NOVANEWS
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
The British government “blackmailed” the US administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower into supporting the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a political commentator in Washington says.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blackmailed the Eisenhower administration by threatening to pull out British forces from the Korean peninsula during the Korean War unless the US, through the CIA, supported the overthrow of Mosaddegh, said Jeff Steinberg, a senior editor at the Executive Intelligence Review.
“So in a certain sense, the US was blackmailed into playing a role in what was fundamentally a British coup, it was on behalf of British Petroleum and their various, extensive oil holdings in Iran,” Steinberg told Press TV on Friday.
“The US unfortunately played a very nasty role in the Mosaddegh coup,” he said. “There is no legitimate excuse for withholding the release of the files on this shameful coup d’etat to overthrow Mossadegh … This was another dark moment in American history.”
The US State Department recently decided to delay the release of a volume of historical diplomatic documents that deals with the ouster of Mosaddegh.
Senior State Department officials decided at a September meeting to delay the release of the document out of concerns that it could adversely affect the current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
“The refusal to release on the basis of the implications for the P5+1 talks to be a relatively shallow excuse,” Steinberg said.
The CIA has already acknowledged its role in toppling Mosaddegh, citing it a “CIA-assisted coup” on a timeline on its public website.
Earlier in a 2009 speech in Cairo, President Barack Obama said that “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”
Last year, other classified documents revealed more details about the involvement of the US and British intelligence agencies in the coup d’état.
The US and Britain had the same level of involvement in carrying out the coup. As much as $5 million were spent buying support from senior officials, military officers, newspaper editors and thugs to carry out the western-backed plot to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans. Zahedi played a major role in the coup.
Mosaddeg’s overthrow led to the return of Iran’s former monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose regime turned increasingly oppressive until it was toppled by the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
