Support for the Overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq

Introduction

Mohammad Mosaddeq became prime minister of Iran in April 1951. An ardent nationalist, he rose to power by challenging Great Britain’s dominance of Iran’s economy and politics. A month before becoming prime minister, Mosaddeq led the effort by the Iranian Majlis (parliament) to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which the British government controlled. Rather than seek compromise with Tehran, London sought to reverse the law by crippling Iran’s oil exports, the main source of government revenue. President Harry S. Truman rejected British efforts to enlist the United States in pressuring Iran to return ownership of AIOC to Britain. British arguments that Mosaddeq was destabilizing Iran found a more friendly audience when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. Fearing that a communist takeover of Iran was increasingly likely, Eisenhower authorized Operation Ajax to oust Mosaddeq. The coup came in August 1953. Its success encouraged subsequent U.S. efforts to destabilize governments Washington disliked, and Iranian nationalists used the coup to fuel anti-Americanism in Iran. SHAFR historians ranked the support for Mosaddeq’s overthrow as fourth-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

Iran emerged from World War II politically and economically weakened. Great Britain and the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1941 and ousted its ruler, Reza Khan, who had seized the Peacock Throne in a coup sixteen years earlier. London and Moscow feared that the shah, an unabashed admirer of Adolf Hitler, would block one of the main avenues for supplying the Soviets in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The new shah was his twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. That political disruption, coupled with poor harvests, impoverished the country.

As elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, nationalism soared in Iran after the war ended. Iranians wanted to take back control of their country. Mohammad Mosaddeq became the champion of those aspirations. A descendant of Persian royalty who had been educated in Europe, he had served as Iran’s finance minister for more than twenty years. Sixty-nine years old when he became prime minister, he sought to reclaim Iran’s independence and expand the power of the Majlis. The former meant confronting Britain, the latter the shah.

Dulles was convinced by what he heard, even though Mosaddeq had excluded Communists from his government and it was the British embargo that had damaged Iran’s economy and roiled is politics. Eisenhower was initially skeptical, saying in March 1953 that Mosaddeq was “the only hope for the West in Iran.” Eisenhower’s opposition faded, however, as Mosaddeq rejected compromise proposals on the AIOC and Iranians took to the streets to protest economic hardship and Mosaddeq’s pursuit of emergency powers. Worried that Iran’s oil might be lost permanently to the West, in June Eisenhower approved a clandestine Anglo-U.S. effort to overthrow Mosaddeq.

Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA and John Foster Dulles’s younger brother, oversaw the planning for Operation Ajax, a covert campaign to inflame Iranian anger at Mosaddeq by paying journalists, mullahs, and politicians to attack him as corrupt and power hungry. At the same time, street gangs would be paid to attack public figures, increasing instability and fueling suspicions that Mosaddeq was attacking his critics. Then, paid demonstrators would march on the Majlis to demand his ouster. Power would be transferred to General Fazlollah Zahedi, who had served in Mosaddeq’s government before a mutual falling out.

Mosaddeq’s fall partly reflected his retreat from his own democratic principles as he grabbed emergency powers and sought to stifle the criticism of Iranians angry that his nationalization policy had failed to produce the benefits he promised. Nonetheless, by intervening in Iran’s internal politics, the Eisenhower administration helped to derail Iran’s nascent democracy and set the country on the path toward autocracy. The Eisenhower administration and its successors also took the seeming success of Operation Ajax as an endorsement for other efforts to oust governments it disliked, most notably a year later in Guatemala. These interventions allied the United States with more dictatorships and generated considerable anti-American sentiment. That consequence became most evident a quarter of a century later when a viciously anti-American nationalist movement swept the shah from power and ushered in the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran.