After over 40 years in broadcast journalism, Emmy winning PBS host, author and political commentator Bill Moyers retired at the end of April 2010. Moyers hosted NOW and Bill Moyers Journal for years on PBS, where he introduced the likes of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly to the masses. In his prior career, he was the assistant to and former Press Secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson.

One of Moyer's most significant productions was the special program The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis (1987).

This two hour special gave historical precedent to the Iran-Contra scandal and Reagan's secret arming and funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, looking back at past covert, illegal activity by the United States. This includes the CIA and Dulles brothers' handiwork in overthrowing elected governments in Iran and Guatemala; collaborating with Nazi war criminals and American mafia dons, the war in Vietnam, assassination attempts of foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, propping up murderous dictators, the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and more.

The clip below features a repentant New York Times reporter Kennett Love, who reported on, and aided in, the coup against Mossadegh in August 1953. Scroll down further for the full video of the 126 minute program.

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.

Kennett Love was a young New York Times reporter in Tehran that summer.

Kennett Love: This was in McCarthy's time and the whole Cold War paranoia was running wild in Washington, and everyone was saying that crazy old Mossadegh was falling under the influence of the Communists. This was not true!

Moyers: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.