1979.
That was the year Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
For most Americans, this event marks the beginning of the conflict between the United States and Iran.
And I’ll be the first to admit that if that’s where the story begins, the rest of the narrative falls neatly into place.
Iran funds militant groups. Iran attacks American interests through proxies. Iran destabilizes the region. Decades of hostility follow.
In that version of the story, we are mostly reacting defensively to an irrational, violent, dangerous threat that endangers not only the United States, but most other peace-seeking Western and Middle Eastern countries.
But history has a funny way of changing depending on where you choose to start the clock.
And if you ask many Iranians where the conflict really began, they’ll point to something else entirely.
They’ll point to 1953.
That was the year of Operation Ajax, a covert CIA operation that removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
To understand why that happened, you have to go back a little further.
For decades before the 1950s, most of Iran’s oil wealth was controlled by a British company called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today known as BP). The arrangement was wildly unpopular inside Iran because, while they produced enormous amounts of oil, much of the profit flowed out of the country.
So in 1951, Mossadegh—who had been elected prime minister by Iran’s parliament—did something that made Western governments very nervous.
He nationalized the oil industry.
The Iranian people liked this, and inside the country, Mossadegh became enormously popular.
But in London and Washington, the move set off alarms. Britain was furious, and with the Cold War underway, American policymakers were increasingly worried that political instability in Iran might create an opening for Soviet influence.
So instead of letting Iran’s internal politics work themselves out, British intelligence and the CIA began planning a covert intervention.
In many ways, Operation Ajax wrote the playbook that intelligence agencies would later use in other countries.
Propaganda was planted in newspapers to discredit Mossadegh; political figures were bribed; organized street protests were encouraged to create the appearance of chaos. Eventually parts of the Iranian military moved against the government.
In August 1953, Mossadegh was overthrown (and arrested).
The Shah of Iran—Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—who had briefly fled the country during the turmoil, returned to power with strong support from the United States, and for the next quarter century, Iran was ruled by that monarchy.
The Shah pursued rapid modernization and maintained close ties with Western governments, but his regime was also increasingly authoritarian. Political opposition was suppressed, and the secret police organization known as SAVAK developed a reputation for brutality.
Many Iranians came to see the Shah not as a legitimate leader, but as a ruler kept in power by foreign governments.
Which brings us back to 1979.
The Iranian Revolution that year overthrew the Shah. The monarchy collapsed, the Islamic Republic was established, and the U.S. embassy seizure followed a few months later.
Of course none of this excuses what happened during the hostage crisis. Taking diplomats hostage is wrong. Supporting terrorist groups is wrong. Targeting civilians is wrong.
But understanding history means recognizing that events rarely (never) emerge out of nowhere.
The event Americans tend to see as the beginning of the conflict was, from another perspective, part of a much longer chain of cause and effect.
And that’s something governments almost never highlight when they’re explaining the origins of a war or justifying to their people why billions of dollars and thousands of lives are being directed toward a conflict they didn’t ask for.
When officials tell the story, the timeline almost always starts at the moment the other side acted aggressively—rarely does it begin with anything “we” might have done earlier.
That’s not unique to the United States, by the way. Every government does this. Every nation tends to tell its own history in a way that emphasizes its goodness and downplays its interventions.
Which is exactly why learning real history matters so much.
If kids grow up only hearing simplified narratives—where conflicts begin suddenly and their own country is always reacting—they miss the deeper lesson about how the world actually works.
But when you look at the full timeline, patterns start to appear.
Governments intervene abroad to secure resources or strategic advantages. Those interventions often create resentment. That resentment eventually produces blowback. And decades later people are still arguing about who started what.
Understanding that dynamic doesn’t make someone anti-American; if anything, it makes them better citizens because they are harder to manipulate and more concerned with lasting prosperity and peace than partisan team-cheering.
That’s one of the reasons parents love The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies.
It walks through real historical events that were once dismissed as “crazy conspiracy theories,” but later turned out to be totally true.
Operation Ajax is one of those stories.
For decades, the CIA’s involvement in overthrowing Iran’s government wasn’t widely acknowledged, but today it’s openly documented in most historical records. The problem is that if you never go looking for those details, you might never realize how much of modern geopolitics makes more sense once you understand what came before.
And most Americans don’t go looking beyond whatever they were taught in school.
When governments tell stories about war, they almost always pick the most convenient starting point.
If the timeline begins where your opponent first struck, you look like the victim. If it begins where you first intervened, the story becomes more complicated.
That’s why real education matters so much.
Kids who only learn the simplified version of history—where their country is always reacting and never acting—grow up with a very distorted understanding of the world.
But kids who learn the full story start asking better questions.
What actually happened?
Who benefited?
What incentives were at play?
And how many other “official narratives” leave out inconvenient chapters?
Because the world looks very different depending on where you start the story.
And the people who understand that tend to be the ones who are hardest to fool.
If you want your kids to learn about Operation Ajax and dozens of other confirmed historical conspiracies, you can check out The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies here.
It might just change the way your family thinks about history.
And that’s a good thing.
— Connor
