Syria or Persia: Who’s on First?

Nick Giambruno on LRC today says Operation Ajax 1953 in Iran was CIA’s first regime change operation. CIA agent Miles Copeland Jr. in an interview with the BBC in 1969 admits that the CIA orchestrated and staged the 1949 Syrian Coup against President Shukri al-Kuwatli. Copeland’s book he is describing is The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics. Here is discussion of another Copeland interview on the same topic which references the CIA’s “arc of Islam” strategy against pan-Arab socialists:

Copeland was the CIA’s first station chief in post-World War II Syria. He said he “put Syria on the path to democracy by starting a military dictatorship.” In many ways, it was the CIA’s imposition of military regimes in Syria, all dominated by the minority Alawite community, that led the way to the government of present Syrian President Bashar al Assad who succeeded his father, Hafez al Assad, upon his death in 2000.

Copeland’s actions in Syria and the Middle East in the 1950s have directly influenced the problems of Syria today. Not only did Copeland usher into power a series of Syrian dictatorships but he helped establish the first liaison between the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood in 1955 to defeat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and like-minded pan-Arab socialists in Syria, Lebanon, and other countries of the Middle East. Barack Obama has almost carried out the CIA’s plans to eliminate the last vestiges of pan-Arab socialism with the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the overthrow and assassinations of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and members of his family, and the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen.

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