Operation Ajax

True Spies Ep. 193 - Operation Ajax

NARRATOR: This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino, and this is True Spies, from Spyscape Studios.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: At that time, there was a euphoria, basically, that the attempt of a coup had failed. The Mossadegh government was secure, not knowing that the military part of the coup planning was still intact.

NARRATOR: Operation Ajax. In the midst of the Iranian revolution, in 1979, a tell-all memoir hit American bookstore shelves. Its author was a former CIA officer called Kermit Roosevelt Jr.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Kermit Roosevelt, who had been in charge of the CIA mission in Iran, was able to mobilize a great number of influential people in American politics to get the CIA to let him publish his memoirs. He hoped to then get a Hollywood contract to film this so-called successful exploit in Iran.

NARRATOR: That ‘exploit’ was a coup, carried out by the British intelligence service MI6, who called it Operation Boot, and the Americans, who called it Operation Ajax. Their interests were separate, Roosevelt writes. The British wanted Iran to reverse its decision to nationalize its oil industry. And the Americans? “We were not concerned with that,” Roosevelt writes, “but with the obvious threat of Russian takeover.” Forty years on, the truth behind Roosevelt’s claims…remains murky.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: That's what my interest is mainly, is what were the causes of the coup.

NARRATOR: History isn’t written so much as composed. The task of a historian is the work of curating and culling, selecting important moments, framing and cropping a snapshot in time. Sometimes the portrait that gets passed down through the ages gives an inaccurate picture of what really went on. This week’s guest has dedicated his career to rewriting the conventional narrative - to set the record straight.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: My name is Ervand Abrahamian - or in Armenian, it's Abrahamian. I was born in Iran, and I've been living in the United States since 1964. I've been working on Iranian history, mostly contemporary history. By that, I mean basically 20th and 21st Century history.

NARRATOR: Ervand Abrahamian has set himself the task of reframing the stories that have shaped our view of Iran and of the Middle East more broadly. In the case of Iran’s 1953 coup d’état, Ervand believes that the work begins by taking another look at the narrative of the Cold War.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The fear of communism was something that was used at that time and later on - even now it's used as an explanation, as an excuse for the coup. Because if you actually look at what was going on, the real fear was not that of communism. It was the fear of losing control over oil.

NARRATOR: This is the story of how the CIA and MI6 plotted and carried out a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Or I should say… It's one story. One version of a story that has been told many different ways over the past 70 years by politicians, historians, the media, and by the intelligence agencies that authored it. This is Ervand’s version of events, based on a career’s worth of research into the facts at hand. But - like most stories, it’s best told from the very beginning. That’s where we’ll begin, with Ervand’s help.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The whole crisis between Iran and Britain and then the United States, started when the Iranian parliament, under great public pressure, nationalized the oil company, which was until then owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, AIOC, purely a British company, and had a monopoly over oil production in southern Iran.

NARRATOR: You’ve probably heard of the AIOC, in one guise or another. It later became known as the British Petroleum Company, which later became BP. In the spring of 1951, the Iranian Parliament, the Majles, voted to take control of the privately run oil industry. That was a big step for a country where such a major industry had long been in the hands of a foreign power.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Basically Britain was a colonial power in Iran. Officially, Iran was an independent state. But in reality, the economy was dominated by the British oil company. So the nationalization of the oil company was more than just an economic issue. It was a way for Iran to declare independence from the British Empire and the British oil company.

NARRATOR: Oil was a symbol of the harm that British colonialism had wrought. By 1950, Iran was producing 664,000 barrels of crude oil a day. But compared to the profits the British were taking, Iran itself was making a pittance. Oil workers lived in shantytowns and toiled under squalid conditions. And while Britons abused and oppressed the people of Iran, the AIOC engaged in corporate whitewashing of epic proportions. It claimed to be revitalizing the country’s economy and improving its citizens’ welfare. And so, says Ervand, when Iran’s Parliament voted to seize its power back, it was a major statement of autonomy. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: It was equivalent to, let's say, India becoming independent after World War II. And it was seen, actually in Iran, the nationalization was, as a form of declaration of independence from colonialism. 

