The IRGC Wrote Washington Into 1953. It Left Britain Out.

On 29 September 2026 the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a 26-page open letter to the American people. Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi presented it in Tehran. The addressees were scholars, students, and the press. The timing was five weeks before the American midterms, seven months into a war the letter dates to 28 February.

The letter has a villain. The villain has an address. The address is the White House.

Read it for what it names, and then read it for the name it will not say.

What the letter puts on the table

It opens on a verse and a distinction. "Death to America," it says, is not hatred of the American people. It is "a prayer for the eradication of the diabolical ruling elite whose seat of power is the White House." The men enthroned there, it says, oppress Iranians and Americans both. Americans empower that government with their votes. The ask at the end is an electoral ask: remove the politicians, stop the wars, end aid to Israel, and a peaceful coexistence is on offer.

The history chapter is where the frame locks.

The letter tells Americans that the present war is the latest chapter in 73 years of hostility, and that the chapter begins in 1953, "the year in which the CIA aided and abetted the Shah's regime to stage a coup and topple the legitimate and popular government of Iran, headed by the Americanophile prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh." A second sentence finishes the move. "The 1953 coup marked the beginning of America's involvement in Iran, and over the decades the U.S. government exploited Iran's natural resources and utilized its strategic geopolitical location to exert greater control over the entire region."

Americanophile. CIA. The beginning of America's involvement. Natural resources, exploited by Washington.

Tehran's own summary, published in the Tehran Times on 5 October, repeats the frame and does not widen it. Seventy-three years of hostility, it says, since the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. Britain is not in the summary. London is not in the summary. Oil is not in the summary.

That is not an editor being short. Twenty-six pages is enough room for a name if the writer wants the name in the room.

The word that does the work

Americanophile is not a description of Mossadegh's politics. It is a label that moves the injury.

Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister on 28 April 1951. He took the office on the condition that the oil nationalization law be ratified. The Majles had already passed the short law on 20 March 1951. The nine-point text that followed charged the government to remove the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company from control of the oil industry of the country. The company was British. It held the concession. It became British Petroleum.

He was not Washington's man, and he was not London's. He was the man who took the concession back. The letter calls him an Americanophile anyway, and then dates America's involvement in Iran from the coup that removed him. A reader who has only the letter would think the injury began when the CIA arrived, and that the prime minister they removed had been leaning toward the country that removed him.

The record runs the other way.

Who proposed the coup

In August 2017 the National Security Archive posted two State Department memoranda that had been Top Secret. They record the British approach.

On 26 November 1952, Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade wrote to Deputy Under Secretary H. Freeman Matthews. The memo is titled "Proposal to Organize a Coup d'etat in Iran." Britain's minister in Washington, Sir Christopher Steel, had asked for a meeting to discuss a coup. Byroade reminded Matthews that the British Embassy had first raised the idea on paper on 8 October 1952. A second memo, 3 December 1952, records the meeting. The Truman administration did not take the offer. The Eisenhower administration did.

The CIA's own later history, released in fuller form in 2013, says the coup "was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government." The same document set describes the British part. The operation was TPAJAX in the American file and Operation Boot in the British file. Monty Woodhouse, MI6's station chief in Tehran, carried the proposal. Anthony Eden, then foreign secretary, treated Mossadegh as a threat to British strategic and economic interests after the nationalization. The Guardian, reporting the 2013 release, noted that the documents also show the British government trying to block public release of the record of its own role.

Junior partner is a fair description of the CIA in the origin of the plot. It is not a fair description of the CIA in the execution. Washington ran the coup it had been asked to run. Both facts fit in one paragraph. The letter has room for one of them.

What the oil settlement paid

The nationalization was the cause. The settlement was the receipt.

After Mossadegh was removed in August 1953, the consortium negotiations opened. A British cabinet minute of 22 February 1954 records Anthony Eden objecting to an American suggestion that Anglo-Iranian take 35 percent. He wanted 44. He was willing, if pressed, to accept 40 percent for Anglo-Iranian, with the American share held down. The chancellor did not want the American share above 40 percent, because of the balance of payments. The cabinet approved Eden's line.

The company that had lost the concession in 1951 was back at the table in 1954, arguing percentages. The letter's phrase for this history is that the U.S. government exploited Iran's natural resources. The percentage fight in the cabinet minute is a British fight.

The name that is missing

Count the proper nouns the letter is willing to spend.

It will say CIA. It will say White House. It will say Israel, and it will tell Americans to stop aid to Israel. It will say Shah. It will say Mossadegh, and it will hang Americanophile on him so that the man who nationalized a British company reads as a client of the country the letter wants blamed. It will say the coup was the beginning of America's involvement.

It will not say Britain. It will not say London. It will not say Anglo-Iranian. It will not say MI6. It will not say Eden. It will not say that the Foreign Office put a coup proposal on paper in October 1952, while Truman was still president and the CIA had not yet agreed to the work.

An omission that size, in a document of this length, aimed at the one audience that has been taught to hear 1953 as an American original sin, is the argument. The letter does not need a forged paragraph. It needs a silence. The silence hands the American reader a war that starts in Washington, a prime minister who loved Washington, and a resource story with no British company in it. Anyone arguing with that reader is arguing inside a frame London does not have to defend, because London is not in the dock.

That is the read between the lines. Not a cipher. A missing defendant.

The Guards are not shy about enemies. A force that will call the American elite diabolical, and will ask American voters to remove their government, can say "Britain" if Britain is on the list. They had the page. They used it on Washington.

What this does not prove

It does not prove that the Guards take instructions from the City. A silence is not a cable. The letter is an Iranian instrument, written for an American election, and it spends its fire on the government that is bombing Iran and arming Israel. That spending is rational on its own terms. A wartime letter blames the army at the gate.

The point is narrower, and it is on the page. When the letter reaches back to the origin story, it edits the origin. The edit removes the country whose company was nationalized, whose foreign office proposed the coup, whose intelligence service named the operation Boot, and whose foreign secretary later fought for the percentage. The edit then calls the removed prime minister an Americanophile, so the edit does not even look like an edit.

Washington's role in 1953 is real. The CIA has admitted it. The letter is not wrong to put the CIA in the sentence. It is wrong by the name it leaves out of the sentence, and by the adjective it puts in the prime minister's place.

The acre in that story was oil. The company on the acre was British. The letter starts the clock when the Americans arrived to help take it back.

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Read the book: The Veil of the Square Mile is out now.

Sources: IRGC open letter, English text as released 29 September 2026 and circulated by IRNA; Carl Osgood, "IRGC Letter to the American People Omits British Role in 1953 Coup," EIR, 1 October 2026, quoting the letter's Americanophile sentence; Tehran Times, 5 October 2026; National Security Archive, "1953 Iran Coup: New U.S. Documents Confirm British Approached U.S. in Late 1952 About Ousting Mosaddeq," 8 August 2017; Guardian, "CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup," 19 August 2013; text of the Iranian oil nationalization law, 20 March 1951; British cabinet minute, 22 February 1954, Eden on the Anglo-Iranian share.