Mohammad Mosaddegh

 Mohammad Mosaddegh

Born: June 16, 1882, Tehran, Iran | Died: March 5, 1967, Tehran (under house arrest) Role/Title: Prime Minister of Iran; Lawyer; Nationalist Leader

Who HE WAS

Mohammad Mosaddegh was a lawyer, professor, author, governor, parliament member, finance minister, and the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. He came from the Iranian ruling class — the son of an Iranian public official, Mosaddegh grew up as a member of Iran's ruling elite. He received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, but his life's work was oriented toward dismantling the foreign grip on his country rather than benefiting from it.

In 1944, Mosaddegh returned to parliament and took the lead of Jebhe Melli (National Front of Iran), an organisation he had founded with nineteen others, aiming to establish democracy and end the foreign presence in Iranian politics. He wasn't an ideologue in the conventional sense. He was a constitutionalist, a nationalist, and a democrat in a region where all three were considered threats by the West.

What set him apart — and made him a target — was that he understood the connection between economic sovereignty and political freedom with absolute clarity. As Mosaddegh put it: "The moral aspect of oil nationalization is more important than its economic aspect."

What HE Built AND Fought For

The centerpiece of Mosaddegh's agenda was the nationalization of Iranian oil — a resource that had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) since 1913, with profits flowing overwhelmingly out of Iran.

By 1948, Britain received substantially more revenue from the AIOC than Iran did. The numbers told the whole story: Iran produced the oil, Britain owned the infrastructure, and Britain took the larger share. Mosaddegh moved to end that arrangement.

On March 15, 1951, legislation to nationalize the oil industry was passed by the Majlis. On April 28, 1951, the Shah confirmed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister after the Majlis elected him by a vote of 79–12. The mandate was clear and democratically unambiguous.

The nationalization wasn't just symbolic. The new administration introduced a wide range of social reforms: unemployment compensation was introduced, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and peasants were freed from forced labour in their landlords' estates. In 1952, Mosaddegh passed the Land Reform Act, which forced landlords to pay a 20% tax on their revenue, half of which was placed in a development fund, while the rest went to the sharecropping tenants.

In a June 1951 speech to his nation, Mosaddegh laid out the stakes plainly:

"With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue." ¹

In June 1952, Mosaddegh traveled to The Hague and presented nearly 200 documents to the International Court regarding the exploitative nature of the AIOC and the extent of its political intervention into the Iranian political system. He was building a legal case against colonialism on the world stage.

Who Came for HIM — and How

Britain moved against Mosaddegh the moment he nationalized. His nationalization efforts led the British government to begin planning to remove him from power. In October 1952, Mosaddegh declared Britain an enemy and cut all diplomatic relations. Britain was unable to resolve the issue unilaterally and looked toward the United States for help.

The U.S. initially hesitated. U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided on a coup after being refused American military support by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who sympathized with nationalist movements like Mosaddegh's. But the political winds shifted.

The British decided to try their hand with the U.S. again, this time emphasizing to the new president that Mosaddegh was a communist and that Iran falling under Soviet influence would be a catastrophic loss in the nascent Cold War. Eisenhower proved more amenable to the idea of overthrowing Mosaddegh, and by early April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles had green-lit an initial million dollars "to be used by the Tehran Station in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh."

The operation had two names: the CIA called it TP-AJAX Project or Operation Ajax; the British named their side Operation Boot. It was, as one source put it, the first covert regime-change operation carried out by the CIA, then only six years old.

The methods were precise and multi-layered. TPAJAX consisted of several steps: using propaganda to undermine Mosaddegh politically, inducing the Shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations.

CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. ran the operation on the ground in Tehran. A tactic Roosevelt admitted to using was bribing demonstrators into attacking symbols of the Shah while chanting pro-Mosaddegh slogans — causing the average Iranian citizen to dislike and distrust Mosaddegh. This was deliberately manufactured chaos, designed to make a popular leader look dangerous to his own people.

The coup nearly failed. The CIA attempted to call off the failing coup, cabling its station chief: "Operation has been tried and failed, and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh which could be traced back to US... Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued." Kermit Roosevelt famously ignored the order and pressed on.

On August 19, 1953, the coup succeeded. The Shah signed two decrees — one dismissing Mosaddegh, the other nominating CIA's choice, General Zahedi, as Prime Minister. These decrees gave legitimacy to the coup and were spread by CIA officials.

It was the CIA's first successful dismantling of a foreign government, and Iran has not known democracy since.

The U.S. government denied its role for decades. The formally declassified CIA history reads: "The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy." That acknowledgment did not come until 2013.

