The Witches of Whitehall: Iran 1953
How Britain conjured a coup brewed from oil and fear.
Before the CIA took credit for unseating Mohammad Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, the plot was born in Whitehall. Britain, not America, mixed the first potion.
When Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company (the ancestor of BP) in 1951, he broke a British monopoly that had financed London’s post‑war recovery. The decision was popular in Tehran but caused conniptions in Westminster. Britain’s foreign‑policy establishment and oil men were of one mind: Mossadegh had to go.
MI6’s Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse, then station chief in Tehran, drew up a blueprint called Operation Boot, a covert plan to topple the PM and restore the Shah. But Mossadegh saw through their manoeuvring: in October 1952 he expelled the entire British mission, including Woodhouse’s intelligence team.
Suddenly London had lost its agents, its informants, and its leverage.
That’s when Whitehall’s witches turned their eyes towards Washington. Woodhouse, now operating from Cyprus, prepared the case; Roger Makins, a deft Foreign Office diplomat with close U.S. ties, took it to the Americans. Their timing was unlucky: Harry Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson were not interested. To them, Iran was a colonial oil dispute of little interest.
Rebuffed, Makins waited. When Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 election, the stage changed. Woodhouse and Makins repackaged the pitch: Mossadegh, they now whispered, was a potential communist The story was completely fake, but it pressed every Cold War button. Eisenhower’s lieutenants - the Dulles brothers - were more than eager to stamp out any buds of communism. Within months, the British plan was reborn as the CIA’s Operation TPAjax.
In August 1953, Mossadegh’s government fell. The Shah returned to rule with U.S. backing, and Western oil flowed again - no longer purely British but now shared with American firms.
It was Britain’s spell that set the tragedy in motion: oil as the goal, paranoia as the method.
Just as Macbeth’s witches foretold fate to make men destroy themselves, Whitehall’s envoys cast their prophecy in Washington - “Communism in Tehran!” - and let another nation strike the blow.
The charm worked. The consequences still echo. The witches on that blasted heath would be proud.
The US driven coup that Whitehall conjured — in four minutes: