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A Coup in Iran
30 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M discuss the 1953 coup in Iran, which gets quite false flaggy...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Humorous Introduction to VPN and Global Politics
00:00:00
Speaker
So, my VPN has been playing up the last few days, and I'm going to admit, I'm not that prepared for this episode. Yeah, my dastardly plan has worked, but I've said too much. Say what? Only that, my dear doctor, I have finally pulled it off. By manipulating global politics and pushing certain governments to enact controls of what is and isn't allowable on the internet, I have forced you, through your own choices, to rely on me for content.
00:00:24
Speaker
You're right, that is dastardly. So you created the entire VPN industry in order to get me, and only me, reliant on you for content on this podcast. Yes. Interesting. Very interesting.
00:00:42
Speaker
Can I ask a question? Of course you can, my minion. Why? Why is this your end goal? But isn't it obvious? It's because I love the sound of my own voice. Intriguing. And when exactly did that realisation hit you? But just after you invited me to be your co-host.
00:01:03
Speaker
Oh, dear. Oh, yes. You set this up. You made me want this. But why? Why? Why? Ah, Josh, you see, I am very lazy and would prefer someone to do the work for me. To quote Remington Steele, I work better in an advisory capacity. So I'm your Laura Holt? Worse. You're my Mildred Krebs. Is anyone other than you going to get that reference?
00:01:31
Speaker
No. Unfortunately, no.
Podcast Format Introduction with Hosts Josh and Dr. Denteth
00:01:58
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. N. Denteth in Zhuhai, China. And can I congratulate you, first of all, in the writing of that intro sketch, having me give the line, I finally pulled it off and not make a crude reference. I mean, that showed dedication to the craft and a level of maturity I would not have thought to credit you with.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yes, I must admit, I was very, very tempted to put a knob jack in there. A knob gag in there. I almost gagged on my knob jack.
00:02:39
Speaker
Whatever that means. Anyway, yes, I pulled it off, Josh. I pulled it off without making it a pulling off reference. Good. Well, let's just say we've both pulled it off and move on. This week, this week, it's just a regular old episode. It's not a What the Conspiracy, it's not a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Neither one of us is trying to hoodwink the other. We're just going to talk about a good old fashioned conspiracy, one that even gets a bit false flaggy. This is classic podcaster's guide to the conspiracy
The 1953 Iranian Coup: A Historical Overview
00:03:08
Speaker
this week.
00:03:08
Speaker
It is indeed because we are going all the way back to 1953 and actually technically slightly further back than that and also more towards the future. But we're going to be circling around 1953 and we're going to be talking about a coup in Iran.
00:03:27
Speaker
which often gets called the 1953 Iranian coup. But of course, the thing about the coup in Iran is that there are questions as to who motivated or brought the coup about. It's unfair to call it an Iranian coup. It's more a coup in Iran. So I don't believe we have anything else to get out of the way at the start. Should we just dive straight into it? Indeed. Indeed. Indeed.
00:03:59
Speaker
So, 1953 in Iran. The short version of what we're going to be talking about today is that in 1953, Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, was overthrown in favor of the Shah. Shah being that that's Iranian royalty, basically.
00:04:17
Speaker
So it was a good old-fashioned coup d'etat, the military took over in supporting the share, but the motivation for it was basically the UK and the United States were really behind it.
00:04:31
Speaker
It wasn't a bloodless coup. Several, sort of two or three hundred people died in fighting during the overthrow. And this coup is significant for being the first time that the United States used the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected government.
00:04:48
Speaker
That we know of. That we know. It definitely wasn't the last time they did it, but as far as we know, this is the first time they did it. So this is the time where they have admitted to doing it. There are suspicions that maybe they were doing it beforehand, although actually not much beforehand.
