Did ayatollahs, not CIA, overthrow Mossadegh?

The traditional story has been that Iran's 1953 prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown by a CIA coup after beginning to nationalize foreign oil companies.

Not so fast. In Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited,
Darioush Bayandor says Shi'ite clerics, including the mentor of the future Ayatollah Ruhollah Khoumeni, were responsible.

On August 15, 1953, the CIA did, indeed, stage a coup to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. But that coup failed. By August 16, the agency had acknowledged its failure and the State Department had already ordered rapprochement with Mossadeq. Three days later, however, a few powerful clerics led by Ayatollah Borujerdi, among whose disciples was a junior cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini, orchestrated major unrest. This unrest, spurred by the clergy who felt threatened by Mossadeq’s promise of a secular democracy, facilitated the coup for which the CIA has been credited, and vilified, all these years.

Bayandor does not exonerate the CIA. Nor does he rule out the possibility that the failed first coup contributed to the instability that ultimately brought about the success of the subsequent one. But the irony of Iran and the CIA is that it shows, among other things, both the agency’s incompetence and, to a large degree, its irrelevance to the events of 1953. Indeed, Fazlollah Zahedi, the purged army general with whom the CIA had been dealing, proves to play only a marginal role in the ordeal. It is ultimately a handful of clergy—awakened from years of dormancy imposed by the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905—who make history for Iran, and who step into the political limelight once more after the coup they themselves helped foment.

At the least, we should genuflect to Iranian "sensibilities" less than we do. It seems that, at the least, the ayatollahs didn't find Mossadegh pliable enough and so were ready to abandon him. Shades of 1979!