Claims Mossadegh Mounting Invasion (1953)
| Arash Norouzi The Mossadegh Project | February 21, 2025 |
Newsweek magazine’s long running feature The Periscope highlighted trends and predictions based on world events. Its information derived from its field of correspondents and government insiders.
In April 1953, they published a short item pushing the absurd claim that Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, Iranian Prime Minister, was mounting an invasion of three neighboring islands in the Persian Gulf. The purpose, they wrote, was to
create a distraction — a cynical political calculation.
Diversion
Nothing has been printed about it, but Premier Mossadegh is quietly massing troops in southern Iran for an invasion of three small Persian Gulf islands belonging to the Trucial sheiks. For more than a century these sheiks,
onetime pirates, have been bound to Britain, by treaties making their territory virtually a British protectorate. Mossadegh’s apparent motive is to divert attention from his disastrous domestic policies.
There was good reason why “nothing has been printed about it” — it was not only fake news, but deliberate black propaganda. It seems they were aiming to tarnish Mossadegh’s image in general and stir animus and distrust of the Iranian
government by its neighbors, in this case the future United Arab Emirates (UAE). Mossadegh was overthrown three months later.
Newsweek itself has since admitted that it was in cahoots with the CIA prior to the 1953 coup. The major 1954 CIA report on the coup by Donald Wilber
revealed that the agency had its material published as articles in
Newsweek.
So there is very good reason to suspect that this made-up story, coinciding with the timing of the brewing CIA plot Operation Ajax, was planted by the U.S. government.
In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency has a partially redacted file on this very text, the only difference being the phrase “it is rumored in Dharan [Saudi Arabia] that...”
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The text in quotes was probably prefaced by stating that the CIA had recently had it placed in Newsweek. There’s really no logical explanation for hiding the rest of it. The subject, which put Mossadegh in a bad light, is
something that could have only pleased the agency. The disclosure of sources and methods, however, is another matter.
The CIA memo’s “confidential — U.S. officials only” markings are itself telling. As the ‘invasion’ rumor was already made public in a major news magazine, the rest of the info they have since blacked out was clearly very sensitive and
most likely, self-implicating •
• CIA Documents on Iran, Mossadegh, 1953 Coup
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Related links:
How Mossadeq Makes Enemies of Our Neighbors (1953 CIA Propaganda)
Drew Pearson Libels Hossein Fatemi As Convicted Criminal (July 11, 1951)
F Is for Fainting | Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 15, 1951
MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”
