I was ten when my teacher accused me and my father of lying. 

It was 1982. The year prior, my family, like many others, had escaped the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution and left Iran. What had started as a popular uprising against the injustices of the Western-backed monarchy spiralled into the creation of an unyielding Islamic republic. Political opponents were persecuted and imprisoned. Veils were forced onto women’s heads in the previously secular country; resistance was penalized with lashes to the back. The country’s implementation of Sharia-inspired laws declared a woman’s worth as half of a man’s. In the months after the revolution, I lay awake at night thinking of people lost to the darkness of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, and the gashes that would be left on the skin from a lash.

My family immigrated to Madrid. I was an outsider at my British-run school. With my newly acquired sparse vocabulary in English and Spanish, I struggled to keep up. My accent was thick. The girls in my class had straight hair; mine was curly and frizzy. My classmates had families in Madrid; mine had been left behind in Tehran. Other children celebrated Christmas; I didn’t.

The day my teacher accused me of lying, I was standing in front of the chalkboard facing my classmates. It was cool outside, the leaves shades of yellow and orange. I held a rolled-up history report in my clammy hands. The teacher stared at me from the far corner of the pale-walled classroom. Her arms were folded, draped by curtains of curled blonde hair. With her pointy nose and bulging eyes, she reminded me of a witch. The class fidgeted with discomfort. 

Moments earlier, I had presented my report. The history books I read in class spoke of Europe in the Middle Ages, the World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. There was no mention of Iran, or of the topic I had chosen for my report: former Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. My father had helped me fill in the facts as I wrote it.

“Mosaddegh was a kind and just man,” I read aloud in front of the class. “He was elected prime minister of Iran in 1951. He wanted to improve the lives of everyday Iranians. He nationalized Iran’s oil. The British government did not like that.”

At that point my British teacher folded her arms. 

“The British and Americans overthrew Mosaddegh in a coup d’état in 1953,” I continued. 

When I finished, before anyone could clap, the teacher said, “Britain would not do that. That is not possible. Where did you get your information?” 

We looked at each other from opposite ends of the classroom.

“It’s true,” I answered finally. 

“Where did you get your information?” she pressed further.

“My father told me,” I mumbled. 

I returned to my desk as she told the class that reports should be based on facts. The urge to cry encased my throat.

At the end of that day, my father picked me up from school in a navy-blue suit and a burgundy tie. My teacher and the principal confronted him at the gates while I played in the playground. I glanced over and saw him smile at them. His smile was always shy, but he was steady and assured. He held his ground. 

Afterward, my father and I walked home along the side streets of our neighbourhood. The oak trees’ canopy towered over us. Brick houses lined the streets. We held hands, his skin soft, his prominent veins doughy against my fingers. When I squeezed them, the veins collapsed only to fill up as soon as I let go. 

“Doesn’t matter what they say, does it? It’s the truth,” he said. 

I nodded, but it did matter. Unbelonging and invisibility crept in that day. We walked in silence the rest of the way home.

Decades later, I read about the coup in American journalist Stephen Kinzer’s 2003 book All the Shah’s Men. Kinzer’s account exposes how the CIA orchestrated and executed the coup. Fake news articles and radio announcements were secretly disseminated portraying Mosaddegh as corrupt, pro-communist and anti-Islam. People were bribed to take part in the coup. A throne was promised to the Shah, the monarch whose rule would be strengthened by Mosaddegh’s overthrow. A mink coat was gifted to the Shah’s sister. One million US dollars were earmarked for the operation, which was principally orchestrated by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a senior officer in the CIA and the grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt. With the blessings of then-US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt Jr. mobilized CIA and British operatives in Iran. 

By July 1953, misinformation and CIA-instigated riots had culminated in a destabilized parliament and a disoriented Mosaddegh. The demonstrations continued into August, when the politically manipulated Mosaddegh banned his supporters from counter demonstrations. The coup unfolded that month, and Mosaddegh was captured and sentenced to three years in prison, after which he was placed under permanent house arrest. The Shah, who had left the country in the preceding chaos, was flown back to Iran to take his throne. The CIA operatives were jubilant. 

