Coup 53

I began making this film back home in Iran in 2009

And have since traveled thousands off miles

in search of witnesses and archive material

in 2012 I gave a TED talk

in which I spoke publicly for the first time about making this film

Coup 53

I am going to be telling the story of this man

doctor Mohamed Mossadegh

He was our first democratically elected prime minister

And the closest Iran came to having its own Mahatma Gandhi

My film has taken so long to finish

that some of the people I have interviewed have since died

In 1952 Time magazine named him man of the year

because he had nationalized Iranian oil and pissed off Winston Churchill

and the company that controlled our oil

you now know it as PB

so in August 1953 Eisenhower and Churchill

staged a coup and overthrew Mossadegh

In 1953 the United States together with Britain

have participated in

supporting a coup in Iran

that got rid off Mossadegh who was a left leaning leader of Iran

and restored the Shah to the power in Iran

I grew up in pre-revolution Iran under the rule of the Shah

went to the school and most of the teachers were political activists

frequently arrested by the secret police

My life under the Shah came to an end in 1975

when I was sent to England for school.

Suddenly at 15 whole new culture, new environment, new language

, and a new tribe to observe: the British

But unlike the Americans,

the British government has never officially

acknowledged its role in the coup.

I must insist that I do not think at any time we really planned a coup.

Mossadegh was potentially the father of a future democratic Iran

An Iran in which a young 12-year-old boy would

not have had to have his teachers arrested or be scared of reading a book

Nothing in my 30-year career as a documentary maker

has prepared me for the remarkable

discovery I am about to make on this journey

Evidence that has the potential to turn a dark chapter in history

inside out

I am the deputy director and research

director at the national security archive

which is a non-governmental organization based at George Washington University

so I oversee a lot of our research projects looking at declassified documents

from US and other archives

and then I have a couple of my own projects

The main one that I work on is on US-Iran relations

and I spend a lot of time looking at that historical issue.

So, these are the papers that I have been waiting

to see; you have seen them over and over again?

Yes. what have you got?

Well,all kinds of stuff from the whole period of post war of

US-Iran relations so we have been collecting over the years

So among other things I have got a small collection of CIA materials.

They are probably

I would guess maybe 200: 300 pages of CIA records that have been released

officially released over time over the years

200:300? Something like that, yeah

They’re at least three internal histories that the CIA has produced

In probably the late 1970s, one of these items was produced

Is this when you write to them asking for information?

This is the response letter to me saying

"we are enclosing this document that you requested"

and then here is the document itself called the battle for Iran

The battle for Iran! Which is still going on!

This is what is new about this release: covert action

In earlier versions which you will see, this is all plotted out

- keep that out - so, we can take this one out

There is still a lot there. I like the fact that there is still lot of blank pages

They are supposed to show you what was there. Right

And what came out that was new? I was in Tehran

On the sixtieth anniversary of the coup

August 19, 2013, I was in Tehran

what was new was essentially this page

the military coup that overthrew Modsadegh and his national front cabinet

was carried out under CIA direction

They had never to my knowledge officially acknowledged their role

- Right! - in the coup

And you see here the first part of that sentence there

As an act of US foreign policy

conceived and approved at the highest levels of government

It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at

but was instead an official admission by both the United States and United Kingdom

that normal rational methods of international communication

and commerce had failed

i.e., Mossadegh was in the way

-And even acknowledged the British role -Right

So, this is the CIA outing the British

who have not yet confessed to it

Right Do you know what, Malcom? um

I am standing

in front of the filing cabinet

of a drawer full of documents

that essentially changed the fate of my country

and changed my fate: what happened to me, what happened to my family,my my..

It was like how your lives, your fate, your destiny is

- encapsulated - Yeah, in half a file drawer

This is it.This changed Iran

This box of papers

You had a million dollars in cash that will run the coup, right?

That is right, and we used about sixty thousand dollars of it. That was all

- Are you saying that sixty thousand dollars was all it took? -Yep

I do not know where the money went

and I did not ask because it was so damn little,that uh

that no one was going to ask me any questions

All they asked me was how the dickens did you get away with spending so little

For those among you who know anything about the coup

Kermit Roosevelt's name has become synonymous with the events of 1953

His version of the story, the stuff of books and TV documentaries

has been the received wisdom for decades

But what we are about to discover in the making of this film

will reveal the suppressed history of what really happened and who was responsible.

This is the most important document our film has discovered

in its nine-year history of production

This has gone on fifty or sixty years

With the United States has been involved in overthrowing governments

Mossadegh back in 1953. No body knows who Mossadeq was

Democratically elected prime minister of Iran

He was overthrown by British and American interest

because he threatened oil interest of the British

And as result of that, the Shah of Iran came in: terrible dictator

Result of that you had the Iranian revolution coming in

and that's where we are today

Good evening!

on day thirty-seven of the seizure of the American embassy

and the kidnapping of the hostages

the United States has now moved the crisis toward a showdown stage

For most Americans , the Iran story begins in 1979 and the hostage crisis

that gripped the world for 444 days and cost Jimmy carter his presidency

But for us Iranians, the story goes back to 1953

and the CIA/MI6 coup that crushed democracy in our homeland

Three hundred killed and hundreds wounded as a conservative estimate

Mossadegh and his government were swept from power in favour of general Zahedi

the man appointed by the Shah in the first place

The thoughts of Britain instinctively turned to Abadan

that monument of British enterprise and engineering skill

The force to abandon what we had created in the wilderness

Is it to much to hope

that we shall see once more the tankers of Britain at Abadan

maybe sanity will yet prevail

and Iran and Britain go forward in harmony.

You know I was here earlier looking through the titles on these boxes

Iran–Contra

CIA Family Jewels

Iran-US relations

Nest of spies, documents from Iran ,Chile Chile

Behavioral study,Mind control. and there is incoming FOIA

- that means new stuff coming in - Right we get stuff everyday

Because we have been filing requests for years and years

It's like a freight train or it just keeps coming and keeps coming

Are you okay for me to spend some time just going through these ?

Absolutely, this is the idea yep help yourself

Thank you very much. I don't know where to start

-Alright -Maybe, I will one day win the battle for Iran.

If I can read enough of those

- Happy reading! - Thank you so much, Malcolm.

The battle for Iran!

It is an entire CIA profile of Mossadegh

Mossadegh's power rose from his consummate ability

to appeal to national aspirations and emotions

The above fact is too little to explain his often bizarre behaviour as a politician

We would call him doughty in some respects

but he was not impersonal. Some of the very moderate person parliament

Parliamentarians would weep when he spoke

even though they knew perfectly well that it was ruinous for their country

and impractical

His way of living and general appearance did not stike one as being

the sort of person you would think of as a prime minister

and I do not mean that because he did not wear stripe trousers

In fact, he always wore pajamas

and that was a rather odd

figure for the future prime minister to cut

My uncle was someone who did not go in for formalities as such

He was who he was

And because of his dress

they didn't think they are prepared to make the difference

Of course, it was the first time that heads of state or politicians

came to a bed side of a prime minister to discuss politics with him

So, it was quite strange in western eyes

Mossadegh was truly a remarkable figure

his father had been finance minister of Iran for decades

his mother had been a princess coming out of the Qajar dynasty

While he was still a teenager,

he became the chief tax collector for his home province

And he greatly impressed people

with his honesty and his seriousness and his efficiency.

He went on to become highly educated. He was the first Iranian

to receive a doctorate in laws from a European university

He was probably the most highly educated Iranian of his generation

I do not think that there has been in the last 50 years

anybody more prestigious than Mossadegh in the history of the country. Why?

For one thing: Mossadegh was incorruptible

The second thing was: he was against the power

always stood up to the power.

End of Empire was a major fourteen-part television series

that chronicled the unwinding of the British empire country by country.

Even though, Iran was technically not part of the empire

it had been dominated for so long by British commercial interest