‘Coup 53’: New documentary highlights MI6 role in toppling Iranian leader Mossadegh

Film starring Ralph Fiennes offers first-hand account of Britain’s role in unseating the democratically elected prime minister, a move that still has ramifications for Iran’s view of the UK and US to this day, as diplomatic editor Kim Sengupta explains

Mossadegh was jailed for three years after his administration was toppled, and then kept under house arrest until his death in 1967 (AFP/Getty)

The US is not the only foreign power which provokes enmity in Iran. There is also deep mistrust about Britain, a sentiment shaped by events in recent history and one which is unlikely to be forgotten or forgiven in the near future.

This is reflected in the current scenario with Donald Trump intent on sabotaging the country’s nuclear deal with international powers – one which the UK, along with other signatory states, is trying hard to preserve. But it is not only America being blamed in Iran for the near collapse of the agreement which was supposed to open the country up to the outside world, with all the rewards that offered.

“We know what Britain is saying publicly, but it is what they may do privately which we are very suspicious about,” Iranian voter Ali Rezah told me while casting his ballot in Tehran in this year’s parliamentary election. “We know what they did to [ousted prime minister] Mossadegh. We also cannot forget Britain’s part in the First World War famine when millions died because British soldiers took away the transport for moving food.”

This image of a perfidious Albion which would, in the end, always side with America was repeated by Iranians, many of them opponents of their current government from the both the right and left of the political spectrum, amid the economic collapse which had been triggered by the US sanctions. “At the end, Boris Johnson will follow Trump’s orders,” was the firm belief of Ebrahim Darbandi, who was also waiting to cast his vote at the Hussainia mosque in the capital.

America experienced a major defeat in the UN Security Council last week when it sought to extend an arms embargo on Iran, receiving the vote of just the Dominican Republic in support. Russia and China voted against the motion. Britain abstained, along with France and Germany, to the annoyance of Washington.

President Trump tweeted in response, from his golf club, that the US will immediately go for “snapback” – a move by which full UN sanctions can be applied if Iran is found to be in breach of the nuclear deal. There is little chance that he will get the backing of other signatory states or the Security Council. But battle lines are drawn, at least until the US election in November and the chance of a new Democrat administration.

Wednesday sees a historical reminder of one of the events which triggered the current state of affairs between Iran and the US and UK, with the release of the documentary Coup 53, on the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, and his replacement by the Shah of Iran.

The film, a fine production by Iranian director Taghi Amirani, will have its first showing on the 67th anniversary of the coup. It charts how Mossadegh was deposed by Washington and London, featuring interviews with many of those involved – Iranian nationalists who supported the prime minister, royalists loyal to the Shah, and British and American officials.

Mossadegh, a progressive and secular leader, earned the antipathy of the British government chiefly by nationalising the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) in which the British government held 51 per cent of the shares, and which had exclusive rights to pump Iranian oil. As relations worsened, the Iranian government broke off diplomatic ties with the UK and expelled the embassy staff of diplomats along with a complement of spies.

The documentary recalls how the Americans were initially disinclined to support British plans to overthrow a democratically elected government which, they thought, would be a check against totalitarian communism. The CIA station in Beirut rejected overtures for a coup from MI6. London sought Washington’s help in getting back the oil rights. But such was the British sense of entitlement that President Harry Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson condemned it witheringly as “destructive and determined on a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran”.

This changed, however, with the coming of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. There was renewed and tireless British lobbying. Winston Churchill claimed to the new president that Mossadegh – who had been openly critical of communism – would veer towards the pro-Russian Tudeh party: with the Cold War at its height, and fear of Soviet expansion, the US changed its position.

There are echoes of another episode of Anglo-American aggression in the Middle East here – the Iraq invasion of 2003 on the fake claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. One of the early purveyors of the false information on this was an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, based in London.

British security officials regarded Chalabi, who had been accused of fraud multiple times in his commercial life and sentenced to 22 years by a Jordanian court in absentia for an alleged $70m bank fraud, as a prize asset.

They excitedly took the allegations of the supposed Iraqi arsenal to Washington, only to be met with scepticism by the Clinton administration. All that changed when George W Bush came to power. A propaganda campaign was launched by the US and UK to justify invasion on grounds of the supposed WMD threat. This included the infamous “dodgy dossier”, which, let us remind ourselves, was produced in London by Tony Blair’s government and not in Washington. The war, with its disastrous consequences, followed.

