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New documents reveal how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy.
By Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian | June 20, 2017, 1:43 PM
Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.
The approximately 1,000 pages of documents also reveal for the first time the details of how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy on the ground.
Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth, whether Arabian-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. When the U.S. firm in Saudi Arabia bowed to pressure in late 1950 and agreed to share oil revenues evenly with Riyadh, the British concession in Iran came under intense pressure to follow suit. But London adamantly refused.
So in early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah. (Though some in the U.S. State Department, the newly released cables show, blamed British intransigence for the tensions and sought to work with Mossadegh.)
The coup attempt began on August 15 but was swiftly thwarted. Mossadegh made dozens of arrests. Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a top conspirator, went into hiding, and the shah fled the country.
The CIA, believing the coup to have failed, called it off.
“Operation has been tried and failed and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh which could be traced back to US,” CIA headquarters wrote to its station chief in Iran in a newly declassified cable sent on Aug. 18, 1953. “Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.”
That is the cable which Kermit Roosevelt, top CIA officer in Iran, purportedly and famously ignored, according to Malcolm Byrne, who directs the U.S.-Iran Relations Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
At least “one guy was in the room with Kermit Roosevelt when he got this cable,” Byrne told Foreign Policy. “[Roosevelt] said no — we’re not done here.” It was already known that Roosevelt had not carried out an order from Langley to cease and desist. But the cable itself and its contents were not previously published.
The consequences of his decision were momentous. The next day, on August 19, 1953, with the aid of “rented” crowds widely believed to have been arranged with CIA assistance, the coup succeeded. Iran’s nationalist hero was jailed, the monarchy restored under the Western-friendly shah, and Anglo-Iranian oil — renamed British Petroleum — tried to get its fields back. (But didn’t really: Despite the coup, nationalist pushback against a return to foreign control of oil was too much, leaving BP and other majors to share Iran’s oil wealth with Tehran.)
Operation Ajax has long been a bogeyman for conservatives in Iran — but also for liberals. The coup fanned the flames of anti-Western sentiment, which reached a crescendo in 1979 with the U.S. hostage crisis, the final overthrow of the shah, and the creation of the Islamic Republic to counter the “Great Satan.”
The coup alienated liberals in Iran as well. Mossadegh is widely considered to be the closest thing Iran has ever had to a democratic leader. He openly championed democratic values and hoped to establish a democracy in Iran. The elected parliament selected him as prime minister, a position he used to reduce the power of the shah, thus bringing Iran closer in line with the political traditions that had developed in Europe. But any further democratic development was stymied on Aug. 19.
The U.S government long denied involvement in the coup. The State Department first released coup-related documents in 1989, but edited out any reference to CIA involvement. Public outrage coaxed a government promise to release a more complete edition, and some material came out in 2013. Two years later, the full installment of declassified material was scheduled — but might have interfered with Iran nuclear talks and were delayed again, Byrne said. They were finally released last week, though numerous original CIA telegrams from that period are known to have disappeared or been destroyed long ago.
Byrne said that the long delay is due to several factors. Intelligence services are always concerned about protecting “sources and methods,” said Byrne, meaning the secret spycraft that enables them to operate on the ground. The CIA also needed to protect its relationship with British intelligence, which may have wished some of the material remain safeguarded.
Beyond final proof of CIA involvement, there’s another very interesting takeaway in the documents, said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University: New details on the true political leanings of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a cleric and leading political figure in the 1950s.
In the Islamic Republic, clerics are always the good guys. Kashani has long been seen as one of the heroes of nationalism during that period. As recently as January of this year, Iran’s supreme leader praised Kashani’s role in the nationalization of oil.
Kashani’s eventual split from Mossadegh is widely known. Religious leaders in the country feared the growing power of the communist Tudeh Party, and believed that Mossadegh was too weak to save the country from the socialist threat.
But the newly released documents show that Kashani wasn’t just opposed to Mossadegh — he was also in close communication with the Americans throughout the period leading up to the coup, and he actually appears to have requested financial assistance from the United States, though there is no record of him receiving any money. His request was not previously known.
On the make-or-break day of Aug. 19, “Kashani was critical,” said Milani. “On that day Kashani’s forces were out in full force to defeat Mossadegh.”
Clarification, June 21, 2017: This piece has been clarified to state that at least one person was in the room when Roosevelt received the August 18 cable, and that the cable was unpublished until now.
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The Unwritten History of Israel’s Alliance with the Shah’s Dictatorship
Top Iranian military officials Hasan Toofanian and Bahram Ariana with some Israeli officers in headquarters of Israel Defense Forces in 1975 (State of Israel via Wikimedia Commons)
by Eitay Mack
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, during which the Ayatollahs took control of the country and brought down the Shah’s absolutist monarchy. The Iranian masses, who were undergoing various ideological changes at the time, overthrew the Shah’s corrupt and oppressive regime.
Much has been written over the years about Israel’s ties with Mohammad Reza Shah and his dictatorship. When it was convenient for the IDF censor and political and security officials in Israel, information — even secret documents from that period — was revealed to the general public.
Recently, files from the Foreign Ministry regarding relations with Iran have been declassified and can now be found in Israel’s State Archives. These include more than 10,000 pages from 1953 until 1979, which were heavily censored when compared to similar files in cases of other countries.
The documents expose Israel’s extensive and exceptional relations with a foreign country, not only because these political and security-based relations were with with a Muslim country, but because the relationship with the Shah’s dictatorship was strategic and central to the State of Israel from a security, economic and political point of view. At the time, Israel’s relations with many other countries were limited mainly to weapons sales in exchange for votes in international forums.
