The CIA's Anti-Democratic 1953 Coup in Iran? What Nobody Tells You About America's Alleged Overthrow of the Shah's "Democratically-Elected" Prime Minister Mossadegh

 

The Iranian tragedy did not begin in 1953. It began in 1979 

Well, what do you know? Another "well-known historical fact" turns out to be nothing but fake news or, if you prefer, leftist re-writing of history. Over on X Twitter, Ole @DerCheapi has penned the post The Mossadegh-Myth: A coup that never happened. The original title in German ("Die Mossadegh-Lüge: Ein Putsch, der keiner war") calls it The Mossadegh Lie.

Some stories have been told so often that nobody asks anymore whether they are true. The story of the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh is one of them.

It goes roughly like this: In August 1953, the CIA and MI6, acting on behalf of American and British interests, overthrew Iran's democratically elected prime minister. They installed the Shah as a puppet. In doing so, they destroyed Iran's democratic future and laid the groundwork for the Islamic Revolution of 1979, for anti-Americanism, for the mullahs, for everything that has gone wrong since.

Over the past few decades, this narrative has hardened into a Western dogma. It appears in school textbooks, in mainstream American journalism, and in the memoirs of those who shaped U.S. policy. The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC (well well well) have canonized it as the original sin of Western Middle East policy. Hollywood took up the same script: Ben Affleck's Argo (2012), winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, opens with a three-minute animated prologue walking the audience through 1953 as the inciting cause of everything that followed.

 … Here in Germany, the chorus is no quieter: Olaf Scholz recently declared that the entire Iranian dilemma traces back to the British and American overthrow of Iran's democratic government, without which Iran would today be "a very successful Western country." … Even the German "Federal Agency for Civic Education "calls 1953 Iran's "primal catastrophe."

The only problem is: the story isn't true.

Not partially untrue. It isn't a matter of "needing nuance." It simply isn't true.

What Mossadegh Was Not

Let's start with the label that carries the whole thing: "democratically elected."

Mossadegh was not elected by the people. The Iranian Constitution of 1906 made no provision for the direct election of the head of government. Article 46 of the Supplementary Fundamental Laws expressly assigned the appointment and dismissal of the prime minister to the Shah. (1) Mossadegh came into office in 1951 because the Shah appointed him, following a non-binding expression of preference by parliament, in the expectation that the 69-year-old aristocrat would gracefully decline. To the Shah's surprise, he accepted.

This is the precise process that the myth sells as a "democratic election." … Mossadegh was no man of the people. He was a Qajar prince, a descendant of the dynasty that had ruled Iran into a state of chronic weakness for more than a century. Under the Qajars, Iran was not a sovereign state but an object of plunder. In 1907, the Russians and British divided the country contractually into spheres of influence; the economy had been sold off through foreign concessions; the hinterland disintegrated into the hands of local tribal chiefs and warlords; and the central government in Tehran often controlled little more than its own capital. It was precisely this disintegration that produced the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. And it was precisely those constitutionalists who, two decades later, together with Reza Khan, the future Reza Shah Pahlavi, finally toppled the Qajar dynasty in 1925. The Pahlavis, in other words, did not come to power against Iran's constitutional movement but with it, as a response to the failure of the very aristocracy from which Mossadegh hailed. His title Mossadegh ol-Saltaneh, "the one belonging to the monarch," was no nickname but a noble designation from that very order which had been overthrown.

… Anyone who declares Mossadegh the hero of Iranian democracy overlooks the irony: the man who fought the Pahlavis was a representative of precisely that old order whose removal had created the precondition for Iran ever to become a modern state at all.

What Mossadegh Did

But surely he was at least a democrat in spirit, right? A man who protected the constitution, respected parliament, preserved the institutions?

No.

In 1952, Mossadegh halted the parliamentary elections for the 17th Majles at the very moment when the number of deputies already elected was just sufficient to make parliament quorate. … he had the Majles grant him emergency powers that gave him the right to govern by decree, initially for six months and then extended by another year. He stripped the Supreme Court of its powers. He took over the Ministry of Defense personally, cut its budget by fifteen percent, dismissed 136 officers, and appointed his own nephew as deputy. …

What the CIA Did (and Didn't Do)

Now to the actual heart of the matter: did the CIA overthrow Mossadegh?

The honest answer is: no. But not because the CIA didn't try. It's because the attempt failed.

Operation TPAJAX was set in motion on August 15, 1953. Colonel Nassiri, commander of the imperial guard, brought Mossadegh the dismissal decree signed by the Shah. Mossadegh, forewarned by Tudeh contacts within the army, had Nassiri arrested. The Shah fled the country. The operation collapsed.

