Operation Ajax!

[Joanne98]

Operation Ajax
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

Tank-riding anti-Mossadegh demonstrators in Tehran on August 19, 1953.Operation Ajax (1953) (officially TP-AJAX) was a covert operation by the United Kingdom and the United States to remove the democratically elected nationalist<1> cabinet of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, to support the Pahlavi dynasty and consolidate the power of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.


Origins
The idea of overthrowing Mossadegh was originally conceived by the British. They asked President Truman for assistance, but when he refused, the British proposed the idea once again to Eisenhower who became president in 1953. The new administration agreed to help.

Rationale for the intervention included Mossadegh’s socialist political views and his nationalization of the oil industry without compensation, which was previously operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later changed to The British Petroleum Company) under contracts the nationalists deemed unfair.


Disputed oil contracts

1909 - 1955
In May 1901, William Knox D'Arcy was granted a concession by the Shah of Iran to search for oil which he found in May 1908. This was the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. On 14 April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated to exploit this find. The company grew slowly until World War I when its strategic importance led the British Government to acquire controlling interest in the company and it became the Royal Navy's chief source of fuel oil during World War I.

In 1931, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, BP merged their marketing operations in the United Kingdom with those of Shell-Mex Ltd to create Shell-Mex and BP Ltd a company that continued to trade until the Shell and BP brands separated again in 1975.

There was growing dissent within Persia however at the imperialist and unfair position that APOC occupied. In 1932, the Shah terminated the APOC concession. The concession was resettled within a year, covering a reduced area with an increase in the Persian government's share of profits. Persia was renamed Iran in 1936 and APOC became AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

A particular point of contention was the refusal of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company to allow an audit of the accounts to determine whether the Iranian government received the royalties it was due. Intransigence on the part of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company led the nationalist government to escalate its demands, requiring an equal share in the oil revenues. The final crisis was precipitated when the oil company ceased operations in Iran rather than accepting the Iranian government's demands.

The newly state-owned oil companies saw a dramatic drop in productivity and, consequently, exports; this resulted in the Abadan Crisis, a situation that was further aggravated by its export markets being closed. Even so royalties to the Iranian government were significantly higher than before nationalization. Without its own distribution network it was denied access to markets by an international blockade intended to coerce Mossadegh into reprivatization.

Following the turmoil of World War II, AIOC and the Iranian government resisted nationalist pressure to come to a renewed deal in 1949. In March 1951, the pro-western Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated and in April, a bill was passed nationalising the oil industry and the AIOC and the Shah were forced to leave the country.

The AIOC took its case against the nationalisation to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, but lost the case. However the government of Britain, concerned about its interests in Iran, convinced the US that Iran was slowly coming under Soviet influence. This was the perfect strategy for the British since the US was in the middle of the Cold War. The British convinced the US to join them in overthrowing the democratically chosen Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, and to install pro-Western General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister of Iran. This overthrow was named Operation Ajax. Mohammed Mossadegh thought that nationalization was the only way to prevent British exploitation of Iran's oil wealth.

On August 19, 1953, the incumbent democratic Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, was forced from office and replaced by Zahedi and the Shah was recalled. The AIOC became The British Petroleum Company in 1954, and briefly resumed operations in Iran with a forty per cent share in a new international consortium. BP continued to operate in Iran until the Islamic Revolution. However, due to a large investment programme (funded by the World Bank) outside Iran, the company survived the loss of its Iranian interests at that time.


Cold war
For the U.S., an important factor to consider was Iran’s border with the Soviet Union. A pro-American Iran under the Shah would give the U.S. a double strategic advantage in the ensuing Cold War, as a NATO alliance was already in effect with the government of Turkey, also bordering the USSR.

In addition, the appropriation of the companies resulted in Western allegations that Mossadegh was a Communist and suspicions that Iran was in danger of falling under the influences of the neighboring Soviet Union. But Mossadegh refused to back down under international pressure.


Planning
In planning the operation, the CIA organized a guerrilla force in case the communist Tudeh Party seized power as a result of the chaos created by Operation Ajax. According to formerly “Top Secret” documents released by the National Security Archive, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate.

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA agent, and grandson of the former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kermit Roosevelt, the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career contract CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.


Outcome
As a condition of restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the U.S. was able to dictate that the AIOC’s oil monopoly should lapse. Five major U.S. oil companies, plus Royal Dutch Shell and French Compagnie Française des Pétroles were given licences to operate in the country alongside AIOC.

Operation Ajax was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in a plot to overthrow a democratically-elected government. The success of this operation, and its relatively low cost, encouraged the CIA to successfully carry out a similar operation in Guatemala a year later.


Repercussions
Widespread dissatisfaction with the regime of the reinstalled Shah led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the occupation of the U.S. embassy. The role that the U.S. embassy had played in the 1953 coup led the revolutionary guards to suspect that it might be used to play a similar role in suppressing the revolution.


See Also
Asadollah Rashidian

Footnotes
^ A Very British Coup (English) (radio show). Document. British Broadcasting Corporation (2005). Retrieved on 2006-06-14.

References
Kinzer, Stephen (2003). All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-26517-9.
Kapuściński, Ryszard (1982). Shah of Shahs. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-73801-0.

External links
The CIA and Iran: What Really Happened?—alternate view by Ardeshir Zahedi
50 Years Later—a look back at the 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran
The C.I.A. in Iran—New York Times report based on uncovered CIA documents
The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953—Provided by the National Security Archive
Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran—new book from the National Security Archive reexamines the coup
How to Overthrow a Government—interview with Steven Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
All The Shah’s Men—interview with Steven Kinzer
Review of All the Shah's Men by David S. Robarge
A Very Elegant Coup—critique of All the Shah’s Men
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax"
Categories: CIA operations | History of Iran | 1953 | 1953 in the United Kingdom | 1953 in the United States | History of the United States (1945–1964) | United States-Iranian relations | Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

[annabanana]

1. A sense of the role that the US & UK & the business of oil

have had in the recent history of Iran is essential when considering our current situation. It's time to read up, America... because oil will not be mentioned by corpomedia in the coming weeks and months!!

[Joanne98]

2. FOLLOW THE MONEY! It's everything.

[mod mom]

3. The history they never taught us in school. Thank you, Joanne98!

[Joanne98]

6. Wikipedia proves that mankind is basically GOOD!

It's only 2% of us who are EVIL!

[Nutmegger]

4. So much for "freedom and democracy".

:kick:

[Joanne98]

5. An illusion we pay a really high price for.....

[TahitiNut]

9. It costs a LOT to build and maintain Disneyworld.

La-la-la-la-la .... :evilgrin:

[Joanne98]

13. M-I-C-K-E-Y MOUSE!

Who's the leader of the pack that's made for you and me,,,,
http://www.fortunecity.com/millenium/plumpton/345/march1.wav

[eppur_se_muova]

7. And before WWI, Brits and Russians killed the first Persian parliamentary movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Constitutional_Revolution

Interesting to note that Iranians created a parliamentary government THREE times, yet they "hate democracy".

[Canuckistanian]

8. All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no2/article10.html

At an NSC meeting in early 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower said "it was a matter of great distress to him that we seemed unable to get some of these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us."1 The problem has likewise distressed all administrations since, and is emerging as the core conundrum of American policy in Iraq. In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times suggests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.

~SNIP

The CIA's immediate target was Mossadeq, whom the Shah had picked to run the government just before the parliament voted to nationalize the AIOC. A royal-blooded eccentric given to melodrama and hypochondria, Mossadeq often wept during speeches, had fits and swoons, and conducted affairs of state from bed wearing wool pajamas. During his visit to the United States in October 1951, Newsweek labeled him the "Fainting Fanatic" but also observed that, although most Westerners at first dismissed him as "feeble, senile, and probably a lunatic," many came to regard him as "an immensely shrewd old man with an iron will and a flair for self-dramatization."7 Time recognized his impact on world events by naming him its "Man of the Year" in 1951.

more at link....

[TahitiNut]

10. The role of the Dulles brothers should never be underestimated.

:puke:

[Joanne98]

14. I'm bookmaking that comment .....

I've seen their names on DU alot but I haven't learned enough... Later!

[scarletwoman]

11. k & r (nt)

[Joanne98]

12. Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins

Tuesday, November 9th, 2004
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.

John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.
20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Men."

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studios.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251

He also talks about the overthrow of Iran!

[The Straight Story]

15. From the title I thought this was an obama thread....(nt)

[me b zola]

16. k&r