Seventy years ago last Saturday, a popular uprising drove the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq out of office—four days after he had legally been dismissed from his position by the shah. In the West, the event has been remembered as an anti-democratic coup orchestrated by the CIA (whose station chief, Kermit Roosevelt, was all-too-eager to exaggerate his role) to subvert democracy in Persia. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went so far as to apologize for U.S. involvement in 2000. Shay Khatiri set the record straight in a 2020 essay:
It is true that Mosaddeq’s ascendance to the premiership, on April 28, 1951, was initially democratic. . . . As he was empowered to do, Mosaddeq [thereafter] dissolved the Iranian Senate. Later, he called for a referendum to dissolve the Majlis, or lower house, as well. He had been warned that the assembly would grant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the right to replace him. He had made the same point previously in a letter to the shah.
Nevertheless, Mosaddeq went ahead. He believed that the shah did “not have the guts” to replace him. His initiative, under questionable voting circumstances, won with 99 percent of the vote. At that point, Mosaddeq began to rule by decree. The shah, however, did have the guts to replace him—and did so. On August 15, 1953, he issued orders removing Mosaddeq and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. Nematollah Nassiri, an army colonel, brought a copy of the royal order to Mosaddeq.
Here is where the actual coup took place. Although the shah’s order was legal by his own admission, Mosaddeq refused it, and arrested Nassiri. He then encouraged an uprising by nationalists, Islamists, and Communists against the shah, who left Iran out of concern for his safety.
There followed a popular uprising in support of the Shah. It caught everybody, including the monarch and the U.S. government, by surprise. . . . Following these pro-shah demonstrations, the CIA reconsidered reinstating the monarch. State Department cables show that the U.S. clandestine operation mainly involved directing ongoing protests on the national radio.
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More about: Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, Shah, U.S. Foreign policy