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I expect that by now most DUers have caught up with the overthrow of Mossadgh in 1953. But how many know about the stuff in the 70's that led to the overthrow of the Shah?
Here's a hint -- it involved the same people who had previously been behind the Phoenix Project assassination operation in Vietnam and would later be neck-deep in Iran-Contra.
Basically, the CIA drug trafficking that was going on in Vietnam during the war to fund covert operations like the Phoenix Project continued after US troops pulled out and even after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. By that point, though, a lot of the people involved were starting to go rogue. They had arms stashes in Thailand and cash in the Nugan Hand Bank which were under their own control and not that of the CIA.
The leader of this bunch was Ted Shackley, who had previously run Operation 40 for the CIA in Miami, training assassins to take out members of Castro's regime. In 1965, he and Tom Clines went to Laos to set up a drugs-arms-and-assassination operation. General Richard Secord coordinated the flights that carried the arms and drugs, and Oliver North and Richard Armitage were involved as well.
After the fall of Saigon, however, they needed a new primary basis of operations. For that reason, Shackley sent Armitage to Iran to set up both an unauthorized operation to funnel drug money from Southeast Asia and a covert assassination program to eliminate enemies of the Shah. Around the end of 1975, Shackley and Clines sent Edwin Wilson (formerly of the CIA's Air America) to Tehran to run the program and train SAVAK in assassination techniques. Secord was also in Iran at that time.
(This, among other things, is why some people were skeptical when Armitage said he'd inadvertently outed Valerie Plame because he just couldn't help himself. Inveterate gossips don't generally get picked to set up covert money-laundering and assassination programs.)
George H.W. Bush took over as CIA director in January 1976 and made Shackley his Deputy Director of Operations. A year later, however, Jimmy Carter became president and Shackley's people were recalled from Iran -- but by then it was too late to save the Shah from the hatred that their operations and their training of SAVAK had engendered.
Meanwhile, most of the same people had moved on to Latin American drugs-and-arms smuggling and then to Iran-Contra. Around the end of 1984, for example, Shackley was introduced by an Iranian general to Manucher Ghorbanifar -- and by the spring of 1985, the two of them and Ollie North were meeting together to cook up the Iranian arms deal.
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