Although four years after Condor came the 1979 oil shock resulting from the Iranian revolution, which pushed the price of oil nearly three times higher per barrel and triggered the kind of panic buying last seen in 1973 in many places in the US. Then came the 1980 Iraq invasion of Iran, further depressing oil exports in the region, which triggered a global recession that did not ease until the mid-1980s.
And the root cause of the Iranian revolution lies in the installation of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, in 1953 following the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh as he wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which at the time was dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which later became British Petroleum, then simply BP, the same company that brought the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the worst oil spill in history.
That 1953 coup in Iran was engineered by British and American intelligence, notably the CIA, which finally admitted publicly the planning and execution of the coup in 2013, only 60 years after it happened. The US provided extensive backing to the Shah, with the CIA training the dreaded secret police, SAVAK, as Iran acted as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East, in the words of Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's defense secretary. Under the Shah, Iranians lived under repression and terror as Western business interests, primarily the oil companies, fattened their bottom lines from their dealings with Iran. A revolution was inevitable, and by 1979, it came in the form of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Long before its public admission, the CIA tacitly acknowledged its role in the coup. In fact, the term "blowback," meaning the unintended negative consequences of a covert operation, was coined as early as 1954 in a CIA report about the Iran coup. Knowledge of CIA involvement in the coup, though hardly touted in the educational system and media, would nevertheless hardly have been unknown in 1970s America, particularly in the wake of the 1960s turmoil including Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, the Ervin Committee investigation of Watergate, and other official investigations such as the House of Representatives' Pike Committee and the Senate's Church Committee, both of which investigated CIA activities starting in the same year as the release of Condor. In fact, the movie is an exemplar of the popular suspicion and paranoia about these operations by the "cloak-and-dagger boys," as President Harry Truman called them. He should know: His administration brought the CIA into existence--and he later expressed regret over that.
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"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." -- William Faulkner
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