The U.S. ambassador to Iran mistakenly told the shah in 1953 that Britain’s newly enthroned Queen Elizabeth II backed a plan to overthrow the country’s elected prime minister and America maintained the fiction even after realizing the error, historians now say.  
The revelation, based on U.S. diplomatic cables cited by the historians, shows how America has struggled even to this day to offer a full, unvarnished account of its actions in the coup that cemented Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s power and lit the fuse for Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
 
“There’s an acceptance that you’re never going to have the whole story,” said Richard Aldrich, a professor at the University of Warwick whose research on the cables will be featured in a Channel 4 documentary in Britain on Sunday. “You’re on a journey to try and achieve a better history but you’re never going to have the complete story.”  
The 1953 coup ended up successfully empowering the shah, even after he fled to Baghdad and onto Italy when it looked as though it would fail. He would rule until 1979, when he fled the country before the Islamic Revolution, secretly and fatally ill with cancer.  
The coup had roots in the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which at that time was majority owned by Britain. Mohammad Mosaddegh, who supported nationalization, then became Iran’s prime minister. Britain launched a blockade on the country and ultimately saw its Tehran embassy ordered closed.
The British, who had begun drawing up plans for a possible coup, then turned to the U.S. under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, fearful of the spread of communism amid the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, gave the go-ahead for TPAJAX — the CIA codename for the coup plot.  
Papers show the CIA at one point  “stockpiled enough arms and demolition material to support a 10,000-man guerrilla organization for six months,” and paid out $5.3 million for bribes and other costs, which would be equivalent to $48 million today. One CIA document casually refers to the fact that “several leading members of these (Iranian) security services are paid agents of this organization.”  
But the coup faced problems, chief among them the shah himself. Diplomats and spies referred to him as a “weak reed” and “petulant.” The CIA dismissively referred to him as “Boy Scout,” Aldrich said.
The shah grew fearful of Mosaddegh’s growing power and prepared to flee Iran in February 1953, months before the coup. U.S. Ambassador Loy W. Henderson rushed to the palace to try to see him. Instead, he got to Hosein Ala, the shah’s minister of court, who called the shah on a palace telephone line.  
Despite fears the telephone may be tapped, Henderson spoke through Ala to the shah, as the Channel 4 documentary “The Queen and the Coup” and a later diplomatic cable by Henderson recounted.  
“I had just received message indicating that very important personage for whom shah had most friendly feelings had also expressed sincere hope that shah could be dissuaded from leaving country,” Henderson wrote.
That cable, part of others released by the U.S. State Department’s historian in 2017, included a footnote mentioning another cable from the U.S. Embassy in London.
“Foreign Office this afternoon informed us of receipt message from (Foreign Minister Anthony) Eden from Queen Elizabeth expressing concern at latest developments re shah and strong hope we can find some means of dissuading him from leaving country,” the footnote reads.  
That suggests Queen Elizabeth herself had sent a message. Instead, Eden at the time was aboard the vessel RMS Queen Elizabeth on his way to Canada, which is what American diplomats in London had meant to say.  
The U.S. Embassy in London realized its mistake and fired off another cable that warned “Queen Elizabeth refers, of course to vessel and not … to monarch.” But Henderson at that point already had spoken to the shah.  
Realizing the mistake, the U.S. Embassy in London wrote back that it “does not (repeat not) propose to inform British of incident.” But that intervention likely ended up helping goad the shah into staying in Iran for several more months — until the CIA launched the coup.  
“In terms of the kind of chain of events, it’s important because, you know, frankly, the shah is a coward,” Aldrich told The Associated Press. “I don’t think the 1953 coup would have happened if the shah had fled then. At this point, there’s no doubt that he’s packed his bags and was pretty much going to the airport when this intervention happened.”  
But those two cables acknowledging the error, which the historians found at the National Archives in Washington, don’t appear in the 2017 release by the State Department, which itself was meant to offer a fuller, warts-and-all accounting of American actions.  
