Iran, 1953: Eisenhower, Churchill, Mosaddegh

In discussing the history of US-Iran relations in the context of the current war, many media accounts go back as far as the upheavals of 1979—the overthrowing of the Shah, the installation of an Islamist regime, and the American embassy hostage crisis. Few, sad to say, go back as far as upheavals of 1952-53—the nationalization of the oil industry by Iran’s democratically elected government, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh; the attempts by Winston Churchill’s British government to persuade the US to help them overthrow that government; and the overthrow itself. In the October 9, 1953 entry in his diary, American President Dwight Eisenhower reflected on the nature of what his government (together with Churchill’s government) had done:

The things we did were “covert.” If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances [of doing] anything of like nature in the future would almost completely disappear.

Knowledge of what they had done did eventually become public, and historians are nowadays all in agreement as to the basic facts. The summary in Brittanica says it well enough:

In 1951 … the Iranian parliament, led by Mosaddegh’s nationalist and democratically elected government, voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry. Seeing its interests thus threatened, the UK embarked on a secret campaign to weaken and destabilize Mosaddegh. At first the British government tried to convince the shah to remove Mosaddegh from office by engineering a parliamentary decree, a ploy that both failed and enhanced Mosaddegh’s reputation while diminishing the shah’s. When the push to remove Mosaddegh evolved into the idea of a coup to overthrow the government, Britain, reluctant to shoulder the responsibility alone, persuaded the U.S. to join forces by playing on Cold War fears that Mosaddegh, an avowed anticommunist, was aligning himself with Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party.

The United States took the leading role in a covert operation, called Operation Ajax, whereby CIA-funded agents were used to foment unrest inside Iran by way of the harassment of religious and political leaders and a media disinformation campaign. These efforts, formally approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to a head in August 1953 when Mosaddegh and his government were overthrown and Mohammad Reza, a pro-Western monarch, was returned to power.

It’s no wonder that resentment of America runs deep in Iran.

An interesting footnote to all this is how Churchill has almost entirely escaped blame for his part in the coup. Notice in the Brittanica summary that Eisenhower is named, but Churchill isn’t; that omission is entirely typical of most accounts of the coup. The American presidents who appear in the standard narrative (Truman, and then Eisenhower) are identified by name, but the British Prime Minister is not. In this as in a number of other respects (notably, the Bengal famine of 1943, in which Churchill withheld relief supplies in a famine that killed millions), Churchill remains history’s Teflon leader, remembered above all for the undeniable greatness of his leadership in 1940, while somehow sloughing off any close association with less flattering episodes.