NARRATOR: Unsurprisingly, nationalization was not a policy favored by the British. Recently re-elected Prime Minister Winston Churchill imposed an embargo on the country, in the hope that he could bend it to his will.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: And often the conventional view is, “Well, this was a British against Iran conflict.” But right from April of 1951, as soon as oil is nationalized, the US gets involved. 

NARRATOR: Just as the US had feared a ‘domino effect’ of country after country falling into communist hands, so, too, did they fear a chain reaction amongst other oil-producing nations.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The real fear, both in London and in Washington, was that if Iran succeeded in nationalizing the oil industry, this would set a terrible example for many other oil-producing countries, many of them that were producing oil for American oil companies, as well as British oil companies, that this contagion was spread throughout the world and there would be a drastic shift of power to unreliable third-world states like Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and so on. And this would be disastrous for the West.

NARRATOR: In Iran, the man chosen to bring nationalization to fruition - the country’s new prime minister - was the leader of a pro-democracy opposition party named Mohammed Mossadegh.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He was very much a committed liberal. He believed that people should have the right to organize, speak, press - these basic enlightenment principles of individual rights. And as a lawyer, he was very much wedded to the Iranian constitution. Also, he was quite unique among the aristocrats in Iran in that he lived in a fairly simple way, and he was very much against corruption. So he would denounce his fellow aristocrats for being corrupt. 

NARRATOR: As you’ll soon learn, some of Mossadegh’s liberal policies would one day backfire. But back then, and still today, his pursuit of democratic values drew comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Mossadegh was always considered clear, and very clean. And this is something, of course, the American documents very much accept.

NARRATOR: What the Americans didn’t accept was his commitment to upholding the promises he’d made to the Iranian people. Mossadegh had entered the premiership with the aim of nationalizing the oil industry. And straight out of the gate, the US wanted him to surrender the whole effort.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Right from the beginning, the US interest was to persuade Mossadegh to basically come to an agreement where oil would remain under either British or Western companies' control and true nationalization would not actually be implemented. They try to persuade Mossadegh to accept formal nationalization without real nationalization, so the oil company is called National Iranian Oil Company but that company would not actually run the oil industry. The oil industry would be run by the Western companies. He refused to accept that.

NARRATOR: A compromise in name only. Mossadegh wouldn’t budge. In the West, the Iranian premier gained a reputation for intransigence.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The US was not really playing an honest broker’s role. It was trying to persuade or hoodwink Iran to accept something that it was not acceptable in Iranian public opinion and of course, to Mossadegh. And here another problem came from the United States. They hoped to get the Shah involved in removing Mossadegh not through a coup, but by parliamentary means. 

NARRATOR: The problem was that the Shah of Iran was wary. As the national monarch, his powers were largely symbolic. According to the constitution, he didn’t have the power to dismiss the Prime Minister. He knew that doing so could have unintended consequences.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He realized that if he went against Mossadegh, he would be actually destroying the foundations of his own monarchy, which turned out to be a true prophecy.

NARRATOR: British and American hands were tied. So they devised another plan. If they couldn’t get the Shah to de-legitimize the parliamentary system, they'd have to manipulate the system to their advantage - which they were well-poised to do. Well before the oil crisis, they had been cultivating Iranian politicians and journalists, passing money to influential people who were willing to do their bidding.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: So they mobilized all the deputies they could and all the influence they had in both the American and British Embassy to try to consolidate enough votes in parliament to depose Mossadegh through parliamentary means.

NARRATOR: Naturally, they’d hand-picked a ‘suitable’ successor.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: This old-time politician Ahmad Qavam, who had been a prime minister a number of times before, he was same generation as Mossadegh, also a product of the of the constitutional revolution, but a man who, although a very shrewd, Machiavellian politician, was willing to come to a settlement on the oil issue where he would basically give back the oil industry to the Western companies.

