A Progressive Fundraiser for the CIA
If you believe the CIA (and who doesn't?), Mohammad Mosaddeq was deposed as Prime Minister of Iran in 1953 by a handful of brilliant CIA operatives operating in Tehran on a shoe-string budget.
This nonsense is based on a classified "report" (by the otherwise obscure Dr. Donald N. Wilber), which James Risen published in the New York Times way back in April, 2000, and it periodically resurfaces in the progressive blogosphere as a tool for terrifying progressive children with the CIA bogeyman! A current post on Booman Tribune is the most recent example.
Dr. Wilber was on the scene in Tehran with the CIA super-spy Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, a master of disguises and assumed identities who periodically shouted "Oh Roosevelt!" at himself, even though he was operating under the name of "James Lockridge."
The report chronicled gruesome details of the events in 1953: how, by spending a meager sum of $1 million, the CIA "stirred up considerable unrest in Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability and supporting the shah"; how it brought "the largest mobs" into the street; how it "began disseminating 'gray propaganda' passing out anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering articles in local press"; how the CIA's "Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with 'savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh'"; how the "house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists"; how the CIA tried to "orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism"; how on August 19 "a journalist who was one of the agency's most important Iranian agents led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set fire to the offices of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mossadegh's foreign minister"; how American agents swung "security forces to the side of the demonstrators"...
According to Dr. Wilber's crazy claims, the CIA must be the most incredibly brilliant bunch of spies in the history of the world.
For a mere $1 million, they made the whole nation of Iran dance like monkeys!
Huge mobs flooded the streets!
Muslim leaders panicked!
Opposition newspapers were destroyed!
Harharharhar!!!
So how did the CIA decline from a bunch of Supermen like Dr. Wilber and Kermit Roosevelt, and turn into those "slam dunk" clowns in Langley who can't find their butts with both hands?
Osama bin Laden was riding around Afghanistan on a white horse year after year, and our CIA Supermen couldn't hit him with cruise missiles, stealth bombers, hired assassins, or even so much as a rock!
And 8 years later, after spending hundreds of billions of dollars and with every conceivable high-tech big-ticket toy that the "intelligence community" ever even dreamed they wanted, the same 6'4" Arab attached to a kidney-dialysis machine is still wandering around somewhere, and those same CIA Supermen have absolutely no idea where that somewhere could be!
Harharharhar!!!
I originally posted a shorter version of this diary as a comment on Booman Tribune, where it immediately disappeared.
June 20, 2009 5:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've come to the conclusion that BooMan is none too bright.
June 21, 2009 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
And looked at al the benefits the United States has reaped as a result of Roosevelt's deft manipulation of Iranian domestic affairs. That $1 million has cost us now untolled billions and how many lives?
June 20, 2009 7:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Having NO faith in the CIA who knows what ever really happened anywhere...
June 20, 2009 7:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Telling a story and having nobody believe it because it flies in the face of everything they are told by a 'Free Press' owned by just a few companies...or isn't reported...that works.
Didn't you listen to Eisenhower or JFK ? Bad boyz, bad boyz...
Maybe you watched Nick Cage's movie about gun-running. Money makes the world go round. Following it is standard police procedure : reality fiction ?
June 20, 2009 7:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Convincing you that a known CIA asset, Osama bin Laden, planned and executed a perfect strike against America, making NORAD stand down in the process, is just as impressive as the Iranian coup in the 50's.
Convincing you that they have lost their touch is a big victory.
June 20, 2009 9:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, I almost got banned on Daily Kos for claiming it was Atta's plan before I got banned on Daily Kos for bashing Obama, although I managed to survive Kos' phobia about 9/11 conspiracy theories because my reading has one less layer of conspiracy in it than the standard account.
According to me, the plan was all Atta, an under-employed genius with advanced degrees in architecture and engineering, instead of a charismatic but not too bright rich kid from Saudi Arabia.
But you're right anyway...
It really would take a Superman at the CIA to convince me that Osama planned 9/11.
Harharharhar!!!
June 21, 2009 12:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have always loved the symbolism of '911'
Tell me that that was not planed by someone intimately familiar with American culture. Always gives me pause.
Interesting take on Kermit, thought provoking. I would point out that it wasn't just the CIA but also the brits and of course the Persian-Anglo Oil company (today's BP) who welded massive influence in the country. Those were the heady days of post colonialism and rampant societal upheaval. I would not really be surprised either way.
June 21, 2009 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the weird things about 9/11, a legacy of the Kennedy assassination, is that we're led to assume anyone who promotes a conspiracy theory about 9/11 is a fruitcake, even though the official accepted story about 9/11 is that it was a conspiracy. "My conspiracy, not *your* conspiracy".
One of William Safire's friends was Jay Epstein, who has some interesting articles about areas people don't much success, including the transfer of the De Beers cartel to Russia, and the fact that no one saw Mohammed Atta get on that plane in Boston, much less appear anywhere else.
Epstein's latest is whether Milken was "right", and it's obvious that Milken was right about quite a lot of things, such as who controls the ratings controls quite a lot. But who exactly is Milken? Well, Deep Capture is wading into this mix with its own exposé on Milken, and we'll see what comes out of those weeds - there last bits on naked short selling have been prett interesting. Let's just say, these are the days when conspiracies become so commonplace, it's hard to fathom the days when things didn't seem completely rigged, only 70% so. Could it be another Natalie Merchant hit?
June 21, 2009 4:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Epstein's site is like a black hole, and after I fell into it from your link, it was two or three hours until I got back.
Shouldn't that guy be running the New York Times?
June 21, 2009 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
well, if you were actually a competent secret executor of secret foreign policy and you wanted to avoid the oversight that is essential to the life of a democratic republic, appearing to be a rerun of the Three Stooges may not be the worst thing that ever happened to an outfit.
Or, to put it another way: The attempt to depose Castro during the Bay Of Pigs didn't work. The CIA became more powerful after that, not less.
When surveying the "blowback" of the cold war, the obvious method to understand how these operations went forward is to follow the money. But that is not easy. The money is funny.
Police raise an eyebrow or two when an enterprise fails and the investors are still rich.
The question to ask is not how capable these people are but who do they work for?
June 20, 2009 10:26 PM | Reply | Permalink