Thus, for example, Israel purchased a significant portion — and in some years all — of its oil from the Shah’s regime, while Iran used Israel as a middleman to sell its oil to third countries. The alliance over oil required that Israel and the Shah ensure the safety of shipping routes. This strengthened their partnership in the struggle against Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser’s repeated attempts to promote ideological and military alliances throughout the Middle East that were hostile to Iran and Israel, particularly in the Gulf states and the Arabian Peninsula.
Private and state-owned Israeli companies, ranging from textiles, agriculture, electrical appliances, water, fertilizers, construction, aviation, shipping, gas, tires and even dentures, had been operating extensively in Iran. In some years, Iran was one of the main destinations for Israeli exports. Meanwhile, Israeli academia also enjoyed relatively extensive cooperation with academics in Iran.
The Shah Never Officially Recognized Israel
Iran de facto recognized the State of Israel in March 1950, but in light of internal pressure by those who opposed Israel and the Shah’s pro-Western and pro-American policies — as well as external pressure by Arab states — Iran avoided officially recognizing Israel.
The Shah did have “secret” representation in Tel Aviv beginning in 1961, and Israel had permanent representation in Tehran, which at one point became an embassy that included military attachés. Due to the sensitive nature of the agreement, Israeli representatives in Iran generally refrained from conducting relations with the Shah regime through bureaucrats in the Foreign Ministry and other government ministries. Instead, it carried out its business through a narrow circle of Shah loyalists and politicians, as well as the top echelons of Iran’s defense establishment. Sometimes those relations were conducted directly with the Shah himself and his Royal Court minister.
Over the years, Israel attempted to hide its involvement in the security apparatuses and the suppression meted out by the Shah, yet the Iranian public was well aware of Israel’s aid to the regime. In particular was Israel’s close ties with the Shah’s security service, SAVAK, which was responsible for the political persecution, torture and murder of the monarch’s political opponents.
Given the breadth of relations between the two countries, I will focus on documents relating to Israeli assistance to the security apparatuses and the suppression by the Shah’s dictatorship, which would eventually lead to his downfall. These documents attest to the depth of Israeli involvement in the regime, Israel’s strategic importance to this relationship, and the fear of the consequences of the Shah’s fall — a concern that became palpable in the years before the end of his rule.
Stability Through Oppression
Israeli awareness of the Shah’s oppressive policies is evident from a telegram sent on April 22, 1955 by the Israeli embassy in London. The telegram describes an Iranian diplomat who tells his Israeli interlocutor that the Iranian government is banning communism everywhere, and that the Americans are satisfied with these actions.
Eight years later, on September 9, 1963, Director of the Middle East Department at Israel’s Foreign Ministry Nathaniel Lorch wrote that the traditional religious processions that took place that month had turned into mass demonstrations against the Shah’s regime, and that the government “was surprised by the use of religious demonstrations for political protest. The riots spread to a number of towns. The government used great force to suppress the riots and officially announced that 86 were killed and 193 were wounded. The last few days passed quietly. The regime controls the situation in both Tehran and its provinces.”
Lorch claimed that “the anti-Israel chants by the demonstrators made up a small part of all the slogans, and in the meantime the anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli tone has completely disappeared.” Lorch further noted that “any attempt to present Israeli-Persian relations as a cause for events should be thwarted.”
According to a January 3, 1964 report prepared by Dr. Zvi Doriel, the head of the Israeli delegation in Tehran: “The internal stability and exclusive reign of the Shah achieved by the suppression of religious and other opponents of the regime in June, as well as by what the regime views as a successful election season, continues without significant disturbance. The process of the disintegration of the National Front [the nationalist coalition that opposed the Shah — E.M.] continues.”
The Shah, according to Israeli reports, also leaned heavily on the ruling Iran Novin Party while fostering a semblance of opposition. According to a November 25, 1964 survey by Israel Haviv of the Middle East Department of the Foreign Ministry, instead of maintaining a one-state system ruled by Iran Novin, the Shah supported the continued existence of the People’s Party as a fictitious opposition party that would imbue parliamentary life in Iran with a more democratic character.
The Iranians Can Stifle Any Resistance Movement
In a meeting on December 19, 1964 between Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aram, the latter praised the relations between Israel and Iran and said that there was no other country with which Iran’s relations were so close. Meanwhile, the Iranians preferred to keep the relationship quiet. Meir Ezri, an Israeli representative in Tehran, reported in a missive sent on May 5, 1965 about a meeting he held with the foreign minister, in which Aram complained about the public nature of Israel’s activities in the country, saying it may harm Iran’s relations with Arab countries.
Ezri replied to the minister, saying that “Israel’s general interest in the Middle East is the existence of a sovereign and prosperous Iran headed by the Shah, who is considered a friend of Israel… We do not believe that the Arabs will ever be friends with Iran despite all Iranian efforts. Our friendship obliges us to bring to Iran’s attention what we know about the Arab efforts aimed at the most vital Iranian interests.”
Israel, as noted, was aware of the murderous suppression of the Iranian opposition. David Turgeman, who was part of the Israeli mission in Iran, reported on January 27, 1966 that the leaders of the communist Tudeh Party had been sentenced to death in absentia, part of a larger trend of putting opposition members on trial. A few months later on July 21, Turgeman reported that the Shah and the top echelons of the government were confident and that “there is no internal danger posed by left-wing oppositionists, and that security forces can stifle any resistance or underground movement.”
