The Queen and the Coup (2020) Movie Script
1
February 1953, the first anniversary
of Queen Elizabeth ll's reign.
Little does she know that
she is about to be deployed
in a coup d'etat in a
country 3,500 miles away.
"Receipt message from Queen
Elizabeth expressing concern
"at latest developments
re Shah..."
The message goes to the
American Embassy in Tehran.
On the streets, a plot to overthrow
the country's Prime Minister
in favour of Iran's monarch,
the Shah, is under way.
But the Shah, terrified,
wants to quit and run.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth
is trying to send a secret message
to the Shah telling
him to stay put.
This would be remarkable.
It would be the covert meddling
of the Queen of
the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs
of another country.
It's an astonishing revelation
in a new investigation
by two British historians...
...how the young Queen's name
was used to destroy Iran's democracy.
It is a secret so sensitive the
evidence has been locked away
for nearly 70 years.
I was truly shocked
when I read this document.
This is the sort of document
that one almost never sees.
The coup was first
planned by Ml6,
then finally
executed by the CIA.
It was, above all, about oil.
We have American
diplomatic material,
we have Foreign
Office documents,
we have CIA material.
But Ml6 have
never admitted to it.
The Foreign Office
were very quick to deny
any British
involvement whatsoever.
In fact, they flat out lied.
It was an episode which would
have devastating consequences
for relations between Iran and
the West right up to the present day.
We do not seek regime change.
However, the Iranian regime's
aggression must end now.
Professors Richard
Aldrich and Rory Cormac
are detectives
with a difference.
They burrow away among the
hundreds of millions of buried documents
in national archives.
The treasure they seek is
past secrets from high places
which have an impact
on our world today.
Intelligence and the monarchy
are perhaps the two most
secretive institutions
in the entire country.
So if and when those
two worlds ever collide,
we're very unlikely to
see unredacted papers.
Aldrich and Cormac's
latest investigation
is into a world-changing event
that happened 67 years ago.
Sometimes the only
way to find the truth
about your own country's
role is to look elsewhere.
So often these things
are hidden from us,
so often the British keep
these things very secret.
But, of course, sometimes
the American documents
are available to historians.
Their aim is to uncover
the full story of a coup
involving the
young Shah of Iran,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It's a trail that will lead
them to none other than
Her Majesty The
Queen, Elizabeth ll.
In 1948, the young Shah
was a guest of the royal family
at the London Olympic Games
and met the two Princesses,
Elizabeth and Margaret.
But it was King George VI
himself the Shah was really after.
He believed his country and
his throne were threatened
by Communist uprisings.
The secret details of the visit
are missing in the British archives.
But in the National
Archives in Washington,
Rory Cormac found cables
from a Foreign Office official
who was keeping Britain's
American allies in the loop.
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"..For Iran to conclude
such an alliance with the UK
"because of trouble it
would cause with USSR."
The Shah was a bit player
in a much bigger power game
as cracks were appearing
in the wartime alliance
between the West and Russia.
Making any alliance more formal,
it would only irritate the Soviets,
and it would only risk escalating
the early Cold War tensions.
Two years later,
the Cold War set in.
Iran, with its huge oil supplies,
was a highly desirable asset.
Its oilfields were owned
by Anglo-Persian Oil,
in which the British
Government had a 51% stake.
Those oilfields would
become a political battleground.
The Shah was a constitutional
monarch, Iran a democracy.
Its most popular politician
was Mohammad Mossadegh,
who believed Iranian oil
should belong to Iranians.
In 1950, he called for the
nationalisation of Anglo-Persian.
ARCHIVE: Long-smouldering
Iranian nationalists made clear
their intention to
seize the oil industry.
The parliament fell in line
behind an old enemy of the British,
the ascetic, bitter
Mohammed Mossadegh.
Mossadegh said no to
the foreign superpowers
who wanted to impose
their ideas, or their short-term
interest, upon our country.
This made Mossadegh
the voice of the nation.
In April 1951, Mossadegh
became Prime Minister.
He announced he was going
ahead with the nationalisation,
infuriating the British.
ARCHIVE:
The executives of Anglo-Persian
Oil panicked and lobbied London.
Britain was trying to find a
way of recovering from the war
and maintaining as
much of the global power
that Britain traditionally had.
And this creates a very,
very important backdrop
to Mossadegh's decision
to nationalise oil in 1951.
Mossadegh might have expected
the anti-colonialist Labour government,
headed by Prime Minister
Clement Attlee, to be sympathetic,
but money talked.
The oil coming from Iran
brought millions in revenue
to the British Treasury.
The Brits are wondering,
"How are we going to make
up for this lost revenue?
"We need this money because we
spent all our money during the war."
Attlee gave the green
light for covert operations.
On 22nd March 1951,
an anonymous article appeared
in the Times newspaper.
It made many damaging
and false accusations
against Mossadegh's government.
It smeared him.
It portrayed him as
corrupt, as unpatriotic,
as economically
incompetent and pro-Soviet,
many of the lines which British
propaganda would go on to take.
This was a crucial article.
The anonymous author
was Ann Lambton.
In public, she was an academic
at the School of Oriental
and African Studies in London.
However, during World
war ll Lambton had, in secret,
been a propaganda chief
at Ml6's station in Tehran.
In private, she was a spy,
and one closely connected
to the British establishment
as a niece of Harold Macmillan -
a cabinet minister in
Churchill's wartime government
and future Prime Minister.
Mossadegh now
found himself her target.
Aldrich and Cormac discovered
a key document in which
Ml6 notified the Foreign
Office of Lambton's covert plans,
plans which were
the first step to a coup.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Ann Lambton
has suggested in a conversation,
"covert means to
undermine the position...
"..of Mr Mossadegh.
"And that the ideal man to
do it would be Dr Zaehner,
"an Oxford lecturer, who
has been extremely successful
"in covert propaganda
in 1944, in lran."
Dr Robert Zaehner, or Dr
Z, as he was nicknamed,
was an old associate of Lambton
from her clays in World War ll Tehran.
He was a very
intriguing character.
He wore small,
pebbledash glasses.
He kept money in socks.
He was a heavy opium smoker.
He was quite discreet,
but very affable.
And he had a great network.
He knew pretty much everyone
who mattered inside Tehran.
In league with Dr Zaehner, Ann
Lambton set about undermining
Iran's Prime Minister.
"The objective must be
to destabilise Mossadegh...
ACTOR'S VOICE: "..and
to give encouragement
"to the substantial body of
Persian friends we still have,
"who are unlikely
to show their faces
"and risk being called
traitors, without some support.
"This would," she hoped, "create
the sort of climate in Tehran..."
"..which is necessary
to change the regime."
This document is fascinating.
It's sent shortly after
Mossadegh has nationalised
Britain's oil assets,
and it's the response.
And the response
is covert action.
This is the genesis of the
operation to remove Mossadegh
and put the Shah
into complete control.
In the summer of 1951,
the plot to bring down Iran's
constitutional government
was christened within Ml6.
Operation Boot was the code name
for the British plans to undermine,
destabilise, and ultimately
overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh.
Then suddenly, and unexpectedly,
the operation took a
whole new direction.
