The ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 as part of an Anglo-American conspiracy is perhaps the darkest chapter in the murky history of Britain’s involvement in the Persian Gulf. Mossadegh had upset Winston Churchill by nationalising the country’s oil industry, from which the UK profited hugely, as well as having access to a steady supply of fuel. The company withdrew all its staff and their dependents from Abadan, bringing production to a sudden halt, and once the Iranians had got things working again sabotage came into play. Although a scion of a noble family, Mossadegh was essentially a reformist liberal, who wanted to further democratise the country following his election in 1951 and to reduce the immense gap between the rich and poor. For this he was branded a socialist, even a Communist fellow-traveller, by the West, which wanted to prop up the young and ineffectual Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Time Magazine nonetheless saw fit to make Mossadegh its Man of the Year in 1952. Despite flattering the Shah, the British colonial mentality prevalent at the time looked down on ordinary Iranians as uncivilised wogs (sic). The British were keen for US help to slap Mossadegh down, but President Harry S Truman was reluctant. However, the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, with Allen Dulles as the first civilian Head of Intelligence, gave Churchill the backing he wanted. From now on the CIA would be working hand-in-hand with MI6, dishing out large amounts of money to royalist sympathisers, including the Shah’s scheming twin sister, Ashraf, in the hope of bringing Mossadegh down.
The coup against Mossadegh came in two installments, as the first attempt to seize him from his residence backfired. Several CIA agents were ready to drop the matter then, despite the enthusiasm of the agency’s Middle East Director, Kermit Roosevelt. But the key MI6 operative in the region, Farsi-speaking Norman Darbyshire, persevered. The new loyalist police chief whom Mossadegh had appointed, Mahmoud Afshartous, was kidnapped, tortured and shot dead, his mutilated body displayed on the front pages of Iran’s daily newspapers as a brutal warning of what was to come. Paid instigators sparked mob riots in the streets, while the Shah and his Queen ran to safety in Rome for a while. The second time anti-Mossadegh army officers came for Mossadegh he could not escape. He was tried for treason, sentenced to three years in solitary confinement, after which he spent a decade under house arrest in Ahmadabad, totally cut off from the outside world. The CIA and later Israel’s Mossad meanwhile helped the Shah establish one of the most ruthless domestic security and intelligence services of the 20th Century, Savak. Hundreds of people perished in the consequent political purge. London and Washington heaved a sigh of relief; not only had a large share of Iran’s oil been retrieved for Western companies but also absolute monarchies — likewise the norm on the Arabian side of the Gulf — were saved from popular revolution. In Iran’s case that would last only until 1979, when the Islamic Revolution followed a renewed flight by the Shah, who died not long after in exile in Egypt.
The CIA has always claimed the main credit — if credit is not a grossly inappropriate word — for the 1953 coup, which was dubbed Operation Ajax (after the cleaning fluid). Emboldened by its success, successive US Presidents would later try to bring about regime change all over the developing world. But as is clear from a brilliant new documentary, Coup 53, by Iranian-born director (and physicist), Taghi Amirani, it was the British who were the real villains of the piece. Far from crowing about it, however, MI6 and parts of the Foreign Office tried to play down and even cover up the degree of UK involvement, especially the key role of Norman Darbyshire. Paradoxically, Darbyshire himself offered a remarkably frank account of his behaviour to a Granada TV film crew making a documentary about the coup in the mid-1980s. As Taghi Amirani discovered as part of his meticulous research into his own film, Darbyshire’s contribution to the Granada programme was mysteriously excised — though some of its contents were leaked to the Observer newspaper. Full details are still considered classified material. What makes Amirani’s documentary so outstanding is not only the wonderful archive material illustrating the main story of the coup, alongside a reconstruction of the Darbyshire Granada TV interview by actor Ralph Fiennes, but also the fascinating explanation of how the film itself was put together, over a period of several years. It is certainly one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen, significant both as an historical record and as a virtuoso exercise in film-making.
Jonathan Fryer 