According to Foreign Policy, the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq is the earliest Cold War coup involvement that the US government has acknowledged. 

Mosaddeq, known affectionately as ‘the grand old man,’ took office as Prime Minister of Iran in 1951 and promptly led a movement to nationalize the British controlled Iranian oil industry. For many Iranians Mosaddeq is a revered figure, a symbol of nationalism, constitutionalism, and democracy.

The nationalization of Iranian oil was a blow to Britain’s economic interests in Iran as well as a threat to the survival of the British Empire in the Middle East.

 The 1985 End of Empire documentary series (Chapter 7: Iran) provides the background and context you’ll want to have to understand the coup. You can watch it for free on YouTube. But first, take a look at the trailer below.

According to a declassified CIA-authored history of the operation, the potential that Iran could be open to Soviet aggression spurred the US to  plan and execute the coup operation called TPAJAX.

American Involvement

US President Harry Truman encouraged British Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill to compromise with Mosaddeq. The US lost patience when Anglo-Iranian negotiations failed.

Fearing a takeover by Iran’s communist Tudeh Party, the newly elected American President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorized the CIA to remove Mosaddeq.

CIA personnel, working with the British, planned and financed the 1953 coup in Iran that removed Mohammad Mossadeq as Iran’s Prime Minister.

A CIA team led by Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of the US President Theodore Roosevelt, organized military units for the coup. 

Several large networks of Iranian agents (paid by the United States) engaged in propaganda and political action in the months before the coup.

A first coup attempt on the night of August 15-16, 1953, was a failure. After more unrest, military units seized control of Tehran on August 19, forcing Mosaddeq into hiding. He surrendered to US backed forces on August 20.

The coup transformed Iran’s constitutional monarchy (under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) into a royal dictatorship. The Shah was later displaced in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

The United States didn’t act alone. British officials helped plan and finance the August 1953 coup, playing a crucial but supporting role to the Americans. They’ve been reluctant to draw attention to their actions, and are quite happy for Washington to take the blame. Various Iranians were also involved.

Although the shah initially opposed a coup, he later agreed, issuing a series of decrees under US leadership.

Iranian Involvement

Some revisionist historians downplay the US role, instead blaming Shiite clerics for Mosaddeq’s downfall. There is, in fact, some evidence that two Shiite clerics were involved, but they were funded and encouraged by the US government.

A document written by British officials in early September 1953 states that Ayatollah Mohammad Behbahani received a large amount of money from US Embassy personnel and then organized crowds that helped carry out the coup. 

A CIA history states that Ayatollah Kashani also helped organize the crowds. It is not clear whether he received US support. However, these two clerics were maverick political activists, not representative of the mainstream Shiite clergy.

Acknowledging the role of Iranian actors, including some Shiite clergy, doesn’t absolve the United States of responsibility for the coup. The Americans organized and led the overthrow, mobilizing and directing the Iranians who were involved.

The CIA’s covert operation to topple Mosaddeq, codenamed TPAJAX was one of the worst kept secrets of the Cold War. According to Foreign Policy:

For decades, both Britain and the United States publicly denied their roles in the 1953 coup so as not to embarrass the shah or endanger their close political and economic ties with Iran. With the overthrow of the shah in 1979, U.S. and British intelligence officers published memoirs . . . boasting of their roles in toppling Mosaddeq.

. . . it was not until March 2000, in the midst of a brief detente between Iran and the United States, that then- U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright officially acknowledged that the ‘United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq.’ She described the coup as a ‘setback for Iran’s political development’ and empathized with Iranians who ‘continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.’

In August 2013, the CIA officially declassified a document acknowledging its own role in the coup.

In 2017, the State Department published a volume of the “Foreign Relations of the United States” series that was full of declassified CIA documents confirming the United States’ covert role in the coup.

