February 1953, the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
Little does she know that she is about to be deployed
in a coup d'etat in a country 3,500 miles away.
"Receipt message from Queen Elizabeth expressing concern
"at latest developments re Shah..."
The message goes to the American Embassy in Tehran.
On the streets, a plot to overthrow the country's Prime Minister
in favour of Iran's monarch, the Shah, is under way.
But the Shah, terrified, wants to quit and run.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth is trying to send a secret message
to the Shah telling him to stay put.
This would be remarkable.
It would be the covert meddling
of the Queen of the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs of another country.
It's an astonishing revelation in a new investigation
by two British historians...
..how the young Queen's name was used to destroy Iran's democracy.
It is a secret so sensitive the evidence has been locked away
for nearly 70 years.
I was truly shocked when I read this document.
This is the sort of document that one almost never sees.
The coup was first planned by MI6,
then finally executed by the CIA.
It was, above all, about oil.
We have American diplomatic material,
we have Foreign Office documents,
we have CIA material.
But MI6 have never admitted to it.
The Foreign Office were very quick to deny
any British involvement whatsoever.
In fact, they flat out lied.
It was an episode which would have devastating consequences
for relations between Iran and the West right up to the present day.
We do not seek regime change.
However, the Iranian regime's aggression must end now.
Professors Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac
are detectives with a difference.
They burrow away among the hundreds of millions of buried documents
in national archives.
The treasure they seek is past secrets from high places
which have an impact on our world today.
Intelligence and the monarchy are perhaps the two most
secretive institutions in the entire country.
So if and when those two worlds ever collide,
we're very unlikely to see unredacted papers.
Aldrich and Cormac's latest investigation
is into a world-changing event that happened 67 years ago.
Sometimes the only way to find the truth
about your own country's role is to look elsewhere.
So often these things are hidden from us,
so often the British keep these things very secret.
But, of course, sometimes the American documents
are available to historians.
Their aim is to uncover the full story of a coup
involving the young Shah of Iran,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It's a trail that will lead them to none other than
Her Majesty The Queen, Elizabeth II.
In 1948, the young Shah was a guest of the royal family
at the London Olympic Games
and met the two Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.
But it was King George VI himself the Shah was really after.
He believed his country and his throne were threatened
by Communist uprisings.
The secret details of the visit are missing in the British archives.
But in the National Archives in Washington,
Rory Cormac found cables from a Foreign Office official
who was keeping Britain's American allies in the loop.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "While the Shah was staying at Buckingham Palace,
"he remarked to the King that he would like to have
"an Anglo-Iranian alliance.
"His Majesty's Government attitude
"is that it would be extremely undesirable...
"..for Iran to conclude such an alliance with the UK
"because of trouble it would cause with USSR."
The Shah was a bit player in a much bigger power game
as cracks were appearing in the wartime alliance
between the West and Russia.
Making any alliance more formal, it would only irritate the Soviets,
and it would only risk escalating the early Cold War tensions.
Two years later, the Cold War set in.
Iran, with its huge oil supplies, was a highly desirable asset.
Its oilfields were owned by Anglo-Persian Oil,
in which the British Government had a 51% stake.
Those oilfields would become a political battleground.
The Shah was a constitutional monarch, Iran a democracy.
Its most popular politician was Mohammad Mossadegh,
who believed Iranian oil should belong to Iranians.
In 1950, he called for the nationalisation of Anglo-Persian.
He was a national hero.
He stood up for the nationalisation of the oil industry which was
far greater, symbolically,
than just nationalising an industry.
Iranians did not want to be subservient
to dictates from outside elements.
It meant trying to give pride to the Iranian nation.
ARCHIVE: Long-smouldering Iranian nationalists made clear
their intention to seize the oil industry.
The parliament fell in line behind an old enemy of the British,
the ascetic, bitter Mohammed Mossadegh.
Mossadegh said no to the foreign superpowers
who wanted to impose
their ideas, or their short-term interest, upon our country.
This made Mossadegh the voice of the nation.
In April 1951, Mossadegh became Prime Minister.
He announced he was going ahead with the nationalisation,
infuriating the British.
