The 1953 Iran coup was the U.S.- and UK-backed overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. John Kiriakou, comparing it to the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s government in the same era, says the Mossadegh coup was “absolutely not” in the United States’ national interest — it was in Britain’s.[1]
From secular politics to religious revolution
Kiriakou traces a direct line from the coup to Iran’s 1979 revolution. With democracy “working” under Mossadegh, its overthrow was followed by the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, working with the United States to crush all opposition — religious, secular-democratic, and communist alike. As harassment, imprisonment, and exile intensified to the point where the state could no longer jail or exile people fast enough, the mosque became the only remaining space where Iranians could organize, since it could not plausibly be shut down the way a political meeting could. Kiriakou argues this dynamic — not religious zeal alone — is why the resulting 1978–79 revolution took a religious rather than secular character, culminating in the Shah’s February 1979 overthrow and the November 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy.[2]
”Forcibly reimposed”
Retelling the sequence in January 2026, Kiriakou stressed that the monarchy had been interrupted rather than continuous. Iran “very briefly had a democratic government”: the Shah’s father had held power, then the Shah briefly, and then Mosaddegh won an election — before “the US and UK overthrew Mosaddegh in 1953.”[3]
Two consequences follow in his account. Mosaddegh “was deposed and spent literally the rest of his life under house arrest.” And the restoration was not a return but an imposition: the Shah “was forcibly reimposed on the Iranian people” — after which, “by 1979, it all fell apart.”[3][4]
He has elsewhere named the two services involved, calling Mosaddegh “the only democratically elected prime minister in the history of Iran” and the 1953 operation a joint effort of the CIA and MI6.[5]