Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2013 A Cold War Narrative: The Covert Coup of Mohammad Mossadegh, Role of the U.S. Press and Its Haunting Legacies Carolyn T. Lee Trinity College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the Cultural History Commons, Islamic World and Near East History Commons, Political History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Carolyn T., "A Cold War Narrative: The Covert Coup of Mohammad Mossadegh, Role of the U.S. Press and Its Haunting Legacies". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2013. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/300 A COLD WAR NARRATIVE: THE COVERT COUP OF MOHAMMAD MOSSADEGH, ROLE OF THE U.S. PRESS AND ITS HAUNTING LEGACIES A SENIOR THESIS BY CAROLYN T. LEE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ART HISTORY A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MAJOR IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, TRINITY COLLEGE THESIS ADVISOR: ZAYDE GORDON ANTRIM, PH.D. ABSTRACT In 1953 the British and United States overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in what was the first covert coup d’état of the Cold War. Headlines and stories perfectly echoed the CIA and administration’s cover story – a successful people’s revolution against a prime minister dangerously sympathetic to communism. This storyline is drastically dissimilar to the realities of the clandestine operation. American mainstream media wrongly represented the proceedings through Iran strictly Cold War terms rather than placing it in it rightful context as a product of the Anglo-Iranian oil nationalization crisis.