UK and US Motivations: Oil and Anti-Communism
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:08
Speaker
But yes, there are questions, maybe there are a few things that happened in the years prior where the CIA probably had their fingers in that pie. But this is the one that we know the CIA evolved in because it was acknowledged back in 2013, although it did take now I have to get my math here, right. So 1953 would appear to be halfway through the last century. And 2013 would appear to be
00:05:34
Speaker
in the second decade of the first century. So if we take halfway through one century and add it to halfway through the second decade of the next century,
00:05:51
Speaker
I think that means we're in the vicinity of X number of years after the event. Correct. We're X equals 60. I think the declassifying of these documents was sort of because it was the 60th anniversary of the coup or something like that. But yeah, it wasn't. Not as in the case of we're going to celebrate 60 years of overthrowing an administration. Here's some document. It's more technically the statute of operations over keeping this stuff.
00:06:20
Speaker
secret has expired, so now this information needs to go into the public domain. 60 years after the fact was the first time that the US officially formally acknowledged their role. 2017, apparently, the UK declassified some documents that was around the communications that had gone on beforehand, showing how the UK had basically
00:06:44
Speaker
come up with the idea of a coup and kind of went to the Americans and said, hey, can you help us do a coup? Which was a conversation that kind of went, I say, fellows, my American cousins, you know, those Iranians are causing us a bit of a spot of buzz. Now, we're not saying that you should overthrow the democratically elected government.
00:07:05
Speaker
are suggesting that maybe it's something you should seriously consider. I mean, just putting it out there, maybe you might like to engage in a coup d'etat, I mean maybe you would, but it really would help your friends over across the pond, and there might be something in it for you. Tap the nose to one side, since this is an audio medium and not a video.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, we might get into the details of the conversation between the UK and the US shortly, but something like that. Now, obviously, a coup is conspiratorial by its very nature, right? You can't. It would be quite difficult to pull off a coup in a non-conspiratorial manner.
00:07:45
Speaker
But the particular details of this one involve a bit of false flagginess in the actual execution of it. The operation to overthrow the Iranian government was called Operation Boot in the UK, possibly because they were giving Prime Minister Mossadegh the boot, I don't know.
00:08:03
Speaker
And in America, it was called TP Ajax, or Operation Ajax. Apparently, I have read that TP was the two-letter country code that the CIA had assigned to Iran. And Ajax was referenced to the Ajax brand Cleaner, because they were like cleaning communism out of Iran, or something. What do I TP? Are they referring to Iran as the Persians, for some reason? I don't know. Capital's Tehran, isn't it? I don't know. Who knows? Maybe it's just
00:08:32
Speaker
Some, some, some, maybe it's not meant to stand for anything and it's just their secret little code. Who knows? Anyway, so I'm going to give you two guesses as to why the UK and the US would have wanted to ferment a coup in Iran. What are your two guesses? All right, so I think they wanted control over moon cheese and
00:08:56
Speaker
They wanted access to Iran's superior dances. Right, so you've gone for obscure and... weird, quite frankly. You should have just gone for the most obvious, basically. Oil and communism. Oil and communism. Well, if this were a what, the conspiracy, I'd definitely have to press this button right now.
00:09:25
Speaker
But you do it ironically because there's no shock at all in finding out that... So did you ever watch Robert Newman's comedy special A History of Oil? I do not believe I did, no.
Robert Newman's Satirical Perspective on Oil Politics
00:09:37
Speaker
So Robert Newman was, and probably still is, but there was this important here for a historical context, was a 90s alternative comedian.
00:09:45
Speaker
who in the early 2000s did a stand-up show called A History of Oil, which was entirely powered by bicycles. So he would actually power the theatre. He was in with people on bikes, generating electricity to power the lights and things, which he acknowledged that when they came to filming with special caused a huge noise-related issue because you've got people on bicycles in the background pedaling all the time as you're trying to shout over the noise that they're creating.
00:10:15
Speaker
And history of oil is a comic routine which basically goes through 100 years of the UK and the US interfering in the Middle East to maintain supremacy over the oil supply. So it's very biting political commentary and it points out that what happened in the 1950s
00:10:38
Speaker
was also the kind of thing happening back in the 1930s and so, because the Middle East has basically been a proving ground for different empires, first the British, then the Americans, to control a resource that they do not have at home. Yes. Now, this is probably a good point to put in a bit of a disclaimer. As you suggest, there's a lot of history in this region going back well before 1953, going well before the 1900s.
