Iranian coup of 1953

In August 1953 Iran's elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a coup organised by the American Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence (MI6) together with Iranian royalists, clerics and army officers. The plot, known to the Americans as TP-AJAX and to the British as Operation Boot, was driven above all by the dispute over Mosaddegh's nationalisation of Iranian oil. It restored the authority of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled as an autocrat for another 26 years.

Since the early 20th century Iran's oil had been exploited by a British firm, later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and Iranians widely resented the terms. After an attempt on his life in 1949, the Shah sought greater powers, while a coalition of his opponents, the National Front led by Mosaddegh, made oil nationalisation its main goal. In March 1951 parliament, the Majlis, voted to nationalise the oil industry after the company refused to open its books, and Mosaddegh became prime minister. Britain answered with a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil. It considered seizing the great refinery at Abadan but Prime Minister Clement Attlee chose economic pressure and covert efforts to undermine the government instead.

The boycott damaged Iran's economy, and by 1953 Mosaddegh's coalition was splintering. He relied increasingly on emergency powers, and fears grew about the communist Tudeh Party, which backed him. In early 1953 Winston Churchill, Attlee's successor, persuaded the new administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to join a plan to remove him; the Truman administration had opposed a coup. In early August Mosaddegh held a referendum to dissolve parliament, which opponents boycotted and many observers considered fraudulent. The Shah, at first reluctant, signed decrees dismissing Mosaddegh and naming General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister.

On the night of 15–16 August Colonel Nematollah Nassiri of the Imperial Guard delivered the dismissal decree, but Mosaddegh, who had been warned, refused to accept it, questioning its validity, and had him arrested. The Shah fled, first to Baghdad and then to Italy. Zahedi went into hiding with CIA help, and the government announced that a coup had been foiled. The CIA was ordered to leave, but its officer in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt Jr., kept working with royalist networks, army officers and clerics such as Ayatollah Mohammad Behbahani, paying for crowds to stir unrest.

On 19 August hired gangs, pro-Shah demonstrators and loyal army units took over key buildings in Tehran; crowds converged on Mosaddegh's residence, and he was forced to flee and was later captured. Some 200 to 300 people died. Zahedi became prime minister, and the Shah returned on 22 August. Mosaddegh was convicted of treason by a military court and on 21 December 1953 sentenced to three years in prison; he spent the rest of his life under house arrest and died in 1967. Many of his supporters were imprisoned and several were executed.

A new consortium of British, European and American companies took over Iranian oil, and revenues rose sharply, from $34 million in 1954–55 to $181 million in 1956–57. The Shah ruled with strong American support until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and according to a National Security Archive study, memories of 1953 sharpened the hostility towards the United States in that revolution. In August 2013 the American government released documents acknowledging that the coup had been carried out under CIA direction, and in 2023 the agency openly took credit for it. A CIA historian later wrote that the operation turned a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolute kingship, with many unintended consequences.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show Iran before and after the coup, with its borders unchanged.