A first-hand account of Britain’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and restored the shah to power has been published for the first time. The account by the MI6 officer who ran the operation describes how it took British intelligence years to persuade the US to take part in the coup. Meanwhile, MI6 recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament with banknotes transported in biscuit tins. Together the MI6 and CIA even recruited Shah Reza Pahlavi’s sister in an effort to persuade the reluctant monarch to back the coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh.“The plan would have involved seizure of key points in the city by what units we thought were loyal to the shah … seizure of the radio station etc … the classical plan,” recalled Norman Darbyshire, the head of MI6’s Persia station in Cyprus at the time of the coup. Britain’s role in a pivotal moment in Iran’s history left an enduring mark on Iranian perceptions of Britain, but details of the role of its spies have remained obscure. Darbyshire gave his version of events in an off-record interview with the makers of Granada TV’s 1985 film End of Empire: Iran. He refused to appear on camera, so the interview was not used directly in the programme. The transcript was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the course of research for a new documentary, Coup 53, due to be released on Wednesday, the 67th anniversary of the coup. The role of Darbyshire, who died in 1993, will be dramatised by Ralph Fiennes. Taghi Amirani, the director of Coup 53, said: “Even though it has been an open secret for decades, the UK government has not officially admitted its fundamental role in the coup. Finding the Darbyshire transcript is like finding the smoking gun. It is a historic discovery.”The typewritten transcript was published on Monday morning by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in the US. The shah appointed Mossadegh as prime minister in April 1951 after he won overwhelming support from the Majlis, Iran’s parliament.
All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/british-spys-account-sheds-light-on-role-in-1953-iranian-coup
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