ARCHIVE: Nurses coming off
duty were among the first to vote.
Another early elector to visit
his polling station at Caxton Hall,
Westminster, was Mr Attlee.
In October 1951, the Labour
Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,
who had approved
the covert operation,
called a general election...
...only to be defeated by
his former wartime boss,
Sir Winston Churchill.
ARCHIVE: For the time being, it
was the end of socialist government.
Attlee thinks about using
force because he's desperate.
He pulls back.
Churchill's different, because
he's absolutely in love with Empire
and the old idea of Empire.
He sees absolutely nothing
wrong in the use of force.
Indeed, he relishes it.
Rory Cormac discovered a
remarkable document from January 1952
which shows the change in tone.
The secret Foreign Office letter
used language which unequivocally
spelt out the plot
being hatched.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Confidential:
Tehran to Foreign Office.
"There being no rival in
sight who is likely to overthrow
Mossadegh by parliamentary
means, it follows that Persia's main
"hope of not passing under
Communist domination...
"..is a non-Communist
coup d'etat
"preferably in the
name of the Shah.
"This would mean an
authoritarian regime,
"which would be ready
to take active steps."
This is the first occasion in
the Iran secret documents,
unearthed by Aldrich and Cormac,
when the words
"coup d'etat" are used.
They're realising that
Mossadegh is not going to be
removed by ordinary
parliamentary procedure.
Something's got to happen, and
that something is a coup d'etat,
which you rarely see written
in Foreign Office documents.
The following month, Queen
Elizabeth ll came to the throne
after the death of
her father, the King,
who had shunned a request
for an alliance with Britain.
Now Her Majesty's
Government's position on the Shah
and Iran was changing fast.
But there was a problem.
For regime change in Iran,
Churchill knew he needed
the support of the new post-war
superpower, the United States.
And its Democrat President,
Harry S Truman, did not approve.
Truman, in particular,
not very keen
initially to get on board
with what appears to
be a British conspiracy
to perpetuate
the British Empire.
But America and Britain did
have one thing in common -
greed for oil.
It had also been
discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The United States had got
in there before the British
and now had its eyes on Iran.
Think about it.
If you're in the US Government, why
should you expend your resources?
Why should you invest
your covert operators?
Why should you even
invest your diplomatic effort,
just so Britain could
take back its oil company?
There's also an impression
amongst the Truman administration
that the British got
themselves into this mess.
In 1950, the Americans
strike a 50/50 agreement
with the Arabian
American Oil Company,
and the Americans
tell the Brits,
"Why don't you
do this with Iran?
"Wouldn't this be a
great arrangement?"
Britain doesn't listen,
so when Mossadegh
nationalises their oil company,
"You made your
bed, you lie in it."
Churchill tried to twist
Truman's arm, writing to him.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Britain and
America must gallop together on Iran.
"L ask, why two good men
asking only what is right
"should not gang up on a
third, who is doing wrong?"
The third man was, of course,
Mohammad Mossadegh.
Churchill's using this
Midwest language,
he's using the cowboy analogy
because he knows that Truman
is from Independence, Missouri,
and this is exactly the kind
of idiom that a plain-speaking
plain dealer from a place like
Independence would appreciate.
The Americans remain
suspicious of the British.
One CIA chief,
CD Jackson, wrote:
"The British are still living in
the days of colonial supremacy.
"They think the only way
to win is to frighten the..."
But none of that stopped
Ml6 officers in Tehran
carrying on plotting.
The plan was for the
Shah to sack Mossadegh
and replace him with a
compliant Prime Minister.
But the Shah had reason
to be wary of the British,
Winston Churchill in particular.
Back in 1941,
Churchill, as Britain's
wartime Prime Minister,
had sanctioned the
toppling of the Shah's father
when he refused to
support Britain's war effort.
Churchill replaced
the father with his son,
the 20-year-old
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
ARCHIVE: The swearing
in of the new Shah,
who is well disposed towards
Britain, was a ceremonious event.
These events scarred the Shah.
He must have felt
that humiliation himself,
and he must have
been very bitter
at the way that his
father had been treated,
and the way that his
destiny had been sealed.
So I think that left a
lifelong impression on him.
One British diplomat in Tehran
suspected the Shah might even
be secretly
supporting Mossadegh.
"It is possible that Mossadegh
has a curious hold over him
"and is able to blackmail him
"every time he sees a danger of
his government being overthrown."
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"As a long-term policy
"it seems that we
should try to work towards
"divesting the Shah
of all his powers...
"..and, if necessary, send him the
same way of his illustrious father,
"S Falle, 8th July, 1952."
S Falle is Samuel Falle,
who is the oriental secretary
in the British
Embassy in Tehran.
Sam Falle is an example of a
whole group of military officers,
who join the Foreign Service
after the Second World War
and take a pretty hard line.
They're pretty old -school
on issues of British
Empire, power...
...and how to treat foreigners.
This is a remarkable document,
because it shows such
disdain for the Iranians,
all the Iranians.
It's not a very nice document.
British plans advanced, but
the Americans stayed out.
So Ml6's Head of Station,
Montagu Woodhouse,
tried a different tactic.
Monty Woodhouse was a
classic, upper-class gentleman spy.
He was a Baron,
he had served during
the Second World War
with the Special Operations
Executive in Greece.
He would go on to
become a Conservative MP.
Woodhouse now
used his political skills
to try to win the
Americans round.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "l was
anxious not to be accused
"of trying to use the Americans
"to pull British
chestnuts out of the fire.
"So I decided to emphasise
the Communist threat to Iran,
"rather than the need to
recover control of the oil industry."
And he is making a
conscious effort to play up,
even exaggerate,
the Communist threat.
Using Communism, rather
than oil, as a justification
became a new ingredient
in the coup planning.
Mossadegh's Foreign
Minister, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
was wise to British scheming.
He himself had been
pilloried by the British
and the year before narrowly
survived an assassination attempt
by an lslamist group
which had links to Ml6.
Britain targeted him
with propaganda,
trying to smear him,
trying to discredit him.
They portrayed him
as a homosexual.
They portrayed him
as a Christian convert.
They portrayed him as a thief.
Fatemi knew the British
Embassy was a hotbed of spies.
In October 1952, he shut it down
in an attempt to quash
Ml6's coup planning.
The Ml6 officers
retreated to Cyprus.
Britain's coup, it seemed,
had ground to a halt.
Then another election,
this time in America,
put it right back on track.
ARCHIVE: Electric signs
flash the news - Ike's in,
and bedlam breaks out amongst
the Republican supporters
as they hear of
their landslide victory.
Dwight Eisenhower becomes
President by the greatest popular vote
ever given a White
House candidate.
Eisenhower's administration
was fanatically anti-Communist
and a stark
contrast to Truman's.
Well, Dwight Eisenhower had
advisors who had a certain view of Iran
that was different from
those who they succeeded,
"We're the can-do boys.
"Let us pursue covert
operations, we'll change things."
Their mind-set was the
Mossadegh government is unstable,
and it is weak, and if it falls,
then the Communists come in,
and now we've got a Cold
War front line with the Soviets,
and Tehran's in the wrong camp.
