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One of the CIA's in-house historians, who the following year went on to become CIA Chief Historian, David Robarge, wrote this review of All the Shah's Men in 2004: https://www.cia.gov/static/all-the-shahs-men.pdf > In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times sugests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose
populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and
geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today. Nearly 20 years ago already, this was an admission of a coup against a democratically elected government, instituting an "absolutist kingship", with "unintended consequences". All of this used to be available in HTML before the recent CIA website redesign. People would do well to read old books, and even watch old television news programs and documentary programs like those from CBS, all the way back to the 60s, before thinking that this wasn't in some sense, common knowledge, at least among those who attempt to be knowledgeable. One great success of the CIA has been that this and a litany of similar events have been hiding in plain sight, and that it is "conspiratorial thinking" just to remember this stuff. |