Turgeman had no doubt about the nature of the regime. In a March 8, 1967 survey he wrote, in conjunction with the Shah’s family protection reforms, that “we must admit that the new law is a classic example of the benefits of a regime of enlightened absolutism.”
The IDF Attaché Is the Hero of the Day
This did not prevent Israel from seeing Iran as a matter of substance. In a survey prepared on February 23, 1966, Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department Mordechai Gazit wrote that “in some respects it was said that Iran-Israel relations are a kind of unwritten secret alliance that gives Israel a range of advantages in the fields of the economy, security, the Middle East and anti-Nasserism.”
Gazit added that Israel is engaged in “the renovation of Iranian Air Force planes and civil aviation aircrafts with full and large compensation… Israeli experts were employed in the anti-Nasser Persian propaganda… very close intelligence cooperation through taking full advantage of the Iranian territory… Close cooperation between the IDF and the Iranian army… The attachés are in daily contact with the Iranian general staff, and this is, in fact, without unnecessary modesty… An Iranian purchase from IMI Systems, in addition to the “Uzi” deals and the other acquisitions are in advanced stages of discussion.”
The published documents do not detail the content of the partnership between Israel and the notoriously despised SAVAK. However, the documents do include a breakdown of military cooperation. For example, according to a telegram from January 4, 1967, the Iranian prime minister asked the Israeli military attaché in Tehran, Colonel Ya’akov Nimrodi, to coordinate the training of the head of his bodyguards. In a conversation held a month later with Meir Ezri, the Israeli representative in Tehran, the prime minister told Ezri that “he instructed the commander of the gendarmerie to purchase an Uzi submachine gun and approved the necessary budget for doing so in accordance with the request of the IDF attaché in Tehran.”
Two months later, on April 13, then-Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin spoke with the Shah, who was interested in Israeli planes and tanks, and was “knowledgeable about what was going on and particularly on the security/military level” when it came to Israeli-Iranian cooperation.
A review by Israeli Ambassador in Tehran, Dr. Zvi Dorel, on August 29, 1967, read as follows: “We have established a close, friendly, and practical partnership between the IDF and the security services and their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programs and missions of national importance, with continuous mutual visits by the heads of the armed forces and their senior officials.”
“Various security problems vital to Israel have been solved in close cooperation with the Iranians,” Dorel continued. “The military attaché is recognized by the general staff and the Iranian Foreign Ministry, it maintains extensive relations with the Iranian army and deals with an impressive list of issues of national importance and enjoys special fondness by the Iranian military circles… They conducted advanced negotiations regarding the purchase of Israeli-made products and BEDEC programs to the tune of millions of dollars… Israeli chiefs of staff and the head of the security services have met with the Shah several times… the Iranian army views the IDF and the security services as allies and those involved in making contact and professional issues… Colonel Nimrodi, an IDF attaché, was a hero today among the army circles.”
The Shah in Israeli Gossip Columns
According to a telegram dated December 27, 1967 (it is unclear who sent it): “Prominent Israeli presence was accepted by the Iranian public as a fact that cannot be annulled… Iran views the ‘revolutionary’ Arab regimes not only as the source of extreme Arab nationalism but also as a threat to the royal regime. This is convenient and encouraging not only in the intimate relations between our security services and those of Iran, but also in the diplomatic realm in Western capitals, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, and even in coordination and cooperation in the Middle East (vis-à-vis the Kurds and Yemen).”
Nevertheless, despite the close relations, the Shah’s regime did not particularly like these relations — or criticism of the regime — to be publicized. The Shah’s inner circle repeatedly objected to Israeli media reports about both the relationship between the two countries as well the hedonism of the royal family. For example, in August 1967 the Iranian Foreign Ministry protested a gossip article published in LaIsha, an Israeli lifestyle magazine for women, about the Shah’s family, even though the Israeli representative in Tehran explained that it was “a magazine of no importance that is mainly read by teenage girls.”
According to a telegram sent by Y. Margolin on September 13, 1967, the Foreign Ministry examined the possibility of appealing to the Attorney General to initiate criminal proceedings against LaIsha and to require any gossip published about the Shah’s family to first be approved by the IDF censor.
According to a telegram sent in August 1972 by Ambassador Ezri to the director general of the Ministry of Defense, the negotiations over the purchase of Israeli tanker aircrafts by the Shah’s dictatorship were progressing. A report prepared by the Foreign Ministry on Israel’s defense exports to the dictatorship on October 29 of that year reveals that between 1968 and 1972, IMI Systems sold $20.9 million worth of equipment to Iran; Israel Aerospace Industries sold $1.3 million; Soltam sold $16.9 million in mortars; Motorola sold $12 million; Tadiran sold $11.3 million and set up a radio equipment factory in Iran; and Israel’s Defense Ministry sold $700,000 worth of equipment.
A United Front against Communism
A letter dated June 28, 1973 by the Finance Ministry’s deputy supervisor of foreign exchange to the deputy director general of the International Defense Cooperation Directorate of the Israel Ministry of Defense stated that, “Recently, Israeli officials have increased their activity in Iran, including: production units of the IDF and our Ministry of Defense, the Air Industry, Tadiran, Motorola, and others who are trying to sell their services and products to the Iranian army, the Iranian Ministry of Defense and similar government agencies.”