But American support for
Britain would not come free.
The Americans
drive a hard bargain.
"You want us in?
"You want us in after we
help you get rid of Mossadegh?
"Then we have to have
an economic stake."
And so the division takes place.
The British retain
40% of the oil,
America retains 40%, and then,
what the Americans have got
is obviously the
profits from the oil,
but they've also got
political leverage.
There is no chance again that
Britain can act independently
over Iran.
With Britain's diplomatic
HQ in Tehran neutralised,
the centre of operations
would become the US Embassy.
All Iranian operatives
working for Ml6
would be passed on
to American handlers...
...the code name changing
from Boot to Operation Ajax.
The Americans
would be taking over.
But the British
weren't out of it.
Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac
were on the verge of discovering
an extraordinary series
of buried documents.
They would show that the
United States would deploy
the Queen of England as a
hidden asset in a bloody coup.
It has remained a closely-guarded
secret for nearly seven decades.
In 1953, the preparations
for a coup to topple
the democratic government
of Prime Minister Mossadegh
and replace it with the
autocratic rule of the young Shah,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
passed from Ml6
to America's CIA.
It would be renamed
Operation Ajax.
The West wanted a puppet,
but the Shah was
proving anything but.
The Shah is quite paranoid,
he's worrying that the
Brits and the Americans
might actually be working
against him all along,
and he's also worried about the
power of the Western hidden hand,
to be able to depose him
whenever they wanted,
just like they
deposed his father.
The Shah was also
caught in a war of nerves
with Prime Minister Mossadegh.
In February 1953,
Mossadegh threatens to resign.
He says to the Shah, "l've
had enough of you and the Brits
"trying to scheme against me
and overthrow my government."
This unnerves the Shah,
and he offers to leave.
At this critical moment,
the Americans were bolstered
by an unprecedented intervention.
At the National Archives in
Washington, Professor Rory Cormac
recently uncovered an
extraordinary secret cable
which seemed to come from
the pinnacle of the British state.
It contained a message
passed on to Washington
by the British Foreign
Secretary, Anthony Eden.
It was for the eyes only
of John Foster Dulles,
America's all-powerful
Secretary of State,
whose brother was
head of the CIA,
and Assistant Secretary
Henry Byroade.
"Top secret.
"From London to
US Secretary of State.
"Number 4844.
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"February 27th, 9pm,
"Eyes only Secretary..."
"..and Byroade."
"Foreign Office this
afternoon informed us
"of receipt message from
Eden, from Queen Elizabeth,
"expressing concern at
latest developments re Shah,
"and strong hope we can find
some means of dissuading him
"from leaving the country.
"British Embassy in Washington
has been urgently instructed
"to discuss with department."
This is a really
intriguing document,
because it reads as if
Queen Elizabeth herself
is sending a message
to the Americans
and trying to persuade the Shah,
another constitutional monarch,
to stay put when
he wants to flee.
And this would be remarkable.
It would be
the...covert meddling
of the Queen of
the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs
of another country.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth
is almost leading the charge,
but she has to do it indirectly,
because Britain no longer
has an embassy in Iran.
Constitutionally, the Queen
should have no direct role
in foreign policy, let alone a
plot to unseat a democratic leader.
But the Americans instantly
realised the impact the message
would have on the Shah.
They immediately forwarded it
to their ambassador in
Tehran, Loy Henderson.
The next day, Henderson spoke
to the Shah's senior minister, Ala,
at the Imperial Palace,
requesting an
audience with the Shah.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Top Secret.
"From London.
"Ala called Shah on
inter-palace telephone,
"and after a few minutes'
conversation, said..."
"..Shah was unable
to see me personally
"since the Prime Minister
was on the way to the palace
"to bid him farewell.
"Shah would
appreciate it, however,
"if I would talk to
him by telephone."
These were desperate clays
for the Americans and British
plotting against
Iran's Prime Minster.
Mossadegh's visit to the palace
seemed to herald the
Shah going into exile.
Henderson reported...
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"Early this morning,
"stories regarding
imminent departure Shah,
"pouring in from many sources.
"Most common version was
that Shah had decided to leave
"because Mossadegh was
threatening if Shah did not, repeat not..."
"..repeat not, so he would
issue proclamation to country,
"criticising Shah and asking people
to choose between Shah and himself."
Henderson urgently needed to pass
on the message from Queen Elizabeth
as a final plea to the Shah,
but he was fearful of
doing it on the phone.
"L asked Ala if he was sure
telephone not, repeat not, tapped.
"Ala said every possible
precaution taken in this respect.
"L told him to tell the Shah
that in interest of country,
"the Shah should not, repeat
not, leave in this fashion.
"L also asked him to tell
Shah that I had just received
"message from a very
important personage,
"for whom Shah had
most friendly feelings,
"had also expressed
sincere hope that Shah
"could be dissuaded
from leaving the country."
It is now almost 70
years after that message,
the Shah is long passed.
I can't get inside
his head directly,
but when you look at the Shah,
at the regard that he had
for royalty and for ceremony...
...and the playing to his ego -
"l've gotten a message from the
most important monarch in the world,
"telling me I need to stay."
That's a boost.
That's a boost that
keeps him in place.
There's an English phrase - it's a
quaint one for me, as an American -
what is it?
- "Be a man, George,"
back from the 18th
century, you know.
Stand up to the pesky Americans
or stand up to the French,
Well, this was a "Be a man,
George" message to the Shah,
which he thought was
coming from the Queen.
He was really going to
defy that and turn her down?
However, as Cormac and
Aldrich continued their investigation
in the archives,
a further new document would
throw up one more revelatory twist.
This document was
truly astonishing,
because clearly, the intervention
that the State Department makes,
the intervention that Loy
Henderson makes, is very important,
in the construction
of that coup.
Without the Shah,
if the Shah had fled - he
clearly was planning to,
he was saying his farewells.
He was pretty much
heading to the airport.
Without Henderson's
intervention,
the coup would
not have happened.
This new document has
remained a carefully guarded secret
in the State Department archive
in Washington for 67 years.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "From
London to the Secretary of State.
"Telegram number 4847,
"February 28th 1953, 11am.
"Priority. Repeated
information."
"Tehran, priority.
"Reference to
Embassy's telegram 4844,
"27th February, repeated Tehran.
"Queen Elizabeth..."
"..refers, of
course, to vessel..."
"..and not...
"..repeat not, to monarch."
I was truly shocked
when I read this document.
This is the sort of document
that one almost never sees.
This is a correction
to a previous telegram.
It's saying, "Our
previous telegram,
"referring to Anthony
Eden and Queen Elizabeth,
"was badly drafted, was garbled,
"and actually, when we
referred to Queen Elizabeth,
"what we actually meant to say
was a message from Anthony Eden,
"who is currently
sailing on the vessel,
"the RMS Queen Elizabeth."
And, of course, at this time
Anthony Eden was sailing to Canada
on the RMS Queen Elizabeth
to attend a conference.
The Americans had a choice.
Own up to their mistake
and tell the British
or keep it a secret.
"Eyes only, Secretary Byroade."
"Deeply regret lack of clarity."
