Building a Nation: Pahlavi Iran, the 'CIA Coup' Myth, and the White Revolution
The history you should know to understand Iran: Part 2
This is Part 2 of this series. In Part 1, we covered the period from the late years of the Qajar Dynasty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the ascension of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1925. This period contains important antecedents to the relationship between religion and the state, constitutional reform, the tensions between modernisation and religious leadership, and the influence of imperial powers in shaping a revived Iranian nationalism oriented towards a strong central government and military strength. In this part, we will cover the period of the Pahlavi Dynasty from 1925 up to the 1978–1979 Islamic Revolution, paying particular attention to the ‘CIA coup’ narrative and the emerging mobilisation of Marxist-Leninist and Islamist agitation in Iran. In the final part, we will focus in depth on the ‘Red-Green’ alliance of Marxist-Leninist and Islamist forces that finally brought about the Islamic Revolution and overthrow of the monarchy. Note: Romanised Persian names are given their Persian, not Arabic, spelling, and ‘Iran’ is primarily used rather than ‘Persia’, the latter used only in specific historical contexts.
The coronation ceremony was laden with symbolic meaning. A new crown representing a new beginning for Iran had been commissioned to replace the Qajar crown. Consistent with the Sasanian invocation of the name ‘Pahlavi’, the new crown was designed in the aesthetic style of the ancient Persian Sasanian Empire (224–651 AD). The theme was deliberate: Reza Shah Pahlavi’s vision for Iran invoked the pre-Islamic glory of ancient Persia. The crowning act was symbolic: no religious cleric was involved in the act of crowning the new Shah. Rather, Reza Shah’s close confidant and, ultimately, Minister of the Royal Court, Abd-al-Hosayn Teymurtas, presented the crown to the new Shah. But Teymurtas did not crown the Shah; Reza Shah took the crown from him and placed it on his own head. The message was clear: the Shah was not serving at the behest of the ulama, but as the instrument of the state’s vision of a restored Iran.
The Shah’s prime minister, Mohammad-Ali Forugi, gave a speech again invoking the Sasanian Empire, declaring that Reza Shah would take his place among other great Shahs in Iran’s history who had led the nation back to a position of strength after periods of decay. Present at the coronation were Armenian Christian priests, Turcmen in tunics, Kurds in silk headbands, and Bakhtiari tribesmen in black felt hats, alongside the bearded Shi’ite mullahs in turbans and long robes. In his coronation, Reza Shah reiterated his commitment to advance and modernise Iran, while respecting Islam in the spiritual life of the nation. However, for Reza Shah, religion in general, and Islam specifically, would have no special privileges in a diverse nation. In his speech, the speaker of the Majles, Hasan Esfandiari, referred to the gratitude of the nation, ‘made of many different and scattered tribes’, that had been brought together under Reza Shah Pahlavi.
The spectacle of the coronation, held at the Golestan Palace in Tehran, was carefully curated: soldiers lined the approaches of the horse-drawn carriage carrying Reza Shah, displaying military grandeur; red, white, and green bunting lined the packed streets of Tehran, evoking pride in resurgent Iranian nationalism; leaders of Iran’s major tribes bedecked in their finest traditional garments evinced a restored, unified Iranian people. Russia was now a Bolshevik state preoccupied by its internal turmoil. Britain was an exhausted empire, preoccupied with its ‘second Ireland’ in Mandatory Palestine. If the spectacle of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s coronation did not quite match Iran’s reality at that time in April 1926, it was a statement of intent for the nation to embark on a process of industrialisation, military modernisation, and reform.
Building a Nation: Pahlavi Iran from 1926 to 1942
Reza Shah Pahlavi wasted little time in setting about the project of building a new Iran. Alongside Teymurtas, his powerful and influential minister of court, Reza Shah’s nation-building project was to be facilitated by the royal court, which became ‘the nucleus of a modern centralised bureaucracy’.1 Constitutionally, the prime minister was appointed by the Shah, and the Majles, as the legislature, passed laws. These dynamics of an autocratic monarch with a strong centralised bureaucracy as the engine of state-building would prove to be both a major driving factor in Iran’s modernisation and economic growth and, eventually, an impediment to responding to changing social dynamics that would ultimately be mobilised against the monarchy in the Islamic Revolution.
The new Shah saw two major avenues to state-building: the army and education. Even before ascending the throne, in 1922 Reza Shah established a scheme to send officer cadets to the prestigious Saint-Cyr Military Academy, established by Napoleon Bonaparte, in France. Reza Shah introduced a compulsory draft for the new national army, a deliberate move after the turmoil of the war years with various provincial movements for autonomy from Tehran (covered in Part 1), which was viewed as a means of unifying men from the various regions and ethnicities that make up Iran. In this respect, the army would serve a nation-building purpose, providing ‘a serious step towards the integration of the society as it brought together young men with parochial loyalties and impressed upon them a romantic vision of Iranian nationalist history…’2 For the officer corps, the army provided a new means of social mobility, often moving on into the centralised civilian bureaucracy. The army thus served as a social institution in the formation of a new Iranian middle class and social elite.
Beyond the military, educational reform would provide the most important and wide-reaching reforms of the Pahlavi state. In the early 20th century, Iran exhibited a wide literacy gap between the Persian-speaking regions and cities and other ethnic groups and the agrarian regional provinces, reflecting a fragmented education system across Iran’s provinces. By the 1930s, Reza Shah had established a state-controlled public school network with a uniform curriculum, introduced compulsory primary schooling, and secularised the state school system. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Reza Shah’s educational reforms was the expansion of education for girls, and by 1931, girls constituted one-third of all students in the Tehran school system, while the proportions in the provinces, although lower, were up to ~20% of students.3 In 1934, Reza Shah opened the University of Tehran, Iran’s first national university, which opened its doors to women in 1937, following the introduction of co-educational secondary schools in 1935.4
As with the officer cadets studying at the military academy in France, in 1928 Reza Shah introduced a state-funded programme to send Iran’s top secondary school graduates abroad to university, primarily to France and Germany, which expanded to include the United States in the early 1930s. This programme enhanced domestic expertise in a range of disciplines and bolstered the subject-matter expertise of the centralised bureaucracy. Through institutions like the Pasteur Institute in Iran and the University of Tehran’s medical school, domestic health and medical sciences developed, providing important improvements in public health with expanded vaccination, water and sanitation measures, and expanded, state-supported healthcare access. Legal reforms, modelled on France’s civil code, were introduced in 1928 by the Minister for Justice, Ali-Akbar Davar, and passed by the Majles, providing for a secular judicial system. These reforms, in particular the de-emphasising of religious instruction and secularisation of the legal system, the co-education of boys and girls, and the emphasis on technical and vocational higher education subjects, were instrumental in the modernisation of Iran in the mid-20th century.
