Made in Langley: How the United States paved the way for the Iranian theocracy it is now bombing.
Mohammad Mosaddegh was not some fire-breathing radical. He was a 71-year-old lawyer, Iranian nationalist, democrat, and constitutionalist who wore a camel-hair coat and wept in parliament. His crime? He had the temerity to suggest that Iranian oil should belong to Iran. What was he smoking? Imagine if Woodside, BHP or Shell had got a whiff of that.
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had stolen Iranian oil under contracts the nationalists knew were fraudulent. It later renamed itself The British Petroleum Company, then simply BP; Britain’s empire having sunk below the yard-arm in the interval, leaving only the initials behind. A particular bone of contention was the infant BP’s refusal to allow an audit to determine whether the Iranian government was even receiving the royalties it was contractually owed. When Mosaddegh discovered the answer was no, he nationalised the industry in 1951. The Iranian parliament voted for it overwhelmingly. On the streets of Tehran, in the last cold days before Nowruz, people danced the raqs-e Tehrani in the winter sunshine.
The word is نه — pronounced na.
One syllable. Flat. Final. The same weight in Persian as it has in English, and considerably older.
Mosaddegh said it to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company when they refused to open their books. The parliament said it by voting unanimously to nationalise. The streets said it by erupting in celebration.
The CIA spent a million dollars making it unsayable.
London was apoplectic. Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, matinee idol, varnisher of fingernails, early champion of Picasso and Cézanne, holder of a first-class Oxford degree in Persian, described by Mussolini as “the best dressed fool in Europe,” by his Oxford contemporary Chips Channon as “mild, aesthetic, handsome and cultivated,” and by his own Cabinet colleague R.A. Butler, a keen student of bloodlines, as “half mad baronet, half beautiful woman”, reached for the amytal.
Britain set out to do the only fair and reasonable thing: weaken and destabilise Mosaddegh. When that grew into a coup, little Britain, not terribly keen to shoulder responsibility alone, persuaded the US to join forces by playing up Cold War fears that Mosaddegh, an avowed anti-communist, was somehow aligning himself with the Iranian Communist Party.
It was, patently untrue, if not outrageously preposterous. But of course, it didn’t need to be anything else.
It was, nonetheless, still a bad lie. CIA analysts did not believe it. A 1952 CIA study concluded that a Tudeh communist coup was not imminent, and a 1953 report reached similar conclusions. Did it matter? The Dulles duo: brothers, Allen running the CIA, John Foster running the State Department, wanted the operation green-lit. Nepotism? It’s OK if you keep it in the family.
On 4 April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh.” The bounty was to lead to three hundred Iranian bodies in the street, after a farcical first-time failure.
Kermit made it work. Into Tehran, in July 1953, walked Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, senior CIA operative, and architect of the dirtiest trick of the twentieth century. Trickery? It ought to be an Olympic event.
Kermit’s caper involved suitcases bulging with cash to manufacture an opposition movement: hiring desperadoes from the athletic clubs and slums of South Tehran to protest, bribing newspaper editors to print disinformation — real fake news — and creating a sham communist party to act as a straw man. Fabulous attention to detail. No-one ever said a good coup has to be subtle.
CIA operatives, pretending to be socialists, threatened Muslim leaders with “savage punishment” if they opposed Mosaddegh, giving the impression that Mosaddegh was cracking down on religious dissent. Very similar stunts are still pulled today.
Whether they wore berets, in 1953, is not recorded. The Che Guevara T-shirt would not be invented for another fifteen years. The religious community rose against him. The press reviled him. The streets revolted. None of it was organic. All of it was bought.
Several hundred thousand dollars from the CIA’s slush fund were handed out to thugs from athletic clubs. Other recruits were found in the slums of South Tehran, eager to take Yankee dollars to put bodies on the street. It was a recipe for disaster. It worked so badly that the use of conscripted agents, rough-heads and louts as provocateurs was set back at least for a fortnight.
But let’s be fair. The operational record of the first coup fiasco is a masterclass in imperial incompetence. The man sent to arrest Mosaddegh at four in the morning was himself arrested, by four tanks that had been quietly positioned outside the PM’s residence by a young Imperial Guard soldier who happened to moonlight for the communist Tudeh Party. You can’t make this stuff up.
The designated replacement prime minister, General Zahedi, spent the interlude moving between safe houses. As you would.
The Shah fled the country in a blind panic, convinced he was finished, and holed up at a hotel in Rome with his fetching young second wife Soraya, the Bakhtiari princess in the Christian Dior wedding gown whose bikini photograph had been banned in Iran, convinced his reign was finished. All was going swimmingly at home, apart from the mobs which tore down his father’s statues in Tehran’s public squares and chanted “Yankees go home.” But you do get a bit of that with your CIA coups.
