Imperial Hubris: 70 Years ago, the CIA overthrew the Parliamentary Gov’t of Mosaddegh in Iran, and Washington has been Complaining about Iran ever Since

FARIBA AMINI08/18/2023

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment: Feature) – On August 19, seventy years ago, the legitimate government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was toppled in a coup jointly orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence agencies and their Iranian collaborators. This article was first published in Persian in Iran in the journal Iran-e-Farda in February 1981. Every year, on the anniversary of the Coup in Iran, I write an article but this time, in memory of my late brother who passed away on October 16, 2023, I have decided to have his article translated.

– Fariba Amini

Distortion in History

By Mohammad Amini*

Fifty years after his passing, misinformation about Mohammad Mossadegh is still prevalent. There is an assertion that Mossadegh repeatedly rejected pragmatic solutions put forth by the United States and the United Kingdom to resolve the crisis, causing Iran’s economy to collapse and paving the way for the coup. This is one of the widely accepted misconceptions. The first error is to refer to Mossadegh’s 80-hour talks with George C. McGhee, the US Assistant Secretary of State.

In October 1951, Mossadegh traveled to New York to speak up for Iran’s rights before the UN Security Council. Then he went to Washington, where, on the advice of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, he agreed to American mediation between Iran and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and then he sat down to talk to McGhee. The truth is that following Lord Herbert Stanley Morrison’s speech in the House of Commons, and then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s letter to President Truman complaining about why he had invited Britain’s “oil thief” to the White House, it was clear that the British government had no intention of reconciling with Mossadegh.

Of course, Mossadegh was unaware of these issues and sat down to negotiate with the Americans in good faith. Unfair historians have claimed that Mossadegh, at the conclusion of his negotiations with McGhee, “rejected all reasonable American offers to return victorious to his country”. On the contrary, by the time the talks were over, according to Dean Acheson, it appeared that Mossadegh had agreed to all his proposals.

“Mossadegh also appeared willing to have it operated by a “neutral” company-for instance, a Dutch company. Sometimes he would seem agreeable to the presence of a few Englishmen, sometimes not. Working from these premises the three [McGhee and his two assistants at the State Department] devised an ingenious scheme by which Anglo-Iranian would get Iranian oil for export on a basis that represented the same fifty-fifty profit division between government and company in effect elsewhere in the Persian Gulf […] Thinking that we had the makings of a deal, I set out for a series of foreign ministers’, NATO, and General Assembly meetings in Europe […] Rowan [economic minister at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.] decreed that Mossadegh, leading the attack on British foreign investments, had to fail, to be crushed and punished. This adamant British attitude ruled out further discussion or search for face-saving formulas of retreat for Mossadegh.”[1]

Acheson added that “Nitze and McGhee ended the negotiations on the ground that Mossadegh had never been definite enough on price to give the British a proposal capable of development”.[2] However, Acheson was well aware that Mossadegh had discovered that these were mere ruses and that the failure of negotiations was due to the Anglo-Persian Company’s defiance and Churchill’s support, rather than the fluctuating price of oil: “they told me that Mossadegh never believed them. He knew that the British wanted a fight to the finish, and he took the declaration of a fight to the finish with dignity.”[3] During an interview for the Truman Library’s oral history project, in response to a question about whether the British were obstinate, George McGhee stated:

“Very. Anglo-Iranian [Company] was run by William Frasier, a Scotch accountant who didn’t understand the modern world. His failure to understand the political forces in Iran helped create a very difficult problem for them. The company and the U.K. faced the possibility of a grave loss at a time when they badly needed the income from Iranian oil; so they played their hand pretty close. They missed a great opportunity. We warned them that we were offering fifty-fifty. They could perhaps have had a settlement at fifty-fifty, but they wouldn’t offer it […] In the midst of the impasse, I suggested that Harriman go out together with a Britisher (the U.K. named Lord Stokes) to attempt to bridge the gap between the Iranian Government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but they were unable to do so.”

The truth is that twenty days after Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister, the British government and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company submitted a lawsuit to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to stop the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which was approved by the majority of the Iranian National Assembly. So, it was clear that four months after filing this lawsuit and during