1953 Iranian coup d'état
On the 19th of August 1953, a tank fired a single shell into the home of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the elected prime minister of Iran. He fled through the smoke and rubble, but hours later turned himself in to the army. By nightfall, the government he led had collapsed. The man who had nationalized his country's oil industry, who had stood before the International Court of Justice at The Hague and accused Britain of stealing from a "needy and naked people," was under arrest.
The operation had two names: the British called it Operation Boot; the Americans called it Operation Ajax, or TP-AJAX. Between 200 and 300 people were killed in the fighting that day. Mosaddegh was convicted of treason and sentenced to three years in solitary confinement, then placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. The Shah he had tried to reduce to a ceremonial figurehead would rule Iran for another 26 years.
What brought the governments of Britain and the United States to orchestrate the fall of a democratically elected leader? And what did they unleash by doing so? Those are the questions at the heart of this story.
In 1892, the British diplomat George Curzon described Iran as "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world." He was not wrong. Throughout the 19th century, Iran sat between two advancing imperial powers, Russia and Britain, each extracting what it could.
In 1901, Mozzafar al-Din Shah Qajar granted a 60-year petroleum search concession to William Knox D'Arcy. D'Arcy paid £20,000 and promised Iran a 16% share of any future net profits. The historian L. P. Elwell-Sutton wrote in 1955 that Persia's share was "hardly spectacular" and that no money actually changed hands. On the 26th of May 1908, the British geologist George Bernard Reynolds struck oil at a depth of 1,180 feet. The company that grew from that moment eventually became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, or AIOC, a corporation now part of BP.
By World War I, Persia's strategic importance had grown so large that the British government bought a controlling share in the company, effectively nationalizing British oil production in Iran on its own terms. Persia received 16% of what the company calculated as "net profits" under the Anglo-Persian Oil Company agreement, a figure that Iranians increasingly regarded as a fiction arranged to their disadvantage.
In 1921, a coup d'état, allegedly backed by the British, brought a general named Reza Khan into the Iranian government. By 1925, Parliament had removed the old Qajar dynasty and crowned him Reza Shah Pahlavi. He launched a rapid modernization program but ruled harshly, suppressing all dissent and jailing opponents. One such opponent was a politician named Mohammad Mosaddegh, imprisoned in 1940. That experience gave him a lasting hatred of authoritarian rule and deepened his commitment to full oil nationalization.
In 1949, an assassin attempted to kill the Shah. Shaken by the attempt and emboldened by public sympathy, the Shah moved quickly to expand his powers, establishing the Senate of Iran, which had been written into the Constitution of 1906 but never convened. He appointed half its members himself, selecting men loyal to his aims.
Mosaddegh objected. He believed the Shah should "reign, but not rule," in the manner of European constitutional monarchies. He gathered political parties and opponents of the Shah's expanding power into a coalition called the National Front, with oil nationalization as its central demand. By 1951, the National Front had won majority seats in the Majlis, the Iranian parliament.
The Prime Minister at the time, Haj Ali Razmara, opposed nationalization. He was assassinated by the hardline Fadaiyan e-Islam, whose spiritual leader was Ayatollah Abol-Qassem Kashani, a mentor to the future Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. After the National Front dominated the subsequent parliamentary voting, the Shah confirmed Mosaddegh as prime minister.
For a time, Mosaddegh and Kashani were allies of convenience. Mosaddegh saw that Kashani could mobilize the religious masses; Kashani wanted foreign influence driven out. But by late 1952 their alliance was fracturing. Kashani berated Mosaddegh for refusing to Islamize Iran, a demand Mosaddegh rejected as a firm believer in the separation of religion and state. By 1953, Kashani had completely turned against Mosaddegh and thrown his support to the Shah. A young, relatively unknown mullah named Ruhollah Khomeini also condemned the Mosaddegh government at this time.
In late 1951, Iran's Parliament voted in a near-unanimous decision to nationalize the country's oil industry. The handful of MPs who privately disagreed voted for it anyway, facing the weight of overwhelming public support and the threat of the Fadaiyan's wrath. The vote made Mosaddegh instantly famous across Iran and placed him at the center of worldwide attention.
Mosaddegh had tried to negotiate first. His proposed compromise was modeled on the 1948 agreement between Venezuela and Creole Petroleum: a 50-50 split of oil profits between Iran and Britain. Against the advice of the United States, Britain refused. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee briefly considered seizing the Abadan Oil Refinery by force. Abadan was then the largest oil refinery in the world. He opted instead for an embargo: the Royal Navy stopped ships carrying Iranian oil, accusing them of transporting "stolen property."
