Muhammad Shah Failure

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By 1953 the conditions were ripe for the execution of a coup: economic troubles stemming from the Abadan blockade had created widespread economic turmoil, Mosaddegh’s national front had splintered under pressure from Royalist and Islamist parities, and the military was being employed by the Shah as a policing force to maintain public order. The political environment degraded significantly, to the point where provocateurs could assemble mobs on a scale sufficient to paralyze Tehran and force the intervention of the military. The CIA, under a plan titled TPAJAX, intended simply to force Mohammed Shah Reza to withdraw Mosaddegh’s appointment to the Majlis, and instead replace him with pro-western General Fazlollah Zahedi as head of the government. …show more content…

Agent provocateurs established the ‘legitimacy’ of the military intervention into politics by the generation of a series of ‘pro-Mosaddegh’ riots in Tehran. The coup itself was executed successfully only on the second attempt. In the first, on August 15th, loyalist officers managed to intercept and imprison the group responsible for serving the arrest warrant to Mosaddegh, including Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, head of the Imperial Guard. The Shah, afraid he would be immediately implicated in the coup, fled to Bagdad, then Rome. However, the American intelligence apparatus in country managed to persuade a number of initial conspirators to attempt a second time: the Shah’s legal decree calling for the removal of Mosaddegh was, after all, still ‘valid’. The next day, at the behest of American intelligence agents in country, copies of the Shah's decree were published in the majority of the (bribed) major newspapers in Tehran. Soon, large and violent mobs organized by provocateurs descended on the public squares; the stage was set for a military intervention to 'restore order', all that was needed was for the pro-shah military elements to organize themselves behind (the currently in …show more content…

Fears of a communist takeover of Iran also fueled action both by the United States and pro-shah elements in their decision to depose Mosaddegh’s regime. Furthermore, the perpetuation of a state of domestic crises by the systematic employment of provocateurs certainly made it effortless to justify the decision to remove Mosaddegh when the time came: one must remember that the core elements of the Iranian military leadership came from the Persian Cossacks Brigade, both the only modernized military division in Iran, and a division with the dual-purpose of being used for civil suppression: the name ‘Cossack’ was not just a moniker, but indeed was appropriate in that the Persian Cossack Brigade adopted its Russian ancestor’s penchant for intervening in domestic affairs to ensure

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