Oil-hungry Britain and “the Subduer of Climate”
When Kermit (not the frog) Roosevelt (not the president, but related to both of them) touched down in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, in the summer of 1953, he had a mission. It was simple: overthrow the democratically appointed prime minister.
The question was, how was one CIA agent with a small group of CIA buddies in the middle of a foreign country going to overthrow the government of a country with 20 million people? Another might be, why is the CIA trying to overthrow the government in the first place?
To answer the latter, because of oil (and because of the British).
Basically, in the early 1900s, Iran was being led by a series of exceptionally corrupt kings, called Shahs. One of these Shahs, who insisted on being called “the subduer of climate” in literal reference to the weather, had struck numerous utterly terrible business deals with British energy companies and the British government, in which Britain got over 80% of the revenue from Iranian oil sales.
Why would Iran sign such bad deals? Well, the Shah at the time (the Subdeur of Climate guy) had his country deeply in debt by taking money out of the government treasury directly, to pay for his harem of 1600 wives (excessive in my opinion), among other things.
Among additional elements, the country could not pay for its own oil drilling infrastructure. Therefore, after Britain bribed the Subduer of Climate guy directly, they let Britain drill it all.
It went on like this through two world wars, during which Britain’s military was powered in large part by Iranian oil. Until finally, a civil war forced the Subduer of Climate guy to agree to a constitution. Then, a massively popular leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, was appointed prime minister. The Shah, at the time, then became more of a figurehead rather than someone with legitimate power.
Mossadegh’s popularity amongst the Iranian people stemmed from his efforts to renegotiate the horrible British deals regarding oil signed decades earlier. At this point, Iran was the fourth-largest producer of oil in the world. After he threatened to do so, Britain called up their buddies, the United States, and said, “Do you wanna go overthrow a foreign government, who is gonna take back its own oil from us?”
After Dwight Eisenhower became president, they thought about it, and they were like, “Yes.”
Kermit and the prime minister
So in comes Kermit, from the CIA, here to overthrow the massively popular leader of a foreign country at the behest of American (and British) oil companies. But the question remains, how does he do it?
Answer: You fire said massively popular prime minister.
Question: How do you fire the elected prime minister of a foreign government?
Answer: A multi-step process.
Step 1: Make all the newspapers and the press hate the prime minister. Kermit bribed almost every news station in Iran to start telling the people that Mossadegh was a communist, homosexual Jewish atheist who secretly wanted to seize absolute power in Iran. When they were literally using almost all of their manpower printing these stories, Kermit got his boys back home in the CIA to start typing up stories for Iranian newspapers, making things up about Mossadegh.
Step 2: Bribe religious leaders called the mullahs (they’ll be back) to start giving religious sermons about how Mossadegh was a secret communist, atheist, gay Jew.
Step 3: Get the Shah (successor to the Subduer of Climate guy from decades prior) on board to take the throne back via allegedly bribing his sister with a fur coat. (I don’t know why this would be valuable in Tehran in the summer.)
Step 4: Hire street mobs to run around saying “I love Mossadegh, long live communism” (he wasn’t a communist), and then hire other street mobs to attack those street mobs. Neither street mob knew they were hired by the same guy, nor did they know said guy was employed by the CIA.
The plan failed its first attempt, and the CIA told Kermit to pack it up and come home. Kermit, however, was locked in and disobeyed the orders and ordered his street mobs to join together and attack key points throughout the city. He did this while telling his propaganda boys to say that the first failed coup attempt wasn’t actually a CIA-backed plot to put the Shah back on the throne, but rather Mossadegh trying to take the throne for himself.
After finding him and firing a tank shell through his house, the mobs told Mossadegh he was fired, and the Shah, backed by American and British interests, was back on the throne, ready to give Britain and now the U.S. all of Iran’s oil.
The Shah is back, baby!
Now, in 1953, the Shah, named Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was back! And instead of spending all his time controlling the weather and chilling with his 1600 wives like his predecessors, he would spend all his time torturing and killing his own civilians and ensuring as much of Iran’s oil as possible was going to the United States and Britain!
The Shah is gone
By 1979, after 26 years of the Shah being back, baby! Just about everybody in Iran, on all sides of the political spectrum, was sick of him, as he was torturing and killing dissidents and giving away the country’s oil.
The far-left communists and the far-right conservative religious mullahs (who apparently had run out of their sugar daddy CIA money from Kermit) organized a violent reverse-overthrow of the U.S.-backed government.
In short, it worked; however, not before the religious mullahs, led by a guy named Ayatollah Khomeini, hijacked the revolution and killed everybody who helped organize the revolution. They overthrew the Shah, took over the government, installed an extremely conservative form of Islam as their governing principles, and took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took about 60 American captives from the embassy.
After numerous attempts at diplomacy by then U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and a military rescue mission crashed in the desert, the hostages were diplomatically returned home minutes after the new president, Ronald Reagan, was sworn in (no side deals happened whatsoever).
The Iranian revolution, which was now captured by an ultra-conservative extremist government, had ousted the oppressive U.S. backed regime, and could now implement an oppressive Islamist regime. And now, instead of giving away all their oil to the U.S. and Britain, they could sell and give all their oil away to virtually no one, because the U.S. and other countries were very mad and imposed sanctions on the country, making it very hard to sell oil.
Since then, Iran and the United States have been beefing, leading directly up to this moment in 2026, where President Donald Trump has invaded Iran, in his mind, hoping to end this multi-decade-old rivalry.