__________________

Sources:

ARGUMENT The United States Overthrew Iran’s Last Democratic Leader
by Roham Alvandi, Mark J. Gasiorowski

End of Empire (Chapter 7: Iran) – YouTube

Coup 53 – a documentary film by Taghi Amirani available to stream (no screen mirroring) at coup53.com for $6.00.
The trailer is below.

Last month on February 11, Iran celebrated the 40th anniversary of the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to herald the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Aljeerza reports that Iranians poured into the streets across the country,  “renewing their allegiance to the country’s Islamic principles at a time of rising economic and political pressure amid the resumption of punishing US sanctions.”

As I looked at the photos from the celebration, my mind took me back in time to a different kind of observance, a week long spectacle in October 1971 celebrating 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. The bash, thrown by the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was opulent.

While the Iranian news agency, Tasnim, reports that “hundreds of foreign guests, including scientific, political, and influential figures travelled to Iran” for the more recent event, their stay was not steeped in luxury and ostentation. And, while hundreds of cameramen and journalists covered the massive rallies in Tehran and other cities, the event did not attract the in-depth international exposure of the shah’s famous party.

The 1971 setting, the ceremonial city of Persepolis, near Shiraz, was magisterial, a magnificent reminder of grandeur past.  However, the shah wasn’t really there to celebrate the glories of days gone by. He was there to announce his own mission, his personal rendezvous with history, his desire to link his monarchy directly to that of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Empire. Of course any connection with Cyrus was a bit presumptuous. The shah’s achievements, however stellar, did not match those of a ruler most famous for freeing the slaves of Babylon, and declaring the world’s first charter of human rights.

Attended by five hundred guests — including twenty kings or shaykhs, five queens, twenty-one princes and princesses, sixteen presidents, three premiers, four vice-presidents, and two foreign ministers — the festivities were politically pretentious. Comfortably settled in air-conditioned tents furnished with Baccarat crystal, Limoges china, and Porthault linens, few attendees were aware of the barrage of criticism surrounding their gathering. Acrimony and disapproval were coming from all quarters.

As soldiers blocked roads to keep ordinary Iranians at bay, dignitaries from around the world were downing quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, roast lamb with truffles, roast peacock stuffed with foie gras, and over 25,000 bottles of wine. This at the same time that a serious famine was occurring in Fars Province, the region of Iran where Persepolis is located.

The Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the event from exile in Iraq, inciting protest and asserting:

It is the duty of the Muslim people of Iran to refrain from participation in this illegitimate festival, to engage in passive struggle against it, to remain indoors during the days of the festival, and to express by any means possible their disgust and aversion for anyone who contributed to the organization and celebration of the festival. Let the festival organizers know that they are despised by the Islamic community and by all alert peoples throughout the world, that they are hated by all lovers of freedom, and that Islam and the Muslims are repelled by the very notion of monarchy.

While the Shah wanted the celebrations to improve his country’s image abroad, accusations of excessive spending were common in the Western press. In the wake of news stories about human rights abuses, massive disparities in wealth, and student protesters who were arrested and beaten, the shah was indignant.

“So what are people complaining about?” he asked. “That we are giving a couple of banquets for some fifty heads of state? We can hardly offer them bread and radishes, can we?”

Today a reminder of that controversial celebration lives on in the public’s national consciousness, in Iran’s own memory palace — an imaginary bastion filled with collective whisperings of foreign conspiracy, tales of great power domination, and stories of Cold War subterfuge.

These spaces have other chambers also, areas harboring resentment over American CIA intervention, anger over the expenditure of vast oil revenues on a misguided strategy of military-led development and, always, outrage over the arrogance of a detested shah. Bitterness and resentment, though, continue to focus, especially, on Reza’s  October 1971 extravaganza.

1953: Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace speech to the UN General Assembly in New York City on December 8. Atoms for Peace is an initiative designed to provide countries with peaceful civilian nuclear technologies. The intent is that this will prevent the pursuit of military nuclear programs. Beneficiaries include Israel, India, Pakistan, and Iran.

