It’s 19 August, 1953. In the streets of Tehran, the capital of Iran, chaos is the order of the day. Hundreds of protesters are erecting barricades, blocking the progress of security forces, and chanting one thing over and over: “Death to the Shah! Death to the Shah!” The protesters are part of the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist party, and they are determined to bring down the Pahlavi dynasty and make Iran into a people’s republic. Nearly all symbols of capitalism are vandalized or destroyed as the mob rampages through the streets. As the property destruction grows in ferocity, a second group of protesters emerges from the ruins of some of the buildings. These counter-protesters began screaming “bring back the Shah!, bring back the Shah!”. The counter protesters are also armed with weapons, and they are soon joined by regular citizens who are sickened by the property destruction and terrified that Iran is about to become a Communist state.
Now the Iranian army steps in to restore order, swiftly moving to separate the rival bands of protesters. Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh surrenders to army authority in order to prevent further bloodshed, and within a few days Shah Reza Pahlavi, who fled the country a week earlier when protests against his rule swelled, returns to his “beloved people.”
What happened on 19 August 1953 was a carefully orchestrated CIA/MI6 coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mosaddegh so that the Shah’s rule wouldn’t be impeded. When Masaddegh became prime minister in 1951, he worked with the Iranian parliament to pass a bill that nationalized Iran’s enormous petroleum and natural gas industry. Before passage of the nationalization bill, Iran’s oil industry was controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was headquartered in London. The vast majority of the company’s profits went back to the United Kingdom, which Masaddegh found to be unacceptable. All Masaddegh wanted was for the resources of his country to be used for the benefit of his country. For this he was branded a Communist by the newly elected UK Conservative Party government of Winston Churchill.
Churchill, who had brilliantly led his country during the dark days of World War II, was discovering that being prime minister of a country in peacetime was much more different than leading a country during wartime. He was also discovering that the vast power the United Kingdom used to wield on the world stage was now gone, but the worst part of being His Majesty’s prime minster in 1951 was trying to deal with the economy. Six years of warfare, which were preceded by nearly ten years of economic depression, had left the United Kingdom’s finances in ruins. Wartime rationing was still in effect in 1951. A nationalization of the Iranian oil industry would have put even greater pressure on the UK’s finances. Churchill, who tended to see the rest of the world as vassal states for the United Kingdom, decided to play the Communist card, hoping to engage President Truman in an MI6 plot to overthrow Mosaddegh’s government.
President Truman wanted nothing to do with the MI6 plot, viewing the British moves as nothing but naked colonialism run amok. Churchill tried to pressure Truman by saying that the United Kingdom was supporting the United States in the Korean War, but Truman coolly replied that the Korean War was a United Nations effort, which the United Kingdom, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, had voted to support in June of 1950. Churchill then decided to impose an embargo on Iranian oil, and he also ordered that British technicians were not to assist Iranian technicians in operating the main refinery at Abadan. To increase economic pressure on Iran, Churchill also ordered the Royal Navy to block any shipments of oil from Abadan. By 1952 the Iranian economy was in free fall. Mosaddegh was becoming increasingly unpopular, thanks to a devastatingly effective MI6 disinformation campaign. Mosaddegh was also facing increasing pressure from the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ayatollah Kashani. Kashani had formed a political alliance with Mosaddegh in 1951, hoping that this alliance would lead to Iran becoming an Islamic state. As Kashani became disillusioned with Mosaddegh, he allied himself with the Shah.
When Kashani turned on him, Mosaddegh made a tactical error. Iran’s Communist party, the Tudeh, decided to throw its support behind the beleaguered prime minister. Mosaddegh should have shunned the support of Iran’s communists, but in desperation to hold on to power, he accepted an alliance with them. Now the United Kingdom had proof that Mosaddegh was under communist influence, and by this point, a new administration was in power in Washington. Dwight Eisenhower had handily defeated the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, and anti-communism was the order of the day in the new administration. The personification of this crusade was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. While Churchill had disdain for Dulles (“he’s the only bull who carries his own china shop with him”, Churchill once acidly remarked), he saw Dulles’s fervent anti-communism as just what he needed to goad the CIA (which was headed by Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles) into helping MI6 overthrow Mosaddegh. The CIA and MI6 came up with Operation Ajax, a covert plan to foment insurrection in Iran, force the resignation and/or arrest of Mosaddegh, and prop the Shah up with Western power. In exchange the Shah would terminate the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, and everything would go back to “normal”.
What if President Eisenhower had told Prime Minister Churchill that the United States wanted no part in interfering with the internal politics of Iran, and had further informed the British government that any attempt by them to topple Mosaddegh would result in the United States taking severe economic action against the United Kingdom?
The toppling of Mosaddegh and the return of the Shah to his throne became a source of great bitterness for the Iranian people, especially as the Shah became a repressive tyrant in the following decades. The CIA/MI6 plot also created a moral hazard for the Iranian government. The Shah witnessed the British and Americans step in to overthrow a democratically elected Iranian leader. This action no doubt inspired the Shah to act in a heavy handed manner, knowing that his “allies” would step in to rescue him should his people once again grow restive and call for greater democratic reforms. What the Shah failed to understand was that unlike Iran, both the United Kingdom and the United States have regularly scheduled elections, and the Republican and Conservative parties that supported him in 1953 might not be around in the future. That was precisely what happened in January of 1979, when the Iranian people once again took to the streets demanding change. This time James Callahan was at Number 10 in London, and he was from the Labour party. Callahan was dealing with even greater economic issues than those that had bedeviled Churchill, and he didn’t have room on his plate for southwest Asia intrigue.
Jimmy Carter was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 1979, and he was not the standard Cold War Democrat. Carter based his foreign policy on human rights, and despite traveling to Iran for a state visit in January of 1978, where he toasted the Shah and Iran as “an island of stability in a troubled region”, Carter was dead set against using any American power to keep the Shah in power. Carter was well aware of the Shah’s use of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, to imprison and torture dissidents in Iran.
Operation Ajax achieved a short term “victory” for western capitalism, but it created a far greater problem which blew up in Washington’s face in January of 1979.
