the 70th anniversary of an event that reshaped the Middle East: the 1953 U.S.- and U.K.-backed coup in Iran that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The aftershocks of the coup are still being felt today.
The coup came two years after Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. He argued Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves, which had been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company later became known as British Petroleum, BP.
The coup was led in part by a CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. The crushing of Iran’s first democratic government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the shah, who relied heavily on U.S. aid and arms. The anti-American backlash that toppled the shah in 1979 shook the whole
— source democracynow.org | Aug 23, 2023