As a condition for restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in 1954 the US required removal of the AIOC's monopoly; five American petroleum companies,
Royal Dutch Shell, and the
Compagnie Française des Pétroles, were to draw Iran's petroleum after the successful coup d'état—Operation Ajax. The Shah declared this to be a "victory" for Iranians, with the massive influx of money from this agreement resolving the economic collapse from the last three years, and allowing him to carry out his planned modernization projects. Released
National Security Archive documents showed that Undersecretary of State
Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had agreed with
Qashqai tribal leaders, in south Iran, to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and spies could operate. The CIA sent
Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. to persuade the exiled Shah to return to rule Iran. Schwarzkopf trained the security forces that would become known as
SAVAK to secure the shah's hold on power. According to a heavily redacted CIA document released to the
National Security Archive in response to a
Freedom of Information request, "Available documents do not indicate who authorized CIA to begin planning the operation, but it almost certainly was President
Eisenhower himself. Eisenhower biographer
Stephen Ambrose has written that the absence of documentation reflected the President's style." The CIA document then quotes from the Ambrose biography of Eisenhower: One version of the CIA history, written by Wilber, referred to the operation as TPAJAX. A tactic Roosevelt admitted to using, was bribing demonstrators into attacking symbols of the Shah, while chanting pro-Mosaddegh slogans. As king, the Shah was largely seen as a symbol of Iran at the time by many Iranians and monarchists. Roosevelt declared that the more that these agents showed their hate for the Shah and attacked his symbols, the more it caused the average Iranian citizen to dislike and distrust Mosaddegh. , commonly known as Shaban the Brainless (
Shaban Bimokh), was a notable pro-Shah strongman and thug. He led his men and other bribed street thugs and was a prominent figure during the coup. The British and American spy agencies strengthened the monarchy in Iran by backing the pro-western Shah for the next 26 years. The Shah was overthrown in 1979. Some Iranian clerics cooperated with the western spy agencies because they were dissatisfied with Mosaddegh's secular government. While the broad outlines of the operation are known, "...the C.I.A.'s records were widely thought by historians to have the potential to add depth and clarity to a famous but little-documented intelligence operation", reporter Tim Weiner wrote in
The New York Times 29 May 1997. "The Central Intelligence Agency, which has repeatedly pledged for more than five years to make public the files from its secret mission to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953, said today that it had destroyed or lost almost all the documents decades ago."
Donald Wilber, one of the CIA officers who planned the 1953 coup in Iran, wrote an account titled,
Clandestine Service History Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran: November 1952 – August 1953. Wilber said one goal of the coup was to strengthen the Shah. In 2000,
James Risen at
The New York Times obtained the previously secret CIA version of the coup written by Wilber and summarized its contents, which includes the following: In early August, the CIA increased the pressure. Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with "savage punishment if they opposed Mosaddegh", seeking to stir anti-Communist sentiment in the religious community. In addition, the secret history says, the house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists. It does not say whether anyone was hurt in this attack. The agency was intensifying its propaganda campaign. A leading newspaper owner was granted a personal loan of about $45,000, "in the belief that this would make his organ amenable to our purposes." The Shah remained intransigent. In a 1 August meeting with General
Norman Schwarzkopf, he refused to sign the C.I.A.-written decrees firing Mr. Mosaddegh and appointing General Zahedi. He said he doubted that the army would support him in a showdown. The
National Security Archive at
George Washington University contains the full account by Wilber, along with many other coup-related documents and analysis.
Release of U.S. government records and official acknowledgement In August 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the coup, the US government released documents showing they were involved in staging the coup. The documents also describe the motivations behind the coup and the strategies used to stage it. Public awareness of American and British participation in Mosaddeq's overthrow was long-standing. An internal narrative from the middle of the 1970s called "The Battle for Iran" makes a clear reference to the CIA's involvement. In 1981, the agency made a highly edited version of the report public in reaction to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blocked out all mentions of TPAJAX, the code name for the American-led operation. These references can be found in the most recent release in 2013, which is thought to be the CIA's first official admission that the agency assisted in the coup's planning and execution. In June 2017, the United States State Department's
Office of the Historian released its revised historical account of the event. The volume of historical records "focuses on the evolution of U.S. thinking on Iran as well as the U.S. Government covert operation that resulted in Mosadeq's overthrow on 19 August 1953". Though some of the relevant records were destroyed long ago, the release contains a collection of roughly 1,000 pages, only a small number of which remain classified. One revelation is that the CIA "attempted to call off the failing coup but was salvaged by an insubordinate spy." The reports released by the U.S. had reached 1,007 pages, consisting of diplomatic cables and letters according to VOA News. In March 2018, the National Security Archive released a declassified British memo alleging that the United States Embassy sent "large sums of money" to "influential people"—namely senior Iranian clerics—in the days leading up to Mosaddeq's overthrow. According to the Guardian, despite the U.S. showing regrets about the coup, it has failed to officially issue an apology over its involvement.
