Report shows how MI6 was given free hand in 1953 Iran coup
Mobsters running riot on the streets of the Iranian capital Tehran amid a UK- and US-backed August 1953 coup against the country’s first-ever democratic government
Press TV – August 3, 2020
A report shows how an MI6 intelligence officer was allowed to spend as much money as he desired to overthrow Iran’s first democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq and restore the Pahlavi regime in 1953.
“My brief was very simple,” said the officer, Norman Darbyshire, according to transcripts censored out of the 1980s Granada documentary, titled “End of Empire,” The Guardian revealed in a report on Sunday. “Go out there, don’t inform the ambassador, and use the intelligence service for any money you might need to secure the overthrow of Mosaddegh by legal or quasi-legal means,” the transcript went on.
The MI6 officer, who died in 1993, goes on to explain that he spent “vast sums of money, well over a million-and-a-half pounds,” adding, “I was personally giving orders and directing the street uprising.”
The Iranian premier, Mosaddeq had played a key role in the country’s 1951 movement that resulted in the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which had been mainly controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), now known as BP.
“[Former British] Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposed the rule of the country’s first democratic leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, largely because it threatened Britain’s interests in Iran’s oil industry,” The Guardian likewise notes.
In August 1953, the British intelligence agency and its American counterpart, the CIA, initiated the coup by the Iranian military, setting off a series of events, including riots on the streets of the capital Tehran, which led to the overthrow and arrest of Mosaddeq.
The coup, which was followed by the temporary rule of CIA- and MI6-approved General Fazlollah Zahedi, enabled the monarch, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi’s return from exile in Italy. It also consolidated the monarch’s rule for the following 26 years until the victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, led by Imam Khomeini, which toppled the Pahlavi regime.
Mosaddeq, who was convicted of treason by a court martial after the coup, served three years in solitary confinement and eventually died under house arrest in exile in 1967.
The historic overthrow, though, is still given as a reason for the Iranians’ mistrust of the UK and the US.
The censored transcript of the MI6 officer Darbyshire’s remarks was discovered by Taghi Amirani, a film director, who used it in a documentary that was released last August under the title “Coup 53.”
“Coup 53 now makes a clear case that the British were orchestrating an uprising, going as far as kidnapping, torturing, and paying for protesters to go out on to the streets of Tehran,” The Guardian writes.
“This coup shaped not only western relations with Iran for 60 years, but changed the Middle East. Imagine if there had been a democracy there,” Amirani was quoted by the paper as saying.
Experts say the upheaval, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad Coup, was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the West’s oil interests in the country.
The MI6 and CIA’s role was first revealed in a 1985 news story by The Observer, The Guardian’s sister paper, but the report was suppressed. Nor did the “End of Empire” series get to feature either Darbyshire or his testimony.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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