Pastorgate: Operation Ajax redux?

[dailykoff]

Many DU members are aware of Operation Ajax, CIA codename for the August 19, 1953 coup d'état that overthrew Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, orchestrated by British and American intelligence operatives:

Bribing Iranian officials, news media, and others with British and American funds, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), organized the covert operation. . . . The project to overthrow Iran's government was codenamed Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX).


Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

The CIA (with Eisenhower's approval) was acting at the behest of British Petroleum, which had failed in its attempts to prevent Mosaddeq from nationalizing Iranian oil operations:

Mossadeq was a nationalist and passionately opposed foreign intervention in Iran. He was also the architect of the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), today known as British Petroleum (BP).

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mossadeq#Operation_Ajax

What's less well known is how the coup was carried out. In a matter of three weeks, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, turned the popular Mosaddeq into a pariah largely by bribing the press into printing scurrilous stories calling him a homosexual, a Jew, a Communist (in fact, he hated Communists), and an atheist, leading to a "loss of support among clerics and the middle class:

The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing newspaper editors, owners and columnists and reporters. Within a couple of weeks, he had 80% of the newspapers in Tehran on his payroll and they were grinding out every kind of lie attacking Mossadeq.

link: http://www.democracynow.org/2004/3/5/how_to_overthrow_a_government_pt

Let's see, a CIA-orchestrated character assassination to benefit oil boys ... sound familiar? :eyes: