# The CIA and British intelligence secretly overthrew Iran's elected prime minister in 1953

**Verdict: Proven.** Officially acknowledged by the US government itself: declassified CIA internal histories, released in 2013 and 2017, state plainly that the agency directed the coup as an act of US foreign policy.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1953
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/operation-ajax

## Summary
Not a theory in the usual sense but a covert operation the US government spent sixty years denying, then admitted in its own words. In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized the British-controlled oil industry, and installed the Shah as an absolute monarch in his place.

## The claim
That the CIA, working with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), planned and carried out a coup (codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by the British) that overthrew Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953, after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and that this operation restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, to unchecked power over the strong objections of Iran's elected government.

## Origin and timeline
- 1901: Iran grants a 60-year oil concession to British investor William Knox D'Arcy, the root of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), later renamed BP, and of Britain's outsized stake in Iranian oil.
- 1951-03: Iran's parliament votes to nationalize the AIOC's holdings; Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalization movement's leader, becomes prime minister the following month.
- 1951-09: Britain evacuates AIOC staff from Abadan, halts Iranian oil production, freezes Iranian sterling assets, and organizes a global boycott of Iranian oil, a campaign that devastates Iran's economy over the next two years.
- 1953-06: CIA and SIS officers finalize a joint operational plan, TPAJAX/Operation Boot, to engineer Mossadegh's removal and install General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place, with the Shah's cooperation.
- 1953-08-15/16: A first coup attempt fails: an officer sent to deliver the Shah's decree dismissing Mossadegh is arrested, and the Shah flees the country rather than risk arrest himself.
- 1953-08-19: A second attempt succeeds. CIA-funded crowds and organized demonstrators fill Tehran's streets, army units loyal to Zahedi seize state buildings, and Mossadegh's house is shelled; he surrenders and is later arrested.
- 1953-08: CIA Director Allen Dulles has the Shah flown back to Tehran from Rome; General Zahedi becomes prime minister and the Shah resumes full, and now largely unchecked, authority.
- 1954: A new international oil consortium replaces the AIOC's monopoly, giving American companies a substantial share of Iranian oil production for the first time.
- 2000: The New York Times obtains and publishes most of the CIA's own 1954 secret history of the operation, written by Donald Wilber, after it is leaked by a former official.
- 2013-08-19: The National Security Archive publishes newly declassified CIA documents: the first in which the agency itself states in its own official history that it directed the coup.
- 2017-06-15: The State Department releases its long-delayed Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) retrospective volume on Iran, 1951–1954, folding covert-action records into the official historical record for the first time.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The CIA planned and directed the 1953 coup against Mossadegh.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the CIA's own declassified internal history. A CIA account released in 2013 states that “[t]he military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.” This is the US government describing its own operation, not an outside allegation.
- Claim: The coup used bribery, propaganda, and paid crowds rather than a straightforward military takeover.
  Evidence: Confirmed in detail by Donald Wilber's 1954 CIA “Clandestine Service History,” later corroborated by the 2013 and 2017 releases: CIA cables and expense records document payments to Iranian journalists and clergy for anti-Mossadegh propaganda, funds used to “persuade” members of parliament, and organized crowds (some recruited from Tehran's underworld) sent into the streets on the CIA's payroll.
- Claim: The coup happened because Mossadegh nationalized British-controlled oil.
  Evidence: Confirmed. Iran's parliament nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951; Britain responded with an evacuation, an asset freeze, and a worldwide boycott that crippled Iran's economy, and formally proposed joint covert action to depose Mossadegh, which the Eisenhower administration, having refused Truman-era British requests, ultimately agreed to join.
- Claim: The first coup attempt failed and a second, successful attempt followed within days.
  Evidence: Confirmed by CIA and State Department records alike. The 15–16 August 1953 attempt to deliver a royal decree dismissing Mossadegh collapsed when the courier was arrested and the plan leaked; a second, larger operation on 19 August, combining paid demonstrations with military units loyal to General Zahedi, succeeded within hours.
- Claim: The CIA's own history overstates how much the coup's success depended on the agency, versus Iranian actors.
  Evidence: Contested among historians, and this is the most genuine open question in the case. The CIA's own accounts, and popularizations that follow them closely, present the agency as the decisive hand. Other scholars, examining the same released record, argue the 19 August crowds and the units that carried the day were substantially organic (driven by clergy who had turned on Mossadegh, economic desperation, and fear of the Communist Tudeh Party) and that Kermit Roosevelt's post-operation cables claiming credit for the outcome outran what he had actually controlled on the ground.
- Claim: The US government hid or denied its role in the coup for decades.
  Evidence: Confirmed. Washington did not officially acknowledge the CIA's role until 2013, and a 1989 State Department volume on the period omitted any mention of American or British covert action at all, an omission serious enough that the series' own outside historical advisers resigned in protest, prompting a law requiring a more complete documentary record.

## Why people believe it
- This is one of the rare cases on this site where the government itself has confirmed the covert operation in its own declassified words, so the pull here is not toward an unproven theory but toward reckoning with an admitted one, and asking why it took sixty years to hear it plainly.
- The coup is treated in Iran, and by many historians of the region, as the hinge event that explains everything after it: the Shah's later authoritarianism, the 1979 revolution that overthrew him, and decades of US-Iran hostility are routinely traced back to August 1953, giving the episode outsized symbolic weight beyond its immediate facts.
- It fits a template that recurs across Cold War history (a resource-rich country's elected leader removed by a foreign intelligence service acting on behalf of a commercial interest) making Operation Ajax a reference point invoked, sometimes accurately and sometimes loosely, whenever a foreign government's collapse is later found to have had a hidden hand in it.

## Open questions
- How much of the coup's success is properly credited to the CIA's own campaign, rather than to Iranian actors moving on their own, remains a live scholarly argument, not a settled one. Ervand Abrahamian's history of the coup, The Coup (2013), treats CIA direction as the decisive factor; Ray Takeyh's 2014 Foreign Affairs essay 'What Really Happened in Iran' argues the opposite extreme, that the American role has been mythologized altogether and Mossadegh's fall was substantially self-inflicted. Other historians, including Roham Alvandi and Mark Gasiorowski, have called that reading 'deeply flawed and highly selective': the argument is over how much credit the CIA deserves, not whether it took part.
- Britain's side of the operation has never been officially acknowledged the way the CIA's was. MI6 proposed the coup first and ran a parallel effort of its own, codenamed Operation Boot, but the UK government has released no equivalent internal history, and British intelligence does not, as a matter of policy, confirm historic operations. As late as the coup's 70th anniversary in 2023, a former UK foreign secretary was still publicly calling on MI6 to follow the CIA's example.
- Even the CIA's own disclosures are incomplete. Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive, who waited eleven years on the public-records request that eventually produced the 2013 release, has said dozens of pages were withheld from it in full, and related material remains classified, so a complete accounting of the operation's financing and chain of command still isn't public.
- How directly the coup should be credited for what followed (the Shah's later authoritarianism, the 1979 revolution, and decades of US-Iran hostility) is a genuine historical argument, not just a talking point. Iranian officials and a US secretary of state have both drawn a direct line from one to the other; other historians caution that 26 years, the Shah's own later choices, and Iran's internal politics separate 1953 from 1979, and that naming the coup as sole or primary cause oversimplifies a longer chain of events.

## Sources
- CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup (Electronic Briefing Book No. 435, declassified CIA documents), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2013): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/
- Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952–August 1953, Donald N. Wilber, Central Intelligence Agency (1954): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ciacase/Clandestine%20Service%20History.pdf
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954 (retrospective volume), Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (2017): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran
- Iran 1953: State Department Finally Releases Updated Official History of Mosaddeq Coup, National Security Archive, George Washington University (2017): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-15/iran-1953-state-department-finally-releases-updated-official-history
- The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953 (Electronic Briefing Book No. 28), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2000): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/
- Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran -- A special report; How a Plot Convulsed Iran in '53 (and in '79), The New York Times (James Risen) (2000): https://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html
- America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, Hugh Wilford, Basic Books (2013): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hugh-wilford/americas-great-game/9780465019656/
- The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, Ervand Abrahamian, The New Press (2013): https://thenewpress.org/books/the-coup/

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