00:11:09
Speaker
There's all sorts of historical factors affecting everything in the lead up to this coup that we don't have the time or the expertise to go into.
00:11:21
Speaker
Every sentence we utter in this episode, you could add, but it's actually more complicated that onto the end of, and that would be a true statement. So I mean, this is going to be a less than one hour long podcast episode, so we're going to be painting with a fairly broad brush, but hopefully we get the key points, right?
Mossadegh's Nationalization of Oil and Britain's Reaction
00:11:42
Speaker
But possibly a few things to say about the history though. So I mean, Iran had plenty of historical reasons to not like the United Kingdom very much. They had been interfering there for quite some time.
00:11:54
Speaker
Now, in terms of the politics, in 1949, there was an assassination attempt on the Shah, and that caused him to start to take a bit more of an interest in politics. And he used his powers as the reigning monarch to set up a Senate of Iran, which he loaded with people sympathetic to him.
00:12:14
Speaker
Now, Mohammed Mossadegh was quite opposed to this. He thought, you know, politics should be for the people. There was an expression that I think had been used for the other royalty in Europe and so on, that they should, what was it? They should they should reign, but not rule. I think it was. So they should, yes, stay out of government. Just just go over there being royalty.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yes, basically it would be a symbolic monarchy. Then the people can look towards and appreciate, but actually, like the Queen of England, in theory, not actually do anything. Although, as we've discovered in recent years, the Queen has a lot more political power than people ever thought she ought to have. So he formed a coalition called the National Front.
00:12:56
Speaker
Which is an unfortunate name. Unfortunately. Yeah. And that would be its translation into English anyway. Possibly has different connotations in the original language. But anyway, and so quite a large coalition, which got enough power to basically make him prime minister. Following the assassination of the previous prime minister, interestingly enough, although I don't think there's anything directly related to the coup around that.
00:13:21
Speaker
But the fact that Prime Ministers are being assassinated probably tells you things aren't as stable as they necessarily could be. And the long and the short of it is that basically he and the Shah did not see eye to eye. He thought the Shah should stay out of politics. The Shah thought he very much should be involved. Which you can kind of understand the Shah going, well, I kind of feel that I shouldn't stay out of politics.
00:13:44
Speaker
Yes, if I can steer the mood of the country a bit more, maybe people might keep trying to assassinate me. But anyway, so back to oil, it all comes down to oil. In 1951, and I believe this was sort of part of his platform in the formation of his coalition, Mossadegh sort of campaigned on this platform that they were going to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. It was controlled largely by foreign interests.
00:14:12
Speaker
and they wanted it to be for Iran, for the people. So 1951, his government voted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, in particular the British controlled Anglo-Iranian, I think at the time it was called Anglo-Persian Oil Company, but then it's always abbreviated to AIOC.
00:14:31
Speaker
Anglo-Iranian oil company, which in the weird way that companies form and split up and amalgamate and merge and what have you, is an ancestor of what these days is BP, British Petroleum. Now, obviously, the British did not take well to the British controlled Anglo-Iranian oil company being nationalised. And so they felt obliged to do something about it. So apparently to begin with, Prime Minister at the time was Clement Attlee.
00:15:00
Speaker
And he apparently considered just going in and taking the Abadan oil refinery by force, but then thought better of that and instead just set up an embargo. The Royal Navy was basically stopping any Iranian ships from leaving Iran.
00:15:20
Speaker
with oil on board. And on top of that, British agents within the country were basically stirring up trouble, and life became increasingly difficult for Iran. They basically couldn't sell their oil to anyone, really, because of these embargoes. And when things were bad for Iran, obviously, that was bad for Masadek, because he was kind of behind it all. But at least to begin with, he still had wide support.