Infrastructure and the economy were also crucial developments during Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign, which he viewed as necessary elements to reducing international dependency and developing a nation that could stand on its own two feet. The construction of the 1,394-km Trans-Iranian railway linking central Iran from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf began in 1927 and was completed in 1938. It was financed by import taxes on sugar and tea, avoiding reliance on foreign loans.5 The first Iranian national bank, Bank Melli, was established in 1927, and by 1930 had replaced the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia as the financial institution operating central bank functions, such as issuing currency. Alongside the railroad, in a nation where transport was ‘largely by camel, mule, and donkey’, was an expanded investment in road infrastructure, such that, between 1920 and 1940, transport costs within Iran fell by ~80%.6 Improved land transportation and lower transport costs increased the value of Iran’s major exports, including carpets, cotton, wool, and dried fruits, allowing for growth in foreign exchange earnings that, in turn, financed expanding domestic industrialisation.
Perhaps the most symbolic assertion of sovereignty and nationalist interests in the nascent state came in 1932, when, after a decline in oil revenue from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company during the Great Depression, Reza Shah unilaterally cancelled the company’s concession on oil royalties. Following mediation by the League of Nations, a new agreement between the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Iran was reached in 1933, which fixed the royalties per tonne of oil and provided other direct payments to the state. As oil production increased during the 1930s, the value of the royalty increased from 0.23 pence in the pound (sterling) per tonne of oil in 1925 to 0.60p by 1941.7 Nevertheless, despite oil accounting for 60% of Iran’s exports, the relative contribution to the state’s revenue never exceeded 15% up to 1950, as a result of the concessions. The dynamic with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company fostered Reza Shah’s suspicion of Britain, and, with a decline in exports to Soviet Russia, Germany became Iran’s primary trading partner for non-oil exports.
However, the pace of modernisation and the style of the centralised bureaucracy created internal frictions in the Pahlavi state. Expanded education precipitated social change, and it was educated urban middle- and upper-class women who initiated appearing in public without Islamic dress, which was voluntary at the time, but remained visible as a social norm, particularly among the rural peasantry8. In 1936, Reza Shah instituted kashf-e hijab, a law that strictly banned the veil and chador in public. The introduction of girls’ education had angered the clerics, who had resisted the reform. The secularisation of the legal system added to the clerics’ sense that Islam was being marginalised in state institutions, which it was, deliberately, by Reza Shah and his bureaucracy. The expanded scope of girls’ education was seen as a product of secularisation. The clerics also perceived an apparent relationship between education for girls and women and turning away from Islamic traditions such as the veil. Clerical anger at the secularisation of society, girls’ education, and an increasingly visible role for women in society would simmer and boil over in response to further reforms in the 1963 White Revolution introduced by Reza Shah’s son and successor.
In addition, Reza Shah’s use of the military as a vehicle for social engineering overlooked the purpose of a military, which is military strength and national defence. His military was, effectively, a ‘parade ground army’.9 The cadre of young officers trained abroad was frustrated in their attempts to reform the army by a combination of reluctant, conservative senior commanders. The upward social mobility of the educated officer corps, often drawn from urban middle-class families, created a social distance from ordinary conscripts who were often from poorer rural backgrounds. With structural issues and heavy expenditure on equipment that the military was not trained to use, the army was poorly prepared for conflict. It would prove to be Reza Shah’s undoing.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Reza Shah formally declared Iran’s neutrality. By 1940, Germany had become Iran’s primary trading partner, with ~40% of Iranian exports bound for Germany, and the Third Reich retained diplomatic and trade representatives in Iran. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Iran—and the Trans-Iranian railway in particular—took on strategic importance as a route through which the Allies could supply Russia. Reza Shah had also refused the Allied request to expel all German nationals from Iran and was determined to maintain Iran’s neutrality in the war. He eventually acceded to the Allies’ request to expel German nationals in 1941.
Despite this, to sever Iran’s economic ties with Germany and to secure supply routes in the Soviet Union, in August 1941, Russia and Britain invaded Iran, violating Iran’s stated neutrality. The ‘parade ground army’ offered little resistance and collapsed within a matter of days. The Shah was forced to abdicate, declaring that he could not serve with authority over an occupied land, and formally named his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as his successor, a proclamation made before the Majles on the 17th September, 1941. However, stating that to be king of an impoverished nation held no honour, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi postponed his coronation until Iran’s sovereignty and economic stability were restored.
Youth aside, Mohammad Reza had been groomed to rule by his father. Educated at both Switzerland’s Institut Le Rosey boarding school and the Tehran Military Academy, Mohammad Reza would adopt his father’s programme of a strong centralised government and secular modernisation, blending it with his own ideas of individual and social freedoms and equal rights. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar irony to the ascension of Mohammad Reza to the throne; under Russian and British military occupation and with severe economic strain on the nation from the war, the conditions into which Mohammad Reza became Shah bore a striking resemblance to the conditions under which his father had succeeded the Qajar Dynasty. Unlike his father, however, during the Allied occupation and in the immediate post-war years, Mohammad Reza Shah was primarily a constitutional figurehead, while the Majles and the office of prime minister exercised executive power. This shift in the constitutional balance of executive power would come to a tumultuous head in the oil nationalisation crisis of 1953.
Rising Cold War tensions, particularly with the Soviet Union refusing to evacuate from northern Iran and attempting to establish a puppet Soviet state in Iranian Azerbaijan in 1946, provided Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with his first opportunity to reassert his constitutional authority. The Shah appointed Ahmad Qavam as prime minister, who leveraged the United Nations and bilateral negotiations with the Soviets to secure their withdrawal from Iran. The Soviet threat, coupled with emerging Marxist-Leninist movements within Iran, led the Shah to pursue closer alignment with the anti-Communist West. His time in Europe in the 1930s had made Mohammad Reza Pahlavi acutely aware of the dangers of political instability and extremist ideologies, whatever their particulars. His reassertion of the Shah’s executive power would come at a time when a tapestry of ideological colours, Islamist green and Marxist-Leninist red, was being woven in the background of a black legend surrounding the 1950–1953 constitutional crisis and the socio-political upheaval of the Shah’s White Revolution.
