LONDON: A former British foreign secretary has urged the government to admit the UK’s leading role in ousting Iran’s last democratically elected leader in 1953, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.
“There are good reasons for acknowledging the UK’s role with the US in overthrowing democratic developments,” David Owen, who was foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979, told the newspaper.
“By admitting we were wrong and damaged steps that were developing towards a democratic Iran, we make reforms a little more likely.
“Women’s powerful arguments for reform are being heard and respected because they are true to a political spirit that has a long history in Iran.
“The British would help their cause and make it more likely to succeed and not be brushed aside if we admitted past errors in 1953.”
The release of declassified CIA material a decade ago revealed that the ousting of elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh, 70 years ago this week, was a joint CIA-MI6 plot pushed for by the UK’s then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill after Mosadegh nationalized British oil interests.
But the UK has retained its stance of not commenting on intelligence operations, a fact that the makers of a new film charting the coup attribute for their failure to find a distributor.
Taghi Amirani, director of “Coup 53,” said: “We’ve had the most bizarre and sinister attempts at supressing both the contents of the film and its chances of getting distribution in many twisted incidents worthy of (John) le Carre.”
Richard Norton-Taylor, author of a book about UK intelligence and the media, described Britain’s silence over its involvement in the coup as “sad and absurd” given the US admission.
