Operation Boot, Britain, and Regime Change in Iran
It’s an ‘open secret’ that the CIA and MI6 helped topple the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. Why can’t the British government come clean about its interference in Iran?
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) toppled Iran’s secular, anti-colonial prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in August 1953. The coup d’état marked an important turning point for Iranian politics: it returned the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi and strengthened the West’s short-term position in the Middle East. Yet, in a glaring example of blowback, it also set Iran on a path to dictatorship that would eventually sow the seeds of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, forever haunting Iran’s relationship with the West.
The role of British and American intelligence is not in doubt. In the US, releases to the National Security Archive, material from the CIA and State Department, and even memoirs provide most of the story. Yet in Britain there is still a reluctance to acknowledge what is effectively an open secret in Washington, London, and Tehran.
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