A conspiracy theory no more:  Last week, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) admitted that there really is an Area 51 in the Nevada Desert; This week, the CIA says that it did orchestrate a coup in Iran in 1953, the event that more than anything might be responsible for the West’s trouble in the Muslim World.

The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup. 

The Western-educated Social Democrat Mohammad Mossadeq was elected Prime Minister in free and fair elections in 1951.  He quickly moved to nationalize Iran’s oil production, which had been under British control through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the company that later became British Petroleum (BP).

Iranian oil was seen as key to post-war economic expansion.  And the CIA and British MI6 viewed Mossadeq as potentially too chummy with the USSR.  So, they sent in US Major General Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr. (father of the first Gulf War commander) with bags and bags of money to pay off thugs and provocateurs, overthrew Mossadeq, and installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi as dictator.  Mossadeq was jailed and died under house arrest years later.

Through the 1970s, the Shah’s secret Police, SAVAK, would frequently use torture as a method to run down and murder dissidents, who now saw this as the manifestation of Western Democracy.  He stoked Islamic resentment by trampling its traditions and forcing westernization.  The Shah, backed by the US and UK, helped other regional dictators tamp down attempts at Democracy.  Critics see these two repressive decades as and creating the conditions that exploded in the 1977 Iranian revolution, a reaction to that which the US and UK forced upon the Islamic world; with that revolution, Islamist militants learned that they could stand up to what they saw as Western imperialism. 

Aside from confirming what many see as one of the greatest post-World War II tactical and political errors, coup d'etat as an official instrument of US foreign policy, this is believed to be the first time the CIA has itself admitted the part it played in concert with the British intelligence agency, MI6.