Operation Ajax (Declassified in 2013 / censored in 2012?) was a covert operation by the US and British intelligence agencies to topple Iran’s first democratically-elected government and replace it with a controlled dictatorship by posing as communists to plant bombs and threaten Iranians opposed to democratically elected people who didn’t support Mohammad Mossadegh. It was also retaliation for the 1951 strike and revolt of the Iranians against BP Oil and to keep Iran from remaining as a nationalized oil producer. The operation included false-flag terror that resulted in the deaths of some 300 people. In the end, BP regained its old power in Iran with a new corrupt and vicious dictator, the Shah, who was also controlled by the global elite.
The declassified document shows that:
- In 1951, Iranians revolted against BP Oil due to wage conflicts and decide to nationalize their oil. The British Navy blockaded the ports and confiscated any oil that left the ports.
- The CIA stepped in and payed off members of parliament and Army officers to help with the operation.
- AJAX was headed by CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of former President Teddy Roosevelt,
- Britain, fearful of Iran’s plans to nationalize its oil industry, came up with the idea for the coup in 1952 and pressed the United States to mount a joint operation to remove the prime minister.
- The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi’s regime two days after the coup prevailed.
- Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric’s home in a campaign to turn the country’s Islamic religious community against Mossadegh’s government.
- Democrat Generals, Nationalist, and Communist were shot and killed and Iran was submerged by fear.
- The shah’s cowardice nearly killed the C.I.A. operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign C.I.A.-written royal decrees to change the government. The agency arranged for the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Desert Storm commander, to act as intermediaries to try to keep him from wilting under pressure. He still fled the country just before the coup succeeded.
The publication under the US Freedom of Information Act came as something of a surprise, since most of the materials and records of the 1953 coup were believed to have been destroyed by the CIA, the Archive said. The CIA said at time that its “safes were too full.”
Like so many other covert and false-flag operations, Operation Ajax remained shrouded in mystery for years. The CIA coup was engineered by a CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Capitalizing on the oil-nationalization showdown between Iran and Great Britain, which had thrown Iran into chaos and crisis, Kermit Roosevelt skillfully used a combination of bribery of Iranian military officials and CIA-engendered street protests to pull off the coup.
The first attempted coup failed after Mossadegh got wind of the conspiracy, but American and British intelligence services in Iran then improvised a second stage of the coup, pulling pro-Shah forces together and organizing mass protests on August 19, 1953. These protests were immediately supported by army and police. Mossadegh’s house was destroyed after a prolonged assault by pro-coup forces, including several tanks.
However, in the second stage of the coup a few days later, the CIA achieved its goal, enabling the shah to return to Iran in triumph … and with a subsequent 25-year, U.S.-supported dictatorship, which included one of the world’s most terrifying and torturous secret police, the Savak.
Mossadegh was replaced with Iranian general Fazlollah Zahedi, who was handpicked by MI6 and the CIA. Mossaddegh was later sentenced to death, but the Shah never dared to carry out the sentence. Mossadegh died in his residence near Tehran in 1967.
For years, the U.S. government, including the CIA, kept what it had done in Iran secret from the American people and the world, although the Iranian people long suspected CIA involvement. U.S. officials, not surprisingly, considered the operation one of their greatest foreign-policy successes … until, that is, the enormous convulsion that rocked Iranian society with the violent ouster of the shah and the installation of a virulently anti-American Islamic regime in 1979.
It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of anger and hatred that the Iranian people had for the U.S. government in 1979, not only because their world-famous democratically elected prime minister had been ousted by the CIA but also for having had to live for the following 25 years under a brutal and torturous dictatorship, a U.S.-government-supported dictatorship that also offended many Iranians with its policies of Westernization. In fact, the reason that the Iranian students took control of the U.S. embassy after the violent ouster of the shah in 1979 was their genuine fear that the U.S. government would repeat what it had done in 1953.