1957: The US begins working with Iran to launch its nuclear program.

1959: President Eisenhower visits Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi in Tehran.

1967: The US builds a nuclear reactor on the campus of Tehran University and provides Iran with fuel for the reactor — weapons-grade enriched uranium.

1970s: As a consequence of the oil boom, Iran’s nuclear program morphs into a full-fledged civilian nuclear program.

Mid 1970s: The shah’s government pays for dozens of Iranian students to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study nuclear engineering. The majority of these students return to Iran and start running the nuclear program. The MIT trainees have been central to Iran’s nuclear program ever since.

1970s: US diplomats begin negotiating to limit Iran’s nuclear program; Iran under the shah insists it has the same right to nuclear power as any nation.

Iran buys nuclear plants from West Germany and France. The research reactor at Tehran University keeps working.

1979: The shah is overthrown and a new Islamist government led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini takes power. The clerics in power do not initially embrace the country’s existing nuclear infrastructure. To them, “Iran’s nuclear program encapsulates Iran’s struggle with modernity.” After the revolution, the program “came to symbolize the kind of rapid modernization that was riddled with corruption and ‘West-toxification.’”

“Ayatollah Khomeini famously said the unfinished nuclear power plants in Bushehr should be used as silos to store wheat . . . they were abandoned as a costly Western imposition on an oil-rich nation.”

(Ali Vaez. NPR: Born in The USA: How America Created Iran’s Nuclear Program. September 18, 2015.)

1980s: As part of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s forces repeatedly bomb the Bushehr nuclear facility which is not operational at the time.

1980-1988: The Iran-Iraq War creates severe power shortages in Iran. Iran’s leaders decide to revive the nuclear program. Their motivation is unclear.

Early 2000s: Iran offers to discuss the future of its nuclear program, even reaching a deal with European powers. The US under Bush does not sign on. Efforts to reach a deal fall apart, and Iran begins building thousands of centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium.

Iran under Khomeini had rejected the program as a symbol of the corrupt West. Now, more than a decade after his death, the nuclear program is becoming a symbol of Iran’s defiance of the West. A new sense of nationalism is created.

2001: Israel has been warning that Iran is making dangerous nuclear progress. American concerns intensify in the years following September 11, 2001.

2007: American President George W. Bush says: “The message to the Iranian people is that your government is going to cause you deprivation. . . . If your government continues to insist upon a nuclear weapon there will be lost opportunity for the Iranian people. They won’t be able to realize their full potential.”

2005: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad becomes Iran’s president. He’s a populist leader who questions the Holocaust and defies President Bush.

2008: In an interview with NPR, Ahmadinejad insists that Iran has a right to a nuclear program.

2009: Ahmadinejad is re-elected in a disputed vote. Protests erupt. The economy is in steep decline.

President Obama’s administration tries to negotiate a nuclear deal. When talks fall apart, the US and other powers intensify sanctions.

2013: Amid growing unrest, Hassan Rouhani is elected president. He pledges to improve relations with world powers. Meanwhile, Iranian diplomats are already quietly meeting with the US.

Economic problems intensify. Iran’s oil exports have dropped by 50%. The value of Iran’s currency has also dropped by 50%.

Iran’s new foreign minister, Javad Zarif, argues that a deal is possible if Iran is allowed some level of enriching uranium. He says: “If you say that Iran should abandon its enrichment program, you cannot abandon science. You cannot abandon technology. We have learned this. So the best way is to make sure that this technology is used in a transparent fashion for a peaceful program.”

2015: The Obama administration eventually accepts this argument. The emerging deal ensures that Iran’s nuclear activity will be limited, inspections will verify, and economic sanctions will be lifted.

Photograph by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann (Flickr)

Unlike the case of Manchuria, the United States and the Soviet Union had no longstanding rivalry in Iran. Instead, the Russians had long battled the British for concessions and influence in that country.

