U.S. Blocks Release of Iran Coup Study

Date: 19 December 2014 - 21:19

News ID: ۸۷۶۰

WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The Obama administration is stalling the release of a key report detailing U.S. covert action in Iran, according to sources in the State Department’s Office of the Historian.
In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government of Iranian Premier Muhammad Mossadegh, installing Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.
It’s no secret that the CIA did it, and the U.S. has admitted it time and again, but the State Department has announced it is once again delaying the release of its study on the coup.
The coup was carried out primarily for the benefit of British oil interests, as Mossadegh was planning nationalization. Legally speaking, the State Department was only supposed to keep the history secret for 30 years.
It’s hard to imagine anything in the history of the coup is unknown, let alone that it could do any further harm to U.S.-Iranian relations after decades of acrimony. Still, the lure of secrecy seems to be winning out among officials, as usual.
State Department historian Stephen Randolph informed the bureau’s committee on historical diplomatic documentation in September that the repeated and highly unusual delay had to do with administration fears that it would negatively impact diplomacy with Iran, according to recently published minutes of the meeting.
Richard Immerman, chairman of the committee, went on to express "frustration that the department had decided to delay publication of the Iran volume” based solely on political concerns, according to the meeting’s minutes.
Release of the controversial and "long-awaited” report was originally slated for last summer, according to Immerman, a Temple University professor. The report, in fact, has been completed and ready for release since at least last June.
"We were expecting it to come out,” Immerman told the Free Beacon, explaining that higher-level officials apparently stepped in to put a kibosh on the scheduled release.
"We were told that it had been placed on hold based on, or largely because of the ongoing negotiations (with Iran) and the concern … that this would further roil the waters and make the prospects of reaching some sort of agreement less likely,” Immerman said.
"This is unusual since all of the agencies have signed off on the document,” Immerman explained. "It’s not being held up by the continued classification of documents. It’s being held up, based on my understanding, by the State Department’s perspective that it would not serve the interests of U.S. foreign policy.”
One volume of information covering the historical period in question already has seen public release, the official went on to note.
"While it does not include all documentation from every U.S. government agency, it is an extensive record of State Department documentation from that period,” the official said.
The State Department’s hesitance to release the report "has been a source of frustration for decades”, according to Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which discussed the issue in a recent publication.
A volume on this time period published in 1989 makes "no mention of CIA covert action” in Iran, according to FAS.
The unreleased volume "will provide documentary evidence, and also officially put the U.S. on the record as admitting its involvement in the 1953 overthrow”, according to historical committee member Immerman.
"It was decided that in this political environment, it would be counterproductive” to go forward with the release, he said.
Additional information about the United States’ action in Iran may "hold the power to move whole countries and to alter the course of events today”, the FAS speculated.