More than six decades later, the coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq and its aftermath are still haunting U.S.-Iran relations. Yet amazingly, Americans do not have access to the full historical record of U.S. involvement in the event, even though much of that record (at least the parts the CIA has not destroyed, by its own admission) is unclassified.
The desire to protect the hard-won 2015 nuclear accord is fully understandable, but this decision appears to be based on misperceptions about the risks—and a disregard for the potential benefits—of releasing this important historical material.
Specifically, the State Department is declining to publish the relevant volume in its venerable series, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), the “official documentary historical record” of U.S. foreign policy, according to the State Department’s web site. The series has already endured one major public scandal over its Iran coverage. In 1989, the State Department published a volume on the early 1950s that deliberately airbrushed out any trace of American and British authorship of the coup.
Scholars called it a fraud, and Congress was sufficiently outraged to pass legislation requiring FRUS to present a “thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record” of American policy. The State Department Historian’s Office promised a make-up volume, which it painstakingly compiled several years ago and expected to publish in 2013. In other words, as the Department’s own historical advisory committee noted in its latest annual report, it is finished and ready to go. But it has yet to appear.
Numerous excuses for refusing to publish documentation on the Iran coup have surfaced over the years. A standard rationale invoked by the intelligence community on a wide range of subjects has been the need to safeguard “sources and methods.” Protecting individuals from harm is praiseworthy, though arguably less meaningful in cases such as this when every major participant is deceased. Protecting methods is also perfectly reasonable in theory, but CIA claims deserve some scrutiny when the agency has used similar assertions to keep World War I-era techniques like the use of invisible ink classified until almost a century later—far beyond the method’s usefulness.
Besides, a 200-page internal CIA history of the coup that leaked to the New York Times in 2000, as well as two other agency histories that have been partially declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, have almost certainly revealed every method the agency utilized in 1953.
Another basis for State Department and CIA interest in blocking access to these records has been the desire to honor a British government request to keep a lid on their part in the coup. The problem with this rationale is that the lid has been off for years. For example, Kermit Roosevelt, who ran the operation in Tehran, published an entire memoir about it in the late 1970s—with CIA consent—and it included references to British involvement. Furthermore, the 200-page CIA history mentioned above contains extensive detail about the British role in planning the operation. In the extraordinarily unlikely event that there is specific information that still deserves protection, government declassifiers can always excise the particulars while leaving the larger picture intact.
In recent years, the CIA appears to be placing less stock in some of these older excuses when it comes to Iran in 1953. To its credit, in 2011 the agency finally declassified part of an internal document confirming its coup activities, and its historical staff reportedly cooperated well recently with their State Department counterparts in compiling the FRUS volume. Other parts of the government have become more candid as well. Two presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have broken with precedent and publicly owned up to the U.S. role in the coup.
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