Twenty-three months separate those two dates. A country supposedly enraged past all endurance somehow contained itself for almost two years — and then went to war anyway. So what actually changed in between? These are the top five reasons the United States entered World War One, ranked not by drama but by depth: from the reason everybody names first, up to the condition underneath all of them. At every single item, the case for war is given at full strength before one word

This episode begins Part IV of our series—The CIA and Covert Empire—by examining the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. We trace the British oil interests that motivated the coup, the Dulles brothers' WWII background that shaped its methods, the operation itself, and the blowback that produced the 1979 hostage crisis and four decades of U.S.-Iranian hostility. We also examine the cases of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames to il