In New York social circles, he was known as the “Jewish James Bond”: a refugee from Nazi Germany whose gratitude to his American hosts was such that he volunteered to join the US army and became the CIA’s first station chief in Berlin as a mere twentysomething, filing early warnings about Soviet activity that have been credited with ringing in the cold war.
Like 007, Peter Sichel also appreciated a fine tipple, and after leaving the US foreign intelligence service it was he who briefly turned a sweet German white, Blue Nun, into one of the best-selling wines in the world.
A film released in UK cinemas a year after his death aged 102, however, shows Sichel as something more akin to a Jewish Jason Bourne: a former agent who grew increasingly disillusioned with CIA meddling and turned a trenchant critic from beyond his grave of US foreign policy – especially in Iran.
In the documentary The Last Spy by the American-German filmmaker Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Sichel openly criticises US governments of the past for acting against the advice of its intelligence community to depose democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo and especially Iran.
In 1953, Iran’s socialist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was overthrown in a coup d’etat instigated by Britain’s MI6 and the CIA in order to protect British oil interests from nationalisation. The coup strengthened the rule of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, until he was toppled by the 1979 Iranian revolution.
“If we had not got rid of Mossadegh, Iran today would be a good member of the family of nations, a socialist democratic country,” Sichel is captured saying on camera in the documentary. Boosting the authoritarian rule of the shah, he adds, “caused a revolution” and “indirectly caused the arrival of the mullahs”, the Islamic theocracy that Donald Trump has described as “evil” and sought to remove in the current war with the republic.
War wastes a lot of lives and the US seems to do war mostly, so this microcosm of war is no surprise.
The US never wanted a “good member of the family of nations” out of Iran or anywhere else we fucked up. We wanted to keep resource-rich nations in the dirt so they could not collectively bargain against our corporate interest, and they did not care how many people got butchered along the way.
You only have to look at the absolute sons of bitches we’ve armed and bankrolled over the years to know our crusade against socialism was never about freedom or dignity.
Absolutely.
