#THE CAT AND THE COUP GAME FULL#

With everything out in the open and mea culpas sorrowfully issued (both the United States and the United Kingdom have shown contrition for their role in the events of 1953, though neither can be said to have formally apologized), you might think the question of whether a coup actually took place had been laid to rest. “Unable to punish those involved in the 1953 coup,” one recalled, “the Iranians took out their anger on us.” While researching Our Man in Tehran, a book about the “Canadian caper” that inspired Argo, the author Robert Wright spoke to former CIA operatives in the capital who ascribed their harsh treatment at the hands of the hostage takers to memories of Mossadegh’s overthrow.

Embassy in 1979, initiating a 444-day hostage crisis, were in part paying America back for 1953. The recent Oscar success of Argo will further sharpen the public appetite, not least because the revolutionaries who seized the U.S. No fewer than three filmmakers are exploring the possibility of bringing Mossadegh to the big screen. A 2011 video game called The Cat and the Coup allows the player, in the guise of a mischievous feline, to summon the significant moments of Mossadegh’s career. There is an approachable history for the nonspecialist, Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. The coup against Mossadegh has now been incorporated into our popular culture. That year, Kim Roosevelt, the CIA spy who had led the 1953 operation, published a rollicking and much-embroidered record of events, and since then a steady stream of academic histories and articles has enlarged our understanding, capped by declassified documents and the leaking in 2000 to the New York Times of a CIA internal account of the operation. and British officials for the benefit of the shah - until he, too, was ousted, in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For decades following the dramatic overthrow in August 1953 of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s revered prime minister, Americans and Britons were led to believe that his toppling was the result not of CIA or MI6 operations but of a popular uprising in favor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

#THE CAT AND THE COUP GAME FULL#

Slowly, by degrees, the full story of another foreign intervention that went wrong - so sweet the conception, so bitter the aftertaste - is coming out. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian.

The cat and the coup game