CIA Admits for First Time 1953 Iran Coup Undemocratic

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (KI) — The CIA now officially describes the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi as undemocratic.
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, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington.
In response to questions from the AP, Iran’s mission to the United Nations described the 1953 coup as marking “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs” and dismissed the U.S. acknowledgments.
“The U.S. admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the mission said in a statement.
From the U.S. side, the CIA’s hand in the coup quickly was revealed as a success of Cold War espionage, though historians in recent years have debated just how much influence the agency’s actions had. It also led the CIA into a series of further coups in other countries, including Guatemala, where American clandestine action in 1954 installed a military dictator and sparked a 40-year civil war that likely killed some 245,000 people.
That’s led to an American political reappraisal of the 1953 CIA action in Iran. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the U.S.’ “significant role” in the coup in 2000. President Barack Obama, speaking in Cairo in 2009, described the CIA’s work as leading to the “overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”
But largely absent from the discussion was the CIA itself. After years of conflicting versions of the coup both in public and classified papers, a member of the CIA’s own in-house team of historians wrote a reappraisal of the operation in a 1998 paper.
But despite a series of American historical documents being made public, including a major tranche of State Department papers in 2017, large portions of that CIA reappraisal remain heavily redacted despite attempts to legally pry them loose by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive. That’s even after pledges by former agency directors Robert Gates and James Woolsey Jr. in the 1990s to release documents from that coup and others engineered by the agency.
Further complicating any historical reckoning is the CIA’s own admission that many files related to the 1953 coup likely had been destroyed in the 1960s.
“It’s wrong to suggest that the coup operation itself has been fully declassified. Far from it,” said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. “Important parts of the record are still being withheld, which only contributes to public confusion and encourages myth-making about the U.S. role long after the fact.”