Dastard be their names. Some followup as one must know "this is how the game is played" when it's for ALL of the marbles:
From Robert Fisk—the preeminent Middle East reporter of our time. Taken from his epic tome The Great War For Civilisation -- The Conquest of the Middle East —2005 [All 1045 pages of it]
"Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran.
He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless seventy-nine-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vise. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of the Greek scholar he was, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior agent in “Operation Boot” in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh. It was “Monty” Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, [he] along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, “Light of the Aryans”, would obediently rule Iran—repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation—on our behalf.
Woodhouse was a reminder that “The Plot”—the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic*—was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece [WW II], a Tory MP, and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic.
Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead: CIA boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers, who organised the coup, Mossadegh himself and the last Shah of Iran. Except for Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran [at the time of the coup], “Monty” was the last survivor.[…]
* The overall tenor of the book is about various Arabic countries, and the West’s relationship to them, therefore a commensurate word in Farsi is not used. Fisk both speaks and writes Arabic, I know not of his fluency in Farsi.~ djo
…There were also lessons for for the Americans and the British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadegh, as James A. Brill has written, “began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism.” Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. “I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,” he said. Things were were taken for granted too easily,” After Mossadeg had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup. “That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!” he told the man from MI6. [Truman, the presidential adoptive father/facilitator of the CIA in 1947, had turned Dulles’ Iranian coup plans down.] ~ djo
But we don’t go in for “little eggs” any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies—and bigger egos—are involved in “regime change” today. [Stated in 2005] Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadegh was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War—and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadegh had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. “If we are ever going to try something like this again,” he wrote with great prescience, “we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.”
The “sort of complacency” which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak— Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organisation”—was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret U.S. mission was attached to Savak’s headquarters. Methods of interrogation included—apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction—rape and “cooking,” the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al-Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.[…]
Dastard be their names. Some followup as one must know "this is how the game is played" when it's for ALL of the marbles:
From Robert Fisk—the preeminent Middle East reporter of our time. Taken from his epic tome The Great War For Civilisation -- The Conquest of the Middle East —2005 [All 1045 pages of it]
"Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran.
He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless seventy-nine-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vise. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of the Greek scholar he was, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior agent in “Operation Boot” in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh. It was “Monty” Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, [he] along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, “Light of the Aryans”, would obediently rule Iran—repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation—on our behalf.
Woodhouse was a reminder that “The Plot”—the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic*—was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece [WW II], a Tory MP, and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic.
Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead: CIA boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers, who organised the coup, Mossadegh himself and the last Shah of Iran. Except for Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran [at the time of the coup], “Monty” was the last survivor.[…]
* The overall tenor of the book is about various Arabic countries, and the West’s relationship to them, therefore a commensurate word in Farsi is not used. Fisk both speaks and writes Arabic, I know not of his fluency in Farsi.~ djo
…There were also lessons for for the Americans and the British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadegh, as James A. Brill has written, “began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism.” Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. “I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,” he said. Things were were taken for granted too easily,” After Mossadeg had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup. “That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!” he told the man from MI6. [Truman, the presidential adoptive father/facilitator of the CIA in 1947, had turned Dulles’ Iranian coup plans down.] ~ djo
But we don’t go in for “little eggs” any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies—and bigger egos—are involved in “regime change” today. [Stated in 2005] Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadegh was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War—and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadegh had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. “If we are ever going to try something like this again,” he wrote with great prescience, “we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.”
The “sort of complacency” which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak— Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organisation”—was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret U.S. mission was attached to Savak’s headquarters. Methods of interrogation included—apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction—rape and “cooking,” the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al-Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.[…]
Great comment, David. I'll look up the book.