The UK sought to censor information regarding its role in the coup, and a significant number of documents about the coup remain classified to this day. As of 2023, Britain has still not formally acknowledged MI6's role.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried in a military tribunal, and convicted of treason. He spoke at his own trial:

"Yes, my sin — my greater sin — and even my greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran's oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world's greatest empire... I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests." ²

Mosaddegh was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for treason and, after he served his sentence, was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. He died in 1967, in his ancestral village, having never been allowed to return to public life.

What HE Left Behind

After the coup, the West moved immediately to consolidate its prize. Zahedi's new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium and "restore the flow of Iranian oil to world markets in substantial quantities," giving the United States and Great Britain the lion's share of the restored British holdings. In return, the U.S. massively funded the Shah's government.

Economically, American firms gained considerable control over Iranian oil production, with U.S. companies taking around 40 percent of the profits. The nationalization Mosaddegh had won was reversed. The oil — Iran's oil — flowed back to the West.

What the West installed in his place was a machinery of repression. In 1957, with the aid of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, the Shah's government formed SAVAK — the Organization of National Security and Information — which developed into an omnipresent force within Iranian society and became a symbol of the fear by which the Pahlavi regime dominated Iran.

But Mosaddegh's ideas could not be imprisoned. Despite beginning to fall out of favor during the later stages of the Abadan Crisis, the secret U.S. overthrow of Mosaddegh served as a rallying point in anti-U.S. protests during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and to this day, he is one of the most popular figures in Iranian history.

Why It Still Matters

The 1953 coup is not ancient history. It is the direct root of the current state of U.S.-Iran relations.

The coup not only encouraged the Shah's descent towards dictatorship — it would later become a rallying cry in anti-U.S. protests during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. That revolution, which replaced the Shah's dictatorship with an Islamic theocracy, created deep distrust between Iran and the United States that has continued to be evident since the 1953 coup, worsened by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and remains strained to the current day.

A former U.S. diplomatic official who was present in Tehran during the coup stated plainly: "The removal of Mossadegh was, in my estimation, a tragic mistake on the part of the United States. We caused, in effect, the Khomeini revolution by doing that."

The CIA's own historian agreed. CIA staff historian David Robarge stated, "The CIA carried out a successful regime change operation. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences."

The Mosaddegh Coup was proof in the eyes of many Iranians that the United States was no different than imperial countries of the past that had undermined their sovereignty to promote their narrow self-interests at the expense of the Iranian people.

Even today, Iranian leaders cite 1953 as proof of American duplicity. For many Iranians, the coup explains why foreign influence must be resisted at all costs.

The people of Iran are living with the consequences of what the CIA did in August 1953. Every round of sanctions, every nuclear standoff, every moment of hostility between Washington and Tehran — it runs through that coup. The question of what Iran might have been — secular, democratic, sovereign over its own resources — is answered by what Mosaddegh was building before it was destroyed.

Key Quotes

"The moral aspect of oil nationalization is more important than its economic aspect." ¹

"Yes, my sin — my greater sin — and even my greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran's oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world's greatest empire." ²

"With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people." ³

"I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests." ²

Sources & Citations

¹ Mosaddegh, Mohammad. Speech to the Majlis. June 21, 1951. Quoted in The Mosaddegh Project. www.mohammadmossadegh.com/biography/

² Mosaddegh, Mohammad. Statement at military tribunal. 1953. Quoted in The Mosaddegh Project. www.mohammadmossadegh.com/biography/

³ Mosaddegh, Mohammad. June 21, 1951 Speech. Quoted via Wikipedia / original Majlis record.

⁴ Central Intelligence Agency. "Zendebad, Shah!" — The CIA's Secret History of the Iran Coup, 1953 (TPAJAX). Declassified 2013/2017. CIA FOIA Reading Room. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/the%20central%20intelligence%20%5B15369853%5D.pdf

⁵ National Security Archive. The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953. George Washington University. November 29, 2000. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/

⁶ U.S. State Department / National Security Archive. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran. Available at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/ch3

⁷ Foreign Policy. "64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup." June 20, 2017. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/

⁸ National Security Archive / The Atlantic. "CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran's Coup." August 26, 2013. https://unredacted.com/2013/08/26/cia-admits-it-was-behind-irans-coup/

⁹ Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training. "The Coup Against Iran's Mohammad Mossadegh." https://adst.org/2015/07/the-coup-against-irans-mohammad-mossadegh/

¹⁰ Britannica. Mohammad Mosaddegh biography. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mohammad-Mosaddegh

¹¹ Lapham's Quarterly. "Operation Ajax." https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/operation-ajax

¹² Ohio State University / Middle East Studies Center. "A History of US-Iranian Relations." https://mesc.osu.edu/news/history-us-iranian-relations