Although there had been an extensive foreign presence in Persia, in contrast to Manchuria, Iran had never been “officially” colonized. Formal occupation began in 1941 with the permanent billeting of British and Soviet troops.

The Americans arrived in 1942-1943 to expedite the delivery of supplies to the Soviet Union through a Persian Corridor.

As the war neared its end, traditional rivalries flared, and conflict between the Allied forces intensified.  Despite some friction, United States and British interests eventually coincided. An implicit partnership developed with the two allies jointly opposing Soviet activities.

By November 1945, the United States was taking a leadership position, pressing for the evacuation of all Allied troops by January 1946. As in Manchuria, the Soviets refused to leave. Instead they decided to support separatist activities in the provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. Such interference was unacceptable to both Iran and the United States.

Parallels with recent events in Manchuria were only too clear. But, once again, it was impossible to separate American ideals and interests. Not only did Iran border the Soviet Union, in an area targeted by the United States for “forward defense,” but the country possessed vast oil resources considered vital to the West’s campaign against ‘international communism.’

As Simon Bromley notes, the military implications of oil were first seen by Winston Churchill. By the end of World War I, “the military and economic significance of oil was apparent to all the major powers.”

Echoing their prior stance, the Soviets pursued the pattern they had established in Manchuria by asserting control over the internal affairs of a neighboring country. In doing so, they were creating a sphere of influence that they felt would protect their borders against possible incursion.

Soviet troop strength in Iran was not insignificant. According to Kuniholm, estimates allowed for 30,000 in Azerbaijan and 75,000 in northern Iran, compared to 5,000 British troops and 6,000 American troops in the rest of the country. The total number of Soviet troops was at least three times that of the Iranian Army.

In addition to military force, Stalin also reapplied previously employed techniques of economic penetration. Just as the Soviets had looted and confiscated  industrial equipment in Manchuria, they seized Azerbaijan’s fertile grain fields, directing and controlling the area’s vast wheat harvest. This had critical impact since the province ordinarily supplied enough grain for its own consumption and, additionally, provided almost half of Tehran’s yearly needs.

Kuniholm says: Because the Soviets “refused to permit the province of Azerbaijan to deliver wheat to the south, and were themselves taking Azerbaijan’s harvest,” the Western allies were required to import wheat in order to prevent starvation in parts of southern Iran.

Similar tactics affected other goods.

For example, Iran was forced to export shoes manufactured in Azerbaijani factories to the Soviet Union, making it necessary to import higher priced shoes in return.

In the end, the Americans saw Soviet actions geostrategically, and also as an implicit threat to the oil fields of the Middle East, a matter affecting national security. The conflict over oil became quite explicit when the Soviets demanded an oil concession in northern Iran.

Isfahan was clearly influenced by Cold War forces, particularly during the years 1960 – 1978. As a close ally of the United States, the city’s post World War II urban development transpired in the Cold War context. Most decisions regarding the urban environment were independent ones. However, American involvement in two specific events — covert action in 1953 and the White Revolution of the early 1960s — combined with domestic and historic factors to create spillover effects which greatly affected the city’s urban fabric. Isfahan’s on-going transformation was then intensified by repercussions from a third event, the enunciation of the Nixon Doctrine.

American CIA intervention in the oil nationalization crisis of 1953 contributed to the downfall of Mosaddegh, bringing an end to Iran’s democratic interlude. De facto constitutional change altered Iran’s political reality, ensuring executive primacy over the legislature and assisting the shah in the consolidation of his authority. The action filtered down to politically active communities like many in Isfahan. It solidified the historical Iranian perception that the country’s political life was shaped by outsiders, and cemented the partnership between the shah and successive American administrations.