By September 1951, Britain had virtually ceased production at Abadan, banned key British exports to Iran including sugar and steel, and frozen Iran's hard currency accounts in British banks. The embargo worked devastatingly well. Tens of thousands lost their jobs at the refinery. Iran spiraled toward bankruptcy. Mosaddegh sought help from President Truman and the World Bank; both declined.
In July 1951, the American diplomat Averell Harriman traveled to Tehran to seek a compromise. He held a press conference calling for reason. A journalist rose and shouted support for Mosaddegh and nationalization. Everyone in the room began cheering and then walked out. Harriman was left standing alone.
Mosaddegh did win one legal victory: when Britain took its case against Iran to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the court ruled it had no jurisdiction. Britain continued the embargo regardless.
In early 1953, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided that Mosaddegh could not be negotiated with. He turned to the new Eisenhower administration, which had replaced Truman in January of that year. The Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that CIA involvement would set; as late as 1952, it had considered unilateral action to assist Mosaddegh. Churchill changed the calculus by reminding the Americans that Britain was supporting them in Korea, and that Anglo-American unity on Iran was a reasonable expectation in return.
According to National Security Archive documents released in August 2017, it was Christopher Steel, the number-two official at the British Embassy in Washington, who pitched the coup idea to U.S. officials in November 1952, repeatedly asking the U.S. to join, arguing that Mosaddegh was leaving Iran vulnerable to a communist takeover. The CIA and MI6 codenamed the joint operation TPAJAX on the American side and Operation Boot on the British.
The Shah himself initially opposed the coup and had supported oil nationalization. The CIA informed him that he too would be "deposed" if he did not cooperate. That threat left him with a lifelong awe of American power. CIA-written firmans, royal decrees dismissing Mosaddegh and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister, were drawn up by the coup plotters and signed by the Shah. Having signed the decrees, the Shah and his second wife, Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, left for a week-long vacation in northern Iran.
The CIA organized a wide range of operations to destabilize Mosaddegh's government before the coup. According to American journalist Stephen Kinzer, these included false flag attacks, paid protesters, the bribing of Iranian politicians, and pro-coup propaganda. CIA operatives posing as communists threatened Muslim leaders with punishment if they opposed Mosaddegh, deliberately stoking anti-communist sentiment in the religious community. A newspaper owner was granted a personal loan of about $45,000, in the CIA's words, "in the belief that this would make his organ amenable to our purposes." One tactic that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. later admitted to was paying demonstrators to attack symbols of the Shah while chanting pro-Mosaddegh slogans, on the theory that the more agents showed hatred for the Shah, the more average Iranians would distrust Mosaddegh.
On Saturday the 15th of August, Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, commander of the Imperial Guard, moved to arrest members of Mosaddegh's government. He also seized the telephone center in Tehran that handled all calls to and from key government buildings. But Mosaddegh had been warned by Tudeh Party cells that had infiltrated the military. He escaped arrest.
On Sunday the 16th of August, Nassiri delivered to Mosaddegh the Shah's firman dismissing him. Mosaddegh rejected it and had Nassiri arrested. In court, Mosaddegh argued that the date on the firman had been tampered with, that it was unconstitutional because it had been issued before the dissolution of the Majlis without parliamentary approval, and that the simultaneous military operations against his government proved this was a foreign coup disguised as a royal decree. In a meeting with the American diplomat Loy W. Henderson on the 18th of August, Mosaddegh made an even bolder argument: that the Shah had no authority to dismiss him at all, as a purely constitutional monarch.
The first coup attempt had failed. The Shah fled to Baghdad, arriving unannounced, and then flew on to Italy. General Zahedi and his son Ardeshir, along with the Rashidiyan brothers, took refuge in a CIA safe house in Tehran. Mosaddegh, believing he had won, asked his supporters to go home and return to their normal lives. The Tudeh Party members did the same.
Kermit Roosevelt Jr. received the order to leave Iran but was slow to act, allegedly due to MI6 interference, and continued to organize against Mosaddegh. Zahedi met secretly with the pro-Shah Ayatollah Mohammad Behbahani, and with CIA money later derisively called "Behbahani dollars," they developed a plan to stoke class and religious resentment toward the government. On the 19th of August, at 8 in the morning, Behbahani mobilized 3,000 stick-and-club-wielding protesters in Tehran. Large crowds gathered in the streets. By midday, pro-Shah demonstrators had pushed back Tudeh Party members. Under Zahedi's command, the army left its barracks, drove off the Tudeh, and stormed government buildings. Mosaddegh fled after a tank fired a single shell into his house, then surrendered. Between 200 and 300 people died that day.