“The spectrum of activity is broad, ranging from the supply of military products and electronics manufactured by factories in Israel, to the export of systems for creating and assembling them on the spot, training, surveys, construction, assembling and maintenance of facilities on the ground through contractors. From what has been brought to our attention, we see that the activities of various Israeli bodies are similar and perhaps even overlapping,” the deputy supervisor wrote.
Iranian police received training in operating communications equipment at Motorola in Israel, but according to a telegram sent on July 2, 1975 by A. Levin from the Israeli mission in Tehran to the Foreign Ministry’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, the Iranians requested to “receive full training in Israeli police facilities.” Levin recommended that the request be accepted and eventually informed the Foreign Ministry that “Israel Police agrees to accept under its auspices and responsibility the course for Iranian liaison officers,” and that the theoretical part of the course will include “tours to police facilities.”
These relations existed at the highest level. Prime Minister Golda Meir met with the Shah in 1972, and in a May 19 report she said that the Shah “thinks that the relations and cooperation between countries that stand against communism should be strengthened: Persia, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.” Two years later, when Meir resigned and Yitzhak Rabin took over, the new Israeli prime minister also visited Iran. According to a telegram from December 8, 1974, Rabin met with the head of the Iranian security services.
The Beginning of the End
It was during those years that Israel began to believe that the regime was unstable. In a report prepared by the Foreign Ministry on September 11, 1972, shortly after Meir’s visit to Tehran, it was noted that “social unrest is manifest among students and intellectuals, and the stability of the regime is maintained through policing.” Four years later, in June 1976, Israel already understood that the Shah was in trouble.
A telegram sent at the time by Israeli Ambassador Uri Lubrani stated that the Shah’s liberalization policy, which included the assumption of powers from SAVAK, led to “the opportunistic elements that until recently had been underground or dormant to take advantage of this and begin expressing their opposition to the regime.” This forced the Shah to return some of SAVAK’s authority in an effort to control the situation.
Ambassador Lubrani added that “the feeling of many in Iran today is that the status of the Shah has begun to be quickly undermined, a process that cannot be reversed and will eventually lead to his defeat and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran. It is very difficult to give a time estimate and my personal assessment, which is not based on any objective data, is that this will take place more or less in the next five years. There is no answer to the question of who or what will replace the current regime. It is reasonable to assume that the monarchy will end and that, at least in the first stage, the military officers will take its place. The big question is who will lead them and what direction he will take.”
As for the consequences for the State of Israel, Ambassador Lubrani wrote that “the implications of a new situation for Israel-Iran relations should the Shah’s rule be undermined are grave, and the current regime of the Shah will be seen as the most positive one for Israel in Iran. Any change in this government will, to the best of our assessment, be to the detriment of our relations with this country.”
Lubrani also that Israel had extensive activities in Iran at the time, including “relationships surrounding the oil supply from Iran (both to supply itself and the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline), and oil sales such as security-related projects,” and that “the security arrangements that were recently signed create an Israeli commitment to Iran vis-a-vis sensitive areas, as well as Iranian financial commitments that are significant for our national economy.”
As time went on, Israel became increasingly concerned about the fate of the regime. Two years later, on August 14, 1978, Lubrani sent a telegram to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem in which he painted a bleak picture of the Shah’s future. The ambassador met with Deputy Police Chief Ja’afri, who told Lubrani that “in the short term he does not anticipate difficulties in maintaining law and order and believes that the military regime is capable of dealing with any attempt at rebellion. On the other hand, he believes that this situation cannot continue indefinitely and that if the government does not take far-reaching measure to change the system of governance and its priorities, the existing regime will collapse.”
Ja’afri believed that the Shah was unaware of his true situation. He also criticized the head of SAVAK for “not introducing changes into the system that the people themselves have hated for years.” Ja’afri claimed that the regime made a mistake when it used the army and “caused many casualties,” while noting “the special relations we had with him and promised to help if necessary.”
The Last Hope
A month and a half later, on September 28, Lubrani reported to the Foreign Ministry that he had met with the Shah in light of the huge demonstrations that sought to oust his regime, during which Shah reiterated his claims that the communists were responsible for the demonstrations. When the Shah asked Lubrani about the identity of his interlocutor, Lubrani answered that “on political matters I have always acted, if not in tandem the head of SAVAK, then through the Royal Court minister or Tufanian (Deputy Minister of Defense – E.M.).”
Lubrani summarized the meeting: “I have a difficult impression of the man. He is not the man we were familiar with, he was distant and sometimes stares. There is no doubt that the man has gone through a nightmare from which he has yet to fully recover. He is full of terror and uncertain of the future. The most worrisome aspect is the sense that he seems to have made peace with his fate, without having found any strong desire to take matters into his own hands and change it. I will add that it is possible that I found the Shah in a temporary moment of gloom.”
Israel did not want to lose its stronghold in Iran under any circumstance. If the Shah was to be deposed, Israel hoped that a military regime would take his place. In a telegram from December 30, 1978, Director of the Middle East Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Yael Vered writes that the best option for the State of Israel is “extreme toughness by the army and the establishment of a military regime and a real military government. Whether initiated by the army in the form of a military coup or with the Shah through tacit consent on his part.”
On January 4, 1979, in a last-ditch attempt to bring calm to the streets of the country, the Shah appointed Shapour Bakhtiar as prime minister. Israel, however, had no illusions about his ability to govern. Four days later, Vered sent a telegram to Israeli missions around the world saying that Bakhtiar’s government had no public support and was in danger of collapsing.
Vered wrote that the Shah and Bakhtiar had reached an understanding about the Shah going on “holiday leave,” but “the length of time and who will decide on his return remains a question and may lead to crises in the future. The Shah continues to symbolize the unity of Iran, and the loyalty of the army to him, even today and despite the number of cracks, is undoubted.”
Vered estimated that if Khomeini and his supporters took power, relations with Israel would come to an end. Yet she maintained hope that the army would take over and that Iran would see “another form of government like the current one or a more convenient army, and it is likely that the presence (of Israel – E.M.) will initially continue under a lower profile.” Vered’s hopes did not come to fruition, and on January 16 the Shah fled Iran.
On February 11, about a week after Khomeini returned from exile to Iran, the Israeli government decided to evacuate its remaining representatives in Tehran, especially Ambassador Yossef Harmelin, while at the same time examining the possibility of leaving an Israeli representative so as to not completely sever ties with the new regime. “The foreign minister instructed the director-general, after the Mossad announced the evacuation of our people, to examine the possibility of leaving a person in a diplomatic appointment so as not to cut the wire,” the cable said. “There will be no official announcement of leaving. If Harmelin leaves – he will be in danger should he be imprisoned, due to the fact that he was the former head of the Shin Bet.”
The Masses Can Bring Down a Regime with Tanks
Yet Israel still held out hope for the new regime. Three days later, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan met with the Japanese ambassador to Israel. A report sent to the Israeli embassy in Tokyo shows Dayan told the diplomat that “the current stage (in Iran – E.M.) is not final and is a transition into a new period. There is concern that the influence of extreme leftists will grow, and that in addition to the religious sea change, xenophobia will also spread.”
Yet, according to Dayan, Iran will still need foreigners to operate its sophisticated weaponry, especially after the Americans had left. Minister Dayan further expressed his concern for the fate of the Jewish community in Iran, arguing that “one must worry about the influence of the events in Iran on other countries in the area, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sudan, and Morocco, who also do not respect civil rights.”
On the same day, Dayan spoke with U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who according to the protocol told the Israeli minister that “the United States does not feel guilt about what happened to the Shah, since the Shah failed to develop a managerial class below him that would shoulder some of the responsibility, and if everything in his country was in his hands, then his mistakes were his alone. There was also the problem of corruption. The revolution in Iran has reached the masses. There is a strong sense of nationalism. One can hope that the Iranians will understand the main factors in their national interest and act accordingly.”
But beyond concerns about the loss of an Israeli “outpost” in Iran, Israel had other no less serious concerns: the fear that the masses in the Middle East would imitate the Iranians and overthrow their own regimes. According to the minutes of a meeting of deputy directors-general held on the same day Dayan spoke with Brown, Pinchas Eliav, director of political research at the Foreign Ministry, said that the serious issue is that “the social-economic-public character of the upheaval proved that the street and the masses could bring down a regime with tanks, the most modern weaponry, and an air force.”
“All these forces stood before a street that is nevertheless a street (perhaps Khomeini had some agents and some communist intervention), incitement, and ideology, and the masses succeeded in overthrowing the regime. This is, in my opinion, a harbinger of danger to all the regimes in the region, including the radical ones.”
Neither Israel nor the United States have never taken responsibility for their continued support of the dictatorship and their support for the Shah in crushing the left and the progressive elements in Iran. Their conduct was instrumental in the establishment of the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs.
Eitay Mack is an Israeli human rights lawyer working to stop Israeli military aid to regimes that commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here. Reprinted, with permission, from +972 Magazine.
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Iran and Israel: A history of the world’s best enmity
Date created : 11/05/2018 - 19:48Latest update : 11/05/2018 - 19:48
Text by:
Marc DAOU
Tensions between Israel and Iran are at a peak following Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Iranian military targets in Syria this week. FRANCE 24 traces the tumultuous relations between the two regional powers.
The long-dreaded prospect of a widespread conflagration in the Middle East resurfaced late Wednesday into early Thursday after the first direct confrontation in Syria, according to Israel, between the Israeli army and Iranian forces in several years.
Israel claims its strikes were in response to a missile volley fired from southern Syria by Iran's al-Quds force, which struck the occupied Golan Heights without causing casualties.
Iran, however, vehemently denies the Israeli version of events, saying Israel's attacks were carried out under false "pretexts".
The escalation of what had been a low-level conflict between the two countries in Syria is just the latest confrontation in a long history of hostility between Iranians and Israelis, both isolated in a predominantly Sunni Arab region.
‘Little Satan’
The animosity between the two countries dates back to the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and the establishment of a Shiite theocratic republic by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Before the Shiite clergy came to power, the two countries enjoyed cordial relations. Iran was the second Muslim country to recognise Israel in 1950, a year after Turkey. Tehran and Tel Aviv were linked by an informal partnership, based on close cooperation on military, technological, agricultural and petroleum issues.
When the Shah was ousted, the tone of bilateral Iranian-Israeli relations dramatically changed. In his very first speeches, Khomeini, the supreme leader of the Islamic revolution, singled out the two main enemies of Iran: the US -- the "great Satan" -- and its main ally in the region, Israel, "the little Satan".
Anxious to extend the influence of the Islamic revolution in the Muslim world and to legitimise the power of the clerics, the Iranian leader, an author of many anti-Zionist works, positioned his nation as a defender of the Palestinian cause and Israel's primary enemy. Israel, Khomeini stressed, was a country he wanted to see "disappeared" in order to "liberate Jerusalem".