The spooks were spooked. CIA headquarters cabled Roosevelt to abort the entire operation. Roosevelt filed the cable in the bin. He had not come all this way… On 19 August, he retrieved Zahedi from his safe house at noon and stage-managed his emergence on to a public street corner at 4:30pm, where the designated prime minister of Iran mounted a tank. The pro-Shah mob had been augmented with tumblers doing handsprings, well-oiled wrestlers displaying their biceps, and weightlifters twirling iron bars, led through the streets by Shaban Jafari, known to all Tehran as Shaban the Brainless, a mob boss on the CIA payroll whose nickname tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual calibre of the operation. Back in his safe house, Roosevelt was playing “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls on repeat. This was the liberating force. This was democracy, delivered.
The first attempt was a disaster. Mosaddegh had been tipped off. Key conspirators were arrested. The Shah, spineless and terrified, fled first to Baghdad, then to Rome. CIA headquarters sent word to abort. Roosevelt ignored it and pushed forward anyway.
The second attempt, 19 August 1953, succeeded.
By nightfall, after a day of violence that left between 200 and 300 people dead, the figure Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men, and Britannica both settle on, the prime minister had fled. They were workers, students, Mosaddegh supporters, bystanders; shot and beaten in streets that had been deliberately set alight with CIA money. Nobody was tried for their deaths. Nobody answered for them. They simply vanished into the accounting of empire.
Mosaddegh surrendered the next day. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced first to death; later commuted to three years of solitary confinement. He used the time to write his memoirs. The first Iranian to hold a European doctorate in law, educated at Sciences Po in Paris, he spent his imprisonment composing the undefeated legal and historical case for everything the CIA had just destroyed.
Then house arrest at Ahmadabad until he died in 1967. When the sentence was handed down, he had said, with the calm sarcasm of a man who understood exactly what he was watching: “The verdict of this court has increased my historical glories. I am extremely grateful you convicted me. Truly tonight the Iranian nation understood the meaning of constitutionalism.” He spent his last fourteen years under the guard of the government his own people had elected him to lead.
The Shah ultimately returned from his Roman holiday, “purring like a giant cat”1. He signed over forty per cent of Iran’s oil fields to American companies. The CIA trained his secret police. SAVAK was established with CIA assistance. What followed was a generation stripped of political freedom; dissidents tortured, opposition banned, whispers turned into arrests.
Roosevelt reported back to the CIA, then worked for the Agency until 1958, when he became a Washington lobbyist. Among his clients was the Iranian government he had helped put in place. He later published a memoir, Countercoup, which one analyst described as pompous and self-congratulatory. Roosevelt told the Shah: “You owe me nothing at all. Except thanks.”
He was not prosecuted. He was not censured. He was celebrated.
What was lost? Iran’s first and only functioning democracy. A generation of civic institutions. The secular, constitutional path that Mosaddegh represented; educated, moderate, nationalist but not theocratic.
The hostage crisis of 1979, the ayatollahs, the revolutionary guards, the nuclear standoff, the entire architecture of US-Iran hostility that has defined the Middle East for half a century, traces its origins to four days in August 1953 when a grandson of a president arrived in Tehran with suitcases of cash and bought himself a coup.
The Eisenhower administration ballyhooed Operation Ajax as a success. And a template. Overnight, the CIA became a central part of the American foreign policy apparatus, and covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape the course of world events. Guatemala fell the following year. Then came the Bay of Pigs. Then Chile. The template held.
They called it a bargain.
The documents are declassified. They sit in the National Security Archive at George Washington University, in the CIA’s own reading room, in the flat, metallic, bloodless directness of a 1954 operational history written by CIA officer Donald Wilber, a chap who knew exactly what he had done and wrote it down anyway.
Iran is still paying the bill.
1. Stephen Kinzer — award-winning journalist, Boston University professor, and author of All the Shah’s Men, the definitive English-language account of the coup. Kinzer describes the coup as the CIA’s first major successful overthrow of a foreign government and the template for everything that followed.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
Part 2:
The Monster They Made (Part 2)
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site. Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
David, don’t ever stop.
Thank you for an excellent historical account of the Iran situation. Obviously trusting any US government is a dangerous folly.
This CIA operation seems to have established the modus operandi for the future overthrowing of democratically elected governments in nations having natural resources that executives of US multinational corporations coveted.
”NO worries!! Send in the CIA to destabilise the country, all terrorists acts are acceptable. If all else fails we will send in our toy soldiers.” It happened in 80+ events across the world since 1945, to the detriment of the victim nations, including Australia.
By encouraging mediocre unthinking, Anglophilic politicians dedicated to a 19th century future, Australia is now a third world export economy watching the profits from our natural resources, plus the subsequent the processing and manufacturing jobs, accrue in foreign countries, to our Australian detriment.
By comparison, PRC China bit the bullet, planned their future for the benefit of the people and are achieving those goals. Perhaps you might notice that this economic ”miracle” has occurred using significant Australian natural resources.
