Bill Moyers, The Secret Government PBS Special, Iran Coup 1953

Moyers: Mossadegh Held Power Legitimately

PBS: The Secret Government, 1987

In 1987 PBS aired a 90 minute special program The Secret Government hosted by Bill Moyers, the veteran journalist, television host and former staff member in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. The TV special reviewed covert activity by the United States vis-a-vis the CIA and Dulles brothers, and its overthrow of the elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, etc. This clip features a repentant New York Times reporter Kennett Love, who reported on, and participated in, the coup against Mossadegh in the early 1950's.

TRANSCRIPT:

Moyers: Iran, 1953: the CIA mounted its first major covert operation to overthrow a foreign government. The target was the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. He held power legitimately, through his country’s parliamentary process, and he was popular. Washington had once looked to him as the man to prevent a Communist takeover. But that was before Mossadegh decided that the Iranian state, not British companies, ought to own and control the oil within Iran’s own borders. When he nationalized the British-run oil fields, Washington saw red.

The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and his brother Alan, Director of the CIA, decided with Eisenhower’s approval to overthrow Mossadegh and reinstate the Shah of Iran. The mobs paid by the CIA, and the police and soldiers bribed by the CIA, drove Mossadegh from office.

Newsreel: "Crown Prince Abdullah greets the Shah as he lands at Baghdad airport after a 7-hour flight from Rome."

Moyers: The King of Kings was back in control and more pliable than Mossadegh. American oil companies took over almost half of Iran’s production. U.S. arms merchants moved in with $18 billion dollars of weapons sales over the next 20 years. But there were losers.

Kennett Love [NY Times reporter]: Nearly everybody in Iran of any importance has had a brother, or a mother, or a sister, or a son, or a father, tortured, jailed...deprived of property without due process... I mean, an absolutely buccaneering dictatorship in our name that we supported. SAVAK was created by the CIA!

Bill Moyers: SAVAK, the Shah’s Secret Police, tortured and murdered thousands of his opponents.
General Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, whom we met earlier, were among those who helped supply the Shah’s insatiable appetite for the technology of control. But the weapons and flattery heaped by America on the Shah blinded us to the growing opposition of his own people. They rose up in 1979 against him.

"Death to the Shah!" they shouted. "Death to the American Satan."

Kennett Love: Khomeni is a direct consequence, and the hostage crisis is a direct consequence, and the resurgence of the Shiia is a direct consequence of the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953.