CAPSULE COMMENTARY: “The C.I.A. and Iran”

“Remember back in 1979 when the Iranians under Ayatollah Khomeini took over the U.S. embassy and held U.S. diplomatic personnel hostage? Remember how our government portrayed the Iranians as horrible devils and the U.S. officials as innocent angels? Well, the front page of last Sunday’s New York Times had a full-length expose of what the U.S. government did in 1953 to precipitate what the Iranian people did 26 years later. Although the CIA, by its own admission, has destroyed many of its documents relating to its coup that put the Shah of Iran in power, a secret history of the CIA’s role in the sordid affair turned up in the offices of the Times. The history was written by Dr. Donald L. Wilber, the CIA’s chief coup planner. (For years, the CIA has maintained that release of the history would jeopardize national security, but so far the Times story hasn’t caused the nation to collapse.) The history shows how the U.S. government (the world’s premier defender of democracy) ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister from power in 1953 and installed the (unelected) shah into power. (The history does not detail the CIA’s participation in the shah’s subsequent reign of terror and torture.) Thus, what we were not told in 1979 was that the Iranian people were expressing their angry and outrage over the installation of the CIA’s brutal puppet 26 years earlier. Now, if we can just get the secret histories of CIA involvement in Chile and Guatemala published, we might just be making some progress toward figuring out why terrorists all over the world hate the United States.”