Chalabi returned to Iraq under US protection in 2003 after the invasion. I attended his first press conference, in the Hunting Club in Baghdad, which was guarded by American troops. No questions about WMDs, or anything else, were allowed from the foreign media. A lone supporter, a tribal kinsman, parading outside in the street with a photograph of Chalabi, was shot by a passing motorist.

The Americans fell out with Chalabi at one point and accused him, a Shia, of spying for Shia Iran. His offices in Baghdad were raided. He later became deputy prime minister in the chaotic course of Iraqi politics and died five years ago.

Back in Iran, “Operation Ajax” was launched in 1953 to depose Mossadegh, initially through a propaganda campaign and proposed election interference, with the CIA chief Allen Dulles authorising a million dollars to be used “in any way that would bring about the fall” of the prime minister.

The coup succeeded. Many of Mossadegh’s supporters were arrested, imprisoned and tortured; some, including foreign minister Hossein Fatemi, were executed. The prosecutors demanded a life sentence for Mossadegh, but a tribunal jailed him for three years in a military prison. He was kept under house arrest after that until his death in 1967. The former prime minister was denied a public funeral because of apprehension that his grave may become a political shrine, and he was buried under his living room.

Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and head of the CIA’s Near East and Africa division, had largely gained credit for the Mossadegh mission. The British government had officially denied any involvement in the coup, but British officials had long complained privately that their role had not received suitable recognition.

This is now partly rectified in Coup 53, with Ralph Fiennes playing Norman Darbyshire, an MI6 officer based in Cyprus who the British claim was the real mastermind of the coup.

Only one photograph of Darbyshire, in dark glasses, is seen in the documentary. He died in 1993, and his account of what took place is read by Fiennes from an interview he gave to Granada TV’s End of Empire film in 1985, which was not shown because he refused to appear on screen.

Fiennes delivery is melodramatic. Through him Darbyshire is a sort of Roger Mooreish version of James Bond, licensed to coup. He said he delivered value for the mission for postwar austerity Britain. “The coup cost £700,000. I know, because I spent it,” he boasts. He had gained valuable intelligence on one occasion from an Iranian military officer for two pounds of Lipton Tea: “He couldn’t get it in Persia and I got it for him and that is precisely what I paid him,” he reveals with a satisfied smile.

Money was a prime factor in organising the opposition to Mossadegh, according to Darbyshire. The young Shah, Rezah Pahlavi, had his doubts about bringing down the prime minister. The MI6 officer and a CIA colleague, Stephen Meade, flew to Paris to meet the Shah’s sister, Ashraf, in an attempt to enlist her help with her brother.

“We made it clear that we would pay expenses, and when I produced a great wad of notes her eyes alighted and she said she would just have to go to Nice for a week to clear things up,” says Darbyshire. “She was quite a flighty woman and Steve, who fancied anything, fancied her,” adds the gallant and discreet MI6 officer.

Darbyshire, in cahoots with a wealthy Iranian family, the Rashidians, had proposed an earlier coup. But, to his chagrin, neither the CIA nor senior MI6 officers were interested. “In the early months of ’53 we were building up with the Rashidians and we thought we had enough military units to mount something, but London started getting cold feet,” he says.

“Unfortunately, the head of SIS at the time, General [John] Sinclair, knew about as much of the Middle East as a 10-year-old, [he was] far more interested in cricket anyway,” Darbyshire (Fiennes) sniffs.

An alternative view could be that the director of MI6, highly respected by his colleagues in the intelligence community, saw only too well the inherent risks of Britain embarking on such a dangerous venture, without American support, on the say-so of a middle-ranking officer.

Darbyshire claims he organised the kidnapping of the chief of police in Tehran, General Mahmoud Afshartous, who had initially made his name by trying to root out corruption in the security forces. Afshartous, who had been promoted by the Shah, was tortured and strangled. The news of the death was met by shock and anger, and contributed to the upheavals which followed.

It was not Darbyshire’s fault, he wanted to point out. “Something went wrong: he was kidnapped and held in a cave. Feelings ran very high and Afshartous was unwise enough to make derogatory comments about the Shah. He was under guard by a young army officer and the young officer pulled out a gun and shot him. That was never part of our programme at all but that’s how it happened,” he claims.

One wonders what would have happened if the Americans had stuck to their initial sceptical instincts about both the coup in Iran and the WMD in Iraq. They did not, and we see the legacy of that now in the strife and suffering which subsequently unfolded in the Middle East.