Declassified · admitted 2013 Operation Ajax — How the CIA Overthrew Iran's Government for Oil

In 1951 Iran's democratically elected PM Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). In response, the CIA and Britain's MI6 organised his overthrow — codenamed TPAJAX — funded with roughly $1 million for bribed officials, "rented" crowds, planted media and military defections. On 19 August 1953 the coup succeeded; Mossadegh was jailed and the Shah's power restored, reopening Iran's oil to Western firms. The CIA formally acknowledged its role in declassified documents released in 2013 and 2017. The agency's own historians called it the template for Cold War regime change — and it fed the anti-Western backlash that culminated in the 1979 revolution. This is not theory; it is the agency's own record.