Yasser Arafat, then head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was the first foreign leader to visit Tehran. He was greeted by crowds shouting "death to Israel".
In 1982, Khomeini ordered the creation of an Islamist militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, an Arab country with a large Shiite community. Hezbollah’s goal was to fight the Israeli army, which invaded Shiite-dominated southern Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the region until 2000.
Iran-Contra affair
In the mid-1980s, as the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) was raging, a scandal erupted in the US. Despite Iran's anti-US, anti-Israeli rhetoric, the Ronald Reagan administration secretly authorised arms sales to Iran, via Israel, to help fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua while simultaneously negotiating the release of several US hostages being held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian militias.
At that time, Israel viewed the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq as a more immediate threat. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was under construction at a site around 17 kilometres southeast of Baghdad.
In 1989, US media revealed that Israel had purchased $36 million worth of Iranian oil in a deal to obtain the release of three Israeli soldiers detained in Lebanon.
Israeli focus on Iran’s nuclear programme starts
In the mid-1990s, Israel was concerned about the resumption, with Russian help, of the Iranian civilian nuclear programme, which was interrupted after the 1979 revolution. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but since the Jewish state -- along with India and Pakistan – is not a signatory to the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel is not subject to inspections. Iran, on the other hand, is a signatory to the NPT as well as its safeguards agreement and is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Despite Iran’s denials, Israel continued to suspect Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons. The Iran nuclear threat has since been taken up by every successive Israeli administration to date.
In 1994, tensions mounted when Israel accused Hezbollah, backed by Iran, of being responsible for the bombing of a Jewish centre in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.
Ahmadinejad’s diatribes
In the early 2000s, tension mounted another notch with advances in Iran’s development of long-range ballistic missiles, capable of being loaded with nuclear warheads. The election of the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 to the Iranian presidency plunged relations between the two countries to a new low. Ahmadinejad’s repeated diatribes against Israel as "an artificial creature doomed to disappear," coincided with advances in the Iranian nuclear programme, including Tehran's willingness to pursue uranium enrichment.
In 2006, after the war that pitted the Israeli army against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Jewish state accused the Islamic republic of supplying Hezbollah, led by Hassan Nasrallah, with an arsenal that enabled the Lebanese Shiite movement to strike deep inside Israeli territory.
In 2009, Tehran criticised Israeli and US secret services for disrupting its nuclear programme with the help of malicious software called Stuxnet. The Iranians, who claim their right to nuclear energy for civilian purposes, also accused Israel of assassinating several physicists and specialised engineers in the Iranian capital.
On several occasions, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel could strike Iran if the international community did not take responsibility. For its part, Iran, now targeted by international economic sanctions, replied that it would not hesitate to respond to any Israeli strike.
In 2012, Netanyahu was widely criticised for a UN General Assembly presentation that featured an amateur line-drawing of a bomb with a red line marking what he said was the last stage of Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity. A year earlier, an IAEA report referred to a "possible military dimension" of the Iranian nuclear programme.
‘Fix it or nix it’
The 2013 election of "moderate conservative" Iranian President Hassan Rouhani opened the door to negotiations with Western nations. Iran meanwhile proceeded to intervene directly and indirectly in neighbouring Iraq against the Sunni jihadist Islamic State (IS) group, as well as in the Syrian conflict, supporting Alawite President Bashar al-Assad.
Israel meanwhile conducted several raids in Syria against the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iranian forces while Tel Aviv repeatedly stressed its refusal to allow Iranian bases near the Israeli-Syrian border.
The 2015 signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as “the Iran nuclear deal,” was widely welcomed by the international community – except Israel and Gulf Sunni monarchies. Amid frosty personal relations between Netanyahu and then-US President Barack Obama, the Israeli leader slammed the agreement which, he insisted, would not prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapon. "Fix it or nix it," was Netanyahu’s mantra, which he repeated at every opportune moment.
Netanyahu’s message was finally heard across the Atlantic by the Republican candidate in the 2016 US presidential race. Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump made no attempt to hide his pro-Israel position, promising to get the US out of the “worst deal ever”. The rhetoric continued after Trump’s election even as America’s European allies made last-minute efforts to convince the billionaire US president to stick with the deal ahead of Trump’s self-imposed May 12 deadline.
Days before that deadline -- and just days after a Netanyahu presentation from the Israeli Defense Ministry accusing Iran of lying – Trump officially announced the USA’s withdrawal from the Iran deal on May 8. That very night, Israel conducted an airstrike targeting Iranian military interests south of the Syrian capital of Damascus, in an area believed to hold an “arms depot belonging to Hezbollah and Iran,” according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Nine people were killed in the Israeli strike, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and the stage was set for the start of the post-Iran nuclear deal season of feverish tensions between Israel and Iran.
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The Muslim Brotherhood as an Auxiliary Force of MI6 and the CIA
We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s new book, « Right Before Our Eyes ». In this episode, he describes the way in which President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, used the terrorist capacities of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Soviets.
In 1972-1973, an official from the Foreign Office – and probably MI6 as well – Sir James Craig, together with the British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Richard Beaumont, began an intense lobbying campaign aimed at harnessing the Muslim Brotherhood for use by the United Kingdom and the United States in the struggle against the Marxists and the nationalists, not only in Egypt, but also all over the Muslim world. Sir James was soon to be nominated as Her Majesty’s ambassador in Syria, then in Arabia, and would find an attentive ear at the CIA. Much later, he was to become the designer of the “Arab Springs”.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. He appointed Zbigniew Brzeziński as his National Security Advisor. Brzeziński decided to use Islamism against the Soviets. He gave the Saudis the go-ahead to increase their payments to the Islamic World League, organised regime changes in Pakistan, Iran and Syria, destabilised Afghanistan, and made US access to oil from the “Greater Middle East” a national security objective. Finally, he entrusted the Brotherhood with military equipment.