The Black Legend, 1950–1963: Oil Nationalisation, the Constitutional Crisis, and ‘CIA Coup’ Myth
In 1925, Reza Pahlavi had initially looked to Kemal Atatürk’s emerging secular democracy in Turkey as a model for post-Qajar Iran. It was the ulama who had urged the continuation of the monarchy, supported by secular monarchists and nationalists. The position of the ulama was that clerics could not rule before the return of the Hidden Imam, and the Shah thus acted as the state’s temporal ruler. Recall that Iran’s constitutional order vested executive power in the Shah, and while the Majles was an elected body, the prime minister was appointed by the Shah. While the combination of his youth and relative inexperience meant that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi initially lacked the authority his father had as Shah, the constitutional order remained in place. The young Shah, by virtue of his kingship, retained the loyalty of the military, important factions in the Majles, sections of the merchant class, and a core element of the ulama.
These dynamics would all interact during what is perhaps the most widely misunderstood and, in Western academic circles, deliberately misinterpreted event in Iranian history: the 1953 ‘coup’, which in reality was not a singular event, but a crisis over oil nationalisation between 1950 and 1953. The narrative in the West runs as follows: Mohammad Mosaddegh was a democratically elected prime minister who sought to nationalise Iran’s oil industry to benefit the people and to expand democratic political reforms; to preserve their interests in Iranian oil, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated an American and British-backed coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah to serve as a Western puppet. Pay close attention to the framing and wording, which are not random: ‘democratically elected’, ‘CIA coup’, ‘installed the Shah’, ‘Western puppet’, all contribute substantial weight to curating a narrative that amounts to one of the most pervasive distortions of the historical record in service of the ‘anti-imperialist’ narratives of the Western academic Left.
As with all myths, there is a grain of truth in some ingredients, but those grains become lost in the overall narrative, which requires some unpacking. Mohammad Mosaddegh was not, as often portrayed, the proverbial ‘man of the people’. He was a Qajar aristocrat with a law degree from the University of Lausanne, the European education typical of the upwardly mobile Iranian social strata. Nevertheless, despite hailing from the previous ruling dynasty, Mosaddegh was an early supporter of a secular democratic Iran at the end of Qajar rule. He opposed Reza Pahlavi’s ascension to the throne and argued against the monarchy’s continuation. In 1949, he founded the Jebhe-ye Melli-ye Irân, or National Front of Iran, a nominally nationalist party with a singular focus on oil nationalisation. However, behind Mosaddegh’s seemingly coherent policy objective of oil nationalisation and personal democratic bona fides, the popular National Front leader showed a willingness to mobilise illiberal forces to achieve his desired ends. When in power, Mosaddegh’s commitment to democracy and Iran’s constitutional order would prove to be thin.
The backdrop to the oil nationalisation crisis of 1950–1953 was Iran’s desire to renegotiate the terms of the 1933 agreement with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which fixed Iran’s royalties per tonne of oil. While oil revenue to Iran increased linearly to 1941, the fixed royalty capped the gross profit potential, and the majority of the oil revenue went to the company. In 1950, Prime Minister Ali Razmara proposed a renegotiated agreement. However, in 1951, Razmara was assassinated by the Fada’iyan-e Islam, an emerging Islamist group. This had followed an assassination attempt on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1949 by a student connected to both Fada’iyan-e Islam and the Tudeh Party. These events would prove to be chillingly prophetic of the eventual ‘Red-Green’ alliance. In April of 1951, the Majles nominated Mosaddegh for the office of prime minister, a nomination the Shah confirmed. The first limb of the myth falls here: Mosaddegh was not a ‘democratically elected prime minister’; Iran’s constitution stipulated that the appointment and dismissal of a prime minister was the Shah’s prerogative, a fact that is crucial to parsing the ‘coup’ myth.
While the Majles had rejected Razmara’s proposed oil agreement, parliament produced an oil nationalisation law in 1951. Continuing his father’s legacy, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi supported efforts to assert Iranian sovereignty over the nation’s resources, including oil. As the Majles had passed the oil nationalisation bill, the Shah fulfilled his constitutional duty and signed the bill into law in May 1951. In substance, the Shah and Prime Minister Mosaddegh were aligned on the desire for greater resource sovereignty; where they differed was in the means of achieving that outcome. The Shah favoured engagement and negotiation with the British, understanding that the British retained the expertise in oil refining that Iran lacked at the time, and fearing the damage of economic retaliation to Iran’s economy. Mosaddegh, on the other hand, was intransigent and unyielding, refusing to negotiate with the British and determined to press ahead with immediate oil nationalisation with no compromise in oil profit-sharing.
Mosaddegh had not accounted for two crucial facts that the Shah foresaw: Iran lacked domestic expertise in oil refining, and was now competing with other oil-producing nations in Venezuela, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, meaning it had less leverage in the global oil market. The British responded as the Shah feared, withdrawing their oil refining experts from Iran and embargoing Iranian oil. Royalties from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company contributed around 40–50% of the state’s revenue and ~77% of Iran’s foreign exchange balance in 1949–1950. By October 1951, Iran’s oil exports plummeted to virtually zero; the contribution of oil revenue to Iran’s foreign exchange balance plunged to ~27%, the state’s monetary reserves were drained, inflation spiked, and unemployment surged.10 In short, Mosaddegh’s intransigence had crashed the Iranian economy. The Shah’s fears were proved correct. With the Tudeh Party growing in visibility on the streets of Iran, the prospect of economic collapse paving the way for Iran to fall behind the Iron Curtain alarmed the U.S. and British alike, concerns shared domestically within Iran where conservatives, moderates, and nationalists alike retained their historically justified distrust of Russia.
