On June 18, 1953, the CIA launched Operation AJAX — a covert operation designed to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had made a catastrophic error, from the perspective of American and British intelligence: he had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran's oil reserves to Iranian control after decades of British exploitation.

The CIA and British intelligence organized street protests, paid opposition groups, bribed Iranian military officers, and coordinated a coup that restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. The Shah ruled as an authoritarian ally of the United States for 26 years, suppressing dissent through his secret police, SAVAK, which was trained and supported by the CIA.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah and established the Islamic Republic of Iran — the government the United States has been in armed confrontation with ever since — was a direct consequence of the 1953 coup. You cannot understand contemporary US-Iran relations without understanding that the Iranian people's hostility toward the United States is grounded in the lived experience of American imperialism, not abstract ideology.

This is the CIA's own account, largely. The agency declassified documents confirming its role in the coup in 2013. The mechanism is not disputed.

The Pattern Across Six Decades

The Iran coup was not an aberration. It was the beginning of a pattern that has repeated across six decades, in dozens of countries, on every inhabited continent.

**Guatemala (1954):** The CIA overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz after he implemented land reform that redistributed idle United Fruit Company land to landless peasants. United Fruit — a US corporation with extensive lobbying connections to the Eisenhower administration — had complained to the State Department. The CIA installed a military dictatorship. Guatemala experienced four decades of civil war in which approximately 200,000 people were killed, predominantly indigenous Guatemalans murdered by US-backed military forces. The Clinton administration formally apologized in 1999.

**Democratic Republic of Congo (1960):** CIA officer Bronson Tweedy coordinated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961. Lumumba had sought Soviet assistance when the US and Belgium refused to help suppress a secession movement supported by Belgian mining interests. The CIA facilitated his arrest and murder. The Congo was subsequently governed by Mobutu Sese Seko — one of the most corrupt and brutal dictators of the 20th century — for 32 years, with consistent US support. Mobutu looted an estimated $5 billion from the country.

**Chile (1973):** The Nixon administration and CIA organized a two-track effort to prevent Salvador Allende — the democratically elected socialist president of Chile — from taking office, and then to destabilize his government. When those efforts failed to prevent Allende's rule, the CIA supported the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973. Allende died during the coup — either executed or by suicide, depending on the account. Pinochet's regime killed approximately 3,200 people, tortured tens of thousands, and disappeared over 1,000. The CIA's role was confirmed by the 1975 Church Committee investigation and subsequent declassifications.

**Nicaragua (1980s):** When the Sandinista government came to power in Nicaragua in 1979, the Reagan administration organized, armed, and funded the Contras — a right-wing paramilitary force — to wage guerrilla war against the elected government. The operation was funded in part through illegal arms sales to Iran — the Iran-Contra scandal. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1986 that the United States had violated international law by mining Nicaraguan harbors and supporting the Contras. The United States withdrew from the court's jurisdiction rather than comply with the ruling.

**Haiti (2004):** The United States, Canada, and France coordinated the removal of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Aristide, who had been elected twice by large majorities, had increased the minimum wage, resisted IMF structural adjustment requirements, and demanded that France repay the indemnity Haiti had paid for its independence — approximately $21 billion in contemporary value. He was flown out of the country on a US military aircraft after being told he had no choice. He has described the episode as a kidnapping. US officials described it as a resignation.

How the Language Works

Each of these operations came with a press release. The official framing was consistent across cases: the targeted government was described as communist, authoritarian, unstable, or a threat to regional security. The operation was described as support for democracy, stability, or the legitimate aspirations of the local population. The actual motivation — resource control, corporate protection, Cold War positioning, or the suppression of economic nationalism — was not mentioned.

This framing has been remarkably durable. Every US-supported coup or regime change operation in modern history has been described in humanitarian or security terms by American officials and, for the most part, by American media. The intervention is always for the people of the targeted country. The people of the targeted country have rarely agreed.

The consistency of the pattern — democratic government pursues policies that threaten US corporate or strategic interests; CIA/State Department organizes opposition; government is destabilized or removed; US-aligned replacement installed; subsequent government provides favorable treatment to US interests — is not consistent with the humanitarian framing. It is consistent with the interests of US capital and US geopolitical positioning.

Why It Keeps Happening

The United States government does not overthrow foreign governments because American citizens want it to. Most Americans, if asked directly, would oppose covertly overthrowing a democratically elected foreign government. The operations happen because:

**They are covert.** Congressional oversight of intelligence operations was minimal through much of the Cold War and has remained inadequate. The Church Committee's 1975 investigation — the most comprehensive examination of CIA activities in US history — found a pattern of operations conducted without meaningful congressional knowledge or approval.

**They serve specific interests.** Each intervention served identifiable US corporate or geopolitical interests. United Fruit in Guatemala, oil companies in Iran, copper companies in Chile. The beneficiaries of regime change are not the American public. They are American corporations and the financial interests connected to them.

**The consequences are externalized.** The civil wars, dictatorships, and humanitarian catastrophes that follow US-backed coups are experienced by the populations of the targeted countries. Americans experience, at most, a news story. The asymmetry between who makes the decision and who lives with the consequences makes accountability nearly impossible.

**The media ecosystem supports the framing.** American mainstream media has, with notable exceptions, reproduced official framing for US foreign policy interventions in real time. The investigative journalism that exposes these operations — Seymour Hersh on Chile, the journalists who broke Iran-Contra, the reporters who worked through FOIA requests to document the Guatemala operation — comes years or decades after the fact, when accountability is no longer actionable.

The pattern continues not because it is secret, but because the people who benefit from it have the power to continue it, and the people who pay for it lack the political power to stop it. At this point in history, the historical record is public. The question is not whether the United States has a consistent practice of overthrowing governments that threaten its interests. The question is what the American public intends to do with that knowledge.