Invisible Hands: The American Century: 3. Operation Ajax

Summary

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The History Podcast – Invisible Hands: The American Century: Operation Ajax (Ep. 3)

Host: David Dimbleby (BBC Radio 4)
Date: August 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This gripping episode of Invisible Hands recounts the covert CIA-backed coup known as Operation Ajax, which overthrew Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. David Dimbleby explores how this pivotal event established America’s clandestine methods for projecting power, set the stage for decades of US intervention abroad, and sowed seeds of resentment that echo into current conflicts with Iran. The episode weaves insightful historical narration, archival newsreels, expert commentary, and personal testimonies to uncover the “invisible hands” behind America’s rise as a superpower.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 1953 Coup: Chaos in Tehran

• Setting: August 19, 1953; violence erupts across Tehran (01:10–02:04)
  • Mob attacks, widespread bloodshed, Mossadegh’s house stormed and set ablaze.
  • Mossadegh flees; radio announces his government has fallen.
  • “An astonishing turn of events because Mossadegh is loved in Iran and admired all around the world.” (A, 02:04)
• Notable Quote:

  “Time magazine in the United States named him man of the Year... He was the most important figure in the world at that time.” (D, 02:29)

2. Mossadegh: Iran’s Nationalist Hero

• Revered for nationalizing Iranian oil, ending British monopoly (20:36–22:12).
• Passionately resisted British influence, viewed as a champion by Iranians:

  “Sometimes he would become so overcome... he would actually break out into tears. And a couple of times he actually fainted on the floor of the Parliament.” (D, 20:20)

• His nationalization infuriated Britain, which sought to reclaim control.

3. Global Cold War Backdrop

• Context of early 1950s: rising Cold War paranoia in the US (06:01–09:08).
• Marshall Plan, Truman’s containment, and hysteria over communist infiltration.
• Harry Dexter White’s persecution underscores the era’s suspicions (07:32–08:31).

4. Eisenhower, The CIA, and Covert Power

• Eisenhower sought to rollback communism while preserving US moral high ground (09:08–10:22).
• US avoided overt imperialism, instead favoring covert action:

  “The US... doesn't resort to overt interventions, right, to sort of gunboat diplomacy like the British had in the 1800s.” (F, 10:29)

5. The Rise of Allen Dulles & CIA Culture

• Allen Dulles, WWII spy, longed for clandestine operations (11:25–14:56).
• Shaped by a strict moral worldview; saw global conflict in terms of good vs. evil.
• The allure of espionage permeated the CIA’s early years:

  “They loved the game of being a spy, of working undercover.” (A, 13:30)

  • Agency dissolved after WWII, revived with the Cold War.

6. The British Appeal for American Intervention

• Britain’s oil interest masked as anti-communist concern to gain US support (22:12–23:35).
• British agent Monty Woodhouse reframed British priorities to align with US anti-communist fears:

  “Knowing the climate in Washington, I decided not even to mention oil and to tell them Mossadegh was opening Iran to a communist takeover.” (D, 23:24)

7. Operation Ajax: Conception and Execution

• CIA Director Dulles seizes the opportunity for covert intervention (24:09–24:44).
• Kermit Roosevelt II (Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson) is chosen to lead on the ground.
• Selection of Kermit Roosevelt: Family legacy of adventure; CIA Middle East head (25:03–25:47).

  “There was a sort of mythology handed down from President Theodore Roosevelt that each man, each boy should go out and seek adventure and do something great.” (E, 25:32)

• The Plan:
  • Smuggling Kermit into Tehran, persuading the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh (26:10–26:24).
  • Initial coup attempt fails; Mossadegh prevails, Shah flees (27:07–27:39).
  • Roosevelt refuses to concede, switches to street-level psyops and engineered chaos.

The Infamous Mob (28:13–29:11)

• Kermit organizes mobs to create chaos, blame Mossadegh and communists, and instigates street battles.

  “He hired a gang of thugs to race through the streets, fire weapons into shop windows... and yell, ‘We love Mossadegh and communism.’ And then he did something even cleverer... sent another mob to protest in support of the Shah and attack his first mob. So now he's created a battle in the streets of Tehran, and he's created a crisis.” (E/D, 28:26–28:45)

The Aftermath

• Mossadegh flees, government collapses, Shah returns (29:11–29:55).
• The Shah’s gratitude:

  “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you.” (E, 29:55) “Which was true, although perhaps not in that order.” (D, 30:07)

8. The Impact and Legacy

• Shah rules for 25 more years, western-backed; eventually ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution (30:17–30:41).
• Revolutionaries equate the Shah and American meddling; chant “Death to America.”
• In the US, the coup is viewed as a Cold War victory, setting CIA’s future direction (31:07–31:59).

  “The idea that the CIA could shape the world simply by covert action really took hold in Washington.” (D, 31:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dimbleby introduces the theme:

  “America was manipulating the Iranian people through a man working for what is now America’s most infamous secret agency, a man called Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.” (A, 02:54)

• Hugh Wilford captures the dilemma:

  “The us... has sufficient respect for international law that it doesn’t resort to overt interventions, right, to sort of gunboat diplomacy like the British had in the 1800s.” (F, 10:29)

• Stephen Kinzer on the coup's wider meaning:

  “He began a plan for another coup. Ten months later they overthrew the government of Guatemala. ... The idea that the CIA could shape the world simply by covert action really took hold in Washington.” (D, 31:07–31:32)

• Closure:

  “The CIA became America’s invisible hand, overthrowing enemies and waging the Cold War in secret. But pretty soon that strategy was going to be tested. The country was going to face its biggest challenge yet.” (A, 31:32–31:59)

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Key Timestamps

• Tehran Coup Unfolds: 01:10–02:04
• Mossadegh’s Global Reputation: 02:29–02:41
• Origins of Cold War Anxiety: 06:01–09:08
• Allen Dulles’ Background and CIA Culture: 11:25–14:56
• British Plot to Enlist US Aid: 22:12–23:35
• Operation Ajax Devised: 24:09–25:47
• Kermit Roosevelt’s Street Mob Strategy: 28:13–29:11
• Coup Success Announced: 29:11–29:55
• Long-term Legacy: 31:07–31:59

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Tone & Style

• The episode is richly narrated, blending suspenseful storytelling, historical documentation, and thoughtful analysis.
• Expert guests speak with gravitas and sense of personal or scholarly connection; direct quotes illustrate their viewpoints.
• Archival audio and newsreel-style segments add urgency and immersive context.
• Tone is measured, inquisitive, and occasionally laced with irony, especially regarding America’s self-image.

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Summary

Operation Ajax did more than topple a democratically elected government—it set the CIA’s template for decades of secret interventions, left a festering bitterness in Iran, and helped define America’s sometimes shadowy global role. This episode masterfully connects past and present, showing how the so-called “invisible hands” of US power can both shape—and haunt—the world order.

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Transcript

[A]

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It's August 19, 1953, and there's chaos on the streets of Tehran.

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Attention is focused once again on the Middle east, where events in Iran have taken a dramatic double twist.

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It's headline news across the world.

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And then the people themselves took a hand.

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Mobs rampage through the city. They smashed the windows of a newspaper office.

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300 killed and hundreds wounded is a conservative estimate.

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They move as a mass, making their way towards the residence of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.

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The rioters freed those taken prisoner earlier and stormed the house of Mosaddegh.

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Rioters pull paintings off the walls and then they set the building on fire. The Mossadegh has melted into the night.

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Former Premier Mossadegh's ruined house is a mute testimony to three days of bloody rioting culminating in a military coup.

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An announcement is made over the radio. Mossadegh is a traitor. His government has fallen. This is an astonishing turn of events because Mossadegh is loved in Iran and admired all around the world.

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Time magazine in the United States named him man of the Year. They chose him over Truman, over MacArthur, over Churchill. He was the most important figure in the world at that time.

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Mohammad Mossadegh must have been baffled at why his people had turned against him.

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He had no idea that there was someone in the basement of the American Embassy manipulating all of this.

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That's right. America was manipulating the Iranian people through a man working for what is now America's most infamous secret agency, a man called Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA. I'm David Dimbleby and from the History Podcast and BBC Radio 4, this is series two of Invisible Hands, the American Century. The story of how the United States became a superpower at the head of a new global order and the invisible hands that guided it. Episode 3 Operation Ajax Back in February this year, the relationship between Iran and the United States exploded.

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The United States and Israel launched strikes from air and sea in what they

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say will be a multi day operation dubbed by the Pentagon.

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Epic Fury.

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Donald Trump blaming the war on Iran's hardline Islamic regime. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder. But what many people don't know is that the roots of this year's conflict are very different from the ones claimed by Trump. Because the real beginning of this story, the beginning no one talks about, goes all the way back to 1953, a year I remember for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

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And as the music rises in triumph, we await her Majesty the Queen and

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the death of Stalin.

