Winston Churchill described Iranian oil as “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” The British in Iran were extracting oil from the country and paying back to the Iranian people only 16 percent of profits after taxes—taxes they paid to themselves, since British Petroleum was then a subsidiary of the Crown. When Iran had had enough and expropriated the oil industry, the British were outraged. They appealed to the United Nations in New York, the International Court in the Hague, and the Truman administration in Washington, losing in each, on all counts.

Truman was on Mosaddegh’s side. A Brit from the coup interviewed in the film says it was because “Americans like to talk to a man who has charisma,” inadvertently implying something about the British at the time. Churchill waited for Eisenhower to be elected, then convinced the new administration that Mosaddegh was a pro-Soviet threat, and the coup became a coproduction of the U.S. and the UK. To front it, MI6 and the CIA enlisted a pro-Shah general who’d been imprisoned by the Allies during World War II as a Nazi sympathizer and who in retirement was spending most of his time with prostitutes. The general’s son, a fancy relic living in Swiss exile since the 1979 Iranian revolution, explains to the camera, with a bare minimum of conviction, that no, it was actually Mosaddegh who had syphilis.

After the coup, the CIA set up Savak, the Iranian secret police, and taught them how to arrest, torture, and execute leftists. The oil companies moved in, and the Shah got $45 million in aid from the Eisenhower administration. Ike became convinced coup d’etats were better than real wars, because they were cheaper and Americans didn’t die in them, and that democracy in the developing world was bad for natural-resource extraction. The United States tested that theory in Guatemala the next year. It worked there too. Twenty-five years later, however, in Iran, it was Long Live Khomeini, Death to Shah, Death to America the Great Satan, etc., with fifty-two American hostages held at gunpoint for 444 days. It’s outrageous that this important film—which many have already seen because it was a film festival hit—is now being suppressed under the threat of further censorship.