Report reveals secret US-India Cold War collaboration
August 19, 2013
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
During much of the Cold War, India enjoyed a close diplomatic and military relationship with the Soviet Union. But a newly declassified document reveals that the South Asian country allowed the United States to spy on the Soviets using its airspace. The revelation is contained in a 400-page history of the American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft program authored on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The formerly classified document, written in 1992 by CIA historians Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, is titled: The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974. It was declassified last week in response to a 2005 Freedom of Information Act request filed by Jeffrey T. Richelson, Senior Fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archive. The Central Intelligence Agency had been involved in U-2 reconnaissance missions since 1954, when the spy program began. Known officially as Project HOMERUN, the U-2 program was a joint effort by the CIA and the National Security Agency that surreptitiously gathered signals and photographic intelligence on Soviet military sites. The program, which has been described by some historians as one of the most successful intelligence projects in US history, relied on the U-2’s ability to fly beyond 70,000 feet over the Soviet Union, thus avoiding detection or attack by Soviet forces. That assumption, however, proved to have been false. In reality, Soviet radars had been able to detect nearly every U-2 flight over Soviet territory. Eventually, on May 1, 1960, Soviet forces managed to shoot down one of the U-2 flights using a surface-to-air missile. This led to the so-called ‘U-2 incident’, during which India sided firmly with the Soviet Union, criticizing the US for violating Soviet airspace. But New Delhi’s attitude to the U-2 program appears to have changed drastically following the Sino-Indian conflict on October 1962, when Chinese forces launched a series of armed incursions into Indian territory, killing over 1,000 soldiers. Read more of this post








By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |







Document confirms CIA role in 1953 Iran coup
August 20, 2013
Almost exactly 60 years ago, on August 19, 1953, a military coup d’état deposed Iran’s legally elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced him with General Fazlollah Zahedi. Mossadegh was placed under house arrest, while his senior government associates and thousands of his supporters were arrested. Many, including Hossein Fatemi, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mossadegh’s trusted friend, were tortured and eventually executed. The coup, which reinstated the Shah at the helm of Iran’s government, is believed to have been planned and executed by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in cooperation with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This, however, has never been publicly acknowledged by the CIA. The Agency has consistently refused comment on the matter, saying that most of the records of its involvement in Iran at the time were “lost or destroyed” in the mid-1960s. This policy of silence, however, appears to have changed this week, after the CIA released an official document that acknowledges the Agency’s leading role in the coup. The document, entitled The Battle for Iran, is part of an internal CIA historical report produced in the mid-1970s by an Agency historian. Parts of it were declassified in 1981, but its most important chapter, titled “Section III: Covert Action”, had been redacted prior to its public release. Sometime ago, George Washington University’s National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the complete release of the report. This was not granted; but the CIA did release a new public version of the document, which contains fewer redacted passages. Among the newly uncovered information is a brief description of the operational side of the August 1953 coup, which the CIA codenamed TPAJAX. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, Cold War, coup plots, declassification, history, Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, News, Operation TPAJAX, United States