Mohammad Mosaddegh
Iran's elected prime minister who nationalized British-controlled oil in 1951 and was toppled by a CIA- and MI6-backed coup in 1953.
In 1951 an aristocratic Iranian lawyer in his late sixties, prone to weeping in parliament and conducting affairs of state from a bed in his pajamas, did what no oil producer had dared: he took the oil back. Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain's single most valuable overseas asset, and for two years he was the most famous man in the developing world. Time named him its 1951 Man of the Year. Then the CIA and Britain's MI6 removed him, and Iran has been arguing about it ever since.
The oil war
Anglo-Iranian, the ancestor of today's BP, pumped Iranian oil, paid Iran a thin slice of the profits, and refused to open its books. In March 1951 Iran's parliament, the Majlis, voted to nationalize the industry; a month later it made Mosaddegh prime minister to carry the law out. Britain answered not with troops but with a blockade: it pulled its technicians, embargoed Iranian oil, and used the Royal Navy to choke exports from Abadan, then home to the world's largest refinery. Britain took its case to the World Court at The Hague and lost, but winning the legal argument did not force anyone to buy Iranian crude. Iran had its oil and could not sell it. The economy withered, and Mosaddegh's coalition of nationalists, clerics, and communists began to fracture.
Operation Ajax
London wanted him gone but lacked the reach; Washington, fearing Iran might tilt toward the Soviet Union, supplied it. The CIA's Kermit Roosevelt ran the plot the Americans called TP-Ajax and the British called Boot: bribed officers, paid crowds, a compliant press. The first attempt, on 15 August 1953, failed, and the young Shah fled to Rome. The second, on 19 August, worked. Mosaddegh's home was shelled, he surrendered, and General Fazlollah Zahedi took power in his place. A CIA internal history later admitted the agency's central role, and in 2013 the United States released documents confirming it.
The martyr
Mosaddegh was tried for treason, served three years, and spent his last decade under house arrest on his estate at Ahmadabad, where he died in 1967. He was buried not in a public shrine but beneath his own dining room. Iran's oil, meanwhile, was handed to a Western consortium in which American companies now took a 40 percent share alongside the British, the very outcome he had fought. Officially he vanished; in memory he grew. For Iranians across the spectrum, secular and religious, his overthrow became the founding example of Western interference, the moment a homegrown democracy was strangled to protect foreign oil. When revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in 1979 and called it a den of spies, 1953 was the precedent they had in mind. A frail man in pajamas who lost his office in a single August night still shapes how Tehran reads every Western offer of friendship.