Mohammad Mossadegh

Mohammad Mossadegh (also spelled Mosaddegh or Mosaddeq) was an Iranian lawyer, parliamentarian, and nationalist politician who served as Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for nationalizing Iran's oil industry, which had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the predecessor of BP.

Born in 1882 into a prominent family, Mossadegh held a doctorate in law from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and entered Iranian politics in the early twentieth century. He served in the Majlis (parliament) and as a cabinet minister before becoming a leading voice of the National Front (Jebhe Melli), a coalition advocating constitutional government and resource sovereignty.

In March 1951 the Majlis passed legislation nationalizing the AIOC, and Mossadegh was appointed Prime Minister the following month. Britain responded with a global boycott of Iranian oil and a Royal Navy blockade, devastating Iran's revenues. Mossadegh took the dispute to the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council, where he personally argued Iran's case in October 1951; the ICJ ultimately ruled in 1952 that it lacked jurisdiction.

Domestically, Mossadegh secured emergency powers and clashed with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In August 1953 he was overthrown in a coup, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup, organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency (Operation Ajax) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (Operation Boot). He was tried for treason, sentenced to three years' imprisonment, and subsequently kept under house arrest at his estate in Ahmadabad until his death in 1967.

The CIA's role was formally acknowledged in declassified documents released by the US National Security Archive in 2013. Mossadegh remains a potent symbol in discussions of resource nationalism, sovereignty, Cold War interventionism, and the long arc of US–Iran relations, and is frequently invoked in Iranian political discourse across the ideological spectrum.