"lt was not, repeat not, until
rereading the message this morning
"that it occurred to us that it
was open to misinterpretation.
"Embassy does not, repeat not,
"propose to inform
British of incident."
The Americans chose to
cover up, rather than own up.
The decision is dramatic, because
Britain would have been livid
if the Queen's name had
been used in vain like that.
The deception went further.
They're also trying to
keep it from the Shah.
Because the Shah
believes that his decisions
were partly in response to a
request from Queen Elizabeth.
They don't want to
know that's not the case.
They don't want the Shah to
realise that essentially he's been
misinformed, perhaps
even unintentionally duped.
He's been persuaded
to take risks.
He's actually been
persuaded to stick his neck out.
And all this, to some
extent, is on a false premise.
He believes he's received a
message from one monarch to another.
He's actually received
a message from a boat.
Not quite the same thing.
At the end of this
extraordinary episode,
there is one undeniable fact -
before the Queen's apparent
message was passed on,
the Shah had
decided to leave Iran.
After receiving it from
the American ambassador,
he changed his mind and stayed.
The coup was back on.
In March 1953, the Ml6
and CIA preparations
for the Iran coup, revealed
in the secret documents,
spilled over onto
the streets of Tehran.
Supporters of Prime
Minister Mossadegh
were taken on by
pro-Shah rioters
manipulated by the Western
intelligence agencies.
Covert action only works
when there's a
pre-existing movement
which aligns with what the Brits
or the Americans wanted to do.
Britain and America
did not create opposition
to Mossadegh from scratch -
these people already
existed and were quite vocal.
What the covert action sought to
do was to push them along a bit,
to bolster them, to fund them,
and to make them as vocal
as they possibly could be.
CIA and Ml6 have a whole
range of agents and collaborators
which they've been
establishing for many years,
but at the moment that
the coup is approaching,
the main mechanism is bribery.
The British put further
pressure on Mossadegh
with a naval blockade.
The British actually talk
about the possibility of invasion,
they talk about the possibility
of sabotaging oil refineries,
at one point they even talk
about the use of nuclear weapons.
So it's an extraordinary
moment in history
when Britain really
rediscovers the whole idea
of old-fashioned
gunboat diplomacy.
The chief of police,
Mahmoud Afshartous,
in attempt to protect
Iran's government,
rallied pro-Mossadegh supporters
against the CIA and
Ml6-backed mobs.
But Afshartous didn't last long.
He was abducted by soldiers
working for General Fazlollah Zahedi,
a former Interior Minister
who was now part of the coup.
Six days later, his
body was discovered
and Zahedi and
certain military officers
were implicated in this murder.
Ml6 officers have since
admitted that the abduction
was part of the
covert operation.
They thought that by
abducting the Chief of Police,
a Mossadegh loyalist,
they would give the opposition
groups a morale boost.
What they didn't expect was
that they would get carried away
and end up killing Afshartous.
Afshartous was beaten,
tortured, then strangled to death.
His corpse was
displayed outside Tehran.
Smears, hired
mobs, military force,
and now murder.
Terror began to erode
Mossadegh's support.
Three months later, the
coup moved into its final phase.
Kermit Roosevelt,
grandson of a US President,
was now the CIA man in
charge of Operation Ajax.
Kermit Roosevelt knows Iran,
he knows the region,
he's confident - with enough
money and enough contacts -
he can pull off this operation.
On 19th July, Roosevelt
arrived in Tehran
after driving
overland from Iraq,
carrying $100,000 in
small denominations.
It was used to incite an
orgy of street violence.
In a last desperate act,
Mossadegh shut down parliament
and declared a state of
emergency on the 16th August.
ARCHIVE:
On 19th August 1953,
the Shah finally dismissed
Iran's Prime Minister and
installed a military government.
British Ministers
lied to the press,
claiming they'd first heard
news of the coup on the BBC.
Forces loyal to the Shah
turned up at Mossadegh's house.
He fled.
Two days later, he was captured,
tried and sentenced to death.
ARCHIVE:
The Shah commuted his
sentence to house arrest for life.
Mossadegh's Foreign
Secretary, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
the man who had closed
down the British Embassy,
was captured by pro-Shah troops
and executed without
trial by firing squad.
The Americans celebrated,
but there were still concerns
about the Shah's
stability and frame of mind.
The US ambassador in Tehran,
who had conveyed the Queen
Elizabeth message to the Shah,
asked if the British
could give him a boost.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Believe it
might be useful for Queen or Churchill
"send oral message
congratulations
"to Shah through
top-secret channels."
A sharp response came back
from the Foreign Office in London.
"L do not think there can
be any question of the Queen
"sending a message."
Associating the Queen
with a bloody coup
rang alarm bells in Whitehall.
Little did officials know the
damage was already done.
But the Americans
had hidden the truth.
For many Iranians,
the success of the coup
was no cause for celebration.
Farrokh Negahdar's
parents were activists
in the pro-Communist
Tudeh Party.
They desperately tried to
destroy incriminating evidence.
I remember, after the coup,
the days which still
deeply reside in my mind...
...the fear, the eyes of my
mum, the eyes of my grandmum,
who were burning
papers in a stove,
and the smell of the burnt
papers was in my nose.
It did not save eight of
his relatives from prison.
A decade later, Farrokh
himself spent a total of ten years
in the prisons of the Shah.
The objectives of Operation
Boot had been achieved,
and Iran's democracy under
Mossadegh successfully destroyed.
For 26 years, the Shah
was a steadfast ally
of Britain, America
and the Queen.
Although he tried to modernise Iran,
his regime also became synonymous
with human-rights
abuses and torture.
ARCHIVE:
In 1979, the Shah became
the victim of revolution himself
and went into exile.
Neither Britain nor America,
fearing the consequences
from the revolutionary
lslamist regime in Tehran,
would give him safe refuge.
I think the Shah
was a broken man.
He...
His life's work...
His life's dreams...
...had...
...were in tatters.
He had a huge deal of pride,
and all of a sudden,
he had found himself
in a situation where he
couldn't even take refuge
in any country that had
preached loyalty to him
and friendship to
him for over 37 years
that he had been in charge.
The Shah ended up in Egypt,
where he died just one year later.
The British Government did
not send official condolences.
Such attempts not to cause
offence to the new Islamic Republic
failed miserably.
The atrocities and
human-rights abuses
by Ayatollah Khomeini's
lslamist regime
at least matched
those of the Shah.
And even those Iranians
who opposed the Ayatollah
have never forgotten
Britain and America's role
in the coup of 1953.
It triggered a chain of events
that, nearly seven decades later,
continue to shake the world.
I think that the Islamic
revolution of Iran
is a direct response
to the coup of 1953.
ARCHIVE:
After the coup, the
psychology of Iranian people
changed dramatically.
They started to blame
the United States,
even religious
layers, not only lefts,
because of their
involvement in the coup.
The 1953 coup was a classic
example of a covert operation
that's carried out for
short-term reasons,
for short-term gain,
but in the long-term it's
immensely damaging.
In Iran, in Afghanistan,
in so many places where
the West has meddled,
the long-term results have
actually been fairly disastrous.
