“The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad [the fifth month of the Iranian calendar] coup, involved the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. [It was] orchestrated [and first proposed] by the United Kingdom (under the name ‘Operation Boot’) and the United States (as the TPAJAX Project or ‘Operation Ajax’).”
* * *
The following, from Hugh Wilford’s book, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013), provides a basic political backdrop to the coup:
“The Cold War skirmishes of 1946 and 1947 … —the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the suppression of separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan—had apparently left Iran firmly tethered with the Western camp. A major source of instability remained, however. Despite the example set by ARAMCO [Arabian American Oil Company] in Saudi Arabia, where oil revenues were split fifty-fifty with the Saudi government, the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) was refusing to share the profits from its drilling operations with Iranians. As the country’s communist party, or Tudeh, began gaining support among the exploited workers in AIOC’s massive Abadan refinery, a broad coalition of reform-oriented groups, the National Front, emerged under the leadership of Mohammad Mosaddeq, a veteran champion of Iranian independence and constitutional rule. Bowing to public pressure, the young shah appointed Mosaddeq as his prime minister in April 1951; a few days later, the Iranian government seized control of the nation’s oil industry from the British.
Initially, the United States tried to take a neutral position in the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute, blocking a plan to retake the Abadan refinery with military force and sending emissaries to Tehran and London to broker a negotiated settlement. Truman administration officials were irritated by the colonial mind-set of their British counterparts and, at this stage, saw the hugely popular Mossadeq, a professional anticommunist, as a barrier against possible Soviet expansion into Iran. They were justified in doing so. The prime minister was no less opposed to Soviet than to British colonialism; like many nationalist leaders in Iran before him, his primary objective was putting an end to the Anglo-Russian Great Game on Iranian soil. In any case, just as in the 1946-1947 crisis, it was far from clear that the Soviets desired communization of Iran. Recent research in Iranian and Russian archives has suggested that neither Moscow nor the Tudeh saw the country as ready for communist takeover.
Gradually a number of other factors undermined American neutrality. Although it is not altogether clear whether US petroleum interests coveted the Iranian oil fields for themselves, they definitely did not like the example set by Mosaddeq’s seizure of AIOC assets and applied subtle pressure against him in Washington. The prime minister was a flamboyant figure, given to conducting business from his bed and to theatrical fits of weeping and fainting. While this behavior delighted his Iranian supporters, it unnerved US officials, who tended to blame it on ‘Oriental’ emotionalism and irrationality (in its 1951 ‘Man of the Year’ article, Time magazine, adopting a prose style clearly intended to evoke an Arabian Nights tale, described Mosaddeq as a ‘dizzy old wizard’). The British, who made much of their greater experience in Persian affairs, did little to discourage this Orientalizing tendency. Finally, with the oil dispute dragging on and pressure on the Iranian economy mounting, the National Front coalition began to fragment. Emboldened opposition elements mounted street demonstrations in Tehran, causing Mossadeq to resort to authoritarian measures. Observers in Washington were alarmed by what they perceived as a weakening of Iran’s capability to resist Soviet influence. It did not help that, with Senator Joseph McCarthy riding high, the domestic political atmosphere in the United States was virulently anticommunist; moreover, as of September 1951, the US ambassador in Tehran reporting on developments was none other than the archetypal foreign service Cold Warrior Loy Henderson.
Although US officials continued to work for a negotiated settlement of the oil dispute, behind-the-scenes support for drastic action against Mossadeq was growing. Following the events of 1946-1947, the CIA had carried on anti-Soviet covert operations in Iran, including BEDAMN, a psychological warfare program run by the archaeologist and former OSS officer, Donald Wilber, now a half-time Agency consultant. After 1951, BEDAMN’s principal agents, Ali Jalali and Faruq Kayvani (CIA code names Nerren and Cilley), increasingly focused their attentions on Mossadeq himself, trying to turn Muslim clerics and other members of the National Front coalition against the prime minister. CIA intelligence estimates, meanwhile, emphasized Mosaddeq’s ‘incompetence and dictatorial tendencies,’ as well as his vulnerability to communist adventurism. It was partly in response to such reporting that in November 1952 the Truman administration adopted NSC 136/1, directing US officials to expand ‘special political operations’ to thwart a possible communist coup.
