 Right, so you're in Santa Monica. I'm in Venice, yes. So, welcome everyone. This is Jodi Evans. I'm the co-founder of Code Pink and this is another in our webinars to help, you know, U.S. citizens understand what their government has done to Iran and how we led up to this moment that was almost World War Three a week ago and I'm really excited because I have Taghi Amarani as our guest today and he is the director of COO53, a documentary that he made over 10 years about the COO in Iran in 1953, a COO that the United States government CIA named Operation Ajax. Ajax like the cleanser to cleanse out a democratically elected leader Iran. Taghi, could you start by telling us where you are right now? Right, you happen to be talking to me at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Some might argue that the belly of the devil, I'm here very short notice because one of the funders of the firm is hosting a hub, a startup hub and I happen to be one of the projects she's supported and she said you should come and show your film here. So I got on a plane at short notice and I find myself in a school hall, in a secondary school who's kindly offered to host the screening for the Davos delegates. How many will show up? Is anyone on the guest? There are thousands of parties happening here every night, every hour. So this is a challenge for the firm, the choices between Champagne and Caviar and a documentary by the 1953 COO. But a very pivotal moment that 1953 COO because when you think about like even the balance of powers Iran is kind of between these two powers that were forming in 1953 and maybe start by telling us why do you think the United States wanted to overthrow a democratically elected leader of Iran? Okay, so some context here is critical. Harry Truman, President Truman said there's nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. This is the history that a lot of people don't know and there are a lot of myths and false information. Because in the absence of real evidence and documentary evidence and papers, you try and piece things together. One of the misconceptions about this COO is that it was just an American COO. It was just a CIA COO. It wasn't. It was actually masterminded and triggered and created and planned by the British. This was very much a British operation where the Americans joined in later. But it has for the last 66 years been known as the CIA COO. Our film turns that story inside out. Our film has got new explosive evidence, documents and interviews and material that really tells the story of this COO in a new way, in a very revelatory way that puts the whole thing into context. It gives you an idea of who was responsible, how it happened, why it happened. Of course, oil was at the heart of the story. When is oil never at the heart of the story when it comes to the Middle East? We were joking the other day that if Iran and Iraq only exported turnips, we wouldn't be there. This is not my line. This is the line from the great journalist Robert Fisk that I heard him say in one of the meetings I attended. So it was always about Iran's oil and the control of Iran's oil. Iran's oil was controlled by the British. The Anglo-Iranian oil company practically owned Iran's oil for over 50 years. And what became the turning point was the election of Prime Minister Musa Adek in 1951, purely on the ticket of nationalizing Iranian oil and ending that control, which triggered the anger and the resentment of Churchill, who believed Iranian oil was British oil. And he managed to lure in Eisenhower and the CIA to help his MI6 officers to overthrow Musa Adek and reinstall the Shah and put in a place, a military general as the Prime Minister. And our film tells that story in incredible detail, the most unbelievable documentary detail that we managed to put together over 10 years. Well, so it really was covert ops, though, that overthrew, that created the coup. And we're, you know, witnessing some of those same covert ops that took place in Bolivia, that was an effective coup also of a leader of the people that cared more about the people than about the profits of oil. But nationalizing oil, that would have been having a democracy and nationalizing oil would have been very important to Iran. Can you also talk about something else that happened then, which was, I believe, they used also sanctions during those two years. Is that true? Okay, so there are a lot of things that have to fall into place for Orc-Restricting a coup. And a lot of what we see today, we were blown away by the parallels of the events today with the story that we are telling from 1953. Putting sanctions and trying to strangulate a country's economy to bring it to its heels was done in 1953 by the British, but particularly they told everybody in the world, anyone who buys Iranian oil buys a lawsuit because to them, in fact, that was stolen oil. There were people who were buying Iranian oil, buying stolen British oil. So that was one thing that is happening now. Fake news was invented back in 1953. The CIA paid huge amounts of cash, buying up newspaper editors and columnists and journalists in Iran to put out propaganda against the prime minister, calling him a homosexual or a communist or a fanatic, crazy guy, and anything that would cut the destabilizes government. And in fact, Stephen Kinzer, brilliant author of Alder Shah's Men and A Great Journalist, whose features in our film said the CIA couldn't get enough