The CIA covered its tracks and denied its role in the coup for decades. Documents confirming its orchestration of the coup were finally declassified in the 2010s. In 2023, the CIA publicly acknowledged that the coup was undemocratic. 

My father is eighty-four now. He still lives in Madrid, while I’ve moved to Toronto. A few years ago, we were chatting about his life. He mentioned in passing that he had been at the coup. I sat back in my chair and looked at his wrinkled face and greying hair. 

“What do you mean, you were at the coup?” I asked. 

He tried to brush it off, but I insisted. 

“I was thirteen. I worked as a seller at a fruit stand in the centre of Tehran,” he said.

August 19, 1953 had been a hot summer day in Tehran. As my father weighed melons for customers, he heard the chants of protesters in the distance, shouting “marg bar Mosaddegh”—death to Mosaddegh. My father watched a serpentine, frenzied mob emerge from the side streets. A neighbourhood hooligan, or “lat mahal” as they were known in Tehran, was at the helm of the mob, holding a lance decorated with ribbons. Most neighbourhoods in Tehran had their lat mahals. Known for their strength, and not for their intelligence, they’d be found brawling on the streets, or in zurkhanehs, houses of strength, showing off their bodybuilding and wrestling abilities. They were showmen who worked crowds with jokes and tricks, feeding off both jeers and cheers, and thus perfectly suited to lead the mob. There were also soldiers and other rioters amongst the protesters, the majority of whom had been bribed by the CIA.

My father recounted how a man had tried to stop the protesters. A soldier whacked the man’s head with the end of his rifle, sending him down. His head hit the pavement and blood oozed out. Alarmed shopkeepers closed their stores. The mob engulfed the pedestrians still lingering on the street as it inched toward the parliament building. My father walked with the mob as it moved, curious and confused. Mosaddegh was beloved for his efforts to improve the lives of everyday Iranians. Why were these men protesting against him? My father spotted a tank among the protesters, armed men sitting atop it. He stayed on the periphery of the mob, scared by the feverish centre. A few hours went by. Suddenly, the broadcast of Radio Iran, a popular local news station, awoke from silence with a voice wrapped in static: “Hello, hello, this is Tehran,” the voice said in Farsi. “The traitor Mosaddegh has escaped.” Rumours spread through the mob of Mosaddegh’s defeat, as well as false accusations that he had gunned down thousands of people in Tehran.

My father walked the streets for hours that day. He cried. He saw a truck emerge from the direction of the protests. It moved slowly down the street, its sides missing; it was only a platform on wheels. A few men stood on the truck, yelling “La ilaha illallah. La ilaha illallah.” A mourning call, meaning “there is none worthy of worship but Allah.” One man, pale and limp, was being held up by two others. In his arms, my father says, was a human’s severed, bloody trachea. The heart and lungs dangled below. 

As I listened to my father’s story, I realized that he held the events of that day in a way history books will not or cannot. He knew the truth long before it became public, as did millions of other Iranians. But my father’s experience of the coup was invisible. Journalists did not archive his experience. Investigators did not interview him. We did not talk about it at family meals. He focused on survival and climbing out of the rubble of poverty. 

Like many in Iran, my father’s childhood was shaped by the West’s colonial exploitation of the country for oil, which was aided by local corruption. He had lived in extreme poverty with his mother and six siblings, his father absent due to opium addiction. While the monarchy and the colonial overlords feasted on oil-funded luxuries, my father accrued the physical scars of poverty: a scarred eardrum and hearing loss from an ear infection his family could not afford antibiotics for; a smooth pink-and-yellow leishmaniasis scar on his left cheek; back pain from the strain of working since he was five. 

It was at my father’s behest that I wrote my grade five history report on Mosaddegh; in a way, he wanted to pass on his love and admiration for the former prime minister, and the truth of Mosaddegh’s orchestrated downfall. I received this truth, and through the reactions of my school’s administration became aware that the story was not known, was not welcome and that those in power preferred I keep quiet. There was no curiosity in my teacher’s inquiry when she asked me where I got my information from. 

