Seeds of Today’s Middle East Disaster Were Sown by the CIA | Opinion

Seventy-one years ago this week, a pair of energetic American brothers carried out a plan to overthrow a pesky Middle Eastern government, setting in motion a chain of events that has the region on the cusp of all-out war. The convoluted tale offers a clear illustration of a truism we tend to ignore: Beware most of all the consequences that are unintended.
In the summer of 1953, the target of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, was Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran’s oil industry. It was a popular move that was part of a broader effort to assert Iranian sovereignty and please Iranians frustrated with foreign control of their resources.
Indeed, while Mossadegh was not exactly a democrat by today’s standards, his rise was something of a democratic dawn. He had been elected by Iran’s parliament, which was itself elected (albeit only by men who were members of the country’s economic elite).
He set about reforming the system to diminish the power of the pro-Western head of state, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been in power for just a decade and was the latest incarnation of centuries of monarchic rule. Having come of age in World War II, the “Shah of Iran” was mindful of the preferences of the victors, chiefly the United States and Britain, and knew well that they preferred their oil close at hand.
As the government seized more and more of the shah’s authority, he attempted to dismiss Mossadegh through a royal decree—but the premier refused to step down, leading to a political crisis. Fearing for his safety, the shah fled Iran, going first to Baghdad and then to Rome, leaving Mossadegh briefly fully in charge.
Enter the brothers Dulles, aided by Britain’s spy agency, MI6. Only declassified in recent years, their Operation Ajax included all the hallmarks: Psychological warfare, bribes, orchestrated street protests and dark propaganda warnings of a world where the Soviet Union could gain a foothold in the oil-rich Middle East if Mossadegh’s nationalist agenda prevailed.
The effort began in earnest on Aug. 15, 1953, and reached its climax four days later when pro-shah forces stormed Mossadegh’s residence, leading to his arrest. The shah was reinstated with U.S. and British backing, his return celebrated with orchestrated jubilation.
The shah ruled for a quarter century more, and he was a modernizer like his father, Reza Shah. Iran under his rule because reasonably advanced and wealthy and benefited not only from great ties from the West but—in a reality that may seem incredible today—with the young state of Israel, too. It was not unheard of for mixed Israeli-Iranian couples to live in either country, and there was strong security cooperation and a brisk commerce between the two.
But the indomitable Persian spirit yearned for democracy nonetheless: The shah in later years became an autocrat far too dependent on his fearsome SAVAK secret police, established with the help of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. He also focused too much of his modernization effort on the elites—as an autocracy might—forgetting that the urban poor and rural religious have far more children. By 1978, demonstrations and strikes against his rule became so fearless as to truly destabilize the regime—representing a wide swath of society, from the more traditional poor to liberals, socialists, and nationalists as well.
Events unfolded with speed. In January the shah fled (again!) to Egypt, destined never to return and dying of cancer the following year. In February, the exiled Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from France, and began deploying his charisma and wiles to set up the foundations of an Islamist theocracy. By April, a referendum was held in which the new state apparatus declared that close to all Iranians supported this plan.
By November, the regime declared its seriousness when it engineered a takeover of the U.S. Embassy by fake students, and took 53 hostages in a crisis that helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter and only ended with their release in January 1981, on the day Carter left office.
In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, hoping to destabilize the regime for fear that it would try to turn Iraq’s population—which unlike Iran’s are Arabs but like Iran’s are mostly Shiite Muslims—against his Sunni-led rule. He badly miscalculated, leading to an eight-year stalemate (then in 1990 badly miscalculated again by invading Kuwait).
The Iran-Iraq war cemented Islamist rule, if anything. In the years that followed the Islamic Republic became increasingly brazen and ruthless, laying down occasional markers in the sand, such as Khomeini’s 1979 “fatwa” ruling legitimizing the murder of British author Salman Rushie (leading to his stabbing more than 30 years later, in 2022) for alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses.
And in recent decades Iran has realized Saddam’s fear and began to export its revolution to the Arab Middle East. Shiite militias are now crawling all over the region, including in Iraq, and two of them have essentially taken over key countries—Hezbollah in Lebanon, bordering Israel, and the Houthis in Yemen, along the waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
Iranian officials publicly yearn for and predict the destruction of Israel, and Iran is also the main funder and backer of the Hamas rejectionist group in the Palestinian areas. In 2007, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel, triggering the war that at this very moment threatens to spiral out of control. Hezbollah has many tens of thousands of Iran-gifted rockets, many of them guided missiles, which it threatens to unleash any day.
Iran has also pressed for decades to achieve nuclear weapons, through various subterfuge while exhausting global inspectors and negotiators with cat-and-mouse games. In 2015, the regime was willing to suspend that project, effectively in exchange for guarantees that it would not be isolated or attacked—but two years later then-President Donald Trump committed a major strategic blunder in cancelling the agreement, and Iran is now believed to be a threshold state, able to quickly build a bomb.
Quickly—but not quite immediately. There may still be time. The world desperately needs regime change in Iran. Indeed, Iran’s people desperately need regime change in Iran.
The Islamist Republic has grown extremely unpopular through its own despotism, which is certainly worse than anything attempted by SAVAK. The regime, which imposes Islam in various ways, women’s dress codes among them, has brought misery and sparked economic sanctions that brought poverty; it is genuinely reviled.
Unfortunately, it also seems to be more ruthless that the regime of the shah. In 1978, the people were insufficiently terrified not to rise up, and once they did the shah’s regime did not decide to open fire at the crowds. The feeling today is that the Islamist regime probably would.
The choice for the world is whether to let Iran go nuclear, at which point its misbehavior will probably increase further still—or take action. The hope would be that focused attacks on the nuclear sites and key installations of the regime might paralyze it long enough to give the people courage. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for at that point is a palace coup by the Revolutionary Guard, the praetorian operation that is the core of the regime and controls much of the economy; they might dump the Islamism like a hot potato.
Ironically, there is some nostalgia for the shah, and many Iranian exiles will tell you that the best outcome is the installing of his son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in the United States, heads one of the exile groups, and has called for Iran to be a secular parliamentary democracy.
The CIA (and MI6) would sign on to that plan in about a second—yet it was the direction of things in under Mossadegh, when them ham-fistedly messed with the timeline. One wonders what might have happened if the Dulles brothers had turned their attentions elsewhere—to Cuba, perhaps—for the rise of the Islamic Republic can be traced directly back to the unintended consequences of the 1953 coup.
In their bid to secure short-term geopolitical gains, the Dulles brothers (and their boss, President Dwight Eisenhower) not only stifled Iran’s democratic development but also instilled a deep-seated resentment towards foreign interference. This resentment found expression in the radical policies of today. The immediate objective of maintaining control over Iranian oil was achieved, but at the long-term cost of giving rise to a monster.
The story of Iran is a cautionary tale for policymakers. A little humility can go a long way. Carry a big stick but think with a bigger brain. Does that mean to leave Iran alone right now? Could anything possibly be worse? Very tricky indeed.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books about Israel. He first interviewed Netanyahu in 1988. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.