00:15:47
Speaker
Now, there was the Tudor party, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, was the Communist Party in Iran. And they weren't massive fans of Prime Minister Mossadegh, but they were very much anti the Shah. So you know, your enemies, enemy is my friends sort of thing. So they were supporting Mossadegh for the time being, even though they didn't really see eye to eye with him.
00:16:08
Speaker
And I think that was the angle that the British used to try and get the Americans on board with them, because obviously 1953, where World War Two is over, where we're into the Cold War now, and America is all about stamping out communism wherever they can find it. So that conversation
00:16:26
Speaker
that you that you lovingly recreated for us alluded to was probably more along the lines of I say old chap these Iranians are looking am I communist if you ask me you might want to do something about that before anything gets worse well yes and this gets us into the kind of interesting thing because the British
00:16:44
Speaker
were interested in maintaining their control of the oil reserves. And they kind of knew that the Americans were petrified of communism. So rather than go, oh, actually.
00:16:58
Speaker
you might want some oil. They were going, well, these people here are getting in bed with communists and you know what that means, America. And it goes, oh my God, they're getting in bed with communists. We've got to shut this communism down. So it's quite a clever tactic by the British to go, hmm.
00:17:17
Speaker
we want this thing and you want to stop that thing so maybe we can kill two birds with one stone and maybe we can also keep the oil which of course didn't happen but that's not another matter entirely yeah so there's you get this this sort of a crossover there's the the
00:17:33
Speaker
the theory, I guess, that this this nationalizing the oil could be part of sort of a Soviet plot acting through this Communist Party there, they're now influencing the country. And so now we've talked about I know we've talked about the Dulles plan, which was kind of more conspiratorial than anything, but the Dulles brothers, John and Alan. Alan. Yeah.
00:17:53
Speaker
were very much a, what would you call it, driving force, perhaps? I thought you could go dynamic duo. Not quite that much, no. They did make quite the duo though, and they had a very strong influence, I think, on America's foreign policy.
00:18:11
Speaker
for some time. So yes, John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State at the time, and the British went to him with this story that Iran might be falling to the Soviets, their communists might be getting too much power, which during the Cold War was exactly the sort of thing that would get a reaction. Now, to begin with,
00:18:30
Speaker
When they first came to them, Truman was president. And he was fighting a war. He was, yes. He was busy with the Korean War. And so I don't think was interested in also getting involved in a coup in Iran at the same time. But 1953 Eisenhower became president, and they managed to convince him to go into cahoots with them to undertake a sort of a joint coup.
00:18:56
Speaker
And the US got the CIA, which was then under Alan Dulles, the other Dulles brother, got him onto it, basically. Now there did seem to be a little bit of disagreement among historians about exactly how much everything, each motivation came into it. Whether it was how much it was about oil, how much it was about communism or what. I think the Americans, like some people have suggested, the Americans knew that the Communist Party wasn't really big enough
00:19:26
Speaker
to be a threat to Iran. And as we will see, they didn't end up being much. So it's a little bit vague and unclear, because everything's a little bit vague and unclear when you're talking about politics in the Middle East, I think. But what we do know is that by 1953, and I believe by 1953 Churchill was Prime Minister again as well.
Shah's Political Moves and Mossadegh's Rise
00:19:47
Speaker
I think. I think he had had his second surge. By this time, Atlee was out, Churchill was in, Truman was out, Eisenhower was in. Between the two of them, they got down to business, because the nationalization was in 1951. By 1953, things weren't going so well for Prime Minister Mosaddeck anymore.
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, there were all those blockades and things, stopping things from going into Iran, which was not making life pleasant for the wealthy middle classes who are, of course, the voters. Yeah. So the economy was not doing well. Politics were, you know, there was political upheaval. And as things got worse and worse for him, he started becoming more sort of autocratic, trying to stay, to hold on to power.
