 Okay. On the 19th of August 1978 in southern Iran, in the city of Abaddon, someone jammed closed the doors of a movie theater, the Cinema Rex, and set the theater on fire. It may have been Islamic radicals who did it. It may have been the Shah's secret police, the Savak. It maybe was a combination of both, but nearly 400 died. The date was significant. It was the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-led coup, Operation Ajax, which had overthrown the independence-minded prime minister of Iran, Mohamed Mosaddegh, in 1953, and facilitated the authoritarian regime of Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. Whoever was responsible for the deaths at the Cinema Rex, religious radicals or secret police, they chose the date for a reason. And they chose the place, too. Abaddon was a symbol of the powerlessness of Iran, vis-à-vis British control, just as Mosaddegh was a symbol of resistance to this power and the quest for an independent, moderate Iran. The vast refinery city of Abaddon was the heart of the Anglo-Iranian oil company, a consortium which had been at the very center of Iranian political life for 40 years. The very dynasty of the Shah, the Pahlavi, had replaced the old Qajar regime with the help of the British, who saw in the first Pahlavi Shah Reza a tough guy who could enforce the famous 1919 Anglo-Persian oil agreement which fueled the Royal Navy and, in fact, most of the empire. Yet the British helped the Soviets invade Iran during World War II, partly because their man had turned toward the Nazis. The Allies put his son on the throne then, and the new Shah, Mohamed Reza, proved pliable and pro-British after the war. But in 1951, the Iranians elected a Prime Minister who, with the backing of the Iranian parliament, took back southern Iran and its British-controlled resources by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian oil company. The British were furious. After a blockade of Iran, the British finally persuaded the Americans to stage a coup, and the Americans did. At the time of the Iranian Revolution, now scroll forward to 1979, President Jimmy Carter was asked about this American-led coup 25 or 26 years before, and he dismissed it then in 1979 as ancient history. Well, it's this ancient history that I want to talk about today, and ancient history or not, it represents, in my view, a historical tragedy. At present, Iran has become, apparently, the next target of opportunity for the American Empire, a kind of great Satan in reverse. Hence, the story is especially timely. I think it's been told many times, and my talk is not so much a reconstruction of the whole thing, but a short narrative of it, and then a somewhat longer comment on its meaning. Okay, in 1951, this 69-year-old Iranian aristocrat, Mohamed Mossadegh, became Prime Minister and promptly led the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, in nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, which had previously been in the hands of the Anglo-Iranian oil company, a consortium that was controlled directly by the British government, not just by British companies, but by the British government itself. Mossadegh was a constitutional lawyer and a statesman who headed the national front, and that was a loose coalition united by anti-British feeling and, to some extent, opposition to the Shah, whom they thought of as a creature of the British. The new Prime Minister was a hard-nosed constitutionalist, a famous truth-teller to those in power, and a person who many modern Iranians compare, these days now, to Gandhi. His sense of humor and his personal quirks were used against him by his enemies, but they added to his charisma for many people. The National Front's goal of greater independence for Iran found real embodiment in opposition to this dominant oil industry, or the domination of the industry by an imperial power, which not only fueled its empire and made huge profits on Iranian oil, but for the pittance that it gave back, most of that went to the Shah and kept him in power. The British didn't take nationalization lying down, and to fight back, they did everything from financing anti-Mossadegh journals and depressing Iran to recruiting Iranian agents who were to organize a pro-British movement to challenging nationalization through the UN and the international courts system. They also blockaded the port of Abaddon so that what oil could be produced couldn't be shipped even by third-party shippers. So Iran's income plummeted, though to tell the truth, Mossadegh was a fiscal conservative who kept the government running in the black and without too much inflation throughout the two years of the blockade. From almost the moment of nationalization, the British began urging the United States to help overthrow Mossadegh and install a pro-British government, arguing that Mossadegh was a strange unhinged radical politician and that the Iranian communist would be the likely successors to his shaky regime. But the Truman administration refused. For one thing, there was this residual anti-colonialism that still lingered in the Democratic Party at that time. For another, the Atchison State Department did fear communists but wanted to bolster Iran in the Cold War as a front-line state by means of loans and foreign aid and keep him as the frontman. In fact, Mossadegh was welcomed on a much heralded trip to the United States where he spoke at the UN and sought to influence international opinion in Iran's favor. Further, the U.S. sent Averill Harriman to Tehran and London as a special envoy to arrange a compromise but the British would not budge. Eisenhower became the American president in the election in November of 52 and British officials immediately saw an opportunity and renewed efforts to gain America and help in overthrowing Mossadegh. A journalist, Stephen Kinzer, has recounted this campaign at length in his very good book, All the Shaw's Men. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead in early 1953 in a memo which was highly significant in laying out the Cold War basis of further American policy. He said, Mossadegh must be removed because the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, might overthrow him and gain control of Iran and that Mossadegh's credentials as a legitimate leader must be subordinated to the problem of the Soviet threat. The American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles and his brother Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, took charge of the plan. Most immediately, however, the man responsible was Kermit Roosevelt, a young CIA official, head of the Middle East desk in the CIA and Teddy Roosevelt's grandson. As early as 52, Roosevelt had been planning Mossadegh's ouster privately or in his spare moments, coordinating with the American ambassador in Iran, Lloyd Henderson. He also had the addition later on in 52 of a network of British intelligence agencies and their Iranian assets. Alan Dulles granted Roosevelt something in excess of a million dollars to support press opposition to the National Front bribe, Iranian politicians, higher street level gangs, and so forth. On August 16, 1953, after weeks of coordinated press attacks, Roosevelt unleashed the coup, featuring riots, plans for the arrests of unreliable officials, other skull-duggery, all of which were supposed to be a prelude to the arrest opposing of Mossadegh. In the event, however, the coup of August 1516 simply failed. Certain arrests didn't take place, certain groups in opposition to Mossadegh were quieted down, some plotters were arrested, that kind of thing, and so it just failed. Yet in spite of orders to leave, and to leave Tehran as fast as possible, Roosevelt decided to try again. Three days later, he did so, and this time, on August 19, 1953, the coup succeeded. After much bloodshed in the streets of Tehran, Mossadegh was deposed, eventually captured, put under house arrest for the rest of his life. He was replaced by General Fazlullah Zahadi, and the United States rapidly made a new oil agreement, cutting in the British and other foreign interests, giving the Shah and the Iranian government a more generous share, but also handing 40% of the consortium to American oil companies, and ensuring that in the process that the communist Tudeh party in Iran would always have the Shah persecuting it through the American trained security police, the Savak. Well, that's the outline. As historian, I think that this case study is of tremendous historical significance, and I think that it resonates in many directions. It puts the exclamation point on that 20th century exchange and pecking order between the British and the Americans. It shows that even the constitutionalist, moderate, almost libertarian politics of Mossadegh must be trumped by the great struggle with the Soviets, a struggle supposedly about freedom. It is a tragedy that, in effect, skewed social relations and cultural conditions in Iran, and led directly to the rise of the fundamentalist regime of Khomeini. That is to say it set up Iran for an increasingly harsh dictatorship that led directly to the 79 revolution, which brought Islamist dictatorship in its own right, state terror tied to fundamentalist versions of Islam, indeed, in some sense, prefiguring a piece of modern Middle Eastern history. So I would like to spend the remaining moments of my time today analyzing another crucial aspect, another way that this historical event resonates. The overthrow of Mossadegh is also a special case for us in this. It shows us that the state and its minions have the ability to form objectives and carry out a complicated plan to success. Now, this might seem obvious to many in this room, maybe most in this room, yet in terms of mainstream thinking, many observers in academia, the press, indeed, experts and elite operatives at many levels, are dismissive of the very idea that a historical convulsion on this scale might come about because it was planned and executed. Let me illustrate what I mean. A friend and colleague of mine was doing research in southern Europe a few years back, and while there he constantly heard common people all around him blame the CIA for this problem or that problem in their country, the leaking pipes, the traffic in the streets. A colleague told me, well, I knew the CIA was too incompetent to carry out 90% of the conspiracies they were blamed for. Now, I mean, this was a joke, but I think the comment is illustrative of a whole mindset of Middle America, mainstream academia, mainstream news and so forth. Things just happen. Plans go awry. Big events, big convulsions happen because of big historical forces based on millions of decisions, not by conspiracy or plan or plot or cabal. This thinking is almost a precept to mainstream academics, and it's also in the minds of many people who are moderate liberals or conservatives, the socially respectable middle, possibly even the average person in the West. Radicals on both right and left on the far ends speak often of conspiracies, but the broad middle of modern opinion I think sees it differently. To my mind, this is a crucial issue, and it's especially important for those of us who adhere to something like the praxeology of Mises to the paleo-libertarian revisionist school of history. As revisionists, we pay attention to rational choices by persons and groups, and when we find, for example, that a small group of men start a war, we look at the larger picture, certainly, but we also look at those men and their plans if we can get at them, if we have the historical evidence. We know, of course, that plans do go awry in ordinary paths of life and, hence, logically, in extraordinary paths of life. I'm thinking here not of conspiracy theories from the fringe of the extreme right and left, but of many of the ideas central to revisionist history, that FDR wanted to get into the war, for example, that the Cold War was used as