Western nations, primarily Britain, controlled Iran’s oil development from its beginnings in the 1920s. Under a weak government, Iran had signed away most of its rights to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now called British Petroleum).
Mohammed Mossadeq Becomes Iran’s Leader
Iran was ruled autocratically by Shah Reza Pahlavi. There was an elected parliament but it was largely ineffective.
In 1951, Mohammed Mossadeq became prime minister. As described by Sandra Mackay and Scott Harrop in their 1998 book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, Mossadeq believed the country’s vast oil reserves ought to benefit the people of Iran, most of whom were living in poverty at the time.
He tried to renegotiate the oil agreements and, when that didn’t work, he nationalized the resource. The British organized an economic blockade of Iran in retaliation that plunged the country into a financial crisis.
Plot to Remove Mossadeq
However, Britain wanted to go further and, writes Dan De Luce in The Guardian (Aug. 20, 2003), proposed organizing a coup with American help, “an idea originally rebuffed by President Truman. But when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House, cold war ideologues - determined to prevent the possibility of a Soviet takeover - ordered the CIA to embark on its first covert operation against a foreign government.”
The CIA became the lead agency in the affair with the assistance of Britain’s secret service. The plan was to disrupt Mossadeq’s government through planting phony stories in newspapers, organizing street demonstrations, and bribing people in a position to be a nuisance. The whole scheme was orchestrated by a CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Coup Unseats Mossadeq
On Aug. 19, 1953 a demonstration against the Mossadeq government was organized by CIA-supported pro-Shah groups. The protesters headed for central Tehran and were joined by police and military equipped with tanks. Fights with government supporters broke out and as many as 300 people died.
Prime Minister Mossadeq fled and by early evening an army general announced he was prime minister and the Shah was Iran’s supreme leader. Thus began two decades of brutal dictatorship under the Shah, who was propped up with American arms and money.
But, the excesses of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, in crushing dissent only made the opposition stronger. In 1979, a popular revolution toppled the Shah and installed a group of conservative Islamic clerics as the governing power.
Long-term After Effects of Internal Meddling
In his 2003 book, All the Shah’s Men, New York Times foreign correspondent, Stephen Kinzer argues that the 1953 coup still poisons relations between the United States and Iran. He even goes so far as to suggest it created the climate of hostility in the Middle East that gave rise to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.
On Nov. 2, 2009 The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl reported on a speech given by a member of Iran’s current opposition. Ayatollah Mohajerani, spoke to a meeting of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, whose audience, Diehl writes, was expecting to hear robust criticism of Iran’s aggressive and confrontational President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program.”
More than 50 years after the event, the ousting of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq still rankles, even among opponents of the current regime.
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