ARCHIVE: Let us hope that the Persians will not allow themselves
to be intimidated by fanatics into a rash act which will lead to
disaster for both countries.
The executives of Anglo-Persian Oil panicked and lobbied London.
Britain was trying to find a way of recovering from the war
and maintaining as much of the global power
that Britain traditionally had.
And this creates a very, very important backdrop
to Mossadegh's decision to nationalise oil in 1951.
Mossadegh might have expected the anti-colonialist Labour government,
headed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, to be sympathetic,
but money talked.
The oil coming from Iran brought millions in revenue
to the British Treasury.
The Brits are wondering,
"How are we going to make up for this lost revenue?
"We need this money because we spent all our money during the war."
Attlee gave the green light for covert operations.
On 22nd March 1951,
an anonymous article appeared in the Times newspaper.
It made many damaging and false accusations
against Mossadegh's government.
It smeared him.
It portrayed him as corrupt, as unpatriotic,
as economically incompetent and pro-Soviet,
many of the lines which British propaganda would go on to take.
This was a crucial article.
The anonymous author was Ann Lambton.
In public, she was an academic
at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
However, during World war II Lambton had, in secret,
been a propaganda chief at MI6's station in Tehran.
In private, she was a spy,
and one closely connected to the British establishment
as a niece of Harold Macmillan -
a cabinet minister in Churchill's wartime government
and future Prime Minister.
Mossadegh now found himself her target.
Aldrich and Cormac discovered a key document in which
MI6 notified the Foreign Office of Lambton's covert plans,
plans which were the first step to a coup.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Ann Lambton has suggested in a conversation,
"covert means to undermine the position...
"..of Mr Mossadegh.
"And that the ideal man to do it would be Dr Zaehner,
"an Oxford lecturer, who has been extremely successful
"in covert propaganda in 1944, in Iran."
Dr Robert Zaehner, or Dr Z, as he was nicknamed,
was an old associate of Lambton from her days in World War II Tehran.
He was a very intriguing character.
He wore small, pebbledash glasses.
He kept money in socks.
He was a heavy opium smoker.
He was quite discreet, but very affable.
And he had a great network.
He knew pretty much everyone who mattered inside Tehran.
In league with Dr Zaehner, Ann Lambton set about undermining
Iran's Prime Minister.
"The objective must be to destabilise Mossadegh...
ACTOR'S VOICE: "..and to give encouragement
"to the substantial body of Persian friends we still have,
"who are unlikely to show their faces
"and risk being called traitors, without some support.
"This would," she hoped, "create the sort of climate in Tehran..."
"..which is necessary to change the regime."
This document is fascinating.
It's sent shortly after Mossadegh has nationalised
Britain's oil assets,
and it's the response.
And the response is covert action.
This is the genesis of the operation to remove Mossadegh
and put the Shah into complete control.
In the summer of 1951,
the plot to bring down Iran's constitutional government
was christened within MI6.
Operation Boot was the code name for the British plans to undermine,
destabilise, and ultimately overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh.
Then suddenly, and unexpectedly,
the operation took a whole new direction.
ARCHIVE: Nurses coming off duty were among the first to vote.
Another early elector to visit his polling station at Caxton Hall,
Westminster, was Mr Attlee.
In October 1951, the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,
who had approved the covert operation,
called a general election...
..only to be defeated by his former wartime boss,
Sir Winston Churchill.
ARCHIVE: For the time being, it was the end of socialist government.
Attlee thinks about using force because he's desperate.
He pulls back.
Churchill's different, because he's absolutely in love with Empire
and the old idea of Empire.
He sees absolutely nothing wrong in the use of force.
Indeed, he relishes it.
Rory Cormac discovered a remarkable document from January 1952
which shows the change in tone.
The secret Foreign Office letter used language which unequivocally
spelt out the plot being hatched.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Confidential: Tehran to Foreign Office.
"There being no rival in sight who is likely to overthrow
Mossadegh by parliamentary means, it follows that Persia's main
"hope of not passing under Communist domination...
"..is a non-Communist coup d'etat
"preferably in the name of the Shah.
