Review: Coup 53 Is a Crackerjack Look at a Anglo-American Coup in Iran

When something is an open secret, does confirmation matter? Coup 53, director Taghi Amirani’s crackling, if somewhat hyperbolic, documentary about the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh during a 1953 coup d’état, argues loudly in the affirmative. Amirani spends too much of the film recounting his dogged years-long pursuit of this or that document in trying to affirm British involvement in what was usually described as a C.I.A.-led operation. But once he finds the goods, the filmmaker engineers a highly dramatic coup of his own that snaps everything into focus: a long-buried interview in which MI6 agent Norman Darbyshire details with petulant pride how His Majesty’s Government demolished a functioning democracy that wouldn’t play ball.

Initially, Amirani puts himself in the center of the action. Much of the film’s first half is spent on its own not especially engaging backstory, recounting what led him to some archive or interview. Fortunately, the Iranian-born filmmaker is a sprightly personality with a palpable commitment to uncovering the machinations behind the coup that replaced the democratically elected Mossadegh with the young Shah, who was favored by the West. Amirani interviews many Iranians and Westerners to provide eyewitness accounts of the overthrow itself as well as context about Iran’s history as a quasi-British colony which Winston Churchill saw as his Empire’s private oil field—a status that Mossadegh threatened to change.

As the film reaches its halfway point, Amirani and editor Walter Murch—who appears on screen as a friendly sounding board for the director’s expostulations—start stitching together a narrative from the musty archives that includes one genuine surprise. After culling hundreds of hours of background material from the Iran chapter of End of Empire, a 1985 BBC documentary series in which a shocking number of politicians and spies say the quiet part about imperialism out loud, Amirani discovers a printed transcript of Darbyshire’s interview in which he openly brags about MI6 leading the coup. As far as Amirani can determine, the interview was either never filmed or was shot and then censored by the British government.,

Amirani’s dramatically effective solution is to paper over the gap by having Ralph Fiennes reenact Darbyshire’s interview. The actor brings a low, louche, cynical energy to the part of a spy who hated not getting credit and likely resented the Whitehall toffs who he thought bungled everything before he came along (the BBC clips are a parade of plummy-accented and sniffy Oxbridge annoyance at the “Persians” ungrateful desire for self-governance).

Once Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form. Mossadegh’s 1952 nationalization of a British-founded oil company and refusal to outlaw the local communist party set off visions of collapsing dominos in London and Washington, D.C. After a first C.I.A.-sponsored coup led by Kermit Roosevelt failed, MI6 and Darbyshire came in to assist. Men on their orders kidnapped, tortured, and killed Mossadegh’s chief of police, dumping his corpse in the street as a destabilization move. As paid-off journalists pumped out anti-Mossadegh propaganda, MI6 hired street thugs to back up the military officers they had swayed to the side of the Shah, their preferred puppet. And when the coup finally took place and Mossadegh was captured, Fiennes’s Darbyshire allows himself a faint smile as he praises himself for a “correct psychological reading of the Persian mob character.”

The broad outlines of this story are already very well documented, which can undercut some of the drama. (Unless a viewer knows nothing about the coup, in which case watching this film could be like a conspiracy-ignorant person seeing Oliver Stone’s JFK for the first time.) Part of this is the fault of Coup 53’s long gestation period. In one early scene, Amirani erupts in surprise when he finds declassified documents at the National Security Archive admitting the C.I.A.’s role in the 1953 coup. It’s easy to imagine that the moment would have had greater impact had the agency not openly confirmed this back in 2013.

A question that hovers over Coup 53 is whether or not there’s enough new material here to justify Amirani’s occasionally overheated approach. Even though Darbyshire’s spy-flick villainy (he may as well be in an underground lair telling the hero about his plan for world domination) is the marquee attraction, MI6’s involvement had been assumed for years. It’s possible, though, that some things are worth revisiting simply for the purposes of underlining them. In one of the BBC clips used by Amirani, a Sir Donald Logan, onetime Iran desk for Britain’s Foreign Office, says flat out, “Our policy was to get rid of Mossadegh as soon as possible.” Considering what followed the coup—the horrors perpetuated by the Shah’s C.I.A.-trained secret police, and the resulting backlash that led directly to the ayatollahs installing their theocracy in 1979—Britain’s role in instigating it is probably worth repeating.