This strategy was clearly explained by Bernard Lewis during the meeting of the Bilderberg Group [1], organised by NATO in Austria, April 1979. Lewis, an Anglo-Israeli-US Islamologist, assured that the Muslim Brotherhood could not only play a major role against the Soviets and provoke internal trouble in Central Asia, but also balkanise the Near East in favour of Israel.
Contrary to a widely-held belief, the Brotherhood was not happy about following the Brzeziński plan – it was looking further afield. It had obtained the assistance of Riyadh and Washington for the creation of other branches of the Brotherhood in other countries – branches that were to come to fruition later on. The King of Arabia granted an average of $5billion annually to the Muslim World League, which extended its activities in 120 countries and financed various wars. As a point of reference, $5 billion was the equivalent of the military budget of North Korea. The League obtained advisory status for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and the post of observer for UNICEF.
In Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Army Chief of Staff, trained at Fort Bragg in the United States, overthrew President Zulfikar Alî Bhutto and had him hanged. A member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in other words the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, he went on to Islamise Pakistani society. The Sharia was progressively established – including the death penalty for blasphemy – and a vast network of Islamic schools was set up. It was the first time that the Brotherhood had been in power outside of Egypt.
In Iran, Brzeziński convinced the Shah to abdicate, and organised the return of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who defined himself as a “Shiite Islamist”. In his youth, in 1945, Khomeini had met Hasan al-Banna in Cairo, and convinced him not to exacerbate the Sunni/Shiite conflict. Later, he translated two books by Sayyid Qutb. The Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionaries agreed on social subjects, but not at all on political questions. Brzeziński realised his mistake the very day that the Ayatollah arrived in Teheran. Khomeini immediately went to pray at the tombs of the martyrs of the Shah’s régime, and called on the army to revolt against imperialism. Brzeziński committed a second error by sending Delta Force to save the US spies who were being held hostage in their embassy in Teheran. Even if he was able to hide from Western eyes the fact that these “diplomats” were actually spies, he made a laughing-stock of his soldiers with the failed mission “Eagle Claw”, and convinced the Pentagon that it was necessary to find a way of defeating Iran.
Brzeziński set up “Operation Cyclone” in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about 40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request [2]. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”, as US propaganda pretended.
The men of the Brotherhood came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from Israel [3] – officially their sworn enemy, but now their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA.
The Carter-Brzeziński strategy represented a change of scale [4]. Saudi Arabia, which up until then had been financing the Islamist groups, found itself tasked with managing the war funds for the fight against the Soviets. The general director of Saudi Intelligence, Prince Turki (son of King Faisal), became an indispensable personality for all the Western summits on Intelligence.
In the early phases, so many problems arose between the Afghans and Arabs that it was impossible to get them to fight together against the Communists. Prince Turki first sent the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam, the “Imam of Jihad”, to bring order to the Brotherhood, and run the Kabul office of the Muslim World League, but the office did not do well and was closed. Azzam was then succeeded by billionaire Osama Ben Laden. Both of them had been trained in Saudi Arabia by Sayyid Qutb’s brother.
During Carter’s term, the Muslim Brotherhood also undertook a long campaign of terror in Syria, including the assassination, by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Fighting Vanguard”, of non-Sunni cadets at the Military Academy of Aleppo. The “Vanguard” were able to use training camps in Jordan, where the British handled their military instruction. During these “Years of Lead”, the CIA managed to broker an alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the small group of ex-Communists under Riyadh al-Turk. He and his Syrian dissident friends, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo, had split with Moscow during the Lebanese civil war to support the Western camp. They affiliated themselves with the US Trotskyist group, Social Democrats USA. Together, the three men drew up a manifesto in which they affirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood formed the new proletariat, and that Syria could only be saved by US military intervention. Finally, the Brotherhood attempted a coup d’état in Syria in 1982, with the support of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party (which was collaborating with Washington against Iran) and Saudi Arabia. The combats which followed at Hama caused 2,000 deaths according to the Pentagon, 40,000 according to the Brotherhood and the CIA.
After that, hundreds of prisoners were slaughtered in Palmyra by the brother of President Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat, who was dismissed and forced into exile in Paris when he attempted, in his turn, a coup d’état against his own brother. The Trotskyists were imprisoned, and most members of the Brotherhood fled either to Germany (home of ex-Syrian Guide Issam al-Attar), or to France (like Abu Musab the Syrian). Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand granted them asylum. Two years later, a scandal broke out within the opposition – which was in exile at the moment of division – $3 million had disappeared out of an envelope of $10 million donated by the Muslim World League.
Towards the constitution of an Internationale for jihad
During the 1980’s, the Muslim World League received instructions from Washington to transform Algerian society. Over a period of ten years, Riyadh paid for the construction of mosques in the villages of Algeria. Each time, a dispensary and a school were built alongside the mosques. The Algerian authorities were delighted with this assistance, especially since they were no longer able to guarantee the people’s access to health care and education. Progressively, the Algerian working classes distanced themselves from the state which was no longer much use to them, and grew ever closer to these generous mosques.
