(LA Times) A week after declassified CIA documents came to light verifying that the U.S. spy agency was behind a 1953 coup in Iran, parliamentarians in the Islamic Republic voted Tuesday to fast-track a lawsuit against Washington for interfering in Iranian domestic political affairs.
Sections of an internal CIA history of the operation that ousted Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and paved the way for the return of the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi were declassified two years ago but made public only Aug. 19 by the National Security Archive, an independent documentation research center in Washington.
The shah's return was followed by years of brutal political reprisals and confrontation, leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the shah's second flight into exile. The deposed monarch took refuge in several countries before being granted a brief U.S. stay for medical treatment that poisoned to this day relations between Washington and the religious leadership in Tehran. The shah died in Egypt in 1980.
Iranian lawmakers will begin Wednesday debating how to take the U.S. government to international court following a vote by the 290-seat parliament that was broadcast on state radio and reported by Iran's Press TV. The plan to fast-track a lawsuit received 173 votes.
“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of the CIA's internal account of the 1953 coup, titled "The Battle for Iran." The relevant admissions were carried by the English-language Tehran Times on Tuesday in its report of the parliamentary action.
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