Robert Parry: A CIA Hand in an American “Coup”? [View all]

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/51279/a-cia-hand-in-an-american-coup

A CIA Hand in an American “Coup”?

by Robert Parry | August 27, 2013 - 6:31am

It has taken six decades for the CIA to formally acknowledge that it undertook a coup against Iran’s elected government in 1953, but the spy agency might never concede that some of its officers joined in a political strike against a sitting U.S. president in 1980, yet that is what the evidence now indicates.

As with the ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the motive for sabotaging the reelection of President Jimmy Carter in 1980 appears to have flowed from fears about the direction of the Cold War, with American hardliners justifying their actions based on an assessment that Carter, like Mossadegh, was a dangerous idealist.

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The apparent 1980 plot to undermine Carter by sabotaging his negotiations with Iran over the fate of 52 American hostages would have been pulled off by rogue CIA officers collaborating with the Republican presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan (and his running mate George H.W. Bush), without the knowledge of Carter and CIA Director Stansfield Turner.

It would have been the work of what legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland described to me as “the CIA within the CIA,” the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood the strategic needs of the United States better than its elected leaders. These national security insiders believed Carter’s starry-eyed faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation.

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