The United States Overthrew Iran's Last Democratic Leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq PDF

11/29/2019 The United States Overthrew Iran’s Last Democratic Leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq
ARGUMENT
The United States Overthrew

Iran’s Last Democratic Leader
Despite a campaign of historical revisionism in Washington, the archival record
makes clear that the U.S. government was the key actor in the 1953 coup that
ousted Mohammad Mosaddeq—not the Iranian clergy.
BY ROHAM ALVANDI, MARK J. GASIOROWSKI | OCTOBER 30, 2019, 9:29 AM
M
ohammad Mosaddeq is a name that evokes strong emotions in the
average Iranian. A charismatic French- and Swiss-educated lawyer
from an aristocratic family, Mosaddeq served two terms as prime
minister of Iran from 1951, when he led the movement to nationalize the British-
controlled Iranian oil industry, until August 1953, when his government was
toppled by a royalist military coup backed by the CIA and the British Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS).
The nationalization of Iranian oil was not only a blow to Britain’s economic
interests in Iran but to the very survival of the British Empire in the Middle East.
While U.S. President Harry Truman encouraged British Prime Ministers Clement
Attlee and Winston Churchill to compromise with Mosaddeq, even hosting the
Iranian premier in Washington in October 1951, the United States eventually lost
patience as Anglo-Iranian negotiations failed. Fearing that continuing crisis and
instability in Iran would lead to a takeover by Iran’s communist Tudeh Party, the
newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to topple
Mosaddeq in 1953.
The coup transformed Iran’s constitutional monarchy, under Shah Mohammad

Reza Pahlavi, into a royal dictatorship that was later toppled in a popular
revolution in 1979. For most Iranians, Mosaddeq remains an evocative national
hero because of his staunch defense of Iran’s sovereignty over its most vital
national resource—oil—in the face of the declining British Empire’s stubborn
refusal to let go of an extremely valuable overseas asset. For many liberal
Iranians who
The story still dream
doesn’t of a democratic
end here, Iran, he
but this month’s freealso remains
articles a symbol
soon will. of civic
nationalism
Subscribe forand constitutionalism
unlimited content today. because of his demand that the shah should
reign but not rule.
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Taghi Amirani’s film is a powerful riposte to a handful of U.S.

and Iranian politicians, academics, think tankers, and
pundits who have been using and abusing history to absolve
the United States of responsibility for toppling Mosaddeq.
The lingering trauma of 1953 is powerfully evoked in Taghi Amirani’s new

documentary film, Coup 53. Amirani’s film builds on the research that went into
the 1985 End of Empire documentary series for British television, revealing
tantalizing details about the role of the SIS in the coup. In the Paris basement of
Mosaddeq’s grandson, Amirani discovered the transcript of an interview with
Norman Darbyshire, the SIS officer who helped devise the coup plan, that was
mysteriously cut from the 1985 broadcast.
With Darbyshire played by Ralph Fiennes, Amirani reenacts the interview in

which the former British spy candidly admits his role in the coup, including the
April 1953 murder of Gen. Mahmud Afshartus, the pro-Mosaddeq chief of police.
The British played a crucial but supporting role to the Americans in the 1953 coup
—and they are not keen to draw attention to their actions. Indeed, they have
never officially acknowledged their role, unlike the Americans, and have been
quite happy for Washington to take the blame.
The release of Amirani’s film this fall, with its narrative of Anglo-American
culpability for the 1953 coup, is a powerful riposte to a handful of U.S. and Iranian
politicians, academics, think tankers, and pundits who have recently been using
and abusing history to absolve the United States of responsibility for toppling
Mosaddeq—a form of official historical revisionism that has reached the highest
levels of the U.S. government in the midst of Washington’s current maximum
pressure campaign against Iran.
On May 8, the Trump administration’s special representative for

