For nearly five decades, America's role in the military coup that ousted Iran's elected prime minister and returned the shah to power has been lost to history, the subject of fierce debate in Iran and stony silence in the United States.
The CIA said a number of records of the operation -- its first successful overthrow of a foreign government -- had been destroyed.But a copy of the CIA's secret history of the coup has surfaced, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979 and for a generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East's most powerful countries.
The document, which remains classified, discloses the pivotal role that Britain played in plotting the coup, and it shows that Washington and London shared an interest in maintaining the West's control over Iranian oil.
The secret history, written by the CIA's chief coup planner and obtained by The New York Times, says the operation's success was mostly a matter of chance. The document shows that the CIA had almost complete contempt for the man it was empowering, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, whom it derided as a vacillating coward. And it recounts, for the first time, the agency's tortured efforts to seduce and cajole the shah into taking part in his own coup.
The operation was the blueprint for later CIA plots to foment coups and destabilize governments -- including the successful coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the disastrous Cuban intervention known as the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Such operations have led to the same kind of long-term animosity toward the United States that occurred in Iran.
The history says that CIA officers orchestrating the Iran coup worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers, hand-picked the prime minister's replacement, sent envoys to bolster the shah's courage, directed a campaign of bombings by Iranians posing as Communist Party members, and planted articles and cartoons in newspapers.
But on that night in August 1953 that was set for Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh's overthrow, almost nothing went according to the meticulously drawn plans, the secret history says. In fact, CIA officials were poised to flee the country when several Iranian officers recruited by the agency, acting on their own, took command of a pro-shah demonstration in Tehran and seized the government.
Two days after the coup, the history discloses, CIA officials funneled $5 million to Iran to help the government they had installed consolidate power.
The outlines of the U.S. role in the coup were disclosed in Iran at the outset and later in the memoirs of CIA officers and other published accounts. But many specifics have remained classified, and the secret history obtained by The New York Times is the first detailed government account of the coup to be made public.
Two directors of central intelligence, Robert Gates and R. James Woolsey, vowed to declassify records of the agency's early covert actions, including the Iran coup. But the CIA said three years ago that a number of relevant documents had been destroyed in the 1960s.
A CIA spokesman said Friday that the agency had retained about 1,000 pages of documents related to the coup, in addition to the history and an internal account written later. He said the papers destroyed in the early 1960s were duplicates and a portion of the working files.
The secret history, along with operational assessments written by coup planners, was provided to The Times by a former official who kept a copy.
It was written in March 1954 by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, one of the leading planners.
Wilber's subsequent memoirs were heavily censored by the CIA, but he was allowed to refer to the existence of his secret history. "If this history had been read by the planners of the Bay of Pigs," he wrote, "there would have been no such operation."
The coup was a turning point in modern Iranian history and remains a persistent irritant in Tehran-Washington relations. It consolidated the power of the shah, who ruled with an iron hand for another quarter century in close contact with the United States. In January 1979, he was toppled and driven from Iran in in a revolution led by Islamic militants.
In November 1979, demonstrators seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, took diplomats and other embassy personnel hostage and declared that they had unmasked a "nest of spies" who had been manipulating Iran for decades. The hostages were held for more than 14 months.
The Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini supported terrorist attacks against U.S. interests largely because of the long U.S. history of supporting the shah. Even under more moderate rulers, many Iranians still resent the United States' role in the coup and its support of the shah.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in an address in March, acknowledged the coup's pivotal role in the troubled relationship and came closer to apologizing than any U.S. official ever has before.
"The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons," she said. "But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."