An initial 1989 release outlining the years surrounding the 1953 coup in Iran whitewashed the U.S. role in the coup. That led to the resignation of the historian in charge of a State Department review board and to Congress passing a law requiring that a more reliable historical account be made.
The State Department did not respond to an AP request for comment. However, over 65 years later, historians still struggle to extract documents from the CIA and other government agencies surrounding the coup.  
These new cables suggest more remains to be discovered, said Malcolm Byrne, who studies Iran at the non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University.
“We’ve known that all along,” Byrne said.
Widespread Iranian anger over the Western coup fed into the revolution and its aftermath, which saw Iranian students seize control of the U.S. Embassy and hold those inside captive for 444 days.  
To this day Iran’s Shiite theocracy portrays the U.S. as a hostile foreign power bent on subverting and overthrowing its government. Hard-liners still refer to Britain as “the old fox,” a sly adversary.  
The 1953 coup is their first piece of evidence.
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Chicago allocated about $750 million in today’s dollars to the police department in 1964 from the city’s general operating budget. About 3.5 million people lived in Chicago then, meaning the city funded the police at a rate of $215 or so per resident, adjusted for inflation.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has rejected demands to defund the Chicago Police Department, arguing that neighborhoods want more police support.
But an analysis shows Chicago is spending more on policing per person than at any time in the last half-century despite a persistent drop in crime over the last two decades, while the vast majority of murders remain unsolved.
The nonprofit news outlet Injustice Watch provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
This year, Chicago budgeted $1.6 billion for its police department, excluding money set aside for police misconduct lawsuits and police pensions. That means Chicago is planning to spend more than $600 per resident on policing in 2020, according to an Injustice Watch analysis of census figures and police budget appropriations compiled by data scientist Forest Gregg.
Chicago’s per capita spending on policing is more than double that in Miami-Dade County in Florida, which has a similar population, and higher than Los Angeles, which is home to 1 million more residents, according to an analysis of publicly available data.
Police records show violent crimes have steadily declined in Chicago after peaking in the 1990s. The rate at which police solve murders in the city has also cratered. Still, the police budget has consistently taken up about 40% of the city’s general operating budget.
For activists and city leaders calling on Lightfoot to cut the police budget, it’s clear that the money could be better spent elsewhere.
“Right now, we’re paying the police to kill folks like me, that’s what’s happening,” said Ald. Jeanette B. Taylor (20th), one of six democratic socialists on the City Council. “We can’t get a nurse, a social worker, or a counselor in schools, but we can always afford more police? That’s not common sense.”
Taylor and the rest of the caucus penned an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times Monday, arguing that the bloated police budget prevents the city from effectively tackling the coronavirus pandemic, which has carved a $700 million hole in the city’s 2020 budget.
“Chicago needs enormous public investment to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and when we sit down to hash out a budget this year, we will be faced with a choice: We can cut policing, or we can slash basically everything else,” the caucus wrote.
Protests continued this week in Chicago and around the nation, spurred by outrage over the May killing of George Floyd, who died in Minnesota after an officer knelt on his neck, and the long list of Black people killed by police. Protestors have decried systemic racism and called for police accountability, and demanded that police be defunded or abolished so governments can spend more money on social services.
The mayor’s office did not respond to specific questions about Injustice Watch’s analysis of police per capita spending. But at a news conference Tuesday, Lightfoot said she disagrees that adequately funding social services and keeping the police budget intact are mutually exclusive.
“I don’t think it’s an either-or proposition,” she said. “The investments we’re committed to make in mental health, in affordable housing, in workforce development, we need to make those investments, period. And we committed to that.”
While funding for the Chicago Police Department has steadily increased over time, the number of violent crimes committed in the city has fallen dramatically since its peak in the early 1990s.
What’s also dropped since then is the rate at which Chicago cops solve murders.
In 1967, the police reported solving 90% of homicide cases. By 1997, the murder clearance rate was 57%. In 2017, the department reported clearing less than one in four homicide cases. An analysis of police records by NPR from October showed the murder clearance rate was even more abysmal when the victim was Black or Latinx.