Iran, Brian Hook, blamed Mosaddeq’s downfall on domestic Iranian actors at an
event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This was
despite the fact that Hook’s own State Department published a long-overdue
The story
volume doesn’t
of the end Relations
“Foreign here, but this month’s
of the Unitedfree articles
States” soon
series will.that was full
in 2017
ofSubscribe for unlimited
declassified content today.
CIA documents confirming the United States’ covert role in the
coup. Subscribe for $2.25/week
Hook claimed that these documents demonstrated that Mosaddeq was

overthrown by a coalition of Iranian actors, including Iran’s Shiite Muslim clergy,
thereby eliding the CIA’s central role in recruiting, mobilizing, and coordinating
these Iranian coup plotters. He pinned the blame for Mosaddeq’s downfall on
Iran’s clergy: “The current religious leaders don’t want to remind people that the
religious establishment at the time supported his overthrow,” Hook told the
audience.
The story doesn’t end here, but this month’s free articles soon will.
Subscribe for unlimited content today.
Iranian ex-premier Mohammad Mossadeq, accused of treason, speaks during court proceedings in Tehran’s
military tribunal on Nov. 20, 1953. STF/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif hit back on the 66th
anniversary of the coup in August, drawing parallels between the Trump
administration’s current maximum pressure sanctions policy against Iran and
the Anglo-American efforts in 1953 to overthrow Mosaddeq, despite the Islamic
Republic’s discomfort with the memory of Mosaddeq as a symbol of secular
Iranian nationalism.
Few professional historians take seriously Hook’s argument that the United
States played no role or a marginal one in toppling Mosaddeq. In fact, the CIA’s
covert operation to topple Mosaddeq, codenamed TPAJAX, was one of the worst-
kept secrets of the Cold War. Just days after the coup, the U.S. ambassador in
Tehran, Loy Henderson, reported to Washington a “widespread” rumor in
Tehran that the United States was behind the fall of Mosaddeq. Associates of
Iran’s new post-coup prime minister, Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, had reportedly been
saying that Iran was “deeply indebted to [the] Americans” for the success of their
efforts.
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, as detailed by the historian Shiva
Balaghi, boasting of their roles in toppling Mosaddeq.
Nonetheless, 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.”
Coincidentally, a few weeks later, the New York Times published a classified CIA
history of the coup that provided extensive details on TPAJAX. This history
leaves no doubt that the CIA played a key role in the coup—planning, financing,
and orchestrating the various Iranians who carried it out. The U.S. government
has never officially acknowledged the validity of this history. But in August 2013,
the CIA officially declassified a document acknowledging its own role in the
coup.
While the CIA documents that have been declassified in the last few years held
few surprises for professionalSubscribe
historians,
for the historical reality of the U.S. role in
$2.25/week
the coup is an inconvenient truth for opponents of the Islamic Republic in the
United States who advocate regime change in Tehran.
Iranian monarchists who support the exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son and heir
of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, worry that these documents refute the monarchist
narrative that the 1953 coup was a popular so-called national uprising in support
of the shah and expose the crisis of legitimacy that engulfed the monarchy after
the foreign-backed coup.
The historical reality of the U.S. role in the coup is an

inconvenient truth for opponents of the Islamic Republic in
the United States who advocate regime change in Tehran.
Meanwhile, current U.S. advocates of regime change in Iran fear that these
documents support Iran’s legitimate grievance that the United States violated
Iran’s national sovereignty during the Cold War. These opponents of the Islamic
Republic, both American and Iranian, worry that if the U.S. public is made to feel
guilty about the CIA intervention in Iran in 1953, they may be less likely to
support another U.S. intervention in Iran today.
These opponents of Iran’s current government have responded with a revisionist

history—put forward by writers such as the retired Pahlavi-era Iranian diplomat,
Darioush Bayandor, and the former U.S. State Department official and current
Council on Foreign Relations fellow, Ray Takeyh—that largely absolves the
United States of responsibility for the coup and instead blames the downfall of
Mosaddeq on Iran’s Shiite clergy, thereby weaponizing the history of 1953 against
the clerical rulers of today’s Islamic Republic.
Takeyh rejects the notion that the United States bears primary responsibility for
Mossadeq’s downfall. He describes this as a “mythology” that has been
“promoted by Iran’s theocratic leaders, who have exploited it to stoke anti-
Americanism and to obscure the fact that the clergy itself played a major role in
toppling Mosaddeq.”
Instead, Takeyh argues that “the CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was
ultimately insignificant” and that “Mosaddeq was bound to fall” because he had
The story
“turned doesn’t
into end demagogue”
a populist here, but thiswho
month’s free articles
alienated his alliessoon
andwill.
refused to
compromise with the British because of his “intransigence.”
Based on a deeply flawed and highly selective reading of the available evidence,
Takeyh has set himself the task of denying the Islamic Republic the “moral high
ground” on the history of 1953, which gives Tehran “an unearned advantage over
Washington and the West, even in situations that have nothing to do with 1953
and in which Iran’s behavior is the sole cause of the conflict, such as the
negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program.”
It is uncomfortable for the Islamic Republic to remember

