According to Wikipedia, the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, on August 19, 1953 (and called the 28 Mordad coup d’état in Iran), was the overthrow of the the democratically-elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in the Washington Post that this common narrative suffers from numerous deficiencies:

[Today] marks the anniversary of one of the most mythologized events in history, the 1953 coup in Iran that ousted Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. CIA complicity in that event has long provoked apologies from American politicians and denunciations from the theocratic regime. The problem with the prevailing narrative? The CIA’s role in Mossadeq’s demise was largely inconsequential. The institution most responsible for aborting Iran’s democratic interlude was the clerical estate, and the Islamic Republic should not be able to whitewash the clerics’ culpability.

Ray Takeyh: Clerics responsible for Iran’s failed attempts at democracy