Discussed in this essay:

The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian. The New Press. 304 pages. $26.95.

Slowly, by degrees, the full story of another foreign intervention that went wrong — so sweet the conception, so bitter the aftertaste — is coming out. For decades following the dramatic overthrow in August 1953 of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s revered prime minister, Americans and Britons were led to believe that his toppling was the result not of CIA or MI6 operations but of a popular uprising in favor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The fiction…