CIA admits involvement in Iran coup - 60 years ago - The real reasons for US/Iranian friction today

CIA admits involvement in Iran coup, 60 years on19 August 2013 Last updated at 23:25 BST

Sixty years ago on Monday, a coup in Iran shook the Middle East.

The democratically elected Iranian prime minister at the time, Dr Mohammad Mossadeq, was overthrown, paving the way for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to return to the country as the Shah. Now for the first time, the CIA has officially acknowledged its own role in the coup, releasing documents that detail America's hand in the events.

BBC Persian's Khashayar Joneidi reports from Washington.

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"Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event's reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah's ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year. But it has taken almost six decades for the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge openly that it was behind the controversial overthrow. Published here today -- and on the website of the National Security Archive, which obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act -- is a brief excerpt from The Battle for Iran, an internal report prepared in the mid-1970s by an in- house CIA historian...".* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

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Sixty years ago, Iranian military officers backed by U-S and British intelligence agencies initiated a coup d'état. The coup toppled Iran's first democratically-elected government and its popular prime minister, Mohammad Mosadegh.

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