NARRATOR: Of all the maneuvers the two countries had attempted, this one seemed to have legs. By 1952, they had secured enough votes to make Qavam a likely candidate to unseat Mossadegh. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: So what Mossadegh did, he realized what was happening politically. He really pulled a fast one. He basically asked the Shah for special powers, extra-parliamentary powers, to pass reforms - especially electoral reforms, land reform, financial reforms. And he also wanted to appoint the Ministry of War.

NARRATOR: This was an act of real savvy on Mossadegh’s part because although the Shah had long appointed the Minister of War himself, according to the constitution, that task belonged to the prime minister and to parliament. Mossadegh asked to make the appointment. The Shah refused so Mossadegh resigned and the Western powers’ desired candidate took over as prime minister - but not in the way they had hoped.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: There were mass demonstrations throughout the country calling for the return of Mossadegh. There was violence in the streets. The Army at first tried to shoot down demonstrators. There was considerable bloodshed. 

NARRATOR: The Shah realized he’d made a grave miscalculation. It was only a matter of time before the masses turned against him.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He then withdrew the Army from the streets. Ghavam had no choice but to resign, and Mossadegh became prime minister again and got what he had wanted, which was both the Ministry of War and special powers to carry out reforms.

NARRATOR: After five tense days, what would become known as the July Uprising came to an end. Mossadegh was back in the seat of power - but this time, with more popular support than ever. Diplomatic maneuvering had failed. Now the Western spy agencies had to consider other options.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: And of course, it also led both the British and Americans to come to the conclusion that the only way they could get rid of Mossadegh was through a military coup.

NARRATOR: Just for a moment, let’s leave behind the tumult in Iran and take a peek behind the curtain at what was going on in the United States. Because in order to make sense of what comes next, you’ll need to understand how the CIA understood what was happening overseas. The July Uprising had rocked Iran in the summer of 1952. But even though plans to stage a coup weren’t launched until later, it’s safe to say they were well in the works.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: They had been pushing and talking about a coup as early as April 1951, as soon as Mossadegh had become prime minister. People had been talking about the only way to deal with the situation was through what the British thought was the right way, was a military coup.

NARRATOR: Ervand says there was a split within the US leadership and intelligence service over how to proceed in the Middle East, fueled by McCarthyist anti-Soviet tensions.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: You had these hard-core people in the CIA who were talking about a coup as early as possible. Then you had more down-to-earth analysts of Iran in the State Department, many of them academics or quasi-academics who were always saying, “There is no real danger of a communist takeover. Mossadegh is very popular. He should be supported and we can deal with him.” The die-hard CIA people were always alarmist that the country was about to become communist, even though they knew it wasn't. And the more academic analysts would say, “Calm down. Let's basically try to negotiate and deal with Mossadegh.” So this goes back and forth. And I would say after the July failure, the die-hards then have the upper hand.

NARRATOR: In the autumn, Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower won the US presidential elections in a landslide victory. The outgoing administration of Democrat Harry Truman had already laid the groundwork for a coup. So when Eisenhower was inaugurated in January 1953, Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles as the director of the CIA and his brother, John Foster Dulles, as Secretary of State.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: People like the Dulles brothers who were die-hard realists, they knew that there was no possibility of a communist takeover, but they used this as a propaganda camouflage to justify it. 

NARRATOR: If you’d like to learn more about Allen Dulles, you can listen to our recent two-part special on his morally complex life and work.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: If the Dulles brothers wanted to throw their grandmother under the bus, they could always say, “Well, we did it in order to save the world from communism.”

NARRATOR: In 1953, the stage was set for drastic action. The new administration was ready to take out Mossadegh by any means necessary. April, 1953. Mossadegh remains prime minister. Who owns Iran’s oil is a matter of fierce contention. But the Iranian economy, buoyed by its agricultural sector, continues to truck along. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: As long as the harvest was good, the weather was good, it actually did okay. There was some austerity, but government officials and civil servants got paid. Iran had some reserves, gold reserves it had used up. It managed to tag along.

NARRATOR: But in Tehran, the atmosphere was tense because, behind the scenes, Western forces were ramping up their efforts to steer public opinion in their chosen direction.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The press, especially the newspapers owned - and funded - by the CIA and MI6, constantly built up this mood of crisis that the economy was going to collapse. People were going to starve and so on. And this created a, I would say, concern in the public, especially in the cities.

NARRATOR: Negotiations over the nationalization of Iranian oil had stalled, much to the chagrin of the US and Britain. And those two countries had control of the local narrative.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: It's interesting. There were a number of some 30 newspapers in Iran. Almost all of them were funded by the British or the Americans. And all of them basically were trying to undermine Mossadegh. And Mossadegh, being a constitutionalist, was not going to close out all these papers. He felt that they had the right to criticize the government. So the mood was, in the street, of instability.

NARRATOR: That was the very same narrative that was being exported around the world. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN:  The mainstream newspapers, I would say, the acceptable, reliable newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, they also gave the official picture of the situation - the official picture being what the State Department and the Foreign Office wanted, which was that Mossadegh's intransigence, refusal to accept a reasonable compromise, was leading the country into economic decline, crisis, catastrophe. And out of this catastrophe, the communists would take over. 

NARRATOR: To bolster that sense of instability, in the spring of 1953, the British went even further. They took an approach that was far more extreme - and far more brutal.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The British abducted and murdered the chief of police, Mossadegh's chief of police.

NARRATOR: The police chief, Mahmoud Afshartous, was kidnapped and murdered. His body was dumped on the outskirts of Tehran, out in the open, for anyone to see. According to Norman Darbyshire, an MI6 officer who was involved in the incident, the British agency hadn’t meant to kill him. Afshartous had been making derogatory comments about the Shah, Darbyshire said, and a young officer had shot him in a moment of rage. But that account doesn’t explain the torture that had clearly been inflicted on the body or why it had been left out in the open. Ervand says that the public display of Afshartous’s body was meant to send a message, to communicate to Iranians that their government wasn’t capable of protecting them.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: This was trying to create the mood that even the chief of police was not safe in Iran. He could be murdered and his body dumped in the garbage outside Tehran. This added to the instability, the mood of instability.

NARRATOR: Then, on July 11, 1953, President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed an agreement to carry out a coup in Iran. In the US, the plan was given the name Operation Ajax, after the popular cleaning product with the ability to scour away dirt and grime. Both halves of the venture brought distinct assets to the table. Britain knew Iran well, having a long-established presence in the country, and had formed relationships with politicians and key players on the ground, including General Zahedi, their pick for the prime ministership. The US, on the other hand, had a large staff at the embassy in Tehran. The CIA named Kermit Roosevelt Jr. as head of field operations in Iran. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: America doesn't have royal dynasties, but they have political dynasties. And Roosevelt, of course, was a household name. So the image, the word Roosevelt, carried a lot of weight.

NARRATOR: Kermit Roosevelt was the grandson of American President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried the White House through the turbulent 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Kermit had been working for the CIA in the Middle East, though he didn’t know much about Iran. According to Ervand, he relied on his British counterparts to understand the ins and outs of what was taking place there.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: And this is where, I think, the MI6 role is often minimized in the writings because when it came to the nitty gritty, you had to know who the young officers were. And the Americans, even though they had been training Army officers from 1942 onward, had not been bothering to keep records of Who's Who in the military. So when it came to the time of the coup, the British could guide Roosevelt [on] which officers are more likely to be supportive of the coup, who's to avoid, and so on.

NARRATOR: The plan had two parts: create enough chaos to destabilize the government, and launch a military intervention that would overthrow it. Part of the effort to destabilize Mossadegh’s government was to plant stories in the press that exaggerated the threat of the communist Tudeh party. Tudeh might pull off a coup, they suggested. Then Iran would be absorbed into the Soviet Union. Of course, Ervand says, all of that was a giant red herring.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Surprisingly enough, if you read the actual - not CIA top documents - but CIA reports from the actual CIA operatives in Tehran, even though they went along with the coup and carried out the coup, their analysis of the Iranian situation in summer of ‘53 was that there was no chance of a communist takeover in Iran. 