CRAIG MURRAY , former UK Ambassador, 11th May 2025 — I now fully accept that the change the western world needs is revolutionary, not incremental.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/05/zionism-has-poisoned-the-uks-central-nervous-system/
Steve, thank you. Once you start researching that Special Relationship, the article practically writes itself. I’m astonished at how much is declassified and quite readily available if you are prepared to quarry it out. And as New England Cocky implies, the same dynamic duo of CIA and MI6 was hard at work in Australia in 1975.
New England Cocky: Point noted. Thank you. The comparison is fair up to a point. China’s state-directed industrial planning has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in a generation: a genuine achievement that Western orthodoxy spent decades dismissing and is now scrambling to explain. The planning worked. The intention to benefit the people, whatever one thinks of the political system that delivered it, produced measurable results that market fundamentalism in comparable economies did not.
But Australia’s significance in that story cuts both ways. Yes, the iron ore, the coal, the LNG that fed China’s furnaces came substantially from under Australian soil. And Australian shareholders, superannuation funds and federal revenues did very nicely from the arrangement. What’s less often said is that Australia didn’t plan that relationship. It stumbled into it, rode the windfall, and called it economic management. The China boom didn’t reflect Australian foresight. It reflected Chinese demand meeting Australian geology, with a commodities price cycle doing the rest.
The deeper irony is this: China used Australian resources to build the industrial base and infrastructure that Australia, still digging holes and shipping raw dirt, has largely failed to build for itself. One country planned. The other quarried. The miracle, such as it is, belongs to the country that knew what it was building toward.
Australia’s significance in the story is real. It just isn’t the flattering kind.
@ David Tyler; Excellent clarifying comment. Thank you.
Thanks David, an entirely brilliant essay. I knew broadly the circumstances, but the detail you have excavated and put together is really important in putting meat on the bones of this case of many by the Anglo-American criminal imperialists.
Following the essay, the comments also bring rude truths.
As the entire Anglo-American caboodle rightly crumbles, all we’re left with is useless bloated hereditary oligarchs who don’t know shit from clay, and a hugely politically powerful enfranchised bigotry of American evangelists and a confused and self-obliterating Britain.
Oz parliament and its unimaginative weld to the brutal racist ‘Old Dart’ deserved everything extracted from it by the criminal Anglo-America. We have payed an enormous price for our toadying stupidity. And still today we remain trapped by it and immiserated.
Just don’t ask the Libs, Nats, LNP or One Notion to get us out of it – they remain in awe of and confused by the Trumpian bandwagon. It would seem our only hope is the road to the brilliant modern China, but we better make sure it’s not slow.
Yes, Clakka.
We were brought up with this “land of hope and glory”stuff.
Are you young enough to remember the royal visits?
I recall in about 1963 we had to march a very long way to see the royals go round around an oval, just to get back where they started.
We were only little tackers and to me, the royals looked like zombies.
A long march back that inevitable sense of anti climax, we had been brought to see God Himself it seemed, from the teachers..
Indeed Paul Walter,
I remember at Monday morning assemblies having to stand at attention and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, and from that primary school on for a number of subsequent years the schools being replete with portraits of the Queen, other royalty and stuff-shirts like Menzies.
First there was the ‘Bay of Pigs’ and ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ all over the radio – it frightened me and made me realize all was not well. Then Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’, and the ‘Little Red Book’ seeped into our minds. Then the horrors of the Vietnam War and thankfully the ‘Moratorium Marches’. These things were sufficient for me to form a view of the wanton brutal stupidity of Anglo-America. As time has passed, through deep reading, my view was solidified by the history of the ‘west’, and an almost endless succession of such events.
Through Charles III time at Timbertop, and since the hullabaloo over Keating’s arm, it became apparent to me that the British establishment were disinterested in Oz culture, and that Oz was being bombarded with propaganda by its own Anglo and Anglo-American toadies (with who knows what to gain). A dull, immature, stifling propaganda that facilitates extraction from Oz, and persists to today.
It seems these greedy, brutal, supremacist, pomposities comprise the nostalgia being pumped by the Libs, Nats, LNP and One Notion. The British would call it a ‘duty’, the Americans would call it being ‘suckered’. In Oz, it’s being ‘conned by flash rats with gold teeth’.
I know what you mean Clakka. Lots of memories, such as
‘red congulist gorrillas ” in New
Guinea (wow…big, hairy guys climbing trees, cunning buggers?) and media turning reality into soap opera over Colin Thorn. Also the Cuban missiles. What seemed to be ommitted was context, but I only learned this much later because
-the Americans had nukes on the Turkish border and that seemed to be what provoked Kruschev.
Most of alI, I recall Colin Thorn- the little kid kidnapped and the nation homed in on the sorry tale. A shock to me as a kid, that such things could happen to kids.