Lounging on his perch by the swimming pool, the spy who hoped to save the Emperor was waiting for the coup de état he had authored to be performed. “There being nothing meaningful to confer about,” Central Intelligence Agency officer Kermit ‘Kim’ Roosevelt later recorded of those last days and hours, “we had another vodka and lime and played the record of ‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight’ from Guys and Dolls.” Early on the morning of 16 August 1953, the radio came alive with military music. Then, the voice of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh came on air: Kim’s coup had failed, and Emperor Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had fled the country for Baghdad, and then Rome.
For many in Iran, the savage American-Israeli campaign to obliterate the country’s theocratic regime will seem strangely familiar. Ever since 1923—when England’s General Edmund Ironside engineered the seizure of power by his protege, Brigadier Reza Khan of the Persian Cossack Brigade—imperial powers deposed Iran’s rulers more or less on will.
The soldier-turned-emperor was expelled from Iran in August 1941, when the Soviet Union and Great Britain occupied Iran—sweeping aside the military and secret police on whom more than half the country’s revenues had been spent. Following his father’s exile, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was placed on the throne, narrowly surviving the events of 1963 with the help of the CIA and British intelligence.
Each time, empires cast their regime-change operations as benevolent actions, designed to protect Iran’s people and the global order. They succeeded in embedding despotism at the heart of the country’s politics and civic life.
Also read: Khamenei’s assassination—what did US achieve by ripping up international law
Empire and terror
Long buried in the bowels of the British Ministry of Defence, a top-secret minute records just how nuclear terror came to Iran. The clerics knew nothing of it: Late in 1955, the United Kingdom firmed up plans, together with the United States, to destroy oilfields in Iran using nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion. The minute accepts that the use of nuclear bombs would cause “irreparable damage”, so severe that any approach made to national governments would be “at present politically unacceptable.” The note proposed, instead, to work with British and American-controlled oil firms.
Enabled by the services of Winston Churchill as a highly-paid lobbyist, Burmah Oil’s subsidiary Anglo-Persian Oil had obtained exclusive rights over Iran’s oil in 1923. Iran’s politicians had pushed back against what they argued was foreign exploitation.
The grant of special economic privileges to foreign powers had long been a fraught issue in Iran. Large-scale protests against King Naser al-Din Shah’s grant of a tobacco monopoly to the British in 1891 had been a key moment in the rise of Iranian nationalism. And in 1951, Prime Minister General Ali Razmara—hand-picked by the British—was assassinated by the religious-fundamentalist terrorist group Fidayin-e-Islam, after he tried to secure better terms for Anglo-Persian Oil than had been secured by companies in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
Following the rise of Mossadegh’s nationalist government after the assassination, the Iranian government announced the nationalisation of Anglo-Persian Oil, which was renamed as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British government went to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court, however, held in a landmark judgment that Iranian national law applied to disputes between the country’s government and private-sector entities.
The British responded with an embargo on Iran’s oil, which cut it off from the global market—a punitive means the US also repeatedly unleashed after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The British Secret Intelligence Service responded to the country’s defeat in the ICJ by proposing a covert action to overthrow the Mossadegh government. The CIA’s classified history of the operation states that plans were drawn up at Larnaca by the two intelligence services in the summer of 1953—just a year after the ICJ judgment.
Following the firming-up of the plans, the CIA and SIS worked together to recruit the conspirators. These efforts were not always successful: The Emperor’s sister came on board in return for a mink coat and a wad of banknotes, but failed to get Mohammad Reza to sign off on documents dismissing Mossadegh.
Cash-for-coups
The CIA coup ended in failure, betrayed to Mossadegh by agents of Iran’s communist party, Tudeh. The cash injected by the CIA, however, ensured that the plans continued to have momentum. Four days after Mossadegh came on the radio to denounce the coup, General Fazlollah Zahedi led a second coup, helped along by CIA agents Ali Jalali and Farug Kayvani, as well as their SIS counterparts Khusrow Khan Qashqai and his brother Malik Mansoor Khan. The brothers, the American official history of the period states, secured support from Iranian garrison commanders against Mossadegh for $5 million.
