Operation Ajax

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Background

In March 1951, after a sustained crisis over the position of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the Iranian economy, the Iranian Majlis voted to nationalise the company's assets. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the leader of the National Front coalition that had pushed the nationalisation through, was sworn in as Prime Minister on 28 April 1951. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which the British Government held a controlling stake, had since 1909 paid Iran a royalty on extracted oil that successive Iranian governments characterised as inadequate; Mosaddegh's nationalisation programme made the recovery of Iranian oil a central element of his political programme.¹

The British Government's response combined diplomatic pressure, an oil embargo against Iran, and the pursuit of legal remedies — first through the United Nations Security Council and then the International Court of Justice (which ruled in July 1952 that it lacked jurisdiction). When economic and legal measures failed, the British Government turned to covert action. The Secret Intelligence Service had developed working contacts among Iranian politicians, military officers, religious figures, and the influential Rashidian brothers — Asadollah, Saifollah, and Qodratollah Rashidian — whom SIS had recruited and paid since the 1940s.²

The British proposal for an SIS-led coup was rejected by the Truman Administration. With the January 1953 transition to the Eisenhower Administration, the position changed. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the new Director of Central Intelligence, proved receptive to British proposals for a joint Anglo-American operation. SIS station chief Christopher Montague Woodhouse travelled to Washington in November 1952 to brief CIA officials; over the following months, the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt Jr. — grandson of Theodore Roosevelt — and SIS officers developed a joint operation.³

The Operation

The operation was given the code names TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by the SIS. Its plan, approved by President Eisenhower in early 1953 and by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, called for a combination of paid-protest action, paid-press action, paid-cleric action, military pressure, and the manipulation of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to issue royal decrees (firmans) dismissing Mosaddegh and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as Prime Minister.⁴

Kermit Roosevelt entered Iran clandestinely on 19 July 1953, taking control of the joint operation from a base in the embassy compound. The operation's first phase — between 1 and 18 August 1953 — produced the Shah's reluctant signature of the firmans dismissing Mosaddegh and appointing Zahedi, the failed initial delivery of the firmans on 16 August, and the Shah's flight to Baghdad and onward to Rome. With the operation appearing to have failed, CIA headquarters sent a cable suggesting Roosevelt withdraw; Roosevelt elected to continue on his own initiative.⁵

The operation's second phase — on 19 August 1953 — involved paid demonstrators recruited from south Tehran, including from the Sha'aban Jafari group of strongmen, who took to the streets simultaneously with religious and political crowds opposed to Mosaddegh. The crowds, joined progressively by Iranian Army units, fought through Tehran. Mosaddegh's house was attacked; Zahedi appeared on Iranian state radio that afternoon to announce the new government. By the evening of 19 August, Mosaddegh had surrendered to the new authorities.⁶

The Shah returned from Rome to Tehran on 22 August. Mosaddegh was tried by a military court, convicted, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment followed by internal exile to his estate at Ahmadabad, where he remained until his death in 1967. The leadership of the Tudeh Party of Iran and other figures associated with Mosaddegh's government were arrested, prosecuted, and in some cases executed in subsequent purges.⁷

Disclosure

The basic outline of the operation became publicly known relatively quickly through journalism and memoir. Kermit Roosevelt's own published account, Countercoup (1979), provided substantial first-hand detail; SIS officer Christopher Montague Woodhouse's Something Ventured (1982) provided the British side. The CIA's own detailed internal history — Donald Wilber's Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952 – August 1953 — was leaked to the New York Times in April 2000 and published in substantial portions; an additional portion was officially declassified by the CIA in 2011. A more comprehensive CIA acknowledgment came in August 2013, when the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a CIA internal history confirming the Agency's role.⁸

The British Government has been substantially more reluctant to acknowledge the SIS role. The official British position for several decades was that operational details remained subject to the Service's standing policy of not commenting on operations. The 2010 publication of Keith Jeffery's MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 — the only authorised SIS history — addressed the institutional context; the post-1949 specifically including Operation Boot has been the subject of substantial subsequent academic accounts including Stephen Dorril's MI6 (2000) and Ervand Abrahamian's The Coup (2013).⁹

Legacy

The 1953 coup has been characterised by a substantial proportion of the academic literature on US-Iranian relations as the formative event of the post-1953 Iranian-Western relationship — the proximate cause, in this account, of the Iranian revolutionary movement that overthrew the Shah twenty-six years later. The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent November 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran were articulated by Iranian revolutionary figures in language that explicitly invoked the 1953 coup; Ayatollah Khomeini's denunciations of the United States referred frequently to the 1953 events.¹⁰

For US-Iranian relations specifically, the 1953 events have remained politically alive across more than seven decades. President Barack Obama's June 2009 Cairo speech directly acknowledged that "in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government" — the first such acknowledgment by a sitting US President. Successive US-Iranian negotiations across the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action period (2013–2018) and beyond have been shaped by the historical context.¹¹

For the institutional history of the CIA and SIS, Operation Ajax established the post-1953 model of joint Anglo-American covert action that produced operations including PBSUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954, support for opposition movements in Iran in subsequent decades, and the broader pattern of Western covert intervention. The internal CIA history's lessons-learned analysis identified the operation as a paradigmatic success and shaped Agency operational doctrine for decades.¹²

Related agencies

This operation is documented in detail on the agency pages of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Secret Intelligence Service. It is referenced on the country pages for the United States, the United Kingdom, and on the broader Iranian intelligence-history context relevant to Iran.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Mark J. Gasiorowski, "The 1953 Coup d'État Against Mosaddeq," in Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (eds.), Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse UP, 2004); Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New Press, 2013).
2. Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (Free Press, 2000), chapter 30.
3. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, Something Ventured (Granada, 1982); James Risen, "Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran," New York Times, 16 April 2000.
4. Donald N. Wilber, Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952 – August 1953 (CIA, March 1954) — National Security Archive declassified release; additional portions released through CIA declassification in 2011.
5. Wilber, Clandestine Service History, op. cit.; Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (McGraw-Hill, 1979) — with subsequent withdrawal of the first edition at the request of British Petroleum and amendment of certain passages.
6. Wilber, op. cit.; Gasiorowski, "The 1953 Coup d'État," op. cit.
7. Abrahamian, The Coup; Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (I.B. Tauris, 1999).
8. National Security Archive, "CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup," 19 August 2013, with publication of declassified CIA internal histories.
9. Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (Bloomsbury, 2010); Dorril, MI6; Abrahamian, The Coup.
10. Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford UP, 1988); Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge UP, 2008).
11. President Barack Obama, "Remarks by the President on a New Beginning," Cairo University, 4 June 2009.
12. Wilber, Clandestine Service History; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2004), opening sections on CIA covert-action doctrine.