As yet, no one in Washington was proposing an operation to get rid of Mosaddeq—that idea originated with the British. Somewhat improbably, it was two professors of Persian, Ann ‘Nancy’ Lambton of London University and Oxford’s Robin Zaehner [R.C. Zaehner specialized in ‘Eastern’ religions, and during his tenure at Oxford, wrote on the Zoroastrian religion, mystical experience, Hinduism, and ‘comparative religion’ generally], who first proposed, in 1951, the anti-Mossadeq plot that culminated in the 1953 coup. The idea received the enthusiastic blessing of new prime minister Winston Churchill—a firm believer in both clandestine warfare and Britain’s right to Iranian oil—and was turned over to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) for development in Tehran. MI6 station chief Christopher ‘Monty’ Woodhouse mobilized British agents such as the three Rashidian brothers—merchants with excellent connections to opposition politicians, clerics, and journalists—in a campaign of anti-Mossadeq intriguing. The prime minister responded in October 1952 by expelling all British personnel from the country. Undeterred, MI6 reassembled its Iranian team on its base in Cyprus under the command of Woodhouse’s assistant, Norman Darbyshire. Before quitting Tehran, Woodhouse himself handed over the Rashidians and other British assets to Roger Goiran, head of the CIA station there. Woodhouse had believed from the first that US support was necessary if the British were to remove Mosaddeq, and in November 1952 he departed for Washington bearing a detailed plan for a joint Anglo-American operation code-named BOOT. While State Department representatives reacted coolly, CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner both expressed guarded interest. As he confessed later, Woodhouse deliberately tailored his presentation to emphasize ‘the anti-Communist element in our plans’ and avoided any hint that Americans ‘were being used to rescue Britain’s oil interests.’ This tactic was effective, he believed. ‘At that date the CIA was a fairly new establishment, and willing to accept professional advice and even influence from the British.’
It was at this juncture that Kim Roosevelt appeared on the scene. Passing through London on his way back from one of his periodic trips to Tehran, Kim was collared by a group of British officials who presented him with BOOT. Intrigued, he pursued the idea with Allen Dulles, now slated to serve as CIA director in the incoming Eisenhower administration. As he explained later, he and Dulles ‘were in quiet disagreement with the outgoing administration’s positions and had in fact already begun studying possible action in support of the Shah, and testing of agents with such action in mind.’
In February 1953, an MI6 team arrived in Washington and proposed Kim as the operation’s ‘field commander.’ Miles Copeland was dispatched to Iran to assess the likelihood of a successor to Mossadeq ‘sticking;’ he returned in April with a positive estimate. Kim, meanwhile, was in Tehran meeting with the Rashidian brothers and a retired army major general, Fazlollah Zahedi, the man identified as the best bet to replace Mossadeq. In May, Donald Wilber and Norman Darbyshire convened in Cyprus to thrash out details of the coup plan, now called TP-AJAX. ‘TP’ was the CIA country prefix for Iran, while ‘AJAX’ seems, rather prosaically, to have been a reference to the popular household cleanser, the implication being that the operation would scour Iran of communist influence.
Following final planning meetings in Beirut, London, and Washington, Churchill granted official British approval for AJAX on July 1; Eisenhower signed off on the plan on July 11. On July 19, with both the CIA BEDAMN and MI6 Rashidian networks fomenting disturbances on the streets of Tehran, Kim slipped over the border from Iraq. He went into hiding in the hills just outside the capital, at the Tajrish home of Joseph Goodwin, one of the journalists who had preceded the shah’s army into Azerbaijan seven years earlier and had since gone to work for the CIA. In the run-up to the coup, Goodwin acted as a replacement for station chief Roger Goiran, who on August 2 abruptly returned to Washington from Tehran. Various explanations for Goiran’s departure have been offered, but the most likely seems his reluctance to participate in what he called ‘Anglo-French colonialism.’ Such misgivings were not uncommon among mid-level CIA officers and the Persian experts who consulted with the Agency.
With a team at CIA headquarters in Washington handling the propaganda and military aspects of the coup, and the British base in Cyprus providing three-way communication, Kim now set to work turning Operation AJAX into reality. The crux of the plan was to provoke a constitutional crisis in which Iranians were forced to choose between Mosaddeq and the shah. Kim and his fellow conspirators were confident that, in a confrontation between the prime minister and the king, the most powerful elements of Iranian society—the merchants of the bazaar, Muslim religious leaders (with their ability to summon urban crowds), and army officers—would rally to the latter.” [….]