(Special to Informed Comment: Feature) – On August 19, seventy years ago, the legitimate government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was toppled in a coup jointly orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence agencies and their Iranian collaborators.  This article was first published in Persian in Iran in the journal Iran-e-Farda in February 1981.  Every year, on the anniversary of the Coup in Iran, I write an article but this time, in memory of my late brother who passed away on October 16, 2023, I have decided to have his article translated. – Fariba Amini

Distortion in History By Mohammad Amini*

Fifty years after his passing, misinformation about Mohammad Mossadegh is still prevalent. There is an assertion that Mossadegh repeatedly rejected pragmatic solutions put forth by the United States and the United Kingdom to resolve the crisis, causing Iran’s economy to collapse and paving the way for the coup. This is one of the widely accepted misconceptions. The first error is to refer to Mossadegh’s 80-hour talks with George C. McGhee, the US Assistant Secretary of State.

 In October 1951, Mossadegh traveled to New York to speak up for Iran’s rights before the UN Security Council. Then he went to Washington, where, on the advice of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, he agreed to American mediation between Iran and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and then he sat down to talk to McGhee. The truth is that following Lord Herbert Stanley Morrison’s speech in the House of Commons, and then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s letter to President Truman complaining about why he had invited Britain’s “oil thief” to the White House, it was clear that the British government had no intention of reconciling with Mossadegh.

Of course, Mossadegh was unaware of these issues and sat down to negotiate with the Americans in good faith. Unfair historians have claimed that Mossadegh, at the conclusion of his negotiations with McGhee, “rejected all reasonable American offers to return victorious to his country”. On the contrary, by the time the talks were over, according to Dean Acheson, it appeared that Mossadegh had agreed to all his proposals.

“Mossadegh also appeared willing to have it operated by a “neutral” company-for instance, a Dutch company. Sometimes he would seem agreeable to the presence of a few Englishmen, sometimes not…

https://www.juancole.com/2023/08/overthrew-parliamentary-government.html

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