and commemorate a secular liberal icon like Mosaddeq.
This revisionist history has become a powerful weapon in the hands of the
Islamic Republic’s opponents because the enduring popularity of Mosaddeq is
inconvenient for Iran’s clerical rulers. Mosaddeq was a secular liberal democrat
who steadfastly refused to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic. Within
Iran, the official narrative has tried to credit Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani, a
populist cleric who initially supported Mosaddeq and then broke with him to
support the shah, as the leader of the oil nationalization movement.
It is uncomfortable for the Islamic Republic to remember and commemorate a

secular liberal icon like Mosaddeq. His legacy and his nonreligious brand of
Iranian nationalism remain so distasteful to Iran’s Islamic rulers that until 2018
they could not tolerate having a single street named after him in the country’s
capital. If the revisionists can pin the blame for Mosaddeq’s downfall on the
Shiite clergy of the 1950s, so the thinking goes, then they might be able to use
Mosaddeq’s ongoing popularity to mobilize Iranians against their clerical rulers
today.
Putting these various politicized historical narratives aside, the

documents and memoirs that are now available to historians leave no doubt that
the United States played a crucial role in the 1953 coup. CIA personnel, working
with their British counterparts, planned and financed the coup; selected its
nominal leader,
The story doesn’tZahedi; and persuaded
end here, the shah
but this month’s toarticles
free supportsoon
the coup
will. and appoint
Zahedi as Mosaddeq’s
Subscribe successor.
for unlimited content today.
A CIA team led by Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of U.S. President Theodore

Roosevelt, organized the military units that provided muscle and backbone for
the coup. The CIA team also directed two large networks of Iranian agents that
carried out key elements of the covert operation, including an elaborate effort to
undermine Mosaddeq in the months before the coup with propaganda and
political action.
A CIA team led by Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of U.S.

President Theodore Roosevelt, organized the military units
that provided muscle and backbone for the coup.
After an initial coup attempt failed on the night of Aug. 15-16, Roosevelt’s team
used these assets first to undermine Mosaddeq by fomenting chaos in Tehran for
several days and then deploying military units and crowds on Aug. 19, seizing
control of Tehran and forcing Mosaddeq into hiding. Mosaddeq surrendered the
following day to the U.S.-backed forces.
The United States certainly did not act alone in overthrowing Mosaddeq. Britain
organized an oil embargo and imposed economic sanctions on Iran soon after
Mosaddeq became prime minister, damaging Iran’s economy. British intelligence
officers also worked tirelessly to undermine Mosaddeq with covert operations
throughout his time in office. These actions undoubtedly weakened Mosaddeq,
but they had failed to dislodge him from power by October 1952, when he broke
diplomatic relations with Britain.
British officials then helped to plan and finance the August 1953 coup and
contributed one of the two covert networks of Iranian agents mentioned above.
But British personnel had been withdrawn from Iran in October 1952 and
therefore did not play any direct role in the August 1953 coup or the covert
political activity of the preceding months.
Various Iranians also contributed to the coup. The shah issued royal decrees
before the coup dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing Zahedi to replace him. He
then fled to Baghdad and later Rome after the initial coup attempt failed. These
actions gave the coup a constitutional façade and helped turn Iranian military
personnel and
Subscribe for civiliancontent
unlimited officials against Mosaddeq.
today.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and his then-wife, Queen Soraya, pose for the media in Tehran in
March 1953. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The shah had initially opposed a coup. He agreed to issue the decrees only after
weeks of pressure from a series of U.S. intermediaries and only after Roosevelt
threatened to proceed without him. Zahedi and his immediate allies also
contributed to the coup. However, like the shah, they acted under U.S.
leadership.
Indeed, Zahedi spent most of the period from Aug. 16-19 hiding in the U.S.
Embassy
Subscribeand a CIA safehouse.
for unlimited No credible evidence has emerged that Zahedi
content today.
and his allies organized the military units and crowds that acted on Aug. 19.
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While many of the military personnel for $2.25/week
members of these crowds undoubtedly
acted voluntarily, they were responding to conditions and following leaders