"This would mean an authoritarian regime,
"which would be ready to take active steps."
This is the first occasion in the Iran secret documents,
unearthed by Aldrich and Cormac,
when the words "coup d'etat" are used.
They're realising that Mossadegh is not going to be
removed by ordinary parliamentary procedure.
Something's got to happen, and that something is a coup d'etat,
which you rarely see written in Foreign Office documents.
The following month, Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne
after the death of her father, the King,
who had shunned a request for an alliance with Britain.
Now Her Majesty's Government's position on the Shah
and Iran was changing fast.
But there was a problem.
For regime change in Iran, Churchill knew he needed
the support of the new post-war superpower, the United States.
And its Democrat President, Harry S Truman, did not approve.
Truman, in particular,
not very keen initially to get on board
with what appears to be a British conspiracy
to perpetuate the British Empire.
But America and Britain did have one thing in common -
greed for oil.
It had also been discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The United States had got in there before the British
and now had its eyes on Iran.
Think about it.
If you're in the US Government, why should you expend your resources?
Why should you invest your covert operators?
Why should you even invest your diplomatic effort,
just so Britain could take back its oil company?
There's also an impression amongst the Truman administration
that the British got themselves into this mess.
In 1950, the Americans strike a 50/50 agreement
with the Arabian American Oil Company,
and the Americans tell the Brits,
"Why don't you do this with Iran?
"Wouldn't this be a great arrangement?"
Britain doesn't listen,
so when Mossadegh nationalises their oil company,
"You made your bed, you lie in it."
Churchill tried to twist Truman's arm, writing to him.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Britain and America must gallop together on Iran.
"I ask, why two good men asking only what is right
"should not gang up on a third, who is doing wrong?"
The third man was, of course, Mohammad Mossadegh.
Churchill's using this Midwest language,
he's using the cowboy analogy
because he knows that Truman is from Independence, Missouri,
and this is exactly the kind of idiom that a plain-speaking
plain dealer from a place like Independence would appreciate.
The Americans remain suspicious of the British.
One CIA chief, CD Jackson, wrote:
"The British are still living in the days of colonial supremacy.
"They think the only way to win is to frighten the..."
But none of that stopped MI6 officers in Tehran
carrying on plotting.
The plan was for the Shah to sack Mossadegh
and replace him with a compliant Prime Minister.
But the Shah had reason to be wary of the British,
Winston Churchill in particular.
Back in 1941,
Churchill, as Britain's wartime Prime Minister,
had sanctioned the toppling of the Shah's father
when he refused to support Britain's war effort.
Churchill replaced the father with his son,
the 20-year-old Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
ARCHIVE: The swearing in of the new Shah,
who is well disposed towards Britain, was a ceremonious event.
These events scarred the Shah.
He must have felt that humiliation himself,
and he must have been very bitter
at the way that his father had been treated,
and the way that his destiny had been sealed.
So I think that left a lifelong impression on him.
One British diplomat in Tehran suspected the Shah might even
be secretly supporting Mossadegh.
"It is possible that Mossadegh has a curious hold over him
"and is able to blackmail him
"every time he sees a danger of his government being overthrown."
ACTOR'S VOICE: "As a long-term policy
"it seems that we should try to work towards
"divesting the Shah of all his powers...
"..and, if necessary, send him the same way of his illustrious father,
"S Falle, 8th July, 1952."
S Falle is Samuel Falle, who is the oriental secretary
in the British Embassy in Tehran.
Sam Falle is an example of a whole group of military officers,
who join the Foreign Service after the Second World War
and take a pretty hard line.
They're pretty old-school
on issues of British Empire, power...
..and how to treat foreigners.
This is a remarkable document,
because it shows such disdain for the Iranians,
all the Iranians.
It's not a very nice document.
British plans advanced, but the Americans stayed out.
So MI6's Head of Station, Montagu Woodhouse,
tried a different tactic.
Monty Woodhouse was a classic, upper-class gentleman spy.
He was a Baron,
he had served during the Second World War
with the Special Operations Executive in Greece.
He would go on to become a Conservative MP.
