Coup 53, review: the untold story of how MI6 brought down Iranian democracy

• Dir: Taghi Amirani. 15 cert, 120 min

The Americans called it “Operation Ajax”. In Britain, before the backtracking, cover-ups and official denials (maintained to this day), it was “Operation Boot”. It’s now known that the CIA and MI6 conspired in the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, in August 1953, in the midst of a stand-off between the PM, a nationaliser, and the Anglo-Iranian oil company later renamed BP.

After the coup, the Iranian government would defer to the power of the Shah and to Western interests for 26 years. The significance of these events for the future of the Middle East, by paving the way for Iran’s 1979 revolution, far outweighs their prominence in mainstream histories. It’s this mysterious gap in the narrative that a new documentary, Coup 53, sets about probing.

It’s a labour of love for the film-maker, Taghi Amirani; his hands were tied for years, until 2013, when the USA released previously classified documents about the coup. The film is premium detective work, a jigsaw with missing pieces. Perhaps the biggest one is the testimony of the late Norman Darbyshire, an ex-spy who headed MI6’s Persia station on Cyprus when the coup occurred.

Digging around in the archives of the 1985 Granada TV series End of Empire, Amirani finds transcripts of something never broadcast: Darbyshire’s confession of his role as an architect of the coup, and his direct involvement in the death of Mossadegh’s chief of police. From the British Government’s point of view, this material could have been incendiary – and it was seemingly excised late in the series’s production.

While there is written proof of what Darbyshire said, the actual footage is nowhere to be found. Oddly, an Observer article about the series, published days before the broadcast, was au fait with the Darbyshire stuff. Could it be, Amirani wonders, that an aggrieved party from the film leaked a non-redacted transcript to the newspaper? (The Observer’s then-editor, Donald Trelford, insisted last week that the transcript had come straight from Granada; he speculated that Darbyshire himself may have got cold feet in the interim.)

Amirani’s editor, the Hollywood veteran Walter Murch, masterminded the sound and picture editing on the likes of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, in which he salvaged artistic order from chaos. Here, his role is to take an event that’s been edited out of history, and splice it back in. Darbyshire’s smoking-gun testimony is restaged on camera, with a suitably Le Carré-esque Ralph Fiennes reading out portions of the interview in the Savoy Hotel, where the 1985 interview was originally filmed.

Told more conventionally, a two-hour documentary about this shadowy affair could have been oppressively didactic, but Amirani and Murch nimbly unlock the subject and invite us inside. Taking a cue from Ari Folman’s 2008 film Waltz with Bashir, Amirani uses animation to bring the bloody turmoil of Mossadegh’s downfall to life, in effective, impressionistic bursts. And the coup is presented as a prototype for CIA interference in countries around the world, from the toppling of Jacobo árbenz (Guatemala, 1954) to that of Jo?o Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Juan Torres (Bolivia, 1971), Salvador Allende (Chile, 1973) – and many more.

In particular, Coup 53 deals with the campaigns of torture used to stamp out dissent after those upheavals – notoriously, those conducted in Iran by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. British officials remain tight-lipped on such inglorious details, as well they might: it was the coup’s toxic legacy that led to its erasure from bureaucratic memory in the first place. With admirable tenacity and care, Amirani has dragged official secrets back into the light.

Coup 53 premieres digitally on August 19, followed by a full VOD release on August 21; see coup53.com