TEHRAN – Seventy-two years ago on August 19, 1953, the United States and Britain advanced a coup against the first democratically-elected government of Iran, the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and reinstalled the monarchist dictatorship headed by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

The coup and the subsequent U.S. support for the ruthless military regime under Mohamad Reza Shah, who had escaped the country while the coup was taking place, came with grave implications. The coup played a major role in shaping the Iranian perceptions of the United States, a new imperialist that had entered the course of the competition with the British and Russians to gain control of Iran’s vast resources.

The coup was primarily motivated by the desire to protect British oil interests in Iran, specifically after Prime Minister Mossadegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. 

The nationalization of the Iranian oil industry 

The movement to nationalize the oil industry was a reaction by the Iranians to concessions made by both Qajar and Pahlavi Shahs to foreign powers. The movement had originated in the parliament and was led by Mosaddegh when he was a lawmaker.  

After the British and Soviet troops invaded Iran in 1941 and toppled first the Pahlavi king, Reza Shah, they replaced him with his young son Mohammad Reza. In the early years of the second Pahlavi Shah, the anti-colonial oil nationalization movement had become too strong to suppress. The weakness of Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime benefited the movement in the period after World War II. Different political groups emerged and the oil movement gradually got stronger and stronger.

As time passed, the United States joined the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, who were seeking to gain control of the Iranian oil reserves. 

In the meantime, a senior cleric named Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani was leading a powerful popular movement outside the parliament against foreign interference in the country’s affairs, giving a hand to the democratically-elected government of Premier Mossadegh. 

The days before the coup

The coup plot lasted for five days from August 15th to 19th. This event involved the CIA and British intelligence (MI6) orchestrating a series of actions, including disinformation and military campaigns, to undermine Mosaddegh's government and install Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the sole ruler. 

In fact, the CIA and British intelligence operations had already been playing out in the previous months to undermine Mosaddegh's popularity and build support for the Shah. This involved propaganda campaigns and organizing protests that eventually led to the army siding with the pro-Shah forces.

The coup plot had been formally approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the CIA played the leading role in a covert operation, called Operation Ajax, whereby CIA-funded agents were used to foment unrest inside the capital, Tehran. The CIA released dangerous thugs such as Shaban Jafari and his friends from prisons and unleashed them in groups to walk in the city streets while hanging posters of Mossadegh on their chests. The funded gangs attacked public and private properties on their way while ranting and raving in the name of the Mossadegh supporters. 

In the period of five days, fighting between supporters of Mossadegh and the Shah resulted in hundreds of deaths.

Eventually, the coup, which was cod-named Operation Boot in the United Kingdom, brought back the stumbling Pahlavi dynasty to the top of power and ensured brutal Pahlavi suppression of the Iranian people for the next 26 years. 

What happened after the coup

After the coup succeeded, Shah, who had returned to the country, issued decrees dismissing Mosaddegh and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the prime minister. These decrees, while issued earlier, played a crucial role in legitimizing the coup when they were revealed to the public.  
Mosaddegh was arrested, tried and convicted of treason by the Shah's military court. On 21 December 1953, he was sentenced to three years in jail, then placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Other Mosaddegh supporters were imprisoned, and several received the death penalty.

Shah reverses course on nationalization of oil industry

The young Shah, along with Britain and the U.S., could not stand the nationalization of the oil industry and the democratically-elected Mosaddegh. For that, they overthrew his government.
In the aftermath of the coup, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi could reassert his autocratic rule and negotiated the 1954 Consortium Agreement with the British, which returned the ownership of Iranian oil to a consortium of Western companies until 1979, the year the Islamic Revolution became victorious. 

It is generally agreed today that the 1953 coup sowed the seeds for the Islamic Revolution of 1979, in which the Shah was overthrown. But even after the 1979 Islamic revolution, which eliminated U.S. presence in Iran entirely, Washington continued its efforts to bring down the revolutionary government in Iran. They dispatched military troops to Iran in Operation Eagle Claw, supported anti-revolutionary coup plotters and the Saddam Hussein regime, and imposed sanctions on Iran, which continue to this day. 

The U.S. intervention in Iran is part of a broader trend in American foreign policy that is aimed at toppling states that refuse to become puppet governments controlled by Washington. According to a dataset published by the Military Intervention Project (MIP), the U.S. has waged nearly 400 military interventions since its founding in 1776.