The world continues to see Iran, and Iranians, as a corner of what former American president George W. Bush called the “axis of evil” in his famous 2002 State of the Union address. Bush’s declaration sealed the image of Iranians as fanatics and terrorists, a stereotype scaffolded on years of media portrayals of a violent Iran: beatings of journalists and women in an extremist Islamic republic, allegations of Iran aiding the perpetrators of terrorist acts. Struggling to fit in as an immigrant child, and then teenager, the one-dimensional portrayal of Iran filled me with shame.

According to Oxford Languages, terrorism is defined as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Following this definition, the Iranian coup was itself a terrorist act. The stakes were high for the British, who wanted to reassert control over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had been placed under Iranian control through Mosaddegh’s nationalization of the oil industry in 1951. 

Mosaddegh was Iran’s first democratically elected president. His charisma and flamboyance landed him the designation of the 1951 Time Magazine Person of the Year. He forged a new democratic path for Iranians—one of self-determination, with education, women’s rights and human rights at the centre. The coup uprooted these national ambitions in the most violent way. 

Perhaps at no other point in the history of the United States can Americans appreciate the destruction that an insurrection like the coup can inflict on a society. The invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 with the purpose of nullifying Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election left behind a palpable sense of confusion, betrayal and agitation. The investigation into the insurrection, and the accountability and scrutiny that followed, provided some sort of a path forward—at least prior to Trump’s re-election this year, and the subsequent mass pardon of most of the insurrectionists. Iranians did not have access to such a path. Though the truth was kept alive in the stories of people like my father, the CIA’s denial of its participation caused paranoia and distrust to fester. Historical traumas can wreak havoc on communities and societies, like the sparks that shoot off a wildfire and send damage across far distances. 

The Shah’s rule after the coup, backed by financial aid from the US, turned into a dictatorship. His often oppressive and opulent style of governing overshadowed his attempts to improve some aspects of life in Iran, and turned impoverished Iranians against him. By 1979, anger at the Shah and Western exploitation erupted into a nationwide uprising, now known as the Iranian revolution. The monarchy was toppled. Afterward, anti-Western sentiment, and paranoia about another potential CIA intervention, grew. The new government took a hard stance on diplomatic relations. It supported the student-led seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the resulting hostage crisis, began to refer to the US as “the Great Satan” and closed its borders to Western collaboration.

In September 2022, twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested in Tehran for allegedly not wearing a hijab, and then died due to the violence Iranian security forces inflicted upon her. I followed the events from my home in Toronto. I watched women in Iran caught in a wildfire they could not escape. After Amini’s death, Western media was quick to portray Iran in the light it always does: oppressive and nonsensical, without any mention of the role the West played in leading the country to its current state. Though I recognize that many factors influence historical outcomes, if I follow the strings of Amini’s death I’m led back to the coup. 

In my late thirties I travelled to Kavir-e Lut, a desert in Iran, with my father. The sand there is light and does not stick together, the soft mounds interspersed by shrubs with long roots searching underground for water and nutrition. As one stares out at the desert, the dunes create visions of cities and old empires, echoes of Iran’s past. 

The first night we were there, my father and I set up a tent in the middle of the desert. I woke up in the night needing to go to the bathroom and unzipped the tent. I gasped in the cool air as I found myself under an indigo dome awash with stars, the tapestry of brilliant points of light uninterrupted in all directions. In that moment of awe, feeling as a part of a greater whole, a sense of belonging was born. But within the beauty of the feeling of connection was also a sense of grief for Iran: for the lost opportunities resulting from the CIA’s brutal undertaking, for democracy and women’s rights, and for stability and prosperity in the Middle East.

My daughter is eleven now. She has not read about the coup in her history books. It was up to me to tell her.  ⁂

Nazanin Meshkat is an emergency doctor, writer, retired dancer, associate professor and, above all, a mother.