00:20:35
Speaker
So there was another one of those, those good old assassination attempts against him. And after that, he immediately jailed dozens of his political opponents and then eventually issued a decree to dissolve parliament, giving him and his cabinet absolute power. Now the Shah, apparently the CIA had gone to the Shah and said, hey, look,
00:21:01
Speaker
what we should do a coup, come, you know, let's organize a coup and we can put you back, kick out on the static and put you back in charge of the country. Now, if you listen to the CIA, I don't know how accurate this is or not, but they basically paint the shower as just a bit of a coward. He was just, he didn't have the guts for it and was too worried about, you know, there was too much risk for him losing or anything. And he was too timid
00:21:28
Speaker
to go along with their plans for a coup. But once Masadek sort of gave himself absolute power, that was enough to convince the Shah, okay, let's kick this guy out and put me back in charge. So come August, August of 1953, Operation Ajax gets into full swing.
00:21:50
Speaker
And Operation Boot. Don't forget the boot. So they actually had to take two shots at the coup, apparently. On the 15th of August, the Shah issued a royal decree dismissing Masadek as Prime Minister and replacing him with General Fazlala Zahidi, who obviously was loyal to the Shah. Which didn't really work, because Masadek simply went
00:22:14
Speaker
We're just going to arrest the colonel. So you've got orders to replace me. I've got orders to arrest you. How is that going to work out? Yeah, so the colonel, so the generals of Haiti was the one who had been put in charge. Another colonel from the army was sent to deliver the message and Masadek had him arrested and his supporters took to the streets in a sort of show of force and the coup did not appear to work out. So the Shah immediately fled the country.
00:22:43
Speaker
went straight to Baghdad and then made his way over to Europe, apparently. Generals of Haiti still claiming that he was the rightful Prime Minister, nevertheless went into hiding because Mercedes supporters were out on the streets. This reminds me of what happened in Venezuela.
00:23:00
Speaker
where you had people go, oh no, I'm the president. No, I'm the president. Well, no, I'm the president, but I have to be in hiding now because the other president who I claim isn't the president actually appears to hold all the strings of power and might arrest me if I walk outside my door, but I am president.
00:23:17
Speaker
So four days later on the 19th of August, they took another shot at it. And this is where things begin to get a bit false
CIA's Role and Mossadegh's Overthrow
00:23:25
Speaker
flaggy. So a bunch of infiltrators who had been hired by the CIA basically
00:23:31
Speaker
started to organise a quote-unquote communist revolution. So they came out saying, hey, let's revolt, let's smash the state, and started bringing in the actual Communist Party members to get them on board with it. And basically just started rioting, essentially. So this is a good old Wikipedia, gives a good summary of the events as they
00:23:57
Speaker
As they put it, soon the Tudor members took to the streets attacking virtually any symbols of capitalism and looting private businesses and destroying shops. Much of southern Tehran's business district, including the bazaars, were vandalized. And with southern public revulsion against this act, the next part of the Haiti's plan came into action from the vandalized bazaars, a second group of paid infiltrators, this time posing as shah supporters,
00:24:19
Speaker
organized angry crowds of common Iranians who were terrified about a communist revolution and sickened by the violence. And then the CIA apparently went and hired the criminal underclass as it were. Who did he hire? Because I love these names.
00:24:40
Speaker
All right, so just let me get ready for this. So I'll give you the first name of one of the two biggest gangsters in South Tehran, Keto, which would be Icy Ramadan. Icy Ramadan. Icy Ramadan. And Shaban Jafari, who is also known as Brainless Shaban.
00:25:00
Speaker
I see Ramadan and Brehla Shaman. I would watch that TV show. Unfortunately, in real life, they were basically gangsters from the South Tehran ghetto. And yeah, basically chaos ensued. Now from the sounds of things, this was kind of a case of the CIA just sort of lighting the match and running away. It sounds like they didn't need to do a lot of provocation to actually get this into full swing. And there are some
00:25:26
Speaker
There were some things I've read which basically suggest it kind of got out of their control and that they ended up not actually being too happy with how things turned out.
