CIA concedes 1953 Iranian coup d’etat was undemocratic

Agency revisits PM’s ousting in its podcast

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — While revealing new details about one of the most famed CIA operations of all times — the spiriting out of six American diplomats who escaped the 1979 US Embassy seizure in Iran — the intelligence agency for the first time has acknowledged something else as well.

The CIA now officially describes the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as undemocratic.

Other American officials have made similar remarks in the past, but the CIA’s acknowledgment in a podcast about the agency’s history comes as much of its official history of the coup remains classified 70 years after the putsch. That complicates the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast, and as it cracks down on dissent.

The “CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,” the agency said in a statement responding to questions from The Associated Press. “The agency’s podcast is part of that effort — and we knew that if we wanted to tell this incredible story, it was important to be transparent about the historical context surrounding these events, and CIA’s role in it.”

In response to questions from reporters, Iran’s mission to the United Nations described the 1953 coup as marking “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs” and dismissed the US acknowledgments.

“The US admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the mission said in a statement.

The CIA’s podcast, called “The Langley Files,” as its headquarters is based in Langley, Virginia, focused two recent episodes on the story of the six American diplomats’s escape. While hiding at the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, a two-man CIA team entered Tehran and helped them fly out of the country while pretending to be members of a crew scouting for a made-up science fiction film.

The podcast, for the first time, identified the second CIA officer who accompanied the late CIA officer Antonio “Tony” Mendez, naming him as agency linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson. He previously had only been known publicly by the pseudonym “Julio.”

But in the podcast, which aired about a month before Hamas’s unprecedented attack Saturday on Israel, another brief exchange focuses on the 1953 coup in Iran.

Seven decades later, the 1953 coup remains as hotly debated as ever by Iran, its theocratic government, historians, and others.