Foreign Policy:

Darioush Bayandor is a Swiss Iranian historian, a former diplomat, and former U.N. official. His latest book, The Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the United States, was published in 2018.

In their Oct. 30 article in Foreign Policy, Roham Alvandi and Mark J. Gasiorowski took issue with my 2010 book Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited, seeking to link it to the current hostility between Iran and the United States. Their ultimate goal is to rehabilitate a discredited narrative to which the release of the secret CIA files in 2017 has dealt a devastating blow. The archival evidence presented below should enable readers to form an independent judgment about the circumstances of the fateful overthrow of the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953.

The first batch of declassified State Department documents, partially related to the Anglo-American coup plot against Mosaddeq, was released in the “Foreign Relations of the United States” series in 1989. CIA files were not included, and direct references to the plot, codenamed TPAJAX, had been redacted. Still, the released material contained valuable insights into the thinking of the Eisenhower administration and the U.S. policies both before and after the event.

Go to link