The 1953 Coup Analysis

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a historian to gain access to the CIA archives on the 1953 coup in Iran.” (Abrahamian, 2001, p. 182) For decades, the lack of available government documents on the 1953 Coup in Iran has made constructing a cohesive narrative of the factors leading up to the coup an immense challenge for historians. However, by comparing the details from other sources, it is possible to determine that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Crisis and the Cold War were the driving factors that led the Central Intelligence Agency and British M16 to stage a coup d’état against Mohammad Mossadeq.

In the absence of more reliable sources, most early scholars attempting to research the 1953 coup turned to autobiographies

83) According to Roosevelt’s account, the coup’s inception belonged almost entirely to the US government, who then coerced the reluctant shah into cooperating. Roosevelt claimed the CIA played the largest role in the coup, operated under explicit endorsement by the United States and Britain, and collaborated with the SIS and AIOC. Roosevelt also heavily emphasized his own role in the operation, and almost completely omits the work of fellow CIA operative Donald M. Wilber, who later claimed much of the credit for the coup’s initial success in his own book. (Balaghi 2013; Wilford

Wilber, a scholar and the head agent in the CIA’s Operation AJAX. In his book, Wilber describes the “sanitization” process through which all current or former CIA employees are required by law to submit their publications. The process, intended to protect sensitive classified information from being uncovered, involves several stages of review in which CIA editors redact any information deemed unfit for disclosure. The process left Wilber’s account of the events severely diluted— the final draft summarized the coup in a single paragraph. (Balaghi