Nationally, police departments around the country had a murder clearance rate of about 62% in 2017, according to the FBI.
Despite its failures to find and capture most murderers, the Chicago Police Department budget nearly doubled between 1967 and 2017, going from $867 million to $1.5 billion, adjusted for inflation.
This year’s police budget is the largest on record. Salaries, wages, and overtime pay together take up more than 80% of the funds. There are more than 13,000 sworn Chicago police officers today, the most since 2008.
Municipal finance expert Michael D. Belsky said the most obvious way to slash the police budget is to have fewer officers on the city’s payroll. That means layoffs, said Belsky, executive director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
But there’s no way to lay off scores of officers without going through the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, a trade union with nearly 350,000 members nationwide.
“It’s very difficult to remove someone; sometimes you have to go to arbitration, sometimes you end up getting sued by the officer and have to settle,” he said. “It’s not that easy to just take out your budget ax and start cutting unionized employees of any sort.”
The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 in Chicago did not respond to requests to comment.
In a statement, the Chicago Police Department said it supports investments in community-based organizations and city departments that provide youth programming, family services, drug rehabilitation treatment, and other services. But the department did not answer specific questions about cutting its budget.
Tamar Manasseh, founder and president of Mothers Against Senseless Killings, or MASK, an anti-violence community group on the South Side, said she’s in no rush to dismantle the police department. But she thinks the city should redirect policing dollars to grassroots efforts that stomp out crime at the root.
“I don’t know if there’s enough commitment from the community yet to police our own neighborhoods, but I know that we can get there. We don’t need as many police as we have now,” she said.
Manasseh’s group is headquartered at a vacant lot straddling the border between Englewood and Auburn Gresham. The group prioritizes keeping the peace in the neighborhood without getting law enforcement involved.
“In the six years I’ve been here, sitting in one of the most dangerous corners of the city, I’ve never called 9-1-1, and I have yet to be murdered, even though this is a ‘hot spot,'” she said.
Volunteers run MASK, but the group provides stipends to a handful of community residents that mediate disputes between other residents. The group also pays for a handful of young people to attend trade schools.
Manasseh said the city could learn from the group’s approach to reducing crime and violence in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
“We sent kids to a trade school and gave them a stipend, and guess what? Violence dropped,” she said. “We’re not asking the city to do anything that we haven’t experimented with — we know it works, and all you have to do is pay people to police their own communities and guess what? Everything will change.”
“You don’t want to do it too quickly, because when all hell breaks loose, the community will beg for the police to come back,” Manasseh said, “but if this is done the right way, it’s revolutionary.”
Matthew Wilbourn is a youth organizer with the anti-violence group GoodKids MadCity and #NoCopAcademy, a coalition opposed to the construction of a $95 million police and fire training facility on the West Side. He said calls to defund the police force city leaders to reimagine what public safety could look like.
“I think people are very scared of that buzzword of ‘defunding’ the police because it sounds like you’re taking away, but it’s all about redistributing that money into something else,” he said.
“The mental health problem in Chicago is frightening, and it has to do with shootings and misunderstanding between people and the police because they’re not equipped to handle this.”
Wilbourn’s comments echo statements Chicago police Supt. David Brown made four years ago when he led the Dallas Police Department. In the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of five officers and injured nine others, Brown contended, “we’re asking cops to do too much in this country.”
“Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve,” he said. “Not enough mental health funding, let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding, let’s give it to cops.”
“I’ll just ask other parts of our democracy — including the free press — to help us, to help us and not put that burden all on law enforcement to resolve.”
