Contrary to what the U.S.
government might think, holding on to the records certainly isn’t helping U.S.
interests in the region.
Troops in Tehran in 1953 AFP/Getty Images | AFP/Getty Images
Sixty-three years ago, the CIA and British
intelligence fomented a coup d’état that toppled the prime minister of Iran,
restored a cooperative shah and strengthened a regional buffer against possible
Soviet aggression. It also unwittingly set Iran on a course toward dictatorship
and helped inject the 1979 Iranian revolution with an anti-American cast that
continues to animate hardline elements within the current regime.
More than six decades later, the coup against Mohammad
Mosaddeq and its aftermath are still haunting U.S.-Iran relations. Yet
amazingly, Americans do not have access to the full historical record of U.S.
involvement in the event, even though much of that record (at least the parts
the CIA has not destroyed, by its own admission) is unclassified.
Most recently, John Kerry’s State Department, which
has shown real acumen in dealing with Iran, has decided not to release its
long-overdue official compilation of internal documents on U.S. diplomacy
covering the coup period, basing its reasoning on a concern for the fragility of
relations with Iran.
The desire to protect the hard-won 2015 nuclear accord
is fully understandable, but this decision appears to be based on
misperceptions about the risks — and a disregard for the potential benefits —
of releasing this important historical material.
Specifically, the State Department is declining to
publish the relevant volume in its venerable series, Foreign Relations of the
United States (FRUS), the “official documentary historical record” of U.S.
foreign policy, according to the State Department’s web site. The series has
already endured one major public scandal over its Iran coverage. In 1989, the
State Department published a volume on the early 1950s that deliberately
airbrushed out any trace of American and British authorship of the coup.
Scholars called it a fraud, and Congress was
sufficiently outraged to pass legislation requiring FRUS to present a
“thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record” of American policy. The
State Department Historian’s Office promised a make-up volume, which it painstakingly
compiled several years ago and expected to publish in 2013. In other words, as
the Department’s own historical advisory committee noted in its latest annual
report, it is finished and ready to go. But it has yet to appear.
Numerous excuses for refusing to publish documentation
on the Iran coup have surfaced over the years. A standard rationale invoked by
the intelligence community on a wide range of subjects has been the need to
safeguard “sources and methods.” Protecting individuals from harm is praiseworthy,
though arguably less meaningful in cases such as this when every major
participant is deceased. Protecting methods is also perfectly reasonable in
theory, but CIA claims deserve some scrutiny when the agency has used similar
assertions to keep World War I-era techniques like the use of invisible ink
classified until almost a century later — far beyond the method’s usefulness.
Besides, a 200-page internal CIA history of the coup
that leaked to the New York Times in 2000, as well as two other agency
histories that have been partially declassified under the Freedom of
Information Act, have almost certainly revealed every method the agency
utilized in 1953.
Another basis for State Department and CIA interest in
blocking access to these records has been the desire to honor a British
government request to keep a lid on their part in the coup. The problem with
this rationale is that the lid has been off for years. For example, Kermit
Roosevelt, who ran the operation in Tehran, published an entire memoir about it
in the late 1970s — with CIA consent — and it included references to British
involvement. Furthermore, the 200-page CIA history mentioned above contains
extensive detail about the British role in planning the operation. In the
extraordinarily unlikely event that there is specific information that still
deserves protection, government declassifiers can always excise the particulars
while leaving the larger picture intact.
In recent years, the CIA appears to be placing less
stock in some of these older excuses when it comes to Iran in 1953. To its
credit, in 2011 the agency finally declassified part of an internal document
confirming its coup activities, and its historical staff reportedly cooperated
well recently with their State Department counterparts in compiling the FRUS
volume. Other parts of the government have become more candid as well. Two
presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have broken with precedent and
publicly owned up to the U.S. role in the coup.
But now, the State Department has latched on to
another reason for officially denying public access to the full historical
record: the fear of a harsh reaction from Tehran. This concern first came up in
connection with the FRUS series as early as 1978, when one of State’s leading
experts on Iran warned his British Foreign Office counterparts that documents
were about to be published with “possibly damaging consequences” for London and
the Shah. (Ironically, that discussion and subsequent British efforts to
suppress the publication are described in detail in records that are freely
available in the British archives — even though the underlying history of the
coup is still draped in secrecy.)
The problem with this rationale is that, so many years
later, the administration’s anxieties over lasting damage coming from the
Islamic Republic have simply not been supported by experience.
Previous coup revelations, whether leaked or official,
have indeed met with sharp responses from Tehran, in the form of Friday Prayer
speeches, media articles or even parliamentary resolutions. But in every case,
the story soon dies and politics return to what passes for normal in Iran,
regardless of whether the country is in a state of revolution, reform or
retrenchment.
The Iranian people, it turns out, have been pretty
well informed for years about the U.S. role in the mid-century coup. In 2000,
when I participated in a conference in Tehran on Mosaddeq and the oil
nationalization period, a few weeks after the New York Times published the
CIA’s still-secret history of the coup, conference-goers — and the Iranian
press — were plainly unimpressed at what they saw as old news about U.S.
interference in their affairs — something they had long taken as a given. They
were much more absorbed by discussions about the roles various Iranians might
have played in Mosaddeq’s overthrow.
The fact is that if hardliners want to mount a
campaign against the nuclear deal — as they have before and undoubtedly will
again — they will find an excuse. They don’t need anyone else to provide one.
Just as exposing fresh evidence about the 1953 coup
has not demonstrably hurt U.S. interests, experience shows that blocking its
release has not provided any notable benefit. American and British officials
back in 1978 wanted to spare the Shah from the “embarrassing things” they
expected to find in the pending FRUS volume. But their alarm over that prospect
now seems pathetically misplaced given that the entire monarchy was swept from
power by the revolution just a few weeks later.
Then — as now — far greater political, economic and
social forces were at work inside Iran. In the coming months and years, if the
nuclear deal sinks or President Hassan Rouhani fails to win reelection in 2017,
it will be because of the actions of very powerful actors inside the country
looking out for their own tangible, personal and institutional stakes — not
because of yet another round of putative “revelations” about an event decades
old.
Instead of holding onto the past, the State Department
has an opportunity here. The consensus of Iran experts I have spoken with in
recent weeks is this: Why not deny hardliners once and for all the benefits
they’ve been reaping from this propaganda gift? Claim the high road by throwing
open the available record even on our most awkward episodes. Identify this for
what it is — a gesture of respect to the Iranian people — and call on Tehran to
act in kind by acknowledging that both sides have historical reasons to claim
grievances against the other.
Looking beyond Iran, releasing the FRUS volume would
contribute to other worthwhile goals. It would give a boost to the president’s
lofty commitment to greater openness, a part of his record that has come under
fire from his supporters in recent years. More importantly, it would at last
provide the American people access to a chapter of their recent history they
have every right to see. It would even strike a blow for the currently
unfashionable principle of judging our past — and our elected officials — on
the basis of historical fact rather than self-serving partisan invention.
Malcolm Byrne runs a project on U.S.-Iran relations at
the nongovernmental National Security Archive based at The George Washington
University. The views presented here are his own.
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