The world’s worst kept secret now revealed


The CIA has finally acknowledged its role, along with British MI6, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, replacing him with the despised Reza Pahlavi who adopted the grandiose title of the Shah of Iran. That event poisoned relations between the two countries ever since. Iranians deeply resented the foisting of the despotic Shah on them who, with massive US support, ruled until his overthrow in 1979.

Of course, people all over the world knew that the CIA was behind the military coup all along so why act as if it was a secret for so long? The answer is that if the US government treats something as secret, then the US media tends to not report it directly and merely alludes to it obliquely. We have seen this play out numerous times, the ‘secret’ bombings of Laos and Cambodia being two of the most egregious examples.

The net result of this government-media collusion is that the general American public tends to not know the truth, though the elites do, and that is the purpose of this ‘secrecy’. Then the US government can act aggrieved when the Iranians call the US ‘The Great Satan’ and they and the media can endlessly speculate on “Why do they hate us?” and ascribe it to irrational dislike of ‘our freedoms’. This game has been played repeatedly and continues to this day.

Comments

  1. Happiestsadist, opener of the Crack of Doom says

    I didn’t even know the CIA had been denying it. I thought it was admitted, it was so well-known.

  2. richardrobinson says

    Right there with you. Though I know plenty of people who can’t make the leap from, “We fucked with their country so we could keep getting their shit for cheap.” to “They might have a legitimate reason to be pissed with us.”

  3. says

    You also get the media adopting the chosen vocabulary of washington, which allows for tremendous manipulation. Thus you get “ethnic cleansing” (to allow the world to stand by and watch Rwanda collapse into genocide) and “collateral damage” (area bombing of civilians in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions) or “enhanced interrogation” (torture) — the media is incredibly complicit in goverment crimes by allowing them to be redefined semantically to non-crimes.

  4. colnago80 says

    It is my information that the CIA field director for the operation was a man named Kermit Roosevelt who subsequently bragged about it at every opportunity. Nothing new here, move along.

  5. left0ver1under says

    They’re still denying at least half the stuff that Philip Agee exposed in “CIA Diary”, despite near all of it being widely accepted by most as true. Meanwhile, the US public still believes the lie that Agee “outed” CIA spies in Greece, leading to their murder by mobs of pro-communists. Agee did no such thing, but why let the facts get in the way?

    Agee is also worth mentioning in light of Edward Snowdon and Julian Assange. After his book came out in 1975, the US told similar hollow lies about “due process” if Agee ever returned to the US, attempted to lure Agee to Spain (which was still pro-US and fascist at the time), and similar harassment happened to Agee when he tried to obtain residence in England. Agee eventually crossed borders illegally and obtained refugee status in West Berlin, using laws intended to protect West German deserters from military service and protect East German defectors. He eventually moved to Cuba where he ran a tourism company until he died.

    Don’t read the wikipedia entry on Agee, it’s full of crap. His own book “On The Run” is far more enlightening, as is the Third World Traveller website and interviews you can find on youtube.

    http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_Diary_Agee.html

    http://youtu.be/nvZQa0hkfgw

  6. left0ver1under says

    So this info is finally coming out. It was promised in 2007. Maybe the US government hoped that people would forget by now and not read it. Teabaggers wouldn’t but people who believe in democracy are still interested.

    http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/22/2030

    CIA to Reveal ‘Skeletons’
    Agency to declassify records of abuses, from domestic spying to assassination attempts
    by Karen DeYoung / Walter Pincus

    WASHINGTON -- The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Thursday.

    The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

    […]

    The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as “the family jewels,” were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency’s employees to inform him of all operations that were “outside” the agency’s legal charter.

    This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated back to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.

  7. twosheds1 says

    I wonder if Iran, or any other country, has actually called the US the Great Satan. We have to trust the media to report that, since most of us don’t speak Farsi, and even if we did, it’s not like they play those speeches on TV in the original language.

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