On Aug. 19, 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had seized Iran’s vast oil fields from the British and put them under Iranian control, was removed from power in a coup organized and financed by the British and U.S. governments.
| Ah. Not solely a CIA project, after all. |
He was replaced by the dictatorial Shah who immediately signed over forty percent of Iran’s oil fields to U.S. companies. The coup ushered in a long nightmare of repression, buttressed by Iran’s brutal secret police, Savak, trained and equipped by the CIA. The Shah not only crushed the democratic aspirations of Iranians, but enriched U.S. oil companies and purchased billions of dollars of weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers.
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