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As more U.S. states roll back their COVID-19 restrictions, Johns Hopkins University reports least 20 states have seen a rise in new cases in the last two weeks, prompting health officials to warn the virus is far from done.An Associated Press analysis of coronavirus testing data compiled by the COVID-19 Tracking Project, found that in 21 states as of Monday, the seven-day average of new cases per capita was higher than the average during the seven previous days.Kaiser Foundation Global Health specialist Joshua Michaud says there is no one reason for the surges.  He calls them “micro-epidemics,” each with its own causes.  In some cases, more testing has revealed more cases. In others, local outbreaks are big enough to push statewide tallies higher. But experts think at least some are due to the lifting of stay-at-home orders, school and business closures, and other restrictions put in place to stem the virus’s spread.In Arizona, hospitals have been told to prepare for the worst. Texas has more hospitalized COVID-19 patients than at any previous time. And the governor of North Carolina said recent jumps caused him to rethink plans to reopen schools or businesses.The northeastern state of Massachusetts, where COVID-19 cases were on a steady downward trend through May, saw a dramatic spike over the last two weeks.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 5 MB480p | 7 MB540p | 9 MB720p | 21 MB1080p | 37 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioHarvard University epidemiologist William Hanage warned even though regions like the U.S. northeast have ridden the first wave, that doesn’t mean it’s over.”  Experts are watching what will happen in the next week or so, in the wake of nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd while in police custody.
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Three U.S. lawmakers asked Zoom Video Communications Inc to clarify its data-collection practices and relationship with the Chinese government after the firm said it had suspended user accounts to meet demands from Beijing.The California-based firm has come under heavy scrutiny after three U.S. and Hong Kong-based activists said their accounts had been suspended and meetings disrupted after they tried to hold events related to the anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown.Zoom said on Friday it was notified of the events and asked to take action by the Chinese government in May and early June.It said it has now reinstated these accounts and will not allow further requests from China to affect users outside the country.”We did not provide any user information or meeting content to the Chinese government,” Zoom said in a statement. “We do not have a backdoor that allows someone to enter a meeting without being visible.”The online meeting platform, which has surged in popularity as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions around the world indoors, has seen its downloads soar in China.The service is not blocked in China, unlike many Western platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which abandoned efforts to crack China’s market years ago due to government demands to censor and monitor content. Twitter on Thursday said it had removed accounts tied to a Beijing-backed influence operation.’Pick a side’Representatives Greg Walden, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the ranking member of a consumer subcommittee, sent a letter to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan on Thursday asking him to clarify the company’s data practices, whether any was shared with Beijing and whether it encrypted users’ communications.Republican Senator Josh Hawley also wrote to Yuan asking him to “pick a side” between the United States and China.The three politicians have previously expressed concerns about TikTok’s owner, Chinese firm ByteDance, which is being scrutinized by U.S. regulators over the personal data the short video app handles.”We appreciate the outreach we have received from various elected officials and look forward to engaging with them,” a Zoom spokesperson said.China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China, did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment from Reuters.Separate China from the worldWang Dan, a U.S.-based dissident and exiled student leader of the crushed 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, had his Zoom account suspended. He said he was shocked to hear Zoom acknowledge it had interrupted meetings he was participating in.His June 3 event with about 200 participants was deactivated midstream, he said.”Zoom compiled with China’s request, preventing us from going about our lives smoothly,” Wang said in an email to Reuters. “It cannot get away with just a statement. We shall continue to use legal means and public opinion to ask Zoom to take responsibility for its mistake.”The company said it is now developing technology to enable it to remove or block participants based on geography, allowing it to comply with requests from local authorities. It said it would publish an updated global policy on June 30.U.S.-based Humanitarian China founder Zhou Fengsuo said he welcomed Zoom’s acknowledgement of the suspensions but told Reuters it was unacceptable for the company “to separate China users from the rest of the world.”The company’s China links have been called into question before.Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab said in April it had found evidence some calls made in North America, as well as the encryption keys used to secure those calls, were routed through China. Zoom said it had mistakenly allowed Chinese data centers to accept calls.Zoom says it has many research and development personnel in China. Its founder Yuan grew up and attended university in China before migrating to the United States in the mid-1990s. He is now a U.S. citizen.Bill Bishop, editor of the China-focused Sinocism newsletter, wrote on Friday that “Zoom should no longer get the benefit of the doubt over its China-related issues and given how many people, organizations, government bodies and political campaigns now rely on its services the company must err on the side of transparency.” 
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