catalyzed and directed by Roosevelt’s team.
The revisionist history of the coup downplays this incontrovertible U.S. role and
instead blames Shiite clerics for Mosaddeq’s downfall. Bayandor claims that
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi—the most senior cleric in Iran during the
Mosaddeq era—supported the coup by sending a telegram to the shah shortly
after the coup praising the monarch and calling for him to return to Iran.
However, as the historian Fakhreddin Azimi has shown, Bayandor’s

interpretation of Borujerdi’s actions is inaccurate and misleading; it falsely
claims that Borujerdi had long opposed Mosaddeq and misrepresents the content
of this telegram. Moreover, a second CIA history of the coup states that the CIA
team tried to enlist Borujerdi’s support for the coup but was unsuccessful.
Acknowledging the role of Iranian actors, including some of

the Shiite clergy, in the 1953 coup does not absolve the United
States of responsibility for the coup.
While Borujerdi does not seem to have supported or participated in the coup,
there is considerable evidence that two other Shiite clerics were involved—and
that they were funded and encouraged by the U.S. government. A recently
released document, apparently written by British officials in early September
1953, states that Ayatollah Mohammad Behbahani received a large amount of
money from U.S. Embassy personnel and then organized crowds that helped
carry out the coup. And the second CIA history mentioned above states that
Ayatollah Kashani also helped organize these crowds, though it is not clear
whether he received U.S. financial support.
Behbahani and Kashani were maverick, populist political activists, distant from
—and often disdained by—the mainstream Shiite clergy epitomized by
Borujerdi. Their involvement in the coup should not be taken as evidence that
the mainstream clergy supported or participated in the coup, as Bayandor
implies. And the clerics who did participate did so with U.S. support.
Acknowledging the role of Iranian actors, including some of the Shiite clergy, in
The1953
the story doesn’t
coup endabsolve
does not here, but this
the month’s
United free
States ofarticles soon will.
responsibility for the coup.
Many historians of the 1953 coup, most recently Ervand Abrahamian and Ali
Rahnema, have judiciously documented
Subscribe for the overwhelming evidence that the
$2.25/week
United States played a central role in toppling Mosaddeq. But their voices are
being drowned out by a shrill cacophony of opportunistic politicians and
revisionist scholars and pundits.
While British and Iranian actors played significant roles in the events before and
during the coup in August 1953, it was the Americans who organized and led the
overthrow of Mosaddeq, mobilizing and directing the Iranians who carried it out.
Roham Alvandi is an associate professor of international history at the London School of Economics and
Political Science and the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War
and editor of The Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and Its Global Entanglements.
Twitter: @RohamAlvandiLSE
Mark J. Gasiorowski is a professor of political science at Tulane University and the author of U.S. Foreign Policy
and the Shah and co-editor (with Malcolm Byrne) of Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.
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11/29/2019 The United States Overthrew Iran’s Last Democratic Leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq

The United States Overthrew

The coup transformed Iran’s constitutional monarchy, under Shah Mohammad

Taghi Amirani’s ﬁlm is a powerful riposte to a handful of U.S.

The lingering trauma of 1953 is powerfully evoked in Taghi Amirani’s new

With Darbyshire played by Ralph Fiennes, Amirani reenacts the interview in

On May 8, the Trump administration’s special representative for

Hook claimed that these documents demonstrated that Mosaddeq was

The historical reality of the U.S. role in the coup is an

These opponents of Iran’s current government have responded with a revisionist

It is uncomfortable for the Islamic Republic to remember

It is uncomfortable for the Islamic Republic to remember and commemorate a

Putting these various politicized historical narratives aside, the

Subscribe for $2.25/week

A CIA team led by Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of U.S. President Theodore

A CIA team led by Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of U.S.

Subscribe for $2.25/week

acted voluntarily, they were responding to conditions and following leaders

However, as the historian Fakhreddin Azimi has shown, Bayandor’s

Acknowledging the role of Iranian actors, including some of

Subscribe for $2.25/week

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