The Shah, waiting in his hotel in Italy until he learned what had happened, "chokingly declared": "I knew they loved me." Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, flew back with him from Rome to Tehran.
Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and originally sentenced to death. The Shah personally commuted the sentence to three years of solitary confinement in a military prison, followed by house arrest for the remainder of his life. His foreign minister and closest associate, Hossein Fatemi, was not as fortunate; he was executed by order of the Shah's military court. Other Mosaddegh supporters were imprisoned, and several received the death penalty.
The Shah that emerged from the coup was a different ruler from the one who had entered it. He suppressed the National Front and the Tudeh Party, concentrated political power in himself and his courtiers, and relied heavily on United States support. The CIA sent Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. to persuade the Shah to return to Iran; Schwarzkopf also trained the security forces that would become known as SAVAK. As a condition for restoring the AIOC, the U.S. required the removal of its monopoly: five American petroleum companies, Royal Dutch Shell, and the Compagnie Française des Pétroles all received shares in Iranian oil production.
The Shah ruled for another 26 years as a pro-Western monarch. In 1979 he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution. The revolution's anti-American character, many scholars have argued, drew direct force from the memory of 1953. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in 2000 that the U.S. intervention in Iran had been a setback for democratic government. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who visited Iran both before and after the coup, wrote: "When Mosaddegh and Persia started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honored one in the Middle East."
In August 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the coup, the U.S. government officially acknowledged its role for the first time, releasing documents confirming that the operation had been carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government." In June 2017, the State Department released a further collection of roughly 1,000 pages of historical records. In 2023, on the 70th anniversary, the CIA formally took credit for the coup. The full set of CIA records was widely thought to hold deeper answers, but the agency acknowledged that it had destroyed or lost almost all of its documents from the operation decades before.
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Common questions
What was the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and who carried it out?
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état was a joint British-American covert operation that removed elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power on the 19th of August 1953. Britain ran its operation under the name Operation Boot, coordinated by MI6; the United States ran its operation under the name Operation Ajax, or TP-AJAX, directed by the CIA. The CIA later acknowledged the operation was carried out "under CIA direction" as "an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government."
Why did Britain and the United States overthrow Mosaddegh in 1953?
A key British motive was protecting the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company after Mosaddegh nationalized Iran's oil industry and sought to audit AIOC's royalty payments. Britain refused Mosaddegh's proposed 50-50 profit-sharing arrangement and began planning to undermine his government. The United States, under the Eisenhower administration, was persuaded partly by Cold War fears that Iran was vulnerable to a communist takeover by the Tudeh Party, and partly by Britain's argument that Anglo-American solidarity demanded cooperation. Historians disagree on which motive was primary; Middle East historian Ervand Abrahamian described the coup as "a classic case of nationalism clashing with imperialism."
What happened to Mosaddegh after the 1953 coup?
Mosaddegh was arrested, tried by the Shah's military court, and convicted of treason. He was originally sentenced to death, but the Shah personally commuted the sentence to three years of solitary confinement in a military prison. After completing that sentence, he was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
When did the United States officially acknowledge its role in the 1953 Iranian coup?
The U.S. government officially acknowledged its role in August 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the coup, by releasing previously classified documents. In June 2017, the State Department released a further collection of roughly 1,000 pages of historical records on the operation. In 2023, on the 70th anniversary, the CIA formally took credit for the coup.
What role did the BBC play in the 1953 Iranian coup?
A documentary titled Cinematograph, aired on the 18th of August 2011, included the BBC's first acknowledgment that its Persian radio service had functioned as a propaganda arm of the British government against Mosaddegh. Iranian staff at BBC Persian radio went on strike to protest the anti-Mosaddegh broadcasts. The BBC was at times also used to send coded messages to coup plotters by altering the wording of its broadcasts.
How did the 1953 coup contribute to the 1979 Iranian Revolution?
The coup restored and strengthened Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, enabling his increasingly authoritarian rule for the following 26 years. When the Shah was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, memories of the 1953 U.S.-British intervention intensified the anti-American character of the revolution. U.S. President Obama noted that for many Iranians, the coup demonstrated that the United States would overthrow a democratically elected government to suit its own interests.
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