A resident of Tehran washes "Yankee Go Home" graffiti from a wall in the capital city of Iran, Aug. 21, 1953.

While U.S. nation-building efforts often are intended to bolster U.S. national security, sometimes they also help American business interests in the process. A prime example is the clandestine U.S. effort to change the government of oil-rich Iran in 1953.

Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh convinced the Iranian parliament to nationalize the western-controlled Iranian oil industry. According to a CIA history of the affair that eventually became public, U.S. officials feared that Mossadegh would guide Iran into the Soviet orbit. With the help of British intelligence, the CIA launched a secret effort, code-named TPJAX, to get rid of Mossadegh and replace him with the Americans' hand-picked choice, Gen. Fazollah Zahedi.

The United States sent Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the man who later led U.S. troops in the 1991 Gulf War, to visit the Iranian monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and persuade him to cooperate with the coup. The CIA planted anti-Mossadegh articles in newspapers and orchestrated a bombing campaign that was falsely linked to Iranian communists. Even so, the coup nearly flopped, until pro-U.S. military officers took command of a pro-Shah demonstration in Tehran and used the momentum to overthrow Mossadegh.

In Guatemala in the early 1950s, the United States decided to intervene to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the president of that Central American nation. Arbenz, a progressive, had convinced Guatemalan legislators to pass a law allowing the government to seize unused portions of large estates and give them to impoverished farmers. That reform threatened the interests of a U.S.-owned business, the United Fruit Company, which had vast holdings in Guatemala.

After deciding that Arbenz was dangerous and susceptible to communist influence, the CIA devised Operation PBSUCCESS. One component was an elaborate disinformation and psychological warfare campaign, which according to declassified CIA documents consisted of "black operations using contacts within the press, radio, church, army and other organized elements susceptible to rumor, pamphleteering, poster campaigns and other subversive action."

The effort extended all the way back to the United States, where a drumbeat for action in Guatemala was sounded by a succession of articles in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest about a threatening communist influence there. The agency also recruited a force of exiles, led by former Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. In 1954, the proxy army invaded Guatemala, and Arbenz was forced to resign. He was replaced by a pro-U.S. military junta.