British spy’s account sheds light on role in 1953 Iranian coup

Interview given by MI6 officer in 1980s was discovered in research for new documentary

A first-hand account of Britain’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and restored the shah to power has been published for the first time.

The account by the MI6 officer who ran the operation describes how it took British intelligence years to persuade the US to take part in the coup. Meanwhile, MI6 recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament with banknotes transported in biscuit tins.

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Donald Trump vows ‘snapback’ over humiliating UN defeat on Iran arms embargo

President says US will unilaterally reinstate sanctions a day after only two countries voted for prolonging embargo

Donald Trump has vowed to use a contentious provision to unilaterally reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran, following what Iran’s president said was a humiliating defeat for the US in its bid to extend an arms embargo on Tehran.

A day after the UN security council overwhelmingly rejected a US resolution to extend the embargo, Trump said at a news conference at his New Jersey golf club: “We’ll be doing a snapback. You’ll be watching it next week.”

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Turkey threatens to suspend UAE ties over deal with Israel

‘The move against Palestine is not a step that can be stomached,’ says Erdoğan

Turkey has threatened to suspend its diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and recall its envoy, a day after the Gulf state announced it would become the third Arab country to establish full ties with Israel.

“The move against Palestine is not a step that can be stomached,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters on Friday.

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Russia, China and Iran seeking to influence US ahead of elections, top intelligence official says

Statement says China is opposed to Trump but offers more concrete evidence of Russia’s efforts to undermine Biden

Russia is backing Donald Trump, China is supporting Joe Biden and Iran is seeking to sow chaos in the US presidential election, a top intelligence official has warned in a sobering assessment of foreign meddling.

The statement on Friday by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, raises fears of a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media to help Trump and hurt his opponent Hillary Clinton.

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Why a Biden presidency might not mean a return to pre-Trump foreign relations

There could be a renewed focus on international cooperation – but Biden would not be great news for Boris Johnson’s Britain

European leaders, desperate for an end to the Trump presidency, are being warned that four years of Joe Biden may present them with new challenges and not a simple restoration of the benign status quo in transatlantic relations prior to 2016.

An evolving Biden doctrine about ending “forever wars” and protecting American workers from Chinese competition would require collective military and economic commitments from the EU that it is still ill-equipped to meet, foreign policy specialists have suggested.

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Trump’s top Iran envoy quits as US bids to extend Tehran embargo

  • Elliott Abrams, key figure in Iran-Contra affair, to take over
  • US intends to bring UN resolution to extend arms embargo

The Trump administration’s lead diplomat on Iran, Brian Hook, has announced his resignation days before the US attempts a high-stakes gambit against Tehran at the United Nations.

Related: Iran's Covid death toll three times higher than admitted, says report

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Iran’s Covid death toll three times higher than admitted, says report

BBC says government papers reveal total is more than 42,000 – far above official toll of 17,000

One person is dying from Covid-19 every seven minutes in Iran, state television in the country has said, as a report claimed the overall toll from the virus was three times higher than authorities have admitted.

A health ministry spokeswoman said on Monday that 215 people had died in the past 24 hours, on top of more than 200 the previous day – the country’s highest figures in nearly a month.

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MI6, the coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up

Documentary reveals evidence confirming a British spy’s role in restoring the Shah in 1953 – and how the Observer exposed the plot

The hidden role of a British secret service officer who led the coup that permanently altered the Middle East is to be revealed for the first time since an Observer news story was suppressed in 1985.

The report, headlined “How MI6 and CIA joined forces to plot Iran coup”, appeared in the 26 May edition but was swiftly quashed. It exposed the fact that an MI6 man, Norman Darbyshire, had run a covert and violent operation to reinstate the Shah of Iran as ruler of the country in 1953. Yet just a few days after the newspaper came out, all fresh evidence of this British operation and of Darbyshire’s identity disappeared from public debate.

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert granted meeting with Australian ambassador to Iran

Exclusive: British-Australian academic will meet diplomat for first time since sudden move to a new notorious prison

The imprisoned British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert is set to be granted a meeting with Australia’s ambassador to Iran as soon as Sunday.

Following reports in the Guardian that Dr Moore-Gilbert was seriously unwell in Qarchak prison and had been removed from quarantine because she was attempting to write to the ambassador for help, the state-run Mizan news agency reported she was in “perfect health”.

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Iran arms sales: US struggles to win support for extension of UN ban

European nations fear extension of arms sale ban would result in Iran leaving 2015 nuclear deal

The US may be forced to accept a UN code of conduct restricting conventional arms sales to Iran, since it is struggling to win unanimous support at the UN security council for a formal extension of the existing UN ban, which expires in October.

European nations fear a formal extension of the ban would result in Iran leaving the nuclear deal.

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Iran threatens US by targeting replica aircraft carrier in Strait of Hormuz

Drill designed to threaten US amid increasing tensions between Tehran and Washington

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have fired a missile from a helicopter targeting a replica aircraft carrier in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, in an exercise aimed at threatening the US amid tensions between Tehran and Washington.

