Tehran mobs and army units seize the capital; Mosaddegh is under arrest by nightfall
For two years Mohammad Mosaddegh had defied Britain by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and by the summer of 1953 the CIA and MI6 wanted him gone. On August 19, 1953, pro-Shah military units and crowds paid with CIA funds seized key positions across Tehran. Mosaddegh was arrested that day, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had briefly fled the country, returned to the throne. Kermit Roosevelt Jr. ran the operation, called Ajax, from inside Iran itself.
This was the CIA's first successful peacetime overthrow of a foreign government, a template Allen Dulles's agency reused in Guatemala the following year. Covert regime change became standard Cold War policy long after Ajax ended, and the anti-American resentment it planted in Iran resurfaced during the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis.
QWho oversaw Operation Ajax from Washington while Roosevelt worked the ground in Tehran?
Allen Dulles ran the CIA during the operation and signed off on the plan from headquarters, which meant Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was left to improvise once the first attempt collapsed. Dulles had taken over the agency only months earlier, and Iran became an early test of how much authority he was willing to hand a field officer working without a reliable communication line back to Washington. On the British side, Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, then a housing minister who would later become prime minister himself, were both involved in the planning that fed into the CIA's operation. Macmillan's role shows how deeply the British cabinet, and not only its intelligence officers, had committed to removing Mosaddegh over the oil dispute.
QWhat name did the British give their half of the joint operation with the CIA?
British intelligence called it Operation Boot, a separate codename from the CIA's Operation Ajax, even though both referred to the same plan against Mosaddegh. The dual naming reflected how MI6 and the CIA ran the effort as a genuine partnership rather than one agency simply assisting the other, each service tracking the operation under its own internal designation. Britain's stake traced directly to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the firm Mosaddegh had nationalized two years earlier, which gave London as much motive as Washington's Cold War anxieties gave the Americans. The two-name arrangement is a small bureaucratic detail, but it confirms this was a genuinely binational covert operation, not an American project with British observers.
QHow long did the failed first attempt take to unravel before Roosevelt tried again?
Operation Ajax had already been running since July 1953 by the time the first move against Mosaddegh failed in mid-August, meaning weeks of planning collapsed almost immediately once the initial decree leaked. That failure didn't end the operation; Roosevelt kept pushing ahead with a second attempt. The interval between the botched first try and the successful second attempt was a matter of days, compressed and improvised rather than the product of a fresh planning cycle. That short turnaround is why the operation is remembered for improvisation, not for a smoothly executed plan.
