Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran

U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and installed the Shah was not even officially admitted until Madeleine Albright acknowledged it in March of 2000, the year that witnessed the declassification of a flood of U.S. documents on the coup. Gasiorowski (political science, Louisiana State U.) and Byrne (research director of the George Washington U.-based National Security Archive) present seven papers of new research from scholars from the Iran, the US, and the former Soviet Union based on these uncovered archival sources as well as recently discovered documents from Iran and the former Soviet Union. The papers look at Iran's political environment in the early 1950s, the activities of the communist Tudeh party, British and American destabilization campaigns, and the factors that led the U.S. to undertake the coup. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mark J. Gasiorowski, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, is the author of U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah and coeditor of Neither East nor West: Iran, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Malcolm Byrne is deputy director and research director of the George Washington University-based National Security Archive, where he directs the U.S.-Iran relations project. He is the coeditor of The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History and The Chronology.