Mohammad Mosaddegh became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951 and nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had been paying Iran a small fraction of its profits and had refused to open its books.
Britain organized a boycott, took the case to the International Court and lost, and then approached the Americans, framing the dispute — which was about oil — as a Cold War problem about Communism.
The operation that followed was called TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by SIS. Kermit Roosevelt Jr. ran it in Tehran in August 1953.
Its instruments were, in the agency's own subsequently declassified history, largely purchased.
Newspapers were bribed to run planted stories: that Mosaddegh was a Communist, that he was moving against the Shah, that he was destroying Islam. Clerics were paid, and threats were made against religious leaders in the name of Mosaddegh's supporters in order to turn them against him. And crowds were rented.
The crowd operation is the technique this chapter is about. Money was distributed through intermediaries — including, in the accounts of participants, to gangs from the south Tehran bazaar district — to produce demonstrations. On 19 August, crowds moved through the city, some purporting to be pro-Mosaddegh Communists behaving destructively, others pro-Shah.
A manufactured crowd is not primarily a physical force. It is a claim about public opinion made in a form that cannot be checked, and the claim then recruits genuine participants.
Two mechanisms drive this. Informational conformity: a bystander who does not know what is happening reads the behavior of others as data about what is appropriate, which is Asch and Latané and Darley combined, and a crowd already in motion supplies a definition of the situation to everyone who encounters it. And deindividuation: submergence in a crowd reduces personal accountability, which licenses behavior individuals would not undertake alone.
Simultaneous placement in bribed newspapers supplied the apparent independent corroboration of the previous chapter: a reader saw the demonstrations described in several papers and inferred a groundswell.
Mosaddegh was arrested on 19 August. The Shah returned, ruled with increasing repression for twenty-six years, and was overthrown in 1979.
The CIA formally acknowledged its role in 2013 with the release of an internal history. The episode is the reference case for what the astroturf-detection material in chapter 253 is about, and its consequences are still being paid.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Astroturf Detection Chapters