London, December 02: The United Kingdom has a history of adopting hostile measures against Iran, which is why the Iranian nation hates the British monarchy, an English journalist says.
“It’s a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits,” Robert Fisk wrote in an editorial in the UK daily, the Independent, on Wednesday.
The English writer and journalist opened the article by evoking an anecdote where an Iranian post-revolution official reminds a Reuters’ reporter that “the founder of the world’s greatest news agency (Baron von Reuter) had built Persia’s railways at an immense profit.”
Fisk went on to trace the UK’s pernicious acts against the Iranians all the way back to 1941, when “Britain staged a joint invasion of Iran with Soviet forces.”
Just over a decade later, the British “helped the Americans overthrow the democratically elected [then Iranian Prime Minister] Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 after he nationalized Britain’s oil possessions in the country,” he added.
“This was not a myth but a real, down-to-earth conspiracy. The CIA called it Operation Ajax; the Brits wisely kept their ambitions in check by calling it Operation Boot,” the journalist noted.
Fisk further said that the UK is also responsible for the deaths of hundreds or “perhaps thousands” of Iranians when its “ruthless” MI6 agent in Tehran Colonel Monty Woodhouse brought weapons into Iran and he eagerly supported the CIA’s project to fund the overthrow of Mossadegh.
Thus, through helping Shah to re-impose his rule, London was also to blame for the torture of the opponents of the regime by Shah’s faithful secret SAVAK police, the editorial added.
Fisk then asked in a thinly veiled ironic tone, “How dare the Iranians remember all this?”
He goes on to add that the documents seized after the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 “proved to the Iranians not only Washington’s attempts to subvert the new order of [late founder of the Islamic Revolution] Ayatollah [Seyyed Ruhollah] Khomeini but the continued partnership of the American and British intelligence services.”
——Agencies