Woodhouse now used his political skills
to try to win the Americans round.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "I was anxious not to be accused
"of trying to use the Americans
"to pull British chestnuts out of the fire.
"So I decided to emphasise the Communist threat to Iran,
"rather than the need to recover control of the oil industry."
And he is making a conscious effort to play up,
even exaggerate, the Communist threat.
Using Communism, rather than oil, as a justification
became a new ingredient in the coup planning.
Mossadegh's Foreign Minister, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
was wise to British scheming.
He himself had been pilloried by the British
and the year before narrowly survived an assassination attempt
by an Islamist group which had links to MI6.
Britain targeted him with propaganda,
trying to smear him, trying to discredit him.
They portrayed him as a homosexual.
They portrayed him as a Christian convert.
They portrayed him as a thief.
Fatemi knew the British Embassy was a hotbed of spies.
In October 1952, he shut it down
in an attempt to quash MI6's coup planning.
The MI6 officers retreated to Cyprus.
Britain's coup, it seemed, had ground to a halt.
Then another election, this time in America,
put it right back on track.
ARCHIVE: Electric signs flash the news - Ike's in,
and bedlam breaks out amongst the Republican supporters
as they hear of their landslide victory.
Dwight Eisenhower becomes President by the greatest popular vote
ever given a White House candidate.
Eisenhower's administration was fanatically anti-Communist
and a stark contrast to Truman's.
Well, Dwight Eisenhower had advisors who had a certain view of Iran
that was different from those who they succeeded,
"We're the can-do boys.
"Let us pursue covert operations, we'll change things."
Their mind-set was the Mossadegh government is unstable,
and it is weak, and if it falls, then the Communists come in,
and now we've got a Cold War front line with the Soviets,
and Tehran's in the wrong camp.
But American support for Britain would not come free.
The Americans drive a hard bargain.
"You want us in?
"You want us in after we help you get rid of Mossadegh?
"Then we have to have an economic stake."
And so the division takes place.
The British retain 40% of the oil,
America retains 40%, and then, what the Americans have got
is obviously the profits from the oil,
but they've also got political leverage.
There is no chance again that Britain can act independently
over Iran.
With Britain's diplomatic HQ in Tehran neutralised,
the centre of operations would become the US Embassy.
All Iranian operatives working for MI6
would be passed on to American handlers...
..the code name changing from Boot to Operation Ajax.
The Americans would be taking over.
But the British weren't out of it.
Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac were on the verge of discovering
an extraordinary series of buried documents.
They would show that the United States would deploy
the Queen of England as a hidden asset in a bloody coup.
It has remained a closely-guarded secret for nearly seven decades.
In 1953, the preparations for a coup to topple
the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh
and replace it with the autocratic rule of the young Shah,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
passed from MI6 to America's CIA.
It would be renamed Operation Ajax.
The West wanted a puppet,
but the Shah was proving anything but.
The Shah is quite paranoid,
he's worrying that the Brits and the Americans
might actually be working against him all along,
and he's also worried about the power of the Western hidden hand,
to be able to depose him whenever they wanted,
just like they deposed his father.
The Shah was also caught in a war of nerves
with Prime Minister Mossadegh.
In February 1953, Mossadegh threatens to resign.
He says to the Shah, "I've had enough of you and the Brits
"trying to scheme against me and overthrow my government."
This unnerves the Shah, and he offers to leave.
At this critical moment,
the Americans were bolstered by an unprecedented intervention.
At the National Archives in Washington, Professor Rory Cormac
recently uncovered an extraordinary secret cable
which seemed to come from the pinnacle of the British state.
It contained a message passed on to Washington
by the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.
It was for the eyes only of John Foster Dulles,
America's all-powerful Secretary of State,
whose brother was head of the CIA,
and Assistant Secretary Henry Byroade.
"Top secret.
"From London to US Secretary of State.
"Number 4844.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "February 27th, 9pm,
"Eyes only Secretary..."
"..and Byroade."
"Foreign Office this afternoon informed us
"of receipt message from Eden, from Queen Elizabeth,
"expressing concern at latest developments re Shah,
"and strong hope we can find some means of dissuading him
"from leaving the country.
"British Embassy in Washington has been urgently instructed
"to discuss with department."
This is a really intriguing document,
because it reads as if Queen Elizabeth herself
is sending a message to the Americans
and trying to persuade the Shah,
another constitutional monarch,
to stay put when he wants to flee.
And this would be remarkable.
It would be the...covert meddling
of the Queen of the United Kingdom
in the internal affairs of another country.
It appears that Queen Elizabeth is almost leading the charge,
but she has to do it indirectly,
because Britain no longer has an embassy in Iran.
Constitutionally, the Queen should have no direct role
in foreign policy, let alone a plot to unseat a democratic leader.
But the Americans instantly realised the impact the message
would have on the Shah.
They immediately forwarded it
to their ambassador in Tehran, Loy Henderson.
The next day, Henderson spoke to the Shah's senior minister, Ala,
at the Imperial Palace,
requesting an audience with the Shah.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Top Secret.
"From London.
"Ala called Shah on inter-palace telephone,
"and after a few minutes' conversation, said..."
"..Shah was unable to see me personally
"since the Prime Minister was on the way to the palace
"to bid him farewell.
"Shah would appreciate it, however,
"if I would talk to him by telephone."
These were desperate days for the Americans and British
plotting against Iran's Prime Minster.
Mossadegh's visit to the palace
seemed to herald the Shah going into exile.
Henderson reported...
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Early this morning,
"stories regarding imminent departure Shah,
"pouring in from many sources.
"Most common version was that Shah had decided to leave
"because Mossadegh was threatening if Shah did not, repeat not..."
"..repeat not, so he would issue proclamation to country,
"criticising Shah and asking people to choose between Shah and himself."
Henderson urgently needed to pass on the message from Queen Elizabeth
as a final plea to the Shah,
but he was fearful of doing it on the phone.
"I asked Ala if he was sure telephone not, repeat not, tapped.
"Ala said every possible precaution taken in this respect.
"I told him to tell the Shah that in interest of country,
"the Shah should not, repeat not, leave in this fashion.
"I also asked him to tell Shah that I had just received
"message from a very important personage,
"for whom Shah had most friendly feelings,
"had also expressed sincere hope that Shah
"could be dissuaded from leaving the country."
Henderson is trying to be very discreet,
so he's choosing his words very carefully indeed.
He knows that there's a chance Mossadegh has tapped
the palace's phone lines,
if Mossadegh found out that the Queen was engaged
in organising some sort of covert action,
this would be devastating for the Queen's reputation,
and for Anglo-American interests in Iran.
It is now almost 70 years after that message,
the Shah is long passed.
I can't get inside his head directly,
but when you look at the Shah,
at the regard that he had for royalty and for ceremony...
..and the playing to his ego -
"I've gotten a message from the most important monarch in the world,
"telling me I need to stay."
That's a boost.
That's a boost that keeps him in place.
There's an English phrase - it's a quaint one for me, as an American -
what is it? - "Be a man, George,"
back from the 18th century, you know.
Stand up to the pesky Americans or stand up to the French,
Well, this was a "Be a man, George" message to the Shah,
which he thought was coming from the Queen.
He was really going to defy that and turn her down?
However, as Cormac and Aldrich continued their investigation
in the archives,
a further new document would throw up one more revelatory twist.
This document was truly astonishing,
because clearly, the intervention that the State Department makes,
the intervention that Loy Henderson makes, is very important,
in the construction of that coup.
Without the Shah,
if the Shah had fled - he clearly was planning to,
he was saying his farewells.
He was pretty much heading to the airport.
Without Henderson's intervention,
the coup would not have happened.
This new document has remained a carefully guarded secret
in the State Department archive in Washington for 67 years.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "From London to the Secretary of State.
"Telegram number 4847,
"February 28th 1953, 11am.
"Priority. Repeated information."
"Tehran, priority.
"Reference to Embassy's telegram 4844,
"27th February, repeated Tehran.
"Queen Elizabeth..."
"..refers, of course, to vessel..."
"..and not...
"..repeat not, to monarch."
I was truly shocked when I read this document.
This is the sort of document that one almost never sees.
This is a correction to a previous telegram.
It's saying, "Our previous telegram,
"referring to Anthony Eden and Queen Elizabeth,
"was badly drafted, was garbled,
"and actually, when we referred to Queen Elizabeth,
"what we actually meant to say was a message from Anthony Eden,
"who is currently sailing on the vessel,
"the RMS Queen Elizabeth."
And, of course, at this time Anthony Eden was sailing to Canada
on the RMS Queen Elizabeth to attend a conference.
The Americans had a choice.
Own up to their mistake and tell the British
or keep it a secret.
"Eyes only, Secretary Byroade."
"Deeply regret lack of clarity."
"It was not, repeat not, until rereading the message this morning
"that it occurred to us that it was open to misinterpretation.
"Embassy does not, repeat not,
"propose to inform British of incident."
The Americans chose to cover up, rather than own up.
The decision is dramatic, because Britain would have been livid
if the Queen's name had been used in vain like that.
The deception went further.
They're also trying to keep it from the Shah.
Because the Shah believes that his decisions
were partly in response to a request from Queen Elizabeth.
They don't want to know that's not the case.
They don't want the Shah to realise that essentially he's been
misinformed, perhaps even unintentionally duped.
He's been persuaded to take risks.
He's actually been persuaded to stick his neck out.
And all this, to some extent, is on a false premise.
He believes he's received a message from one monarch to another.
He's actually received a message from a boat.
Not quite the same thing.
At the end of this extraordinary episode,
there is one undeniable fact -
before the Queen's apparent message was passed on,
the Shah had decided to leave Iran.
After receiving it from the American ambassador,
he changed his mind and stayed.
The coup was back on.
In March 1953, the MI6 and CIA preparations
for the Iran coup, revealed in the secret documents,
spilled over onto the streets of Tehran.
Supporters of Prime Minister Mossadegh
were taken on by pro-Shah rioters
manipulated by the Western intelligence agencies.
Covert action only works
when there's a pre-existing movement
which aligns with what the Brits or the Americans wanted to do.
Britain and America did not create opposition
to Mossadegh from scratch -
these people already existed and were quite vocal.
What the covert action sought to do was to push them along a bit,
to bolster them, to fund them,
and to make them as vocal as they possibly could be.
CIA and MI6 have a whole range of agents and collaborators
which they've been establishing for many years,
but at the moment that the coup is approaching,
the main mechanism is bribery.
The British put further pressure on Mossadegh
with a naval blockade.
The British actually talk about the possibility of invasion,
they talk about the possibility of sabotaging oil refineries,
at one point they even talk about the use of nuclear weapons.
So it's an extraordinary moment in history
when Britain really rediscovers the whole idea
of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy.
The chief of police, Mahmoud Afshartous,
in attempt to protect Iran's government,
rallied pro-Mossadegh supporters
against the CIA and MI6-backed mobs.
But Afshartous didn't last long.
He was abducted by soldiers working for General Fazlollah Zahedi,
a former Interior Minister who was now part of the coup.
Six days later, his body was discovered
and Zahedi and certain military officers
were implicated in this murder.
MI6 officers have since admitted that the abduction
was part of the covert operation.
They thought that by abducting the Chief of Police,
a Mossadegh loyalist,
they would give the opposition groups a morale boost.
What they didn't expect was that they would get carried away
and end up killing Afshartous.
Afshartous was beaten, tortured, then strangled to death.
His corpse was displayed outside Tehran.
Smears, hired mobs, military force,
and now murder.
Terror began to erode Mossadegh's support.
Three months later, the coup moved into its final phase.
Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of a US President,
was now the CIA man in charge of Operation Ajax.
Kermit Roosevelt knows Iran,
he knows the region,
he's confident - with enough money and enough contacts -
he can pull off this operation.
On 19th July, Roosevelt arrived in Tehran
after driving overland from Iraq,
carrying $100,000 in small denominations.
It was used to incite an orgy of street violence.
In a last desperate act, Mossadegh shut down parliament
and declared a state of emergency on the 16th August.
ARCHIVE: After nine hours of bloodshed,
the forces of the Shah were in command
and Mossadegh's reign as virtual dictator of Iran had ended.
Premier Mossadegh's ruined house is a mute testimony
to three days of bloody rioting, culminating in a military coup
from which the one-time dictator of Iran fled for his life.
Now, indeed, all the shouting and the banners were for the Shah.
On 19th August 1953, the Shah finally dismissed
Iran's Prime Minister and installed a military government.
British Ministers lied to the press,
claiming they'd first heard news of the coup on the BBC.
Forces loyal to the Shah turned up at Mossadegh's house.
He fled.
Two days later, he was captured, tried and sentenced to death.
ARCHIVE: The aged defendant has constantly challenged the authority
of the court to try him.
The Shah commuted his sentence to house arrest for life.
Mossadegh's Foreign Secretary, Dr Hossein Fatemi,
the man who had closed down the British Embassy,
was captured by pro-Shah troops
and executed without trial by firing squad.
The Americans celebrated, but there were still concerns
about the Shah's stability and frame of mind.
The US ambassador in Tehran,
who had conveyed the Queen Elizabeth message to the Shah,
asked if the British could give him a boost.
ACTOR'S VOICE: "Believe it might be useful for Queen or Churchill
"send oral message congratulations
"to Shah through top-secret channels."
A sharp response came back from the Foreign Office in London.
"I do not think there can be any question of the Queen
"sending a message."
Associating the Queen with a bloody coup
rang alarm bells in Whitehall.
Little did officials know the damage was already done.
But the Americans had hidden the truth.
For many Iranians, the success of the coup
was no cause for celebration.
Farrokh Negahdar's parents were activists
in the pro-Communist Tudeh Party.
They desperately tried to destroy incriminating evidence.
I remember, after the coup,
the days which still deeply reside in my mind...
..the fear, the eyes of my mum, the eyes of my grandmum,
who were burning papers in a stove,
and the smell of the burnt papers was in my nose.
It did not save eight of his relatives from prison.
A decade later, Farrokh himself spent a total of ten years
in the prisons of the Shah.
The objectives of Operation Boot had been achieved,
and Iran's democracy under Mossadegh successfully destroyed.
For 26 years, the Shah was a steadfast ally
of Britain, America and the Queen.
Although he tried to modernise Iran, his regime also became synonymous
with human-rights abuses and torture.
ARCHIVE: It was Revolutionary Guards
who, with Khomeini's tacit support, decided to take the fight
to the seat of the Shah's power base - the armed forces.
The repeated street demonstrations were a declaration to the Shah,
and to the world, there could be no turning back.
In 1979, the Shah became the victim of revolution himself
and went into exile.
Neither Britain nor America, fearing the consequences
from the revolutionary Islamist regime in Tehran,
would give him safe refuge.
I think the Shah was a broken man.
He...
His life's work...
His life's dreams...
..had...
..were in tatters.
He had a huge deal of pride,
and all of a sudden, he had found himself
in a situation where he couldn't even take refuge
in any country that had preached loyalty to him
and friendship to him for over 37 years
that he had been in charge.
The Shah ended up in Egypt, where he died just one year later.
The British Government did not send official condolences.
Such attempts not to cause offence to the new Islamic Republic
failed miserably.
The atrocities and human-rights abuses
by Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist regime
at least matched those of the Shah.
And even those Iranians who opposed the Ayatollah
have never forgotten Britain and America's role
in the coup of 1953.
It triggered a chain of events that, nearly seven decades later,
continue to shake the world.
I think that the Islamic revolution of Iran
is a direct response to the coup of 1953.
ARCHIVE: Khomeini branded the United States "the great Satan".
After the coup, the psychology of Iranian people
changed dramatically.
They started to blame the United States,
even religious layers, not only lefts,
because of their involvement in the coup.
Marg bar Amrika! Marg bar Amrika! Marg bar Amrika!
The 1953 coup was a classic example of a covert operation
that's carried out for short-term reasons,
for short-term gain,
but in the long-term it's immensely damaging.
In Iran, in Afghanistan,
in so many places where the West has meddled,
the long-term results have actually been fairly disastrous.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media