Iran Coup Quotes

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

About 90 percent of the one billion Muslims in the world today identify with the Sunni tradition. Of the remainder, most are Shiites, the largest number of whom are in Iran.

Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed “the use of force or the threat of the use of force” against Iran, and that Truman himself had “stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.

He ran Iran, which is a big and complicated country, wearing a pair of pyjamas.

When the British ploy to pressure the Shah into fast action on the dismissal of Mossadeq did not work, officials from Whitehall consulted Ann Lambton, by then a professor of Persian Studies in London and a sage on British foreign policy in Iran. Her advice was clear, categorical, and drastic: find a way to remove Mossadeq from power forcefully. He is a demagogue, she said, and the only way Britain would retain its influence in Iran would be through his removal. She also believed that the British government must ultimately handle this matter alone, as in her mind the United States had “neither the experience, nor the psychological” depth to understand Iran—a sentiment much shared in those days by British officials.44 She introduced government officials to Robin Zaehner, a professor-spy, who could help plan and implement her proposed coup against Mossadeq. If Zaehner was one of the British masters of conspiracy against Mossadeq, then the three Rashidian brothers were Zaehner’s chief instruments of mischief. No sooner had Mossadeq come to power than the brothers began to receive large funds from the British to “maintain their agents.” 45 In June 1951, when British efforts to convince the Shah to fire Mossadeq failed, they threatened to attack Iran and take over the oil region of the country: in the words of the Foreign Secretary, “to cow the insolent natives.” 46 The operation, aptly called “Buccaneer,” entailed sending a number of British warships to the waters off the coast of the oil-rich region of Khuzestan and authorized “the use of force, if necessary.” 47 Encouraged by the Truman administration’s strong opposition to the idea of a military solution, the Shah told the British Ambassador that “I will personally lead my soldiers into battle against you if you attack Iran.

The 1953 coup was a catastrophe which slammed him [Mosaddegh] to floor, and from which Iran never fully recovered

Obama and his cabal of communists picked and the laws they wanted to follow.” It was a free for all for his comrades. Billions of dollars’ worth of intelligence went to China, Russia and Iran. Our ports went to enemy combatants - even those on the Pentagons “blacklist” who were wanted for “capture or kill.” America’s adversaries were awarded and embraced under the Obama

1907 with the Anglo-Russian Agreement carving up Iran into “zones of influence.” Britain took the southwest, Russia the north. They further consolidated their hold in 1914 with the British occupying the whole of the south, including the oil regions. The British government later, without any trace of irony, presented Iran an itemized bill for having occupied the south. The bill totaled 313 pounds, 17 shillings, and 6 pence.

Iran asserts that Bahrain, though across the Gulf, is a “lost province”—a claim made both by the shah and subsequently by the Islamic Republic. In 1981, two years after Khomeini took power, Iran backed a failed coup. Another coup in Bahrain was averted in 1996. Despite the fact that Bahrain had been ruled by the Al Khalifa family since 1783, Iran renewed its claims to the kingdom starting in 2007. Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani declared that Bahrain was an “Iranian province separated from Iran as a result of colonialism.

(His obtuseness reminded me that BP—previously known as British Petroleum—had started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company: the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran’s government in the 1950s had led to the coup that ultimately resulted in that country’s Islamic Revolution.)

refused any aid until the oil issue was settled. Matters came to a head in August when Mossadeq for three days, backed by the Communist Party, seemed the irresistible dictator of Iran. . . . But fortunately the loyalty of the Army and fear of communism saved the day. —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech entitled “Peace with Justice

I refused any aid until the oil issue was settled. Matters came to a head in August when Mossadeq for three days, backed by the Communist Party, seemed the irresistible dictator of Iran. . . . But fortunately the loyalty of the Army and fear of communism saved the day. —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech entitled “Peace with Justice

