Mohammad Mosaddegh

• 1. Introduction

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  Mohammad Mosaddegh, born on the 16th of June 1882, became the most popular politician in Iran's modern history by doing something no Iranian leader had dared before: he seized the oil fields. In 1951, as prime minister, he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, stripping Britain of an enterprise it had controlled since 1913. The British responded with a blockade so effective that Iranian oil production fell nearly 96 percent. The Americans responded with a covert operation. And the man who had been elected by 79 votes to 12 in parliament ended his days under house arrest, buried in his own living room. Three questions run through Mosaddegh's story. How did a lawyer from a Qajar aristocratic family become the symbol of a nation's struggle for self-determination? Why did the United States, which had initially opposed British policy in Iran, end up financing his removal? And what did the world lose when the coup succeeded on the 19th of August 1953?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Mirza Hideyatu'llah Ashtiani, Mosaddegh's father, served as finance minister under the Qajar dynasty, and died of cholera in 1892 when his son was still a child. The family's standing was reinforced from his mother's side: Princess Malek Taj Najm-es-Saltaneh was the granddaughter of the reformist prince Abbas Mirza and a great-granddaughter of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar. After his father's death, the title Mosaddegh-os-Saltaneh passed first to a paternal uncle and then, in time, to Mohammad himself. He bore it long after titles were officially abolished.

  At 24, Mosaddegh was elected from Isfahan to the newly opened Persian Parliament in 1906, but was barred from taking his seat because he had not reached the legal minimum age of 30. The exclusion did not dampen his drive. In 1909, he left for Paris to study at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po. Illness brought him back to Iran in 1911, but only two months passed before he returned to Europe, this time to the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland. In June 1913, he received his doctorate in law, becoming the first Iranian to earn a European PhD in the discipline.

  Back in Iran, he taught at the Tehran School of Political Science on the eve of World War I. Then came a succession of posts that traced the turbulent shape of early twentieth-century Iranian politics: minister of justice, governor of Fars province, finance minister, foreign minister, and governor of Azerbaijan Province, all between 1920 and 1923. When supporters of Reza Khan moved in 1925 to dissolve the Qajar dynasty, Mosaddegh voted no. He gave a speech in the Majlis praising Reza Khan's record as prime minister but warning that replacing the dynasty by legislative fiat violated the 1906 Iranian constitution. The Majlis deposed the young Ahmad Shah Qajar on the 12th of December 1925 regardless, and Mosaddegh retired from politics rather than serve the new Pahlavi order.

• 3. The Oil and the Crisis

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  Since 1913, Britain had been extracting oil from Persian lands through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and by 1914 the British government had purchased 51 percent of its shares, making the Crown the majority shareholder. After the Royal Navy converted its ships to oil fuel, the company was considered vital to British national security, and its profits helped offset Britain's budget deficit. Iranian oil, in other words, was a British strategic asset built on Iranian soil.

  Mosaddegh returned to parliament in 1944 and founded the National Front of Iran in 1949 with nineteen others, including Hossein Fatemi, Ahmad Zirakzadeh, Ali Shayegan, and Karim Sanjabi. The stated aim was democracy and an end to foreign control of Iranian politics, with the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company at its centre. On the 28th of April 1951, the Majlis elected Mosaddegh prime minister by 79 votes to 12.

  In March 1951, before he was even formally confirmed, Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, cancelling its oil concession, which was otherwise set to run until 1993, and expropriating its assets. In a speech on the 21st of June 1951, before the United Nations Security Council, he framed the move in terms that Iranian crowds found galvanising: he said Iran was the rightful owner of all the oil in Iran, and that the revenues would let the country combat poverty, disease, and backwardness.

  Britain's response was swift and punishing. It declared a de facto blockade, reinforced its naval presence in the Persian Gulf, persuaded sister international oil companies not to fill the gap left by the AIOC, and threatened legal action against any buyer of Iranian oil. The AIOC pulled its technicians out and shut the installations. Without trained engineers, Iran's nationalised refineries could not maintain full production. Oil output fell from 664,000 barrels in 1950 to 27,000 barrels in 1952, a drop of almost 96 percent. At the same time, BP and Aramco doubled output in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq so that Britain felt no shortage at home. Iran's oil income fell to nearly nothing, and the promised domestic reforms ground to a halt.

• 4. Domestic Reforms and Fractures

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  Unemployment compensation, benefits for sick and injured workers, and the abolition of forced peasant labour on landlords' estates all arrived in the early months of Mosaddegh's administration. In 1952, the Land Reform Act forced landlords to pay a 20 percent tax on their revenue, with half deposited into a development fund and the rest passed to sharecropping tenants. That fund paid for public baths, rural housing, and pesticides in the countryside.

  After the public uprising of Si-ye Tir, the 30th of Tir on the Iranian calendar, restored Mosaddegh to office following his brief July 1952 resignation, he returned more powerful than before. On the 3rd of August 1952, the Majlis granted him emergency decree powers for six months. He used them to cut the Shah's personal budget, ban the Shah's direct communications with foreign diplomats, transfer royal lands back to the state, and expel the Shah's politically active sister, Ashraf Pahlavi. A second land reform decree superseded the Shah's own 1951 program, establishing village councils, increasing peasants' share of production, and levying heavy fines on landlords who compelled unpaid labour.

