1953 Iran coup

1953 coup d'état
Tank-riding anti-Mosaddeq demonstrators in Tehran on August 19 1953.
Date 1953 Location Iran Result Overthrow of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, and his subsequent replacement by Fazlollah Zahedi on August 19 1953.

In the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the United Kingdom and the United States orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically-elected administration of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and his cabinet from power. The support of the coup was carried out, using widespread bribery in a covert operation by Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to a report on the BBC, Britain, motivated by its desire to control Iranian oil fields, contributed to funding for the widespread bribery of Iranian officials, news media and others. The project to overthrow Iran's government was codenamed Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX). The coup re-installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the primary position of power. In 2000, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, during the administration of President Bill Clinton, called it a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.

Origins

The idea of overthrowing Mosaddeq was conceived by the British who asked U.S. President Harry Truman for assistance but he refused. The British raised the idea again to Dwight D. Eisenhower who became president in 1953. The new administration agreed to participate in overthrowing the elected government of Iran.

Mosaddeq decided that Iran ought to begin profiting from its own vast oil reserves and took steps to nationalize the oil industry which had previously been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later changed to the British Petroleum Company). Britain pointed out that Iran was violating the company's legal rights and spearheaded a worldwide boycott of Iran's oil that submerged the regime into financial crisis. The monarchy supported by the U.S. and Britain invited western oil companies back into Iran. "The crushing of Iran's first democratic government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the Shah, who relied heavily on US aid and arms," Dan De Luce wrote in the Guardian in a review of All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer, a reporter for The New York Times, who for the first time revealed details of the coup.

Background

Early Oil Development

During the British imperial period The Great Game, Mozzafar al-Din Shah Qajar, the Shah of Iran, sought to partially alleviate debts he owed to Britain by granting a 60-year concession to search for oil to William Knox D'Arcy in May 1901.

D'Arcy struck oil in May 1908 which was the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. Due to financial hardships, controlling interest was sold to Burmah Oil Company who incorporated the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909 to exploit this find.

The company grew slowly until World War I when its strategic importance led the British Government to acquire controlling interest in the company, essentially nationalizing British oil production in Iran for a short period of time, becoming the Royal Navy's chief source of fuel oil in defeating the Central Powers during World War I. During this period, British troops occupied strategic parts of Iran.

Post-World War I

There was growing dissatisfaction within Persia with the oil concession and royalty terms, whereby Iran received 16 percent of net profits. This dissatisfaction was exacerbated by British involvement in the Persian Constitutional Revolution as well as the British Empire's use of Iranian routes to invade Russia in an attempt to reverse the October Bolshevik Revolution.

In 1921, a military coup, organized by the British, placed Reza Pahlavi on the throne as Shah of Iran. The new Shah undertook a number of modernization measures, many of which were advantageous not only to the British but the Iranians as well, such as the Persian Corridor railroads for military and other transportation.

In the 1930s, Nazi Germany heavily courted the Shah in order to secure access to oil, for use in their war effort. The Shah terminated the APOC concession. The concession was resettled within a year, covering a reduced area with an increase in the Persian government's share of profits.

In 1935, the Shah insisted that the name Iran be used instead of Persia and, so, APOC became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).

In 1941, Britain invaded Iran, exiled the Shah, and secured both Iranian oil production and strategic railways. The British installed Reza's 22 year old son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran.

Post-World War II

In the constitutional republic of Iran, nationalist leaders were becoming increasingly powerful as they sought to reduce the long-time foreign intervention in their country, including the highly-profitable British oil arrangements.

A particular point of contention was the refusal of the AIOC to allow an audit of the accounts to determine whether the Iranian government received the royalties it was due. Intransigence on the part of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company led the nationalist government to escalate its demands, requiring an equal share in oil revenues. A final crisis was precipitated when the oil company ceased operations in Iran rather than accepting the Iranian government's interference in its business affairs.

AIOC and the Iranian government resisted nationalist pressure to come to a renewed deal in 1949.

1950s

In March 1951, the pro-western Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated. In April, the Iranian parliament passed a bill to nationalize the oil industry. This was undertaken with the guidance of western-educated Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq, at that time a member of the parliament, who believed nationalization was the only way to provide prosperity and national sovereignty for the Iranian people. By May, Mosaddeq had been elected Prime Minister by the parliament.