In 1960, US pressure was one of several factors that convinced the monarch to embark on a program of change known as the White Revolution. At this time, the extension of further support (which the shah desperately needed for survival) became conditional on political and economic reform. The program, basically following US dictates, contributed to the social and economic aspects of Isfahan’s transformation. Land reform, for example, proved to be an impetus to rural-urban migration, and many new industrialists emerged in its wake.

Urban change in Isfahan intensified for the rest of the 1960s. In addition, Soviet influences surfaced. In the context of the Soviet-American competition for influence, the shah asserted his autonomy by purchasing weapons from the USSR, and entering into an agreement for a turnkey steel complex, which included the construction of a ‘new town’ called Aryashahr on the outskirts of the city.

The relationship with the Soviets soon weakened, however, and, as the decade came to a close, American influence regained its primacy. The 1968 Nixon Doctrine set the stage for the coming decade and the years of most intrusive US influence by securing the shah’s position as regional policeman and facilitating his weapons procurement program.

By 1978 and the onset of the revolution, Isfahan had undergone a demographic transition as a consequence of US stimulated land reform and  later weapons purchases. American defense manufacturers had established a  physical presence in the city, and qualified Iranian workers had been diverted from the civilian to the military sector. Many had relocated from other cities in Iran to meet associated labor requirements. The city’s neighborhoods and consumer offerings had been modified to meet the needs of foreign workers and their families, and infrastructure construction was driven by the needs of Isfahan’s military-industrial complex.

The shah was perceived to be a pawn of the foreign establishment.

Public space and collective life were presumed to be shaped by outsiders as more Isfahanis sensed a loss of control over all aspects of their urban environment. While many foreigners believed that the shah had maximized his opportunities, his inability to integrate Iran more favorably into the global economy while, at the same time, satisfying Iran’s development requirements meant the downfall of his monarchy. It also signaled a failure of American grand strategy for, just as the USSR was establishing a presence in neighboring Afghanistan, the US lost its most staunch ally in the region. However, the new Islamic regime adopted a policy of nonalignment, mitigating the loss.

So far as Iran’s cities were concerned, the purported switch to a more “south – south” model of development resulted in mostly superficial change. Economists argue that the urban challenges that faced the shah’s regime have, if anything, become more serious and more problematic under the Islamic Republic.

Leading the list of these critical problems are controlling the recent demographic explosion; reversing the troubling rural migration; creating enough productive work for new entrants into the job market; reducing the acute shortage of urban housing and curbing real estate speculation; winning the race between the rising number of students and the number of new classrooms and teachers at all levels of education; and, finally, redressing the steady decline in the standard of living.

Importantly, though, conversations about the overbearing and insensitive foreign presence have been replaced years later by appreciation for the city’s refurbished parks and landscaping, a new beltway, and a recently constructed power-generating facility. While there are continuing anxieties over chronic unemployment and inflation, the city’s struggle with global and militaristic flows has been replaced by more domestic concerns. And as The New York Times reported

After 12 years of neglect since the Islamic revolution, Isfahan, Iran, a former Persian capital, has reclaimed its status as one of the Middle East’s most beautiful places.

Still, happenings since 1991 when the Times piece was published have not all been positive. The city is now at the center of the debate over Iran’s nuclear capabilities. While the US and Iran have entered into an agreement that resolves some of the major issues, we will have to wait and see if the agreement holds. Has Isfahan lost its innocence? Or will Americans be flooding its streets again, this time to wonder at the city’s marvelous Islamic heritage? It’s trite to say, but “only time will tell.”

Photograph by Ninara (Flickr)

Demands for democratization inherent in some aspects of the revolutionary process have, until recently, gone largely unaddressed. The formation of political parties was not precluded by Iran’s 1979 constitution which in Article 26 provides that

the formation of parties, societies, political or professional associations, as well as religious societies, whether Islamic or pertaining to one of the recognized religious minorities, is permitted provided they do not violate the principles of independence, freedom, national unity, the criteria of Islam, or the basis of the Islamic Republic.

The understanding was further restricted, however, by a political parties law which was passed in September 1981. This law restricted the emergence of parties by making party formation dependent on obtaining a permit from the Ministry of the Interior.

Article 10 of the law established a commission of the ministry comprising two Majlis deputies, two representatives from the Judiciary, and one from the interior ministry to issue the permits. The commission was also supposed to supervise the activities of the parties and organizations it approved, and order the dissolution of parties engaged in activities contrary to the law. Offenses included activities that could undermine the foundations of the Islamic Republic or Iran’s independence, or intensify conflicts within the Iranian nation.

Thus, the over 100 political organizations which suddenly “sprang into being” in the initial turmoil after the revolution were almost immediately suppressed. The Iran-Iraq War pushed them further into the background, and Iran became, in effect, a one party state under the ruling Islamic Republican Party (IRP). The IRP was the only functioning political party from 1979-1986 when it was “voluntarily” dissolved.

With the war’s conclusion, concerns about the economy and demands for broader mass participation once again emerged. Still, while several groups served as quasi-parties, as of the 1997 presidential election, authentic parties were not a reality. Nevertheless, many new voters — especially women and young people — were drawn into the political arena by debates over social and cultural freedoms as well as by calls for political pluralism and the establishment of parties.

The election of Mohammad Khatami paid more than lip service to such demands. On several occasions, Khatami said that

if properly formed — that is, not imposed from above or planted from outside — parties were important. A ‘self-sufficient and advanced society’, he said, ‘cannot last without civil societies, which include political parties’. Khatami’s impressive election victory, noted one Tehran daily, created an atmosphere of ‘great expectations’ in which people were ‘assuming that the system [would] permit the re-establishment of political parties and application of democratic politics’.

Since Khatami’s election, though, Iran has witnessed its most violent clashes since the revolution. In July 1999, reform minded youth confronted religious hardliners in the streets of Tehran leaving unresolved the prospects for — or timing of — an Iranian transition to democracy. Many of those who voted for President Khatami beaome increasingly dissatisfied with the slow pace of reform. While the first local council elections in Iran were held in February 1999, some argue that they had no real significance.

An Iranian businessman quoted in The Financial Times says they were

just another bone thrown to the people to keep them quiet. What authority are these councils going to have beyond ruling over garbage disposal?

Indeed, President Khatami hoped that the new councils would have fiscal and political authority to manage schools, housing, roads, and small development projects without having to consult the central government in Tehran.

As with the Poder Popular in Cuba,  some saw this move toward local control as democracy in action. Others, however, were more cynical, noting that so long as the central bureaucracy retained authority over budgetary allocations, empowerment at the local or grassroots level could only be token, nothing more than a pressure valve. Moreover, concern over the nation’s economy raised questions about whether it would be possible for a democratic movement to take hold.

Reportedly, most Iranians were forced to work more than one job, manufacturing was operating at barely 30% of capacity, inflation was running more than double the official rate of 18%, and the majority of the population was living below the poverty level.

Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi argue, however, that this situation need not be determinative. Democracy is not linked to economic growth they say, and, thus,

the vision of the relation between development that dominated the intellectual mood and served to orient U.S. foreign policy during the cold war years appears strangely convoluted.

Obviously, we will have to wait sometime before it is possible to make an authoritative assessment of Iran’s possibilities. What is clear, however, is that the US presence in Iran during the Cold War years did nothing to facilitate democracy. Rather, American actions, particularly the CIA intervention in 1953, subverted the constitution, minimizing the opportunity for democratic institutions and processes to take hold.

Photograph by Beshef (Flickr)

____________________

Readers interested in this topic may want to consult the following sources:

Stephen C. Fairbanks, “Theocracy Versus Democracy: Iran Considers Political Parties.” The Middle East Journal Volume 52 Number 1 (Winter 1998).

Adam Przeworksi and Fernando Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49:2 (1997).