The sequence of what followed is crucial. Due to the economic collapse, Mosaddegh came under increasing political pressure. The oil nationalists in the National Front had their way; now Mosaddegh and his party loyalists were faced with a profound economic crisis. Mosaddegh’s response was to assault Iran’s constitutional order, seeking to diminish the Shah’s executive powers and effectively turn the office of prime minister into a dictatorship. In 1952, Mosaddegh demanded that the Shah’s executive power to appoint the army’s chief of staff and the minister of war be transferred to the prime minister. When the Shah refused, Mosaddegh resigned in protest, forcing a constitutional crisis. Initially, it appeared Mosaddegh had the upper hand. The Shah appointed Ahmad Qavam, who had served successfully as prime minister during the Azerbaijan-Soviet crisis in 1946, but he lacked Mosaddegh’s broad support. Mass public demonstrations, known as the Tir Uprising, followed Qavam’s appointment, demanding that Mosaddegh be reinstated. After five days, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi relented and reappointed Mosaddegh as prime minister.
It was here that Mosaddegh overplayed his hand. With Mosaddegh and his government having deployed ‘illegal means to ensure the election of its candidates’ in the 1950 election, loading the Majles with his supporters, Mosaddegh called on parliament to grant him emergency decree powers, which the Majles granted, effectively handing him ‘dictatorial powers’.11 However, his increasingly authoritarian tendencies began to fracture his support base. In January 1953, Mosaddegh demanded that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi give up his role as commander-in-chief of the military, a move so unconstitutional that it aroused the royalists and conservatives in the Majles and in Iranian society, and incensed the military, whose loyalties lay firmly with the Shah. He then demanded that the Shah go into exile. In the same month, Mosaddegh demanded that his emergency decree powers be extended, which the Speaker of the Majles, the Islamist fundamentalist Ayatollah Kashani, hitherto a Mosaddegh ally, opposed. In response, Mosaddegh mobilised his supporters in the Majles to oust Ayatollah Kashani from his position as speaker. Mosaddegh now lost the support of the Islamists loyal to Kashani, and Kashani shifted his supporters towards the Shah. In turn, Mosaddegh now increasingly relied on the Marxist-Leninist Tudeh Party and its capacity to mobilise ‘the street’.
The final straw came in July 1953 when Mosaddegh, unsatisfied with his accumulation of power, moved to dissolve the Majles and effectively become the dictator of Iran. In a nationwide radio address, Mosaddegh announced that the Iranian people must choose between himself and the Majles and announced his intention to dissolve the Majles by referendum, another unconstitutional move, as the dissolution of parliament was an executive power of the Shah. Mosaddegh then rigged the election, holding an open-ballot vote with his street mobs mobilised to pressure voters; in August, Mosaddegh announced a 99.94% ‘Yes’ vote in favour of dissolving the Majles. Public dismay at Mosaddegh’s flagrant disregard for the constitution and naked power grab shifted further support toward Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The second crucial limb of the myth falls here: the fantasy that Mosaddegh was a brave reformer charting a path to democracy for the Iranian people is an inversion of the historical record. Mosaddegh tore up Iran’s constitutional order in pursuit of his personal power, which culminated in his attempted wresting of dictatorial control of the country.
This is why the ‘CIA coup’ myth remains such a distortion. There was indeed a coup to take power in Iran: a coup by Mosaddegh himself. A coup is defined as an illegal seizure of power through a top-down overthrow of the state’s existing government or leadership. Only Mosaddegh’s illegal, unconstitutional attempts to take the Shah’s executive powers for himself, dissolve parliament, and rule by dictatorial decree fit the definition of a coup. What is described as a ‘CIA coup’ was the process of reasserting Iran’s constitutional order by the Shah dismissing Mosaddegh from his office. Mosaddegh had fragmented his coalition and whittled away key allies, including within his own nationalist faction. The constitutional dismissal of a prime minister does not count as a ‘coup’; this is an unserious proposition. It is also important to note that it wasn’t the fear of oil nationalisation per se that precipitated U.S. and British involvement in the domestic turmoil; it was the fear of economic collapse that Mosaddegh’s reckless pursuit of oil nationalisation entailed, and the apprehension that economic collapse would create favourable conditions for a Communist takeover in Iran.12
So, what role did the CIA have in the culmination of the constitutional crisis in 1953? The operation that is termed ‘the CIA coup’, TPAJAX, primarily involved applying diplomatic pressure on the Shah to exercise his constitutional prerogative to dismiss Mosaddegh and appoint a new prime minister. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to America and Britain’s frustration, had been reluctant to dismiss Mosaddegh, given his popular support. But that support had dwindled by August 1953 to a small group of loyalists. It is important to note that the Shah’s move to dismiss Mosaddegh was entirely legal and constitutional. U.S. State Department communications make it clear that the Shah insisted ‘that such action as he took must be within the framework of his constitutional power, hence, not (repeat not) a coup.’13 The shifting balance of support was also clear to the CIA, which observed that Mosaddegh’s increasing attempts to undermine the Shah ‘would probably serve to unite the opposition as did Mossadeq’s [sic] attempt last spring and might conceivably result in Mossadeq’s [sic] own downfall.’14 This is precisely what occurred.
In August 1953, the Shah formally dismissed Mosaddegh as prime minister by royal decree and appointed General Zahedi instead: Mosaddegh refused to stand down. Forces loyal to Mosaddegh had arrested the dispatch that had been sent to issue the royal decree to Mosaddegh. This was, effectively, the end of the ‘CIA coup’, because there was no contingency for Mosaddegh’s refusal to resign. To avoid further aggravating tensions over Mosaddegh’s thwarting of the royal decree, the Shah flew to Baghdad and then to Rome, a move which incensed royalists, conservatives, the military, and even religious factions against Mosaddegh. The other elements that are stressed in the CIA coup myth were the CIA organising ‘rent-a-mobs’ to take to the streets to protest Mosaddegh and support the Shah, and funding a propaganda campaign against Mosaddegh. There is also a grain of truth to this, and the CIA did help to disseminate the Shah’s royal decree and mobilise support in the growing street demonstrations by various factions. However, the vast majority of the protests were organic Iranian demonstrators united by the sense that Mosaddegh had gone too far.
