Mohammad Mosaddegh

Mohammad Mosaddegh was the Iranian prime minister who nationalised his country's British-owned oil industry and was overthrown two years later in a coup organised with the help of the American and British intelligence services. Prime minister from 1951 to 1953, he spent his last fourteen years in prison and under house arrest. His fall left a lasting mark on Iranian attitudes to the West, and he remains one of the most admired figures in modern Iran.

Mosaddegh was born on 16 June 1882 at Ahmadabad, near Tehran, into the highest circles of the Qajar state. His father was a finance minister; his mother descended from Fath-Ali Shah. As a young man he was elected to the first parliament, the Majlis, after the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–07, but could not take his seat because he was under the legal age. He studied in Paris and then at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where in 1913 he became the first Iranian to earn a doctorate in law at a European university.

After the First World War Mosaddegh served as minister of justice, of finance and of foreign affairs, and as a provincial governor. Elected to the Majlis in 1923, he voted in 1925 against deposing the Qajar dynasty in favour of Reza Khan, arguing that it violated the constitution, and withdrew from politics once Reza Shah took the throne. He returned to parliament in 1944, after the British had forced Reza Shah to abdicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1949 he and other politicians founded the National Front, which aimed to strengthen parliamentary democracy and end foreign influence, above all the grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The company's concession was nationalised in March 1951, and on 28 April the Majlis chose Mosaddegh as prime minister by 79 votes to 12. He argued that oil revenues could fund the entire budget and end foreign tutelage. Britain responded with an embargo on Iranian oil and took the dispute to the United Nations, while the company withdrew its technicians. Time magazine named him its man of the year for 1951. His government also introduced unemployment compensation, sick pay for workers and a land reform that taxed landlords for the benefit of tenants.

In July 1952 Mosaddegh resigned after the Shah refused him control of the war ministry. Mass protests followed his replacement, troops withdrew from Tehran, and within days the Shah recalled him on his own terms. He then ruled with emergency powers, cut the Shah's budget and in October 1952 broke off relations with Britain. But the oil boycott was impoverishing Iranians, and allies including Ayatollah Kashani turned against him. Shortly before the coup, a referendum to dissolve parliament passed with 99 per cent of the vote, in a poll with separate booths for yes and no that drew sharp criticism.

Britain, which had urged Mosaddegh's removal, found a partner in the Eisenhower administration, which feared that Iran might drift towards the communist Tudeh Party. The CIA, with Kermit Roosevelt Jr. directing operations in Tehran, organised propaganda, bribed officials and paid crowds. After a first attempt failed and the Shah fled abroad, a second effort succeeded days later: royalist troops shelled Mosaddegh's residence, almost 300 people died in the violence, and General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister. The 1953 coup restored the Shah, and a new consortium agreement in 1954 gave Western companies a large share of Iranian oil.

Charged with treason, Mosaddegh was sentenced on 21 December 1953 to three years' solitary confinement, rather than the death penalty the prosecution sought. He then lived under house arrest at Ahmadabad until he died of cancer on 5 March 1967, and was buried in his own house. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, crowds estimated at a million marked the anniversary of his death. In 2013 the United States formally acknowledged the CIA's role in the coup; Britain has never done so.

Our 1945 map shows Iran in the years before his premiership, and the 1960 map shows the country under the restored rule of the Shah.