a cover for creating a more powerful state, for example, or the Higgsian idea that great crises are often used by the state to extend its reach. Now, back to the topic. I think that this case tells us much about the ability of a state-related elite to make a plan affecting millions of people, finance its stage, manage its preparations, and carry it out, and I think that our most, that our really extensive knowledge about this case is truly fortuitous. It's almost accidental. What we know about the Mosedek plot is from the standpoint of the historian surprising. We know not only about how the CIA planned a specific nationwide operation to overthrow the government, but also how the game plan was structured. Some parts of AJAX were unsure, hit or miss, subject to Murphy's law, but it worked in the end. It required accounting for all the contingencies in thinking through plan A, plan B, plan C, and maybe plan D, and it failed in the first attempt, but it succeeded on the second. Anti-Mosedek sentiment in various sectors of Iranian society did in fact make it easier to foment to engineer this coup d'etat, but the CIA provided the blueprints, the money, and the know-how. How do we know all this? Well, a couple of accidents ended up revealing many of not all the details. The first was an accident of personality. The CIA officer overseeing the Middle East operations was, as I've said, Kermit Roosevelt, 37-year-old grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, who possessed something of his grandfather's outlook and personality. Roosevelt had been keeping an eye on Iran, deciding that as he later said, quote, Mosedek was stealing Iran little by little, and the Soviet Union would gain control unless the Iranian people, Armenian people, could be dramatically warned of what was happening. They were, in my opinion, overwhelmingly loyal to the Shah and would rally to his support. It was, it was Roosevelt's can-do attitude that caused him to travel to Tehran and enthusiastically oversee the coup preparations personally. When the coup went awry on the first attempt on August 15th, the same attitude led him to insist on staying in Tehran to try, try again. When the coup succeeded on August 19th and 20th, he was ebullient. It was a great victory for his innate, his innate understanding of the benevolent American big stick. He clearly considered it later in life as one of his most important personal achievements. Yet he dutifully kept his covert victory a secret until the climate was right and until the 1979 Iranian Revolution was underway. The Shah, by this time, had for a long time been represented and accepted in the United States as a fast friend and a great modernizer of his country. He was a celebrity in America, often noted for his presence at international jet set parties in Houston and New York. So when this revolution of anti-American Shia radicals burned the shah and effigy and called the United States the Great Satan, it no doubt seemed like the perfect time for Kermit Roosevelt to tell the story of his big adventure. His memoir, Counter-Coup, appeared at about the time the shah actually fell. Shortly thereafter, in an interview in the Los Angeles Times in July 1980, Roosevelt further emphasized the central role of the Americans in overthrowing Mossadeg. By the time of the interview, by the way, the hostage crisis was underway and you can imagine the meaning of this self-congratulatory interview in the LA Times for the relatives of Americans who were hostages in Tehran. Well, a conjunction of factors led Roosevelt, I think, to reveal more secrets was perhaps wise. Some other important American participants followed suit or at least followed the same trajectory. So the outlines of the story were established in 1979-80, but a group of tenacious scholars and journalists took it from there for a variety of reasons, perhaps the trauma of the 1979 revolution, a group of American academics and investigative reporters, some of them Iranian in origin, zeroed in on the story in the wake of Roosevelt's revelations. Most of the official sources were, of course, highly secret, but this group, one by one, launched freedom of information act cases winning access to various documents. The most active of these scholars was historian Mark Gashorovsky of LSU. Eventually in 1985, many of these scholars and a number of prominent investigative journalists band-banded together to found the National Security Archive housed at George Washington University. The archive went online in the 90s and now offers the largest non-governmental online collection of declassified official documents in the world, I suppose except for WikiLeaks, which are declassified informally. For years the group had organized pressure on the CIA to release the documents from the coup, but many were reported destroyed. Some were simply held back. One document known by researchers to exist was an internal CIA history of the coup, written by the coup's principal planner, Donald Wilbur. In early 1954, he had done the departmental history of the project and issued it then. The CIA had made promises to release this document in the 90s, but after the release was canceled again and again and again, the National Security Archive lodged a suit, a lawsuit in 99, winning its case the following year. However, in the intervening period, the Wilbur history was leaked to the New York Times, which published at Peace Meal in 2000. For all the evidence that we know was destroyed within the CIA and we know that a lot was, it is astounding that this report surfaced. You can now read this secret history on the Internet. Much of the story that Wilbur told had already been excavated by historians and journalists, in particular by Professor Gusherovsky, but the full details added more to the picture, and this full picture is quite instructive for us as we follow this theme. In it, in the picture, we see that Kermit Roosevelt's agents built on years of work by the British