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Iran 1953: The Coup That Built the CIA's Playbook
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1953, the CIA toppled Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh — and invented the template for every covert regime-change operation that followed. This is where the doctrine of plausible deniability stopped being theory and became policy.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before there was a Langley, before there was a director's suite or a classified budget or a bureaucracy that answered to almost no one, there was a question. A question that a small group of men in Washington asked themselves in the years after the Second World War.
The concept that shaped almost every CIA operation of the Cold War era is called plausible deniability. The idea is straightforward enough.
To see how this played out in practice, you start with Iran in nineteen fifty-three. The operation there, codenamed Ajax by the Americans and Boot by the British, was the first major covert regime-change operation the CIA ever ran.
The Eisenhower administration looked at Mosaddegh and saw something different from what Truman had seen. They saw a nationalist leader in a strategically vital country, one that bordered the Soviet Union, one with massive oil reserves, one that was now in political turmoil.
One year later, the CIA ran a second operation. This one was in Guatemala, codenamed PBSUCCESS.
In April of nineteen sixty-one, the CIA ran the operation that would define its failures as sharply as Iran and Guatemala had defined its early successes. The Bay of Pigs invasion was planned under Eisenhower and executed under Kennedy, and it collapsed with a completeness that was hard to explain away.
After the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy administration didn't abandon its campaign against Cuba. It intensified it.
By the mid-nineteen sixties, a pattern had formed that would define the next two decades of American covert action. The pattern ran like this.
The nineteen seventies brought the first serious public reckoning with what the CIA had been doing. Congressional investigations led by Senator Frank Church exposed assassination plots, regime-change operations, and the institutional culture of unaccountable covert action.
The CIA didn't become what it became by accident. It became what it became because the founding logic made it almost inevitable.
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