Various sites are reporting that the CIA has finally come clean about its role in the 1953 coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq. Monday, on the sixtieth anniversary of the coup, the National Security Archive published on its website The Battle for Iran, a report prepared in the mid-1970s by an in-house CIA historian. Writing in Foreign Policy, deputy director and director of research at the National Security Archive Malcolm Byrne explains that, “the document was first released in 1981, but with most of it excised, including all of Section III, entitled ‘Covert Action’—the part that describes the coup itself. Most of that section remains under wraps, but this new version does formally make public, for the first time that we know of, the fact of the agency’s participation: “[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy.”

As Max Boot remarks at Commentary, “to say that the CIA is now ‘admitting’ its role is somewhat inapt; the CIA has all but bragged about its role for decades.” Indeed, CIA officers like Kermit Roosevelt, credited as leader of the plot, and their colleagues in British intelligence wrote well-known memoirs of the operation, which leads Boot to wonder if the CIA is “trying to claim more credit than it deserved for Mossadeq’s overthrow.” “It is unknowable,” Boot continues, “whether the coups would have happened anyway even without CIA blessing, but they might well have.”