Iran. The Shah of Persia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, returns to Tehran. The brief reign of the lawyer Mohammad Mosaddegh or Mosaddeq[a] (Persian: مُحَمَد مُصَدِق), who had been elected by the Iranian parliament two years earlier, ends. He had nationalized the AIOC (Anglo Iranian Oil Company), the concessionaire of the oil fields. This provoked a British boycott of Iranian oil, a serious economic crisis, Soviet aid proposals, street protests largely organized by the CIA and MI6, and ultimately the restoration of the Shah on August 22, 1953. For a quarter of a century, Iran became a laboratory for an experiment in modernization and secularization of a large Muslim country. Ataturk had already done something similar in Turkey.