In this regard, it is important to note that the ‘rent-a-mob’ and propaganda claims overstate the CIA’s clandestine capabilities in Iran at the time, which, as declassified documents make clear, were limited in scope to mobilising anti-Tudeh Party demonstrations.15 The CIA had been active in Iran since 1948, combating the influence of the Marxist-Leninist Tudeh Party, which was developing traction, particularly outside of the main metropolitan areas. Historical documents reveal that most of the CIA’s contingency planning related directly to measures to be taken in the event of an attempted Communist takeover in Iran. In March 1953, the CIA were explicitly acknowledging that their ability to mobilise propaganda tools and street demonstrations was confined to providing ‘effective pro-Mossadegh [sic] demonstrations’ and that pro-Shah demonstrations would be ‘on the condition that these demonstrations not be in effect anti-Mossadegh [sic] demonstrations.’16
This is where the crux of the ‘CIA coup’ myth, the final limb of the myth, falls: what happened after Mosaddegh refused to accept Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s dismissal. Mosaddegh’s remaining supporters, primarily Tudeh partisans and nationalists, rioted. The Tudeh partisans then broke from Mosaddegh, refusing to obey his directions, and escalated their violent demonstrations. It was at this juncture that Mosaddegh’s coup finally came to a head. He had lost control of the Tudeh partisans, and different political factions had rallied around the crown in response to the Shah leaving the country. What followed was a spontaneous uprising against Mosaddegh and in support of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It started with the Tehran bazaar merchants and spread among ‘Iranian people of all classes who were disgusted…’ with Mosaddegh’s attacks on the Shah. 17 The U.S. Embassy in Iran, using the analogy of a forest fire, described an ‘initial small flame found [an] amazingly large amount [of] combustible material and was soon [a] roaring blaze.’18 General Zahedi, acting both as prime minister and with the military, took control of government buildings. However, the weight of the pro-Shah protests was driven by civilians, not the military, as the surprised Deputy Director of the CIA, Charles Cabell, noted in a memorandum to President Eisenhower:
‘An unexpectedly strong upsurge of popular and military reaction to Prime Minister Mossadeq’s [sic] Government has resulted, according to late dispatches from Teheran [sic], in the virtual occupation of that city by forces proclaiming their loyalty to the Shah, and to his appointed Prime Minister Zahedi.’19
Mosaddegh surrendered to the military on the 20th of August; on the 22nd, the Shah returned to Tehran to be greeted by Prime Minister Zahedi. The oil nationalisation issue that reemerged in 1950 culminated in 1952–1953 in the gravest challenge to Iran’s constitutional order since Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar’s 1908 dissolution of the Majles and bombardment of parliament. Mosaddegh’s assault on Iran’s constitution had decimated the economy and created an opening for ominous forces, including Islamist fundamentalists and Marxist-Leninists, to coalesce. They would threaten Iran’s stability for the subsequent two decades until their final victory, albeit Pyrrhic for the useful idiot Leftists who ended up in a noose or in exile, in the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979. From his initial position of mass popular support, Mosaddegh had gambled that his power grab would ride a wave of public approval: his gamble failed, and the turmoil he unleashed on the nation would ultimately destroy the country he claimed to act only in the interests of.
Instead, when it came to the crunch, that public support, from bazaar merchants to the military to religious leaders, took to the streets to defend Iran’s constitutional order. Ayatollah Kashani issued a fatwa for crowds to mobilise against Mosaddegh and for the Shah, a move which had a far greater impact than any CIA attempts at rabble-rousing. The ‘CIA coup’ myth constitutes Iran’s black legend, exaggerating and fabricating the importance of the omnipotent White Men of History, while writing the agency of the Iranian people out of their story. As the Iranian historian Ray Takeyh puts it, the ‘CIA coup’ myth constitutes ‘a paternalistic narrative…in which the Iranians—elites and ordinary people alike—appear as benighted pawns in the hands of diabolically clever Americans.’20 It echoes the narrative of the overstated British role in Reza Pahlavi’s ascent to power in 1921–1925, in which ‘helpless, ignorant Iranians’ are portrayed as mere props on the stage being manipulated by ‘nefarious, all-knowing Westerners’.21
The Shahs’ pro-Western orientation, however, which appeared to many Iranians in the 1950s as a clear choice against the looming threat of Tudeh and the Soviet Union, would, in the shifting, tumultuous tides of the 1970s, become a vulnerability. As the ‘Red-Green’ alliance cemented itself, the ‘CIA coup’ myth provided potent propaganda material for mobilising against the Shah in the Islamic Revolution by portraying his rule as illegitimate. It remains the dominant narrative of Iran’s history for the Western academic Left, a Big Lie repeated so often over the decades that it became cemented as an illusory truth. It continues to serve its purpose; to this day, it provides the exculpatory narrative to the ‘anti-imperialist’ Left to excuse the ideology and crimes of the Islamic Republic.
A White Revolution of the Shah and His People, 1954–1976: Economic Rebirth, Social Reform, and Reactionary Agitation
The restoration of the constitutional order had effectively provided the Shah with a new mandate as ruler. Yet that mandate was not unconditional; the Iranian people were seeking, above all, stability and the opportunity for greater prosperity. For Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, that mandate consequently came with the pressure to deliver for his people. His father’s reforms had expanded domestic education and leveraged both the military and Iran’s fledgling third-level education system to send Iranian’s abroad for further study, and had sought to modernise the nation’s infrastructure and economy. The Shah sought to expand modernising reforms, military expansion, and economic growth. Unlike his father’s reign, however, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would face growing internal threats to the nation’s stability from religious extremists and Marxist-Leninist factions.
The oil nationalisation crisis had been, as the Shah anticipated, a disaster for the Iranian economy. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s initial priority was the stabilisation of oil revenue, achieved through a 1953 agreement between the new National Iranian Oil Company (founded by the oil nationalisation legislation signed into law by the Shah in 1951) and Western oil companies, in which Iran received 50% of the oil profits. By 1957, oil production had been restored to pre-1950 levels, and oil production and net profits increased thereafter. The Shah did not view the 1954 oil consortium agreement as conclusive or static. As Iranian oil production increased in the context of voracious global demands for oil in the post-Second World War period, the Shah exerted continued pressure on foreign oil companies to renegotiate on increasingly favourable terms for Iran. By 1960, Iran accounted for ~5% of global crude oil production; by 1972, that had doubled to ~10%.22 The Shah was instrumental in the 1960 founding of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the collective bargaining of which allowed Iran greater leverage over its domestic oil production.