material to get to the journalist. So they had somebody in Langley writing fake news and having it shipped to Tehran to be translated. Assassinating key allies, an army general who was very, very devoted to Mossadah and was this line of defense against the coup plotters. He was assassinated. Slow down and say that again. Sorry. Slow down and say that again. They assassinated a general, right? Mossadah appointed a chief of police, a general at that time, a general who was chief of police and was very loyal to him. And he was fighting against the coup plotters. He had secret information about the army officers who were plotting a coup with the CIA and MI6 agents. And they kidnapped him, strangled him, tortured him, tortured him and assassinated him and threw his body in the mountains north of Tehran. This was a way of destabilizing his government and taking out one of his allies in order to prepare the way for the overthrow. So, and there's a whole bunch of other information that has come to light during the making of the film. Because it took so long to make the film, we kind of had time to dig deeper. We went further than any other documentary researching footage, documents, books, papers, personal and public to put the story together. And how many people know that the Shah's secret service was in fact founded and trained by the CIA. As soon as they put him back in power in 1953, they realized that they needed to prop him up. This guy has been, you know, put him back in power. He needs support to stay in power. So they sent, in fact, we have an interview with the man who did it. The military intelligence officer whose job was to train the Shah's secret service is interviewed in our film, long dead, but we have the footage. And he talks about how, you know, he helped shape the SAVAC secret service. I grew up under SAVAC when I was a kid, a dear pre-revolution in Iran. So I kind of know that experience firsthand. My teachers were arrested frequently by the agents. So growing up in Iran under the Shah, you know, what were the politics like? How did people feel about the coup then? And then how did that feed in again to the destabilizing revolution and where we are now? Well, you can't understand the revolution and its aftermath and where we are with the mess we're in inside and outside Iran. You can't really understand that until you know the backstory. You know, victims never forget the victims move on. The scar, that kind of the resentment that was planted amongst Iranian people just kept bubbling away under the surface until it exploded in 1779. You can draw a direct line from 1753 to 1779. In fact, you know, one of the first portraits that was held up in placards on the streets in the lead-up to the revolution and after were portraits almost out there. He's still embodied and symbolized for Iranians a secular democracy, which is something they haven't had and are still struggling for. So when you say it led up to the revolution and now, so it caused the revolution, but what was it the revolution that people wanted? Yeah, it was a major factor. It was definitely a major factor. And the fact that it was very much an anti-American, you know, the death to America was invented in 1779, but it wasn't heard on the streets of Tehran for the first time in 1779. It was also heard back in 53, when the first attempt of the coup failed and the word got out that they were involved. But I have to keep stressing that this is not an American coup only. If there's the one thing that our film puts the record straight on is this was an Anglo-American coup. This was as much, if not more so, an MI6 coup which brought in the Americans. Churchill reached out to Truman first when Truman was still in office saying help us out. He would never say help us get our oil back. He said help us save Iran from communism. We need to save Iran from communism. They made a bogie man out of Russia. And so the fear of communism was the pretext for this. And Truman quite rightly said, no, we are not in the business of overthrowing governments. Iran has sovereignty, has to be respected. And in fact, he was even offering aid to Iran to solve its economic problems. But as soon as Eisenhower got in, even before he took office, even before he was inaugurated, the MI6 and CIA agents under the control and direction of Alan Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles started planning the coup. But MI6 could not have done this on their own because Mossad Dirk realized that this was found out, what was happening, and he kicked the British out. He shut down the British embassy and expelled everybody in the embassy, including the secret agency, were handing out the money and organizing the coup. And so in that situation, but they had no assets on the ground. They had nobody in Tehran anymore. They had to reach out to the Americans to help them out. So that's how the operation became a joint Anglo-American operation. Well, can you remind our audience who the Dulles brothers were under Eisenhower? John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles were two of the most powerful lawyers in America. They worked for this legendary firm, Sullivan and Crumble, which was more than just a law firm. It was the legal phase, the international phase of American corporations abroad. They could go and change entire face of nations with the power they wielded. Very murky history of Alan Dulles in the Second World War and his operations with