00:25:35
Speaker
because it got a bit out of hand, but nevertheless, they sort of kicked things off, but it didn't take much kicking off. Well, this is also historically why organisations like the CIA tried to deny ever being involved in the coup, because they could plausibly say, look, this situation was going to happen. Maybe there were some agents provocateur in Tehran at the time who
00:26:00
Speaker
people in particular ways but this was an avalanche that was going to occur nonetheless so you can kind of do that argument you go well it was going to happen so we
00:26:14
Speaker
really cause it, even though we actually caused it. So that was basically the plan. You spark, again, quote unquote, communist revolution. You have have rioting and mass lawlessness in the streets. That gives an excuse for Zahaidi to come out in charge of the army and basically fight back against these communists, real or otherwise.
00:26:37
Speaker
And this time they won, which again is sort of, that's one of the things people had said, you know, the Americans knew that the Iranian army was a considerably stronger fighting force than the Communist Party in Iran, and that if it came to a fight, the army would definitely win.
00:26:57
Speaker
And they certainly did. So they took the streets. Masadek himself apparently went on the run after a tank fired a shell into his house. But fairly quickly saw which way the wind was blowing and gave himself up and apparently sort of, you know, some of his supporters had said, you know, he should rally his people. He should sort of get them together and fight back. But he was like,
00:27:22
Speaker
he seemed to have decided that no, the cause was lost. He didn't want any more bloodshed, so he just turned himself in. And so by the end of the day, on the 19th, General Zahadi and the army were in control of the government. So the Shah, who apparently sort of, upon being given the news, wept for joy at the sign that the people really loved him and actually wanted him back in power,
00:27:45
Speaker
happily returned to Iran, and officially appointed General Zahidi as the Prime Minister. Masalik himself was tried and convicted and sentenced to death, although the Shah then overturned his death sentence, and he instead did three years in prison and was then kept under house arrest for the rest of his life.
00:28:06
Speaker
And the coup at that stage was basically over, so I can only assume, once all that was sorted out and all the dust had settled, that everything was fine and around from then on, and everyone lived happily ever after.
00:28:19
Speaker
and Iran was and continues to be a lovely conflict-free place in the world. And that's where you put the instinct in and we'll talk to you in the bonus episode after this musical break. Or at least we would if that is how history actually turned out because of course it turns out that the Shah himself was deposed in 1979 and Iran became what it's now known as, which is the Islamic Republic
00:28:46
Speaker
which is under the control of the Ayatollahs.
Long-term Impact: Anti-Western Sentiment and the 1979 Revolution
00:28:49
Speaker
In this case, in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini. And basically one of the reasons which made this possible is a quite strong anti-US sentiment within Iran.
00:29:03
Speaker
basically because of how they interfered in the country during the coup. So it ended up being quite, quite an own goal for the West. You sort of went from Masadaq, who was not necessarily anti-West, but definitely pro-Iran. And he was interested in being part of the global Western order was also being a nationalist, okay, look, willing to be part of the Western world.
00:29:30
Speaker
what we aren't willing to be is a vassal state where you control our sovereignty and our resources. So we'll take those resources back and then interact with you as equals, something that the British couldn't stomach. No. So they went from him to the Shah, who was obviously pro-West. He was apparently quite sort of awed by the might of the power that the American
00:30:00
Speaker
empire, if that's the word, had. But then, because a whole lot of people weren't very happy about the way America had been interfering in their country, once the Shah finally got booted out, you ended up with an overtly anti-Western, anti-Western, anti-US government.
00:30:23
Speaker
So essentially, if they hadn't interfered, things probably would have been better off for everyone all round. So that possibly leads something to the whole idea that maybe the CIA and the US didn't actually intend for things to go quite the way they did and weren't.
00:30:42
Speaker
I'm 100% happy with the end result at the time. But once again, everything I've just said, everything we've both just said is actually a lot more complicated than what we've just said, but there's way too much history.