The results for Iran’s economic growth and national development were nothing short of staggering, with an average economic growth rate of ~9–11% from the mid-1960s onwards, twice that of other countries in the Middle East. In 1970 and again in 1973, the Shah, leveraging Iran’s position as a leader within OPEC, threatened to withdraw oil concessions to Western companies, leveraging a further 12% increase in oil revenues per barrel.23 The 1973 Sale and Purchase Agreement was particularly crucial, and politically poignant, because it vindicated the Shah’s long-game approach to oil as a national resource juxtaposed against Mosaddegh’s economically suicidal intransigence. ‘Agreement’ is perhaps gratuitous; the Shah effectively presented foreign oil consortia with an ultimatum which shifted the companies from producers in Iran to consumers for Iran. The Sale and Purchase Agreement vested full control of oil reserves and production in the National Iranian Oil Company, and required consortia to purchase crude oil directly from the company at government-set prices. The agreement thus constituted the final nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry to the benefit of Iran. Surplus oil could now be sold to the highest bidder, with Japan stepping in to become a primary export destination for Iranian oil.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was determined that the country would reap the immediate rewards of its rapid economic growth. Continuing the model of a strong centralised bureaucracy established by his father, the Shah and his closest friend and trusted advisor, Asadollah Alam, who served as prime minister from 1962–1964 and then minister of court from 1964–1977, and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah’s longest-serving prime minister (1965–1977), embarked on a plan of rapid economic expansion. Oil revenues were funnelled into national development plans to improve infrastructure, modernise the military, and expand natural gas, steel, and mineral resources. Industrial capacity, notably in gas and mining, expanded rapidly to become, after oil, substantial contributors to the economy.24 Powered by oil revenue, the industrial expansion of the economy precipitated Iran’s rapid economic growth and development, reflected in a doubling of GPD per capita between 1962 and 1972. As Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had deferred his coronation in 1941 until Iran was economically and politically stable and independent, his formal coronation as Shah finally took place in 1967 at the Golestan Palace in Tehran.
However, Iran’s rapid economic gains were unequally distributed, with a stark urban-rural divide evident in both opportunity and development, which translated into an increasing wealth gap. Many of the industries powering economic expansion were capital rather than labour-intensive, so high unemployment persisted, particularly in less developed agrarian provinces. Moreover, the Shah’s determination to rapidly inject oil revenues back into the economy ignored the counsel of several of his economists who worried not only about the inflationary effects, but also about the reliance on oil revenue that immediate spending, rather than planned infusion into the economy and investment in foreign reserves to buffer against weaker economic conditions, entailed.25 The expectations created by the rapid economic growth created a sense of divide between an expanding urban, middle-class with professional and social mobility, and the predominantly subsistence agrarian lives of the majority of the population in the provinces. High domestic inflation combined with oil-related economic instability came to bite in the mid-to-late 1970s, which Leftists and Islamists used to fuel the sense of popular grievance against the Shah.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was, however, acutely aware of the glaring gaps in Iran’s economic progress, particularly among rural landless peasants and the vast tenant farmer class. As early as 1949, the Shah articulated his own vision of land redistribution that would enable the state to purchase land from the aristocracy and apportion it to tenant farmers.26 In 1951, the Shah issued a royal decree which divided royal landholdings on which ~2,000 villages were situated among the local population.27 Up to the 1960s, ~50–60% of the Iranian population lived and worked as tenant farmers within a feudal landlord-tenant system, but the land was primarily in the ownership of a small group of wealthy landlords and aristocratic families, known as the ‘thousand families’.2829 In 1957, the Shah commissioned United States agricultural economist Joseph R. Motheral to conduct a comprehensive study on land redistribution, and Motheral’s recommendations would ultimately be instructive for the Shah’s 1963 ‘White Revolution’.30 The Shah wished for the land reform program to be ‘one in which human welfare comes first and balance-sheet considerations second’ and to ‘give the peasants a stake in their country’ as part of the modernisation process.31 The system of tenant farming and lack of modernisation in agricultural methods meant that in a drought-ridden country, agriculture lagged far behind other industries in Iran’s economic development.32
The full programme of that modernisation process culminated in the January 1963 proclamation of the ‘White Revolution’, or ‘the Revolution of the Shah and his People’33. The White Revolution constituted a six-point, 20-year plan of economic (primarily agrarian), social, and political reform. While land redistribution constituted the centrepiece of the programme, the reforms also included extending the franchise to women and allowing women to run for political office, the nationalisation of forests and pastures, a national literacy programme, and a profit-sharing scheme for industrial workers. There is a cynical view of the White Revolution that the Shah used the reforms purely to consolidate his own political power. This is an uncharitable overextrapolation. The Shah did indeed intend to break the power of the feudal aristocracy, who used their power in the Majles to maintain their hegemony over Iran’s land, including blocking agricultural reforms and ensuring their landholdings remained untaxed. He also viewed land reform as a crucial strategy to undercut the Tudeh Party, which sought to mobilise the dispossessed rural tenant farmers in support of its revolutionary cause. Nevertheless, the Shah’s bona fides in seeking to ‘develop the nation morally, socially, and economically’ are hard to question, and the historical record is clear that his personal sense of acting for the Iranian people and nation was a deeply held, sincere conviction.3435
The issue with the White Revolution was not the Shah’s genuine commitment to social reform and, in particular, economic opportunity for Iran’s peasantry. It was unintended consequences, some perhaps foreseeable and some unforeseeable. The first was the backlash from the powerful landowning class, within which one potentially foreseeable consequence was the impact on the clerical establishment. Iran’s Islamic clerics owned vast areas of land known under Islamic law as vaqf, lands given as a religious endowment, the rights to which are considered inalienable. The Shah’s land reforms revoked the tax exemption of clerical lands and, because the property is considered to belong to God, the ulama viewed the reforms as forbidden under Sharia law. The clerical establishment was also threatened by the Shah’s literacy programme, which targeted secular education; the clerics viewed this as usurping their dominant role in the provision of religious education in rural regions. To add to the clerical anger, women’s suffrage and the opening up of political office to women caused outrage among the highly patriarchal clerical establishment, particularly when six women were elected to the Majles in 1963.
The White Revolution represented a turning point in the role of the clerical establishment in politics, which had previously overwhelmingly supported Iran’s constitutional order and monarchy: from 1963 onwards, hardline clerics openly mobilised against the monarchy. The most vociferous clerical critic of the reforms was Ruhollah Khomeini, who launched a campaign against the White Revolution reforms. The Shah’s allyship with Israel also developed a heightened salience through the 1960s and early 1970s, as the government relied on Israeli expertise in irrigation techniques to improve Iran’s drought-ridden pastures, and American agricultural technology to expand productivity. Khomeini was thus able to portray the reforms as a ‘Zionist’ plot and reframe land reform not as a development to benefit the rural tenant farming class, but as a direct threat of ‘Western imperialism’ to the nation. The ‘CIA myth’ started to do its share of legwork in this respect. The clerics also indicted social progress, particularly the increasing visibility of women in education, politics, and society, as Western-influenced attacks on Islam and the ‘traditional’ role of women in society.
