Iran 1953: How Britain and the CIA Use Covert Operations to Overthrew a Country to Keep Its Oil

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:25:15 +0200

In 1953, Britain and the CIA orchestrated one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history — the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. His crime? Nationalizing Iran's oil industry and demanding that his country's most valuable resource belong to its own people.
What followed was a masterclass in imperial manipulation: economic warfare, naval blockades, propaganda campaigns, bribed journalists, paid mobs, and a rogue CIA operative who ignored direct orders to abort the mission. The operation destroyed Iran's democracy, installed an authoritarian monarch backed by a brutal secret police, and set in motion a chain of events that led directly to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the hostage crisis, and decades of hostility between Iran and the West that continues to this day.
This is the full story — from the exploitative oil concession of 1901 that handed nearly half a million square miles of Persian territory to a single British financier, to the boardrooms of BP and the backrooms of the CIA, to the tanks rolling through the streets of Tehran. It's a story about oil, power, and what happens when a nation's sovereignty stands in the way of corporate profits.
The CIA didn't publicly acknowledge its role for 60 years. This video explains why.
Sources and further reading:
— "All the Shah's Men" by Stephen Kinzer
— Declassified CIA documents on Operation TPAJAX (National Security Archive, George Washington University)
— "Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran" by Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne
— Britannica: 1953 Coup in Iran
— Council on Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Iran Timeline
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