and their agents, in particular, two high-rolling Iranian brothers named Rashidian. The British also developed potential replacements for Mossadak once their hoped for coup was accomplished. Once the Americans took over the project beginning in November 1952, they used this British knowledge and personnel base, and the CIA-led measures began immediately. As mentioned above, Mossadak certainly had his own homegrown opponents to worry about, but the foreign intervention accelerated and strengthened the opposition, extending it to the poorest sections of Tehran. American, British, and Iranian individuals spread millions of American dollars to generate much violence in the streets on the days of the coup. Wilbur's history confirms that agents of the United States organized these riots, bribed high-ranking officials, chose the successor of Mossadak, directed military units when and where to intervene. The CIA directed the Shah's American-trained secret police to arrest lists of potential Mossadak supporters. The CIA commissioned the organization of riots, forged indigenous documents, as they call them, arranged the bombing of prominent Iranian clerics with false flag marks on them to make the bombers appear to be somehow sponsored by Mossadak. American assets bribed high-ranking officials and set up the machinery of the storming of Mossadak's home and his arrest. Wilbur's internal CIA account tells us quite openly of the planting of newspaper articles, not just in the Iranian press, but also in the American press, Newsweek, and other outlets. Roosevelt's coup plan involved replacing Mossadak with General Faisalullah Zahedi, thought to be a reliable partner by the Americans, though, like others who eventually ended up in the post-Mossadak regime, Zahedi had been imprisoned by the British during World War II for his Nazi sympathies. Throughout the period before the coup, Roosevelt relied on the talents of Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., who had trained both the Iranian gendarmerie and the original recruits in the Shah's secret police, the Savak. After Allen Dulles flew to be with the wavering Shah in Rome, who had gone on vacation just before the coup for his own safety, Dulles flew, helped him fly back to Tehran, and it was Schwarzkopf himself who succeeded in getting the hesitant Shah to sign a number of decrees, including the illegal decree to depose Mossadak and appoint a new prime minister without reference to the parliament. And yet, after all these calculations, as we've seen, had Kermit Roosevelt not decided to try again against the odds, the second day of the rioting and violence would probably not have occurred. Hence, Dulles, Roosevelt, and others produced layers of plans covering contingencies at all levels. They had to neutralize Mossadak's government, sabotage every part of the political process, bribe, lie, and much more. We can take a genuine lesson from all this, I think. Plans by well-financed elites with support from the state can achieve their goals, or at the very least, can push forward toward a range of suitable outcomes and settle for one of those. And when the plans succeed, the successful planners often repeat. Hence, in the case of the United States imperial apparatus, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Guiana, Cuba, well, that one didn't work. But then the planners changed the plan slightly and moved ahead in a slightly different direction, with a slightly different mode. The point is that the modern state empire can and does both propose and dispose. Those who dismiss clandestine plots as historical improbability are simply not being objective or rational. This doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory is true, as Murray Rothbard once said jokingly, just most of them. Actually, in his brief essay, The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited, Rothbard makes some brief but profound distinctions about evidence, research, questions, and more. It's well worth reading. One way or the other, in the context I've outlined above, the hard evidence for this one just happened to survive. A postscript to this lesson of the Iran coup is this. Whatever else modern empire is about, it is certainly about personal aggrandizement. In his secret CIA history, coup planner Donald Wilbert admires how wonderfully committed the participating agents were from an ideological standpoint. He paints them all as true believers. Kermit, Roosevelt, and others gave the same opinion. Yet not surprisingly, in spite of their status as true believers, many of the participants gained quite materially from the results of the plot. The Americans had stood by and watched as the British oil monopoly was broken up, then unceded Mosadek, and forged a new oil agreement guaranteeing American companies a 40% share. Kermit Roosevelt himself, CIA ramrod of the coup, left the CIA not long after, ended up working for Gulf oil, one of the companies in the Iranian consortium. Richard Helms, as head of the Dirty Tricks Division of the CIA, had helped in the planning. He was much later in 1973 welcomed to Iran by his old friend the Shah as US ambassador, just as he retired from his previous post as director of the CIA. In conclusion, the Mosadek coup contains many lessons for us, and the one I've concentrated on today is that this was a tragedy that impacts us to the present that makes the United States and Britain complicit in the creation of conditions for violence and conflict extending even to today. We can think back to the beginning violence of the Cinema Rex Theater in Abaddon, a case of terrorism that ended 400 Iranian lives on the anniversary of a coup that cost a similar number of Iranian lives paid for by American taxpayers. And many more deaths would come and not only those of Iranians by any means, it is certainly the case based on the extraordinary evidence available to us that this was a tragedy that was quite explicitly engineered. Thank you.