The newly state-owned oil company saw a dramatic drop in production as a result of Iranian inexperience and the AIOC-mandated policy that British technicians not work with the newly created National Iranian Oil Company. This resulted in the Abadan Crisis, a situation that was further aggravated by its export markets being closed when the British Navy imposed a blockade around the country in order to force the Iranian state to abandon the effort to nationalize its nation's oil. Oil revenues to the Iranian government were significantly higher than before nationalization, since nationalization, by definition, caused oil profits to be directed into the state's coffers rather than into the hands of foreign oil companies.

The United Kingdom took a case against the nationalization to the International Court of Justice at The Hague on behalf of AIOC, but lost the case. The government of Britain was concerned about its interests in Iran, and laboring under a misconception that Iran's nationalist movement was Soviet-backed. Eventually, Great Britain persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Iran was slowly coming under Soviet influence. This was an effective strategy for the British, since it exploited America's Cold War mindset. U.S. President Harry S. Truman never agreed to the British proposal to oust Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. But in 1953, General Dwight Eisenhower became the President of the United States, and the British convinced the new American administration to join them in overthrowing the only democratically elected government Iran has ever had and re-establishing British control of Iranian oil.

Planning Operation Ajax

As a condition of restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the U.S. required that the AIOC's oil monopoly lapse. Five major U.S. oil companies, plus Royal Dutch Shell and French Compagnie Française des Pétroles, were designated to operate in the country alongside AIOC after a successful coup.

In planning the operation, the CIA organized a guerrilla force in case the communist Tudeh Party seized power as a result of any chaos created by Operation Ajax. According to formerly "Top Secret" documents released by the National Security Archive, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate.

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA officer, and grandson of the former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kermit Roosevelt, the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.

The CIA operation centered around having the increasingly impotent Shah dismiss the powerful Prime Minister Mosaddeq and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans after careful examination for his likeliness to be anti-Soviet.

The BBC spearheaded Britain's propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word to start the coup.[1]

Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup d'état briefly faltered, and the Shah fled Iran. After a short exile in Italy, however, the Shah was brought back again, this time through follow-up CIA operations, which were successful. Zahedi was installed to succeed Prime Minister Mosaddeq. The deposed Mosaddeq was arrested, given what some have alleged to have been a show trial, and condemned to death. The Shah commuted this sentence to solitary confinement for three years in a military prison, followed by house arrest for life.

In 2000, the New York Times made partial publication of a leaked CIA document titled, "Clandestine Service History – Overthrow of Premier Mosaddeq of Iran – November 1952-August 1953." This document describes the planning and execution conducted by the American and British governments. The New York Times published this critical document with the names censored. The New York Times also limited its publication to scanned image (bitmap) format, rather than machine-readable text. This document was eventually published properly – in text form, and fully unexpurgated. The complete CIA document is now web published. The word 'blowback' appeared for the very first time in this document.

Outcome

On August 19 1953, the Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, was forced from office and replaced by Zahedi and the Shah was recalled.

The AIOC became the British Petroleum Company (BP) in 1954, and briefly resumed operations in Iran with a forty percent share in a new international consortium. BP continued to operate in Iran until the Islamic Revolution. However, due to a large investment program (funded by the World Bank) outside Iran, the company survived the loss of its Iranian interests at that time. The success of North Sea oil exploration contributed to BP's fortunes and the company recovered swiftly, continuing to be one of the world's foremost oil companies to this day.

Repercussions

Popular discontent with the erosion of Iran's social mores, its sluggish economy, and other developments caused widespread dissatisfaction with the regime of the Shah, leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The occupation of the U.S. embassy also took place during the 1979 revolution, which caused diplomatic relations to be severed between the new Iranian government and the United States. The role that the U.S. embassy had played in the 1953 coup led the revolutionary guards to suspect that it might be used to play a similar role in suppressing the revolution, some revolutionary guards reported.

Jacob G. Hornberger, the founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, commented that "U.S. officials, not surprisingly, considered the operation one of their greatest foreign policy successes -- until, that is, the enormous convulsion that rocked Iranian society with the violent ouster of the Shah and the installation of a virulently anti-American Islamic regime in 1979." According to Hornberger, "the coup, in essence, paved the way for the rise to power of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and all the rest that's happened right up to 9/11 and beyond."

Cold War and controversy

For the U.S., an important factor to consider was Iran's border with the Soviet Union. A pro-American Iran under the Shah would give the U.S. a double strategic advantage in the ensuing Cold War, as a NATO alliance was already in effect with the government of Turkey, also bordering the USSR.

In addition, even though the appropriation of the companies resulted in Western allegations that Mosaddeq was a Communist and suspicions that Iran was in danger of falling under the influences of the neighboring Soviet Union, Mosaddeq declined to change course under moderate international pressure.

One controversial argument which has been put forward by William Blum in his 2003 book Killing Hope is that a conspiracy organized by the Dulles brothers was the main motivation for US involvement in Iran. The Dulles brothers had worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, a prominent law firm that represented Standard Oil of New Jersey. Standard Oil had wanted to gain oil interests in Iran for many years; but the AIOC had a monopoly on the region. The Dulles brothers saw a chance to give Standard Oil the ability to set up operations in the region, when the British asked about a coup. The British, no longer the dominant power, knew they could not remove Mosaddeq without the US, which meant that the US would be entitled to a portion of the Iranian Oil, which they were okay with, because 60% is better than nothing. After the Coup, 40% of Iranian oil was owned by US oil companies.

In addition to relying on entirely circumstantial evidence, this theory ignores several key factors outlined below. First, the idea of ousting Mosaddeq had been formed in preliminary stages by the Truman administration long before the Dulles brothers came into their positions as Secretary of State (JF) and Director of Central Intelligence under Eisenhower. Steve Marsh's article The United States, Iran and Operation 'Ajax': Inverting Interpretative Orthodoxy points out key policy continuities between the two administrations, arguing that the change in administration was not the key factor in the acceptance of the coup. Second, it ignores the most basic goals of British foreign policy in Iran. To say that Britain was no longer the dominant power in the Middle East is accurate, but to assume that this was understood by the people and governments in power is not. The subsequent events in Suez show that even after the fall of Mosaddeq, Britain still felt it had a right to overseas possessions. Moreover British policy did not show willingness to compromise. In fact, the blockade and sanctions imposed on Mosaddeq’s government represented a successful unilateral policy that could have crippled Iran and, in the long term, been successful in reestablishing the dominance of the AIOC, or at the very least destroying Iran’s political stability entirely thereby sending a message to the world that nationalization of private property was not acceptable, and that the sanctity of contract endured.

A major factor that made this plan unacceptable to the new superpower was that it would probably leave Iran politically and economically crippled. The cold-war mentality in the US viewed this possibility as extremely dangerous, as it could result in communist takeover. This (probably unrealistic) fear of communist takeover was played on by the British and Iranians to encourage US support. Eventually, Churchill prevailed and convinced the Eisenhower administration that they would better contain the communist threat by removing Mosaddeq. These arguments were meant to refute the assertions that the TPAJAX was an entirely economically motivated conspiracy that was orchestrated by John and Alan Dulles with the help of Kermit Roosevelt.

There is also some speculation that Kim Roosevelt may have been part of a British plot to maintain an anglophile alliance with the United States. The British company AIOC (Anglo Iranian Oil Company) had a full monopoly on Iranian oil, but by 1951, Prime Minister Mosaddeq had nationalized oil and removed British interests in the region. The British contacted the Truman administration to set up a coup, but they were not interested, as Mosaddeq had been an anti-communist, and kept the Tudeh Party in place. However, in 1953 a new administration came to power and contacted MI-6 (British) to give their support for a coup. John Foster Dulles (secretary of state from 1953-1961) and his younger brother Allen Dulles (CIA Director) came up with Operation Ajax, a plan giving a million dollars to Kermit Roosevelt to create a coup. Roosevelt began giving money to General Zahedi, who in turn distributed the money among his soldiers to ensure their loyalty. In 1953, Zahedi led tanks into Tehran and closed the Majlis (legislature) and removed Mosaddeq from power.

See also

• Asadollah Rashidian
• Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

References

• Kinzer, Stephen (2003). All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-26517-9. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kapuściński, Ryszard (1982). Shah of Shahs. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-73801-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• 50 Years Later—a look back at the 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran
• The C.I.A. in Iran—New York Times report based on uncovered CIA documents
• The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953—Provided by the National Security Archive
• Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran—new book from the National Security Archive reexamines the coup
• How to Overthrow a Government—interview with Steven Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
• All The Shah’s Men—interview with Steven Kinzer
• Review of All the Shah's Men by David S. Robarge
• A Very Elegant Coup—critique of All the Shah’s Men
• The spectre of Operation Ajax by Guardian Unlimited