1953 Iran coup: How a garbled message from ‘Queen Elizabeth’ bolstered the overthrow of Mosaddegh’s government

Newly unearthed documents reveal how British monarch’s name was abused by the US to ‘help destroy Iran’s democracy’

It is widely regarded as the original sin of the west’s post-war Middle East policy; a coup that squelched a people’s democratic aspirations and ultimately led to the calamitous rise of the militaristic nationalism and Islamic extremism that shape the region today.

Nearly 67 years ago, the popular nationalist government of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was toppled with the aid of British and American spies seeking to reinstal the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as absolute ruler of Iran. A quarter century later, in 1979, his rule too would be ended, by Islamist clerics and activists who inspired movements across the region.

Over the decades the event has taken on a mythical quality, the conspiracy that launched all other conspiracy theories. Of course, say people across the Middle East, western intelligence is behind everything from the rise of al-Qaeda and Isis to valuations of local currencies. Just look at how they toppled the government in Iran when it sought to nationalise its oil industry in the early 1950s in defiance of British imperial power.

But in recent years, historians around the world poring over documents released from official archives have repeatedly revised assessment of what transpired. Some have argued that Mossadegh was on his way out already, and that a local alliance of pro-Shah goons, business interests and conservative clerics opposed to his left-leaning policies was already on the verge of taking him out. Yet another set of reassessments concluded that, rather than a case of derring-do by slick spies, the coup was a badly planned and nearly botched accident that was more John Cleese than John le Carre.

The assessment of the two historians behind the Channel 4 documentary airing on Sunday, The Queen and the Coup, falls in the latter category, that the ultimate success of the coup which was hatched in 1951 by British spies seeking to keep control of Iran’s oil was more a comedy of errors than a smooth operation.

Never-before-seen documents unearthed by historians Rory Cormac and Richard Aldrich show how the name of the young Queen Elizabeth was abused at a key moment to “help destroy Iran’s democracy”, as the documentary says.

In the months-long crisis and period of scheming preceding the August 1953 coup, the young Shah, who had been a western protege of London and Washington and their global plans for countering the Soviet Union, was planning on leaving the country and heading into exile fearing the unrest brewing in the country.

Aldrich and Cormac found documents showing that at a key moment the US received a note to the Shah from then-British foreign secretary Anthony Eden that seemed to suggest that Queen Elizabeth herself was making a rare intervention into foreign policy to urge him to stay put. Knowing how much the Shah had sought a formal alliance with the British monarchy, the US ambassador in Tehran passed on the note to the royal court.

Pro-Shah troops occupying Tehran during the 1953 coup (AP)

But later it emerged that the note was garbled, and that it was Eden himself aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth ocean liner that was urging the Shah to stay in Iran.

The Americans realised they had made a mistake but decided to cover it up from both the Brits and the Iranians. “They don’t want the Shah to realise that essentially he’s been misinformed, perhaps even unintentionally duped,” Aldrich, professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, says in the documentary.

The Shah’s decision not to go into exile gave western intelligence operatives of the MI6 and the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt time to plan and scheme. The UK plan to overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with an authoritarian regime led by the Shah was called Operation Boots. The Americans called their scheme Operation Ajax.

Six months later Mossadegh was ousted as pro-Shah mobs took over the streets and a crisis caused by a US and UK blockade strangled the economy.

“I think what we found is an important revelation that brings the Queen into the picture,” Cormac, a professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, said in a telephone interview. “Had the Shah fled at the time, the MI6 coup planning wouldn’t have taken place.”

Once back in power, the newly emboldened Shah launched a 25-year reign of terror. Leftists, liberals and Islamists alike were thrown for years into torture chambers as the increasingly grandiose monarch squandered the nation’s oil wealth on pricey American weapons systems. His regime ultimately ended in one of the most cataclysmic revolutions in world history, giving birth to the most avowedly anti-western regime on the planet.

Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi reads his inaugural speech at the initial session of his nation’s first senate in Tehran, 16 February 1950 (AP)

It’s important to put the events surrounding the coup and its aftermath into perspective. Iran in 1953 was a flawed constitutional democracy; Mossadegh, the country’s most popular politician, had been nominated by the Shah and elected by a democratically elected parliament in 1951, and the country might have beat an unsteady path to democracy regardless of whether Mossadegh had been ousted.

Islamic fundamentalism did not take root in the Middle East because of Iran’s revolution; it had antecedents throughout the region, and the 1967 defeats of Arab nationalist leaders at the hands of Israel arguably played a greater role in the rise of religious extremism.

What the revelations that have emerged do show is the extraordinary luck of the British and Americans. Sweeping the crucial facts behind their accidental success in Iran under the rug gave them license to continue attempting to destabilise countries for decades afterwards.

In the years after the coup, and drunk on extremely flawed stories of its own successes in Iran, the MI6 used subterfuge and treachery to attempt to topple regimes in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

“The Foreign Office at the time was not really pro-covert operations; they were trying to rein MI6 in,” said Cormac, who specialises in the history of intelligence services. “When this operation happened, they brought Kermit Roosevelt back to London on a victory tour. His tales convinced the foreign office to let MI6 do more.”

The Queen and the Coup is on Channel 4 on Sunday 14 June at 9pm