From declassified documents, it is clear that at least some cash made its way to influential clerics, too. A British account refers to the anti-Mossadegh Ayatollah Mir Muhammad Behbahani receiving bribes from the CIA in return for bringing out crowds of protestors. Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani also played a key role in the protests, though there is no documentary evidence that he was paid.
LP Elwell-Sutton, a British scholar, wryly explained why America and the UK seemed to have no moral qualms about their enterprise: “Really, it seemed hardly fair that dignified and correct Western statesmanship should be defeated by the antics of incomprehensible orients.” A 1998 official study by CIA historian Scott Koch observed that Mossadegh found the British comprehensible. “They sully everything they touch,” he told American diplomat Averell Harriman.
Also read: Regime change is a pipe dream. A stress test on Iran is what we’ve got so far
A grim legacy
For the most part, these events played to a well-established template. The democratic revolution of 1905-1911 led to the formation of the first constitutional government in the Middle East. The constitutionalists, historian Ali Ansari has written, succeeded in defending themselves against the absolutist monarch Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar. The new order, though, was dismantled by the united effort of France, Britain and Russia, who enabled an occupation of Tabriz by the Tsarist military. The occupation was marketed as a response to the lack of democracy and state weakness—but in fact undermined progress toward just those ends, scholar Keyhan Nejad notes.
The joint occupation of Iran by the Soviet Union and the UK in 1941, similarly, was justified as necessary to prevent threats from Nazi Germany, which were in fact a shambolic failure. The need to protect Iran from communist influence was used to legitimise the coup of 1953; The CIA did not seem to care that General Zahedi had earlier been an advocate for Nazi Germany.
Little imagination is needed to understand the consequences: The brutalities inflicted on Iran’s people under the Shah led many to turn to the anti-democratic and illiberal politics of the clerics who captured power in 1979. Even though the clerics were to prove at least as authoritarian and brutal as their predecessors, they offered the simulacrum of national sovereignty, if not the real thing.
Little credibility remains in Western claims on Iran, because of its less-than-edifying track record. That includes its handling of nuclear issues. In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear research reactor at Osirak. British classified investigations made clear Iraq had no weapons programme, and had complied with international inspection requirements for its reactor.
There was no threat from Iraq in 2002, either. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s determination that the country’s nuclear-weapons programme had been dismantled a decade earlier was ignored.
From the century of imperial regime change, Iran’s rulers learned that nuclear bombs were a critical tool of survival. The pursuit of the bomb, after all, was put in place not by the clerics, but the Shah. After 9/11, hoping to avoid a showdown, Iran began providing intelligence on the Taliban and al-Qaeda to the US. Then, in 2003, Tehran conveyed an offer for talks with the US through Swiss diplomats in Tehran. “The Bush administration, full of hubris after the quick overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam, didn’t respond,” Barbara Slavin notes.
The lessons of the Iraq War, and earlier American regime-change efforts, should be obvious. The dismantling of Iran’s regime could unravel the country’s complex ethnic and religious mosaic, leading to the breakdown of state authority and the rise of warlords. This might not concern Israel or the US—but will have hideous consequences for the country’s people as well as neighbouring states like the Persian Gulf monarchies and Saudi Arabia.
“Any Iranian government, this one or a successor, revolutionary or pro-Western, faces a nuclear-armed adversary in Israel and the United States that has now twice struck Iranian territory in a single year,” former diplomat Nima Germani argues. Each war might inflict hideous costs on Iran and its people, but it is also a compelling argument for the country’s leaders to seek nuclear weapons.
Each imperial act through the last century was intended to produce a compliant, powerless Iran. The policy has instead made the country a cradle for monsters.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)