February 1953, the first anniversary
of Queen Elizabeth ll's reign.
Little does she know that
she is about to be deployed
in a coup d'etat in a
country 3,500 miles away.
"Receipt message from Queen
Elizabeth expressing concern
"at latest developments
re Shah..."
The message goes to the
American Embassy in Tehran.
On the streets, a plot to overthrow
the country's Prime Minister
in favour of Iran's monarch,
the Shah, is under way.
But the Shah, terrified,
wants to quit and run.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth
is trying to send a secret message
to the Shah telling
him to stay put.
This would be remarkable.
It would be the covert meddling
of the Queen of
the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs
of another country.
It's an astonishing revelation
in a new investigation
by two British historians...
...how the young Queen's name
was used to destroy Iran's democracy.
It is a secret so sensitive the
evidence has been locked away
for nearly 70 years.
I was truly shocked
when I read this document.
This is the sort of document
that one almost never sees.
The coup was first
planned by Ml6,
then finally
executed by the CIA.
It was, above all, about oil.
We have American
diplomatic material,
we have Foreign
Office documents,
we have CIA material.
But Ml6 have
never admitted to it.
The Foreign Office
were very quick to deny
any British
involvement whatsoever.
In fact, they flat out lied.
It was an episode which would
have devastating consequences
for relations between Iran and
the West right up to the present day.
We do not seek regime change.
However, the Iranian regime's
aggression must end now.
Professors Richard
Aldrich and Rory Cormac
are detectives
with a difference.
They burrow away among the
hundreds of millions of buried documents
in national archives.
The treasure they seek is
past secrets from high places
which have an impact
on our world today.
Intelligence and the monarchy
are perhaps the two most
secretive institutions
in the entire country.
So if and when those
two worlds ever collide,
we're very unlikely to
see unredacted papers.
Aldrich and Cormac's
latest investigation
is into a world-changing event
that happened 67 years ago.
Sometimes the only
way to find the truth
about your own country's
role is to look elsewhere.
So often these things
are hidden from us,
so often the British keep
these things very secret.
But, of course, sometimes
the American documents
are available to historians.
Their aim is to uncover
the full story of a coup
involving the
young Shah of Iran,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It's a trail that will lead
them to none other than
Her Majesty The
Queen, Elizabeth ll.
In 1948, the young Shah
was a guest of the royal family
at the London Olympic Games
and met the two Princesses,
Elizabeth and Margaret.
But it was King George VI
himself the Shah was really after.
He believed his country and
his throne were threatened
by Communist uprisings.
The secret details of the visit
are missing in the British archives.
But in the National
Archives in Washington,
Rory Cormac found cables
from a Foreign Office official
who was keeping Britain's
American allies in the loop.
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"..For Iran to conclude
such an alliance with the UK
"because of trouble it
would cause with USSR."
The Shah was a bit player
in a much bigger power game
as cracks were appearing
in the wartime alliance
between the West and Russia.
Making any alliance more formal,
it would only irritate the Soviets,
and it would only risk escalating
the early Cold War tensions.
Two years later,
the Cold War set in.
Iran, with its huge oil supplies,
was a highly desirable asset.
Its oilfields were owned
by Anglo-Persian Oil,
in which the British
Government had a 51% stake.
Those oilfields would
become a political battleground.
The Shah was a constitutional
monarch, Iran a democracy.
Its most popular politician
was Mohammad Mossadegh,
who believed Iranian oil
should belong to Iranians.
In 1950, he called for the
nationalisation of Anglo-Persian.
ARCHIVE: Long-smouldering
Iranian nationalists made clear
their intention to
seize the oil industry.
The parliament fell in line
behind an old enemy of the British,
the ascetic, bitter
Mohammed Mossadegh.
Mossadegh said no to
the foreign superpowers
who wanted to impose
their ideas, or their short-term
interest, upon our country.
This made Mossadegh
the voice of the nation.
In April 1951, Mossadegh
became Prime Minister.
He announced he was going
ahead with the nationalisation,
infuriating the British.
ARCHIVE:
The executives of Anglo-Persian
Oil panicked and lobbied London.
Britain was trying to find a
way of recovering from the war
and maintaining as
much of the global power
that Britain traditionally had.
And this creates a very,
very important backdrop
to Mossadegh's decision
to nationalise oil in 1951.
Mossadegh might have expected
the anti-colonialist Labour government,
headed by Prime Minister
Clement Attlee, to be sympathetic,
but money talked.
The oil coming from Iran
brought millions in revenue
to the British Treasury.
The Brits are wondering,
"How are we going to make
up for this lost revenue?
"We need this money because we
spent all our money during the war."
Attlee gave the green
light for covert operations.
On 22nd March 1951,
an anonymous article appeared
in the Times newspaper.
It made many damaging
and false accusations
against Mossadegh's government.
It smeared him.
It portrayed him as
corrupt, as unpatriotic,
as economically
incompetent and pro-Soviet,
many of the lines which British
propaganda would go on to take.
This was a crucial article.
The anonymous author
was Ann Lambton.
In public, she was an academic
at the School of Oriental
and African Studies in London.
However, during World
war ll Lambton had, in secret,
been a propaganda chief
at Ml6's station in Tehran.
In private, she was a spy,
and one closely connected
to the British establishment
as a niece of Harold Macmillan -
a cabinet minister in
Churchill's wartime government
and future Prime Minister.
Mossadegh now
found himself her target.
Aldrich and Cormac discovered
a key document in which
Ml6 notified the Foreign
Office of Lambton's covert plans,
plans which were
the first step to a coup.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Ann Lambton
has suggested in a conversation,
"covert means to
undermine the position...
"..of Mr Mossadegh.
"And that the ideal man to
do it would be Dr Zaehner,
"an Oxford lecturer, who
has been extremely successful
"in covert propaganda
in 1944, in lran."
Dr Robert Zaehner, or Dr
Z, as he was nicknamed,
was an old associate of Lambton
from her clays in World War ll Tehran.
He was a very
intriguing character.
He wore small,
pebbledash glasses.
He kept money in socks.
He was a heavy opium smoker.
He was quite discreet,
but very affable.
And he had a great network.
He knew pretty much everyone
who mattered inside Tehran.
In league with Dr Zaehner, Ann
Lambton set about undermining
Iran's Prime Minister.
"The objective must be
to destabilise Mossadegh...
ACTOR'S VOICE: "..and
to give encouragement
"to the substantial body of
Persian friends we still have,
"who are unlikely
to show their faces
"and risk being called
traitors, without some support.
"This would," she hoped, "create
the sort of climate in Tehran..."
"..which is necessary
to change the regime."
This document is fascinating.
It's sent shortly after
Mossadegh has nationalised
Britain's oil assets,
and it's the response.
And the response
is covert action.
This is the genesis of the
operation to remove Mossadegh
and put the Shah
into complete control.
In the summer of 1951,
the plot to bring down Iran's
constitutional government
was christened within Ml6.
Operation Boot was the code name
for the British plans to undermine,
destabilise, and ultimately
overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh.
Then suddenly, and unexpectedly,
the operation took a
whole new direction.