OSS in Switzerland and elsewhere. So when Eisenhower became president, he elected John Foster Dulles as a Secretary of State and Alan Dulles as head of the CIA. So these are pretty powerful brothers and they got to work. They got to work even before taking office. And one of the big first projects was overthrowing Mossad Depp. And so they're buying the media. They've crushed them with sanctions. They've got covert ops. So they bought some, and you say that the, they bought some religious leader came into this. They found someone that they could pay, they could just create a mob in this, you know, tell a little bit about that. So they had several tools in their toolbox for this, for the screw. One was retired army officers who were on the payroll and were ready and willing. And retired army officers who were loyal to the Shah and were keen to help. That's one group. The journalists and columnist and newspaper editors who were easily bought and very willing to write propaganda to help the destabilization. Members of parliament were also bribed to, you know, put spanners in wrenching the works of the sort of parliamentary process. One or two religious leaders were involved because they had a mass following amongst the ordinary people in the bazaar. There was a renter mob, you know, the heavy guys that guys would get things done. You pay them, they get stuff done for you. And there's some very, very prominent business leaders who also had connections with both to the mob and the religious leaders. So it was a very good toxic mix that came together at the right time to pull off the coup. Incidentally, you have to know that the first attempt at the coup failed because the word got out and Mossad and his loyal officers who were guarding his house were ready for these people to show up and arrested them. And then the word got out and there was a mass protest in support of Mossad there. But, you know, in fact, it was under the direction of the MI6 agent, Norman Darbyshire, who was controlling and directing everything from Cyprus. He was the head of Iran Station from Cyprus to wireless and, you know, Wookiee Tokti's got the mob out to enforce to kind of have a second go. And that ended being the coup on the 19th of August. And of course, the Shah, the young Shah, was a critical character in all this because without his signature, without the royal decree, they couldn't go ahead. So he also kind of funded it or supported it and made it happen? Well, he gave, he wasn't so much funding it. He gave his signature. Symbolically, this had to look like it was a royal decree, an order from the Shah under the Constitution that could dismiss a prime minister and install another one. And so they had to get that signature from him to basically fire Mossad there and reappoint someone else. Okay, and then some for someone lost. Have you guys picked? Oh, there we are. You're back. And so one of the things I found interesting in your film was the end of the film, someone says, oh, how amazing these covert ops are awesome. We can use these to take over other governments. Do I remember that correctly? Well, the Operation Ajax, the coup in Iran in 1953 was a CIA kind of first covert action in a covert overthrow of a government. And as far as they were concerned, it went really well. It was quick. It was cheap. It was easy. No Americans died. So it was like, wow, we can do this again. We should emboldened them. And so they obviously went and pulled that off again in Guatemala the next year in 1954. And I thought, you know, we have a whole string of coups, you know, all the way to 1973 and Chile and, you know, how long have you got for the list? This sense of confidence was falsely created because the British suppressed the role. The MI6 man who was the mastermind and really was the critical fact guy in pulling this off wasn't allowed to speak. They didn't exist. He didn't exist. The operation didn't exist. The British were not involved, which gave free reign for Kermit Roosevelt, who was a CIA man in Tehran, to come back and overinflate his sense of achievement and the ease with which this was pulled off and pumped everybody up. He wrote books. He was on talk shows. He got a lot of deals. He got a lot of consultancies. He got a lot of good juicy relationships out of this role he had in the absence of the British acknowledgement and admitting their part. So had it been a different scenario, he wouldn't have been able to encourage the British and American government to go ahead and pull other things off in Latin America, starting with Guatemala. So that lie emboldened the US. We've lost your video again. Oh, good. So, you know, because of that for quite a long time, it was really seen as the US coup, because the US took credit for it and the CIA was front and center, which is a lot of why you see deaths for America in 53 and then again in 79. But talk to me about how Iranians feel about the United States right now, the people of Iran. Yeah, America not only kind of claimed credit for it, some documents have been released gradually over the years. In 2013, more papers came out that essentially was CIA admits its part on the sixth anniversary of the coup. And nobody has ever really apologized for it, but Obama has talked about it. He's acknowledged it in his big Cairo speech when he became president. He's reaching out to the Muslim world. Madeleine Albright has talked about it. Clinton has talked about it. I think Americans have