From Operation Ajax to Open Decapitation: The Unfinished Business of America’s Iran Problem
Seventy years after the CIA helped unseat Iran’s elected prime minister in the 1953 coup known as Operation Ajax, Washington’s approach to Tehran appears to have come full circle—from covert manipulation to overt force. The history is not a prologue so much as a warning: removing a leader is often the simplest part. What follows has a way of rewriting a nation’s politics—and America’s place within it—for generations.
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The 1953 operation was a study in meticulously engineered illusion. Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA officer who moved through Tehran under the alias James Lockridge, built a reality in which a beleaguered monarch appeared reclaimed by an adoring public. CIA funds greased the presses; newspaper editors ran fabricated stories painting Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh as a communist stooge and closet British loyalist. Clerics were paid to denounce him from pulpits. Army officers were bribed. Mobs marched through bazaars carrying the Shah’s portrait and chanting royalist slogans.
There was, crucially, preexisting tension to exploit. Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iranian oil had ignited a British-led embargo that strangled the economy. He sidelined the Shah, alienated conservative clerics who once backed him, and presided over deepening crisis. The CIA did not conjure opposition out of thin air—it identified fractures and forced them open. Yet most historians agree: without American and British intervention, Mossadegh would not have fallen when he did, or in the way he did. Iranian politics did not simply erupt; foreign power was decisively imposed upon it.
What followed remade Iran. The Shah’s rule hardened into autocracy, buttressed by American money, American weapons and a CIA-trained secret police, SAVAK, that became synonymous with repression. Suspicions of Anglo-American orchestration were not conspiracy; Mossadegh said as much at his own trial. The conviction calcified into civic memory, transmitted through families and stitched into identity. When revolution came in 1979, it doubled as a verdict on 1953. The students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran did so because they believed, based on lived experience, that it would again be used to unmake their politics.
The Islamic Republic that rose from the upheaval was no liberation for most Iranians. It birthed its own secret police, its own prisoners of conscience, its own enemies list. The revolution made in the people’s name often stood against them. Yet one strand of continuity ran through state and society alike: a deep skepticism of American intentions seeded by 1953. As the CIA’s own historian later conceded, Operation Ajax “transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences.”
From the villa to the video
In 1953, regime change was the domain of covert tradecraft—false names, forged headlines, hired muscle. Concealment was the strategy. Seven decades on, subtlety seems almost passé. The strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were announced in a video posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform. The objective—regime decapitation—was briefed openly to reporters. Asked who should lead Iran next, Trump didn’t hedge. “I have to be involved in the appointment,” he told Axios, dismissing the apparent frontrunner, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, as “a lightweight.” The former president later declared he would accept nothing less from Tehran than “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
Israel, meanwhile, struck the building in Qom where Iran’s Assembly of Experts was in session to choose the next Supreme Leader, further scrambling a succession many assumed would be tightly managed. Beyond Iran, the tone has been similarly transactional. Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was captured in January. On the surface, the logic appears seductively simple: the United States possesses unmatched military and intelligence capacity; if hostile leaders can be plucked from the chessboard, why not play the game this way more often?
The shortest road, the longest shadow
History supplies the answer. Iraq and Afghanistan loom as reminders of how quickly victory can curdle into entanglement. But Iran is the cautionary tale that keeps returning to the scene of the crime. The 1953 coup looked like an unalloyed success in its moment. The Shah signed the oil. The communist threat—never as imminent as advertised—was neutralized. Washington congratulated itself. The bill arrived 26 years later and it is still being paid, not only in Tehran’s streets and prisons but also in the architecture of permanent suspicion that frames every U.S.–Iran encounter.
The point is not that regimes cannot be changed by force, or even that undeserving rulers should be safe from it. The point is that in Iran, perhaps more than anywhere else, the act of intervention becomes the story that outlives the interveners. The chant that still reverberates in demonstrations—“Death to America”—did not spring from an abstract ideology. It grew from a CIA villa in Tehran, from a manufactured uprising that ended an experiment in parliamentary sovereignty, from a firman signed by a reluctant Shah under the pressure of a foreign plan.
Power can remove; only politics can build
There is a throughline from Mossadegh’s courtroom testimony to the panic in the embassy compound, from SAVAK’s cells to the morality police and Evin Prison, from a foreign-backed monarch to a clerical absolute leader: when outside force writes the first draft of a country’s future, the last draft is invariably written by the people who must live in it. They do so with the memory of what was done to them. That memory constrains reformers and hardens radicals. It narrows the space for pragmatism and nourishes a politics of grievance and resistance that can take on a life of its own.
In that light, today’s open pursuit of regime decapitation risks replaying a familiar American error—confusing what power can remove with what politics must build. Killing a supreme leader or toppling a government may rearrange the hierarchy. It does not resolve the legitimacy crisis that arises when a nation believes its destiny is being organized elsewhere. Nor does it guarantee that what follows will be friendlier to U.S. interests, more stable for the region or freer for the people who will live under it.
The hardest question
It is tempting, amid the plume of smoke over Tehran and the precision of modern warfare, to measure success in surgical strikes and captured autocrats. But history suggests a more sobering metric: whether the choices made in Washington, Jerusalem or any other capital help produce a political order in Iran that is accountable to Iranians themselves. That is the only foundation that can bear the weight of real change—and the only basis on which hostility can fade rather than metastasize.
The United States can, in theory, help install almost anyone in Tehran. It has done versions of this before. The harder question—the one 1953 answered in blood and memory, and the one Washington still struggles to answer—is what happens next.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