ARCHIVE: Nurses coming off
duty were among the first to vote.
Another early elector to visit
his polling station at Caxton Hall,
Westminster, was Mr Attlee.
In October 1951, the Labour
Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,
who had approved
the covert operation,
called a general election...
...only to be defeated by
his former wartime boss,
Sir Winston Churchill.
ARCHIVE: For the time being, it
was the end of socialist government.
Attlee thinks about using
force because he's desperate.
He pulls back.
Churchill's different, because
he's absolutely in love with Empire
and the old idea of Empire.
He sees absolutely nothing
wrong in the use of force.
Indeed, he relishes it.
Rory Cormac discovered a
remarkable document from January 1952
which shows the change in tone.
The secret Foreign Office letter
used language which unequivocally
spelt out the plot
being hatched.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Confidential:
Tehran to Foreign Office.
"There being no rival in
sight who is likely to overthrow
Mossadegh by parliamentary
means, it follows that Persia's main
"hope of not passing under
Communist domination...
"..is a non-Communist
coup d'etat
"preferably in the
name of the Shah.
"This would mean an
authoritarian regime,
"which would be ready
to take active steps."
This is the first occasion in
the Iran secret documents,
unearthed by Aldrich and Cormac,
when the words
"coup d'etat" are used.
They're realising that
Mossadegh is not going to be
removed by ordinary
parliamentary procedure.
Something's got to happen, and
that something is a coup d'etat,
which you rarely see written
in Foreign Office documents.
The following month, Queen
Elizabeth ll came to the throne
after the death of
her father, the King,
who had shunned a request
for an alliance with Britain.
Now Her Majesty's
Government's position on the Shah
and Iran was changing fast.
But there was a problem.
For regime change in Iran,
Churchill knew he needed
the support of the new post-war
superpower, the United States.
And its Democrat President,
Harry S Truman, did not approve.
Truman, in particular,
not very keen
initially to get on board
with what appears to
be a British conspiracy
to perpetuate
the British Empire.
But America and Britain did
have one thing in common -
greed for oil.
It had also been
discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The United States had got
in there before the British
and now had its eyes on Iran.
Think about it.
If you're in the US Government, why
should you expend your resources?
Why should you invest
your covert operators?
Why should you even
invest your diplomatic effort,
just so Britain could
take back its oil company?
There's also an impression
amongst the Truman administration
that the British got
themselves into this mess.
In 1950, the Americans
strike a 50/50 agreement
with the Arabian
American Oil Company,
and the Americans
tell the Brits,
"Why don't you
do this with Iran?
"Wouldn't this be a
great arrangement?"
Britain doesn't listen,
so when Mossadegh
nationalises their oil company,
"You made your
bed, you lie in it."
Churchill tried to twist
Truman's arm, writing to him.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Britain and
America must gallop together on Iran.
"L ask, why two good men
asking only what is right
"should not gang up on a
third, who is doing wrong?"
The third man was, of course,
Mohammad Mossadegh.
Churchill's using this
Midwest language,
he's using the cowboy analogy
because he knows that Truman
is from Independence, Missouri,
and this is exactly the kind
of idiom that a plain-speaking
plain dealer from a place like
Independence would appreciate.
The Americans remain
suspicious of the British.
One CIA chief,
CD Jackson, wrote:
"The British are still living in
the days of colonial supremacy.
"They think the only way
to win is to frighten the..."
But none of that stopped
Ml6 officers in Tehran
carrying on plotting.
The plan was for the
Shah to sack Mossadegh
and replace him with a
compliant Prime Minister.
But the Shah had reason
to be wary of the British,
Winston Churchill in particular.
Back in 1941,
Churchill, as Britain's
wartime Prime Minister,
had sanctioned the
toppling of the Shah's father
when he refused to
support Britain's war effort.
Churchill replaced
the father with his son,
the 20-year-old
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
ARCHIVE: The swearing
in of the new Shah,
who is well disposed towards
Britain, was a ceremonious event.
These events scarred the Shah.
He must have felt
that humiliation himself,
and he must have
been very bitter
at the way that his
father had been treated,
and the way that his
destiny had been sealed.
So I think that left a
lifelong impression on him.
One British diplomat in Tehran
suspected the Shah might even
be secretly
supporting Mossadegh.
"It is possible that Mossadegh
has a curious hold over him
"and is able to blackmail him
"every time he sees a danger of
his government being overthrown."
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"As a long-term policy
"it seems that we
should try to work towards
"divesting the Shah
of all his powers...
"..and, if necessary, send him the
same way of his illustrious father,
"S Falle, 8th July, 1952."
S Falle is Samuel Falle,
who is the oriental secretary
in the British
Embassy in Tehran.
Sam Falle is an example of a
whole group of military officers,
who join the Foreign Service
after the Second World War
and take a pretty hard line.
They're pretty old -school
on issues of British
Empire, power...
...and how to treat foreigners.
This is a remarkable document,
because it shows such
disdain for the Iranians,
all the Iranians.
It's not a very nice document.
British plans advanced, but
the Americans stayed out.
So Ml6's Head of Station,
Montagu Woodhouse,
tried a different tactic.
Monty Woodhouse was a
classic, upper-class gentleman spy.
He was a Baron,
he had served during
the Second World War
with the Special Operations
Executive in Greece.
He would go on to
become a Conservative MP.
Woodhouse now
used his political skills
to try to win the
Americans round.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "l was
anxious not to be accused
"of trying to use the Americans
"to pull British
chestnuts out of the fire.
"So I decided to emphasise
the Communist threat to Iran,
"rather than the need to
recover control of the oil industry."
And he is making a
conscious effort to play up,
even exaggerate,
the Communist threat.
Using Communism, rather
than oil, as a justification
became a new ingredient
in the coup planning.
Mossadegh's Foreign
Minister, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
was wise to British scheming.
He himself had been
pilloried by the British
and the year before narrowly
survived an assassination attempt
by an lslamist group
which had links to Ml6.
Britain targeted him
with propaganda,
trying to smear him,
trying to discredit him.
They portrayed him
as a homosexual.
They portrayed him
as a Christian convert.
They portrayed him as a thief.
Fatemi knew the British
Embassy was a hotbed of spies.
In October 1952, he shut it down
in an attempt to quash
Ml6's coup planning.
The Ml6 officers
retreated to Cyprus.
Britain's coup, it seemed,
had ground to a halt.
Then another election,
this time in America,
put it right back on track.
ARCHIVE: Electric signs
flash the news - Ike's in,
and bedlam breaks out amongst
the Republican supporters
as they hear of
their landslide victory.
Dwight Eisenhower becomes
President by the greatest popular vote
ever given a White
House candidate.
Eisenhower's administration
was fanatically anti-Communist
and a stark
contrast to Truman's.
Well, Dwight Eisenhower had
advisors who had a certain view of Iran
that was different from
those who they succeeded,
"We're the can-do boys.
"Let us pursue covert
operations, we'll change things."
Their mind-set was the
Mossadegh government is unstable,
and it is weak, and if it falls,
then the Communists come in,
and now we've got a Cold
War front line with the Soviets,
and Tehran's in the wrong camp.