The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

Founded in Buenos Aires in 1974 and relocated to Mexico City after Argentina’s 1976 coup, Tercer Mundo (Third World) covered political events throughout what is today known as the Global South—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In its first issue (September 1974), the journal discussed Argentina’s nationalist leader, Juan Domingo Perón, events in Peru, the decolonization struggle in Mozambique, dictatorship in Bolivia, and the Middle Eastern conflict. In issue 4 (May 1975), Tercer Mundo analyzed “Islamic Socialism” in Somalia, denounced the U.S. economic “blockade” of Cuba, discussed cultural decolonization in Tanzania, and reported on struggles for economic independence in Angola and Panama. Publishing from Mexico City a few years later, the journal’s issues 20 and 27 (April 1978 and February 1979) trained its anti-imperialist lens on issues commonly affecting Libya, Morocco (Western Sahara), Zaire (Congo), Mexico, Panama, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and Cambodia.

The CIA condoned, connived at, or indeed took an active role in assassination plots and coups against figures as varied as Guatemala’s Arbenz, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Congo’s Lumumba, Chile’s Allende, Cuba’s Castro, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Iran’s Mossadegh, and Vietnam’s Diem. Is it that difficult to believe that those who viewed assassination as a policy tool would use it at home, where the sense of grievance and the threat to their interests was even greater?

Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’etat before reaching their potential. Indeed postcolonial independence movements — which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions — were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).

Never forgetting the involvement of military officers in the 1953 attempt to force him from his throne, the Shah took great pains to keep the three services well apart so that they were incapable of mounting a coup or undermining his regime. There was no joint chiefs-of-staff organisation, nor were the three services linked in any way except through the Shah, who was the Commander-in-Chief. Every officer above the rank of colonel (or equivalent) was personally appointed by the Shah, and all flying cadets were vetted by him. Finally, he used four different intelligence services to maintain surveillance of the officer corps. These precautionary measures were mirrored on the Iraqi side. Keenly aware that in non-democratic societies force constituted the main agent of political change, Saddam spared no effort to ensure the loyalty of the military to his personal rule. Scores of party commissars had been deployed within the armed forces down to the battalion level. Organised political activity had been banned; ‘unreliable’ elements had been forced to retire, or else purged and often executed; senior officers had constantly been reshuffled to prevent the creation of power bases. The social composition of the Republican Guard, the regime’s praetorian guard, had been fundamentally transformed to draw heavily on conscripts from Saddam’s home town of Tikrit and the surrounding region.

The Iranians were also novices in modern torture techniques, and so, as we shall soon see, after the coup against Mossadegh, the CIA helped train the Iranian security services in torture techniques—techniques borrowed, as in the case of Pinochet’s Chile, from the experts on such subjects -- the Nazis. And again, this type of alliance is not a thing of the past. The best example of this today is in Ukraine where, as Max Blumenthal writes, “Massive torchlit rallies pour out into the streets of Kiev on regular occasions, showcasing columns of Azov members rallying beneath the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel banner that serves as the militia’s symbol.”53 As Blumenthal explains, Azov is a militia now incorporated into the Ukranian National Guard, and, despite its openly pro-Nazi ideology, including violent anti-Semitism, this militia has obtained heavy US weaponry transfers “right under the nose of the US State Department,” while “U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers have been working closely with this battalion.

As for President Eisenhower, he seemed to be less than proud of what the United States had done in Iran. Thus, an October 8, 1953, entry in his diary which is quoted in the newly-released documents about the coup reads: “Another recent development that we helped bring about was the restoration of the Shah to power in Iran and the elimination of Mossadegh. The things we did were ‘covert.’ If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in the region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would totally disappear.”58 Of course, Eisenhower would not let much time go by before he was involved in another coup of “like nature” in Guatemala, with possibly even more disastrous results.

