From the document
The radio jeep didn't arrive, the telephone system wasn't put out, tanks were moving but we couldn't tell whose tanks they were, and it was just obvious that something had gone very sour
Zahedi was in our hands from Monday morning on.
they carried the firman; they carried the fake interview with Zahedi; they carried the next day the real interview with Zahedi
By the time we had Radio Teheran we were in.
Excerpts are passages from a US government work (public domain), quoted exactly and checked against the text on history.state.gov on every rebuild.
The 2017 Foreign Relations volume on Iran exists because of an omission. The 1989 volume on Iran in 1951–1954 printed the oil dispute but left out the covert operation that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953. The editors say the gap drew sharp criticism and led Congress in 1991 to rewrite the law governing the series3. The retrospective volume, released in 2017, filled the gap with CIA operational records, many transcribed from microfilm that no longer exists2,3.
Of its documents, this one says most about how Operation Ajax (TPAJAX), code-named TPAJAX, actually went: the record of a meeting at CIA headquarters on 28 August 1953, nine days after the coup, taken down by a reporter1.
Who was in the room
Present were General Charles Cabell, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence; Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director for Plans; Richard Helms, his chief of operations; Kermit Roosevelt, chief of the Near East Division, just back from Tehran; Tracy Barnes; John Waller, the Iran branch chief; Donald Wilber, a consultant; and others whose names are still withheld1.
What Roosevelt said
Wisner opened by explaining why Roosevelt had sent so few reports between 16 and 19 August: he had chosen to act rather than write cables1.
Roosevelt then described the failure of the first attempt on the night of Saturday 15 August. By about 6 a.m. word came that Colonel Nasiri, the Shah's guard commander sent to deliver the decree dismissing Mosaddeq, had been arrested1,4. Mosaddeq's chief of staff, General Riahi, told the American general McClure that Americans were implicated. Roosevelt told McClure that was untrue1.
The station's response was to recast the failed coup as a legal change of government that Mosaddeq had blocked. It arranged a secret meeting with the two foreign correspondents in town, of the New York Times and the Associated Press. General Zahedi's son showed them the Shah's firman naming Zahedi prime minister, along with photostats. The station kept the original in its safe and had statements typed in Persian for Zahedi to sign and distribute1. Roosevelt also said that Zahedi and other Iranian allies were hidden in American houses, some inside the embassy compound. Meanwhile Ambassador Loy Henderson and General McClure were assuring Mosaddeq's government that no Iranians were being sheltered there. Roosevelt said Henderson knew the truth and McClure probably did not1.
Washington was ready to give up. In a cable of 18 August, CIA headquarters reported the State Department's view that "operation has been tried and failed." Unless Roosevelt and Ambassador Henderson strongly objected, it told him that operations against Mosaddeq "should be discontinued"2. Roosevelt describes the same days as a series of postponements and a decision, reached at a four-hour "Council of War," to stage a demonstration on Wednesday 19 August whatever happened1.
On the day itself, troops from Kermanshah broke up pro-Mosaddeq crowds in Hamadan on their way to the capital. Crowds in Tehran wrecked the pro-Mosaddeq newspaper Bakhtar Emruz. Radio Tehran went off the air and came back "deliriously pro-Zahedi"1. An Iranian officer the station sent out in an embassy car came back with a tank full of air force officers, who took Zahedi from his hiding place to the radio station1.
What it reveals
The document is frank about methods: forged and genuine statements planted in the press, allies hidden from the government in American houses, and assurances to Mosaddeq's government that the station knew were false1. It also shows how the agency saw the result. Asked about the Qashqai tribes, Roosevelt said the Shah "is now our boy," and the room discussed how to handle them. When Wisner asked to hear "what happened in London," Roosevelt asked whether that should be taken down. Wisner said it was not necessary, and the record ends there1.
Release
CIA documents released in August 2013 are generally taken as the agency's first official admission of its role. The State Department published the retrospective volume in June 2017, about a thousand pages with only a small part still classified4. In this record, more than 30 passages, from under a line to 26 lines, and about a dozen names are still withheld. Each is marked in the text1.
Sources
- FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, Document 307 (Record of Meeting in the Central Intelligence Agency, 28 August 1953), US Department of State, Office of the Historian (2017).
- FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, Document 278 (CIA headquarters to the Tehran station, 18 August 1953), US Department of State, Office of the Historian (2017).
- FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954 (volume front matter and preface), US Department of State, Office of the Historian (2017).
- Wikipedia 1953 Iranian coup d'état, Wikipedia.