But American support for
Britain would not come free.
The Americans
drive a hard bargain.
"You want us in?
"You want us in after we
help you get rid of Mossadegh?
"Then we have to have
an economic stake."
And so the division takes place.
The British retain
40% of the oil,
America retains 40%, and then,
what the Americans have got
is obviously the
profits from the oil,
but they've also got
political leverage.
There is no chance again that
Britain can act independently
over Iran.
With Britain's diplomatic
HQ in Tehran neutralised,
the centre of operations
would become the US Embassy.
All Iranian operatives
working for Ml6
would be passed on
to American handlers...
...the code name changing
from Boot to Operation Ajax.
The Americans
would be taking over.
But the British
weren't out of it.
Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac
were on the verge of discovering
an extraordinary series
of buried documents.
They would show that the
United States would deploy
the Queen of England as a
hidden asset in a bloody coup.
It has remained a closely-guarded
secret for nearly seven decades.
In 1953, the preparations
for a coup to topple
the democratic government
of Prime Minister Mossadegh
and replace it with the
autocratic rule of the young Shah,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
passed from Ml6
to America's CIA.
It would be renamed
Operation Ajax.
The West wanted a puppet,
but the Shah was
proving anything but.
The Shah is quite paranoid,
he's worrying that the
Brits and the Americans
might actually be working
against him all along,
and he's also worried about the
power of the Western hidden hand,
to be able to depose him
whenever they wanted,
just like they
deposed his father.
The Shah was also
caught in a war of nerves
with Prime Minister Mossadegh.
In February 1953,
Mossadegh threatens to resign.
He says to the Shah, "l've
had enough of you and the Brits
"trying to scheme against me
and overthrow my government."
This unnerves the Shah,
and he offers to leave.
At this critical moment,
the Americans were bolstered
by an unprecedented intervention.
At the National Archives in
Washington, Professor Rory Cormac
recently uncovered an
extraordinary secret cable
which seemed to come from
the pinnacle of the British state.
It contained a message
passed on to Washington
by the British Foreign
Secretary, Anthony Eden.
It was for the eyes only
of John Foster Dulles,
America's all-powerful
Secretary of State,
whose brother was
head of the CIA,
and Assistant Secretary
Henry Byroade.
"Top secret.
"From London to
US Secretary of State.
"Number 4844.
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"February 27th, 9pm,
"Eyes only Secretary..."
"..and Byroade."
"Foreign Office this
afternoon informed us
"of receipt message from
Eden, from Queen Elizabeth,
"expressing concern at
latest developments re Shah,
"and strong hope we can find
some means of dissuading him
"from leaving the country.
"British Embassy in Washington
has been urgently instructed
"to discuss with department."
This is a really
intriguing document,
because it reads as if
Queen Elizabeth herself
is sending a message
to the Americans
and trying to persuade the Shah,
another constitutional monarch,
to stay put when
he wants to flee.
And this would be remarkable.
It would be
the...covert meddling
of the Queen of
the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs
of another country.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth
is almost leading the charge,
but she has to do it indirectly,
because Britain no longer
has an embassy in Iran.
Constitutionally, the Queen
should have no direct role
in foreign policy, let alone a
plot to unseat a democratic leader.
But the Americans instantly
realised the impact the message
would have on the Shah.
They immediately forwarded it
to their ambassador in
Tehran, Loy Henderson.
The next day, Henderson spoke
to the Shah's senior minister, Ala,
at the Imperial Palace,
requesting an
audience with the Shah.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Top Secret.
"From London.
"Ala called Shah on
inter-palace telephone,
"and after a few minutes'
conversation, said..."
"..Shah was unable
to see me personally
"since the Prime Minister
was on the way to the palace
"to bid him farewell.
"Shah would
appreciate it, however,
"if I would talk to
him by telephone."
These were desperate clays
for the Americans and British
plotting against
Iran's Prime Minster.
Mossadegh's visit to the palace
seemed to herald the
Shah going into exile.
Henderson reported...
ACTOR'S VOICE:
"Early this morning,
"stories regarding
imminent departure Shah,
"pouring in from many sources.
"Most common version was
that Shah had decided to leave
"because Mossadegh was
threatening if Shah did not, repeat not..."
"..repeat not, so he would
issue proclamation to country,
"criticising Shah and asking people
to choose between Shah and himself."
Henderson urgently needed to pass
on the message from Queen Elizabeth
as a final plea to the Shah,
but he was fearful of
doing it on the phone.
"L asked Ala if he was sure
telephone not, repeat not, tapped.
"Ala said every possible
precaution taken in this respect.
"L told him to tell the Shah
that in interest of country,
"the Shah should not, repeat
not, leave in this fashion.
"L also asked him to tell
Shah that I had just received
"message from a very
important personage,
"for whom Shah had
most friendly feelings,
"had also expressed
sincere hope that Shah
"could be dissuaded
from leaving the country."
It is now almost 70
years after that message,
the Shah is long passed.
I can't get inside
his head directly,
but when you look at the Shah,
at the regard that he had
for royalty and for ceremony...
...and the playing to his ego -
"l've gotten a message from the
most important monarch in the world,
"telling me I need to stay."
That's a boost.
That's a boost that
keeps him in place.
There's an English phrase - it's a
quaint one for me, as an American -
what is it?
- "Be a man, George,"
back from the 18th
century, you know.
Stand up to the pesky Americans
or stand up to the French,
Well, this was a "Be a man,
George" message to the Shah,
which he thought was
coming from the Queen.
He was really going to
defy that and turn her down?
However, as Cormac and
Aldrich continued their investigation
in the archives,
a further new document would
throw up one more revelatory twist.
This document was
truly astonishing,
because clearly, the intervention
that the State Department makes,
the intervention that Loy
Henderson makes, is very important,
in the construction
of that coup.
Without the Shah,
if the Shah had fled - he
clearly was planning to,
he was saying his farewells.
He was pretty much
heading to the airport.
Without Henderson's
intervention,
the coup would
not have happened.
This new document has
remained a carefully guarded secret
in the State Department archive
in Washington for 67 years.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "From
London to the Secretary of State.
"Telegram number 4847,
"February 28th 1953, 11am.
"Priority. Repeated
information."
"Tehran, priority.
"Reference to
Embassy's telegram 4844,
"27th February, repeated Tehran.
"Queen Elizabeth..."
"..refers, of
course, to vessel..."
"..and not...
"..repeat not, to monarch."
I was truly shocked
when I read this document.
This is the sort of document
that one almost never sees.
This is a correction
to a previous telegram.
It's saying, "Our
previous telegram,
"referring to Anthony
Eden and Queen Elizabeth,
"was badly drafted, was garbled,
"and actually, when we
referred to Queen Elizabeth,
"what we actually meant to say
was a message from Anthony Eden,
"who is currently
sailing on the vessel,
"the RMS Queen Elizabeth."
And, of course, at this time
Anthony Eden was sailing to Canada
on the RMS Queen Elizabeth
to attend a conference.
The Americans had a choice.
Own up to their mistake
and tell the British
or keep it a secret.
"Eyes only, Secretary Byroade."
"Deeply regret lack of clarity."