NARRATOR: There was one key character Roosevelt and the coup planners still hoped they could manipulate: the pro-American and pro-British Shah of Iran. Involving the national monarch would lend an air of legitimacy to the whole unsavory plot. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The Shah was very reluctant to do that. He said if he went against Mossadegh in oil nationalization, he would be delegitimizing his monarchy, the whole system. And he refused to actually work against Mossadegh initially.

NARRATOR: But the two Western powers insisted that if he didn’t agree to play ball, they’d move forward without him. And they suggested that they’d cease supporting him if they did so. Backed against a wall, the resistant Shah finally relented and agreed to go along with the plan. The plot was to be carried out in mid-August. It would hinge on the participation of the Imperial Guards, the most royalist branch of the military loyal to the Shah. The commander of the Imperial Guards would present Prime Minister Mossadegh with a decree ‘from the Shah’ removing him from office and appointing General Zahedi in his stead. The execution of the coup relied on a dubious interpretation of the Iranian constitution.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: According to the Iranian constitution, the Shah's decree, or farmān (firman), was purely a formality. The parliament had to first appoint, and nominate the prime minister, and then the Shah would then give him the farman. But here they were making a mockery of the written constitution. They were claiming that the Shah had the power to actually make and unmake the prime minister.

NARRATOR: The plan the Westerners considered a “non-military” coup would all unfold on the night of the 15th of August, 1953.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The chief of the Imperial Guards, Colonel Nassiri, would mobilize a number of Imperial Guards from the palace. They would drive with trucks. One convoy would go to Mosaddeq's home, and arrest Mossadegh. The same convoy would also arrest the main ministers, pro-Mossadegh ministers. Another convoy would go to the chief of staff offices and occupy the chief of staff.

NARRATOR: The operation went according to plan at the start. But when Colonel Nassiri reached Mossadegh’s home, he was surprised to find that Mossadegh had been waiting for him - with four tanks. Just in case.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: When Naseri came to Mossadegh to present him with his dismissal, Mossadegh said, “This can't be true. The Shah doesn't have the power to do that.” But more than that, when Nassiri arrived at the office, even though he had a truck full of Imperial Guards outside Mossadegh's home, [there] were tanks ready to blow them up if necessary, and the tanks had been placed there just in time before the arrival of the Imperial Guards.

NARRATOR: Mossadegh had been tipped off to the whole plan by a member of the Imperial Guard. That young man happened to be working for the military branch of the communist Tudeh party, which wanted to keep Mossadegh in power. The coup attempt was foiled. The Shah, meanwhile, boarded an emergency flight to Baghdad, then holed up with his wife at a nice hotel in Rome.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The CIA claimed that he had cold feet, but according to the Shah's version, part of the agreement was that if anything went wrong, he would actually leave the country. But, of course, the CIA claimed the Shah basically chickened out and fled.

NARRATOR: The CIA was left in the dark about what had gone wrong. They didn’t know that Mossadegh had gotten an advance warning. Members of both the US and UK intelligence agencies deemed the coup a failure. But not everyone. Kermit Roosevelt, amongst others, pushed for a second attempt. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Roosevelt in Tehran knew that the real military part of the coup had not failed. It was still intact. And he then, basically, said [that] even though the constitutional facade had failed, they would carry out the real military tank coup because that part of the coup had not been revealed or contaminated.

NARRATOR: In the Iranian capital, the attempted coup had stoked a pro-Mossadegh fervor.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: There was a huge outburst of public support for Mossadegh against the Shah. Shah statues were all pulled down in most of the towns. At that time there was a euphoria, basically, that the attempt of a coup had failed. Basically, the regime, the Mossadegh government, was secure, not knowing that the military part of the coup planning was still intact.

NARRATOR: So far, Roosevelt and the other plotters had been fixated on how to pull off a coup purely by political means. Now they had a new challenge on their hands: how to get tanks into the city and achieve their goal by force.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The Mossadegh government had set up almost a foolproof system to prevent coups. What they had done was appoint people they trusted in charge of the barracks around Tehran. There were five barracks in Tehran. Two of them had a lot of tanks, so they could control the movement of tanks from the barracks into Tehran. So they had to find some way of shortcutting the command system.

