MB Civic

Robert Sheer in TruthDig .. “Oscar 2013: Hollywood’s CIA Celebration”:

After the overthrow of the shah in 1979, I interviewed for the Los Angeles Times CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, who led the coup against Mossadegh. For a quarter century, the United States had denied any connection with the coup, but Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was about to release a tell-all book on the subject that the CIA had approved, and he was willing to talk .. Roosevelt told me that he and Dulles kept their plan secret from Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, because they were sympathetic to Mossadegh as a genuine nationalist leader. “Acheson was absolutely fascinated by Dr. Mossadegh. He was in fact sympathetic to him,” Roosevelt said [] Instead, he waited until Allen Dulles’ brother, Foster, took over as secretary of state in the incoming Republican administration, and then Dr. Mossadegh would come to be defined by the U.S. as a potential puppet of the Soviets. In our interview, 25 years after the coup, Roosevelt was at pains to say that in retrospect, the communist label didn’t really fit. “Mossadegh was not pro-communist. … I think that the British were very stupid in negotiations with Mossadegh. … “I think it was possible to make an offer he would have accepted and that would have avoided this whole blowup. If they had said, ‘OK, we’ll increase the rate (paid to Iran for their oil) we’ll give you a certain percentage of the ownership,’ this would have been the smart thing for them to do.”

and here’s Robert Parry in Consortium News: The Shortsighted History of ‘Argo’ ..

Despite a brief documentary-style opening referencing the 1953 coup and the dictatorial rule of the Shah of Iran until 1979, Argo quickly descended into a formulaic tale of sympathetic CIA officers trying to outwit nasty Iranian revolutionaries, complete with a totally made-up thriller escape at the end .. In that sense, Argo recalls Charlie Wilson’s War, which presented a dangerously misleading account of the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan. Though “just a movie,” Charlie Wilson’s War’s storyline has become something of a baseline for America’s understanding of the historic challenges in Afghanistan

i for one was surprised that Argo mentioned the Mossadegh coup at all – usually mainstream media, TV, movies, news etc omit that whole chapter – baby steps – mab