The CIA says in a podcast episode that the 1953 Iran coup was undemocratic

The Central Intelligence Agency said in a recent podcast episode that a CIA-backed coup in Iran in the 1950s was “undemocratic,” a first for the agency.

According to an Associated Press article, the 1953 Iranian military coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power gave control of Iran to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served until his own overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

During the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. Embassy in Iran was occupied by a group of Iranian students who took American citizens and others hostage for 444 consecutive days. The CIA sent agents to recover six American diplomats in one of the agency’s most famous missions, which served as the inspiration for the film Argo.

The CIA discussed these events and the 1953 coup in a recent episode of the CIA podcast “The Langley Files,” named after Langley Virginia, where CIA headquarters is located. The podcast launched in late 2022 to publicly dispel some of the more negative rumors circulating about the country’s most secretive arm of government (a significant percentage of which, to be entirely fair, involve military coups).

CIA historian and Langley Files host Walter Trosin said in the episode that much of the agency’s activities focused on “strengthening” democratically elected governments, but that this particular operation did not meet those criteria.

“However, we should recognize that this is therefore a really significant exception to that rule,” Trosin said.

“This is one of the exceptions,” replied CIA historian Brett Geary.

After the episode was released, the CIA issued a statement to the AP essentially saying that the story of the CIA’s 1979 extraction mission could only be told in the context of all the events leading up to that day.

“CIA leadership is committed to being as open as possible with the public,” the agency said in a statement to the AP. “The agency’s podcast is part of that effort – and we knew that if we wanted to tell this incredible story, it was important to be transparent about the historical context of these events and the CIA’s role in them.”

The CIA has kept most, if not all, information about the coup secret for the past 70 years. However, despite these recent developments and despite public statements by other members of the government in the past, almost all of the CIA’s information about the coup remains classified to this day. According to the AP, the CIA actually once admitted that most of the files related to the 1953 coup were likely destroyed in the 1960s.

“It is wrong to claim that the coup process itself has been fully declassified. Far from it,” said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. “Important portions of the records are still being withheld, which only adds to public confusion and encourages the creation of myths about the U.S. role long after the fact.”

Iran rejected the CIA’s moves to shed some light on the situation, calling them “the beginning of relentless American interference in Iran’s internal affairs” in a statement to the AP.

“The US admission never resulted in compensatory measures or a real commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policies towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the Iranian mission to the United Nations said.

These developments come at a time when tensions between the United States and Iran are high even by historical standards, as the US pressures Iran to halt progress on its nuclear program. President Biden also just reached an agreement with Qatar to prevent Iran from accessing $6 billion in assets held as part of a prisoner exchange deal in response to Iran’s long-standing support of Hamas, a militant group that has a bloody and unprecedented attack on Israel was lifted over the weekend in which hundreds of civilians were killed.

Another first for the Agency took place in the same podcast episode: The identity of a previously unnamed CIA agent involved in the 1979 extraction was revealed as Agency linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson, previously identified only as “Julio” was known.

Johnson told the podcast hosts about his experience on the mission, saying it was particularly challenging because the diplomats they had to rescue were not spies and had no formal training for anything related to the situation they found themselves in , resembled.

“Working with the six of them – they’re newbies,” Johnson says in an interview that aired on the podcast. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They have not been trained to be stealthy and elusive.”