Operation Ajax: How the CIA Learned to Topple Governments

(00:00:00) Operation Ajax: How the CIA Learned to Topple Governments
(00:01:55) How Britain Recruited America
(00:04:33) Operation Ajax Takes Shape
(00:06:06) The Coup That Almost Failed
(00:07:39) What Ajax Actually Produced
(00:09:08) The Template Is Set

In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who wanted one thing: for Iran's oil to belong to Iran. What followed was the CIA's first experiment in regime change — and it changed everything.

Operation Ajax is the blueprint. Before 1953, the United States had never overthrown a foreign government. After it, the CIA would do so repeatedly, with growing confidence and shrinking hesitation. This episode traces exactly how that happened: how Britain's MI6, shut out of Iran by an oil embargo that wasn't working, recruited the newly formed CIA into a joint covert operation by reframing an economic dispute as a Cold War emergency. How the Dulles brothers — Allen at Langley, John Foster at the State Department — proved far more receptive than Truman's team had been. And how Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of a president, ran a black operation from Tehran that paid off journalists, bribed religious figures, hired crowds from the criminal underworld, and manufactured the appearance of a popular uprising.

Mosaddegh was not a communist. The intelligence didn't firmly support that conclusion. But the ideological predisposition of the Eisenhower administration made the British case feel convincing — and that gap between evidence and action would become a defining feature of CIA covert operations for the next forty years.

This is the coup that built the playbook. This is how the CIA learned what it could do.

This episode includes AI-generated content.