672. What Was Operation Ajax? How U.S. Intervention in Iran Still Affects Us Today

Hi, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works, a Tuttle Twins podcast. I, as always, am Brittany Hunter, your host, and today I want to talk about something you are probably hearing all over the news, and that is you're hearing about the country Iran or Iran. I don't know which way everyone says it differently, and then you never know, but both of those are correct.

People know you're talking about. I want to talk about it because I know sometimes, especially as a kid, a younger person, you hear these things and you don't really understand them. I remember when I was four, the first Iraq war happened, and I remember hearing the word Iraq and hearing these names and being very scared because I didn't understand what was going on, but I remember hearing these horrific things on the news.

I think it's really important to understand what's going on. Right now, there's some conflict with Iran. There is, you've got Israel, you've got Iran, and then you've got America, American government, who often, more often than not, always sides with the Israeli government.

Whether or not you think there are some very valid reasons that we should stand up to Iran and to engage in this, I want to make sure you understand the conflict and where it came from. Even though it is Israel and Iran right now, there's a reason that Iran and America have some tensions as well, and I want to talk about that. If you are, and I hope you do, avid readers of the Tuttle Twins, you have this book, hopefully The Golden Rule, which I think sums up a lot of what's happening and a lot of what's going on in Iran because years and years and years ago, and we're going to get into this, the US meddled in Iran, and now there's some consequences for that.

The golden rule is treat others as you would want to be treated. We're going to come back to that and that theme and how it plays into this, but I want to go back all the way to 1979, which was even before I was born, not by much, but even before I was born. In 1979, that's when President Carter was in office, there were a bunch of Iranian students, college students, who ran into the US embassy over there, and they held diplomats, so some people who represent the United States and help with relations, that's what a diplomat is between different countries, that's why different countries have embassies, so you'll have diplomats everywhere, but they ran into this embassy and they held US citizens and diplomats hostage for 444 days, and that is, of course, longer than a year, so that is a very, very long time, and they were humiliated, and their lives were threatened, and it was absolutely horrible, and it wasn't for a very long time that it came to an end, and the reason that they held them hostage is there was a leader there called the Shah, he was like, think of it like their president, and he was a former leader, he was ousted because the people were not fans, and then he got cancer and he was being treated in America, and the college students were basically saying, this man was horrible, you need to send him back here so he can be held accountable for his actions to the people who he was ruling over, and we didn't send, or we, I say we, I'm saying the United States government because I know the government makes choices that sometimes are not our choices, and more often than not are not our choices, so I want to make sure I differentiate that, so the college students were very, very angry about that, and you're probably thinking, oh my goodness though, holding people hostage, absolutely horrible, and you would be right, it is, but why did they do this, what happened before 1979 that made all this come to reality, and what happened goes all the way back to 1951, and we're going to talk about something called Operation Ajax, so and please forgive me for not pronouncing all these words correctly, so there was a leader, Mosaddegh, and I say that wrong sometimes because I speak French, where you say the, you do a lot of the pronunciation differently, so if it sounds too French, I apologize, so Mohammad Mosaddegh became the prime minister of Iran, and he was picked by the people, that was their, you know, president, that was who they elected, but here was the problem, he wanted to nationalize the oil company, Iran has a lot of oil, and Britain didn't like that because they had a lot of interests wrapped up, a lot of money wrapped up in the oil industry in Iran, and so the fact that they were going to nationalize it was going to hurt this British oil company a lot, and so Britain is like, we cannot have this, absolutely not, this is really going to mess up the whole good thing we have going on here, and so they go to the US, and they say, hey, we need you to partner with us, we need you to come and help us do something to get this guy out of office, so that we can go about as business as usual, so at first, we were like, no, we're not going to do it, it was Eisenhower, we're not going to get involved, this isn't our thing, 1953 comes around, and the United States decides to get on board with this, and they put together this plan called Operation Ajax, so what they were going to do is, they were going to meddle in elections, and they were going to help someone else come into power, basically, they were going to interfere in the election, and have somebody who would promote Western or American interests, and when we say Western, America is part of the Western world, especially during this time where it was the Cold War, where you had East and West, and without getting into it too much, the East was kind of this, I say kind of, it was, this idea of communism, of socialism that was encroaching, and that America was, and the Western world was very scared of, so think of the Western world as free market and capitalism, even though, let's be honest, the government isn't always great at protecting free markets and capitalism, that was kind of the distinction there, and then there was the Red Scare, where America was so worried that the domino effect, if we let any country become communist socialist, it was going to interfere, and so when Iran was like, okay, we're going to partner with the Soviet Union, or we're going to partner with these Eastern factions, then that's when America was like, all right, we're going to help Britain, because this is the Red Scare, we have to stop communism, so 1953 rolls around, and the United States and Britain help prop up this guy named Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, I think I actually said that pretty decently, so he was a close friend of Britain, close friend of the United States, they thought he was going to do what they wanted him to do, the problem was, remember, the people didn't vote him in, this wasn't their choice, it was the government meddling in elections, our government, not even their government, so he, the Shah did not act very good, he wasn't good to his people, he was acting like a tyrant king, not a president, and so the people couldn't speak freely, there was the secret police that was going around and arresting people and torturing people, and anybody who didn't agree with them was terrified that this was going to happen to them, and so this was a very, very scary situation, so then, of course, in 1979, this is where you have the hostage crisis, but they got tired, the people got tired of the Shah ruling over them, they didn't like him, he wasn't good to them, and so then there was somebody named Ayatollah, that's another word for president or leader, so the leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, I always say that wrong, so please forgive my horrible spelling, but he was leading people in protesting and saying, we're not going to do this anymore, and finally, the Ayatollah and his group were able to chase out the Shah, right, he was gone, but this is where you get a lot of anti-American, anti-Western sentiment, because they weren't dumb, they knew that America and Britain had come in and helped destroy the rule of, the vote, the, I don't like, you know, we've talked about democracy before, we'll get in there before, that's not always the best way, but it was, they were ruining the democratic system of the people electing their leader, and so they chased the Shah out, and they start shouting things like, down to America, and they become very anti -Western civilization, so that's Britain too, and of course they did, if we had somebody do that here, and it was a leader who was horrible to us, we wouldn't be very happy, and so this comes back to the golden rule, would we want people to treat us like that? No, and the golden rule was foreign policies, think about it, if I push somebody on the playground, they're probably going to push back, and this is what happens with other countries, and that is why when Ron Paul was running for office, he would always tell people, you know, we should be friends with other countries, we should trade with other countries, because as Frederick Bastia, the economist, used to say, if goods, so products, free market, if goods don't cross borders, armies will, because when you're not trading, and you're not engaging in friendship, bad things are going to happen if you become at odds with people, which is exactly what happened, so they're very upset, the Iranian people, and of course then when the Shah gets cancer, he comes to America, and we're helping him, and so there's all these things that Iran is so mad about, and 1979 might seem like a very long time ago, but it's not that long ago in the memory of people politically, and you might know this because some of your parents or grandparents might like to talk about Reagan, President Reagan, and how he came in and did a lot of really good things for the country economically, and that was 1980.

