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, 87, n.283.
34 FRUS, 1952–54, vol. X,748–52.
35 FRUS, 1952–54, vol. X, 755–56.
36 Gasiorowski and Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, 334, n.23.
37 Richard and Gladys Harkness, “Mysterious Doings of the CIA,” Saturday Evening Post, 6 November 1954.
38 Translates as “Spontaneous National Uprising.”
39 Overthrow, 67.