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Moscow heads the communist world in mourning the passing of Joseph Stalin.

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This was also the year of a CIA led coup to remove Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. A coup that marked the beginning of a new era of America's role as a global superpower.

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These are the actual documents marked confidential,

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top secret, eyes only.

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It's the stuff of crime and mystery and spy novels.

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In the last episode we finished a few years before the Iranian coup in 1947, George Kennan had helped transform America's vision of the world. He wanted America to push back on the Soviet Union. He wanted to contain communism, but he didn't want to do it by force. Instead, he wanted to use the dollar.

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An historic change in U.S. foreign policy toward the maintenance of peace and order may well shape the future destiny of all the peoples of the world.

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It was called the Marshall Plan.

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The Marshall Plan is designed to afford eligible nations that margin of help in credit and materials which they need to bring their overall economy back to health.

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Kennan believed America had to resist Soviet expansion, but not by conquering territory. That's what the old imperial powers would have done. America was building a new kind of power. And the Marshall Plan was a radical new kind of foreign policy, an enlightened foreign policy as they saw it. But then, in 1949, everything changed.

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President Truman's dramatic announcement that Russia has created an atomic explosion.

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The Soviet Union had acquired the atomic bomb. In the holocaust of tomorrow, survival will not be measured in terms of hours and days, but in terms of minutes and seconds. And in America, paranoia took hold.

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You are in the crosshairs of the bomb site. An enemy is centering on you wherever you are. Take cover. Take cover.

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Communists became public enemy number one in recognizing a communist.

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Physical appearance counts for nothing. In if he openly declares himself to be a communist, we take his word for it.

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People became so obsessed about communism, they looked for it everywhere. They even thought it was working within the American government itself. There were government officials actually passing secrets to the Soviets.

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But there are other communists who don't show their real faces, who work more silently.

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One of those government officials under suspicion was Harry Dexter White, the man we Featured in Episode 1, the Hero of Bretton Woods. As we know, Harry Dexter White wanted to cooperate with the Soviets and believed in one united world. But now he was accused of sharing information with Soviet spies. He denied it, and as far as we can tell, there isn't much evidence that he was a spy. Beyond that, he did speak with his Soviet counterparts, which at the time was normal for American officials. But in this climate of hysteria, that was enough to tarnish him forever.

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My grandfather was a target of some

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of the worst accusations that you can possibly be the target of, and it erased any of his accomplishments.

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America was in a new era now, an era of fear and suspicion, and pretty soon, President Truman was caught up in it. His government was unpopular, and there was a widespread belief that it had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. As a result, in 1952, he decided not to stand for re election.

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Ike for president. Ike for president. Ike for president. Ike for president. You like Ike? I like Ike. Everybody likes Ike for president. Hang out the band and pizza drum. We'll take Ike to Washington.

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In his place came Dwight D. Eisenhower, the architect of America's victory in World War II and a man who was elected on a promise to not just to crush the communist threat in America, but to roll it back. Across the world, freedom is pitted against

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slavery, likeness against the dark. The faith we hold belongs not to us alone, but to the free of all the world.

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Because communism was spreading out, there were now communist governments not just in Eastern Europe, but in places right across the planet like China.

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A monster rally in Shanghai celebrates communism's greatest victories since the coup.

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In Czechoslovakia and North Korea, nationalist forces

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clash with Korean communist elements who look to Soviet Russia for approval.

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Communism was becoming a global threat, a threat that couldn't be dealt with just using America's financial clout as George Kennan wanted. A threat that America, as the new superpower, would have to stand up to. But Eisenhower and America had a big problem.

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It didn't want to look like an old fashioned imperial power throwing its weight around in the former colonies.

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This is historian Hugh Wilford, author of the CIA An Imperial History.

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The us, you know, has sufficient respect for international law that it doesn't resort to overt interventions, right, to sort of gumboat diplomacy like the British had in the 1800s.

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The US had set out its stall as the virtuous superpower. And so Eisenhower was looking for a solution. How could America stay the good guys while driving back communism wherever it found it?

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Let's get going. I have a half an hour to go. Stephen, I'm all yours.

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This is Stephen Kinza.

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I'm a longtime New York Times correspondent. I'm now a college professor of international relations at Brown University. I'm the author of a book about the 1953 coup in Iran called All the Shah's Men.

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Stephen Kinze is also the biographer of the man who would provide Eisenhower with his solution. A man who'd become the head of a powerful secret organization. The man's name? Alan Dulles. Allen Dulles was one of three children born into a grand family in upstate New York in the late 19th century. Their father was a pastor with a strict Calvinist interpretation of the Bible.