NARRATOR: Roosevelt and his MI6 counterpart, Norman Darbyshire, chipped away at the question. Who commanded the tanks? And how could they get them into Tehran? Roy Henderson, the American ambassador, had left the country in advance of the failed coup in order to keep his hands clean of the whole sordid affair. But when the initial plan went awry, Henderson jetted back to Tehran to try to help clean up the mess. Together, he and Roosevelt hashed out a plan of attack. On August 18, Henderson paid a visit to the prime minister himself. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: And told Mossadegh that the US would completely withdraw from Iran unless Mossadegh established law and order in the streets of Tehran. Because the demonstrators, the mobs, were threatening Americans, threatening the embassy and the US couldn't feel safe in Iran unless there was law and order. So this was a sort of an ultimatum to Mossadegh that he had to clear the streets of any demonstrators.

NARRATOR: Not only that. Henderson told him that the US would stop recognizing Mossadegh as the head of the Iranian government. He even went so far as to suggest that the Shah had dismissed him as prime minister, raising the question of whether Mossadegh lawfully held his post. But on the other hand, if the prime minister put an end to the demonstrations, Iran would receive financial assistance from the Americans. Mossadegh, of course, knew the Shah didn’t have the authority to remove him. But later, he said that he felt his authority was being undermined. And if the US stopped recognizing his legal role, things could only go from bad to worse. 

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Henderson was pressuring Mossadegh to reestablish law and order, but eventually, of course, to reestablish real law and order, you would have to bring the tanks in. And this, again, was very much part of the coup strategy.

NARRATOR: Mossadegh folded. He called for a ban on demonstrations and asked the Army to shoot at the rioters if necessary. Around 32 tanks were dispatched from their barracks to reestablish law and order in Tehran. Meanwhile, [the] CIA and MI6 would contribute to the chaos. They would hide behind a group of nefarious local actors and throw the metaphorical match that would light an oil fire.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN:  The way it was designed was to create an uproar. Hire thugs who were in the pay of one conservative religious leader, Ayatollah Behbahani, to come out into the streets to beat up people, burn offices, threaten a bazaar, and create an uproar. So when you have a created uproar, then the question would be, how is the government going to establish law and order? And that's where the military aspect of the coup comes in.

NARRATOR: Those tanks that the coup plotters had kept outside of Tehran were now being driven into the capital city by royalist officers, under the guise of re-establishing law and order.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: But of course, Roosevelt and the coup strategists knew once the tanks were in Tehran, then they could go and head toward Mossadegh’s home and other strategic points. They weren't interested in the mobs in Tehran. They were interested in the power centers.

NARRATOR: And what seat of power was stronger than Mossadegh’s own home?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: They bombarded Mossadegh’s home and then mobs came in, looted the place. Mossadegh was able to escape to a neighboring place, a house.

NARRATOR: In the midst of the siege, Mossadegh and 15 of his colleagues fled, climbing over a wall and into a neighboring house. In the chaos of his escape, the Iranian leader gashed his head open. The brutal bombardment lasted for many hours. The wounded prime minister communicated with go-betweens for both sides. But, according to Ervand, he never called on his supporters to go out and fight on his behalf.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Whether it was he didn't want bloodshed or whether he felt that there was no chance of basically fighting the tanks, it's not clear what the reason was. He refused to call his supporters into the streets.

NARRATOR: Eventually, he resigned himself to the inevitable, and gave himself up to General Zahedi.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Then he was arrested, put in prison, and then put on trial a few months later.

NARRATOR: Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Iran’s new leadership got off to a rather rocky start.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: The Shah at that time was in Rome. He took a few days to fly back to Tehran. And here is a significant sort of symbolic picture: When he comes back to Tehran, he sees Nassiri, Colonel Nassiri, who had been the head of the Imperial Guards there, grinning and happy to meet him. He sees that on him is this insignia of a general. And the Shah says, “Who made you a general?” He said, “Of course, Zahedi.” He says, “Zahedi has no business making you a general. Only I can make you a general.” So here the Shah is already on day one of his return very keen on preserving his special turf, the military turf.

