The CIA and MI6 jointly embarked on a plan to stage a coup that would ensure that the West maintained control over the country's vast oil reserves (shades of things to come). This coup is widely believed to have provided the 'business model' and the bravado for future coups by the CIA during the Cold War, including in Guatemala in 1954, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1961, and the ill-fated attempted coup in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (BOP) in 1961, where the renovators' business model came spectacularly unstuck, these representing just a few of their Greatest Hits!
In true CIA custom, in Iran not everything went according to plan. The man who would be Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, by all accounts something of a reluctant usurper, succumbed to 'stage fright' at the eleventh hour and did an unexpected runner to Italy. But the CIA quickly recovered its composure and schlepped their 'under-study' back in time for the opening night curtain raiser of the new regime. For both the CIA and the Shah, who went on to rule his country with an iron, bloody fist avec unerring American support for almost twenty-five years, in true show business fashion, everything was 'all right on the night'; the Shah's show went on to enjoy an extended run with generally positive reviews.
(That most of these "reviews" were written by the Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK, the Shah's political and security muscle throughout his 'regime', is axiomatic, especially since writing was apparently one activity SAVAK agents both excelled at and enjoyed. Their torture manuals were as notorious for their prescribed brutality as for their invention.)
Interestingly, the CIA's Iranian operation was directed by none other than Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt, the grandson of former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt (he of the "walk softly, carry a big stick" infamy), and a not too distant cousin of former Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). At the time Roosevelt was the senior spook in The Company's Middle-East station (he'd been recruited by no less a personality than Frank "The Mighty Wurlitzer" Wisner), and was their point man on the ground in overseeing the Iranian adventure, dubbed Operation Ajax. Despite his name, for Teddy's 'grand-sprog' this was no Sesame Street romp. No sirree Bob! This was serious spy sh*t.
Notwithstanding the apparent success of the mission, the coup was to have profound, far-reaching, and plain scary, geopolitical, economic and national security consequences for the US and the West in general. For starters just ask Jimmy Carter for further confirmation of this, and for any still standing and in control of their metacognitive faculties, go from there president by president! (Although Albright sort of apologised to Iran in 2000 -- possibly the closest thing to a mea culpa ever offered by the U.S. for their wayward imperial ways -- it didn't apparently count for much.)
Yet one of the most surprising revelations about Kermit's coup was the following. In his must-read book a Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, F William Engdahl recounted the less familiar story that the demise of the Shah (aka the 'Peacock Potentate') was engineered by the same forces that brought him into power in the first place. As we know this went on to produce sizable blowback for the U.S. with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The much reviled Shah had for a variety of reasons outlived his usefulness, with the onset of the 1979 oil crisis presenting said forces both the ideal opportunity and pretext -- albeit according to Engdahl, one largely manufactured in this case -- to proceed to the next phase of their (ahem) Persian renovation project.
If indeed Engdahl is correct in this assessment, from this we can safely deduce the subsequent '79 Revolution, the storming of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, along with the kidnapping of the embassy personnel (a world changing event by any measure), was not what many have deemed an organic -- nor an entirely predictable or welcome -- development for those who'd decided the Shah had passed his use by date. Moreover, the reality (there's that word again) of 'client-dictators' overstaying their 'welcome' will be one familiar to 'buffs' of Uncle Sam's regime change history, with the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2002, again on prefabricated pretexts and for not dissimilar reasons, providing a most consequential exemplar thereof.
According to the author, in 1978, President Carter named diplomat George Ball to head a White House task force under the direction of Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the proud, now recently departed, father of Islamic terrorism and patron saint of jihadists, Wahhabists, and Salafists and the like. In doing so, Carter effectively gave Brzezinski the nod on opening another Pandora's Box in the Greater Middle East, and as the Law of Moral Causation (trade name: 'karma') would have it, brought about the president's own political demise. As Engdahl explains it:
'Ball recommended Washington drop support for the Shah and support the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini...and the CIA led a coup against the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier. The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic Brzezinski taking public 'credit' for getting rid of the 'corrupt' Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.'
To Be Continued......
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Intermission: Stay Tuned for Part Two
In the interim, I highly recommend readers check out the following. Herein, the inimitable Robert Newman gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred plus years - but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at school, he places oil centre stage as the cause of all the commotion. Newman's truly unique presentation -- equal parts vaudeville, stand-up comedy, performance art, and history lesson -- will help explain the rationale behind America's deliberately antagonistic military and economic provocation of Russia (with similar plans for China, Iran, and now it would seem Qatar), and why this geopolitical one-upmanship is such an existentially dangerous gambit for us all going forward.
Newman's presentation also helps explain why the British Empire was hell-bent on preventing Germany at the turn of the century from becoming a major economic power, an imperial-minded foreign policy gambit which knowingly and deliberately paved the way for World War One, a conflict which shaped the geopolitical world as we know it today in more ways than can be recounted herein. Younger folks - especially those that dozed off in history class wondering what all the fuss was about - prepare to be enlightened.
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