The drill, in a waterway through which 20% of all traded oil passes, underlines the lingering threat of military conflict between Iran and the US after last summer saw a series of incidents targeting oil tankers in the region. In January, a US drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad and Tehran responded by firing ballistic missiles targeting American forces in Iraq.

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert: British-Australian academic moved to notorious Iran desert prison

Middle East scholar, who was arrested in 2018, taken to Qarchak women’s jail, one of the most hostile institutions in the country and reportedly stricken with Covid-19

A British-Australian academic serving a 10-year-prison sentence in Iran for espionage has been moved to a remote desert prison, notorious for violence and reportedly stricken with coronavirus.

Cambridge-educated Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Middle East scholar, had been held in Tehran’s Evin Prison for nearly two years, before her sudden move three days ago to Qarchak women’s prison, south-east of Tehran.

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Iranian passenger plane forced to change course as US fighter jets approached – report

Iran promises political response after several passengers were reportedly injured when Mahan Air plane quickly changed altitude

Two US fighter jets came close to an Iranian passenger plane over Syrian airspace, causing the pilot to change altitude quickly to avoid collision and injuring several passengers, Iran’s official IRIB news agency reported.

The agency initially said a single Israeli jet had come near the plane but later quoted the pilot as saying there were two jets that identified themselves as American.

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Iran suspends execution of three anti-government protesters in death row

Trio who participated in November demonstrations received public support following request of retrial

Iran’s supreme court has agreed to suspend the executions of three men on death row for their participation in anti-government protests in November, whose sentences sparked an online outcry last week.

Lawyers for the trio – Saeed Tamjidi, 26, Mohammad Rajabi, 28, and Amirhossein Moradi, 26 – said in a statement on Sunday the country’s supreme court had agreed to examine the men’s application for a retrial.

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Seven vessels catch fire in southern Iranian shipyard

Incident at port of Bushehr latest in series of fires and blasts that could be part of sabotage campaign

At least seven vessels have caught fire in a southern Iranian shipyard, in the latest in a series of explosions and fires that analysts speculate could be part of a state-sponsored sabotage campaign targeting the country’s industrial, nuclear and military sites.

No casualties were reported at the port of Bushehr, the city that hosts Iran’s only nuclear power plant, but images distributed by state media showed plumes of thick smoke billowing into the air and several fire trucks at the site.

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The Guardian view on Covid-19 worldwide: on the march

Infections are accelerating in largely untouched countries and those which hoped they had come through the worst. But there is hope

“Most of the world sort of sat by and watched with almost a sense of detachment and bemusement,” said Helen Clark, appointed to investigate the World Health Organization’s handling of the pandemic. The former New Zealand prime minister was describing the early weeks of the outbreak, and the sense that coronavirus was a problem “over there”. The failure to recognise our interconnection created complacency even as the death toll rose.

It took three months for the first million people to fall sick – but only a week to record the last million of the nearly 13 million cases now reported worldwide. As England emerges from lockdown at an unwary pace, Covid-19 is accelerating globally. The WHO has reported a record surge of a quarter of a million cases in a single day. The death toll is over half a million people and rising fast.

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Iran report on downed Ukrainian jet blames misaligned air defence system

Missile defence operators had failed to recalibrate their systems, Tehran says

A report from Iranian investigators on the shooting down in January of a Ukrainian jet has blamed a misaligned air defence system giving wrong information to its operators, who did not seek authorisation to fire before killing all 176 people onboard.

Iranian officials initially blamed the crash of Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 near Tehran on the morning of 8 January on technical problems with the aircraft, but days later admitted their own missiles had mistakenly downed it.

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Iran denies latest blast reports and accuses west of disinformation

Tehran says incident in early hours in garrison town of Gamdareh was a power outage

Iran has denied reports that fresh mysterious explosions have rocked two towns close to Tehran, accusing the west of waging psychological warfare by spreading false messages on social media.

Reports suggested that the blasts had occurred in the early hours of Friday in Gamdareh, a residential town that houses a number of military garrisons, including bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and in Shahr-e Qods. Officials insisted the reports were false but accepted there had been a power outage.

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Global report: India becomes third worst-affected country as giant Covid-19 hospital opens

Cases reach almost 700,000 to pass Russia in third place; Iran suffers record death toll; alarm in South Africa as cases jump amid easing of lockdown

India has passed Russia as the country with the third-highest number of coronavirus cases in the world after recording a record number of cases for one day.

The health ministry added 23,000 new cases on Monday, taking India’s total to 697,000 and almost 20,000 deaths. On Sunday India racked up nearly 25,000, its highest total for one day.

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Iran admits incident at Natanz nuclear site caused major damage

Country says suspected attack could slow production of advanced centrifuges, which Israel and US see as threat

Iran has admitted an incident at one of its main nuclear sites last week caused major damage and could slow down the country’s production of advanced centrifuges, technology Israel and the US see as a threat, intensifying suspicions there may have been a deliberate attack on the facility.

Newly released satellite imagery showed the damage from what Iranian authorities attributed to a fire at the Natanz nuclear facility was far more extensive that previously disclosed.

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