When Prince Fahd became the King of Saudi Arabia in 1982, he nominated Prince Bandar (son of the Minister for Defence) as ambassador to Washington, a post he retained for the duration of Fahd’s reign. His function was double – on one side, he looked after Saudi-US relations, on the other, he served as an interface between the Director of Turkish Intelligence and the CIA. He became friends with the vice-President and ex-Director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, who considered him as his “adopted son” (whence his nickname “Bandar Bush), then with Secretary for Defense Dick Cheney and the future Director of the CIA, George Tenet. He made his way into the social life of the elite and also had an entrée into the Christian cult of the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, called The Family, as well as the ultra-conservative Bohemian Club of San Francisco.
Bandar directed the jihadists from the Muslim World League. He negotiated with London for the purchase of weapons from British Aerospace for his kingdom, in exchange for oil. These record-breaking “pigeon” contracts, in Arabic “Al Yamamah”, would cost Riyadh between 40 and 83 billion pounds sterling, of which an important part would be transferred to the Prince by the British. A corruption and fraud scandal arose, but was suppressed by the Saudi and British governments.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan entrusted Carl Gershman, ex-leader of the aforementioned Trotskyites, Social Democrats USA, with the directorship of the new National Endowment for Democracy [sic] [5]. This was an agency which depended on the “Five Eyes” agreement, camouflaged as a NGO. It was the legal window for the secret services of Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Gershman had already worked with his Trotskyist comrades and his Muslim Brotherhood friends in Lebanon, Syria and Afghanistan. He set up a vast network of associations and foundations that the CIA and MI6 used to help the Brotherhood wherever possible. He pledged allegiance to the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, which basically states that all alliances are justified so long as they serve the interests of the United States (against its rivals, who are ipso facto “totalitarians”.
In this context, the CIA and MI6, who, at the peak of the Cold War, had created the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), used this organisation to supply the necessary funds for the jihad in Afghanistan. Oussama Ben Laden belonged to the organisation, which included several Heads of State [6]
In 1985, the United Kingdom, faithful to its tradition of academic expertise, equipped itself with an institute tasked with studying Muslim societies and the ways in which the Brotherhood could influence them – the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
In 1989, the Brotherhood succeeded in perpetrating a second coup d’état, this time in Sudan, on behalf of Colonel Omar el-Bechir, who wasted no time in nominating the local Guide, Hassan al-Turabi, as President of the National Assembly. In a conference held in London, al-Turabi announced that his country was going to become the rear base for all the Islamist groups in the world.
Also in 1989, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) arose in Algeria, based around Abbasi Madani, while the party in power collapsed under the weight of numerous scandals. The FIS was supported by the mosques “gifted” by the Saudis, and as a result, by the Algerian people who had been frequenting them for a decade. FIS won the local elections, due more to rejection of the country’s leaders than by belief in the ideology of FIS. Considering the failure of the politicians and the categorical impossibility of negotiating with the Islamists, the army carried out a coup d’état and cancelled the elections. The country sank into a long and murderous civil war about which we knew very little, but which claimed more than 150,000 victims. The Islamists did not hesitate to practise both individual and collective punishments, for example when they massacred the inhabitants of Ben Talha – guilty of having voted despite the fatwa forbidding them to do so – and destroyed the village. Evidently, Algeria served as a laboratory for new operations. The rumour spread that it was the army, not the Islamists, who had massacred the villagers. In reality, several senior officers from the secret services, who had been trained in the United States, joined the Islamists and spread confusion.
In 1991, Osama Bin Laden, who returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero of the anti-Communist struggle at the end of the war in Afghanistan, officially fell out with the King, while the “Sururists”, or followers of Sheikh Surur, rose up against the monarchy. This insurrection, the “Islamic Awakening”, lasted for four years, and ended with the imprisonment of the principal leaders. It showed the monarchy – who imagined that they enjoyed total authority – that by mixing religion and politics, the Brotherhood had created the conditions for a revolt via the mosques.
In this context, Osama Bin Laden claimed that he had proposed the aid of a few thousand veterans of the Afghan war to fight Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but astonishingly, the King seemed to prefer a million soldiers from the US and their allies. Allegedly as a result of this disagreement, Bin Laden left for exile in Sudan – but in reality, his mission was to regain control of the Islamists who had escaped the authority of the Brotherhood and had risen up against the Saudi monarchy. With Sudan’s Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, he organised a series of popular pan-Arab and pan-Islamic conferences, to which he invited the representatives of Islamist and Nationalist movements from about fifty countries. The aim was to create, at the party level, the equivalent of what Saudi Arabia had already succeeded in doing with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which brought States together. The participants did not know that these meetings were paid for by the Saudis, and that the hotels where they met were under CIA surveillance. Everyone participated, from Yasser Arafat to the Lebanese Hezbollah.
The FBI managed to convict the BCCI, a gigantic Muslim bank which had become, over time, the bank used by the CIA for its secret operations, particularly the financing of the war in Afghanistan – but also the narco-traffic in Latin America [7]. When the BCCI was declared bankrupt, its smaller clients were not reimbursed, but Osama Bin Laden managed to recover $1.4 billion to continue the Muslim Brotherhood’s work for Washington. The CIA then transferred its activities to the Faysal Islamic Bank and its subsidiary, Al-Baraka.
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Did CIA Director William Casey really say, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"?
Answered 241w ago · Upvoted by Mark Berger, former Legislative aide for a United States Senator.
I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration.
The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the 'intelligence' that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines.
As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public. Barbara Honegger