If clerical backlash was foreseeable, the most significant unintended consequence of the White Revolution’s land reform was the disruption of the previous rural social order. The Shah had believed that land reform would provide political stability; the reforms in fact created seismic political instability.36 Reforming land and creating a system where farmers were shareholders or owners sounded idealistic in principle; in practice, the policies were inefficient, and the attempt to create large-scale farms dislodged masses of tenant farmers, rather than the initial intent of creating small freeholders. The reforms also largely failed to increase agricultural production.37 In an economy already dominated by capital-intensive industries, this added to increasing numbers of low-literacy, low-skilled rural workers who now migrated to cities. In cities they were confronted with the spectacle of a new, cosmopolitan Iran: women in the fashion of the day, working jobs; the wealth of Iran’s new middle class; modern infrastructure. The urban-rural divide now found expression in a profound sense of economic and cultural alienation from Iran’s progress. For these disoriented, largely illiterate men, the mosques provided the sanctuary and sense of stability their lives lacked: they would also provide fertile ground for mobilising this disaffection against the monarchy in the Islamic Revolution.38
The mullahs took the lead in stirring up protests against the Shah’s reforms, which turned into violent demonstrations in Tehran, Qom, and other cities. The Shah responded immediately, arresting and imprisoning Khomeini, which triggered further violent demonstrations. The Shah required the military and the Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar (SAVAK; National Intelligence and Security Organisation) to suppress the demonstrations. Founded in 1957, the SAVAK had primarily focused on the Tudeh Party and the growing concern of the Pahlavi state, influenced by the oil nationalisation crisis, of the threat of communism. By the mid 1960s, the Tudeh Party had been heavily infiltrated by the SAVAK and their leadership imprisoned or exiled. However, in the aftermath of the White Revolution, the Shah and his security apparatus faced a new, religiously inspired threat alongside resurgent Marxist-Leninist agitation. Following his release from prison, Khomeini was placed under house arrest and then exiled to Turkey, before he landed at the Shia seminary in Najaf, Iraq, in 1964. It was in Najaf that his theories of Islamic governance would start to take shape, and from where he would continue to incite his followers against the Shah.39
The aftermath of the White Revolution through the 1970s entailed an expanded role for the SAVAK in state security, combating the rising threat of Islamist-inspired violence and reemerging Marxist-Leninist leftist movements. Alongside the ‘CIA coup’ myth, this period constitutes another element of the black legend against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign as Shah, the subject of fantastical exaggerations of the supposed brutality of the SAVAK, of mass incarcerations, torture, and executions, with claims of ~100,000–300,000 political prisoners and ~70,000 executions.40 In a tale tragically familiar to any Israeli’s, the exaggerations and lies were generated by the Islamists and Leftists as a response to their own provocations, laundered by the Western media and NGOs like Amnesty International, and cemented by academics to form a narrative of the Shah’s brutality.41 In fact, recent work from Iranian historians and, crucially, from Emad al-Dib Baghi, who worked at the ‘Martyrs Foundation’ (Bonyad-e Shahid) in the Islamic Republic on state records, places the total number of political prisoners during the peak of the insurgency in the 1970s at ~3,200–4,000, and the total number of insurgents killed between 1971 and 1979 at 341.424344 None of this diminishes the fact that human rights abuses did take place under the Shah, by SAVAK in particular. But the facts dismiss the fantasy that Pahlavi Iran was every bit as brutal as the Islamist regime that followed, a lie that has been deployed by the regime’s apologists in the West for five decades.
The latter point is crucial, because it entails the distinction between a legitimate government responding to an insurgency against specific, defined violent groups in society, and the widespread use of violence as a coercive tool of social control applied indiscriminately across the population. It must be noted that Pahlavi Iran operated no systematic or arbitrary state policies designed to persecute people based on their sex, sexual orientation, or religious or ethnic minority status. Even anti-monarchy Iranian historians, Ervand Abrahamian in particular, have acknowledged the distinction between the Shah’s security apparatus, which did not exercise its writ randomly to terrorise the Iranian population, but was highly focused on crushing specific violent political threats to the government and the country, and the population-wide repression of the Islamic Republic.45
Of those specific threats, however, the Shah and SAVAK viewed the Leftist factions as far more dangerous, not only to Iran, but to the stability of the Gulf region. The Shah even deployed the Iranian military to Oman in 1972 to fight the Dhofar Rebellion, a Soviet- and Chinese-backed Marxist insurgency against the Omani monarch, which helped (along with the British Special Air Service) turn the tide against the Marxists. However, this emphasis on the Marxist threat overlooked the Islamist threat; the focus on defanging the Leftist guerrilla groups in Iran led to an underestimation of the growing Islamist threat, largely mobilised through the mosques. When Saddam Hussein, then vice president of Iraq, made overtures to the Shah to have Khomeini assassinated (Khomeini was viewed as a threat to Iraq’s stability, too), the Shah reportedly replied: ‘We are not in the business of killing clerics.’ By the time the threat of the Islamist clerics mobilised by Khomeini and the masses being radicalised to their cause was realised, it was too late in the game to thwart their momentum.
Ultimately, the structures that underpinned the successes of the Pahlavi dynasty’s nation-building project would also prove to be their undoing. The centralised bureaucratic model of the state that Reza Shah Pahlavi developed had, under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, become more technocratic.46 The paradox of the Pahlavi state was that the state was both the engine of national progress and separate from society.47 This positioned the state as an omnipotent entity, with the Shah as the benevolent guiding hand for all national developments. Separation from society created a disconnect between the state and its technocratic elite, which was driving social, economic, and cultural change, and the impact of such changes on different sections of society. The separation from society and the centralised structure of the state combined to create a state that lacked flexibility and responsiveness to rapidly changing dynamics on the ground. The Shah and his technocratic elite were indeed the engine of Iran’s rapid economic development and social progress. Yet there is little doubt that this could have been better managed and implemented to mitigate the potential discordance between the emerging urban middle class and rural peasantry, between the educated and uneducated.
