REAR VISION - ABC RADIO PROGRAM - 24 June 2009
Reporter:
It is clear from our documents that this man Derbyshire was not on the staff of the
Corporation. So what was he doing, interfering with BBC programs? There's no doubting the significance of a code word being broadcast. It was a prearranged signal to the Shah of Iran that plans were in place for a coup against Dr Mohamad Mossadeq, the leader of the country's elected government.
This 200-page CIA report, less than subtly entitled 'Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq
of Iran' details the unfolding plot led by an American agent called Kermit Roosevelt.
Steven Kinzer:
Kermit Roosevelt was a fascinating character. He really was a true-life James
Bond, and when it was decided that the United States would overthrow Mossadeq, he was the guy that the CIA turned to. They gave him the job. They told him, 'You've got to go to Iran and you've got to do everything you need to do and you've got to overthrow Mossadeq.'
Kermit Roosevelt crossed over clandestinely into Iran at the beginning of August, 1953. He went to work in a basement office in the US Embassy and immediately began building a network of people, basically by bribing them.
He bribed all manner of people. One of the early plots that he came up with was that he would try to bribe enough members of parliament so that maybe they could vote a No Confidence motion to depose Mossadeq. And a number of them accepted these bribes, and they broke away from the Mossadeq coalition.
But the idea of deposing Mossadeq through a vote of No Confidence never panned out. So Kermit Roosevelt went off and did other things with his money. For example, he bribed mullahs, the religious leaders in Iran, to begin denouncing Mossadeq from the pulpit as an atheist, or nonbeliever, which was not true, as Mossadeq was a devout Twelver Shi'ite.
He bribed newspaper editors and reporters, to the point where he had
80% of the Iranian press in his payroll. And what that meant was that every day, Iranians would wake up to news reports and commentaries about
how Mossadeq was Jewish, he was homosexual, he was a British agent, just about anything bad you could think of, would show up day after day in practically every newspaper in Tehran. So by the spreading around of money, Kermit Roosevelt was immediately going to change the public tenor and view of Mossadeq.
He also bribed commanders of military and police units, so they would be ready to help him on the day that he struck against Mossadeq.
One of the things that he did, perhaps this was his most masterful idea, he went to the Tehran bazaar, where there was a group of thugs operating under a very colourful leader named Shabaan the Brainless. And he hired Shabaan, who actually is still alive, living in California, and Shabaan's job was: get together the biggest group of thugs and gangsters you can find.
We're going to pay every one of them. Find every adult male who wants to be a gangster for a day, and hire them. And what your job is, (and this is exactly what this gang did for several days in Tehran) run through the streets wildly, smash shop windows, fire guns into mosques and then shout, 'We love Communism and Mossadeq'.
So he created this mob that was very violent, that was posing as thugs for Mossadeq. But that wasn't all. Roosevelt went one step further: he hired another mob to attack that mob, the idea being he wanted to create the image, in the minds of ordinary Iranians, that Iran was in chaos.
Mark Gasiorowski:
They organised a crowd. It marched from southern Tehran up into the central area of the city.
Gradually other Iranians joined these crowds, and at the same time certain military units that were supporting the coup took certain steps. They went and attacked Mossadeq's home and had a long military battle with loyalist forces there; they seized a radio station, seized certain key intersections and places like that. And eventually, during the course of the day, both with the crowds in the streets and the military units, the coup forces managed to prevail. Mossadeq was
forced to flee out of his house, he hid for a day or two and eventually gave himself up, and the pro-Mossadeq forces were just overwhelmed. and by the end of the day, on the 19th, the coup forces had succeeded.
Steven Kinzer:
This coup is a classic in the history of American interventions abroad in one
sense, and that is it seemed successful at first. but in the long run, when we look back on it, we can see that it had terrible, unintended consequences. the reason it seemed successful was we got rid of a guy we didn't like, and we put in someone who would do whatever we said, that was the Shah.
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