  But the political coalition holding all this together was fraying. Mozzafar Baghai, head of the worker-based Toilers party, broke with Mosaddegh. So did Hossein Makki, who had helped lead the takeover of the Abadan refinery and was once considered Mosaddegh's likely successor. Most damagingly, Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, who had called for a holy war on Mosaddegh's behalf during the July uprising, turned against him in January 1953 when Mosaddegh requested that his emergency powers be extended for another twelve months. Historian Ervand Abrahamian and journalist Stephen Kinzer offer competing accounts of the 1952 election controversy, but the source that united Mosaddegh's enemies was the fear, shared by clergy and conservatives alike, that his expanding emergency powers pointed toward one-man rule. Iranian civilians, meanwhile, were, in the source's words, "becoming poorer and unhappier by the day", primarily because of the British-led boycott.

• 5. Operation Ajax

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  Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, arrived in Tehran to personally direct the operation that would bring down the Iranian prime minister. His presence was the final piece of a conspiracy assembled in stages across two capitals. Britain had already been running its own covert program, Operation Boot, channelling roughly ten thousand pounds sterling per month through the Rashidian brothers to buy influence among Iranian military officers, religious leaders, the press, and street gangs, according to CIA estimates.

  In October 1952, Mosaddegh had cut all diplomatic relations with Britain, calling the British an enemy. That move closed off any remaining legal avenue and pushed Washington closer to London's position. The American shift crystallised after Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency. In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the CIA, then headed by his brother Allen Dulles, to draft overthrow plans. On the 4th of April 1953, Allen Dulles approved one million dollars to be used, in the CIA's own phrasing, "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh."

  The plan centred on persuading the Shah to issue a royal decree dismissing Mosaddegh. The Shah was terrified. It took multiple meetings with American officials, and the bribing of his sister Ashraf with a mink coat and money, to change his mind. CIA operatives posing as nationalists and socialists threatened Muslim leaders with punishment if they opposed Mosaddegh, manufacturing the impression that he was already cracking down on dissent. A referendum to dissolve parliament passed with 99 percent approval, but separate polling stations for yes and no votes drew sharp criticism.

  The first coup attempt failed. Declassified CIA documents released in 2017 show that, after the Shah fled to Italy, CIA headquarters believed the operation was over and on the 18th of August 1953 sent Roosevelt a telegram telling him to leave Iran immediately. Roosevelt ignored it. He circulated a false account that Mosaddegh had tried to seize the throne, bribed agents to mobilise mobs, paid both anti- and pro-monarchy demonstrators, and tricked Mosaddegh into urging his own supporters to stay home. The protests turned violent, leaving almost 300 dead. Pro-Shah tank regiments stormed Tehran and bombarded the prime minister's official residence. Mosaddegh escaped into hiding, then surrendered the following day at the Officers' Club, where General Fazlollah Zahedi had been installed with CIA assistance. On the 22nd of August, the Shah returned from Rome. Mosaddegh's closest associate and minister of foreign affairs, Hossein Fatemi, was later executed by firing squad on the 10th of November 1954 by order of the Shah's military court.

• 6. Trial, Confinement, and Death

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  On the 21st of December 1953, a military tribunal sentenced Mosaddegh to three years of solitary confinement, well below the death sentence that prosecutors had sought. Mosaddegh responded in a voice described as calm and laced with sarcasm: "The verdict of this court has increased my historical glories. I am extremely grateful you convicted me. Truly tonight the Iranian nation understood the meaning of constitutionalism."

  After his prison term ended, he was placed under house arrest at his residence in Ahmadabad, where he remained until his death on the 5th of March 1967 from cancer. He had been diagnosed with carcinoma in 1966 and received radiation therapy at Mehr hospital in Tehran. When his condition deteriorated, stomach ulcers began bleeding, and he was transferred to Najmieh Hospital, where he died the same night. The government denied him a public funeral. Despite his request to be buried beside the victims of the political violence of the 30th of Tir 1331, which corresponds to the 21st of July 1952, he was buried in his own living room.

• 7. Legacy and Reckoning

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  On the 5th of March 1979, not even a month after the Shah was deposed, an estimated crowd of over one million Iranians converged on Ahmadabad for the twelfth anniversary of Mosaddegh's death. For sixty solid miles, the highway from Tehran to his burial site was described as a massive, unbroken chain of cars, and in the final seven or eight miles mourners had to complete the journey on foot.

  In March 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a partial acknowledgment, stating that the coup was "clearly a setback for Iran's political development" and that it was easy to understand why Iranians continued to resent the intervention. In 2013, during the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States government formally acknowledged its role in the coup as a part of its foreign policy initiatives, confirming that it had paid protesters and bribed officials. The British government has never admitted its involvement.

  The CIA's internal reporting in 1979 predicted no imminent threat to the Shah's regime just one month before his overthrow by Ayatollah Khomeini's movement. That failure of intelligence was itself a downstream consequence of the 1953 coup: by removing Mosaddegh and installing a client monarch, the CIA had built its picture of Iran on a foundation that hid the depth of popular discontent. Time magazine had named Mosaddegh its Man of the Year in 1951, placing him alongside Dean Acheson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur as that year's finalists. The documentary Coup 53, released in 2021, uncovered evidence that MI6 operative Norman Darbyshire was involved in the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of General Mahmoud Afshartous, Mosaddegh's chief of police, a detail that had remained hidden for nearly seven decades.