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They looked at the world and they saw it as divided between good and evil. And everybody who divides things between good and evil naturally puts themselves on the

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good side, which taught young Allen Dulles a lesson he never forgot.

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So that meant that all of America's rivals or enemies or non allies in the world were evil.

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When America joined the war against Nazi Germany in 1941, he decided to join up. But he didn't take the obvious step of becoming a soldier. He was going to do something more secretive, something he believed would be more effective at rooting out evil wherever it lived. Allen Dulles became a spy, sending people

[D]

out to be parachuted behind enemy lines and running all sorts of wild secret operations.

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The organization he ended up working for was called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS for short. It was America's wartime intelligence agency and was full of men like Dulles, men with a taste for intrigue and adventure.

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I think some of it goes back to reading books by authors like Rudyard Kipling when they were just boys. Hugh Wilford, again, Dulles reputedly died with a copy of Kipling's spy adventure Kim on his bedside table.

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They loved the game of being a spy, of working undercover. But when the war came to an end in 1945. So did the OSS.

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The trouble was, you know, Americans had a long history of mistrusting secret government power and intelligence agencies.

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President Truman thought America should be a different kind of superpower, that the secret services had no role during peacetime. And so he shut down the oss, and Alan Dulles and his spy friends landed back in the everyday world with a bump.

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They hated their new life. They were like the British pilots from the Battle of Britain who never knew if they were coming back alive from one day to the next, and suddenly they're back being the milkman in some town in the Midlands.

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Truman did eventually set up an American intelligence agency, but he didn't really see it as anything much more than a White House news desk.

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Basically, it would just compile intelligence from other government departments and then report to the President on the basis of that.

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Allen Dulles joined Truman's group, which quickly became known as the CIA. But he found it dull. He wanted action, adventure, secret missions. And so he waited.

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Waited for a change in administration that would give him a President who was as enthusiastic about covert operations abroad as he was.

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And in 1952, as we've heard, that change arrived.

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Everybody likes, I'm President, hang up the barracks, beat the drum we'll make light to what she done.

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Eisenhower was elected president, and Dulles saw his opportunity to go back to his old life of intrigue and spying, because he knew Eisenhower wanted to root out the communist threat for good, but also wanted America to uphold its promise of being the squeaky clean leader of the free world. And so Dulles offers him a way of achieving this goal. He says, you don't need to go to war with communism in the open. You can do it in secret, not with soldiers, but with spies.

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It's the sort of iron fist within the velvet glove. The US Prefers to use enlightened, progressive methods that go with its own self image and will look good in the eyes of the rest of the world. But when things get critical, it is prepared to resort to hard power disguised as covert action.

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And Dulles says he knows just the organization to carry out this covert action. The CIA

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pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydrogenated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunch boxes with peace of mind. Get back to school. Ready at Whole Foods Market.

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To understand what happened after Alan Dulles became the head of the CIA, I want to introduce you to a man I met 50 years ago in Tehran. It was 1976 when I interviewed him for the BBC's Panorama program. The Shah of Iran is one of the last absolute monarchs in the world. For 35 years, he's ruled 35 million people in the vast desert plateau that stretches from Turkey to Afghanistan and the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. The Shah's name was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He ruled Iran from what was known as the Peacock Throne. He was famous for his opulence. He threw luxurious parties at one. In the early 70s, he flew 15,000 trees in from Versailles, along with 50,000 songbirds to roost in them. When he took power in 1941, he was thought of as a rather weak man. But by the time I interviewed him in 1976, he'd changed. He was confident and powerful, a ruthless ruler of his country and willing to hold the world to ransom by threatening to raise the price of Iranian oil. Sound familiar? How much pressure has there been from the United States to keep this oil rise down?

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Oh, a lot. What would they like to see?

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Or what would they find acceptable?

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Nothing. They would like to expect us not

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to rise the price of oil when they themselves increase the price of steel, for instance. I was particularly interested in the Shah because the Shah's relationship with Britain went way back. At the beginning of the 20th century, as the British continued to expand their empire, it had negotiated the right to look for oil in Iran.

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Its undeveloped natural resources were suspected. There was oil seepage and there was strong, like the burning bush of the Old Testament. Then, in 1908, British prospectors found oil in commercial quantities.

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A year later, the British set up the Anglo Persian Oil Company. We now know it as bp. And Iranian oil became the heartbeat of the British economy.

