Operation Ajax: How the CIA Overthrew Iran's Mosaddegh in 1953

Truman said no. Eisenhower said yes. In a few days of August 1953, the CIA helped topple Iran's elected prime minister — and reset how Iranians saw America. Episode 2 walks carefully through the coup using the declassified record. Britain recasts an oil dispute as a Cold War emergency; the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt runs Operation TPAJAX on the ground; the first attempt fails and the Shah flees; then paid crowds, bribed papers, and provocateurs manufacture chaos until a violent August 19 brings Mosaddegh down at the cost of some 300 lives. We're precise about what the documents show — the CIA acknowledged the operation in 2013, and the State Department's FRUS retrospective volume followed in 2017 — versus what historians still debate.