British Greed + CIA Blowback = Islamic Revolution.

Two must-listen-to podcasts from 'Rear Vision' on the history of foreign intervention in Iran:
Oil, Democracy and a CIA Coup
The Iranian Revolution

"Kermit Roosevelt was a fascinating character. He really was a true-life James Bond, and when it was decided that the United States would overthrow Mossadeq, he was the guy that the CIA turned to. They gave him the job. They told him, 'You've got to go to Iran and you've got to do everything you need to do and you've got to overthrow Mossadeq.' Kermit Roosevelt crossed over clandestinely into Iran at the beginning of August, 1953. He went to work in a basement office in the US Embassy and immediately began building a network of people, basically by bribing them. He bribed all manner of people.

One of the early plots that he came up with was that he would try to bribe enough members of parliament so that maybe they could vote a No Confidence motion to depose Mossadeq. And a number of them accepted these bribes, and they broke away from the Mossadeq coalition.

But the idea of deposing Mossadeq through a vote of No Confidence never panned out. So Kermit Roosevelt went off and did other things with his money. For example, he bribed mullahs, the religious leaders in Iran, to begin denouncing Mossadeq from the pulpit as an atheist, or non-believer, which was not true, as Mossadeq was a devout Twelver Shi'ite.

He bribed newspaper editors and reporters, to the point where he had 80% of the Iranian press in his payroll. And what that meant was that every day, Iranians would wake up to news reports and commentaries about how Mossadeq was Jewish, he was homosexual, he was a British agent, just about anything bad you could think of, would show up day after day in practically every newspaper in Tehran. So by the spreading around of money, Kermit Roosevelt was immediately going to change the public tenor and view of Mossadeq.

He also bribed commanders of military and police units, so they would be ready to help him on the day that he struck against Mossadeq. One of the things that he did, perhaps this was his most masterful idea, he went to the Tehran bazaar, where there was a group of thugs operating under a very colourful leader named Shabaan the Brainless (see photo above). And he hired Shabaan, who actually is still alive, living in California, and Shabaan's job was: get together the biggest group of thugs and gangsters you can find. We're going to pay every one of them. Find every adult male who wants to be a gangster for a day, and hire them. And what your job is, (and this is exactly what this gang did for several days in Tehran) run through the streets wildly, smash shop windows, fire guns into mosques and then shout, 'We love Communism and Mossadeq'.

So he created this mob that was very violent, that was posing as thugs for Mossadeq. But that wasn't all. Roosevelt went one step further: he hired another mob to attack that mob, the idea being he wanted to create the image, in the minds of ordinary Iranians, that Iran was in chaos."