The US State Department has decided to delay the release of a volume from its foreign relations history that deals with the CIA-backed overthrow of Iranian prime minister in the 1950s.
According to the Associated Press, the department has delayed the publication “out of concern that it could undermine (ongoing) nuclear diplomacy with Iran.”
“The decision was made at a September meeting of the department’s advisory committee on historical diplomatic documentation and recorded in minutes released this week,” AP reported on Thursday.
Last year on the anniversary of the CIA-orchestrated coup, US spy agency released documents which for the first time formally acknowledged its key role in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.
Mosaddeq’s ouster led to the return of former dictator Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose regime was overthrown 26 years later during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup.
The US role in the coup was openly referred to by then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 2000 and by President Barack Obama in a 2009 speech in Cairo.
