CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic
<i>“CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,”</i><p>Then they&#x27;ve got a long way to go. Everybody already knew that the Shah&#x27;s coup was planned and backed by the CIA. That was part of a long and ugly history of CIA covert operations that have backfired spectacularly. It&#x27;s not unreasonable to trace the Sunday&#x27;s horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.<p>I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged. But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.<p>Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of <i>mea culpas</i> and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it&#x27;s going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.