In fact, the Iranian hostage situation where the students came in and held people hostage ended, I think it was the day Reagan got into office, so that was kind of a new era, but so back to Operation Ajax, so Operation Ajax is what we called that event when the United States and Britain swooped in, you know, covertly, secretly, and meddled in the elections over in Iran in 1953, and a lot of people used to think that was a conspiracy, right, this thing that a bunch of quacks who didn't like the government or didn't trust it or maybe were pro -Iran or hated America or unpatriotic that they were spreading these rumors because no country would dare do that. Our country's good, but guess what? Our government is not full of angels. I think it was James Madison who was saying that that's why we needed a bill of rights and a constitution, because governments are not made of angels, not even a little bit, and so this conspiracy ended up to be true.

In fact, you can read more about it. This is a one of my favorite, I know I've probably said this a lot, but this is probably my second favorite Petal Twins book, and that is, of course, true conspiracies, because Operation Ajax ended up a very real thing, and like I said, 1979 might not seem like a long time ago, but it's actually still happening, or we're still seeing the consequences of it, because this is why we're having conflict with Iran today. It happened all the way back in 1953, and so we have to remember that when we don't follow the golden rule as a people, and hopefully our government, you know, listens and follows that, they probably won't, but we hope so.

So, when we don't treat countries well, of course they're not going to treat us well in return, and they're going to remember things we did to them, destabilizing their country through putting other leaders in, and so Operation Ajax and all this stuff that happened forever ago leads to the things we're doing today and that are happening today, and so when you see these things, I want you to remember and maybe ask your parents, or nowadays you can ask Chat GPT or ask Google. You have so many resources at your disposal. How did we get to where we are today? Because it's usually not some single instance that happened right now.

You can usually go back in history, so Operation Ajax, maybe read more about it. This Tuttle Twins book, True Conspiracies, is a great place to start. There's so much good information in here, and we'll go over more of the true conspiracies in other episodes, but we will leave it there, and until next time, please don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends, and until next time, we will talk to you later.