While revealing new details about the CIA rescue mission that inspired the Ben Affleck film Argo, the agency has for the first time acknowledged that the 1953 coup it backed in Iran was ‘undemocratic’.
The admission came in a recent episode of the CIA’s podcast, The Langley Files, released about a month before the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel last weekend.
The 1953 coup, backed by US and British intelligence and carried out by Iran’s military, saw the overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister and cemented the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It comes at a time of soaring tensions between Washington and Tehran, over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aid to terror groups including Hamas, and its domestic crackdown on dissent.
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, and which remains a sore point in Iran, where the Shah is remembered, perhaps unfairly, as an American ‘puppet’.
The ‘CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,’ the agency said in a statement.
‘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.’