acknowledged that it happened and they were involved. The British have not to this day. They have not. So the bogeyman has been and quite rightly so because without them, it wouldn't have happened. And after the coup, America became the dominant power in Iran. They took over and pushed the British aside. They became the dominant power. So a lot of death to America is death to America because of that. I think if you remove governments, people to people are incredibly good at connecting. There's so many cultural, social parallels between there's so much capacity for friendship and cooperation between American people and Iranian people. You remove governments and you're in a different world. I mean, that doesn't just apply to Iran and US. Any people, you know, people are the same. I'm saying things. I'm now repeating a cliche. People care about the same things. They come to get over the same things. They connect over the same things. They have a lot more in common that separates them and differentiates between them. And you know, I have so many American friends who go to Iran on tourism trips and they come away blown away by the hospitality and kindness and the connections they make. Yeah. So there is no animosity between Iranian people and American people. That's not where the problem is. That's never been the problem. The problem lies, you know, where we know where it lies. So that's, yeah. So thank you so much for talking to us. I mean, we're doing this because we really want to educate people about Iran and what a beautiful country it is and how much it's been put through by the United States government for so long, including devastatingly right now with these sanctions that were already crippling and now have been even created more extreme sanctions. For you, what, you know, in the last months, how has it felt to be, feel this close to World War III, the United States against Iran? I mean, I'm torn to pieces as an Iranian to see what, you know, ordinary Iranians are going through and the way this relationship, this poisonous relationship has lasted for so long, we and I in our 40, 41st year of the standoff. But the important thing is for people to know context and know backstory. If only we knew why we are where we are, we would see things differently. We would understand things. The sanctions only hurt ordinary Iranians. They hurt my relatives and my friends and families. They can't get the medicines. It doesn't really help the situation by penalizing and punishing the people. I don't understand. There's no luck to this for me. You know, we were talking to Iranians. They were having negotiations. They signed the deal. There was, you know, people came around the table and talked for the first time with the JCP. How do you say it? The JCP always forget, you know, the deal, the nuclear deal that Trump tore up. Right. So it's a, whilst I'm torn to pieces about what's happening right now as an Iranian, I'm kind of, I have to say, I'm happy that it's brought attention to the film. The film has become incredibly urgent and vital viewing and really timely. We began making it 10 years ago. Never did we think in a million years, a film that we started 10 years ago, which was essentially about history, has become so relevant and timely and vital viewing. It developed into a thriller or an investigation. We didn't see it become that. You've lost a picture. Yeah. Yeah. I'll come back. A lot of reviews. We've had incredible reviews. We've been blown away by the reviews. And after our Telluride world premiere, people are referring to the film as a thriller. The incredible novelist, John Le Carré, came to it, came to see the film. Someone has described the film as worthy of a John Le Carré novel. There are, I have the world's greatest film editor working on this. I think that's where I owe the credit to the brilliance of the film is Walter Merch, the man who worked on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and The Conversation and The English Patient. He worked on this film with me for four years. And we had the ride of our lives as filmmakers, bringing all these disparate pieces together in a very compelling story, which is not just a history lesson. It's a thriller and it's an enlightening piece of history that people should know because it's now current affairs and not history. And it is kind of a mafia story, just the mafia members being the British and US governments. Yeah. I mean, in fact, some of the guys who are in the pay of the British look like kind of straight out of The Godfather or Al Capone. They wear the same hats. They wear the same suits. They must have been watching too many movies. I don't know. It's got this movie has got history, a thriller, an assassination. There's even some sex, but not on the screen. It's got battle scenes. It's got animation. It's got everything you want and more and it will leave you blown away and enlightened and really educated. So what can I say? Thank you for giving a glimpse into the film and into that very potent time that has really been the leverage to where we are today. Sorry you have to be in the belly of the beat and we're calling on everyone to be with us this Saturday as we have a global march for peace and to end war with Iran. Find out more about that at code pink backslash 0125 2020. And do please add the teaser to the film so people will know what we're talking about. Of course. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.