00:30:57
Speaker
What's the word nuance, then either of us could A, understand or B, talk about in a single podcast episode? Well, yes. I mean, there's a lot of shades of grey there. So to go back to my comment before about how the CIA could plausibly claim, well, you know, the coup was going to happen whether or not we engaged in some provocative actions. Of course, the counter to that is, yeah, but the reason why
00:31:22
Speaker
Iran society was in kind of a state of peril, was due to things like the blockades, which were being maintained by the British and the US. So if you hadn't been interfering with the political structure by engaging in military and trade embargoes, then Tehran would not have been in the situation. It was when your agent's provocateur did the things they did.
00:31:49
Speaker
So you can kind of see why that then leads to a situation where even though the Shah who is pro-West is in control, the actual Iranian people are going, yeah, but the only reason why we had a coup was because of Western interference. That seems like a bad idea leading towards people in Tehran going,
00:32:09
Speaker
We don't really like the West particularly much, which then allows something like the Islamic Republic to come into existence. So one last thing, just to emphasize the false flagginess of it, because we haven't had a decent false flag episode in a while, but there's so many of them out there.
00:32:27
Speaker
I'm glad you put episode in there, because I was afraid you were going to say we haven't hit a decent false flag in quite a while. There's a steady stream of them at all times, I think. But yes, so there were two agents, Roosevelt and Wilbur. Is that played by Tom Stobard, Roosevelt and Wilbur in Tehran?
00:32:47
Speaker
something like that. Sounds familiar, but I think you might have some of the salient details slightly out of place, but that's okay. In this case, Roosevelt and Wilbur, as representatives of the Eisenhower government, they did a whole bunch of bribing, for one thing. They
00:33:05
Speaker
They bribed government officials, they bribed reporters, they bribed businessmen. We haven't touched on the propaganda side of things, but the way things were reported in Britain and the US, as well as reporting within Iran, I think there was a lot of interference there. And obviously they bribed those gangsters, good old icy Ramadan and brainless Shabaan to stir up a whole lot of trouble.
00:33:34
Speaker
And so Roosevelt apparently was on the record as saying that one tactic they used was to bribe demonstrators to attack symbols of the Shah while chanting pro-Mossadic slogans. And so that's basically your classic false flag. They get people to attack symbols of the Shah, which
00:33:56
Speaker
If you were a monarchist, which there a bunch were, the Shah was kind of a symbol of the country. And so you have these people saying they were pro-masadic, but attacking symbols of the Shah made people dislike and distrust Masadic, when in fact the only reason they were doing it is because they've been bribed to
00:34:16
Speaker
by the CIA in the first place. So, got a classic, classic false flagginess there. Ah, the CIA. What will they do next? I shudder to think. I literally shudder to think. I would rather not, quite frankly. And that's basically the very brief version of the story of the 1953 coup in Iran.
00:34:39
Speaker
A false flag for the ages. Which kind of brings this episode to a close, so we do of course need to record a bonus episode. Any plans for what to talk about in the bonus episode? Well, we're going to be talking about a needle wielding attacker, which is actually quite hard to say with speech disfluency.
00:34:57
Speaker
who attack security guards and constant goers with drugs, according to one headline. And we probably should talk about Altoro's 9-11 moment, which happened earlier this week. Yeah, so if you'd like to hear about either of those things, and who knows what else, quite frankly, I think last week we got into a
00:35:18
Speaker
a fairly detailed dissertation on the film Doppelganger starring Drew Barrymore, which I think I incorrectly said was 1996, when in fact it was 1993, I should obviously know better than that. But anyway, if you'd like to hear about any of that sort of stuff, and you're a patron, then you're all set. If you're not a patron, you can just go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. And if you don't want to be a patron and don't want to hear about any of those things, well, then you're everything is peaches and cream as well. So...
00:35:48
Speaker
Mmm. So, I believe, unless you have any closing remarks, we're all done. I'm just gonna say Peaches and Cream again. Okay, well then I'll just be a good old stickler for tradition and simply say goodbye. Peaches and Cream. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R. Extenteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
00:36:17
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.