… Ayatollah Kashani, humiliated by Mossadegh, supplied the religious legitimation. The Tudeh Party tore down statues of the Shah, alarming the clergy, who feared a communist takeover. The bazaar shut down. The military marched. …

What Happened with the Oil

The economic argument with which the coup thesis is typically rounded out also doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The usual narrative is that the West overthrew Mossadegh in order to return nationalized Iranian oil to private, Anglo-American hands. In fact, the opposite happened. The nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was not reversed after 1953. The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), founded in 1951 under Mossadegh, remained the owner of the reserves, the facilities, and the refinery at Abadan. What changed was the form of utilization.

 … The nationalization for which Mossadegh is venerated as a martyr was thus completed not in spite of, but after, his overthrow.

Who Benefits from the Lie?

That leaves the uncomfortable question: why does this story persist so stubbornly?

Because it offers too much to too many actors to disappear.

It serves the Western left, which after Vietnam needed a vocabulary of American guilt. Iran became the canvas on which "imperialism" could be demonstrated beyond the Southeast Asian defeat. Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men (2003) even derived 9/11 from 1953, a chain of causation so absurd that it works only if no one asks any questions.

The CIA itself also profited massively from this narrative. The events surrounding 1953 were a complete success for both the West and Iran: communist influence was pushed back, looming chaos was averted, and in the following decades up to 1979, Iran experienced one of the most impressive economic developments in its history …

… It serves Western politicians who want to stage diplomacy and appeasement with Tehran as atonement for past guilt. Madeleine Albright apologized in 2000. Barack Obama repeated the legend in Cairo in 2009 and in his memoirs. John Kerry negotiated the nuclear deal with diplomats who, schooled in the language of Western self-accusation, played the Mossadegh card routinely whenever the pressure at the negotiating table grew too great.

But no one benefits from it more than the regime in Tehran itself.

Ali Khamenei is dead. The system he embodied for decades lives on, for now, as of the time of this article, and with it the function the Mossadegh myth serves for that system. As long as the world is talking about 1953, it isn't talking about 1979. As long as the supposed CIA coup is being debated, the mass executions of 1988, in which thousands of political prisoners were murdered on Khomeini's orders, are not. As long as Mohammad Reza Shah appears as an "American puppet," the Revolutionary Guards, who since 1979 have been financing terror in dozens of countries, don't have to explain themselves. As long as the West accuses itself, the regime in Tehran doesn't have to face accusation.

The legend of the coup is the most important weapon of the Islamic Republic. Not its missiles. Not its proxy militias. Not even its nuclear program.

But a story the West tells itself, and which the regime listens to, comfortably leaning back.

What This Means for Us

In January 2026, an estimated tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators died under the gunfire of their own security forces. Eyewitnesses reported hundreds of corpses in the streets. The regime shut down the internet so that the world could not watch.

In that very moment, German politicians, talk-show intellectuals, and public broadcasting correspondents were declaring that the real key to understanding Iran lay in a 73-year-old event that, in truth, did not happen the way they retell it. They did so in the conviction that they were saying something enlightened.

That is the real scandal. Not that the story is told incorrectly. But that it is told incorrectly at the very moment when the victims of this regime are dying in the streets, and that the lie covers, of all people, those who pulled the triggers.

Not merely that, but because every repetition of this lie is a slap in the face of those Iranians who, since 1979, have been tortured, hanged, and shot so that the regime can keep ruling. The Iranian tragedy did not begin in 1953. It began in 1979. 

No need to comment beyond what can be read on X. Still, what stands out for me is this sentence:

[Mossadegh's] Tudeh Party tore down statues of the Shah, alarming the clergy, who feared a communist takeover

In other words, Iranians feared, rightly or wrongly, that the "democratically-elected" PM was (like Fidel Castro six years later) a secret communist and/or, at the very least, a Moscow plant, ally, or useful idiot (if not all three). 

No matter how obscure the paths to power of people like Fidel Castro in 1959 (how about Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020?!), the Left is always claiming that (neo-)communists in power is the result of invariably democratic decisions made of, by, and for the people. 

But like in Russia in 1917 and like in all the countries of Eastern European countries — not to mention China — in the eight years prior to 1953, the election of a communist was, or was supposed to be, the very last time there were elections in the respective nation — before a campaign of persecution set in.

Once again, the Left's insistence on American guilt (and the attendant need for its citizens to feel the deepest shame possible) is based on exaggerated or on (outright) fake news…