NARRATOR: Alas, the Shah didn’t much care for the Westerners’ pick for prime minister. He never trusted Zahedi.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He tolerated Zahedi while he was negotiating with the oil companies about nationalizing the oil industry, returning the oil companies [to] a consortium. And once that was done, the Shah then engineered Zahedi's removal. And when Zahedi was forced to resign, he had a meeting with the Shah and he said, ”When should I leave Iran?” And the Shah looks at his watch and says, “As soon as possible.” 

NARRATOR:  As for Mossadegh: after he was released from prison, he lived under house arrest until his death, 13 years later. Already a popular politician during his prime ministership, Mossadegh is now seen in some circles as a martyr for his cause. And he seemed to know that would one day be the case. In fact, according to The New York Times, upon his arrest, he reportedly said: “The verdict of this court has increased my historical glories. I am extremely grateful you convicted me.” You don’t have to be a historian to know that much has changed in Iran since 1953. But Ervand argues that the die was cast on that night in August when two Western powers ousted the country’s democratically elected leader. Even with a loyalist Prime Minister like Zahedi augmenting his power, the Shah never truly received the legitimacy he craved.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: I think the long-term ramifications, which neither the British or the Americans were officially willing to admit, is the coup really undermined the legitimacy of not only the monarchy but also the constitutional monarchy in Iran. So after ‘53, the Shah had tight control, basically through a police state and, a military state. What he tried to do was to get other forms of legitimacy. 

NARRATOR: The Shah attempted a set of land reforms that backfired miserably. He also tried to elevate his status by promoting the idea of Iran’s long monarchical history with a celebration in Persepolis - at a time when the economy had stagnated, people were starving, and the idea of a big party was not well-received. Ervand says that when, in 1978, Iran erupted into revolution, the sea change was a direct consequence of the events of 1953. Of course, it was an Islamist, not communist, revolution that rocked the nation. It wasn’t until 60 years later that the US formally acknowledged its role in overthrowing Mossadegh. The country still places blame on the specter of communism. Ervand remains unconvinced. And as for Britain?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: They won't comment on the coup although there are some leaks, memoirs and leaks, an interview with Norman Darbyshire about the coup. But officially the British position is to remain mum.

NARRATOR: Ervand says there was a concerted, engineered effort on the part of the British not to let the facts of the coup be seen or revealed. But to someone who’s spent his life poring over leaks, memoirs, and other documents, the denial seems almost absurd. Which brings us back to Kermit Roosevelt.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Kermit Roosevelt was allowed to publish his memoirs, even though the CIA did everything to stop it.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1979, Roosevelt told the Los Angeles Times that he’d decided to write a book about the coup in consultation with the Shah. He reportedly said to the shah, “You know, there is an awful lot being published about you now. None of it is true, and it is not doing any good. What about my telling the real story?” The CIA was not thrilled at the prospect of a tell-all. But declassified documents now show that Roosevelt made changes to the book at the Agency’s request, and the CIA considered the manuscript that went to press ‘a work of fiction’. The real story is out there, Ervand says, you just have to keep your eyes open.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN:  In 1978, when the Iranian revolution was in full swing, there was a Labour Party conference, and one Labour Party member, I think he was a member of Parliament, sent a memo to the Foreign Office saying, “There's an Iranian here who claims that the ‘53 coup was engineered by the MI6. Is there any information about this?” So the Foreign Office sends a young intern to go through the files and to see what they have. And the young intern comes back and says, “I can't find anything about the coup in our records.” He didn't actually read between the lines carefully enough.

NARRATOR:  You can learn more about this story in Ervand Abrahamian’s book The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations. I’m Sophia Di Martino. Join us next week for a deep dive into the tradecraft of some of the world’s most successful - and most formidable - spies.