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The buses and the lorries were running on oil from Iran. The factories were powered by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power around the world, was powered 100% by oil from Iran.

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So the British took the majority of the profits from Iran's assets and in return, helped keep the Shah on his Peacock Throne. It was an arrangement that worked for everyone except the Iranian people.

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Iranians were living in some of the worst conditions of any people on earth.

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But in the late 1940s, one Iranian decided enough was enough.

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Sometimes he would become so overcome with his denunciations of the British and his lamentations about the sufferings of Iranians that he would actually break out into tears. And a couple of times he actually fainted on the floor of the Parliament.

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This man's name was Muhammad Mossadegh. He was an Iranian aristocrat, and he had one obsession, that oil had made Iran a rich country, but that the Iranian people were being denied those riches.

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In his speeches, he was very passionate. He was like one of those preachers that's trying to urge the congregation to be better while whipping them.

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Mossadegh dedicated his life to removing British influence from Iran. The Iranians came out in the streets in support of him. They held rallies, they protested against the British influence. And all this frightened the young shah, who was worried that Mossadegh was trying to ferment a revolution. And so, against the wishes of the British, the Shah decided to make Mossadegh his prime minister. He was hoping to pacify his political rival. But that's not how it worked out. The moment he got power, Mossadegh decided to do something really radical, something unprecedented, something that would transform his country forever. He nationalized Iranian oil.

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There was a densely packed session of the Security Council at New York. Dr. Mosaddegh, speaking in French, reiterated the Persian attitude to the oil dispute.

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The British were furious.

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Mossadegh's action terrified the British.

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They knew they had to do something to remove Mossadegh and get their oil back. But how? Only days after Eisenhower won the presidential election in autumn 1952, a senior agent from the British Secret Intelligence Services traveled to Washington to meet the CIA and State Department officials. He had the kind of British name that Americans love. Christopher Montagu Robert Woodhouse, the 5th Baron Terrington, or Monty for short. And Monty was on a mission from the British government to ask the United States for help in Iran. But he knew he didn't have much clout with the Americans.

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And he wrote, our argument isn't going to work. The argument we're using is this madman took away our oil. Please overthrow him so we can have our own. That wouldn't mobilize Americans.

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It would be seen as a typically colonial attitude and unacceptable. So instead, he tried a different tack.

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Knowing the climate in Washington, I decided not even to mention oil and to tell them Mossadegh was opening Iran to a communist takeover.

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Luckily for Monti, he was pushing at an open door because Allen Dulles was about to become the director of the CIA and Monty was presenting him with a golden opportunity. An opportunity to prove that the CIA could do what needed to be done to stop Communism in whatever way necessary, without anyone ever knowing anything about it. The CIA could do America's dirty work without her losing the moral high ground.

[D]

He had the idea of doing more than isolating Mossadegh. He decided he wanted to overthrow Mossadegh.

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This was just the kind of adventure Dulles believed the CIA was made for. Ever the adventurer and the romantic, he names his plan in Iran after a mythical warrior, Operation Ajax. All he needs now is someone with that same warrior spirit to carry it out.

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There are a lot of Roosevelts, and it's a little bit confusing, but the way that most people start counting is they start with Theodore Roosevelt, who was President of the United States. His second son was named Kermit. That's the first Kermit that. Kermit's son was my grandfather, who was the CIA agent in Operation Ajax.

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Kermit Roosevelt II was the man Dulles would end up turning to. And this is his grandson.

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I'm Kermit Roosevelt iii. I'm a professor of Constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania, Carey Law School.

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And Kermit Roosevelt iii, forgive me if this sounds a bit confusing, says his grandfather didn't need much persuading to take up the mission Allen Dulles offered him. He was primed for adventure from an early age.

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There was a sort of mythology handed down from President Theodore Roosevelt that each man, each boy should go out and seek adventure and do something great. And I think my grandfather was looking for something like that.

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Like Dulles, he was an old OSS man now working as the head of the Middle East Department at the CIA. And so when he got the call from Alan Dulles, he was only too pleased to accept he was going to be the CIA's man on the ground. In late July, he arrived in Iran.

[E]

He's apparently smuggled into the Imperial palace, rolled up in a rug in the back of a car so that no one will see him.

[A]

And there he tells the Shah, you have to fire Mossadegh.

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The Shah was not really what you would call a brave person, and he agreed with the idea.

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Kermit left the Shah's palace and went home, waiting to hear the news that Mossadegh had been arrested.

