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• Facilitated the overthrow of the Iranian government after democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh sought to nationalize Iran's oil fields. The coup reinstated the Shah as dictator of Iran and initiated a period of 25 years of repression and torture, while the oil industry was returned to foreign ownership with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent. • Supported the CIA organized coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala after Arbenz nationalized some of the land occupied by giant US company United Fruit. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director Allen Dulles had a personal interest in protecting United Fruit's businesses. Both had heavy investments in United Fruit and supposedly talked Eisenhower into defeating the “Communist threat” in Guatemala. The coup initiated 40 years of US supported military-government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims. • Supported CIA programs to assassinate leaders and overthrow governments in Costa Rica, Syria, Egypt, Laos, Ecuador, Guyana and Indonesia. In attempts to drive Sukarno from power in Indonesia, the CIA organized dissident military officers and armies to wage full-scale war on the government, including bombing runs by US pilots. In Guyana, president Eisenhower, and later Kennedy, had reportedly given direct orders to assassinate Cheddi Jagan, Guyana's democratically elected leader. In Laos, the CIA and State Department rigged elections and sponsored coups at least three times between the years 1958 and 1960. Eisenhower intended to keep the leftist Pathet Lao party from being included in the country's government and to ensure that the government did not adopt a neutralist policy towards communism. US objectives in Laos were carried out by a secret army created by the CIA. The army consisted of Meo hill tribesmen, other Laotians, Thai, Filipinos, Taiwanese, and South Koreans. These forces were armed, equipped, fed, paid, guided, strategically and tactically, and often transported into and out of action by US officials. Often, US soldiers supporting operations in Laos worked for CIA-front companies like Air America. • Ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, who had legally and peacefully become the Congo's first prime minister after winning independence from Belgium. Several years after the assassination, the infamously brutal Mobutu took power with support of the US and renamed the country Zaire. Rather than committing the sin of suggesting greater political and economic independence for his country, as Lumumba had, Mobutu sold off his country's immense resources to multinational corporations, while inflicting 30 years of brutality and abject poverty for Zaire's people and attaining a multi-billion dollar fortune for himself. A longstanding official friend of the US government, Mobutu was later called, "our best friend in Africa," by George H.W. Bush. • Helped train the troops of Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier and supplied US military power to smash revolutionary efforts to overthrow the repressive dictatorship of Haiti. • Conspired to lead a joint US-Turkish invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Iraqi government after Iraqi leader Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem showed interest in nationalizing Iraq's oil fields. With the plans for full-scale war foiled by Soviet threats to intervene on Iraq's side, the CIA undertook various alternate plans for overthrowing the Iraqi government, including an assassination attempt. • Approved a covert plan to overthrow the Cuban government and reinstall a Cuban dictatorship that supported US hegemony in Latin America and the Caribbean. US tactics included the use of a powerful propaganda campaign and the organization of a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles to invade the island. |
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