The technocratic state that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi built was also more personality-centred than even that of his father’s, which was both a blessing and a curse. When the going was good, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was a ‘formidable, hard-working, capable, and decisive ruler’; but under pressure, he could become withdrawn and indecisive.4849 Added to his cancer diagnosis in 1974, which was kept a state secret, the Shah was physically as well as emotionally exhausted at a time when his full strength and capability were required to face down the Islamic Revolution with more conviction. What prevented him from doing so, however, was not simply indecision; it was his refusal to ‘spill the blood’ of his people to retain his crown, which motivated his decision to leave Iran voluntarily. Yet he was also, as he acknowledged on the tarmac of Tehran airport, a tired man. The Shah had built a state in which he acted as the paramount decision-maker, which was consequently highly vulnerable to political instability if he was not in a position to act decisively. For the supporters of the Islamic Revolution, the Faustian bargain with Islam began when the Shah boarded a plane out of Tehran.
The project of building a forward-looking, modern, strong, independent Iran that started with Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925 and continued by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was, in many ways, successful. Expanded education, modern infrastructure development, public health improvements, legal reforms, and secularisation underpinned the emergence of the most socially progressive country in the Middle East, all achieved in the context of incremental progress towards economic sovereignty that was eventually realised with the rapid economic growth of the 1960s to the early 1970s. And yet, it wasn’t enough. The centralised, autocratic nature of the state; the uneven distribution of educational, infrastructural, and economic development; wider Cold War dynamics; the lingering salience of Islam; these factors would all combine to undermine the foundations of Iran’s constitutional monarchy and, eventually, turn the country over to the mullahs.
Epilogue
I had a professor during my degree for a course on the Americas in the early modern period who often invoked the concept of ‘La Leyenda Negra’ (the Black Legend), a theory of historical scholarship which identified how Spain and the Spanish Empire in the Americas were depicted as uniquely cruel, intolerant, and rapacious. While the Spanish Empire did indeed expand violently and entail brutality and repression, the motivations for exaggerating the claims beyond the reality of the historical record were political, motivated by rival European empires and anti-Catholic bias.
Iran’s history in the 20th century, and the Pahlavi Dynasty more specifically, is the subject of its own Black Legend, perhaps we may call it Revaayat-e siyaah, in which both Shah Pahlavis are portrayed as mere Western pawns, where Iran’s history is a function of the 1953 ‘CIA coup’, and where particularly Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi is portrayed as a tyrant recklessly wielding Gestapo-like repression to coerce the population under his rule. The motivation for this Black Legend is to justify the Islamic Revolution and sanitise the regime’s near half-century of totalitarian violent rule, a laundering role that the Western liberal/left media continues to be all too happy to perform.
While the Pahlavi Dynasty deserves scrutiny and criticism where it is warranted, the slaughter of over 40,000 Iranians in January of this year means that the propagation of Iran’s Black Legend is no longer tolerable. Redressing these historical distortions in this moment is urgent.
Sheikholeslami, A. Courts and Courtiers in the Reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Encyclopaedia Iranica. 1993;6(4):381-384.
Chehabi, H.E. The Pahlavi Period. Iranian Studies. 1998;31(3/4):495-502.
Mathee, R. Transforming Dangerous Nomads into Useful Artisans, Technicians, Agriculturists: Education in the Reza Shah Period. Iranian Studies. 1993;26(3/4):313-336.
Ibid.
Pesaran, H. M. Economy in the Pahlavi Period. Encyclopaedia Iranica. 1997;8(2):143-156.
Clawson, P. Knitting Iran Together: The Land Transport Revolution, 1920-1940. Iranian Studies. 1993;26(3/4):235-250.
Ref. 5.
Ref. 3.
Cronin, S. Reza Shah and the Paradoxes of Military Modernisation in Iran. Oriento Moderno. 2004;23(84):175-203.
Brew, G. The Collapse Narrative: The Coup and the Reintegration of Iranian Oil, 1952–1954. In: Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War. Cambridge University Press; 2022:118-148.
U.S. Department of State, Document 254. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
Ref 10.
U.S. Department of State, Document 271. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
U.S. Department of State, Document 259. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
U.S. Department of State, Document 170. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
Ibid.
U.S. Department of State, Document 283. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
Ibid.
U.S. Department of State, Document 349. In Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954, vol. X. Ed. Carl N. Raether and Charles S. Sampson.
Takeyh, R. & de Bellaigue, C. Coupdunnit: What Really Happened in Iran? Foreign Affairs. Sept/Oct 2014;93(5):163-167
Ibid.
U.S. Office of Economic Research. Iran: The Shah’s Economic and Military Expansion. Directorate of Intelligence Memorandum. Feb. 1973:73–14.
Ibid.
Moghadam, F.E. An historical interpretation of the Iranian Revolution. Cambridge Journal of Economics. 1988 Dec;12(4):401-418.
Mohaddes, K. Pesaran, M.H. One Hundred Years of Oil Income and the Iranian Economy: A Curse or a Blessing? Economic Research Forum. Working Paper 771; 2013.
Roush, J. The Motheral Report and Land Reform in Iran, 1952-1963. Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports. 2025.
Ibid.
Ref. 26
Shahbaz, K. Iran’s White Revolution. World Affairs. 1963;126(1):17-21.
Ref. 26.
Ref. 26.
Ref. 22.
Watson, K. The Shah’s White Revolution: Education and Reform in Iran. Comparative Education. 1976 Mar;12(1):23-36.
Shahbaz, K. Iran’s White Revolution. World Affairs. 1963;126(1):17-21.
Ref 32.
Ref. 24.
Ref. 22.
Anderson, S. King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran. Doubleday, 2025.
These events are provided as an overview here, and will be covered in more detail in Part 3.
Cooper, A.S. Enduring myths of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Middle East Institute. Feb 13, 2004.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Kadivar, C. A Question of Numbers. Rozigar-i Naw (Persian). Aug 8, 2003.
Abrahamian, E. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. University of California Press, 1999.
Ibid.
Schayegh, C. “Seeing Like a State”: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 2010 Feb.;42(1):37-61.
Ibid.
U.S. Office of Economic Research. Iran: The Shah’s Economic and Military Expansion. Directorate of Intelligence Memorandum. Feb. 1973:73–14.
Ref. 38.