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So there he is in his safe house. What's he to do? Well, according to legend, he spent the night in the company of a couple of trusted associates and a whole lot of gin and tonic, listening to Luck Be A Lady Tonight from Guys and Dolls. Sunday morning, my grandfather is waiting to hear the news on the radio, but instead, he hears military music.

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Mossadegh had caught wind of this plot, and he had loyal soldiers waiting outside. Though the officers who came to arrest Mossadegh were themselves arrested.

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It looked like the CIA's coup had backfired spectacularly. The Shah quickly fled Iran, ending up in Rome, and Mossadegh was now in total control.

[E]

And it's at this point that the CIA actually tells my grandfather, this operation is a failure. Give it up. Go home.

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The CIA's plan, its big moment, had failed. The whole strategy of opposing communism through covert action was in doubt. But Kermit Roosevelt, ever the adventurer, he had another idea.

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My grandfather, I think, is looking for his moment of glory. He's like, this is my test. I'm gonna pass it.

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He sent a cable to Washington saying there might still be a slight remaining chance for success.

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He decided to set Tehran aflame.

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Kermit Roosevelt came up with a plan that would become the CIA playbook for years to come.

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He hired a gang of thugs to race through the streets, fire weapons into shop windows, break mosque windows, and yell, we love Mossadegh and communism. And then he did something even cleverer.

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He sent another hired mob to protest in support of the Shah and attack his first mob. So now he's created a battle in the streets of Tehran, and he's created a crisis.

[A]

Kermit has caused Tehran to explode. The streets are on fire. The city's burning.

[D]

They converged on Mossadegh's house. There was an extended battle in which several hundred people were killed.

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Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh escaped out of the back door of his house and fled. His overthrow was complete. At lunchtime that day, the announcement came over the radio, just as Kermit Roosevelt had originally planned. Mossadegh is a traitor. The government has fallen. Long live the Shah, king of kings. When the Shah returned to Tehran from his brief Roman exile, Kermit Roosevelt was waiting for him.

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And ever after, he reported what the Shah said to him, which was, I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you.

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Which was true, although perhaps not in that order.

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The Shah would rule on the peacock throne for another 25 years.

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But then, of course, eventually, there's the Islamic revolution.

[C]

Good evening. A tearful Shah of Iran left his country today on a vacation from which he may never return.

[A]

And protesters chanting death to America.

[C]

Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran. When the news broke, the Shah had gone. It was like liberation day today. There were more shouts of yankee go home.

[A]

They blamed America for the whole history of Iran Since Mossadegh was removed in Washington, though, the feeling at the time was that this was a victory. A victory in the fight against communism. Operation Ajax was a turning point for Allen Dulles, for the CIA and for American foreign policy.

[D]

Within days after that coup succeeded, he began a plan for another coup. Ten months later they overthrew the government of Guatemala. They went off around the world and were intervening in places from Indonesia to the Congo. The idea that the CIA could shape the world simply by covert action really took hold in Washington.

[A]

The CIA became America's invisible hand, overthrowing enemies and waging the Cold War in secret. But pretty soon that strategy was going to be tested. The country was going to face its biggest challenge yet. A challenge that threatened to destroy the very ideal of America and the post war order.

[C]

The US fighter bombers continue to step up the air war in Vietnam in a series of heavy attacks on Viet Cong position.

[A]

That's next time. Invisible Hands the American Century is a samizdat audio production for BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast. It's hosted by me, David Dimbleby. The producer is Red Zi Bernard. The executive producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Licitsina. Story editing by Joe Sykes, Dasha Licitsina and Peggy Sutton. Sound design by Jeff Emtman. The historical consultant is David Milne and the commissioning editor at Radio 4 is Dan Clark.

[B]

From BBC Radio 4.

[C]

I got one more question for CIA, and this is as big as it gets.

[B]

I'm Kim Cattrall and I'm back as the CIA trailblazer Eloise Page.

[C]

I do solemnly swear. I do solemnly swear.

[B]

It's 1964 and President Lyndon B. Johnson is in the White House.

[C]

Just confirming that is the order.

[B]

In the years that follows, the CIA is put to the test.

[A]

A car with its hood up in the middle.

[B]

Central Intelligence Series 3, starring Kelsey Grammer.

[C]

You didn't even have the guts to tell me.

[B]

David Duchovny.

[A]

Pleasure's all mine, Ms.

[C]

Page.

[B]

And me, Kim Cattrall.

[A]

Your reputation precedes you.

[B]

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