"lt was not, repeat not, until
rereading the message this morning
"that it occurred to us that it
was open to misinterpretation.
"Embassy does not, repeat not,
"propose to inform
British of incident."
The Americans chose to
cover up, rather than own up.
The decision is dramatic, because
Britain would have been livid
if the Queen's name had
been used in vain like that.
The deception went further.
They're also trying to
keep it from the Shah.
Because the Shah
believes that his decisions
were partly in response to a
request from Queen Elizabeth.
They don't want to
know that's not the case.
They don't want the Shah to
realise that essentially he's been
misinformed, perhaps
even unintentionally duped.
He's been persuaded
to take risks.
He's actually been
persuaded to stick his neck out.
And all this, to some
extent, is on a false premise.
He believes he's received a
message from one monarch to another.
He's actually received
a message from a boat.
Not quite the same thing.
At the end of this
extraordinary episode,
there is one undeniable fact -
before the Queen's apparent
message was passed on,
the Shah had
decided to leave Iran.
After receiving it from
the American ambassador,
he changed his mind and stayed.
The coup was back on.
In March 1953, the Ml6
and CIA preparations
for the Iran coup, revealed
in the secret documents,
spilled over onto
the streets of Tehran.
Supporters of Prime
Minister Mossadegh
were taken on by
pro-Shah rioters
manipulated by the Western
intelligence agencies.
Covert action only works
when there's a
pre-existing movement
which aligns with what the Brits
or the Americans wanted to do.
Britain and America
did not create opposition
to Mossadegh from scratch -
these people already
existed and were quite vocal.
What the covert action sought to
do was to push them along a bit,
to bolster them, to fund them,
and to make them as vocal
as they possibly could be.
CIA and Ml6 have a whole
range of agents and collaborators
which they've been
establishing for many years,
but at the moment that
the coup is approaching,
the main mechanism is bribery.
The British put further
pressure on Mossadegh
with a naval blockade.
The British actually talk
about the possibility of invasion,
they talk about the possibility
of sabotaging oil refineries,
at one point they even talk
about the use of nuclear weapons.
So it's an extraordinary
moment in history
when Britain really
rediscovers the whole idea
of old-fashioned
gunboat diplomacy.
The chief of police,
Mahmoud Afshartous,
in attempt to protect
Iran's government,
rallied pro-Mossadegh supporters
against the CIA and
Ml6-backed mobs.
But Afshartous didn't last long.
He was abducted by soldiers
working for General Fazlollah Zahedi,
a former Interior Minister
who was now part of the coup.
Six days later, his
body was discovered
and Zahedi and
certain military officers
were implicated in this murder.
Ml6 officers have since
admitted that the abduction
was part of the
covert operation.
They thought that by
abducting the Chief of Police,
a Mossadegh loyalist,
they would give the opposition
groups a morale boost.
What they didn't expect was
that they would get carried away
and end up killing Afshartous.
Afshartous was beaten,
tortured, then strangled to death.
His corpse was
displayed outside Tehran.
Smears, hired
mobs, military force,
and now murder.
Terror began to erode
Mossadegh's support.
Three months later, the
coup moved into its final phase.
Kermit Roosevelt,
grandson of a US President,
was now the CIA man in
charge of Operation Ajax.
Kermit Roosevelt knows Iran,
he knows the region,
he's confident - with enough
money and enough contacts -
he can pull off this operation.
On 19th July, Roosevelt
arrived in Tehran
after driving
overland from Iraq,
carrying $100,000 in
small denominations.
It was used to incite an
orgy of street violence.
In a last desperate act,
Mossadegh shut down parliament
and declared a state of
emergency on the 16th August.
ARCHIVE:
On 19th August 1953,
the Shah finally dismissed
Iran's Prime Minister and
installed a military government.
British Ministers
lied to the press,
claiming they'd first heard
news of the coup on the BBC.
Forces loyal to the Shah
turned up at Mossadegh's house.
He fled.
Two days later, he was captured,
tried and sentenced to death.
ARCHIVE:
The Shah commuted his
sentence to house arrest for life.
Mossadegh's Foreign
Secretary, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
the man who had closed
down the British Embassy,
was captured by pro-Shah troops
and executed without
trial by firing squad.
The Americans celebrated,
but there were still concerns
about the Shah's
stability and frame of mind.
The US ambassador in Tehran,
who had conveyed the Queen
Elizabeth message to the Shah,
asked if the British
could give him a boost.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Believe it
might be useful for Queen or Churchill
"send oral message
congratulations
"to Shah through
top-secret channels."
A sharp response came back
from the Foreign Office in London.
"L do not think there can
be any question of the Queen
"sending a message."
Associating the Queen
with a bloody coup
rang alarm bells in Whitehall.
Little did officials know the
damage was already done.
But the Americans
had hidden the truth.
For many Iranians,
the success of the coup
was no cause for celebration.
Farrokh Negahdar's
parents were activists
in the pro-Communist
Tudeh Party.
They desperately tried to
destroy incriminating evidence.
I remember, after the coup,
the days which still
deeply reside in my mind...
...the fear, the eyes of my
mum, the eyes of my grandmum,
who were burning
papers in a stove,
and the smell of the burnt
papers was in my nose.
It did not save eight of
his relatives from prison.
A decade later, Farrokh
himself spent a total of ten years
in the prisons of the Shah.
The objectives of Operation
Boot had been achieved,
and Iran's democracy under
Mossadegh successfully destroyed.
For 26 years, the Shah
was a steadfast ally
of Britain, America
and the Queen.
Although he tried to modernise Iran,
his regime also became synonymous
with human-rights
abuses and torture.
ARCHIVE:
In 1979, the Shah became
the victim of revolution himself
and went into exile.
Neither Britain nor America,
fearing the consequences
from the revolutionary
lslamist regime in Tehran,
would give him safe refuge.
I think the Shah
was a broken man.
He...
His life's work...
His life's dreams...
...had...
...were in tatters.
He had a huge deal of pride,
and all of a sudden,
he had found himself
in a situation where he
couldn't even take refuge
in any country that had
preached loyalty to him
and friendship to
him for over 37 years
that he had been in charge.
The Shah ended up in Egypt,
where he died just one year later.
The British Government did
not send official condolences.
Such attempts not to cause
offence to the new Islamic Republic
failed miserably.
The atrocities and
human-rights abuses
by Ayatollah Khomeini's
lslamist regime
at least matched
those of the Shah.
And even those Iranians
who opposed the Ayatollah
have never forgotten
Britain and America's role
in the coup of 1953.
It triggered a chain of events
that, nearly seven decades later,
continue to shake the world.
I think that the Islamic
revolution of Iran
is a direct response
to the coup of 1953.
ARCHIVE:
After the coup, the
psychology of Iranian people
changed dramatically.
They started to blame
the United States,
even religious
layers, not only lefts,
because of their
involvement in the coup.
The 1953 coup was a classic
example of a covert operation
that's carried out for
short-term reasons,
for short-term gain,
but in the long-term it's
immensely damaging.
In Iran, in Afghanistan,
in so many places where
the West has meddled,
the long-term results have
actually been fairly disastrous.