CIA’s Overthrow of Iran in 53 Reaps Bitter Harvest

(Sherwood Ross, formerly a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and City News Bureau of Chicago, is a media consultant to the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

Iranians’ hatred of America dates back to the CIA’s violent 1953 overthrow of democratic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh’s government in order to arrange sweetheart contracts for western oil companies, author Stephen Kinzer writes in “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq.”

The CIA’s installation of despot Shah Mohammed Reza Palevi on a throne, Kinzer writes, “ultimately set off a revolution that brought radical fundamentalists to power” in Iran and led to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.