Obama admits US role in 1953 Iran coup

June 5, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

US President Barack Obama has admitted US involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran which overthrew the democratically elected government of premier Mohammad Mossadegh.

“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” Obama said during his keynote speech to the Muslim world from Cairo University in the Egyptian capital.

It is the first time a sitting US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup.

The CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, run until then by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The oil company had been for many decades the largest single financial asset of the British government.

For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests (something the British were to note bitterly after Anglo-Iran’s operations were taken over by by an American consortium in the immediate post-coup years).

The 1953 Tehran skullduggery was the first time the CIA was directly involved in this type of action and its success fed into a long string of such involvements around the world, the democratically-elected government of president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala being the next victim in 1954.

That same year, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned and decapitated in Egypt, with the Nasser regime being assisted by the guiding hand of Kerrmit ‘Kim’ Roosevelt, the same CIA operative who ran ‘Operation Ajax’, the code-name of the 1953 Iran coup.

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