Wherever the Four Horsemen (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco & Royal Dutch/Shell) gallop the CIA is close behind. Iran was no exception. By 1957 the Company, as intelligence insiders know the CIA, created one of its first Frankensteins—the Shah of Iran’s brutal secret police known as SAVAK. Kermit Roosevelt, the Mossadegh coup-master turned Northrop salesman, admitted in his memoirs that SAVAK was 100% created by the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency that acts as appendage of the CIA. For the next 20 years the CIA and SAVAK were joined at the hip when it came to matters of Persian Gulf security. Three hundred fifty SAVAK agents were shuttled each year to CIA training facilities in McLean, Virginia, where they learned the finer arts of interrogation and torture. Top SAVAK brass were trained through the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Public Safety Program, until it was shut down in 1973 due to its reputation for turning out some of the world’s finest terrorists…. Popular anger towards Big Oil, the Shah and his new police state resulted in mass protests. The Shah dealt with the peaceful demonstrations with sheer brutality and got a wink and nod from Langley. From 1957-79 Iran housed 125,000 political prisoners. SAVAK “disappeared” dissenters, a strategy replicated by CIA surrogate dictators in Argentina and Chile. … In 1974 the director of Amnesty International declared that no country had a worse human rights record than Iran. The CIA responded by increasing its support for SAVAK.3

Indeed, as evidenced in a CIA memo contained in the 2017 released documents, Zahedi’s having been a Nazi collaborator was seen as an asset to the Americans. As the memo, detailing US assets in Iran, explains, “Associated with the Nazi efforts in Iran during World War II, he has long been firmly anti-Soviet. A pro-Western orientation is reflected in the education of his son in the U.S. and the activity of his son in the Point IV [Truman’s Cold War technical assistance plan to developing countries] in Iran….” The memo goes on to say that the CIA’s contacts in Iran believed Zahedi “to be the only military man on the scene who would stage a coup and follow it through with forcefulness.”20

In short, Mossadegh’s being in power was not a threat to the US interest of preventing Soviet expansion. The CIA acknowledges the Soviets’ “paucity of military preparations and the probable unwillingness of the USSR to intervene militarily on its [Tudeh’s] behalf.”27 And finally, the CIA, in another memo on April 17, acknowledges “Moscow’s recent overtures of conciliation toward the West.”28 In the end, the CIA’s assessment was correct, with the Soviet Union not making any moves in the eleventh hour of the coup to save the Mossadegh government.29 Thus, the CIA was quite aware that there was no internal or external Communist threat to Iran. Indeed, the CIA recognized that, to the extent Mossadegh was dealing with Russia at all, he was being forced to by the very circumstances in which the United States and Britain were putting him. Thus, in an August 6, 1953, internal embassy memo, Iranian Minister of National Economy A.A. Akhavi is quoted as saying that “there is no desire to have any relations with the neighbor to the north, including commercial relations, but that Iran was being forced to deal with Russia by reason of the fact that the United States and most of the free world would not buy its products.”30

Meanwhile, the CIA explains that, once the coup against Mossadegh succeeds, “the U.S. government should confine any comment upon a change in government in Iran to a repetition of our traditional unwillingness to interfere in the internal affairs of a free country and our willingness to work with the government in power. … The U.S. Government should avoid any statement that the oil question is involved in a change of government in Iran.”26 In other words, the United States should lie as usual about its true intentions in overturning a foreign government.

At this point, it may be of value to revisit the United States involvement in the rise of the “Colonels in Greece” and the Juntas in Latin America. Just after WWII, Britain and the United States intervened in the Greek civil war on behalf of the fascists against the Greek left which had successfully ousted the Nazis from Greece—a formidable feat given that Britain had intervened during WWII against the left-wing guerillas. With the help of Britain and the United States, the fascists prevailed in the post-WWII civil war in Greece and “instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek),”8 just as it had helped create the repressive SAVAK in Iran. The fascist government erected a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens as thanks for the United States’ role in the coup under his leadership. This statue has been blown up, rebuilt, and blown up again several times. And then, much to the chagrin of both Britain and America, democracy broke out again in Greece—the country which, as we all know, invented democracy—when liberal George Papandreou was elected in 1964. Just before the 1967 elections which Papandreou was sure to win again, a joint effort of Britain, the CIA, Greek Military, KYP and US military stationed in Greece brought about a military coup which brought the fascists back to power. And, as with the Shah in Iran, the new rightist government immediately instituted “martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killing, the victims totaling 8,000 in the first month. … Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.”9 Sound familiar?