Operation AJAX, and the Begining of the National Security State

The CIA in Iran from Policy to Coup

 

"... Operation AJAX, represents more than a single foreign policy decision, but rather a paradigm shift away from democracy, congressional oversight, and transparency of government, toward secret policy and covert actions carried out by the executive branch and the national security apparatus.
The plot to overthrow the Mossedegh government in Iran originated within the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and in the fall of 1952, SIS meet with CIA’s Near East and Africa Division (NEA) representatives in Washington. Iran was not on the agenda, but after British intelligence brought up the possibility of a “joint political action to remove Prime Minister Mossedegh,” the NEA committed to studying the proposals

 

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Another good example of the limited knowledge about Operation AJAX within the U.S. government is a State Department memo entitled “Proposed Course of Action with Respects to Iran” detail diplomatic strategies to end the oil crisis in Iran. The memo that is dated August 10th 1953, was issued just 9 days before Mossedegh was overthrown, and indicates that many within the State Department were in the dark on what was going on in Iran.
Operation AJAX, though a CIA operation, had Ambassador Loy Henderson, and General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, playing critical roles.

The U.S. embassy in Tehran was utilized for a number of purposes as AJAX unfolded. The current Iranian administration has published a total of 77 volumes of “Documents from the Den of Spies” since the student take over the U.S. Embassy in 1979, offered up a huge cache of classified documents showing clandestine operations were centered in and around the Embassy.
Schwartzkopf was brought in to pressure the Shah, with whom he had an excellent relationship during WWII, into signing the firmans, royal decrees, one to dismiss Mossedegh and one to appoint Gen. Zahedi (Roosevelt 147-149). The military played other supporting roles from transportation of agents, to making clandestine approaches to number of ‘operational assets.’
The CIA’s own history of the affair mentions that the possibility that ‘blowback’ is likely to result from the overthrow of Mossedegh. The rise of the Shah and his brutal regime, secured by SAVAK, the secret police, which was created and supported by Israel and CIA (Roosevelt 9), surely contributed to the social tension that exploded in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In the long run the CIA’s first overthrow was a mistake, but Operation AJAX became in many ways the blueprint for future covert operation carried out by the Agency in the Cold War and beyond. After Roosevelt debriefed the British government, including Winston, an SIS aid approached Roosevelt with a folder covered in ribbons and sealing wax, and told Roosevelt “that [the folder] represented approval of a project on which they had previously been turned down by the Foreign Office and that this reversal of the Foreign Office was due to the success in Iran

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Dr Donald Wilber, the author of the Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossedegh of Iran, and a key planner and strategist of Operation AJAX, as quoted by the New York Times, had this to say about Operation AJAX and its effect on subsequent CIA covert operations: “If this history had been read by the planners of the Bay of Pigs, there would have been no such operation,” and “in hindsight, one might wonder why no one from the Cuban desk ever…read the history ..."

 

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