US Official: The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets

Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, tells the story of the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.

The 1953 street demonstrations, together with the Cold War claim that the US had to grab Iran before the Soviets did, served as the US government’s justification for overthrowing Iranian democracy. What the Iranian people wanted was not important.

Today, the street demonstrations in Tehran show signs of orchestration. The protesters, primarily young people, especially young women opposed to the dress codes, carry signs written in English: "Where is My Vote?" The signs are intended for the western media—not for the Iranian government.

More evidence of orchestration is provided by the protesters’ chant, "death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad." Every Iranian knows that the president of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed Westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator, as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him.

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion. More

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Airborne slaughter of innocents became standard operating procedure, part of an “ideological group think we associate with cultures of war.” Victims are no longer individual civilians, but entire nations. Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor became “codes for mass destruction and psychological warfare,” adopted by both bin Laden and the U.S. -- “one side using this as a model for the horrors of 9/11, the other finding inspiration in what we call the cutting edge of shock and awe, tactics that were presumably to ensure victory in the unprovoked war of Iraq.”