United States financial support The CIA paid a large sum to carry out the operation. Depending on the expenses to be counted, the final cost is estimated to vary from $100,000 to $20 million. CIA gave Zahedi's government $5 million after the coup, Throughout the crisis, the "communist danger" was more of a rhetorical device than a real issue—i.e. it was part of the cold-war discourse ...The Tudeh was no match for the armed tribes and the 129,000-man military. What is more, the British and Americans had enough inside information to be confident that the party had no plans to initiate armed insurrection. At the beginning of the crisis, when the Truman administration was under the impression a compromise was possible, Acheson had stressed the communist danger, and warned if Mosaddegh was not helped, the Tudeh would take over. The (British) Foreign Office had retorted that the Tudeh was no real threat. But, in August 1953, when the Foreign Office echoed the Eisenhower administration's claim that the Tudeh was about to take over, Acheson now retorted that there was no such communist danger. Acheson was honest enough to admit that the issue of the Tudeh was a smokescreen. Political theorist
John Tirman points out that agricultural land owners were politically dominant in Iran well into the 1960s, and the monarch Reza Shah's aggressive land expropriation policies—to the benefit of himself and his supporters—resulted in the Iranian government being Iran's largest land owner. "The landlords and oil producers had new backing, moreover, as American interests were for the first time exerted in Iran. The Cold War was starting, and Soviet challenges were seen in every leftist movement. But the reformers were at root nationalists, not communists, and the issue that galvanized them above all others was the control of oil." The belief that oil was the central motivator behind the coup has been echoed in the popular media by authors such as
Robert Byrd,
Alan Greenspan, and
Ted Koppel. Middle East political scientist
Mark Gasiorowski states that while, on the face of it, there is considerable merit to the argument that U.S. policymakers helped U.S. oil companies gain a share in Iranian oil production after the coup, "it seems more plausible to argue that U.S. policymakers were motivated mainly by fears of a communist takeover in Iran, and that the involvement of U.S. companies was sought mainly to prevent this from occurring. The Cold War was at its height in the early 1950s, and the Soviet Union was viewed as an expansionist power seeking world domination. Eisenhower had made the Soviet threat a key issue in the 1952 elections, accusing the Democrats of being soft on communism and of having 'lost China.' Once in power, the new administration quickly sought to put its views into practice." A 2019 study by Gasiorowski concluded "that U.S. policymakers did not have compelling evidence that the threat of a Communist takeover was increasing substantially in the months before the coup. Rather, the Eisenhower administration interpreted the available evidence in a more alarming manner than the Truman administration had." Gasiorowski further states "the major U.S. oil companies were not interested in Iran at this time. A glut existed in the world oil market. The U.S. majors had increased their production in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1951 in order to make up for the loss of Iranian production; operating in Iran would force them to cut back production in these countries which would create tensions with Saudi and Kuwaiti leaders. Furthermore, if nationalist sentiments remained high in Iran, production there would be risky. U.S. oil companies had shown no interest in Iran in 1951 and 1952. By late 1952, the Truman administration had come to believe that participation by U.S. companies in the production of Iranian oil was essential to maintain stability in Iran and keep Iran out of Soviet hands. In order to gain the participation of the major U.S. oil companies, Truman offered to scale back a large anti-trust case then being brought against them. The Eisenhower administration shared Truman's views on the participation of U.S. companies in Iran and also agreed to scale back the anti-trust case. Thus, not only did U.S. majors not want to participate in Iran at this time, it took a major effort by U.S. policymakers to persuade them to become involved." Faced with choosing between British interests and Iran, the U.S. chose Britain, Gasiorowski said. "Britain was the closest ally of the United States, and the two countries were working as partners on a wide range of vitally important matters throughout the world at this time. Preserving this close relationship was more important to U.S. officials than saving Mosaddeq's tottering regime." A year earlier, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill used Britain's support for the U.S. in the Cold War to insist the United States not undermine his campaign to isolate Mosaddegh. "Britain was supporting the Americans in Korea, he reminded
Truman, and had a right to expect 'Anglo-American unity' on Iran."
Abbas Milani and
George Lenczowski have echoed the view that fears of a communist takeover or Soviet influence motivated the U.S. to intervene. On 11 May 1951, prior to the overthrow of Mosaddegh,
Adolf A. Berle warned the U.S. State Department that U.S. "control of the Middle East was at stake, which, with its Persian Gulf oil, meant 'substantial control of the world.'"
News coverage in the United States and the United Kingdom When Mosaddegh called for the dissolution of the Majlis in August 1953, the editors of the
New York Times gave the opinion that: "A plebiscite more fantastic and farcical than any ever held under Hitler or Stalin is now being staged in Iran by Premier Mosaddegh in an effort to make himself unchallenged dictator of the country." A year after the coup, the
New York Times wrote on 6 August 1954, that a new oil "agreement between Iran and a consortium of foreign oil companies" was "good news indeed": Costly as the dispute over Iranian oil has been to all concerned, the affair may yet be proved worthwhile if lessons are learned from it: Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran's experience will prevent the rise of Mosaddeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders. In some circles in Great Britain the charge will be pushed that American "imperialism"—in the shape of the American oil firms in the consortium!—has once again elbowed Britain from a historic stronghold. An early account of the CIA's role in the coup appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post in late 1954, purporting to explain how "the strategic little nation of Iran was rescued from the closing clutch of Moscow." The report was approved by the CIA, and its authors may have been assisted by
Kermit Roosevelt Jr., who had written for the
Post before. ==Britain's role==