Iran’s 1953 Coup Couldn’t Have Happened Without the United States

The August 1953 coup in Iran is traditionally seen as the most significant episodes of the early Cold War, a landmark in U.S. covert interventions in the Global South, and a watershed moment in the political history of modern Iran. While the United States supported the operation to unseat prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and replace him with a new government led by Iran’s shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, revisionist scholars such as historian Ray Takeyh and Darioush Bayandor, a former Iranian diplomat, argue that it was primarily an Iranian affair, with the U.S. playing as secondary or, in some accounts, a negligible role.

It is true that Mosaddeq would not have fallen from power without actions undertaken by Iranians. But it is misleading to elide the U.S. role in the coup, the memory of which continues to continues to haunt U.S.-Iran relations. Even more importantly, the United States played a major role in stabilizing the shah’s post-coup regime. Focusing on the events of August 19 alone obscures Washington’s ultimate aims with the coup: the return of Iran’s oil resources to foreign control, an objective the United States achieved roughly one year after Mosaddeq’s dramatic fall from power.

Following the discovery of oil in 1908, the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, later renamed British Petroleum, or BP) operated Iran’s oil industry, enjoying almost complete autonomy and sharing little of the resulting wealth with Iran’s government. In April 1951, Iran’s parliament nominated nationalist leader to be the country’s new prime minister. Once in power, Mosaddeq nationalized the country’s British-owned oil industry, promising an end to years of foreign interference in domestic Iranian politics. The nationalization set off an international crisis, with the British government arguing Iran’s action was illegal and placing a blockade on Iran’s oil exports.

The United States supported the British argument but was worried about Iran’s internal stability. The British blockade, enforced with the cooperation of major U.S. oil companies, squeezed Iran’s economy and drained Mosaddeq’s finances. Concerned that such an “oil-less” state would lead Iran to ruin and eventual communist rule, the United States spent two years trying to get Mosaddeq to agree to proposals that would leave Iranian oil in the hands of Western corporations.

But Mosaddeq would not surrender control of Iran’s oil industry, even if it meant the immiseration of his government. To end the dispute, reverse nationalization, and preserve Iran from communism, the United States resolved in early 1953 to remove Mosaddeq from power and replace him with a new prime minister, former general Fazlollah Zahedi, with support from the shah.

The United States and Britain both played a critical role in making the coup possible. The United States supplied funds and constructed a secretariat to coordinate members of Iran’s military who backed the shah over Mosaddeq. The British utilized their wide-ranging intelligence network, which included prominent clerics, businessmen, and politicians. The critical U.S. contribution was convincing the reluctant shah to take part, as this granted the operation a degree of constitutional legitimacy. Acting through several intermediaries, including the shah’s twin sister and former military advisor Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the United States sent assurances to the shah that he would receive U.S. support once he assumed power and that the nationalization crisis would be resolved on terms favorable to Iran. While powerful factions on Iran’s political scene wanted Mosaddeq gone, repeated efforts to push him out had failed due to a lack of organization. The United States and Britain provided the funding and coordination that facilitated the successful coup on Aug. 19, 1953.

Though the operation was a success, Iran’s government required further assistance from the United States. The first and most immediate need was financial: The Eisenhower administration approved $45 million in emergency aid to help the shah and Zahedi cover the state budget in 1953 and 1954. Over the next decade, the United States would provide Iran $800 million in economic and military assistance. Leaving these sums out of the total calculation of costs for the coup—which on its own cost less than $5 million—obscures the importance of such aid, both for the United States and for the shah.

Other assistance was less material but no less significant. The CIA helped the government round up and detain thousands of communists and leftists, including prominent members of Mosaddeq’s government. The agency’s connections to the powerful Qashqai tribe, one-time allies to Mosaddeq who had opposed the shah, helped the new government defuse a tense showdown between armed tribesmen and military forces in Iran’s southern provinces. The CIA also assisted the shah with rigged elections in early 1954, purging prominent nationalists from political power and reducing the country’s parliament to a rubber-stamp committee. The U.S. ambassador suggested that “an undemocratic independent Iran” would be preferable to an Iran “behind” the “Iron Curtain.”

Declassified documents also indicate that the United States supported the shah, rather than prime minister Zahedi, in the aftermath of the coup. Prior to August 1953, most U.S. officials had expressed middling support for Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, regarding him as a weak and indecisive ruler, and on at least one occasion suggesting that he abdicate in favor of one of his brothers. But the monarch returned from a brief exile in August and quickly asserted personal control over the government and military. When Zahedi, who had his own ambitions, turned to the United States for help, he was rebuffed. He slipped into a secondary role and was ousted by the shah in 1955. Officials in Washington warmed to the shah and supported the extension of “his personal hold over the people,” in the belief that it would help solidify Iran’s pro-Western strategic alignment, thus laying the foundation for the shah’s subsequent dominance of Iran’s political system.

Stabilizing the shah’s government was the short-term objective, but the larger U.S. goal was pushing through a new oil agreement, both to return Iranian oil to the market and to ensure a stream of revenue for the shah’s cash-strapped government. The shah opposed any deal that reversed nationalization, for fear of the political repercussions, but acknowledged the need for an agreement to secure additional financial support from the United States. Moreover, the shah hoped to earn money from Iran’s oil production—an interest he would maintain throughout his entire reign—and for that to happen, Iran would need a new agreement with the Western corporations, as they controlled both the price and major markets for petroleum.

The final terms of the agreement were reached in August 1954. They reflected the U.S. desire for a “partial negation of nationalization.” While a semblance of nationalization was preserved, in reality the agreement “denationalized” Iran’s industry and put Western corporations back in control. This control would last, in one form or another, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the shah’s fall from power.

The legacy of the coup remains a complicated one, disputed among both scholars and Iranians seventy years later. Understanding the events of August 1953, and the precise degree of foreign involvement, remains difficult given the continued paucity of documentary evidence. As with many covert operations, there is much we do not know—and may never know—about the coup to overthrow Mosaddeq.

Yet without U.S. involvement, driven by policies influenced both by Cold War strategic concerns and a desire to control the oil of the Global South, the coup against Mosaddeq would not have occurred. The post-coup government would have struggled with greater instability, and it is unlikely it would have successfully come to terms with the international oil companies on a settlement resolving the nationalization crisis. The United States did not orchestrate or control events, but it did play an outsized role in facilitating the ultimate outcome, and it got the results it wanted for decades afterward.